JULY
17
High summer is on us, and I see why the British loathed the Protectorate so. ‘Oh what a foretaste of hell this is,’ poor Napier wrote home to his wife, and he was accustomed to the miseries of Karachi. It is not merely that Hav is hot — it is no hotter than anywhere else in the eastern Mediterranean — nor even that it is particularly humid. The trouble is an oppressive sensation of enclosure, a dead-end air, which can make one feel horribly claustrophobic.
They say the suicide rate is high, and I am not surprised. When I look out from my terrace now the citizenry below looks all but defeated — prostrate on park benches, or shuffling dejectedly along the pavements beneath floppy straw hats and parasols. Out in the Balad, where there are no trees, and not much greenery either, it is far worse; the dust lies thickly in those pot-holed streets, the shacks with their iron roofs are like ovens, and the people sprawl about like so many corpses, beneath shelters rigged up of poles and old canvas.
There is no air-conditioning in Hav, except at the Casino (and perhaps a few very rich houses of Medina and Yuan Wen Kuo). We depend still upon revolving fans, upon wind towers, upon the shades and awnings which now cover every window, and in the Palace at least, upon electrically operated punkahs — huge sheets of tasselled canvas waving ponderously about to stir a little fitful breeze through the stifling salons. Those massed fans are twirling desperately now beneath the high ceilings of the Serai, but even so, Hav being Hav, many of the more senior clerks take all their files into the gardens, and are to be seen scattered over the brown dry grass with their documents spread around them and thermos flasks close to hand. Signora V. spends most of the day sitting on the roof reading old magazines, and the urchin soup at the Fondaco café is served chilled, like a very exotic vichyssoise.
The English hated it; and yet there is to the flavour of this stagnant city, limp and hangdog in the heat, something peculiarly seductive, rather like that smell of rotting foliage you sometimes discover in the depths of woodlands — a fungus smell, sweet and dangerous. It is a curious fact that of the exiles who have come in modern times to spend a few weeks, a few months in Hav, nearly all have come in the summer time, when the city is at its cruellest.
Armand is of course the expert on Hav’s exiles, and in the heat of noon the other day, as we drank lime juice at the little refreshment stall which has sprung up on the promenade, I asked him how he accounted for this odd preference.
‘It is simple.’ (Everything is simple to Armand Sauvignon.) ‘Hav is like some exile itself, and never more so than in these terrible days of July and August. Ergo, like goes to like, and your wandering poet, your dreaming philosopher, your Freud or your Wagner feels most at home here when everything is at its worst.’
‘Drinking iced lime juice,’ said I, ‘beneath a sunshade on the promenade.’
‘Ha! Touché! But they did not always live like us!’
Nor did they. By and large the Hav exiles have lived anonymously, or at least obscurely, during their time in the city. I went one day to the apartment in which Freud had his lodgings, when he came to Hav in 1876 to search for the testes of the eel. Seconded by the Department of Comparative Anatomy at Vienna University, he had already failed in this task at Trieste, but the Hav eel has the reputation of extreme virility, frequenting as it does the irrigation canals and brackish pools of those aphrodisiac salt-marshes, so he transferred his researches here. The newly installed Russian administration allowed him to use as a laboratory the old ice-house, not yet converted to Count Kolchok’s purposes, and he found himself lodgings in the House of the Chinese Master.
To my surprise I discovered that he is remembered there still. Clambering up the spiral staircase, now strewn with litter and scratched with incomprehensible slogans, I found the eighth floor, in Freud’s time one big apartment, divided into four tenements; but when I knocked at the first door, and asked if this was where the scientist had stayed, ‘Yes,’ said at once the tousle-haired young woman who opened the door, ‘come in and see.’ It was an ungainly room she showed me — wedge-shaped, with only a narrow wall at the inner end, and a single window at the other looking through the marble mesh outside to the roofs of the Great Bazaar — and it was in a state of homely chaos, which the woman casually did her best to reduce, picking up clothes and papers from the floor as we entered, and clearing a pile of sewing from the sofa to give us sitting space.
‘It was my great-grandmother’s place then — she was Austrian, she came here as governess to a Russian family, but married a local man. Of course Freud was unknown in those days, and nobody took much notice of him. It was only in my father’s time that people began to be interested.’
‘Lots of people come to see the place?’
‘Lots? Not lots. Perhaps seven or eight a year. Sometimes they are interested in Freud, sometimes in eels! My husband does not welcome them, but then it was my family that Sigmund lived with, not his.’
‘Sigmund!’ I laughed. ‘You know him well!’
‘Yes, yes, I feel I do. He is very kindly remembered in our family — such a nice young man, we were always told, with his funny stories and his jokes. Besides, we have little things of his here that bring him close to me’ — and opening a drawer she brought out a black leather box, embossed ‘S.F.’, and showed me its quaint contents. There was a comb — ‘Freud’s comb?’ ‘Sigmund’s comb, certainly’ — and a silver-gilt pen, and a letter from the Trieste laboratory of the comparative anatomy department wishing him luck — ‘After 400 Trieste eels, my dear old boy, you deserve to find your quarry among the salts of Hav’ — and a silhouette in an oval frame which portrayed, she said, Freud’s mother. ‘And here’, she said, ‘is a funny rhyme that Sigmund left for my great-grandmother when he went away.’ It was four lines of German, in a clear script, which I will try to translate into verse:
To my dear Frau Makaclass="underline"
For poor Freud, having dissected those 400 eels in Trieste, examined another 200 during his six weeks in Hav, and never did find a testes — a curious failure, remarks his biographer Ernest Jones, for the inventor of the castration complex!
It was historical chance, of course, that brought Anastasia to Hav in the height of summer — if indeed she came at all. Of all this city’s exiles, voluntary or compulsory, real or legendary, she is the one Hav most enjoys talking about, partly because people here are still enthralled by the Russian period of heir history, but chiefly because romance says her vast collection of jewelry is still hidden somewhere in the peninsula.
As to whether she really came, opinions vary. Count Kolchok swore to the end of his days that she did not, and Anna Novochka also denies it: pure tosh, she says — ‘If she was ever here, would I not have known of it?’ On the other hand there is a strong tradition in the Yeğen family that in August 1918 a girl arrived on the train in a sealed coach, all curtains drawn, together with three servants and a mountain of baggage — to be met at the frontier by a car from the Serai, while the baggage was picked up by mule-cart at the central station and taken to the western hills.