Of course they may not be deserters from Afghanistan at all. Another theory is that they are dissident Russian artists, scientists or writers, kept here in reserve, so to speak, until the Western powers feel their propaganda value will be most useful. This has happened before. In the 1950s a distinguished young Russian physicist arrived on a boat from Syria, and immediately made his way to the British Agency. There he stayed for some months safe, sound and secret, awaiting the apposite moment.
But one day a senior British official arrived by train from Ankara supposedly for a last de-briefing of the man, or perhaps a final indoctrination, and thereafter nothing was ever heard of the refugee again. The name of the senior official is lost too: but I wonder, could it have been H. A. R. (‘Kim’) Philby?
Pace Armand, much the best-known refugee in Hav today is that meditative old Nazi he first pointed out to me — do you remember? — as being very much wanted by the Israelis. The Mossad do not seem to have been searching very hard, for Oberführer Boschendorf is to be found, most days of the week, buttonholing people with his story in the pleasure-gardens of the Lazaretto.
I often go there myself, for I love to watch the solemn Hav children enjoying themselves on the biplanes, steamrollers, cocks and wooden camels of the elderly roundabouts, and one afternoon Boschendorf picked on me. ‘Please, please, I know you are a writer, I want you to know the truth’ — so we went into the old Admiralty House café, and placing his hat carefully on the seat beside him, he told me his tale.
It was perfectly true, he said, as I had doubtless learnt, that during the late war (he always called it the late war) he had been involved in the deaths of Jews, but it was not out of racial hatred. It was because he had cherished since childhood a deep, a truly mystical empathy for the destiny of the Jewish people — ‘but am I ever believed in Hav, this snake-pit, this Babylon? Never!’ His obsession began when he had been taken as a boy to the Passion Play at Oberammergau. ‘The sublime and awful meaning of it! A Jew, the noblest of Jews, condemned to death by his own people — but only, as I realized in revelation that day, as their own imperishable contribution to the destiny of all humanity. It was they themselves that they were sacrificing upon the Cross. Christ was but the image of all his people, the Jews but an enlargement of Christ!’
At first he had seen Hitler and the Nazi party as the embodiment of all evil, the Anti-Christ — ‘how I suffered for the Jews with their horrible yellow badges and their degradations’. But then came the war, and he first heard of the Final Solution, the plan to exterminate all the Jews of Europe. ‘It was a second revelation to me. The Jews, the Christ-people, were to be sublimated at last in total sacrifice, and join their archetype upon the Cross. I saw it all in ecstasy, those tragic millions, deprived of all but their heritage, in pilgrimage to their own Calvaries. I could not imagine — it would take a Wagner to imagine! — what it would mean for the future of the world, and I came to see Adolf Hitler, as I had long seen Pontius Pilate, as a divine instrument of redemption. I saw all the mighty energies of Germany, beset by enemies on every front, directed to the sacred task — inspired!’
Boschendorf got himself into the SS, and was concerned, as a junior administrative officer, with paperwork for Eichmann’s death-trains; but he was never charged with war crimes, and came to Hav after the war not through the tortuous channels of Odessa, but by paying his own fare on the Mediterranean Express. This anti-climax seemed to prey upon his mind.
‘They will not listen! They do not hear! Am I a criminal? Am I not rather an agent of God’s passion? Was I not to the Jews as Judas was to his master, no more than the means of holy destiny? Have I not risked death to bring them death?’ Suddenly unbuttoning his jacket and baring his chest, he showed me tattooed there a Star of David — ‘There, as they branded the Jews entering upon their fulfilment so they branded me, at my instructions, Hauptsturmführer, SS, with the badge of the Chosen!’
‘Quick, Herr Boschendorf—’
‘Dr Boschendorf.’
‘—quick, button up your shirt, everyone is staring at you.’
‘WHY?’ he shouted. ‘Must I be ashamed of my badge?’ He rose to his feet and displayed his chest right and left across the café, whose customers were in fact assiduously pretending not to notice. ‘MUST I BE ASHAMED?’
One or two of our neighbours now offered me sympathetic smiles, as if to say that they had seen and heard it all before, and the waiters, to a man, conscientiously looked the other way.
‘Oh I know what these people’ — he threw a hand around the room — ‘have been telling you. That’s Hav! That’s Babylon! They say I am wanted in four continents, don’t they? But do I hide myself? Do I hide my badge of sacrament? The Israelis know and respect me for my love of their people, for whom I shed their blood…’
I thought he was going to break down. ‘I saw you that day with Armand Sauvignon. Did you believe what he told you? Do you know what he did in the late war? He it was, when Jews arrived in Hav, who saw to it that they were shipped to France, and thence to Germany — but he did it not in love, but in hatred. Ask anyone! Oh, we all know Monsieur Sauvignon, novelist, gentleman of France, hypocrite.’
He calmed down presently and politely paid his bill. The head waiter bowed to him respectfully as we left the café. ‘I so much enjoyed our talk,’ Boschendorf said, ‘and feel relieved that you are now in possession of the truth — always a rare commodity in Hav. Use it how you will.’ He asked me if I would care to join him on the Electric Ferry back to the Fondaco, but I said no, I would stay on the island a little longer, and watch the children on the merry-go-round as the fairy lights came up.
Who else is sheltering, here in the haven of Hav? A few Israeli deserters, and a few Syrians, who are said to enjoy regular get-togethers at which they damn each others’ governments indiscriminately. Plenty of Palestinians, they say. The Caliph’s Assyrians. Perhaps one or two of Boschendorf’s old comrades. A clutch of Libyans, often to be seen, heads together, gloomily eating kebabs at the Al-Khouri restaurant in the bazaar.
And me, of course, and me. ‘What are you running away from?’ Magda asked me once. I said I wasn’t running away from anything. ‘Of course you are,’ she said. ‘In Hav we are all running.’ Perhaps we are, too, each of us finding our own escape in this narrow sultry cul-de-sac. Like many another cage the peninsula of Hav, blazed all about by sun, trapped in dust and moulder, offers its prisoners a special kind of liberation. The harsher, the freer! When the sun goes down on these summer days I feel the city to be less than itself, and look forward impatiently to the hot blast of the morning.
18
To Yuan Wen Kuo last night, for dinner with M, in the cool of the July evening. We ate early at the Lotus Blossom Garden, and afterwards wandered agreeably around the streets thinking how pleasantly unremarkable everything looked. The Chinese consider it lucky to live in uninteresting times, and it seemed to me that by and large they go to some lengths to live in uninteresting places, too.
Ten miles across the peninsula from the city of Hav proper, which is by any standards unusual, the Chinese have created a town of their own which seems quite deliberately its antithesis: a town without surprises, homogenous in its slatternly makeshift feeling, and imbued with all the standard Chineseness of all the Chinatowns that ever were — the tireless crowds and the smell of cooking, the piles of medicinal roots and powders, the shining varnished dead ducks hanging from their hooks, the burbling bewildered live ones jammed in their market pens, the men in shirtsleeves leaning over the balconies of upstairs restaurants, the severe old ladies on kitchen chairs, the children tied together with string like puppets, as they are taken for walks in parks, the rolls of silk from Shanghai, the bookshops hung with scroll paintings of the Yangtze Gorges, the nasal clanging of radio music, the clic-clac of the abacus, the men playing draughts beneath trees, the disconsolate sniffing dogs, the rich men passing in the back seats of their Mercedes, the poor men pedalling their bicycle rickshaws, the buckets full of verminous threshing fish, the labourers bent double with teachests on their backs, the dubious little hotels, their halls brightly lit with unshaded bulbs, the glimpses of girls at sewing-machines in second-storey windows, the fibrous blackened harbour-craft, the old-fashioned bicycles, the shops full of Hong Kong television sets, the Yellow Rose Department Store, the Star Dry-Cleaning Company, the pictures here of Chiang Kai Shek peak-capped against a rising sun, there of Mao Tse-Tung bare-headed against the Great Wall — in short, the threshed, meshed, patternless, hodge-podge, sleepless, diligent and ordinary disorder of the Chinese presence.
How I enjoyed it last night! As we loitered around the streets of Yuan Wen Kuo, digesting our Sautéed Chicken with Wolf-berry (recommended to me in Beijing long ago as a specific against depression), I felt extraordinarily reassured by the prosaic activity of it all. I felt in fact, in a calm illogical way, as though I were enjoying a brief spell of home leave from the front.