‘It feels like déjà vu,’ I wanly remarked.
‘Oh come on,’ said Magda, ‘don’t give us that balls. It’s nothing like the old place. Don’t you remember the mess of everything, and queuing for our food ourselves — at that very corner over there, as a matter of fact? And what about the people — look at them! Look at that huddle of Arabs, Henri — where have they sprung from? They call it the League of Intellectuals but there isn’t one in a hundred here who writes or composes or even reads! Isn’t that true, Henri?’
‘One in a thousand more like it.’
‘Oh no, Jan Morris,’ Magda said, ‘don’t give us any of that nonsense about old times.’
She led us to a table and chairs bang in the centre of the room, where the hubbub was worst. I wondered why.
‘Because here, in all this noise, nobody can bug us.’
Pure waste of time actually, Henri said. Bugging people as Magda imagined, with hidden mikes and all that, was just a joke by now. There were much subtler means of surveillance nowadays. ‘But bugger them anyway. Better safe than sorry. When we want to talk, we take a walk.’
So we settled ourselves in the middle of everything, and without anyone ordering there arrived a succession of dishes — cold goat-meat slices, chips, Hav hummus, frogs’ legs, chunks of eel, urchins of course and, wonder of wonders, bowls of fruit that were defined for me as snow raspberries (canned of course, said Magda, but still…). From time to time people stopped by to greet us — a shifting company of Magda’s and Henri’s acquaintances, Antons and Ludovics and Marettas, who claimed somewhat unconvincingly to remember me, and solemnly took a single chip from our plates, or a prawn, or a lump of bass-roe, almost as a matter of ritual, before bowing and proceeding.
‘We call it sharing our sustenance,’ Magda said, ‘which is a sort of code for sharing our convictions. We are the Sustenance folk! You have only been here half an hour, but already you have met half the true intellectuals of this so-called League. Oh, and here’s another — remember Azzam, he of the Alien Office long ago? Now he’s the most private of our private citizens — isn’t that right, Azzam?’
Azzam delicately took a snow raspberry, and sat down with us. He was smiling gently. He had aged, but I remembered him. The earnest young bureaucrat with pens in his breast-pocket had become the stooped, scholarly-looking gentleman in a tweed shooting-jacket, carrying under his arm what looked like a sketching-pad. ‘A pleasure to meet you again,’ he said. ‘You perhaps remember me as Mahmoud, but I am always Azzam now, don’t ask me why.’
‘If you want the facts,’ Magda said, ‘Azzam’s your man. Isn’t that right, Henri?’
‘Azzam’s the boy, definitely,’ said Henri. ‘Sit down, boy, give us the facts.’
‘The facts are,’ said Azzam, fastidiously biting into his snow raspberry, ‘that there are no facts. Facts are factotum in the new Hav. Facts are faxes. Faxes are facts. Fair blows the fact on summer eve, and fierce the mountains fart.’
Magda laughed. ‘Bravo, Azzam. But Ezra Pound’s dead, you know. So is constructivism. So is post-constructivism. So’s Braudel, Jan, isn’t he? that old fraud you used to admire so much. Melchik certainly is. So just talk straight now, dear Azzam, and explain to Jan here whatever it is you’re going to explain.’
Azzam smiled again. ‘All right, Magda, but where to begin? How much does the dirleddy absorb?’
‘Try me,’ I said.
‘Spill the beans,’ said Henri.
‘Tell her the truth,’ said Magda.
‘Tea?’ said a passing waiter with a pot. ‘Best Hav Broadleaf, freshly plucked?’
‘That’s the truth,’ Azzam suddenly shouted. ‘That’s the new Hav truth! Freshly plucked broadleaf that tastes like shit, and GM snow berries out of a tin!’
Half the people in the room turned to see who was shouting but, when they saw it was Azzam, seemed to lose interest. Magda said, ‘Enough already’ (she loved old American movies, I remembered), and so the four of us left the League of Intellectuals, with me sheepishly in the rear.
I thought there seemed something something contrived or stagy to this episode. It was like a performance, climaxing in Azzam’s blatant eccentricity. It was like a charade, in which I had played a non-speaking role.
‘Man, these Brits are too quick for us,’ said Henri when I voiced the thought outside the club, ‘but believe us, don’t disturb yourself, our Myrmidonic stiffs are too damn slow to perceive the nature of the game.’
What was the game, I wondered? but I was soon distracted. Out of the League, Magda led us round the back, past the Office of Ideology and down a street of blank new warehouses, until we found ourselves on the Fondaco Quay. ‘There,’ said Magda, ‘now you can talk about old times!’ For it was very like the waterfront I knew, only more so. It was more crowded, more bustling, more animated that ever it was in my memory. The afternoon was bright, and across the harbour I could see Lazaretto island with its topsy-turvy skyline of bobbles and wind-towers, and the immense pillar of the Myrmidon Tower flashing its signal still — from here it looked as though it was emerging from the water itself, shaking the drips off. Beyond, the hills closed in to the narrow passage of the Hook, and far away I could just make out, glistening blue-green, a stretch of open sea. It was a sparkling scene, and the activity of the waterfront matched it.
‘Wow, what’s happened here?’ I exclaimed in delight, and they explained it to me. Since the dredging and widening of the Hook larger local craft had been able to use the city quays, and Hav’s new status as a vibrant entrepôt meant that coastal shipping from a much wider area now brought their goods for unloading and re-shipping here. The really big freighters, the container ships, docked at the new deep-sea port at Casino Cove, but larger salt-ships could now tie up here, and a new traffic of dhows and traders found it profitable to sail through the Hook to Hav.
I could see it for myself. The Fondaco itself, the great Venetian caravanserai which had dominated the waterfront, had vanished, and in its place were five or six large and unlovely warehouse blocks, with a myriad aerials on their roofs and huge commercial signs all over them.. And the quays themselves were crammed with a marvellous variety of dhows, moored there side by side, sometimes three or four abreast, a jumbled mass of high poops and superstructures, fluttering flags, gangplanks from vessel to vessel, ship to shore, huge piles of crates or sacking, derricks and winches and rumbling generators. Along the quays trucks stood double- or triple-parked, nose to tail, with longshoremen stacking them with goods, foremen shouting through loudhailers, a revving of engines, a hooting of horns, and everywhere a busy mass of men and women, in dungareees or gallabiyehs, the wide straw hats of Hav, Arab kuffiyas, bright gypsy headscarves, turbans, skullcaps and occasional burkas — a tumult of humanity, always shifting, always noisy, laughing and shouting in a babel of languages. Off-shore idly lay a couple of coastal freighters, smoke drifting from their funnels, and there was a flurry of small boats. Fishing-boats with the graceful old Hav rig navigated their way among the mooring-buoys, and motor-boats scudded here and there, and out on the harbour I could see a lovely white streamlined vessel, low in the water, making its way to the salt-quay.