So that night I turned up at the hotel, where Fatima was waiting for me expectantly, nervously I thought, inside her kiosk. ‘Now you must remember’, she said, ‘that I have sworn you to secrecy — you must not let me down.’ Never, I assured her, and she stopped outside one of the downstairs bedroom doors, said, ‘In there,’ and left me. I entered, and two young men rose to greet me. One was Yasar Yeğen, who had driven me down the Staircase on my very first day in Hav. The other, introduced to me simply as George, was the man who had spat at me outside the Palace, when the gendarme dismounted and beat him up.
Neither mentioned our previous encounters. They shook my hand gravely, offered me Cyprus brandy from a bottle that stood, with a couple of toothmugs, on the bedside table, and said they were ready to take me to a Cathar meeting that evening.
‘You must realize’, said Yasar, ‘that we do this only because we have heard good things of you, and we may want you to give evidence.’
‘Evidence?’ I did not like the sound of that.
‘We want you to tell the world, if it is necessary, that you saw the Cathars of Hav this very night in séance.’
He was using the word, I knew, in its French sense, but all the same it gave me an eerie jolt.
‘If it is necessary, I say. You will know. Otherwise you must swear to me that you will reveal nothing — where you have been, who you saw. You must ask me no questions — promise me.’
‘I promise.’
‘Very well, then we need not blindfold you. Try not to look where we are going.’
I tried hard, and it was not difficult. We rode in George’s Citroën, Yasar in the back with me, and I could scarcely help observing that we sped straight across Pendeh Square, turned behind the old legation buildings, and entered the Medina by the small gateway, only just wide enough for a car, which is called Bab el Kelb, ‘Dog’s Gate’. After that I was lost. We went up this alley and that, more than once seemed to double back on our tracks, crossed a square or two, passed through one of the open bazaars; and finally, leaving George and the car in a yard full of iron pipes and asbestos sheeting, and half used as a football pitch, Yasar and I entered the back door of one of the towering old Arab houses which form the core of the Old City. I could see the minaret of the Grand Mosque over a rooftop to my right, but for the life of me I could not tell which side of it was facing us. Their secret was safe. I had no idea where I was.
Up some steep stairs we went, across a landing, around an open gallery above the interior courtyard of the house, up some more stairs, through what appeared to be some kind of robing-room, for there were outdoor clothes on hooks, hangers and chairs all over it, until we entered a small chamber, more a cupboard than a room, through whose wall I could hear a muffled drone of voices, sometimes a single speaker, sometimes a chorus, talking what sounded like French. Yasar closed the door. We were in utter darkness. He pulled aside a curtain then, and through a glazed and grilled little window I could see into a dimly lit room below.
‘The séance,’ whispered Yasar. ‘You see the Cathars of Hav.’
Actually, now that I was there it reminded me more of a Welsh eisteddfod than a spiritualist meeting, for the forty or fifty people down there were all strangely robed. On the left sat the women, in white, veiled like nuns. On the right were the men, in black, with cowls worn far forward over their faces. And on a dais in the middle sat a dozen men whose robes were bright red, whose turbans were wound around the lower halves of their faces like Tuaregs, and whose tall wooden staves were each capped with the shining silver figure of an animal, tail extended. I could not hear what was being said. It seemed to be a sort of ritualized conference, for sometimes one of the elders spoke alone, sometimes a man or woman rose from the floor to make a contribution, and sometimes the whole company broke into the droning mechanical chant that I had heard before. ‘Remember,’ said Yasar, ‘you know nobody here.’
I nodded, but wondered. Were not some of those veiled figures familiar to me, beneath their theatrical cloaks and hoods, behind their veils? Did not that woman in the front row, the tensely crouching one at the end — did she not look a little like — who was it? — Yes! Anna Noyochka’s misanthropist housekeeper? Was it possible — surely not — but was it possible that the man speaking now, his hood deeply down over his forehead, was standing somewhat in Missakian’s stance? Could they conceivably be Assyrians, those stocky men just behind him? Was it altogether fancy, or could I detect above the red veil of the most stalwart of the elders the tunnel pilot’s lordly stare?
I could be sure of none of them. I was disturbed and bewildered, and began to see the most unlikely people disguised in those queer vestments among the shadows of the chamber — the Caliph, Mr Thorne, Chimoun, even crazed old Dr Boschendorf! They were probably all in my imagination, and I did not have long to search for more substantial clues, because at a word from the chief elder, and a knock on the floor from his stave, the company rose to its feet and turned towards the dais, as if they were about to recite a creed or mantra. Instantly Yasar drew the curtain and hurried me out of the room, down the stairs and into the car where George was waiting.
‘You must ask us no questions,’ said Yasar. ‘You have the evidence, if it is needed. Remember your promise.’
‘Remember,’ said George, less kindly I thought.
‘Yes, yes, I remember. But just let me ask you one thing — only one, and nothing more I swear. Who were the men on the platform, the ones in red? Were they priests?’
The young men looked at each other, and shrugged. ‘I don’t know how you say it in English,’ said Yasar, ‘but we call them Les Parfaits.’
The Perfects!
Not Prefects — Perfects!
I told nobody about my visit to the upper room of the Cathars, but I did tell Mahmoud that I had been to see the hermits, and that they only confirmed what he had said about Hav — they were not in the least religious. He was intensely disappointed. He had thought them the great exceptions. As a matter of fact in his adolescence he had cherished the ambition of joining them one day in a life of prayer and meditation. ‘They were my ideal,’ he said.
‘Why didn’t you join them, then?’
‘Why was I never a roof-runner? Cowardice, Jan, pure cowardice. I have lived a life of it.’ Having met Topolino’s followers for myself, I did not think much courage was needed to join them on the terrace: but I was not so sure about the Cathars.
20
All this time (it may have crossed your mind) and I still had not clambered the escarpment to the cave-homes of the Kretevs, the most compelling of all the Havians! I wonder why? Sometimes I was afraid of disillusionment, I suppose, in this city of reappraisals. Sometimes I reasoned that I should end with the beginning, and keep those atavists for my last letter. And sometimes I felt that, what with the Cathars, and the British Agency’s radio masts, and the peculiar island Greeks, I was surfeited with enigma. But I kept in touch with Brack, and at the market the other day he beckoned me over to his stall. He said that if I wanted to come to Palast (which is, so far as I can make out, more or less what the troglodytes themselves call their village) I had better come that very day — if I brought my car I could join the market convoy when it went home in the afternoon. Trouble was brewing in Hav, he said, bad trouble, and it might be my only chance. He shook his head in a sorrowful way, and his ear-rings glinted among his dreadlocks. So at three o’clock — sharp! — I drove down to the truck park, and found the Kretev pick-ups all ready to go. Brack leant from his cab and gestured me to follow him. The other drivers, starting up their engines, stared at me blankly.