by Jan Morris
Very different they said, very sad. But then they looked at each other and laughed. Very comfortable, too, they said! No, they did not miss the caves, they preferred the central heating. Their menfolk all had construction jobs at the airport. And when the guest workers were in their quarters — they went off by bus each day to their work sites — why, then the whole place was full of life, better than those long lonely days on the Escarpment. They laughed and giggled and nudged one another. Oh yes, they said, the Cathar Government had looked after them well, after the Intervention.
At this a big old man, heavily bearded, interrupted us. ‘Of course they looked after us. They needed us. Now they want to show the world how civilized they are. Why d’you think this lady is here now? Because they’ve sent her here to see how well they treat us. Do you think this is any way of life for a Kretev? Don’t you care about the bears, you silly women? Don’t you care about anything? I’ll tell you, lady, what they’re doing to us is ethnic engineering. We’re like snow raspberries to them. They’re mutating us. GM folk, that’s what we are. Human snow raspberries.’
He stumped off, leaving the women giggling and the children looking goggle-eyed at me, and suddenly I remembered what the place reminded me of. It was like that huge healthy construction the Nazis built on the island of Rugen in the Baltic, to provide holiday indoctrination for the Hitler Youth.
It was still only late afternoon, so I turned in my tracks and drove south by the old rough roads, skirting the city, leaving the harbour away to my left, until I struck the old highway to the ferry station for San Spiridon, on the east coast of the peninsula. I remembered the unassuming little island community as being, in a curiously suggestive way, the heart or fulcrum of Greekness in Hav, and Fatima Yeğen had told me that it was left unscathed by the Intervention. There used to be only one steamboat a day to the island, but I guessed that things might have changed by now, and I was right.
I left the car in a car park and walked down to the little dock. No steamboat lay gently hissing there, but a gleaming streamlined hydrofoil was revving its engines. ‘Just in time,’ said a cheerful dockhand in sailor’s gear, ‘and there isn’t another for an hour.’ The passengers already on board had changed, too. They were certainly Greek, but they no longer looked like peasants from the Dodecanese, but more like well-dressed office-workers on a daily commute. Their string-tied suitcases and straw hampers had become briefcases and plastic shopping-bags. Their children were demure. There was not a dog or a mule or a motorbike on board the spanking little vessel, and nobody smoked a pipe. Only the inevitable tall-hatted Orthodox priest sat there with an air of authority, reading his Bible.
Except for the priest everybody looked up at me as I found myself a seat, but nobody spoke. Only when we had crossed the sound, fifteen minutes later, and were about to dock at the island, did an elderly woman sit down beside me and say: ‘Haven’t we met before? Didn’t you come to San Spiridon long ago? Jan Morris, isn’t it? I am Kallonia Laskaris.’
‘Kallonia Laskaris — of course! I’d have known you anywhere’ — and we both laughed. ‘And how is your dear little daughter, who was so kind to me that day?’
‘This is “my dear little daughter” — Arianna, come over here and meet an old friend’ — and there she was, an elegant young woman in her early thirties, in T-shirt and designer jeans, assuring me that she remembered very well my visit to the island all those years ago, but not very convincingly.
‘I’m told you wrote about us that time,’ said Kallonia. ‘I won’t ask if you’re going to write something again, my dear — although I hope you do have a blue pass, don’t you? — but you must come home with us anyway and see what’s happened to our lovely San Spiridon — thanks be to God.’
I told her I only had an hour, before I must catch the hydrofoil back.
‘Never mind, dear Jan. We shall do it just like we did last time. Arianna will quickly show you round the place again, and I will get in a few dear friends to meet you. You will see some changes! But our good shepherd-saint and the Holy Mother of God has protected us.’
I didn’t remember Kallonia ever talking like this, and as Arianna led me up the hill, I mentioned it to her.
‘You’re right,’ she said. My mother is born again. St Spiridon is very big in her life these days — he was the shepherd-saint, you know — but then he’s very big to nearly everyone on the island now. You say you noticed a difference in her conversation. Don’t you notice any difference in the place?’
Holy Mother of God I did. Nothing had basically changed, but everything seemed rejuvenated. The fishermen’s shacks were all repainted, the taverns were smart, one of the shops had become a small supermarket, the other was a cyber-café. The church, at the end of its causeway, was a brilliant white, and the celery fields were meticulously maintained.
‘Not GM celery, I hope,’ I said, but Arianna scoffed.
‘Monsanto on San Spiridon? The saint would never allow it. And who would be fool enough to mutate Spiridon celery?’
I asked her what had happened, to recharge the island in this way, but she told me to ask the people when we got home. ‘They can explain it better than I can.’
And sure enough, when we reached Kallonia’s house on the top of the hill, the company assembled there beneath the pergola was only too ready to oblige. There were four or five bourgeois-looking gentlemen and their wives, and the sideburned young owner of the cyber-café, and Kallonia herself of course, and the priest I had seen on the hydro-ferry, and except for the priest they all talked at once, while Kallonia and Arianna moved among us with tumblers of Hav retsina and vine-leaf rice rolls — ‘We would give you a proper meal, dear Jan, but I know you haven’t got the time.’
It was the priest, of course, still wearing his hat, who prevailed over the hubbub, and emerged as spokesman for them all — spokesman for the island itself, as Kallonia whispered in my ear.
‘We are grateful to our patron saint, of course, and to the Holy Mother of God’ — all crossed themselves here — ‘for what has happened to our beloved island and our community, but we must also be properly grateful to our Perfects and the Holy Cathar Government. For it is they who, assiduously exploring the byways of Hav’s ancient history, realized that at the root of it, the core and the root, the foundation — at the bottom of it was Greekness’ (murmurs of approval).
‘Our forebear Achilles, it is now recognized, was the true Father of Hav. Our Myrmidonic ancestors, we now understand, were the original Cathars, and although our religious practices have diverged somewhat down the centuries, nevertheless we gratefully acknowledge that our theologies are in profoundest essences identical.’ (‘Identical,’ confirmed one of the bourgeois gents. ‘Almost identical,’ murmured the owner of the cyber-café.) ‘Identical,’ firmly concluded the priest.)
So it was, he went on, that the Myrmidonic Republic recognized the island as — well, say the Runnymede of Hav, where Magna Carta was signed, or that field by the lake, he forgot the name, where the Swiss Confederation was established. ‘It is the cradle of our Republic, and as such is generously favoured by the Perfects and the State. There was a time, we must explain to our visitor from across the seas, when to be Greek in Hav was something to be ashamed of. Our people were forced to be furtive in our Greekness. We were subdued, we lost our old Hellenic pride — our epic pride, one might say — or as one writer across the seas has written, I am told, our pride in our bright heroic past.
‘But now — well, dirleddy, look around you Do we seem furtive? Are we not the Greeks of old once more?’ (Cries of yes, yes, praise to the saint, praise to the Holy Mother, etc.) ‘That is because we know ourselves now to be the original Havians, and the Republic knows it too!’
Happy confusion ensued, the priest beaming in triumph, the gentlemen shaking hands with each other, the ladies breaking fitfully into song, the cyber-café man telling me that of course he realized their theologies were hypothetically identical, the retsina flowing, Kallonia t
elling me she hoped I now understood a little more, until we saw from the terrace the hydrofoil returning from the mainland, and with embraces, kisses and loud good wishes in Havian Greek, I was seen off through the celery fields down to the harbour.
Stuffed full of Hellenism, then, I just had time to drive down and see the Iron Dog again. It was, after all, the most extraordinary legacy of the Greeks in Hav, placed there above the Hook, so it was claimed, by the Spartans when they were besieging the city. I knew that the nearby Conveyor Bridge had escaped the Intervention. Its destruction might have blocked the channel into the harbour, and its French subsidies had continued throughout, together with regular maintenance by engineers from Paris. Nobody had mentioned, though, the Dog.
I drove most of the way, over tussocky tracks, but had to walk the last few hundred scented yards to the high plateau above the bridge. Beyond it that animal still stood, proud and strange as ever, his tail flowing behind him, his snout extended. For the first time he struck me as some sort of heraldic beast, like a savage armorial. The wind blew, as it always does there, the container cabin lurched silently across the channel, a ship sailed by far below, and the whole scene seemed to me altogether hallucinatory, like so much of Hav itself.
I clambered down the slope to look through my binoculars at the famous graffiti on the dog’s flank, but I could make none of them out. The Norse symbols, the Venetian ciphers, the Kaiser’s eagle, ‘H. M. Stanley’ arrogantly under the creature’s chin, all had been overwhelmed by enormous tangles of cyber-graffiti — those weird stylized inscriptions which are plastered bafflingly all over the western world, but which I had never before seen in Hav. They looked more than ever mysterious on the hide of the Iron Dog, high above the chasm, as if a horde of aliens had passed that way, leaving their arcane signatures behind.
I drove back to L’Auberge Impériale just at twilight, and spent the evening chatting to Miss Yeğen. We shared a bowl of celery soup (‘the real stuff’, said Fatima, ‘like you, fresh this morning from San Spiridon’), and capped it with a glass or two of Aqua Hav. This was rather too sweet for me, but she liked it.
FRIDAY
Into the tunnel
5
To the Rialto — everything? — in the bazaar — an initiative — the Escarpment rally — tunnel effects
‘And what’, asked Fatima at the breakfast table, ‘are you planning for today? Do you need the car? Or are you running away to the flesh-pots again?’
‘Today’, I said, ‘I must go to the Rialto, and I shall go afoot.’
She thought I meant I was planning a visit to the movies, so I explained myself less Shakespearianly. I wanted to see where the action was, where the money was generated, where the shakers and movers hung out.
‘Ah, the Hav Rialto. Well you can walk there easily enough. You can find the way, I’m sure. It’s the Medina, of course, as it always was, and around the Grand Bazaar is where it all happens — not in the Bazaar, but in the streets all around it. It’s nearly all new, of course — you realize that — but you’ll see some things you remember, and if you want to find out more about the Roof-Race they’ve got an office down there now, around the corner from the Grand Mosque. As it happens, I think you know its manager. Remember my cousin Yasar, who drove you down the Staircase when you first came? That’s him. Give him a kiss from me. He’ll tell you everything.’
Everything? He’d certainly told me a lot last time, but times have changed in Hav since then . . . I embraced Fatima, thanked her for the bedroom and the car, gave her the rest of the Aqua Hav and set off for the Medina. I hardly knew where I was, so utterly changed was the city-scape, but I used as a point of reference the Castle high on its hill above the city. Nothing has changed up there, I thought to myself. Missakian is dead, but lives on in the memory of his melody. The Crusaders are still marching bravely down to their ships, and Saladin instructs his scribes just how to word the inscription on his gateway. The Venetians are up there still, watching their salt-convoys sailing for Alexandria, and I expect the officers of Her Majesty’s Royal Regiment of Artillery sometimes visit their gun emplacements. The permanence of this immanent city is embodied in those old walls, thought I sententiously to myself as I followed my nose through the unfamiliar streets below.
I had expected to find the Medina, rebuilt from its own ruins, rather like Wall Street, rigid, overbearing, pompous, or at least like the new financial quarter of Frankfurt, which had similarly been reborn out of chaos. But oddly enough it turned out to be much more like the original Rialto, that tight-packed financial quarter around the famous bridge in Venice, stepped and jumbled and full of dead ends, which has survived the centuries with its scrambled character intact. Could it be that the architects of the new Hav really did have Venice in mind? Certainly the minarets of the Great Mosque, high above the offices of concrete and mirror-glass, stand there very much as the Basilica of San Marco still lords it over its red-tiled rooftops.
For they have rebuilt this financial quarter of Hav, this new Rialto, in a deliberately stylized way. Motor-traffic is banned within the spectral circuit of the medieval walls — themselves entirely demolished — and there is nothing straightforward to its plan, nothing obviously rational. It is like a pastiche. The few main thoroughfares are entangled in alleys and lanes and little squares. Perhaps the famous Kiruski had something to do with it, because in its insidious way it is a perfect allegory of the money-making world. ‘Turn up on your right hand at the next turning,’ says Shakespeare’s Launcelot, directing a visitor towards the Venetian Rialto, ‘but at the next turning of all, on your left; marry at the very next turning, turn of no hand, but turn down indirectly to the Jew’s house.’ So it seemed to me in the Rialto of Hav, too — the detail perfectly explicit, the whole a deliberate tangle.
At first I simply wandered — and wondered. This is a formidable place. It is a labyrinth of money. It has none of the ostentation of Yuan Wen Kuo, so brassily, flauntingly showy. Instead it is a nook-and-cranny sort of place, where you would be more likely to find one of those discreet private banks of the City of London, or the secretive institutions of Zurich, than the Bank of America, say, or the Hong Kong and Shanghai. Up every alley there seems to be another quiet institution. Modest brass plates announce the presence of the Stockholm and Copenhagen Trust Company, or Lisbon Trading, or Cosmopolitan Exchange, or Balkan & Baltic. Some of the doors are unmarked. Some of the plates need a polish — intentionally, I suspect. Even the movement of people — couriers? security men? accountants? — down the narrow side-streets and cul-de-sacs has an obscurely muffled air. The absence of traffic, too, makes it feel even more Venetian: the voices of people, the swarming footsteps of passers-by, the hum of air-conditioning and the constant ringing of telephones sound all the louder by contrast.
Hah! Here was a name-plate I recognized, among several of many nationalities in the doorway of a particularly anonymous-looking block: Butterworth and Sons, World-Wide Preferential Shipping Tariffs. I pressed a button. A man’s voice said, ‘Yes.’. ‘Jan Morris,’ said I. A long pause, then a man’s voice: ‘Jan Morris? Good Lord. Well I never. Come on in.’ A buzz, a click, and the door was opened. The offices of Butterworth and Sons occupied the ground floor, and waiting for me in the hall was Mr Mitko Butterworth himself. ‘Yes,’ we cried in unison when we saw each other — ‘In spite of all temptations. . .!’
‘Fancy your remembering,’ we tumbled over each other in saying, and then, still laughing, he led me into his highly functional office, all chrome and electronics. ‘Yes, after all these years, fancy your remembering. How did you find us? Just by chance? Certainly not through the British Legation, what? They don’t like us there any more than they liked us when they were a hoity-toity Agency!’
Mr Butterworth didn’t seem to have aged much, and was still in his shirtsleeves, though I noticed he had given up on cuff-links.
‘Well well well, fancy that. There’ve been some changes made, n’est-ce pas? What? I suppose you hardly r
ecognize the old place?’
‘I certainly wouldn’t recognize Butterworth and Sons,’ I said, eyeing the suavity all around me, and remembering the musty premises of 1985.
‘Yes, that’s true, we haven’t done badly since the Intervention. All’s in order for the fifth generation of Butterworths, touch wood. Oh, how rude of me: care for a coffee? Or an Aqua Hav perhaps?’
Coffee would be lovely I said, and he winked at me as he spoke into his desk telephone. ‘Very wise. Can’t stand the Aqua stuff myself, but all good Havians are obliged to like it.’
The coffee arrived and we were silent for a moment until the golden-robed servant withdrew.
‘You’re still not Havian yourself, then?’
‘No, no, no. Never. Well, not altogether. Nowadays, I must admit, I do have more than one nationality. In my business there are advantages to it.’
‘What is your business, actually? I know you told me your great-great-grandfather, was it? — wanted to extend the range of the agency. Has it happened?’
Mr Butterworth stirred his coffee cup for a moment. ‘Shipping agencies’, he said, ‘have always been complex businesses. We’ve always tried to move with the times, which is why we’ve hung on here all this time, and I think I can say we’ve adapted successfully to the new Hav. Those name-plates outside are all ours really, you know — subsidiary companies of ours, associate agencies, concessionaires, that kind of thing.’
‘You mean the whole building is yours?’
‘Well yes, in a manner of speaking. Ownership is a sort of abstraction in Hav these days. Let’s say we have an enthusiastic interest in it all — how’s that?’