I was greatly encouraged by all this. ‘Now you can talk of old times,’ said Magda, squeezing my arm affectionately. ‘Here, here on the old waterfront, the real old times survive.’
‘And it is here,’ said Azzam, ‘that the real truth survives too — the ideological truth, that is. We can tell you now, Jan, now that we are clear of eavesdroppers, the reason for our performance at the League. Of course our conversations are bugged there, whatever Henri says, and the Office of Security knows that we and our friends — our friends of the Sustenance, as we say — talk subversively. But we present ourselves to them simply as common-or-garden silly intellectuals, econological nuts as you might say. We pretend to be crazy Greens — it was we who invented the joke that the “M” on the Tower stood not for Myrmidon but for Monsanto — rather funny, don’t you think?’
‘Yeah, well we are Greens too,’ Henri put in, ‘but not crazies.’
‘Quite, but our real quarrel with our rulers is part aesthetic, part ideological, part doctrinal, part liturgical.’
‘Bless my soul,’ said I, ‘no wonder you bring me down to the quays to talk.’
‘Yes Azzam,’ Magda said, ‘you always make things too complicated. He’s really a poet you know, Jan, a very Havian poet. His mind works like a maze. Do you know that anjlak about the intricacy of intricacies? That’s one of his. Let me put it all more simply. What we are really against, Jan, is the Republic’s philistine manipulation of history — brainwashing really — which is beginning to infect ever the most high-minded of our citizens. Let me give you an example. You’ve met Dr Porvic, I know, and probably found him a perfectly decent sort.’
‘Absolutely, I laughed at him a bit, but I liked him.’
‘Quite right too. He’s a genuine lover of books and words, and I’m assured he’s a good Cathar. But you must surely have realized that he is also a fool.’
‘A sucker,’ said Henri.
‘Yes, a sucker who has been brain-washed himself and is now brain-washing everyone else. Did you get the bit about Missakian? Of course you did. How he was killed by the first shot of the Intervention just as he was sounding the Lament? Well cast your mind back, Jan dear. You were here that day. You know just as well as we do that the first shots of the Intervention were fired in the afternoon!’
‘You don’t have to be Agatha Christie’, Azzam said, ‘to see the flaws in that. And what about that stuff about the picture of the burning House being found on Missakian’s corpse, apparently painted before the House was burnt at all? Poor old Porvic, he genuinely believes that was a miracle.’
‘He believes the whole malarky, I really think he does. He honestly believes that the Cathars are descended from those ridiculous Myrmidons. And he’s not alone, you know. There are lots like him. In their muddled minds they’ve accepted the idea that the theocracy is historically ordained — divinely ordained too, naturally.’
‘What do you make of it all politically?’ I asked. This seemed to floor them rather. They looked at each other questioningly.
‘We are not really political animals,’ Azzam said, ‘we of the Sustenance. There’s a lot to be said for the Republic. It’s certainly better than what came before. You may question the taste, but you can’t deny the speed and efficiency of the recovery. Hav is certainly richer than it was before, and much better ordered, too. Lazaretto is a great success, no question about that. What we object to is this: that it’s all based upon lies. Of course that outburst of mine at lunchtime was play-acting —’
‘Good stuff all the same,’ said Henri.
‘Thank you, Henri, but much more important is what I didn’t say: that the theocracy is built upon intellectual pretence and fakery. As a result we are living lies. That’s what we are fighting against: institutional lying. That’s what this is all about.’
‘Well, enough already,’ Magda said again. ‘I think Jan’s heard enough. But we’ve got a couple of things we want to show you, Jan — don’t worry, nothing ecological, just new Sights of Hav, as the tourist brochures would say, if any tourists were allowed in the city. You’re very privileged, you know — all thanks to us.’
‘All thanks to Dr Porvic.’
‘Well, you may be right there,’ said Henri. ‘You’re getting the picture. An invitation from us has generally come from him.’
We walked around the point from the Fondaco Quay. ‘You must not suppose’, Azzam said, ‘that because we differ in some of our views from the Republic, we do not recognize its achievements. For example the way the Cathars assumed the defence of Hav, so soon after the first attack of the Intervention, was an inspiration to us all. We are disturbed by the arcane use they have made of the House of the Chinese Master—’
‘Creepy’s the word,’ said Henri.
‘Well, yes, creepy if you like — but we admire what they’ve done with the Carlotto.’
The Carlotto? Round the corner we walked, past the last of the warehouses, and there mounted on a high platform was a small warship. I recognized it. It was the Arnaldo Carlotto which used to be moored more or less permanently beside the old Lazaretto amusement park. She was built in 1918 as a Yangtze gunboat for the Italian navy, but was given to the Hav Government in 1940 to act as a guard ship for the port. Now she stood high and dry above the quay, gleaming with new paintwork. She looked brand new. Her two tall funnels were bright red, her wooden bridge was polished, her twin guns, fore and aft, were proudly elevated and over her long afterdeck a snow-white tarpaulin was stretched.
‘You know her history?’ Henri asked me. ‘Boy, she did well. She hadn’t put to sea for years when the Intervention came, but when the first warships showed themselves — you saw them yourself, right? — the old girl got steam up at once and sailed out to the Hook to wait for them. She hadn’t a hope, of course, but she stood there all alone, firing away like crazy as the destroyers came through the narrows. They say it was six hours before she sank at last, blasted clean out of the water.
‘After the Intervention the Cathars had her raised and rebuilt, and put her on that throne. They treat her well, don’t they? They made her a Hero Ship. Folks love her, as you see.’
Certainly, queuing up the gangplank, filing around the deck, sporadic groups of sightseers toured the vessel, and I could just hear, above the hubbub of the Fondaco Quay round the point and out of sight, the insistent recorded voice of a commentary. And when after ten minutes or so the voice ceased, I heard something else too: the baffling cadences and third-tones of the Myrmidonic anthem.
‘God,’ said Mazda, ‘there’s that bloody tune again — if you can call it a tune. It comes around every ten minutes, Jan, so never stay here as long as that! I suppose old Porvic told you its story? And you believed it, of course — about the loose stone in the Séance House, and the brilliant young music student? Really. That fool Borge will do anything for them.’
Henri said: ‘And have you heard what they’ve done with the stuff at the rock clubs? They call it the Hav Sound. Huh! Some brilliant young music student! Some fucking sound!’
Next, they said, and finally, they wanted to show me a sacred site — well, not exactly a sacred site, but the nearest thing to one that Hav possessed. ‘Now of course you never knew’, said Magda, ‘about the Cathar séances, when you were here before.’