It was said of Nijinsky that he was never happier than he was in Hav, and he is remembered still with proud affection. ‘I saw Nijinsky clear’ is a leitmotif of elderly reminiscence in Hav, among Arabs and Turks as often as among the Europeans of the concessions. He used to love to wander the city by himself, an image so unforgettable that old people describe him as though they can actually see him still. Sometimes he would be on the harbour-front, watching the ships. Sometimes the trumpeter, arriving at Katourian’s bastion, would find the great dancer already there. He liked to go to the station to see the train leave in the morning. And Anna one day, hunting among her souvenirs in a black leather box full of papers, pictures, twists of hair, postage stamps, imperial securities — ‘Securities! Some securities!’ — produced for me a photograph of Nijinsky taken on an outing, it said in spindly French on the back, in 1912.
There were only two figures in the picture, against a background of sky and bare heathland. One was the Iron Dog, full face. Beside it, ramrod stiff, wearing a kind of peasant jerkin and baggy trousers, Nijinsky stared expressionless into the lens, his hair ruffled by the wind.
The Ballet Russe, they say, was deeply influenced by its association with Hav. Bakst the great designer was seduced by the peculiar colour combinations he found here — the Russian dazzle of golds, crimsons and bright blues set against skies, seas and heathy hills that expressed a different sensibility. Benois was so taken with the Hav costume — straw hat and gallabiyeh — that he introduced it into the fair scenes of Petrushka. Diaghilev himself seems to have been calmed and comforted by the city’s blend of the heady and the sombre, the exhilarated and the brooding; he is buried in Venice, but Anna says she herself heard him say that he would like to lie in the little Russian graveyard overlooking the sea in the western hills of Hav.
The graveyard is forlornly neglected now, though its wind-break of dark cypresses makes it visible from far away, like a war cemetery. It lies on a slope of the hill, looking out over the western bay and Pyramid Rock; from its lower graves you can just see the faded baubles of Little Yalta. Dominating the plot is the tall obelisk that marks Count Kolchok’s grave, with a portrait in bas-relief and a long Russian epitaph. There are a few lesser obelisks, and a couple of broken columns, and some mourning angels. Mostly, though, they are simple crosses, some of wood, that mark the last resting places of Hav’s Russians. Often their inscriptions have long been obliterated, by the heat, and the winds off the sea; everywhere the coarse grass grows, and here and there the scrub off the heath has broken through the surrounding wall. Soon it will have obliterated all but those obelisks, and an elevated angel or two.
11
When Marco Polo came to Hav in the thirteenth century, he was struck not so much by the wealth or power of the city, but by something unusual to its nature. ‘This is a place of strange buildings and rites, not like other places.’ Modern Hav is not perhaps exactly beautiful — it is too knocked about for that, has been infiltrated by too many shabby purlieus, frayed by too many reverses of fortune. But it does still possess some quality of fantasy, something almost frivolous despite its ancient purposes, and this is caused I think by its particular criss-cross mixture of architectural styles, which makes many of its buildings feel like exhibition structures, or aesthetic experiments. Add to this piquancy of melange a certain flimsiness of construction — Hav bricks are small and slight, Hav roofs look lightly laid upon their joists — and the impression is given of a monumental but neglected folly, built by a sequence of playful potentates for their own amusement down the centuries.
The one Hav prospect that occasionally gets into picture-books, having been painted by numberless artists of the T. Ramotsky school, is the view looking northward from the waterfront towards the castle. Deposited here without warning out of the blue, you really might be at a loss to know where on this earth you were. To the right stands the hulk of the Fondaco, built of red brick brought from Venice, with its four squat corner towers, its machicolations, and its arcading half-filled now with hoardings and concrete walls. In the background, splendidly blocking the scene, the hill of the acropolis is crowned with the ruin of the castle, Beynac’s keep mouldering at the summit, Saladin’s gateway good as new below. To the left rise the walls of the Medina, protruded over by wind-towers, minarets and the upper floors of the huge merchant houses beside the bazaars.
And in the centre, seen across the busy traffic of the quay, is the official complex created by the Russians to celebrate their presence on this southern shore. The square itself, with its equestrian emperor in the centre, is said to be bigger than the Grand Square at Isfahan upon whose proportions the Arabs originally based it, and is bounded left and right by double lines of palm trees; between the eastern avenue the tramline runs, between the western is the gravel footpath along which Loti saw Nijinsky dance, originally preserved for Russian officials and their ladies, now a favourite public dalliance. The waterfront end of the square is marked by a line of bollards, placed there by the Venetians and made from captured Genoese guns; at the other end, where the winding path to the castle starts, there is a handsome double terrace, with urns and lions couchant on it, and in the middle a big circular fountain which, for all its dolphins, nymphs and bearded sea-gods, alas no longer founts.
Then to the east and west, more like pavilions than substantial buildings, rise the showy display pieces of Russian Hav, Serai on one side, station on the other. Their symbolism is extravagant, and entertaining. They represent Mediterranean Russia — the achievement at last of a dream as much aesthetic, or imaginative, as political. High above them tower the gilded onion domes, capped with gay devices, which instantly summon in the mind bitter steppes and snowy cities of the north — something of the sleigh and the fur hat, the samovar and perhaps the OGPU too — Mother Russia, at once smilingly and authoritatively embodied, here at the end of the railway line.
But below these bright globules, which somehow manage to be a little grim, as well as flashy, the architects Schröter and Huhn (who also designed the gigantic garrison cathedral at Tiflis, up the line) built in a very different allegory: for the tall arches and arcades below the domes, the gardens surrounding them, the inner courtyards and the long interior corridors are built in what architects Schröter and Huhn conceived as Southern Eclectic. Ogive arches in multi-coloured brick sustain that Slavic roofline, and there are high balconies with hoods, as in great houses of Syria, and even mashrabiya windows here and there. The courtyards are Alhambran, with prim patterns of orange trees; the tall shuttered windows of the wings might be in Amalfi or the old part of Nice.
Seen in the general rather than the particular, against the high silhouette of the castle hill, this ensemble really is rather spectacular, a little muted though its colours are now, a little skew-whiff some of its shutters and rickety the less frequented of its balconies: and especially seen from the Electric Ferry, sliding quietly across the harbour, all those strange and disparate shapes, the towered severity of the Fondaco the bright domes, the stark castle walls above, seem as they shift one against the other oddly temporary, as though one of these days the Grand Hav Exhibition must come to an end, and all its pavilions be dismantled.