My wife sends you her regards.
I immediately went round to the Aliens Office and presented the letter to Mahmoud. What did it mean? Nothing, he said, nothing. It was just rumours, that was all. I should take no notice of it. What could the British Agent know that he didn’t know? — why, he had been with the Governor himself that very morning. ‘But if I were you,’ Mahmoud added, ‘I would not show the letter to anyone else.’
I showed it to everyone, of course, but they nearly all pooh-poohed it, or professed to. As the days passed, nevertheless, I felt the city’s usual indeterminate disquiet, its habitual grumble or frisson in the air, unmistakably resolving itself into something more menacing. If I had been haunted before by the Iron Dog or the Cathars, I was pursued now by the implication of those two black aircraft.
Yes, what about those aircraft? Few people admitted to having seen them at all, but those who did said they were probably just passing over, or taking part in Turkish war games. Then it seemed to me that there were rather more of those baffling tramp steamers coming and going in the harbour, vague of destination and improbable of cargo, but Chimoun assured me that it was ‘merely a seasonal fluctuation of traffic’. The gunboat moored at the Lazaretto had steam up one morning, for the first time since I have been in Hav, and that afternoon I found the Fondaco wharf screened off by canvas awnings, and was told to go round the back way by a sentry shouting down at me from the roof; I peered through a gap when he wasn’t looking, but all I could see was a pile of banana boxes. The annual football match between the Salt Men and the Runners, representing in effect the Balad and the Medina, was indefinitely postponed ‘owing to probable weather conditions’, and it was announced in the Gazette that in future the Electric Ferry services would end at sunset, instead of midnight as before.
Little symptoms, symptoms in the mind perhaps. Nobody seemed to be worrying. Signora Vattani said: ‘Believe me, I know what trouble is. I’ve seen enough of it in my time. I know when trouble’s in the air.’ Armand said: ‘Yes, ma chérie, these are feelings that we all have after our first few months in Hav. It is like an island here. After a few months we pine to get off — then we pine to get back again.’ Magda said darkly: ‘You’re right, you’re right, at last you feel it, you are becoming the true Havian at last.’ Fatima Yeğen said she did not like to think about such things. I took to listening to the BBC news each night, but there was no mention of Hav.
I telephoned Ronald Thorne and asked him if he would elucidate his warning, or allow me to come to the Agency to talk about it. ‘Really, Miss Morris,’ he said, ‘I think I have done my duty in writing to you. These are busy times for me. You must take your own counsel on these matters.’ I telephoned Hav 001, too, but it was always engaged. I kept my eye on the various refugees I knew in the city, the Israelis, the Libyans, those two Russians, somehow supposing that they would be more sensitive than the rest of us to stirrings in the political atmosphere: they were still drinking in the same cafés, loitering around Pendeh Square, sitting on the water-front, as they always did.
But by last week nobody could ignore the signs. On the Monday morning, very early, there was an explosion somewhere, and the electric power was off all day. The Gazette appeared with half its front page blank, and worshippers going to the Grand Mosque for morning prayers found that indecipherable graffiti in red paint had been scrawled all over its arcades. On Wednesday I was told there had been some kind of riot in the Balad, and when I walked across the square I found the Palace guards no longer in their white drill and epaulettes, with those quaint guns and those stylized smiles: they were in camouflage suits now, held automatic rifles, and seemed to be cultivating the facial expressions of martial art. ‘Don’t worry,’ Mahmoud said, ‘don’t worry, that always happens at the end of July — this is their training time.’ But when I drove south from the Medina later that day, intending to draw some pictures of the Iron Dog, the track was blocked with barricades, and notices said that the Conveyor Bridge was closed to traffic for essential repairs.
Now everybody was beginning to be anxious, without admitting it, without knowing why. The Gazette told us nothing, but nobody could fail to see the two black aircraft when they came back on Thursday morning, because they flew deafeningly backwards and forwards very low over the centre of the city, shaking the windows with the thunderous blast of their engines. There was a long, long line at the bank when I went to collect my draft. Fatima reported an unusual number of passengers leaving on the train. Somebody said they had seen all the rich yachts from Casino Cove sailing away together, as in convoy, south past San Spiridon towards Cyprus. At the café in Pendeh Square I met a disconsolate group of young Germans who had come to Hav on an overland adventure tour: they had expected to stay a week, they said, but had been ordered back up the Staircase that same night. When I asked Armand what could be happening, he said, testily: ‘How can I know? I am just an old pensioner. I am no longer in touch.’
On Thursday night, soon after midnight, I heard a single protracted burst of automatic gunfire, somewhere quite close. Nothing more. I ran to my balcony and looked out across the city, but all seemed peaceful. A few people were walking along the pavement below. The last No. 2 tram was disappearing under the Brandenburg. I could see the lights of a ship moving slowly down the harbour past the dim outline of the Lazaretto. The Serai domes shone ominously above the roofs, and made me think of Diaghilev, the King of Montenegro, and Rimsky-Korsakov playing his piano in the palace garden. High above us I could sense, rather than see, the grey shape of the castle, up whose winding path, in a few hours, Missakian would be labouring with his trumpet for another day’s lament — how many had the city heard, I wondered, and with what variety of feeling, since the Crusaders marched off between the silent ranks of Arabs to their waiting galleys at the quay?
I was moved by the moment, and by the thought of all the life and history, all the secrets and confusions, all the truths and fantasies, all the strains of blood and conflict that surrounded me there that night. I felt it was all mine! But though I heard no more gunfire, and though as the time passed, while I stood watching in the warm night, a profound and peaceful silence fell upon the city, yet I decided there and then to take the Agent’s advice and make my arrangements to leave.
The city was frightened now. In the bazaar a myriad rumours were going about — of a coup d’état caught in the bud, of an impending Turkish takeover, a Palestinian conspiracy, a Greek plot, a kidnapping of the Caliphate or an assassination attempt at the Palace… Mahmoud denied them all, but was increasingly evasive. Remarkably few people, I noticed, were taking their lunches at the Athenaeum. Another note arrived for me, this time from Mario Biancheri: ‘I shall not be at the market tomorrow. I have to go to Istanbul. I shall be at the Pera Palas. Ciao.’
When I went to the station to buy my ticket out, they told me that from that night the train would come no further than the old frontier. ‘I can sell you a ticket, but you will have to make your own way up the Staircase — no rebates.’ I decided to drive up there and abandon the car at the station, or give it to Yasar, if he was around. I spent the morning saying my goodbyes, but already it seemed Hav’s brittle society was coming apart.