At eleven-thirty really sharp, every day of the week, one can hear the muffled report of a gun from the prison island, San Pietro. Hav time being half an hour before St Petersburg time, ever since the days of Russian rule, eleven thirty rather than noon has been the official centre of the Hav day, the moment when all official departments close for the midday break. The shop shutters rattle down again, the trams pause in their schedules, and for most of the people of Hav a rather heavy lunch is followed by three or four hours of idle siesta, even in the winter months — until as the evening begins to draw in everything starts up all over again.
The prison gun goes off once more at half past eight in the evening, and the working day is over. Nowadays, those who do not go home to supper with TV linger on till ten or eleven in the cafés and restaurants of New Hav, or go out to dinner in Yuan Wen Kuo, where things stay open later, or find disreputable indulgences, so Miss Yeğen says, in the back-streets of the Medina and Balad slums. But I am told that in the old days the climax or focal point of the evening, at least in the summer season, was the midnight arrival of the Express, to disgorge its complement of grandees and celebrities before a wondering crowd at the platform barricade. Now the train seldom arrives before two or three in the morning: and by then, as we know, nobody is awake in Hav but Miss Yeğen in her cubicle at the hotel.
One must also settle in, here as everywhere, in the official or administrative sense. This has proved a surprisingly pleasant experience. ‘You must go to the Serai,’ said Miss Yeğen, ‘and register at the Aliens Registration Office, or else zam, you will be on my cousin’s train without a first-class ticket, on your way to Kars.’ So I went along to the Aliens Office, round the back of the government buildings, and there, presenting my passport, and Evidence of Solvency (namely my American Express credit card, which so far as I know is accepted by nobody here), I met Mr Mahmoud Azzam, Deputy Controller of Aliens.
‘Dirleddy,’ said Mr Mahmoud Azzam — for this form of address, I now realize, is generic to courtly gentlemen of Hav, whatever their language — ‘I see you are a writer. So am I, when I am not being Deputy Controller of Aliens, and you really must allow me, since it is now almost eleven thirty, to introduce you to some of our confrères. Do please take lunch with me in what you might call our headquarters, the Athenaeum Club — just around the corner.’ Mr Azzam was in his late twenties, I would judge, and rather progressive of appearance, having long sideburns and a droopy moustache, besides wearing in his lapel a badge saying in Turkish Balinalari Öldürmeyin, ‘Save the Whale’. He did not look Athenaeum material, so to speak, especially when, having packed away his files and put his three or four pens in his breast pocket, he took me round the corner and I saw the club-house before me. It was built by the Russians, and looked all you would expect of an Athenaeum, dorically pillared on a single floor, grandly porticoed, green-shuttered, Minerva-crowned of course — in short, if a little down-at-heel, distinctly of the literary or scholarly élite. Was this really Mr Azzam, I wondered? No less pertinently, I mused, eyeing my own dusty sandals and less than immaculate slacks, was it entirely me?
But I need not have worried. Hardly had we climbed the front steps, entered the tall portico (bees’ nests clustered under its eaves), and pushed open the big front door, when a comforting hubbub reached us — loud talk, much laughter, even snatches of singing. ‘We are all intellectuals here,’ said Mr Azzam, as though that explained everything, and thus encouraged, holding my copy of Braudel’s The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II, Volume II, as if in credential, I accompanied him into the maelstrom.
The whole of the ground floor of the Hav Athenaeum, which I surmise was once hall, dining-room, bar and silent library, is now a gigantic kind of common room, as in some extremely avant-garde university. Cafeteria, bar, sitting-room, office, library, seemed to be strewn at random around this immense chamber. All was in a state of exuberant vigour. Everyone was talking very loudly, as at a cocktail party, except for those bent over books and magazines in the library wing, and there were knots of people arguing and gesticulating over drinks, and people shouting to one another from one end of the cafeteria queue to the other. Even the elderly women behind the counter replied to orders in screeching fortissimi. It was not at all how I imagined an Athenaeum.
And another un-Athenaeum-like thing: hardly anybody there, except the counter-women and me, seemed much more than thirty years old. Men and women, they looked like so many students — not even associate professors, I thought, at the most research graduates. They greeted me very breezily as we elbowed our way through. ‘Hello old thing,’ said a man in big horn-rimmed glasses, provoking a storm of ‘Hush’, ‘Anton, so rude’, and ‘Take no notice, dirleddy’, and from a young woman behind us in the queue came the cry ‘Braudel! That monster!’
I asked her afterwards, when we came to share a table, why she cherished this exotic antipathy — it is not common, after all, to feel so fiercely about illustrious scholars.
‘Why, because in God knows how many pages of God knows how many volumes, he never even recognizes the existence of Hav.’
This raised ardent waves of assent from our companions — ‘shame, shame’, ‘quite true’, ‘notorious’, etc. ‘Fair play, Magda,’ said Mahmoud Azzam, ‘surely he mentions us in footnotes?’
She ignored him. ‘And do you know why?’ she asked me urgently, looking me very close and hard in the face. ‘Because the French wish to refuse our being. They do not wish us to have existed. They failed to keep us after their infamous occupation in 1917, and so they want us not to be. They are a very jealous people. They know Hav has been for centuries, for aeons, a centre of art and civilization — long before France was thought of! — so if they cannot have us, and pretend us to be French, like Guadeloupans, or what-have-yous in the Pacific Sea, then they do not want us to be.’
A frenzied discussion followed this outburst, some supporting Magda, some telling me to take no notice of her, some declaring the Italians to be much worse than the French, some blaming the Americans, some fondly remembering visits to Paris, some going on to talk about wine, or Sartre, or Yves Saint Laurent (‘You have met Yves? he is my hero’)… ‘We are intellectuals you see,’ Mahmoud bawled in my ear. ‘There is no subject that we cannot discuss, and all subjects make us angry:’
So now I am a member of the Athenaeum — it will make me feel at home, Mahmoud says. More than that, I am a colleague of Mahmoud and Magda and the man with the horn-rimmed glasses, whose name is Dr Borge, and so, despite my age, a temporary member of the intellectual establishment. Why were they all so young? I ventured to ask the other day, and there was a short silence before Mahmoud replied, ‘Ah, well, you see in 1978 there were certain scandals here, and the leaders of the affair — the Prefects? is that the word in English? — they were all members of the Athenaeum. Many, many members, most of the older ones, resigned then.’
‘Huh,’ said Magda, ‘or were made to resign…’
I asked no more. I knew my place. Still, I wonder what did happen in 1978? I wonder who the Prefects were?
Hav days pass swiftly, but somehow hazily. I know of nowhere in the world where the purpose of life seems so ill-defined. It is perfectly true that in the past Hav has played an exceedingly important role in history — has sometimes seemed indeed, as Magda would claim, the very centre of affairs, a crux, a junction of great traffic, not just the run-down terminal of the preposterously anachronistic Mediterranean Express. Especially down at the harbour, I can often imagine the days when the dhows and galleys lay alongside in a clamour of commerce, and the camel caravans from remotest Central Asia, all bales, and straw, and buckets, and ropes, and arguing Turcomans in long robes, assembled sprawled and grunting on the quays beside the warehouses!