Happy confusion ensued, the priest beaming in triumph, the gentlemen shaking hands with each other, the ladies breaking fitfully into song, the cyber-café man telling me that of course he realized their theologies were hypothetically identical, the retsina flowing, Kallonia telling me she hoped I now understood a little more, until we saw from the terrace the hydrofoil returning from the mainland, and with embraces, kisses and loud good wishes in Havian Greek, I was seen off through the celery fields down to the harbour.
Stuffed full of Hellenism, then, I just had time to drive down and see the Iron Dog again. It was, after all, the most extraordinary legacy of the Greeks in Hav, placed there above the Hook, so it was claimed, by the Spartans when they were besieging the city. I knew that the nearby Conveyor Bridge had escaped the Intervention. Its destruction might have blocked the channel into the harbour, and its French subsidies had continued throughout, together with regular maintenance by engineers from Paris. Nobody had mentioned, though, the Dog.
I drove most of the way, over tussocky tracks, but had to walk the last few hundred scented yards to the high plateau above the bridge. Beyond it that animal still stood, proud and strange as ever, his tail flowing behind him, his snout extended. For the first time he struck me as some sort of heraldic beast, like a savage armorial. The wind blew, as it always does there, the container cabin lurched silently across the channel, a ship sailed by far below, and the whole scene seemed to me altogether hallucinatory, like so much of Hav itself.
I clambered down the slope to look through my binoculars at the famous graffiti on the dog’s flank, but I could make none of them out. The Norse symbols, the Venetian ciphers, the Kaiser’s eagle, ‘H. M. Stanley’ arrogantly under the creature’s chin, all had been overwhelmed by enormous tangles of cyber-graffiti — those weird stylized inscriptions which are plastered bafflingly all over the western world, but which I had never before seen in Hav. They looked more than ever mysterious on the hide of the Iron Dog, high above the chasm, as if a horde of aliens had passed that way, leaving their arcane signatures behind.
I drove back to L’Auberge Impériale just at twilight, and spent the evening chatting to Miss Yeğen. We shared a bowl of celery soup (‘the real stuff’, said Fatima, ‘like you, fresh this morning from San Spiridon’), and capped it with a glass or two of Aqua Hav. This was rather too sweet for me, but she liked it.
FRIDAY
5
‘And what’, asked Fatima at the breakfast table, ‘are you planning for today? Do you need the car? Or are you running away to the flesh-pots again?’
‘Today’, I said, ‘I must go to the Rialto, and I shall go afoot.’
She thought I meant I was planning a visit to the movies, so I explained myself less Shakespearianly. I wanted to see where the action was, where the money was generated, where the shakers and movers hung out.
‘Ah, the Hav Rialto. Well you can walk there easily enough. You can find the way, I’m sure. It’s the Medina, of course, as it always was, and around the Grand Bazaar is where it all happens — not in the Bazaar, but in the streets all around it. It’s nearly all new, of course — you realize that — but you’ll see some things you remember, and if you want to find out more about the Roof-Race they’ve got an office down there now, around the corner from the Grand Mosque. As it happens, I think you know its manager. Remember my cousin Yasar, who drove you down the Staircase when you first came? That’s him. Give him a kiss from me. He’ll tell you everything.’
Everything? He’d certainly told me a lot last time, but times have changed in Hav since then… I embraced Fatima, thanked her for the bedroom and the car, gave her the rest of the Aqua Hav and set off for the Medina. I hardly knew where I was, so utterly changed was the city-scape, but I used as a point of reference the Castle high on its hill above the city. Nothing has changed up there, I thought to myself. Missakian is dead, but lives on in the memory of his melody. The Crusaders are still marching bravely down to their ships, and Saladin instructs his scribes just how to word the inscription on his gateway. The Venetians are up there still, watching their salt-convoys sailing for Alexandria, and I expect the officers of Her Majesty’s Royal Regiment of Artillery sometimes visit their gun emplacements. The permanence of this immanent city is embodied in those old walls, thought I sententiously to myself as I followed my nose through the unfamiliar streets below.
I had expected to find the Medina, rebuilt from its own ruins, rather like Wall Street, rigid, overbearing, pompous, or at least like the new financial quarter of Frankfurt, which had similarly been reborn out of chaos. But oddly enough it turned out to be much more like the original Rialto, that tight-packed financial quarter around the famous bridge in Venice, stepped and jumbled and full of dead ends, which has survived the centuries with its scrambled character intact. Could it be that the architects of the new Hav really did have Venice in mind? Certainly the minarets of the Great Mosque, high above the offices of concrete and mirror-glass, stand there very much as the Basilica of San Marco still lords it over its red-tiled rooftops.
For they have rebuilt this financial quarter of Hav, this new Rialto, in a deliberately stylized way. Motor-traffic is banned within the spectral circuit of the medieval walls — themselves entirely demolished — and there is nothing straightforward to its plan, nothing obviously rational. It is like a pastiche. The few main thoroughfares are entangled in alleys and lanes and little squares. Perhaps the famous Kiruski had something to do with it, because in its insidious way it is a perfect allegory of the money-making world. ‘Turn up on your right hand at the next turning,’ says Shakespeare’s Launcelot, directing a visitor towards the Venetian Rialto, ‘but at the next turning of all, on your left; marry at the very next turning, turn of no hand, but turn down indirectly to the Jew’s house.’ So it seemed to me in the Rialto of Hav, too — the detail perfectly explicit, the whole a deliberate tangle.
At first I simply wandered — and wondered. This is a formidable place. It is a labyrinth of money. It has none of the ostentation of Yuan Wen Kuo, so brassily, flauntingly showy. Instead it is a nook-and-cranny sort of place, where you would be more likely to find one of those discreet private banks of the City of London, or the secretive institutions of Zurich, than the Bank of America, say, or the Hong Kong and Shanghai. Up every alley there seems to be another quiet institution. Modest brass plates announce the presence of the Stockholm and Copenhagen Trust Company, or Lisbon Trading, or Cosmopolitan Exchange, or Balkan & Baltic. Some of the doors are unmarked. Some of the plates need a polish — intentionally, I suspect. Even the movement of people — couriers? security men? accountants? — down the narrow side-streets and cul-de-sacs has an obscurely muffled air. The absence of traffic, too, makes it feel even more Venetian: the voices of people, the swarming footsteps of passers-by, the hum of air-conditioning and the constant ringing of telephones sound all the louder by contrast.
Hah! Here was a name-plate I recognized, among several of many nationalities in the doorway of a particularly anonymous-looking block: Butterworth and Sons, World-Wide Preferential Shipping Tariffs. I pressed a button. A man’s voice said, ‘Yes.’. ‘Jan Morris,’ said I. A long pause, then a man’s voice: ‘Jan Morris? Good Lord. Well I never. Come on in.’ A buzz, a click, and the door was opened. The offices of Butterworth and Sons occupied the ground floor, and waiting for me in the hall was Mr Mitko Butterworth himself. ‘Yes,’ we cried in unison when we saw each other — ‘In spite of all temptations…!’