Hav (30 page)

‘He believes the whole malarky, I really think he does. He honestly believes that the Cathars are descended from those ridiculous Myrmidons. And he's not alone, you know. There are lots like him. In their muddled minds they've accepted the idea that the theocracy is historically ordained — divinely ordained too, naturally.'

‘What do you make of it all politically?' I asked. This seemed to floor them rather. They looked at each other questioningly.

‘We are not really political animals,' Azzam said, ‘we of the Sustenance. There's a lot to be said for the Republic. It's certainly better than what came before. You may question the taste, but you can't deny the speed and efficiency of the recovery. Hav is certainly richer than it was before, and much better ordered, too. Lazaretto is a great success, no question about that. What we object to is this: that it's all based upon lies. Of course that outburst of mine at lunchtime was play-acting —'

‘Good stuff all the same,' said Henri.

‘Thank you, Henri, but much more important is what I didn't say: that the theocracy is built upon intellectual pretence and fakery. As a result we are living lies. That's what we are fighting against: institutional lying. That's what this is all about.'

‘Well, enough already,' Magda said again. ‘I think Jan's heard enough. But we've got a couple of things we want to show you, Jan — don't worry, nothing ecological, just new Sights of Hav, as the tourist brochures would say, if any tourists were allowed in the city. You're very privileged, you know — all thanks to us.'

‘All thanks to Dr Porvic.'

‘Well, you may be right there,' said Henri. ‘You're getting the picture. An invitation from us has generally come from him.'

We walked around the point from the Fondaco Quay. ‘You must not suppose', Azzam said, ‘that because we differ in some of our views from the Republic, we do not recognize its achievements. For example the way the Cathars assumed the defence of Hav, so soon after the first attack of the Intervention, was an inspiration to us all. We are disturbed by the arcane use they have made of the House of the Chinese Master—'

‘Creepy's the word,' said Henri.

‘Well, yes, creepy if you like — but we admire what they've done with the
Carlotto
.'

The Carlotto? Round the corner we walked, past the last of the warehouses, and there mounted on a high platform was a small warship. I recognized it. It was the
Arnaldo Carlotto
which used to be moored more or less permanently beside the old Lazaretto amusement park. She was built in 1918 as a Yangtze gunboat for the Italian navy, but was given to the Hav Government in 1940 to act as a guard ship for the port. Now she stood high and dry above the quay, gleaming with new paintwork. She looked brand new. Her two tall funnels were bright red, her wooden bridge was polished, her twin guns, fore and aft, were proudly elevated and over her long afterdeck a snow-white tarpaulin was stretched.

‘You know her history?' Henri asked me. ‘Boy, she did well. She hadn't put to sea for years when the Intervention came, but when the first warships showed themselves — you saw them yourself, right? — the old girl got steam up at once and sailed out to the Hook to wait for them. She hadn't a hope, of course, but she stood there all alone, firing away like crazy as the destroyers came through the narrows. They say it was six hours before she sank at last, blasted clean out of the water.

‘After the Intervention the Cathars had her raised and rebuilt, and put her on that throne. They treat her well, don't they? They made her a Hero Ship. Folks love her, as you see.'

Certainly, queuing up the gangplank, filing around the deck, sporadic groups of sightseers toured the vessel, and I could just hear, above the hubbub of the Fondaco Quay round the point and out of sight, the insistent recorded voice of a commentary. And when after ten minutes or so the voice ceased, I heard something else too: the baffling cadences and third-tones of the Myrmidonic anthem.

‘God,' said Mazda, ‘there's that bloody tune again — if you can call it a tune. It comes around every ten minutes, Jan, so never stay here as long as that! I suppose old Porvic told you its story? And you believed it, of course — about the loose stone in the Séance House, and the brilliant young music student? Really. That fool Borge will do anything for them.'

Henri said: ‘And have you heard what they've done with the stuff at the rock clubs? They call it the Hav Sound. Huh! Some brilliant young music student! Some fucking sound!'

Next, they said, and finally, they wanted to show me a sacred site — well, not exactly a sacred site, but the nearest thing to one that Hav possessed. ‘Now of course you never knew', said Magda, ‘about the Cathar
séances
, when you were here before.'

Oh yes I did, but I didn't say so.

‘Not many of us did, and we certainly didn't know where they held their rites — the Lord knows what would have happened to anyone who penetrated them, which is why the whole set-up remained so mysterious. It's mysterious enough still, but not so much.'

‘Come now Magda,' Azzam interrupted, ‘we know no more about the Perfects now than we did then. I bet you even old Porvic doesn't know who they are, Jan, and he's one of their own bigwigs.'

‘That's true enough, but at least we know where the Séance Hall used to be in those days, and that's where we're taking you now.'

It wasn't far. The streets of new Hav are as confusing in their way as the old ones were. The old ones were endlessly muddling in their intricate alleys and courtyards, the new ones blur the mind with their monotony — each one looking so like the next that it is difficult to keep track on a course through them. Except for the big motorways most of them are pedestrianized, but for me this makes it hard to judge any distance. The only building I thought I recognized as we walked was a mosque protruding above the rooftops: it looked to me like a reconstructed version of the old Grand Mosque. But it certainly wasn't far to the sacred site.

‘Voilà!' said Magda, slightly ironically, when we reached a very small clearing in the middle of a cluster of housing blocks, with a narrow arcade around it. ‘There's our sacred site. It was here that the Cathars used to hold their fateful
séances
, in a secret hall in an old Arab house that used to stand here. You would never have noticed it — nobody did. But inside it, or underneath it perhaps, on this very spot, all that has happened to Hav in our time was plotted and decreed.'

‘That is so,' said Azzam. ‘Like it or not, this is the crucible of our present.'

I wandered off by myself, thinking. Was it really here that I had, all those years before, been hurried up those steep dark steps to spy upon the Cathars below? Was it here that I had half-imagined, half-dreamed the identities of the red-cloaked Perfects, and promised never to reveal where I had been or what I had seen? I felt a pang of guilt about what I had written in the event, written in ignorance as it was, and wondered if that was why my book had been banned — evidently the Sustenance people, at least, had never read it.

In the centre of the little clearing there was a raised oblong platform of marble, with an inscribed plate of bronze on top of it. Step-ladders were placed nearby for the convenience of visitors, and while Magda, Azzam and Henri watched me from the arcade I climbed up one and bent over to read its inscription. It was in five languages, Havian, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese and English, and this is what it said:

I stood up there for a moment or two, wondering what it meant, until Magda came over and asked if I was all right. Still bemused, I clambered down the ladder, and she said: ‘I know just what you're feeling. I felt it, the first time. Remember what? — that's you're thinking, aren't you? Or remember who? That's the sacredness of it, that we none of us have the faintest notion what it's all about, and probably never will. I saw your old friend Porvic standing here once in tears, and I bet you anything he didn't know what he was crying about.

‘Come on, Jan, blow your nose; we'll have a last cup of tea before we trundle you off on your buggy to the delights of Lazaretto.'

‘Did you ever know a lady named Fatima Yeğen?' I asked them when we went to the café for our tea. ‘She was something to do with the railway.'

Magda and Henri looked blank, but Azzam said he thought he'd read something about her in
Myrmidon Mirror
, the more gossipy, he said, of the city's two newspapers. ‘I think you'll find she's running the old station hotel.'

‘L'Auberge Impériale,' I cried in delight. ‘D'you mean to say it still exists?'

‘Only in name really, only what's left of it. The station was completely destroyed, of course, and the railway itself never reopened. But I rather think the Yeğen family had some official connection with it — wasn't there somebody called the Tunnel Pilot in those days?'

Indeed there was, I told him. In my time the Pilot was Fatima Yeğen's cousin Rudolph, and if she was still alive and letting rooms I wouldn't take a Lazaretto buggy, I'd find my way to L'Auberge Impériale instead.

‘Well don't expect too much,' said Azzam. ‘I've only seen it from the outside, but I wouldn't fancy it myself, and alas the three of us have to be back at the League for a Sustenance discussion. Can you find your way there by yourself?'

‘She's a grown woman, Azzam. It's easy, Jan. Go back to the Fondaco Quay, and after the warehouses, before you turn the corner to the
Carlotto
, you'll see a big motorway running away from the harbour. That's August 17 Street. Walk up it for a few hundred yards and you'll find Centrum Square. That's where the station used to be and you can't miss what's left of the hotel. We'd come with you, but we just haven't got time. You must continue your investigations all alone.'

So we parted, and I walked alone in the evening through the streets of the city — streets and quays of ghosts they were to me — thinking of all I had seen there once, fancying the lights of the old British Residence across the water, imagining the little Electric Ferry bustling to and fro across the water, hearing the voices of old friends, smelling the lost scents of Hav, treading the pavements I might once have trodden until —

‘Can I help you, dirleddy?' asked a smiling lady in black, sitting in a kiosk of glass and gilded ironwork.

She was much older — of course she was; her hair was white and her figure was less ample, but it was undoubtedy Miss Fatima Yeğen, the Tunnel Pilot's cousin. Out she came from her kiosk to embrace me, and of course she had a room for me, and of course we must have supper together, and there was so much to talk about wasn't there? and oh! the things that had happened to Hav since I went away, wasn't it a shame about the beautiful old tiled hotel sign? hadn't I noticed? mind the step, if I needed anything I had only to ring the bell, and how lovely it all was, and she'd be seeing me later, and she'd turned the geyser on to let me have a nice hot bath.

Azzam was, I have to admit, right. The Impériale was no great shakes, as dear Dr Porvic would have put it. It was a bum joint, as Henri might have said (in Hav all foreign slang is out of date). About half the size of the original, I suppose, it had been salvaged from the ruins of Hav Centrum, and was apparently still shored up with temporary girders and scaffolding. On one external wall, seen from the old station square outside, there still showed the fireplaces and blocked up doors of grander times.

Here and there inside, too, as I explored the yellow-painted corridors, I found reminders of the past: here a decidedly Russian-style landscape (muffled ladies in long skirts snowballing with preternaturally rosy children), here a chipped and rusted enamel advertisement (
TAKE THE TRAIN
!
MEDITERRANEAN EXPRESS DIRECT TO MOSCOW
, with a fanciful representation of onion domes and Cossacks), and standing in a dark corner cold and unpolished, a fine old samovar surmounted by a Russian imperial eagle. But they were no more than hints, really, rather than relics of what had once been there.

‘Oh dear me no, Miss Morris, the Impériale is not what it was,' said Miss Yeğen, when we settled down in her cosy sitting-room for, as she put it, ‘a little light something before bed'.

‘But what would you do? No trains, very few visitors — only Chinese and Arab commercials, by and large — and certainly no help from the Government. They wanted to pull the place down, actually, when they pulled down the station ruins, and it was only because we all made a fuss that they let it stand.'

So making a fuss did have some effect, in the new Hav?

‘Not often, but sometimes. There's not much what you might call public opinion these days. The papers don't spend much time on everyday matters — I was surprised when the
Mirror
had that article about me and the hotel, but that may have been the influence of Signor Biancheri, who's always had a soft spot for the Impériale. Still, it was certainly people making a fuss who saved the Roof-Race.'

I'd forgotten all about the Roof-Race.

‘Oh feelings ran so high about the Roof-Race that those Cathars really couldn't go ahead and do away with it. They meant to, you know. When they rebuilt the Medina they were going to make no provision at all for the Roof-Race, and it was only because everybody was up in arms that they made the new course — not a patch on what it was, but something, I suppose — worth your while to take a look at, anyway.'

I said I was surprised the Cathars had given in on the matter. ‘Me too,' said Fatima, ‘what with them being so mad on health and safety and all that. But who knows what they really think about anything?'