We were strolling as we walked, in the warm of the evening, among the straggly press of the boulevards, and their mingled smells of food, dirt, jasmine and imperfectly refined gasoline. We had walked all through the Italian quarter, and down past the Schiller Fountain (in whose water ugly fat carp swam in the half-light — ‘like submarines’, said Sauvignon. ‘Don’t you think so? — yellow submarines’) and we were in his own territory now, on the pavement opposite the Bristol. He took my arm. ‘You have half an hour?’ he said. ‘Join me in an aperitif — and a glimpse of the past.’
We passed through the huge dark foyer, where an old porter rose to his feet as Sauvignon passed by, and a clerk behind the reception desk, in open-necked pale-blue shirt and gold necklace, murmured a greeting; we passed the almost empty dining-room, decorated with large now-brownish murals of Parisian life; and pushing open a brass-handled double door inlaid with figures of seahorses and mermaids, we entered the Bar 1924. It was absolutely packed. Every table was full, but an obliging waiter, recognizing my companion, squeezed a party of young Lebanese together and found room for us. The air was full of Turkish tobacco smoke; the waiter thrust before us a stained typewritten list of archaic cocktails — Sledgehammers, Riproarers, Topper’s Special, and yes, Papa’s Sting! Blaring above it all, deafeningly vigorous and brassy, there was jazz.
It was an elderly combo which, spotting Sauvignon through the haze, dipped its instruments in welcome: a grizzled black trumpeter, a trombonist with rimless spectacles, a gentlemanly Chinese pianist, a grey-beard playing bass and a middle-aged elf in a red shirt frenzied at the drums. They performed with a somewhat desperate enthusiasm, I thought, a repertoire of long ago. Sometimes somebody shouted a request — “‘Honeysuckle Rose”!’ “‘A-Train”!’ “‘Sentimental Journey”!’ The pianist had a small cup of coffee on his piano. The trumpeter occasionally groaned ‘Yeah man…’ but more in duty than in ecstasy. “‘Yellow Submarine”!’ called Sauvignon during a pause in the music, and as the trombonist broke into an approximate lyric — ‘Weallivinayellersummerine’ — he raised his Manhattan towards me in a toast. ‘To yesterday’s youth,’ he said.
Above the door of No. 24 Residenzstrasse — in the old German quarter, hardly a stone’s throw across the Viale Roma from my apartment, there is a modern plaque in German. It commemorates the fact that between 1941 and 1945 members of the German anti-Nazi resistance movement, der Widerstand, were given refuge there under the clandestine protection of the German concessionary administration.
The development of New Hav, and its last apotheosis during the Second World War, was as extraordinary as its beginning. Isolated there on that distant foreshore, with poor communications and the loosest of supervision from Geneva, the three regimes developed almost autonomously. The Italians, who saw themselves from the start as colonists, threw themselves enthusiastically into Mussolini’s imperial designs, putting up fasces all over the place, erecting ostentatious murals depicting Mare Nostrum or Africa Revicta, proudly welcoming Marshal de Bono when he paid a visit after his conquest of Ethiopia, and eventually refusing even to receive the timid representatives of collective security who now and then arrived on the train from Switzerland. They had high hopes, Signora Vattani has confided in me (her husband, she claims, was an ‘important official’ in the administration) — they had high hopes of taking over the whole of Hav, if ever war gave them a chance, and when war did come they openly disregarded the laws of neutrality by re-provisioning Italian submarines in the harbour.
The French treated Hav above all as a place of pleasure and prestige. They wished their quarter of New Hav to be a showcase of French panache. They sent stylish magnificos to be their Residents, the smartest young men of family to be their administrators. They sponsored visits by eminent musicians and French drama companies. The French gracefully gave way to their partners when it came to matters of political priority or protocol, but they saw to it that their quarter was much the most inviting, and made sure that, as Armand Sauvignon says, the social life of Hav revolved around their handsomely Moorish-style Residency on its artificial hillock. When France fell to the Germans in 1940 the Resident of the day, the ineffably fashionable Guyot de Delvert, unhesitatingly declared for Vichy, had banners portraying Marshal Pétain flying all down the Rue de France, and no longer sent social invitations to the British Agency.
The Germans’ was the oddest role. ‘Those Boches,’ Sauvignon told me once, ‘really, to a well-brought-up young man direct from the Sorbonne, they were like people from another planet.’ Subjects as they were of liberal Weimar, they set out to make their quarter of New Hav its properly representative outpost. ‘You would never have believed it! You could do anything over here, you could assume any personality you pleased. I never saw such cabarets — even the Egyptians were shocked sometimes. The place was full of drug-addicts, poets, homosexuals, pacifists, God knows what — everyone you met was writing a novel. I used to go over there to the Café München whenever I felt the pressures of social life too great for me, and I was sure to find myself in a group of writers or artists, some actually from Germany, but Turks too, and Syrians, and really people from everywhere. I met Thomas Mann there once. He asked me what was the right way to pronounce mésalliance, I remember…’
I constantly hear astonishing stories about the behaviour of the German diplomats during the Second World War. Signera Vattani thought it traitorous — ‘They should all have been shot, if you ask me.’ Others thought it truly heroic. There were only two German Residents during the entire history of New Hav, and they both stood firmly in the German liberal tradition. The second of them, Heinrich von Tranter, was appointed to office in 1932, the year before Hitler came to power. By guile and social influence, and some say by the connivance of von Papen, the impenetrable German Ambassador in Ankara, he managed to hang on to his post throughout the Second World War, and made Hav a secret refuge and headquarters for Germans opposed to the Nazi regime.
‘We knew nothing,’ Signora V. fervently assures me. ‘We had no idea what was going on. Do you think we would have allowed it, endangering our own men and ships? Why those ruffians were in daily touch with the British Agent, giving him all sorts of information all the time!’
But had not Fatima Yeğen told me that Hitler himself was supposed to have visited Hav during the war?
‘He did, he did, he came down incognito in a special car on the train with that von Papen. We knew nothing of it, we had no idea, and then on the Tuesday morning I was crossing Unter den Südlinden to get some sausages at the German delicatessen — they had excellent sausages throughout the war — and I looked up and there was von Tranter’s big black car coming slowly down the boulevard, and a motor-cycle escort all around it, and who should be sitting in it but Hitler himself, with von Tranter beside him and von Papen sitting in the front with the driver. I was never so astonished. Look, I was saying to everyone on the pavement, look, it’s Herr Hitler! but half of them didn’t believe it even when they saw him for themselves. The very next morning he was gone again, they say. We were told a U-boat picked him up at Malaya Yalta and took him to Italy.’
Yet even Hitler, if he really did come (and if you believe that, in my opinion, you will believe anything), even Hitler apparently did not suspect what was going on under the aegis of his own swastika at 24 Residenzstrasse. Throughout the later years of the war a steady stream of German dissidents and resistance workers were smuggled through Turkey or by sea to Hav, where they coordinated escapes and clandestine missions secret even now. It was perfectly true, as Signora Vattani so scornfully alleges, that von Tranter was in touch with the British in Hav: this was a main point of contact between the German underground and the Western Allies. If the Fascists of the Italian quarter did not know what was going on across the Viale Roma, the British Secret Service certainly did, and time and again its agents and interrogators came into Hav by submarine from Cyprus and Egypt.