‘But what would you do? No trains, very few visitors — only Chinese and Arab commercials, by and large — and certainly no help from the Government. They wanted to pull the place down, actually, when they pulled down the station ruins, and it was only because we all made a fuss that they let it stand.’
So making a fuss did have some effect, in the new Hav?
‘Not often, but sometimes. There’s not much what you might call public opinion these days. The papers don’t spend much time on everyday matters — I was surprised when the Mirror had that article about me and the hotel, but that may have been the influence of Signor Biancheri, who’s always had a soft spot for the Impériale. Still, it was certainly people making a fuss who saved the Roof-Race.’
I’d forgotten all about the Roof-Race.
‘Oh feelings ran so high about the Roof-Race that those Cathars really couldn’t go ahead and do away with it. They meant to, you know. When they rebuilt the Medina they were going to make no provision at all for the Roof-Race, and it was only because everybody was up in arms that they made the new course — not a patch on what it was, but something, I suppose — worth your while to take a look at, anyway.’
I said I was surprised the Cathars had given in on the matter. ‘Me too,’ said Fatima, ‘what with them being so mad on health and safety and all that. But who knows what they really think about anything?’
And apropos of that, did she remember when, thanks to her, I had gone with Yasar and George to that secret séance? What had become of them?
Fatima fell silent for a moment then, while she looked about for a sugar-spoon.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you borrow my car for the day tomorrow, take a turn around, see what you want to see, and then in the evening we can have a nice long chat. What do you think? You can stay another night, can’t you?’
I thought so. I had my blue pass, after all. So after accepting a warm dry kiss from Miss Yeğen, off I went along the gloomy corridor to bed. There seemed to be no other guests at the Impériale that night, and all I heard as I dozed off was a gurgle of antique plumbing, and a distant barking of dogs. No steam-whistle from the station, when the Hav Express pulled in. No clanking of wagons or porters’ shouts. Not another sound, until the carrillon woke me like a bad dream in the morning.
THURSDAY
4
Surely hers wasn’t one of the Tunnel Pilot’s cars, was it, I asked Fatima Yeğen in the morning, like the one I had bought all those years before?
She laughed a tinkly girlish laugh. ‘No, no, Miss Morris, what a scream you are! They all went to the scrap heap long, long ago, like the railway itself.’ And when we went out to the hotel garage after breakfast, there awaited me a stylish new Shanghai coupé, white, with a sunshine roof and CD player — ‘all mod cons,’ tinkled Miss Yeğen again, ‘almost like Lazaretto!’
There was a map on the passenger’s seat. ‘I think you’ll need this,’ she said, and spread it out for me on the roof of the car. She was right. Except for the shape of the peninsula itself, the very topography of Hav looked different. Slap across it, from one coast to the other, there now ran a dual-carriageway motor-road (H1), following the route of the filled-in Spartan Canal and linking the city with the new port at Yuan Wen Kuo. There was no sign now of the International Settlement — ‘vanished like a dream’, said Miss Yeğen — and what had been the heart of the old city, where the Serai had been, and the palaces, was apparently now absorbed within a large rectangular slab labelled Medina. And the Balad, the old Arab quarter? ‘Ah well,’ said Miss Yeğen, ‘I won’t tell you that. Give yourself a surprise!’
And the rest of all I had known? The castle survived, of course, and there was evidently still a settlement on San Spiridon, the Greek island, but the old Russian pleasure-place of Malaya Yalta was not even marked, and the old motor-road up to the Escarpment was coloured in green (‘Unsuitable for motor traffic’).
Miss Yeğen sighed heavily as I folded up the map. ‘Such changes! So much gone! But never mind, there’s lots for you to see still. Enjoy yourself! “Laugh and be happy” is my motto! Tell me all about it tomorrow!’
And so, finding reverse gear with some difficulty, since the symbols on the knob were all in Chinese, I eased the car backwards into Centrum Square and continued my investigations.
I hit the H1 north of the castle hill. One way led to the Medina (20 km, said a road-sign), the other to Yuan Wen Kuo (32 km, with a picture of a steamship puffing smoke). I turned to the east, and now and then saw traces of the old canal running now one side, now the other of the highway. It was a grey morning, and the landscape was much as I remembered it: bare rolling moorland, with occasional woodland clumps, running away to the distant line of the Escarpment. Here and there patches of wild flowers, brilliant in bright blues and yellows, were revealed when sunshine momentarily broke through the clouds. No animals crosssed my path — no animals seemed to be in the moors — but streams of bulky trucks with trailers, interspersed with plush black limousines, passed in both directions along the road.
This part of the peninsula never was much populated, because of its harsh flinty soil, but it came as a shock to me when, descending a long gradual slope to the eastern shore, I found there was no sign of Yuan Wen Kuo, only a shack or two off the road and a few dingy shops.
An elderly Chinese was sitting in a bamboo chair outside one of the buildings, looking rather like a Chinaman in an old western, so I pulled off the highway and asked him what had happened. Surely the whole town, which I remembered as a perfectly ordinary Chinese settlement, had not been destroyed in the Intervention?
‘No, dirleddy, much destroyed but not all. Rest all moved. Rest gone north — that way,’ and he pointed to the big road behind me.
‘All moved?’ I repeated incredulously. It sounded like an Old Chinese Fable. ‘Everything? Palace of Delights? Yellow Rose Store? Big Star Floating Restaurant? They all just got up and went? Like magic?’
He thought this very funny. How he laughed, and pulled his beard, and puffed his pipe, and tilted back on his chair! No, no, no, he explained to me, very carefully. The town of Yuan Wen Kuo had been peaceably moved fifteen years before, to become the port town of the new deep-sea harbour, and the old place had been abandoned in a very short time — ‘one month, two month, everyone gone. Now not much to do here except watch the cars go by.
‘But Yuan Wen Kuo now very rich, dirleddy, big ships, rich people, many streets. Go and see! Back to big road, turn right. You soon be there. No, no, no, Yuan Wen Kuo no move by magic — ha, ha, ha…’ and I heard him chuckling still, waving his pipe at me, as I turned the car around and returned to the H1.
A mile or two further on the new Yuan Wen Kuo hit me. It was recognizably Chinese still, with its garish signs and its ceaseless sense of movement, but Chinese in the twenty-first-century manner, brash, angular, blazing, like a miniature Shanghai. This Yuan Wen Kuo had been shifted from the arcane protection of its neighbouring hills, and the principle of Feng Shui, which had governed Chinese building aesthetics for so many years, had evidently been abandoned. Nothing remained of the Palace of Delights, and I saw no sign of the Kuomingtang-Communist rivalries that used to fester and flourish here. Gone, too, was the shambled homeliness I used to find so soothing, and the energy of the place was altogether more concentrated, more controlled. It was a small town still, but ostentatiously, even brutally modern, and I noticed that the ship on its civic greeting — WELCOME TO YWK, GATEWAY TO HAV — was certainly not a traditional steamer, like the ones on the highway sign, but a fiercely stylized and deeply loaded container ship. It all reminded me of one of the New Towns of Hong Kong, only rather more restrained.