Hav

by Jan Morris

  When, after breakfast, the resort’s public-relations officer took me on a tour of the project, I asked her to explain this curious choice. ‘You are aware I suppose’, she replied, ‘that the artistic heritage of Myrmidonic Hav has been essentially Minoan, in all genres. Our greatest artists down the centuries, from Melchik all the way back to Avzar himself, the supreme maze-maker, found their inspiration in the Cretan mysteries. That is why the Perfects invited our famous Kiruski to bring to this project an overriding sense of our intellectual heritage. It is an unprecedent project, you realize. There has been nothing like it in the history of civilization.’

  Well, she was a public-relations person, but she may be right. The resort Lazaretto! is a vastly confusing sprawl of a dozen separate guest-houses, each with its own swimming-pool and squat Havian wind-tower, linked by a succession of bridges, hedged footpaths and pedestrian tunnels, and designed in a striking melange of moods or analogies. I am at a loss to define its style — like that reception hall, it seemed to me slightly Kremlinesque, and a bit Bedouin, with touches of the Ottoman and underlying vibrations, so the PR lady suggested, ‘of the unique evocative symbolism that is so characteristic of Hav’s thought and art’.

  Fine sandy beaches line the northern coast of the resort, impeccably raked, lined with cafés and patterned with chaises-longues and parasols. From there one can look across the harbour to Hav City on the northern shore. ‘So near and yet so far,’ the PR lady commented, ‘yet there’s nothing there that you can’t get here.’ It looked very different from the Hav I remembered. Gone was the esoteric skyline of turrets, minarets and gilded domes. Only the castle still stood on its crag high above. For the rest, all was a grey flattish blur of new buildings, low and flat, with a minaret protruding here and there, and a distant jumble of masts and riggings at the waterfront, but none of the gaudy eclecticism that made the old city so compelling.

  In the southern part of the island, the former San Pietro, the foreign legations are assembled in a Diplomatic Suburb. My cicerone did not take me there. It was not part of Lazaretto, she told me, but was placed adjacent to the resort for administrative purposes. As in the old Hav, the sovereign states had been permitted to build their missions in their own national styles, ‘folksy, modernist, mock-primitive, what have you,’ and she was not impressed. ‘The area is outside the direct remit of our famous Kiruski, and so lacks ideological certainty.’ But actually, in the very middle of the whole ensemble, built on the landfill which has made the two former islands into one, the Myrmidon Tower stands, so far as I can see, utterly beyond ideology — a virtuoso display of unashamed, unrestricted, technically unexampled vulgarity.

  Over lunch I told the PR person that nevertheless I would like to call that afternoon on the British Legate, in the Diplomatic Suburb. ‘I can’t think why,’ she said, but she called the Legate for me anyway, on her mobile telephone. I asked if I could come and see him.

  ‘What for?’ he said.

  ‘For old times’ sake. I knew one of your predecessors, long ago.’

  ‘And who might that have been?’

  I thought of saying Harry Potter or Sir Homer Simpson, but restrained myself.

  ‘I forget the name,’ I said. ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘I see. Well come along at 3 p.m. this afternoon. You know where we are? I can give you five minutes.’

  Again I considered a sharp retort, but what the hell, said I to myself, you’re not going for the fun of it.

  And fun it wasn’t, my visit to the British Legate. I agreed with the PR lady. The Diplomatic Suburb turned out to be a drably incomplete development lot, laid out in petty avenues and crescents and a very far cry from Lazaretto! — a far cry too, from the grandiose diplomatic quarter of the old Hav. Half a dozen unprepossessing villas flew the flags of different states, and displayed half-hearted architectural features of their nationalities — here a florid touch of Alpinism, there the simulacrum of an Iowa barn — but several more were unfinished, and there were some vacant building sites, too. The British Legation had mock half-timbering and was rather like a Surbiton villa of the 1930s, even to the garden gate and the box hedges. O tempora, O mores, I thought to myself, remembering the colonial elegance of the old Agency.

  The Legate opened the door himself when I rang the crested doorbell. He looked at his watch as we shook hands, and walked before me into a downstairs room with royal portraits above a desk and copies of Britain Today on a deal coffee-table. He was a plumpish man of about thirty-five, wearing an open-necked shirt beneath his suit jacket. He had a gingerish moustache and pale, protruding blue eyes, and suggested to me a middle-ranking regimental officer offered early retirement. His vowels were not impeccable.

  ‘Now look here,’ he said, ‘I’ve found out about you since we talked, and I want to give you a few words of advice. I’ve had trouble with your sort in previous postings. We had that Mary Ann Abbott at Lagos, and that was bad enough. I’ll be straight with you. Here in Hav it just won’t do. Do you understand me? I gather they’ve given you a blue pass, God knows why, but I’m not going to tolerate any hanky-panky or prying about. You are a British subject, remember. None of that Welsh nonsense with me. Do you get me?’

  ‘I really only wanted to ask you—’ I began, but he interrupted me.

  ‘Don’t ask me a damn thing. If you want to ask anything, ask at the Office of Ideology. You have a blue pass, go and ask them. You see my situation here, I have a very small staff and I have my work cut out for me. As for old times’ sake, if I were you I’d forget all about old times. Old times is not what Hav is about. Old times is not what this Legation is for. Here, take this to read on the way back to the resort. Hear, read and inwardly digest.’ And thrusting a pamphlet in my direction, he led the way to the hall and without offering his hand closed the door behind me.

  I looked back when I got to the garden gate, and caught sight of him watching me from a corner of his office window, like a Parisian concierge at a lace curtain. The pamphlet was an order from the Myrmidonic Republic, headed by the Republican helmet-logo, and evidently circulated among all foreign legations:

  Members of diplomatic missions accredited to the Myrmidonic Republic are reminded that they will be held accountable for the behaviour of foreign guests in the Republic. Reports of disrespectful conduct, circumvention of Republican security or privacy laws, blasphemy towards Cathar establishments or unauthorized intrusion into the affairs of the Myrmidonic Republic will invite serious repercussions. Foreign visitors should be advised that under Myrmidonic customary law private citizens are subject to the discipline of organs of the State, including diplomatic missions, which are themselves permitted to operate within the Myrmidonic Republic only as licensed agents of that Republic

  No wonder, I thought as I walked back towards Palast One past the glittering entrances of the Tower — no wonder half those legations were unoccupied.

  Lazaretto feels so utterly alien to all that I remember of the old Hav that when I returned to my suite I was surprised to find a letter awaiting me.

  Welcome back [it said]. You are no doubt surprised to hear from me, after all that has happened in Hav since we last met, but the force of destiny can be merciful and here I am installed as general manager of Lazaretto! (spelled with an exclamation mark, please note, to show how excruciatingly fashionable we are). Remember Chevallaz, who use to be our restaurant manager? He now runs the catering here, with a staff of a thousand chefs. No, I am joking, but any complaints about the food, put them to him — not enough ginger with the sea-urchins, eels over-pickled, I know what a gourmet you are. It’s all a far cry from the old Casino, but we are lucky to be here still, and there are still some friends about. Now then, mark in your engagement diary: Dinner with Mario, Casino Grill, 7.30 p.m. Monday evening! THIS VERY EVENING!! Until then, many embraces. Ciaou, Mario Biancheri.

  PS. I expect you know that the book you wrote last time was banned after the Intervention, so I’ve never read it. I’m told
it mentions me. If you happen to have a copy tucked away in your make-up bag . . .

  I called home later, and this was an exhilaratingly Lazzareto experience, because it was all voice-activated. It works like this. You lightly press your door-key (a round metal representation of the Havian Maze) upon a gun-metal strip which runs around every wall of your suite, like a dado, whereupon a disembodied operator, speaking apparently out of the ether, invites you to place your call. Name the number you want, and after a few clicks and pauses the voice of your beloved replies from far away — not through a single loudspeaker, but through multi-stereos throughout the suite. You speak wherever you like — walking about, in the bath, pouring yourself a drink, and the voice from home is vibrantly all about you. The conversation ended, the last oral kisses exchanged, and a touch of the key on the tele-dado switches it off.

  ‘Not much like the old days, eh?’ said Biancheri at the dinnertable. ‘Remember the black dial-phones at the old Casino? But look over there now — and there behind the bar was the very same barman whom I had known at the Casino in the old Hav, and years before that at Harry’s Bar in Venice — still smiling the same Gorgonzola smile, still managing to wave a hand and polish a glass at the same time. ‘You see? Not everything is gone . . .’

  For I must understand, he told me, lowering his voice a little, that Hav’s Myrmidonic rulers were no fools, whatever else one might say of them. ‘They knew that our old team at the Casino was a good team, not only very professional, respected throughout the world, but also experienced in the sometimes circuitous ways of Hav. You understand me? They knew us, we knew them.

  ‘At the Intervention we were scattered of course, as you will remember, but they had no difficulty in finding us. I had stayed in Turkey, old Giovanni there had gone back to Venice to retire, Chevallaz went home to his family restaurant in Zurich. It was not difficult to lure us back to help launch this somewhat excessive venture. What’s the phrase you have these days — over the top? OTT? Well, dear friend, if Lazaretto! is OTT, so were the opportunities they offered us.’

  Chevallaz joined us then, and remarked to me that he was glad our cat Ibsen had recovered from his wounded paw. I was taken aback. How did he know about Ibsen? The two men looked at each other wryly. ‘My dear Signora,’ said Chevallaz, ‘you must realize that your telephonic system here is not exclusively your own. High-tech is inter-tech in the new Hav.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Biancheri, laughing. ‘And you should assume that if Chevallaz knows about it, by now the Security Perfect himself is aware of your cat’s misfortune. If you don’t wish to start a War of Ibsen’s Paw, take my advice, Jan, don’t make use of the tele-dado in Palast One.’

  I didn’t know how to reply, but they soon changed the subject anyway, and told me about their problems with the Chinese construction workers, and their difficulties in adjusting the demands of the hotel industry to the immemorial Havian ethos — ‘It must have been rather the same for whoever designed the House of the Chinese Master, if he had Taoist theologians on his back.’ And what had happened to that House, I wondered, that ancient wonder of Hav, which had amazed so many travellers down the centuries? Burnt out in the Intervention, they told me, together with nearly all the monuments of old Hav. The copper-domed Serai? The Montenegrin Legation? League of Nations International Settlement, where I had lived last time?

  Gone, all gone, they said. Even the Medina was burnt to the ground, and the slum-quarter of the Balad had been entirely rebuilt — ideologically rebuilt, they said, Myrmidonically rebuilt, and they laughed a lot. There was not much left of the old Hav, as I would see for myself when I went over to the city — ‘You do have a blue pass, I suppose? Of course you do, or you wouldn’t be in Palast One.’

  The truth seems to be that the Lazaretto island is a self-contained, insulated conclave within the Myrmidonic Republic. If visitors arrive by sea, as I did, they disembark there. If they come by air, they are taken straight there by helicopter from the airport. The island is in effect the Foreign Quarter of Hav, all tourists confined there, all legations within their own compound, rather like the districts where aliens had to live in Stalin’s Russia.

  But it is also the public face of the Republic. Everybody recognizes the image of the Tower. Every glossy tourist brochure portrays the luxury of the resort, with its restaurants and bars and bazaars and swimming-pools and casinos and boutiques and beaches, and the white-clad straw-hatted servants attentive at every corner. The brassily capitalist structure of Lazaretto is rigidly regulated by the Republic (‘one feels so safe, dear’), and as everyone knows it is already one of the great international tourist destinations, attracting wealthy pleasure-seekers from half the world — ‘just the same types,’ said Biancheri, ‘as used to come to the old Casino, only very much more so . . .’

  After dinner he suggested I might like to see the view from the top of the Tower. By now the building was floodlit from top to bottom, and its lobby, sheathed in chrome, was blindingly illuminated. Soldiers or policemen were everywhere inside, wearing combat gear and toting automatic rifles, but the duty officer at the desk knew Biancheri. ‘Where tonight, signor?’ he said.

  ‘No stops,’ Biancheri replied. ‘I would just like to show my guest the prospect from the top.’

  ‘She has a blue pass? Show it me, please. Right. Proceed, signor. Car 7 it is’.

  ‘Ciaou,’ said Biancheri, and we stepped into an elevator. It was very large and empty, with glass sides, and when Biancheri pressed its only button it seemed to explode upwards out of its pad, like a rocket. My heart went into my mouth. I nearly fell.

  ‘Dear God!’ said I, ‘you might have warned me.’

  ‘Wait, my dear, in a moment or two you will be soothed. It is all arranged. Trust me.’

  And it was true, for the elevator presently slowed, the lights were dimmed, my heart stopped pounding, and as we then sidled gently upwards I discovered that on all four sides of us there was an aquarium — an upright aquarium, as it were, extending to the top of the tower — an acquarium 200 floors deep, through whose waters, oblivious to us as we passed, a multitude of fish floated and loitered, golden, black and crimson shapes, with prickly fins or languidly trailing tails, drifting here and there in and out of the elevator’s lights. Soft tuneless music played. The lights were dimmed. Up we glided through the fish and the water, weightlessly. After the detonation of our launch it was delightfully comforting.

  ‘An old Chinese device,’ Biancheri said. ‘Haven’t you seen the fish tanks in Chinese dentists’ waiting-rooms? They were originally to calm anxious patients, but their effect is so addictive that nowadays dentists have them there for their own pleasure — like a narcotic. The Chinese who built this place carried the idea to extremes, and reversed it. First we get that almighty shock, and then in contrast we are given this lovely feeling of beauty and release. They call it Peace after Murder. It is part of The Lazaretto Experience.’

  I wondered if every elevator travelled through the fish-tank in this therapeutic way, but no, it was only Summit Car 7, the number 7 being a traditional Havian symbol for contentment. It alone was non-stop, too. ‘After all, the people who live here have to get off at their own floors sometimes — give them a chance!’

  ‘And who are they,’ I asked, ‘when they’re at home?’

  But before he could reply we had reached the top, and stepped out into a second lobby, equally policed. We showed our passes. We signed a book. An electric door slid, and we stepped out on to the summit gallery. High above us blazed the great letter M, flashing its colours, and behind it Achilles’ crested helmet, and above them both, invisible from the ground, were batteries of aerials and electronic dishes. There was a ceaseless hum of machinery somewhere. Below us a great glow of light emanated from the building itself, almost as though it was burning — it was like standing on top of a pillar of fire. And far down there on the ground Lazaretto was now laid out for me like a diagram, or a mathematical theorem.

  Oh, the f
amous Kiruski had done his job well! Now I understood. It reminded me of those immense sand-drawings in the Peruvian desert whose subjects are apparent only from the air — spiders, crabs, monkeys that only the gods can see. Kiruski had so arranged things that the meaning of Hav itself should be represented in this, its newest incarnation, but that only from its utmost pinnacle, beneath the lamp of the great ‘M’ itself, could it be understood. Now I saw it all, in all its allegory! There were the lights of Lazaretto, far below us, and now I realized that all its paths and tunnels and shrubberies and towered villas were in the form of the circular labyrinth, the old Cathar symbol for mystic perfection. On the other side the Diplomatic Suburb was a metaphor of the mundane, patchily symmetrical, sans mystery, sans discipline — decidedly lacking, as the lady had warned me, ideological certainty. And high above it all, god-like in its strength and selfishness, indestructibly the Myrmidon Tower spread its glory, flashed its message of conviction across maze and mediocrity, island, harbour and city itself.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Biancheri on the way down. ‘You look a little shaky.’

  Something did seem to have happened to me up there — a spasm of dizziness, like a transient mini-stroke. It might have been the elevator, I told him, the rocket-jolt and the fish, Murder and Peace, or perhaps it was the effect of all those electronics, or just the height maybe. I thought it was more probably, though, an overwhelming sensation of sheer power that had overcome me in the tower — some kind of transcendental influence, you might say . . .