Hav

by Jan Morris

  ‘Aha,’ he said. ‘Well perhaps you’re right. There’s a lot of power stacked up in that building. And believe you me, they know all about Ibsen’s paw up there! Perhaps you’re right!’

  He walked me back to Palast One, through the garden torches and the bazaars, and when we parted he said: ‘You take care of yourself, now. This isn’t Llanystumdwy. Oh and by the way, you can disengage the tele-dado by pressing a little pink button behind the jacuzzi.’

  TUESDAY

  The Way of Genius

  2

  A baleful effect — expecting the answer yes — his deputies awaited me — a magical tale — in memoriam — taking a turn

  Because of the time change I woke early next morning, and went out to my balcony to watch the dawn break. I remembered that on my very first morning in Hav, two decades before, I had awoken to the sound of Missakian’s trumpet from the castle rampart, thrillingly echoing across the wakening city. I stood there now in the half-light, looking towards the distant outline of the citadel, hoping to hear that magical reveille again.

  As the sun’s rim showed itself above the horizon I imagined the trumpeter in the cold lee of the castle wall, wetting his lips and raising his instrument as the city’s minstrels had done every morning for so many generations. But no. No silvery trump called, to die away heart-rendingly into the mist. Instead there suddenly sounded, tremendously amplified over loudspeakers across the city, the lugubrious clanging chimes of a carillon, playing music that I did not recognize but which sounded almost fictionally antique. I was reminded, there and then, of the prehistoric horns they keep in the National Museum at Copenhagen, found deep in a peat-bog, which are sometimes taken from their cases and played on ceremonial occasions, and which were once described to me as sounding ‘older than the bogs themselves’. And I remembered too how a folk-band leader, in the Balad of years before, had described Havian music as ‘something very cold out of the long ago’.

  So that carillon seemed — older than Hav itself, not indeed in the timbre of the instrument itself, but in the nature of its music, which seemed to employ rhythms I had never heard before, chords and intervals beyond the rungs of the harmonic ladder — rarities of nature, perhaps, like triply diminished thirds. Was it in some lost mode — Lydian, Phrygian, Havian? The effect was baleful anyway, and the loud clanging so depressed me that I went indoors and shut the window, so that the discreet rush of the air-conditioning would drown it. Poor Missakian, thought I, if he were still alive to hear it.

  Just as I did so I noticed an envelope sliding beneath my door. It was stamped with the helmet logo, and was an invitation to visit the Office of Ideology at ten o’clock that morning — sharp. This sounded to me less an invitation than a summons, or at best one of those Latin interrogatives that expect the answer ‘yes,’ so I thought it best to accept, and made sure to be at the tunnel entrance just before ten.

  Transportation is one of the many polished pleasures of Lazaretto. Wherever you are in the resort, whether you are walking down to the beach or just wandering around, within a minute or two a bright-painted resort buggy is sure to slow down beside you and ask if you need a lift — ‘Welcome, dirleddy, make yourself comfortable, please; where would you like to go?’

  It is especially convenient if you plan to go through the harbour tunnel to the city, because until late at night half a dozen buggies are perpetually going back and forth. All you must do is show your blue pass to the man at the gate, sign the exit book, and away you trundle into the underwater tunnel, which is gaily decorated all over with mosaics illustrating the history of Hav from Troy to the Intervention, concluding with a representation of the Myrmidon Tower, flat on the tunnel roof, whose colours gradually merge with the daylight that greets you outside. It is very stylish, very cool. ‘Ideology Office, dirleddy? Hold on.’

  I was sad to think that these poky little vehicles, like something off a Florida golf course, had replaced the Electric Ferry that had contributed so inescapably to the atmosphere of the old Hav, but I had to admit advantages: in a trice we had emerged from the tunnel into a city square, and the buggy-driver, removing his straw hat with a courtly air, was surreptitiously accepting my tip (for gratuities, Biancheri had told me, are forbidden not just at Lazaretto, but anywhere in the new Hav).

  The square, Memorial Square, was entirely unfamiliar to me. The sea was out of sight, the waterfront was presumably behind me somewhere, and every single structure seemed to be brand-new. The buggy had dropped me before a large low building of white concrete. Its façade was plastered with a myriad Achillean helmets of marble, row upon row, rather as the Casa de las Conchas in Salamanca is studded all over with cockle-shells. I did not have to ask if this was the Office of Ideology. It had ideology written all over it. An armed sentry in white uniform and astrakhan hat, much like the military livery I remembered, gestured me inside with a charming smile, and in the severely functional lobby I was almost fulsomely greeted. It is true that I had to insert my blue pass into an identification slot, rather like putting a ticket into a railway-station machine, but the woman at the desk was wreathed in ingratiation. The Director himself, she said, was eagerly expecting me, being himself a scholar of the English language, and she congratulated me on my punctuality, a virtue much prized in Hav. It was a great pleasure to have me at the Office, declared this amiable functionary, and she herself took me up the white marble staircase to the office at the top.

  ‘Ah, Dirleddy Morris, what a privilege to meet you,’ said the trimly suited elderly man, wearing a red tarboosh, who rose from his desk to greet me. A monocle dangled from a golden cord around his neck, and what with this and the tasselled tarboosh, he looked remarkably like an Egyptian pasha of the previous century.

  ‘Please, sit down, take comfort, and I’ll join you.’ Coming round to the front of his desk he sat beside me on a squashy flowered sofa and asked me if I would care for tea. ‘No? Not indeed our finest Hav Broadleaf, cultivated in our new plantations on the escarpment slope? Well then, let us instead take a little chat.

  ‘We are particularly pleased to have you as our guest, Dirleddy Morris, because here in the Office we have all perused your book, and we feel that you have an instinctive sensation, a gut-sensation as it were, for the fundamental identity, one might say the basic soul, of our beloved country.’

  ‘I thought the book was banned,’ said I.

  ‘Banned? Oh dear me no, certainly not. For one reason and another it has been difficult to obtain in recent years, but as you see, we certainly have our hands on it here’ — and reaching up to his desk he showed me a well-worn copy of Last Letters from Hav.

  ‘There is one memorable passage which checked us of your empathy for the Hav meanings, and encouraged us to have the League of Intellectuals send you their invitation. It occurs on page 99.’

  The page evidently had a marker in it, for he immediately opened it there. ‘Would you care, dirleddy, if I reminded you of your own words? They are greatly moving to any true Havian, I think. You may remember that they demonstrate the return of fishing-boats into our harbour, and this’ (he cleared his throat and put his monocle in his eye) ‘is how they run:

  ‘. . . the boats all have engines nowadays, but they often use their sails, and when one comes into the harbour on a southern wind, canvas bulging, flag streaming, keeling gloriously with a slap-slap of waves on its prow and its bare brown-torsoed Greeks exuberantly laughing and shouting to each other, it is as though young navigators have found their way to Hav out of the bright heroic past.’

  ‘Those are your own words, dirleddy, and sublimital words they are. They bring the tears to my eyes to read them’ — and he took out his monocle and wiped it, to demonstrate the fact — ‘because they seem to see through the tumbled years into the bright heroic times of our beginnings. As though young navigators have found their way to Hav out of the bright heroic past. There it is, dear Miss Morris, there is the truth of us. There is the beauty of our condition, as we sail, shouting and
laughing at one another, brown-torsoed into our newly reborn city. Thank you. You write as if you are yourself writing out of the soul of Hav, and that is why you are here as our honoured guest today.’

  I don’t suppose his was quite the sort of figure I had in mind when I wrote the piece (which I had forgotten all about), but I let that go. ‘How very kind of you,’ I said. ‘I did wonder why the League had invited me, especially as I had heard you’d banned the book.’

  ‘No, no, Ms Morris, I have told you. Indisputably not banned. Simply unobtainable for administrative reasons, I remonstrate you. As you will find, certain segments of it — that same glorious passage, for example — have been reprinted by this Office and intentionally circulated. We all very much hope that if you publish a sequel, bring your reflections on Hav up to the instant, we shall have the pleasure of reprinting it in full here in Hav — we would rather have it done here, because, you must know, your Western publishers are notoriously unreliable in matters of administrative cooperation. I am myself, as you may perhaps have observed, a student of English idiom, and I personally relish your use of vocabulary.

  ‘So there we are, dirleddy. Our cards are displayed. It is an ornament to have you here, and I hope you will allow me personally to conduct you on an inspection of our new Hav. I know you have already tasted the wonder of Lazaretto. (They spell it with a symbol of astonishment, you know, just for effect — a cranky modernism, in my opinion, but you know what publicists are.) Now, you are expected for a morning conference with my deputies here at the Office, disposed for 10.30 sharp, and after an early lunch we shall spend the afternoon en promenade, so to speak. (We used to have a French resident here, before the Intervention — a literary cove himself, as it happens — and he always used to amuse me by his talk of going en promenade — so much more gentlemanly, he seemed to think, than simply taking a turn, as you or I would have exclaimed it.)’

  With elaborate politesse he showed me to the door.

  ‘My private name, by the way, is Dr Porvic, and I will now say you goodbye. See you later, alligator.’

  I very nearly responded in kind, but I wasn’t at all sure that he was joking.

  Downstairs his deputies awaited me, five of them. They reminded me of the ideologues of apartheid who, long before, had greeted me with similar earnest solemnity at Stellenbosch in South Africa. There would be no joking with them, I knew. They sat me down on a hard chair in a small conference room, and gathered about me rather like medical students at an anatomy theatre. They were all young, all in suits and ties, all with small Achillean badges in their lapels, and they were clearly settling down to put me straight.

  It was a bit like being lectured — not exactly brainwashed, just having inaccurate notions corrected. They knew, they said, of my well-known sympathy for the Havian ethos — the Director had told them about it, and they had read the Office’s extracts from my book, and now wished only to make clear to me what had been achieved since the end of the Intervention.

  Fundamentally, they said, the change was revelatory. When the Cathar Perfects had assumed power, after the withdrawal of the Intervening Force, they had made public the results of secret scholastic research which they had undertaken down the centuries, and which made apparent for the first time the profoundest origins of the State. As was well known, although the Cathars had been forced into anonymity in the sixteenth century, they had always been the true guardians of the Hav identity, but it had hitherto been supposed that the cult had been established here by knights of the First Crusade.

  ‘Now then,’ said they (I forget now which one of them actually said it — in my memory they seem to have spoken with one voice), ‘I’m sure you are aware that the earliest known urban settlement on our peninsula was that of Troy. Schliemann himself identified its remains on the western coast, and there is no doubt that Achilles set up his camp there when the Iliadic expedition first arrived from the Aegean (there was, of course, no such thing then as Greece).

  ‘You also surely know that Achilles brought his own bodyguard with him, Myrmidons, from the province of Thessaly in the north of what is now Greece. They sailed in their own ships — fifty of them in all. The Myrmidons long ago vanished from history, or legend for that matter, except as a synonym for fierce and dogged loyalty. By the time Achilles died they had dispersed, gone, vanished we know not where — Homer does not tell us.’

  I was beginning to see the light.

  ‘Are you beginning to see the light, Ms Morris? Dr Porvic tells us that your enlightened attitude to the meaning of Hav comes, he believes, purely by instinct. As we remember it, he tells us that you yourself come from the country of Wales — Cymru, is it? He says it is itself an often forgotten province of heroic origins, and suggests that this predisposes you, as it were, to absorb the Hav epic and its aesthetic.

  ‘Be that as it may . . . I dare say you are aware that in the past it has sometimes been proposed that the Kretevs, the cave-dwellers of the Escarpment, were not as had previously been thought Celts from central Europe, but descendants of that lost Myrmidonic host. It is also indisputable that the Cathar cult itself drew its original inspiration from Eastern mysteries—in particular Manicheanism and related dualistic conceptions. Now DNA tests carried out by our Office ethnic scientists have indeed established that the Kretev blood-stream, or as we prefer to call it, Ethnic Authority, had no known Celtic affinities. On the other hand it showed scientifically detectable analogies to ethnicities of certain provinces of what is now called Greece.

  ‘And here is the glory of it. During the Intervention, evidence was clandestinely discovered which proved without doubt — we repeat, without doubt, Ms Morris — that the ancient Cathar families of Hav, the Perfects of the ancient cult, shared the same ethnicity. In short, that our Cathar theocracy could claim unquestioned and legitimate descent from the Myrmidon warrior people who first came to Hav with the hero Achilles — possibly, unlikely though it sounds, through the medium of the troglodytes! It has even been suggested that Mani, the original prophet of Manicheanism, may have settled on our peninsula during his meditative wanderings. So it was established that the Cathars were, so to speak, the divinely sponsored rulers of our republic, suppressed for so many years by prejudice religious, political and ethnic.’

  The five deputies sat back in their chairs, observing my reaction. It must have satisfied them. I was fascinated, and astonished. So much about the new Hav now fell into place.

  ‘I see that the implications of this momentous certainty are apparent to you, and now you will begin more truly to understand the nature of our Republic. It is indeed revelatory. We honour, as it were, two aesthetics, one spiritual, one secular — not unlike the division of loyalties in the old Soviet republics, between theoretical Communism — Leninism, if you like — and the Stalinist State. On the one hand there is the mysterious aesthetic of the maze, which has been for many centuries the inspiration of Havian art and philosophy. It was itself perhaps introduced here from Crete — the Cretans themselves, you may remember, sent eighty ships to Troy. On the other hand??. there is the more absolute aesthetic of the Myrmidonic tradition, bold, warlike, glittering. Just as the concepts of Good and Evil are accorded equal respect by Manicheans, so these two structures of thought and beauty have now been reconciled by the Cathar theocracy, resulting in the Republic which, while grandly Myrmidonic in its outward aspects, is sustained by more ethereal principles beneath.

  ‘Both are animated,’ he continued, ‘by an inner conviction, cherished by Cathars down the generations, that Hav occupies a particular transcendental position in the world at large, peculiar to itself, which is how it has maintained its separateness down the centuries. You will have noticed, perhaps, from your visit to the Tower, that when our famous Kiruski designed the Lazaretto island, he made sure that all three conditions were to be allegorically represented. The brilliance of the resort is balanced by that less lovely appendage, the Diplomatic Suburb, expressing the darker nature of creation, and high
above there rises in culmination the magnificent assurance of the Tower. And the whole is embraced within our immemorial symbol of the maze.’

  So there, said the directors, as one man, now I knew all.

  ‘But you talk about aesthetics,’ I protested, ‘you say nothing about practices.’

  ‘Practices?’ said their leader. ‘You mean political practices, economic practices, matters like that? Dirleddy, they fall outside our province. We deal in this Office with Ideology and Ethnic Authority. Day-to-day management affairs you must discover for youself — and if we are to go by Dr Porvic’s assessment of your talents, we are sure you will! Ah, and here he is now!’

  For the Director was waiting for me in the lobby, when I left the conference chamber with all the deputies. ‘Well, how did the convening occur?’ he asked to the radiant smiles of the woman at the reception desk. ‘Did my deputies instruct you well?’

  ‘Excellently, although I have to say that in some ways they left me more confused than I was before.’

  Ha ha, laughed all the deputies, and Porvic did too. ‘Ah, dirleddy, that is the mazian aspect of our national personality. If you would like to discuss it more deeply I will happily introduce you some of my colleagues with a profounder knowledge of it than I can myself profess, or even my learned deputies here. Best of all, I can lead you to our famous Professor Kiruski, who is the most eminent authority of them all.’

  But no, I said hastily, ‘I’ve only got two weeks,’ and the Director and his deputies laughed again.

  ‘Urchin soup?’ he asked as we left the building, to the winning salute of the sentry. ‘Would that satisfy your taste-buds?’ I remembered the waterfront café I used to frequent, which made a speciality of sea-urchins, and attracted a wonderfully cosmopolitan, raffish and bohemian clientele. I assumed it had been buried under the concrete of his own office, but he took me round the back, and there in a cluttered alley, overshadowed by that wall of Achillean helmets, the same old café appeared to thrive.