Morris says in the epilogue that if Hav is an allegory, she’s not sure what it is about. I don’t take it as an allegory at all. I read it as a brilliant description of the crossroads of the West and East in two recent eras, viewed by a woman who has truly seen the world, and who lives in it with twice the intensity of most of us. Its enigmas are part of its accuracy. It is a very good guidebook, I think, to the early twenty-first century.
Preface
There can be few people nowadays who do not know the whereabouts of Hav, but when I first went there in the 1980s it seemed an almost chimerical city. Many visitors, of course, had described it in earlier days, marvelling at its curious monuments, pontificating about its history, catching something of its atmosphere in memoirs, novels and poetry—
Nobody, however, had written a proper book about the place, at least in modern times. It was almost as though a conspiracy had protected the peninsula from too frank or thorough a description.
But the cataclysm of 1985, known in Hav nowadays as the Intervention, made the name of the place familiar wherever newspapers are read. As it happened, I had arrived there some months before to write a series of literary letters for the magazine New Gotham, leaving just as catastrophe struck. When the essays were published in book form I called them Last Letters from Hav, because I assumed that the character of the city I had got to know, if not the city itself, must have been obliterated. Hav had seemed to me a little compendium of the world’s experience, historically, aesthetically, even perhaps spiritually, and could surely never be the same place again.
Two decades later, when I had resolved to write no more books, I received an unexpected invitation from the Hav League of Intellectuals to revisit the city. I was surprised, because I had heard that Last Letters had been banned there, but thinking that it might result in an addendum to my original study, I accepted the offer and went back to Hav in the spring of 2005. I found it astonishingly resuscitated, different in character, certainly, from the city I had known, but hardly less allegorical of feel.
Denied entry to the United Nations in the years after the Intervention, Hav enjoyed diplomatic relations with only a handful of foreign states, stayed aloof to all regional groupings, and as a theocracy severly discouraged contacts with most of the rest of the world. However, in this ambiance of religious fundamentalism and state inhibition, political movements and activists of many kinds had found their way to Hav, and had made it in many ways a paradigm of our twenty-first century zeitgeist.
So in this volume we see the place stereoscopically, so to speak: in the first part through the misty lens of my letters of twenty years ago, in the second part rather more clearly, but still opaquely — for although carefully selected journalists have been able to visit Hav since the Intervention, and many travel magazines have advertised its dazzling tourist resort of Lazaretto, whether by intent or inherence it is still a destination like no other. As a contemporary Havian anjlak-poet has written,
ONE
Last Letters from Hav
Six Months in 1985
Map
MARCH
1
I did what Tolstoy did, and jumped out of the train when it stopped in the evening at the old frontier. Far up at the front the engine desultorily gasped, and wan faces watched me through crusted carriage windows as I walked all alone down the platform to the gate. There was no pony trap awaiting me of course (Tolstoy’s reminded him sadly of picnics at Yasnaya Polyana), but a smart enough green Fiat stood in the station yard, a young man in sunglasses and a blue blazer beckoned me from the wheel, and in no time we were off along the rutted track towards the ridge.
Very unusual, said the driver, to find a customer at the station these days, but he made the journey twice a week anyway, there and back, under contract to the railway. This was the tunnel pilot’s car, he explained, and he was Yasar Yeğen the tunnel pilot’s nephew, the pilotage being a hereditary affair. In his great-grandfather’s time they had done the trip with a pony cart, and in those days, when the tunnel was considered one of the wonders of the world, all manner of great swells used to leave the train up there for the experience of the spectacle. Why did they need a pilot for the tunnel? The Porte had insisted on it, for southbound trains only, as a token of the Sultan’s sovereignty after the Pendeh settlement; and ever since then, for more than a century, while Porte, Sultan and Czars too had all passed into history, a member of the Yeğen family had boarded the Mediterranean Express at the frontier stop, and formally ushered it through the escarpment.
Dust billowed behind us as we bounced over the snow-streaked plateau; ahead of us there stood a solitary tall stone, a megalith upon a mound; and then suddenly we were on the rim of the great declivity, and over it, and plunging down the ancient and spectacular mule-track, the celebrated ‘Staircase’, which appears in all the old engravings crowded with pack-trains, wandering dervishes, beggars squatting on rocks, platoons of soldiers with pikes and muskets, great ladies veiled in palanquins, vastly turbanned dragomans and gentlemanly horsemen in fly-netted pith helmets — ‘a very inconvenient approximation’, as Kinglake called it, ‘of Jacob’s Ladder’. The coming of the railway ended all that, and now the track was altogether empty — hardly anybody used it, Yasar Yeğen told me, except Adventure Tours in four-wheel-drive buses, and the cave-dwellers who inhabited the western face of the escarpment. So we proceeded gloriously unimpeded, skidding helter-skelter around those once-famous zigzags, and occasionally evading them with boisterous short cuts between the outcrops.
Halfway down I looked back, and there I saw, issuing from a squat chimney near the crown of the cliff, a pillar of black smoke which showed that the Express was on its way, chuffing subterraneously down its own spiralling descent within the limestone. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Yasar, ‘I am never late,’ and sure enough, when we slithered to a showy stop on the gravelly clearing at the tunnel mouth, it was only a few minutes before we heard the train’s resonant wailing cry from the bowels of the mountain. A gust of sooty smoke out of the big black hole — a cyclopean eye groping through the murk — a powerful emanation of steam, grease and coal dust — and there it was, tremendously emerging from its labyrinth, a huge locomotive of dirty red with a cowcatcher and a brass bell, its crew leaning from each side of their cab, as they reached the daylight, wearing goggles and greasy cloth caps, but bearing themselves as grandly as ships’ officers on their flying bridges. The train eased itself to a stop with a mighty hissing of brakes, steam and smoke, and beneath the numerals on its cab I could just make out, not quite obliterated even now, the old Cyrillic characters of the Imperial Russian Railways.