So there, said the directors, as one man, now I knew all.
‘But you talk about aesthetics,’ I protested, ‘you say nothing about practices.’
‘Practices?’ said their leader. ‘You mean political practices, economic practices, matters like that? Dirleddy, they fall outside our province. We deal in this Office with Ideology and Ethnic Authority. Day-to-day management affairs you must discover for youself — and if we are to go by Dr Porvic’s assessment of your talents, we are sure you will! Ah, and here he is now!’
For the Director was waiting for me in the lobby, when I left the conference chamber with all the deputies. ‘Well, how did the convening occur?’ he asked to the radiant smiles of the woman at the reception desk. ‘Did my deputies instruct you well?’
‘Excellently, although I have to say that in some ways they left me more confused than I was before.’
Ha ha, laughed all the deputies, and Porvic did too. ‘Ah, dirleddy, that is the mazian aspect of our national personality. If you would like to discuss it more deeply I will happily introduce you some of my colleagues with a profounder knowledge of it than I can myself profess, or even my learned deputies here. Best of all, I can lead you to our famous Professor Kiruski, who is the most eminent authority of them all.’
But no, I said hastily, ‘I’ve only got two weeks,’ and the Director and his deputies laughed again.
‘Urchin soup?’ he asked as we left the building, to the winning salute of the sentry. ‘Would that satisfy your taste-buds?’ I remembered the waterfront café I used to frequent, which made a speciality of sea-urchins, and attracted a wonderfully cosmopolitan, raffish and bohemian clientele. I assumed it had been buried under the concrete of his own office, but he took me round the back, and there in a cluttered alley, overshadowed by that wall of Achillean helmets, the same old café appeared to thrive.
‘We forfeited so much of our heritage in the Intervention,’ the Director said, ‘that some of us have done our best to preserve those native institutions that survived. As it occurs, and you would not of course have known it, this café was always a gathering place of Cathars, where many adherents met to plan the continuance of the cult. It was very dangerous to be a Cathar in Hav, you know. Many of my own ancestors died for their heresy.’
We sat down at a heavy wooden table, on a heavy wooden bench, and very respectful servants, recognizing the Director, filled our soup-plates with the bubbling urchin-broth, fragrantly steaming. ‘You call it a heresy? That seems ironic.’
‘Well they called it a heresy first, when they tried to exterminate our enlightenment in the so-called Albigensian Crusade, but more recently we assumed the phrase ourselves as an emblem of our defiance. And our pride. Our heresy was, after all, the top-hole truth.’
I have never been absolutely sure what the Cathar heresy was, but having sat through one ideological lecture already that day, I changed the subject. What about the carillon and the dawn trumpet-call, I asked?
‘Ah, the trumpet, Katourian’s Lament, ah, what a falling-off is there. Even in Hav we make our errors. Even in Hav we have our differences of taste or historical judgement. I don’t altogether know how to affirm this, but it has to be conceded that some segments of our society are, you might say, more goahead than others — though all working from the heart, of course, for the good of our Republic, under the guidance of our Perfects, no argumentation about that. As Avzar Melchik worded it in his greatest work — now then, how can I translate it for you — let’s see… well, something like ‘A rose without petals has lost its flavour’ — you maintain my drift?
‘So, the petals of my particular Office — the Office of Ideology and Ethnic Authority, to give it its full title — our petals are of traditional flavour. We are Kiruskians lock, stock and barrel. Our colleagues at the Office of Public Ritual, on the other hand are, shall we postulate, somewhat less devoted to the status quo ante. We have contrived to reconstruct this café in its traditional posture, because it stands within the focus of our own building, but if the Public Ritual people had the authority they would undoubtedly have replaced it with a cafeteria.’
‘Dear God,’ I said, spluttering politely over my soup, ‘a cafeteria!’
‘Precisely. Imagine! The trouble about the Lament arose when, after the Intervention, sympathizers of our republic in China, with whom we enjoy cordial relationships, on an old-boy basis in fact, wished to chip in a symbolical contribution to our efforts of reconstruction.’
‘Decent of them,’ I said, for I was beginning to get the conversational hang of things.
‘Granted. But what they gave us was not hard cash but that confoundable carillon. It’s mounted up there at Katourian’s Place, in a little summer-house sort of place, and every damned morning it plays our national anthem — mechanically, of course, and frightfully loud.’
‘Dear me. No work for Missakian, then.’
‘By Jove no. Missakian Costas was the last trumpeter, killed poor fellow on the very day of the Intervention. The shell terminated his life just as he was playing the Lament that morning, and his very trumpet is preserved in the museum — we shall see it in a moment or two.’
‘But what is that anthem? I never heard it before.’
The Director assumed a mystic tone of voice, as if we were in church. ‘Ah, that is a different tale,’ he said. ‘It is a magical tale. After the Intervention, when the Holy Cathar Government revealed itself and assumed authority, there was need for a new national hymn, more ideologically relevant. You may perhaps remember the former one? No? Well, be that as it was. Because of the ancient Cathar proscription of sacred song, it was decided that a solely melodic anthem must be sufficient to express our national gratitude. But how, dirleddy’ — he asked me rhetorically — ‘how, dirleddy, could a sufficient tonality be found for so exalted a function?
‘The answer is: by a miracle. Unbeknownst to anyone, hidden in a wall of the Séance House was a most ancient manuscript, brought to light by the exact same shell-burst that terminated poor Missakian. Our Perfects hastened to examine it, and found it to be a hitherto unbeknownst musical score, in the medieval Catharist notation, of extreme beauty and obvious ideological reference.
‘One of our brilliant young music students re-notated it for contemporary use, and that is the smashing melody, dirleddy — smashing even at the hands of that monster machine — which you doubtless heard this morning calling us all to loyalty and gratitude. Isn’t that a palpable miracle? Wouldn’t you say so?’
After lunch — a second bowl of soup for Dr Porvic, I noticed, on the house of course — we walked around the corner to the Museum of the Intervention, which was a building precisely the same as the Ideology Office, only smaller, and with fewer Achillean helmets on it. We were met at the door by the curator, who greeted Porvic obsequiously but hardly noticed me. The very first thing he showed us, in a solitary cabinet inside the entrance, was Missakian’s badly dented trumpet, described as ‘The historic instrument of Missakian Costas’. Beside it, I was touched to see, was the plaque erected on the castle rampart in 1837 by officers of the British Royal Artillery. It had commemorated the original musician, Katourian, after whom the trumpet-place was named, but Dr Melchick said it was now there to remember everyone who had blown the Lament at Katourian’s Place down the generations. ‘Call me sentimental,’ he said, ‘if you like, but I myself caused that plaque to be re-erected here’ — and it seemed to me that he blushed.