Hav (34 page)

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 recognize 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?'

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?'