Hav

by Jan Morris

  Armand is of course the expert on Hav’s exiles, and in the heat of noon the other day, as we drank lime juice at the little refreshment stall which has sprung up on the promenade, I asked him how he accounted for this odd preference.

  ‘It is simple.’ (Everything is simple to Armand Sauvignon.) ‘Hav is like some exile itself, and never more so than in these terrible days of July and August. Ergo, like goes to like, and your wandering poet, your dreaming philosopher, your Freud or your Wagner feels most at home here when everything is at its worst.’

  ‘Drinking iced lime juice,’ said I, ‘beneath a sunshade on the promenade.’

  ‘Ha! Touché! But they did not always live like us!’

  Nor did they. By and large the Hav exiles have lived anonymously, or at least obscurely, during their time in the city. I went one day to the apartment in which Freud had his lodgings, when he came to Hav in 1876 to search for the testes of the eel. Seconded by the Department of Comparative Anatomy at Vienna University, he had already failed in this task at Trieste, but the Hav eel has the reputation of extreme virility, frequenting as it does the irrigation canals and brackish pools of those aphrodisiac salt-marshes, so he transferred his researches here. The newly installed Russian administration allowed him to use as a laboratory the old ice-house, not yet converted to Count Kolchok’s purposes, and he found himself lodgings in the House of the Chinese Master.

  To my surprise I discovered that he is remembered there still. Clambering up the spiral staircase, now strewn with litter and scratched with incomprehensible slogans, I found the eighth floor, in Freud’s time one big apartment, divided into four tenements; but when I knocked at the first door, and asked if this was where the scientist had stayed, ‘Yes,’ said at once the tousle-haired young woman who opened the door, ‘come in and see.’ It was an ungainly room she showed me — wedge-shaped, with only a narrow wall at the inner end, and a single window at the other looking through the marble mesh outside to the roofs of the Great Bazaar — and it was in a state of homely chaos, which the woman casually did her best to reduce, picking up clothes and papers from the floor as we entered, and clearing a pile of sewing from the sofa to give us sitting space.

  ‘It was my great-grandmother’s place then — she was Austrian, she came here as governess to a Russian family, but married a local man. Of course Freud was unknown in those days, and nobody took much notice of him. It was only in my father’s time that people began to be interested.’

  ‘Lots of people come to see the place?’

  ‘Lots? Not lots. Perhaps seven or eight a year. Sometimes they are interested in Freud, sometimes in eels! My husband does not welcome them, but then it was my family that Sigmund lived with, not his.’

  ‘Sigmund!’ I laughed. ‘You know him well!’

  ‘Yes, yes, I feel I do. He is very kindly remembered in our family — such a nice young man, we were always told, with his funny stories and his jokes. Besides, we have little things of his here that bring him close to me’ — and opening a drawer she brought out a black leather box, embossed ‘S.F.’, and showed me its quaint contents. There was a comb — ‘Freud’s comb?’ ‘Sigmund’s comb, certainly’ — and a silver-gilt pen, and a letter from the Trieste laboratory of the comparative anatomy department wishing him luck — ‘After 400 Trieste eels, my dear old boy, you deserve to find your quarry among the salts of Hav’ — and a silhouette in an oval frame which portrayed, she said, Freud’s mother. ‘And here’, she said, ‘is a funny rhyme that Sigmund left for my great-grandmother when he went away.’ It was four lines of German, in a clear script, which I will try to translate into verse:

  To my dear Frau Makal:

  If you find, upon eating an eel,

  A part [körperteil] you would rather avoid,

  Please pack up that bit of your evening meal

  And send it to young Dr Freud.

  For poor Freud, having dissected those 400 eels in Trieste, examined another 200 during his six weeks in Hav, and never did find a testes — a curious failure, remarks his biographer Ernest Jones, for the inventor of the castration complex!

  It was historical chance, of course, that brought Anastasia to Hav in the height of summer — if indeed she came at all. Of all this city’s exiles, voluntary or compulsory, real or legendary, she is the one Hav most enjoys talking about, partly because people here are still enthralled by the Russian period of heir history, but chiefly because romance says her vast collection of jewelry is still hidden somewhere in the peninsula.

  As to whether she really came, opinions vary. Count Kolchok swore to the end of his days that she did not, and Anna Novochka also denies it: pure tosh, she says — ‘If she was ever here, would I not have known of it?’ On the other hand there is a strong tradition in the Yeğen family that in August 1918 a girl arrived on the train in a sealed coach, all curtains drawn, together with three servants and a mountain of baggage — to be met at the frontier by a car from the Serai, while the baggage was picked up by mule-cart at the central station and taken to the western hills.

  Others say Anastasia arrived on board a British warship, which anchored beyond the Iron Dog and sent her in by jolly-boat, while wilder stories suggest she struggled by foot over the escarpment, helped by Kretevs — even living for a time, so it was imagined in a recent historical novel, in one of their caves. I often meet people who claim that their parents met her, though never it seems in very specific circumstances, only at some ball or other, or at the railway station. There is a legend that she was at Kolchok’s funeral — and a fable, inevitably perhaps, that she succeeded Naratlova as his mistress.

  But nobody offers any very definite theories as to what became of her. Perhaps she went on to America? Perhaps, when Russian rule ended in Hav, she simply faded into the White Russian community here, adopting another name as Anna did? Perhaps she was murdered by the KGB? Perhaps she is still alive? Far more substantial are speculations about her treasure, which seems to have grown over the years until it now sometimes embraces most of the Russian crown jewels. The existence of this trove is taken very seriously. The Palace with its outbuildings has been combed and combed again. Little Malta, a very popular site, has almost been taken apart. Every weekend you see people with metal-detectors setting off for the derelict villas of the western hills, and Anna has a terrible time keeping intruders out of her garden — ‘and I ask you, if there was treasure in my flower-beds would I be living like this?’

  I have an open mind about Anastasia, but it is intriguing to think that, if she really did escape to Hav, her exile might well have overlapped with that of Trotsky, who spent a secretive month here in the summer of 1929. This is well-documented. He was photographed arriving on the train (the picture hangs in the pilot’s office), and he lived in an old Arab house just within the Castle Gate of the Medina — hardly a stone’s throw from the Palace compound so recently vacated by Kolchok and his Czarist apparatus. Melchik has described the arrangements in his novel Dönüş (‘The Return’): the gunmen always on the flat roof of the house, the heavy steel shutters which closed off the central courtyard in case of a siege. When Trotsky went out, which was very rarely it seems, he was hemmed all about by bodyguards; when he left for France, at the start of the fateful wanderings that led him in the end to Mexico, it is said he departed on board a private yacht. The house is now occupied by a Muslim craft school, and the only reminders of Trotsky’s stay are the shutters still attached to the courtyard pillars — very reassuring, the headmaster told me waggishly, when pupils show signs of rebelling.

  It has been suggested that Hitler’s probably apocryphal visit to Hav may have been sparked by Wagner’s paradoxical fondness for the place. Paradoxical because there seems to me nothing remotely Wagnerian about Hav, and its summer discomforts (the composer’s three stays were all in July) do not seem at all to his taste.

  He was apparently compelled, though, by the brooding wall of the escarpment, by the mysterious anachronism of the Kretevs in their high c
averns, and by the idea that in Hav the Celtic gods of the old European pantheon had somehow found their last apotheosis. He lived here in conditions of heroic austerity — none of his habitual silks and velvet hangings — in a wooden house near the railway station, burnt down during the fire of 1927 which also destroyed the Cathedral of the Annunciation and the theatre. There he was constantly visited, it is said, by wild men from the escarpment, Greeks from San Spiridon, Arabs and blacks; he even took to dressing Hav-style, they say, in striped cotton and straw hat.

  But then the advantage of going native in Hav is that nobody knows what native is. Now as then, you can take your choice! Chopin, for example, when he came here with George Sand in 1839 after their unhappy holiday in Majorca, chose to live in the Armenian way, rented a house in the Armenian quarter of the Old City and briefly took lessons in Armenian with the city trumpeter of the day. On the other hand James Joyce spent nearly all his time at the Café München, the famous writers’ haunt on Bundstrasse, while Richard Burton the explorer, as one might expect, went entirely Arab, strode around the city in burnous and golden dagger, flagrantly snubbed the British Resident, and was rumoured to have got up to terrible things in the darker corners of the Medina — he himself put it around that he had decapitated a man in a bath-house.

  Almost the only visiting celebrity not to adopt the ways of the city, in one way or another, was Edward Lear the painter. He set up his studio respectably in a house overlooking the harbour, took on many pupils both English and Havian, and described Hav as ‘a very snuffyuffy, scrumdoochian kind of place’.

  There have been many enforced refugees, from many countries and many situations, who have found in this confused and eclectic city a temporary haven. Even as I write, I see one of them on a park bench below. I know him slightly. He is dressed anachronistically even by Hav standards, for he presents an image direct from the American 1960s: his hair is long and pigtailed, his moustache is droopy, he wears baseball shoes and patched jeans frayed at the bottom. His guitar is propped against the bench beside him, and he is fast asleep — head back, mouth slightly open, arms on the back of the bench showing (I happen to know) a tattooed dove of peace on one bicep the words ROLLIN’ STONE on the other. He is in his late thirties, I would guess. He is known in Hav as Bob.

  Scores of young Americans, evading the draft for the Vietnam War, found their way to Hav in the sixties and seventies, mingling easily enough with the travellers on the hippie route to Afghanistan and Katmandu who used, in those days, sometimes to stop off in the peninsula. As far as I know Bob is the only survivor, having scornfully disregarded the amnesty which took most of the draft evaders home to the United States. He is rumoured to be rich really, and to be supported by subsidies from his family, but I doubt it: he busks with his guitar for money, a familiar figure on the waterfront and the pavements of New Hav, and once he took me to his lodgings, a bed-sitting-room in the German quarter plastered all over with anti-war posters, pictures of Joan Baez and Dylan, and touching colour snapshots of his mother and father, gazing into the dark little apartment, with its crumpled bed and chipped mugs by the sink, out of a well-tended garden in Iowa.

  Look over there now, through the gateway to the promenade, and you will see, dangling their legs over the edge of the quay, two fugitives of another sort. They are stocky men in their thirties, unshaven rather, in brown baggy trousers and open-necked shirts. Their hair is quite long now, but it was close-cropped when I first saw them, shortly after my arrival in Hav. Unlike Bob, who knows everyone, they are extremely aloof, lodging in a Turkish boarding-house near the central post office, and supporting themselves certainly not by busking, but rumour says by subventions from the British Agency (which is to say, it is knowingly added, the CIA).

  They are, we are told, deserters from the Soviet army in Afghanistan, and arrived in Hav nobody knows how — some say by sea. They are supposed to have been thoroughly interrogated by Mr Thorne and his assistants, and then let loose in the city. They seem quite happy. One is a skilled mechanic, and sometimes does odd jobs for people, if he can be made to understand what is needed — very few people speak Russian in Hav now, while the two deserters speak nothing else. The other is variously rumoured to be a fighter pilot and a colonel in the KGB. When I try to speak to them, they smile pleasantly and say nothing. Magda says they would be admirable recruits for the Athenaeum.

  Of course they may not be deserters from Afghanistan at all. Another theory is that they are dissident Russian artists, scientists or writers, kept here in reserve, so to speak, until the Western powers feel their propaganda value will be most useful. This has happened before. In the 1950s a distinguished young Russian physicist arrived on a boat from Syria, and immediately made his way to the British Agency. There he stayed for some months safe, sound and secret, awaiting the apposite moment.

  But one day a senior British official arrived by train from Ankara supposedly for a last de-briefing of the man, or perhaps a final indoctrination, and thereafter nothing was ever heard of the refugee again. The name of the senior official is lost too: but I wonder, could it have been H. A. R. (‘Kim’) Philby?

  Pace Armand, much the best-known refugee in Hav today is that meditative old Nazi he first pointed out to me — do you remember? — as being very much wanted by the Israelis. The Mossad do not seem to have been searching very hard, for Oberführer Boschendorf is to be found, most days of the week, buttonholing people with his story in the pleasure-gardens of the Lazaretto.

  I often go there myself, for I love to watch the solemn Hav children enjoying themselves on the biplanes, steamrollers, cocks and wooden camels of the elderly roundabouts, and one afternoon Boschendorf picked on me. ‘Please, please, I know you are a writer, I want you to know the truth’ — so we went into the old Admiralty House café, and placing his hat carefully on the seat beside him, he told me his tale.

  It was perfectly true, he said, as I had doubtless learnt, that during the late war (he always called it the late war) he had been involved in the deaths of Jews, but it was not out of racial hatred. It was because he had cherished since childhood a deep, a truly mystical empathy for the destiny of the Jewish people — ‘but am I ever believed in Hav, this snake-pit, this Babylon? Never!’ His obsession began when he had been taken as a boy to the Passion Play at Oberammergau. ‘The sublime and awful meaning of it! A Jew, the noblest of Jews, condemned to death by his own people — but only, as I realized in revelation that day, as their own imperishable contribution to the destiny of all humanity. It was they themselves that they were sacrificing upon the Cross. Christ was but the image of all his people, the Jews but an enlargement of Christ!’

  At first he had seen Hitler and the Nazi party as the embodiment of all evil, the Anti-Christ — ‘how I suffered for the Jews with their horrible yellow badges and their degradations’. But then came the war, and he first heard of the Final Solution, the plan to exterminate all the Jews of Europe. ‘It was a second revelation to me. The Jews, the Christ-people, were to be sublimated at last in total sacrifice, and join their archetype upon the Cross. I saw it all in ecstasy, those tragic millions, deprived of all but their heritage, in pilgrimage to their own Calvaries. I could not imagine — it would take a Wagner to imagine! — what it would mean for the future of the world, and I came to see Adolf Hitler, as I had long seen Pontius Pilate, as a divine instrument of redemption. I saw all the mighty energies of Germany, beset by enemies on every front, directed to the sacred task — inspired!’

  Boschendorf got himself into the SS, and was concerned, as a junior administrative officer, with paperwork for Eichmann’s death-trains; but he was never charged with war crimes, and came to Hav after the war not through the tortuous channels of Odessa, but by paying his own fare on the Mediterranean Express. This anti-climax seemed to prey upon his mind.

  ‘They will not listen! They do not hear! Am I a criminal? Am I not rather an agent of God’s passion? Was I not to the Jews as Judas was to his master, no more than the
means of holy destiny? Have I not risked death to bring them death?’ Suddenly unbuttoning his jacket and baring his chest, he showed me tattooed there a Star of David — ‘There, as they branded the Jews entering upon their fulfilment so they branded me, at my instructions, Hauptsturmführer, SS, with the badge of the Chosen!’

  ‘Quick, Herr Boschendorf—’

  ‘Dr Boschendorf.’

  ‘—quick, button up your shirt, everyone is staring at you.’

  ‘WHY?’ he shouted. ‘Must I be ashamed of my badge?’ He rose to his feet and displayed his chest right and left across the café, whose customers were in fact assiduously pretending not to notice. ‘MUST I BE ASHAMED?’

  One or two of our neighbours now offered me sympathetic smiles, as if to say that they had seen and heard it all before, and the waiters, to a man, conscientiously looked the other way.

  ‘Oh I know what these people’ — he threw a hand around the room — ‘have been telling you. That’s Hav! That’s Babylon! They say I am wanted in four continents, don’t they? But do I hide myself? Do I hide my badge of sacrament? The Israelis know and respect me for my love of their people, for whom I shed their blood . . .’

  I thought he was going to break down. ‘I saw you that day with Armand Sauvignon. Did you believe what he told you? Do you know what he did in the late war? He it was, when Jews arrived in Hav, who saw to it that they were shipped to France, and thence to Germany — but he did it not in love, but in hatred. Ask anyone! Oh, we all know Monsieur Sauvignon, novelist, gentleman of France, hypocrite.’

  He calmed down presently and politely paid his bill. The head waiter bowed to him respectfully as we left the café. ‘I so much enjoyed our talk,’ Boschendorf said, ‘and feel relieved that you are now in possession of the truth — always a rare commodity in Hav. Use it how you will.’ He asked me if I would care to join him on the Electric Ferry back to the Fondaco, but I said no, I would stay on the island a little longer, and watch the children on the merry-go-round as the fairy lights came up.