Hav

by Jan Morris

  I said I’d been at Yuan Wen Kuo the day before, and was struck by the contrast in style between it and the Medina.

  ‘Ah well, yes, that’s the Chinese way. They like a bit of flash. They’re all at each others’ throats anyway, and love to show off. They’re much more internecine, if that’s the word, than we are down here. Almost all the firms up there are Chinese, cutthroat competitors, and very big business too. They deal in things — things they make, things they sell, huge construction projects, all that kind of stuff. They’re big on import—export—always have been. Down here we’re more — well, theoretical.’

  As he said this, he put his finger down the side of his nose and smirked a bit. ‘Funny really,’ he said. ‘It used to be the Chinese who ran laundry businesses . . .’

  ‘Are you saying . . .’

  ‘Yes I am, more or less. Leave it at that. You see, the Chinese prefer things up front. They’ve been active in Hav for years and years, as you know, and they feel a bit superior to all these people around here. If you want to build an airport, fine, go and talk about it at Yuan Wen Kuo; they’ll fix everything for you, money, materials, labour, technicians, the whole lot — even architects — they hoped to get that Lord Rogers for the terminal, you know. They’ve built the whole caboodle at the Balad.

  ‘But if you want to ship, say, a cargo of electronics from Cuba to Abu Dhabi, or broker a deal in some debatable substance or other, or fix an exchange rate somewhere, or even arrange a tricky introduction, why, the Medina’s the place, and you can’t do better than consult Butterworth and Sons, Founded 1823! A long-standing British firm, as our letter-heads used to say, “To Be Trusted in All Transactions”.’

  ‘I’m sure old Oswald would be proud of you.’

  ‘You can be damned sure of it. He’d be right at home on the new Hav. We do a lot of business with the Lazaretto, you know — wasn’t Biancheri rather a pal of yours in the old days? Lazaretto’s just the old man’s style, I like to imagine. He was very go-ahead in his day.’

  And how about the Cathars, I asked him. ‘How d’you get on with them?’

  ‘Ask no questions, my love, and you’ll be told no lies — well, not many, anyway.’ He laughed boisterously once again and showed me to the door. ‘Where are you off to next?’

  I said I was going to the Great Bazaar, to look into the matter of the Roof-Race.

  ‘Ah yes, the Roof-Race, our Bull Run. There’s money in that, too. Keep your nose clean.’

  The Great Bazaar was just at the end of his street. My only remembrance of it concerned the Roof-Race, when in ’84 I raced with the then Mahmoud (now Azzam) through its tumultuous arcades to catch the climactic moments of the Bazaar Leap and the finish. It was still the same shape, with its Market Gate and its Castle Gate, but that was all. It had been rebuilt after the Intervention as a shopping-mall, and was interspersed with a dozen or more coffee shops at which, as I explored the place, swarms of young people sat on sofas or stood at counters noisily talking — junior commerçants or financiers, I assumed, having their lunch break.

  The old pattern of the Bazaar, with its myriad alleys open to the sky, had been preserved, and the shops did somehow retain a faintly Levantine air. They all had open fronts. Their produce was laid out in big trays, or hung in flouncy rows, and from their dark interiors the shopkeepers peered out, just as in the old days, like so many watchful serpents, sometimes hissing the terms of a reduction. It reminded me rather of the mock souks that have sprung up in some Arab countries, for the benefit of nervous tourists, at which even the haggling is a sort of pretence.

  When I stopped for a coffee myself, and mentioned it to young people at the counter, they were inclined to agree. ‘But then,’ said one girl, ‘the whole Great Bazaar is a con, isn’t it? The Castle Gate isn’t really a gate after all, and look at the Roof-Race circuit!’

  I hadn’t seen the Roof-Race circuit, so they took me up to a viewing site above the café. ‘See what I mean?’ said the girl. ‘What’s real about that?’

  Nothing was. The old Roof-Race had been run over a ramshackle antique course full of dangerously miscellaneous obstacles, chimney-pots and wind-towers, drainpipes and balustrades, intersected everywhere by the open-roofed alleys that ran below: a medieval, maze-like course immemorially supposed to have been the route run by the legendary Messenger to reach Gamal Abdul Hussein. It was all too real, and people died running it, or jumping over the round open space that was the crux of the Great Bazaar. Now almost the whole roof of the new, concrete mall was perfectly flat, and the only obstacles were artificial bumps sometimes, rather like very high speed-bumps, and concrete chimneys dotted here and there. The roof was still split this way and that, to correspond with the bazaar alleys below, but I noticed that in every case it sloped downwards to the gap, and the line of sight was clear everywhere. A white steel fence ran all around the circuit; dotted here and there were view platforms like the one we were on.

  ‘See what I mean? All sanitized, all sham. Even the chimneys are sham — who needs chimneys now? And the jumps — you can see for yourself, they’ve all got safety shelves, and as for the Great Leap itself, there in the middle, they put a safety net under that.’

  ‘Yes, but be fair, Sofy, it’s still a hell of a course. I wouldn’t like to run it. They’ve made it less dangerous, yes, but they run it so much faster nowadays that there are nearly as many accidents anyway.’

  ‘I wasn’t telling her about the danger; I was talking about the reality of it. It isn’t real any more. It’s all stage-managed. Look for yourself! You can see! It’s lost all meaning now. It used to be a true honour to wear the red ribbon, but who cares now?’

  As we went down again they said I ought to go and talk to the people at the Race Office, outside the Castle Gate. ‘Fair’s fair,’ they said, ‘go and see what they have to say.’

  So I left them ordering more coffees at the café, and walked down the main arcade and out through the great gate (itself a sort of reluctant approximation of its medieval original). Immediately outside it, on a rounded corner building, a large sign said: ‘THE ROOF-RACE INITIATIVE 2012’. Display windows below were full of Roof-Race photographs, old and new, victors falling bloodied from the ramparts, art photographs of the Great Leap taken from below, groups of champions, Governors presenting the gold goblet surrounded by preposterously overdressed civic worthies, legendary winners from the past posed with laurel wreaths around their necks. In the foreground there was a photograph of some filmic celebrity holding above her blonde head a banner proclaiming: ROOF-RACE FOR THE WORLD!

  I went inside. A man was sitting at a big desk, piled with pamphlets and carved in front with a gilded helmet. He was dressed in a Hav gallabiyeh and sported a black-and-white rosette. ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘Could it be’, I began, ‘that—’

  ‘Yes, yes, it could! Fatima told me to expect you!’ He jumped up from his chair (the back of it ornamented with maze-circles) and kissed my hand enthsiastically. ‘Dirleddy, what a pleasure to see you again. Do you recognize me? Do you honestly?’

  I didn’t, to tell you the truth. He had been a slim, racy, perhaps rather wild young man: now he was the plump epitome of middle-aged Havian respectabililty, and he talked in a committee-room timbre.

  ‘No, I thought not. Ah well, one can’t expect it — age creeps up on all of us, does it not? Prosperity too! But sit down, sit down, how can I help you?’

  I told him that he could explain to me first what all this Initiative stuff was about. Why 2012? He was only too pleased to explain. It was a campaign, he said, to have the Roof-Race recognized as an Olympic sport in time for the 2012 holding of the Games.

  ‘I must first tell you what has in recent years happened to the Race’ (and as that receptionist had audibly articulated the exclamation mark in ‘Lazaretto!’, so Yasin made it clear to me that ‘the Race’ had a capital ‘R’). ‘You may or may not know that since the year 2000 it has been thrown open to competitors from around the w
orld. It is now a major event on the international sporting calendar. Like the Bull Run at Pamplona — just as an example, you understand — it attracts entries from everywhere, and our Government is anxious that it should become a universally recognized feature of modern Hav. With the Myrmidon Tower, it will be something that comes to everyone’s mind when Hav is mentioned.’

  He sounded as though he had it by heart. ‘You’ve said all this before, haven’t you?’ I said.

  He laughed and shrugged. ‘Oh Miss Morris, you’ve been in this game too long. But there we are, it’s my job. I’m no longer the young man skidding down the Staircase; I am a Myrmidonic Civil Servant Grade 3. Anyway, it’s like I say: they wanted it be a world-class event, and so when the Grand Bazaar was rebuilt they decreed that it must be reconceived too. Health and safety, don’t you know.

  ‘Actually they had first wanted it abolished altogether, but you know how much it meant to Havian people — there was such an outcry that the Perfects themselves intervened. But they did remodel the whole course, to make it generally acceptable to world opinion.’

  ‘They took all the character out of it, you mean. I’ve just been up to see it.’

  ‘That is not for me to say. I am only the Race spokesman. Suffice it to say that the course has now been judged, by independent international experts, to conform to the highest safety standards. This being so, the Government has decided that it should occupy a similar status to the Cresta Run at St Moritz in Switzerland. That’s also confined to a particular place, but open to all comers, and we feel confident that Hav will soon be ready to accommodate big sporting crowds — the new airport, Lazaretto and all that, all the necessary infrastructure.’

  But, said I, St Moritz was a bit different because the Cresta was a winter sports event.

  ‘Quite true, and as a matter of fact we have thought of using artificial snow machines to make the Roof-Race a winter sport too. It was thought too risky in the end, so instead we are pressing for the Race to be accepted as a sport in the summer Olympics for 2012. We’ve hardly started the campaign yet. We’ve only just opened this office. But the Government is going to use all its influence, especially of course among our economic associates, to see that we win. It will be a triumph for Hav. Lazaretto is sponsoring it, and with the new Balad airport, and of course with Havberry products becoming household names around the world, it will put us on the map at last.’

  ‘You want to be on the map?’

  ‘Not much. But that’s my job.’ He looked at me a little wistfully, I thought. ‘But actually, Jan — I may call you Jan, mayn’t I? — actually I hate the whole thing. I’m just paid to say all this. For me the Roof-Race was always a private affair. It was just for us, us Havians. Also it was exciting — it was, wasn’t it? And of course the danger was part of it. Nobody complained in the old Hav about the danger, did they? It’s only since the Intervention, and all that — making a profit out of everything, giving Hav its proper place in the world, all that balls. Health and safety, all that nonsense.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’d really like to happen. It’s too late to do anything about the Roof-Race. Trying to revive it as it was couldn’t work, and the new course means it’s something totally different and new, really nothing to do with the old one. But if they really must put Hav on the sporting map — give it a Cresta Run, as it were — I think they should have a car rally on the Escarpment. We’d call it the Escarpment Rally.’

  Now he was warming up. ‘I know the country well, as you will remember — remember whizzing down to pick up my cousin, the first time we ever met? I know the country well, and I’ve already worked out a route. We can use the Tunnel itself. They’ve taken out all the rails — the Chinese bought the lot, to ship away as scrap metal. Think of it: all those hairpin bends inside the mountain!

  ‘I’ll tell you what, Jan. Are you free this afternoon? Why don’t I take you up there, and you can see for yourself? We will run our own Escarpment Rally.’

  A great idea, I thought. Anything is grist to my mill, and besides, I hadn’t forgotten that he was one of the two young men who had taken me to the séance long ago.

  ‘Well then, suppose we meet here around two. My car’s in the multi-storey. OK? I’ve got a group coming any minute now from the airport, but I should be through with them by then. Ideology bring them in, you know, on their way to Lazaretto. Stay and hear my recitation, if you like.’

  I declined, and at that moment there arrived half a dozen rather worn-looking tourists, clearly just off a long flight, most of them American it seemed, and ushered by a tour guide in Havian rig. I hastily left, but lingered for a few moments by the door, to hear Yazin say, in his fruity official voice: ‘Welcome, welcome. Before your helicopter takes you to enjoy yourselves at our great resort, I am so happy and privileged to be able to tell you something about an exciting new initiative that we are embarking upon here in Hav . . .’

  I left, closed the door quietly behind me, and returned to the Bazaar for another coffee.

  When I returned to the Roof-Race office Yasar was outside waiting for me. How did the recitation go, I asked him?

  ‘It went. They loved it. I know it by heart,’ and as we walked out of the Medina to the car park he added: ‘They always love it. Who wouldn’t? One of them said the Messenger sounded a bit like Robin Hood — oh, and one of them said they’d read about it in your book. I didn’t know you’d written a book? I hope I don’t come into it.’

  Fortunately for me we reached the car park then — and fortunate for me too, I could not help thinking, that my book was banned . . .

  His car was a trim little Honda Type R (built at their new Izmir factory, he said) and the minute he swung it out into the highway I knew I was in for a sharp ride. We whizzed — his word! — round the foot of the Castle on to the H1, and then up past the airport. Before the Havberry plant we turned off, and then we were on a rough road that went through the salt-flats towards the old Palast. This, he said, was where his rally route began.

  I thought it seemed more suitable for motorbikes than for cars, but no, no, no, he said, not necessarily, and suddenly he put his foot down and we leapt over the flats leaving a vast cloud of sandy salty dust billowing behind us. There was no other traffic on the track — the big salt-wagons, he said, had their own tarmac road down the coast to the harbour — and the only signs of life were trucks moving among the flats and the big grey salt elevators steaming. This would only be the preliminary phase of the event, Yasar told me, and all too soon it was over, and we were bounding and bouncing up the first slopes of the Escarpment.

  Here were the caves of the Kretevs. They were lifeless. Nobody was there. Not a tumble-down lorry stood about, no raggedy swarm of children ran after us, no bright washing hung from laundry lines. ‘No bears,’ I said as we bounced and joggled over the hard bumps.

  ‘No bears, no Kretevs, no snow raspberries, no life. That’s what the Intervention did to us. Only these holes in the ground.’

  They did look like holes, too, like rabbit warrens perhaps, or abandoned badger setts, with the same scrabbled signs of old activity around them. I found it hard even to imagine the curious community that used to be there, so full of life and love, with their cosy troglodyte homes and their weird relationship with the bears. Could any of their tradition survive, I wondered, among the comfortable conformities of the new Balad? And then I remembered what the women had said about the guest workers, and thought that perhaps all was not lost. . .

  Yasar seemed to have read my mind. ‘Don’t fret,’ he said, grimly clutching his bucking steering-wheel and desperately changing gear around corners — his paunch made it a little difficult. ‘Don’t you worry, the Kretevs will find a way. They always have.’

  We did not stop when we reached the top of the ridge, high above the sea to our left. Instead we raced down to the flat ground on the other side, and then, turning to the east, made an exhilarating run at top speed along the northern lee of the Escarpment — thirty mil
es or so along the tussocky moorland, flying over mounds and declivities, swooping around bumps, with such a roar and a rattling and a whoosh that Yasar was laughing aloud beside me. ‘I call that the Frontier Run,’ he said at last, breathlessly braking the car to career around a rock. ‘We’ve been following the old frontier all the way. Now back to the station.’

  We turned in our tracks to run westward along the flank of the ridge, and soon I saw where we were. All alone there stood the remains of the Frontier Station, where the Express used to stop to pick up the Tunnel Pilot, and where I had first met the young Yasar. It looked picked clean, as it were. The roof and gates and platform shelters had all gone. So had the railway lines. It might never have been a railway station at all, and it looked as though nobody had been there for years. ‘Sometimes I see Kretevs here,’ Yasar said. ‘God knows what they’re up to. They scare me rather — they look like ghosts.’

  He swung the car into the cutting where the railway had run, stopped, and switched off the engine. Now the only sound was the ticking of its engine cooling, and the rush of the wind. ‘Look up there,’ Yasar said, pointing to the top of the Escarpment before us. I looked, I looked hard, and I could just make out, like a careless stroke of pencil lead in a drawing, a thin black line silhouetted against the sky. It was the Megalith, the high point of the old Staircase, from where I had looked back, all those years before, to see the warships of the Intervention approaching. In my mind I could see the scene as if it were yesterday. I could almost hear the blast of those black aircraft, heralding the change of all things in Hav.

  ‘Right,’ said Yasar then. ‘The tunnel run.’ Revving the engine hard, he slipped the clutch and we shot helter-skelter into the darkness. The Hav Tunnel, built by Roman Abramoff of the Imperial Russian Railways, used to be famous as the most daring feat of railway engineering ever undertaken, because it descended (or ascended) such a startling distance in so short a time. It avoided a precipitate surface gradient by a series of a dozen or more hairpin bends, so close together that they amount in fact to a spiral. ‘Nothing like this had ever been attempted before’, said Branger’s Railway Engineering in 1878, ‘and will probably never be tried again. It was Abramoff’s final tour de force.’ And when Norman Foster’s celebrated Millau Viaduct was opened in France in 2005, even then the Civil Engineering Gazette declared it to be reminiscent, in its sheer technical virtuosity, of Abramoff’s Hav Tunnel.