Because of the time change I woke early next morning, and went out to my balcony to watch the dawn break. I remembered that on my very first morning in Hav, two decades before, I had awoken to the sound of Missakian’s trumpet from the castle rampart, thrillingly echoing across the wakening city. I stood there now in the half-light, looking towards the distant outline of the citadel, hoping to hear that magical reveille again.
As the sun’s rim showed itself above the horizon I imagined the trumpeter in the cold lee of the castle wall, wetting his lips and raising his instrument as the city’s minstrels had done every morning for so many generations. But no. No silvery trump called, to die away heart-rendingly into the mist. Instead there suddenly sounded, tremendously amplified over loudspeakers across the city, the lugubrious clanging chimes of a carillon, playing music that I did not recognize but which sounded almost fictionally antique. I was reminded, there and then, of the prehistoric horns they keep in the National Museum at Copenhagen, found deep in a peat-bog, which are sometimes taken from their cases and played on ceremonial occasions, and which were once described to me as sounding ‘older than the bogs themselves’. And I remembered too how a folk-band leader, in the Balad of years before, had described Havian music as ‘something very cold out of the long ago’.
So that carillon seemed — older than Hav itself, not indeed in the timbre of the instrument itself, but in the nature of its music, which seemed to employ rhythms I had never heard before, chords and intervals beyond the rungs of the harmonic ladder — rarities of nature, perhaps, like triply diminished thirds. Was it in some lost mode — Lydian, Phrygian, Havian? The effect was baleful anyway, and the loud clanging so depressed me that I went indoors and shut the window, so that the discreet rush of the air-conditioning would drown it. Poor Missakian, thought I, if he were still alive to hear it.
Just as I did so I noticed an envelope sliding beneath my door. It was stamped with the helmet logo, and was an invitation to visit the Office of Ideology at ten o’clock that morning — sharp. This sounded to me less an invitation than a summons, or at best one of those Latin interrogatives that expect the answer ‘yes,’ so I thought it best to accept, and made sure to be at the tunnel entrance just before ten.
Transportation is one of the many polished pleasures of Lazaretto. Wherever you are in the resort, whether you are walking down to the beach or just wandering around, within a minute or two a bright-painted resort buggy is sure to slow down beside you and ask if you need a lift — ‘Welcome, dirleddy, make yourself comfortable, please; where would you like to go?’
It is especially convenient if you plan to go through the harbour tunnel to the city, because until late at night half a dozen buggies are perpetually going back and forth. All you must do is show your blue pass to the man at the gate, sign the exit book, and away you trundle into the underwater tunnel, which is gaily decorated all over with mosaics illustrating the history of Hav from Troy to the Intervention, concluding with a representation of the Myrmidon Tower, flat on the tunnel roof, whose colours gradually merge with the daylight that greets you outside. It is very stylish, very cool. ‘Ideology Office, dirleddy? Hold on.’
I was sad to think that these poky little vehicles, like something off a Florida golf course, had replaced the Electric Ferry that had contributed so inescapably to the atmosphere of the old Hav, but I had to admit advantages: in a trice we had emerged from the tunnel into a city square, and the buggy-driver, removing his straw hat with a courtly air, was surreptitiously accepting my tip (for gratuities, Biancheri had told me, are forbidden not just at Lazaretto, but anywhere in the new Hav).
The square, Memorial Square, was entirely unfamiliar to me. The sea was out of sight, the waterfront was presumably behind me somewhere, and every single structure seemed to be brand-new. The buggy had dropped me before a large low building of white concrete. Its façade was plastered with a myriad Achillean helmets of marble, row upon row, rather as the Casa de las Conchas in Salamanca is studded all over with cockle-shells. I did not have to ask if this was the Office of Ideology. It had ideology written all over it. An armed sentry in white uniform and astrakhan hat, much like the military livery I remembered, gestured me inside with a charming smile, and in the severely functional lobby I was almost fulsomely greeted. It is true that I had to insert my blue pass into an identification slot, rather like putting a ticket into a railway-station machine, but the woman at the desk was wreathed in ingratiation. The Director himself, she said, was eagerly expecting me, being himself a scholar of the English language, and she congratulated me on my punctuality, a virtue much prized in Hav. It was a great pleasure to have me at the Office, declared this amiable functionary, and she herself took me up the white marble staircase to the office at the top.
‘Ah, Dirleddy Morris, what a privilege to meet you,’ said the trimly suited elderly man, wearing a red tarboosh, who rose from his desk to greet me. A monocle dangled from a golden cord around his neck, and what with this and the tasselled tarboosh, he looked remarkably like an Egyptian pasha of the previous century.
‘Please, sit down, take comfort, and I’ll join you.’ Coming round to the front of his desk he sat beside me on a squashy flowered sofa and asked me if I would care for tea. ‘No? Not indeed our finest Hav Broadleaf, cultivated in our new plantations on the escarpment slope? Well then, let us instead take a little chat.
‘We are particularly pleased to have you as our guest, Dirleddy Morris, because here in the Office we have all perused your book, and we feel that you have an instinctive sensation, a gut-sensation as it were, for the fundamental identity, one might say the basic soul, of our beloved country.’
‘I thought the book was banned,’ said I.
‘Banned? Oh dear me no, certainly not. For one reason and another it has been difficult to obtain in recent years, but as you see, we certainly have our hands on it here’ — and reaching up to his desk he showed me a well-worn copy of Last Letters from Hav.
‘There is one memorable passage which checked us of your empathy for the Hav meanings, and encouraged us to have the League of Intellectuals send you their invitation. It occurs on page 99.’
The page evidently had a marker in it, for he immediately opened it there. ‘Would you care, dirleddy, if I reminded you of your own words? They are greatly moving to any true Havian, I think. You may remember that they demonstrate the return of fishing-boats into our harbour, and this’ (he cleared his throat and put his monocle in his eye) ‘is how they run:
‘…the boats all have engines nowadays, but they often use their sails, and when one comes into the harbour on a southern wind, canvas bulging, flag streaming, keeling gloriously with a slap-slap of waves on its prow and its bare brown-torsoed Greeks exuberantly laughing and shouting to each other, it is as though young navigators have found their way to Hav out of the bright heroic past.’
‘Those are your own words, dirleddy, and sublimital words they are. They bring the tears to my eyes to read them’ — and he took out his monocle and wiped it, to demonstrate the fact — ‘because they seem to see through the tumbled years into the bright heroic times of our beginnings. As though young navigators have found their way to Hav out of the bright heroic past. There it is, dear Miss Morris, there is the truth of us. There is the beauty of our condition, as we sail, shouting and laughing at one another, brown-torsoed into our newly reborn city. Thank you. You write as if you are yourself writing out of the soul of Hav, and that is why you are here as our honoured guest today.’