12
Last week, for the first time, I stood like Nijinsky beside the Iron Dog.
You can reach it direct from the Medina, but I preferred to approach the beast from the east, snout-on so to speak; so I drove through the German gate of New Hav after breakfast, took the rough track around the back of the British Agency, and arrived at the Conveyor Bridge in time for the nine o’clock crossing (which for myself I think of as a flight, so airy is the motion of that platform beneath its spindly wires, with its wind-indicator swirling and its pennant streaming bravely). The other passengers were all Greeks — a man in a truck, three black-shawled women with an empty pony cart. As we approached the western shore, I noticed, the eyes of us all, even the captain’s, were drawn to the enigmatic creature on its high headland; and when we drew level with it, almost at the same height as our platform, all the women crossed themselves.
For the bridge disgorges its passengers a little way inland from the Dog, and you must walk back along the windswept moor to get to it. No good taking the car, for there is no track, and the ground is thick with scented scrub — so scented that it fills the air with its fragrance, and is said to give an intoxicating bouquet to the water from the spring which, sprouting halfway up the sea-cliff, is thought to be the reason why the Greeks landed here in the first place. The wind blew about me, then, the captain waved from his high gazebo, and through the perfumed sunshine I walked towards the most celebrated of all Hav’s monuments.
It was not, when I reached it, how I had foreseen. From a distance it looks all stark arrogance, its head held so high, its tail outstretched, its legs, slightly splayed, planted fiercely in the ground. It has been called the Iron Dog at least since the eleventh century, when the Crusaders wrote the earliest descriptions we possess; but so relentless does it appear, especially in photographs, that some modern scholars have declared it to be not a dog at all, but rather the fox that young Spartans were supposed to take into the hills, to gnaw at their bellies and make men of them. ‘I can never see a picture of that animal’, wrote T. E. Lawrence, who subscribed to the theory himself, ‘without feeling a pain in my tum.’
But when you get close to the figure, such notions seem implausible. Whatever else he may be, the Iron Dog is certainly not a fox. His face is genial. His legs are implanted not ferociously at all, but playfully. His elongated tail streams eagerly, as though he is only waiting the word to spring after grouse or gazelle. He is made of bronze, with the remains of gilt showing on it, but so subtly is he structured, and so infinite are the little cracks of time and weather that layer his skin, that the material looks more like wood, and makes the figure seem remarkably light — especially as its big metal plinth has long since disappeared into the soil, turf and scrub.
The Iron Dog is about six feet high, paw to ear, and there are many graffiti on his hide. There is the famous rune, companion to that on one of the Arsenal lions in Venice, which proclaims that men of the Byzantine emperor’s Norse bodyguard once landed on this peninsula. There are indecipherable scratches in Greek. A very hazy M.P., on the animal’s rear flank, is popularly supposed to be Marco Polo’s. There are some marvellously flowery little ciphers which have been identified as the marks of Venetian silk merchants, and scores of stranger devices, apparently of all ages, which seem to have some cabalistic meaning. Henry Stanley the explorer, who came here after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, has signed himself shamelessly beneath the animal’s chin. More disgracefully still a large crowned eagle, deeply and professionally chiselled, commemorates the visit here of Kaiser Wilhelm, on his way to Jerusalem.
Disgraceful, and yet… There is something intensely moving about those mementoes, cut, all down the centuries, in the skin of so ancient a beast. I found a stone and added my own emblem (I will not tell you what), establishing my line of succession, too, to the first of all the peoples who have put ashore in Hav. Here as everywhere, one likes to lay claim to the heritage of the Greeks.
The modern Greeks of Hav certainly enjoy it. If I have been told once, I have been told a thousand times about the lost glories of the Hav acropolis, about Schliemann and Achilles, about the great Spartan assault, in the fourth century BC, whose siege-work was the still recognizable canal, and whose triumphant trophy is supposedly the Iron Dog. ‘Hav is essentially a Greek city,’ said the Orthodox bishop boldly when I went to see him in his palace beside the cathedral. ‘It is the last of the Greek colonies along the shore of Asia Minor.’ But then he is profoundly prejudiced against everything Turkish, including Turkish geography. He frequently calls the Turkish people barbarians, and once publicly declared them to be the enemies of God. I asked him if this was not playing with fire, Hav being where and what it was. He merely shrugged his brawny shoulders. ‘I think what I think, I say what I say.’
Others of the Greek community are more cautious. The Greek shops and loan offices which have always proliferated in the Balad rarely announce themselves in Greek script nowadays, and many of their owners, I am told, have adopted Turkish or Arabic names. Several people important in the administration are supposed to have concealed Greek origins.
‘Do you really suppose your friend Mahmoud is an Arab? Some Arab! He’s no more Arab than Missakian’s Armenian!’
‘Missakian’s not Armenian?’
‘Of course not. He’s pure Greek, anyone can see that, like half the people in this place who call themselves Armenian, or Jewish, or Syrian…’
‘Dear God,’ I said to Magda one day, trying to assimilate all these confusions, ‘I don’t think I shall ever master the meaning of Hav.’
‘The meaning of Hav is easy,’ she said coldly, ‘it’s the meaning of Greeks that’s hard.’
Certainly theirs is a somewhat shadowy presence in the city. There seem to be no Greeks at the Athenaeum. I have noticed none in the bar of the Adler-Hav, or listening to the jazz at the Bristol, and there were certainly no Greek names on the roster of the roof-runners. Signora Vattani scoffs when I remark upon these facts. ‘Of course there are no Greeks in society. Greeks are shopkeepers. You never saw a Greek in New Hav, in the old days, unless he was delivering the groceries. If you want to meet Greeks, you must go to the Balad.’ But the bishop gave me different advice. ‘To see the Hav Greek as he really is — to see the true Havian, in fact — you should visit San Spiridon. You have seen the Iron Dog. Now go and see the people who created it.’ He himself was born on the island, and he gave me, there and then, a letter of introduction to his sister Kallonia — ‘It means beautiful in our dialect,’ he said, ‘but I’m sorry to say she isn’t.’
A ferry goes there once a day, out in the morning, back in the afternoon, so yesterday I drove to the ferry station, which is near the south-eastern extremity of peninsular Hav, and joined the islanders for the crossing. The little steamboat was packed to its gunwales — women in black sitting on piles of their own parcels, powerful men with moustaches smoking bitter pipes, young bloods with motorbikes singing to the music of their transistors, children scampering everywhere, mules, horses, brawny dogs with spiked collars, the inescapable priest in his tall black hat and a few cheerful girls in cotton frocks.
The crossing takes half an hour — the ferry-boat is elderly, the currents there, sweeping in and out of China Bay, are very strong — and by the time we had tied up at the island dock, I swear, nobody on that ship was unaware of my purposes. I could almost hear the intelligence running around those decks. ‘She’s a writer — Iron Dog — Greeks — Kallonia Laskaris — saw the Bishop — Kallonia — writer — Iron Dog…’ And when we disembarked, amid a little harbour settlement of tin shacks that looked more like western Canada than eastern Mediterranean, three or four of the women, and an indeterminate number of dogs and children, guided me up the hill through the celery fields to the Laskaris house, which seemed to occupy the very centre and apex of the island.