Gone, all gone, they said. Even the Medina was burnt to the ground, and the slum-quarter of the Balad had been entirely rebuilt — ideologically rebuilt, they said, Myrmidonically rebuilt, and they laughed a lot. There was not much left of the old Hav, as I would see for myself when I went over to the city — ‘You do have a blue pass, I suppose? Of course you do, or you wouldn’t be in Palast One.’
The truth seems to be that the Lazaretto island is a self-contained, insulated conclave within the Myrmidonic Republic. If visitors arrive by sea, as I did, they disembark there. If they come by air, they are taken straight there by helicopter from the airport. The island is in effect the Foreign Quarter of Hav, all tourists confined there, all legations within their own compound, rather like the districts where aliens had to live in Stalin’s Russia.
But it is also the public face of the Republic. Everybody recognizes the image of the Tower. Every glossy tourist brochure portrays the luxury of the resort, with its restaurants and bars and bazaars and swimming-pools and casinos and boutiques and beaches, and the white-clad straw-hatted servants attentive at every corner. The brassily capitalist structure of Lazaretto is rigidly regulated by the Republic (‘one feels so safe, dear’), and as everyone knows it is already one of the great international tourist destinations, attracting wealthy pleasure-seekers from half the world — ‘just the same types,’ said Biancheri, ‘as used to come to the old Casino, only very much more so…’
After dinner he suggested I might like to see the view from the top of the Tower. By now the building was floodlit from top to bottom, and its lobby, sheathed in chrome, was blindingly illuminated. Soldiers or policemen were everywhere inside, wearing combat gear and toting automatic rifles, but the duty officer at the desk knew Biancheri. ‘Where tonight, signor?’ he said.
‘No stops,’ Biancheri replied. ‘I would just like to show my guest the prospect from the top.’
‘She has a blue pass? Show it me, please. Right. Proceed, signor. Car 7 it is’.
‘Ciaou,’ said Biancheri, and we stepped into an elevator. It was very large and empty, with glass sides, and when Biancheri pressed its only button it seemed to explode upwards out of its pad, like a rocket. My heart went into my mouth. I nearly fell.
‘Dear God!’ said I, ‘you might have warned me.’
‘Wait, my dear, in a moment or two you will be soothed. It is all arranged. Trust me.’
And it was true, for the elevator presently slowed, the lights were dimmed, my heart stopped pounding, and as we then sidled gently upwards I discovered that on all four sides of us there was an aquarium — an upright aquarium, as it were, extending to the top of the tower — an acquarium 200 floors deep, through whose waters, oblivious to us as we passed, a multitude of fish floated and loitered, golden, black and crimson shapes, with prickly fins or languidly trailing tails, drifting here and there in and out of the elevator’s lights. Soft tuneless music played. The lights were dimmed. Up we glided through the fish and the water, weightlessly. After the detonation of our launch it was delightfully comforting.
‘An old Chinese device,’ Biancheri said. ‘Haven’t you seen the fish tanks in Chinese dentists’ waiting-rooms? They were originally to calm anxious patients, but their effect is so addictive that nowadays dentists have them there for their own pleasure — like a narcotic. The Chinese who built this place carried the idea to extremes, and reversed it. First we get that almighty shock, and then in contrast we are given this lovely feeling of beauty and release. They call it Peace after Murder. It is part of The Lazaretto Experience.’
I wondered if every elevator travelled through the fish-tank in this therapeutic way, but no, it was only Summit Car 7, the number 7 being a traditional Havian symbol for contentment. It alone was non-stop, too. ‘After all, the people who live here have to get off at their own floors sometimes — give them a chance!’
‘And who are they,’ I asked, ‘when they’re at home?’
But before he could reply we had reached the top, and stepped out into a second lobby, equally policed. We showed our passes. We signed a book. An electric door slid, and we stepped out on to the summit gallery. High above us blazed the great letter M, flashing its colours, and behind it Achilles’ crested helmet, and above them both, invisible from the ground, were batteries of aerials and electronic dishes. There was a ceaseless hum of machinery somewhere. Below us a great glow of light emanated from the building itself, almost as though it was burning — it was like standing on top of a pillar of fire. And far down there on the ground Lazaretto was now laid out for me like a diagram, or a mathematical theorem.
Oh, the famous Kiruski had done his job well! Now I understood. It reminded me of those immense sand-drawings in the Peruvian desert whose subjects are apparent only from the air — spiders, crabs, monkeys that only the gods can see. Kiruski had so arranged things that the meaning of Hav itself should be represented in this, its newest incarnation, but that only from its utmost pinnacle, beneath the lamp of the great ‘M’ itself, could it be understood. Now I saw it all, in all its allegory! There were the lights of Lazaretto, far below us, and now I realized that all its paths and tunnels and shrubberies and towered villas were in the form of the circular labyrinth, the old Cathar symbol for mystic perfection. On the other side the Diplomatic Suburb was a metaphor of the mundane, patchily symmetrical, sans mystery, sans discipline — decidedly lacking, as the lady had warned me, ideological certainty. And high above it all, god-like in its strength and selfishness, indestructibly the Myrmidon Tower spread its glory, flashed its message of conviction across maze and mediocrity, island, harbour and city itself.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Biancheri on the way down. ‘You look a little shaky.’
Something did seem to have happened to me up there — a spasm of dizziness, like a transient mini-stroke. It might have been the elevator, I told him, the rocket-jolt and the fish, Murder and Peace, or perhaps it was the effect of all those electronics, or just the height maybe. I thought it was more probably, though, an overwhelming sensation of sheer power that had overcome me in the tower — some kind of transcendental influence, you might say…
‘Aha,’ he said. ‘Well perhaps you’re right. There’s a lot of power stacked up in that building. And believe you me, they know all about Ibsen’s paw up there! Perhaps you’re right!’
He walked me back to Palast One, through the garden torches and the bazaars, and when we parted he said: ‘You take care of yourself, now. This isn’t Llanystumdwy. Oh and by the way, you can disengage the tele-dado by pressing a little pink button behind the jacuzzi.’
TUESDAY
2