I often go to see her, to take tea in her sparse and airy drawing-room (where pale squares upon the walls show where pictures used to hang), followed often enough, as we talk into the evening, by glasses of vodka with squeezed lime juice. She was not always called Novochka. Like many of the Russians who stayed in Hav after the Revolution, she adopted a new name of her own invention: she says it means ‘Fresh Start’. Her housekeeper is Russian too, but of more recent vintage; she came to Hav via Israel five or six years ago, and is, so Anna tells me, totally disenchanted with everything. She does look rather sour. Anna herself on the other hand is the very incarnation of high spirits, and in her I feel I am meeting the miraculously preserved mood of Imperial Hav itself.
For Russian Hav was nothing if not high-spirited. It was, of course, very artificial and snobbish, like all such colonies — ‘Why must you always be talking of Hav?’ says Chekov’s Vasilyev to his friend Gregory (in An Affair). ‘Isn’t our town good enough for you then? In Hav you never hear a word of Russian, I’m told, nothing but French and German is good enough down there.’ But it seems to have possessed a certain underlying innocence. The Russians eagerly accepted Hav, under the Pendeh Agreement of 1875 as their only outlet to the Mediterranean (having lost the Ionian Islands to the British half a century before), and as a stepping-stone perhaps towards those Holy Places of Jerusalem which meant so much to them in those days. They knew well enough, though, that strategically it was useless to them — its harbour hopelessly shallow, its position fearfully vulnerable. To these disadvantages they cheerfully reconciled themselves, and instead set out to make the place as thoroughly agreeable as they could.
Politically, of course, it was an absolute despotism — Hav had never been anything else — but the Russian yoke was light enough, minorities were not suppressed, opinions were given reasonable latitude. At the end of the nineteenth century indeed Hav became a favourite destination for young Russian revolutionaries on the run, until in 1908 somebody blew up the Governor’s private railway coach, and Count Kolchok was obliged to accept a detachment of the secret police.
Even the grandiose buildings around Pendeh Square — more grandiose still before the Cathedral of the Annunciation and the Little Pushkin Theatre were burnt down in the 1920s — even those somewhat monstrous buildings are generally agreed to be fun. They may have been intended to blazon Russia’s Mediterranean presence to the world, but at least they did so exuberantly, Anna says that in her girlhood, before the First World War, they used to be positively dazzling in their golds and blues, their gardens exquisitely maintained and the gravel of the avenue in front of the Palace raked and smoothed so constantly that it looked like ‘coral sand, when the tide has just gone out’. And the villas in the hills, where most of the richer Russians preferred to live, seem, if Anna’s memories are true, to have been the happiest places imaginable.
‘You must realize there are so few of us. We were all friends — enemies too of course, but friends at the same time. Many of us were related. I had three cousins living in Hav at one time. Kolchok himself was a relative on my mother’s side. And when le haut monde came down for the season from Moscow and St Petersburg, why, we knew all of them too — or if we didn’t, we very soon did. It was like the very nicest of clubs. And everyone felt freer here, far from the Court, without estates to worry about, or serfs I suppose in the old days. We were Russia emancipated!’
In the high summer season Hav was terrifically festive. To and fro between the villas went the barouches and the horsemen, laughing in the evening. Trundling hilariously down the road to the sea went the bathing parties, stopping at the blue pavilion to clamour for lemonades. Ever and again the waltzes rang out from the garden of the Palace, and the coaches and cars jammed the great square outside, and the lights shone, and long after midnight one heard the footmen calling for carriages — ‘Number 23, His Imperial Highness the Grand Duke Felix… Number 87, the Countess Kondakov!’ Little sailing-boats with canopies used to take the ladies and children for decorous trips around the harbour, to the Lazaretto pleasure-gardens, down to the Iron Dog, while the young men sometimes rented dhows to sail around the southern point and meet their families at Malaya Yalta.
‘Were you never bored, with so much unremitting pleasure?’
‘Never. But then I was only a little girl, remember. I see it all through the eyes of childhood. Never have I been so excited, never in all my life, as I used to be when we were taken to the station to see the first train of the season arrive. It was a fixed day, you know, announced beforehand in the Court Gazette and so on, and the first train was one of the great events of the year. We were allowed to stay up especially! We would all wear our best clothes, and all the barouches and luggage-traps would be waiting out there in the square — oh, I remember it so clearly! — and it used to seem like hours till the train arrived. We could hear it hooting, hooting, all the way through the Balad.
‘And then, when it came at last, the excitement! All the grand ladies in the latest fashions, fashions we’d never seen before, and the gentlemen in their tall hats, with carnation buttonholes, and Kolchok would be there to greet whatever princess or Grand Duke was on board, and then he’d go around welcoming old friends and kissing cousins and so forth, and everybody else would be embracing their friends and laughing, and we children would be hopping up and down with the fun of it. And then all the servants jumping off from the coaches behind, and the bustle and fuss of getting the luggage together, and out we’d clop from Pendeh Square like a kind of army. It was so colourful, you have no idea. When we got home, before we children were packed off to bed, we were allowed to have a cup of cocoa with the grown-ups.
‘My father said to me once, “Whatever you forget in life, don’t forget the pleasure of this evening with our friends.” I never have, as you see. I can hear him saying it now! And now all those friends are gone, only one old woman living on and remembering them.’
Between 1910 and 1914 the supreme event of the Hav social calendar was the annual visit of the Diaghilev Ballet to the Little Pushkin Theatre. Diaghilev first came to Hav in 1908, was fascinated by the place, and was easily persuaded to bring his company from Paris for a week at the height of the season each year. Diaghilev in Hav became, for those few brief summers, one of the great festivities of Czarist Russia, and hundreds of people used to come by special train for the performances.
A huge marquee was erected in Pendeh Square for the week, and there after each night’s performance dancers and audience alike dined, drank champagne, danced again and ate urchins into the small hours, in a magical aura of fairy lights and music, beneath the velvet skies of Hav. In 1910 the French novelist Pierre Loti, then a naval officer, was in Hav for one night during the first Diaghilev season, his ship having anchored off-shore. ‘It was like a dream to me’, he wrote afterwards, ‘to come from my ship into this midnight celebration. The music of the orchestra floated about the square and rebounded, I thought, from the golden domes of the Palace. The ladies floated in and out of the great tent like fairies of the night — white arms, billowing silk skirts, shining diamonds. The men were magnificent in black, with their bright sashes and glittering orders, Diaghilev himself occupying the centre of the stage. And in and amongst this elegant throng there flitted and pranced the dancers of the ballet, still in their costumes — fantastic figures of gold and crimson, moving through the crowd in movements that seemed to me hardly human. When I walked across the square to the picket-boat awaiting me at the quay I saw a solitary figure like a feathered satyr dancing all alone with wild movements up the long avenue of palms outside the Palace. It was Nijinsky.’