One charming institution, nevertheless, does bring a gentle suggestion of order to this haphazard haven. It is the Electric Ferry. Looking rather like a floating London taxi, being black, all-enclosed and the same at each end, this little vehicle sets slowly and silently off promptly at seven each morning from the Fondaco on its journey across the harbour — to the market, the two islands, the New Hav promenade and then back the same way to the Fondaco, its last trip ending precisely at midnight. Its passengers are few, but its manner is inexorable. Young Chinese run it, keeping it very clean, collecting their fares in leather pouches and issuing tickets stamped in red ELECTRIC FERI HAV: and one of the most characteristic sounds of this city is the bang, bang, bang which precedes its arrival at the quay — the noise of its slatted seats being punctiliously slammed back on their hinges, to face the other way for the next voyage.
MAY
9
It is 5 May, the day of the Roof-Race. As the horse-race is to Siena, as the bull-running is to Pamplona, as Derby Day is to the English or even perhaps Bastille Day to the French, so the day of the Roof-Race is to the people of Hav.
It is not known for sure how this fascinating institution began, though there are plenty of plausible theories. The race was certainly being run in the sixteenth century, when Nicander Nucius described it in passing as ‘a curious custom of these people’; and in 1810 Lady Hester Stanhope, the future ‘Queen of Palmyra’, was among the spectators: she vociferously demanded the right to take part herself, and was only dissuaded by her private physician, who said it would almost certainly be the end of her.
In later years the Russian aristocracy made a regular fête of it, people coming all the way from St Petersburg simply for the day, and lavish house-parties were organized in the villas of the western hills. Enormous stakes were wagered on the outcome; the winner, still covered with dust and sweat; was immediately taken to the Palace in the Governor’s own carriage for a champagne breakfast and the presentation of the traditional golden goblet (paid for, by the way, out of an annual bequest administered by the Department of Wakfs).
Today gambling is theoretically illegal in Hav, but the goblet is still presented, more prosaically nowadays at the finishing line, and the winner remains one of the heroes of Hav for the rest of his life — several old men have been admiringly pointed out to me in the streets as Roof-Race winners of long ago. The race is so demanding that nobody over the age of twenty-five has ever run it — no woman at all yet — and only once in recorded history has it been won by the same runner twice; so that actually there is quite a community of winners still alive in Hav — the most senior extant, who owns the pleasure-garden on the Lazaretto, won the race in 1921.
The most familiar account of the race’s origins is this. During a rising against the Ottoman Turks, soon after their occupation of Hav, a messenger was sent clandestinely from Cyprus to make contact with the patriotic leader Gamal Abdul Hussein, who was operating from a secret headquarters in the Medina. The messenger landed safely on the waterfront at midnight, but found every entrance to the Old City blocked, and every street patrolled by Turkish soldiers. Even as he stood there wondering how to get to Gamal, at his house behind the Grand Mosque, he was spotted by Turkish sentries and a hue and cry was raised; but far from retreating to his boat, whose crew anxiously awaited him in the darkness, without a second thought he leapt up to the ramparts of the Medina, and began running helter-skelter over the rooftops towards the mosque. Up clambered the soldiers after him, scores of them, and there began a wild chase among the chimney-pots and wind-towers; but desperately leaping over alleyways, slithering down gutters, swarming over eaves and balustrades, the messenger found his way through an upper window of Gamal’s house, presented his message, and died there and then, as Hav legendary heroes must, of a cracked but indomitable heart.
Such is the popular version, the one that used to get into the guide-books — Baedeker, for instance, offered it in his Mediterranean, 1911, while adding that ‘experienced travellers may prefer to view the tale with the usual reservations’. Magda has another version altogether, concerning the exploits of an Albanian prince, while Dr Borge regards the whole thing as pagan allegory, symbolic of summer’s arrival, or possibly Christian, prefiguring the miracle of Pentecost. Most Havians, though, seem to accept the story of the messenger; and in my view, if it wasn’t true in the first place, so many centuries of belief have made it true now.
The course is immensely demanding. It begins, as did the messenger’s mission, with the scaling of the city wall, beside the Market Gate, and it entails a double circuit of the entire Medina, by a different route each time, involving jumps over more than thirty alleyways, culminating in a prodigious leap over the open space in the centre of the Great Bazaar, and ending desperately in a slither down the walls of the Castle Gate to the finish. The record time for the course is just under an hour, and officials are posted all over the rooftops, beneath red umbrellas like Turkish pashas themselves, to make sure there is no cheating.
Virtually all Hav turns out for this stupendous athletic event. All shops and government offices are closed for the day, and almost the only person who cannot come to watch is Missakian the trumpeter, because it is his call from the castle rampart which is the signal for the start. In former times the race was run at midnight, as the messenger supposedly ran, but so many competitors died or were terribly injured, tripping over unseen projections, misjudging the width of lanes, that in 1882 the Russians decreed it should be run instead as dawn broke over the city — to the chagrin of those young bloods whose chief pleasure, if we are to believe Tolstoy, lay in seeing the splayed bodies falling through the street-lights to their deaths. But if it was well ordered in Russian times, when Grand Duchesses came to watch, it is less so now: the race itself may be properly umpired and refereed, but the spectators, conveniently removed as they are from the actual course above their heads, are left absolutely uncontrolled. ‘You are strong,’ said Mahmoud, inviting me to join him at the great event, ‘we will do the triple.’
This meant so positioning ourselves that we could see the three climactic moments of the race, one after the other — the start, the Bazaar Leap and the finish. For aficionados this is the only way to watch, and over the years dozens of ways of doing it have been devised. Some use bicycles to race around the outer circle of the walls. Some are alleged to know of passages through the city’s cellars and sewers. Our system however would be simple: we would just barge our way, with several thousand others, down the clogged and excited streets from one site to the other.
Forty-two young men took part in the race this morning, and when we hastened in the half-light to join the great crowd at the Market Gate, we found them flexing their muscles, stretching themselves and touching their toes in a long line below the city wall. Two were Chinese. One was black. One I recognized — he works at the Big Star garage, where I bought my car. One was Mahmoud’s cousin Gabril, who works for the tramways company. Several wore red trunks to show that they had run the race before, in itself a mark of great distinction, and they were all heavily greased — a protection, Mahmoud said, against abrasions.