I really do not think Havians excel at the musical art. They are adept enough at Western forms, and addicted to Arabic pop, but the indigenous kinds seem to me less than thrilling. Dr Borge was as good as his word, and took me last week to the ‘place he knew’, which turned out to be a dark café in one of those morose unpaved streets of the Balad, between the railway line and the salt-flats. Here, he said, the very best of Hav folk-music was to be heard. The night we went the performers were a particular kind of ensemble called hamshak, ‘sable’, because they specialized in elegiac music, and this made for a melancholy evening. They were all men, dressed in hooded monk-like cloaks supposed to be derived from the habits of Capuchin confessors who came here with the Crusaders. Their instruments were rather like those of the folk-music group at the Victor’s Party, only more so: reedier, wheezier, janglier still, and given extra density by two drummers beating drums made of furry animal skins (‘Hav bear skins,’ said Dr Borge, ‘— no, I am only joking’). We drank beer, we ate grilled fish with our fingers, and through the sombre light of the place the music beat at us. Sometimes, apparently without pattern, one or another of the musicians broke into a sad falsetto refrain (‘Reminiscent isn’t it’, said the young doctor, ‘of cante hondo?’). Sometimes, in the Arab way, the music suddenly stopped altogether and there was a moment of utter silence before the whole band erupted once more in climactic unison.
It was more interesting than enjoyable. It was rather like cante hondo, having sprung I suppose from the same musical roots. But the clatter of the tambourines and the clash of the cymbals reminded me irresistibly of Chinese music, such as one endures during the long awful hours of the Beijing Opera, while the plaintive notes of the flutes seem to come from some other culture entirely. Could it be, I wondered, that in Hav music, as in Hav medieval poetry, some dim Celtic memory is at work? Anything was possible, the Philosopher said; and when after the performance I put the same question to the band leader, a suitably cadaverous man with an Abraham Lincoln beard, his eyes lit up in a visionary way. ‘Often I feel it’, he said, ‘like something very cold out of the long ages’ — a sufficiently convincing phrase, I thought, to catch his inspiration’s meaning.
Out of the long ages certainly comes the genius of Avzar Melchik, the best-known Hav writer of the twentieth century, whose personality I can most properly use to cap this brief digression into criticism. If there is nothing overtly Celtic in his work, there is much that is undeniably mazy — even the given name he adopted, you may notice, is that of the great maze-man of legend.
Melchik, who died in 1955 (the year in which he was tipped as a likely rival to Haldór Laxness for the Nobel Literature Prize), wrote in Turkish and in French and sometimes in both at the same time, alternating passages and even sentences between the languages. He was never in the least Europeanized, though — Armand dismisses him as a mere provincial — and his novels, if you can call them novels, are all set in Hav. They are powerful evocations of the place, through which there wander insubstantial characters, figures of gossamer, drifting for ever through the Old City’s alleys or along the waterfront. Melchik so detested the invention of New Hav that he refused to recognize its existence in his art, and though his stories are set in the 1940s and 1950s, the Hav that they inhabit is essentially Count Kolchok’s Hav, giving them all a haunting sense of overlap.
There is no doubt that Melchik was obsessed by the idea of the maze. Every one of his books is really its diagram. But in his most famous work, and the only one widely known in the West, he turns the conception inside out. Bağlilik (‘Dependence’) is the tale of a woman whose life, very gently and allusively described, is a perpetual search not for clarity but for complexity. She feels herself to be vapidly self-evident, her circumstances banal, and so she deliberately sets out to entangle herself. But when at last she feels she is released from her simplicities — has reached the centre of the maze in fact — she finds to her despair that her last state is more prosaic than her first.
Soon after finishing Bağlilik Melchik died. He was unmarried, and lived a life of supreme simplicity himself in a small wooden house, hardly more than a hut, on the edge of the Balad. It is now kept up as a little shrine, with the writer’s pens still on his desk, his coat still hanging behind the door, and beside the china wash-basin, for all the world as though he has just been called into another room, the copy of Pascal’s Pensées which he is said to have been reading on the last day of his life. An elderly woman acts as caretaker, paid by the Athenaeum, and told me when I visited the house that she felt the shade of Melchik ever-present there. ‘When I make myself a cup of coffee in the kitchen, I often feel I should make one for him too.’
‘And do you like this ghost?’
She thought for a moment before she replied. ‘Have you been to his grave?’ she asked. ‘Perhaps that will answer the question for you.’
So I went there. Melchik was a Maronite Christian, and he is buried in the Maronite cemetery behind the power station. His grave is not hard to find — it stands all by itself at the northern corner within a hedge of prickly pears. You can see nothing of it, though, so formidable is this surrounding barrier, until you are within a few feet: and then you find it to be, not a slab, or a cross, or an obelisk, but a twisted mass of iron, like a half-unravelled ball of metallic wool, mounted on a stone slab with the single word ‘MELCHIK’ just visible within the tangle. He designed it himself.
I saw what the caretaker meant. Could one exactly like such a spirit? Nothing, I thought, so cut-and-dried: but even there, all the same, where Melchik was represented only by those crude bold letters within the meshed and worried metal, I felt his presence burning.
Few places, I must say, honour their emblems more loyally than Hav honours its generic and imaginary maze. This city may not look especially labyrinthine, but behind its façades, I am coming to realize, beneath its surfaces bold, bland or comical, there lie a myriad passages unrevealed. Perhaps even the subterranean short cuts of the Roof-Race enthusiasts are only allegorical really!
Of course all cities have their hidden themes and influences — New York has its Mob, Rome its Christian Democrats, London its Old Boy Network, Singapore its Triads, Dublin its Republican Army, all working away there, out of sight and generally out of thought, to determine the character of the place. The unseen forms of Hav, though, seem to me harder to define than any, so vague are they, so insidious, and I find it difficult to enunciate the feeling this is beginning to leave in my mind. It is a tantalizing and disquieting sensation. It is rather like the taste you get in the butter, if it has been close to other foods in the refrigerator; or like the dark calculating look that cats sometimes give you; or the sudden silence that falls when you walk into a room where they are talking about you; or like one of those threadbare exhausting dreams that have you groping through an impenetrable tangle of time, space and meaning, looking for your car keys.