But those purposes have long gone, and more than any other city I know Hav seems to live in a hazy vacuum. They used to say of Beirut that, just as aerodynamically a bumble-bee has no right to fly, so Beirut had no logical claim to survival. Even more is it true of contemporary Hav, which has no visible resources but the salt and the fish, which makes virtually nothing, which offers no flag of convenience, but yet manages to stagger on if not richly, at least without destitution.
History has left Hav behind, and our own times too, like Professor Braudel, have wilfully ignored the place. Its modern reputation is murky. Its political situation, vague enough even when you are in the city, is a blur indeed to the world at large. There is no airport, no proper highway into the peninsula, no harbour deep enough for big ships, and only a trickle of tourists ever bothers to make the long and extremely inconvenient journey on the train. Not one foreign news agency or newspaper maintains a correspondent in Hav. Only the British have a consul here, though the Turks possess their own Delegation Office in the Serai, and Hav has no missions abroad.
Were it not for the vessels in the harbour, the train twice a week, and the vapour trails of the airliners flying high overhead to Damascus, Teheran and the further east, it would often feel as though the place occupied its own entirely separate plane of existence, insulated against everywhere else.
All this makes the ponderous routine of Hav seem strangely introspective. Who cares? one soon comes to feel. Who cares if Missakian sounds his trumpet on the rampart? Who cares if the train is late, or what the Prefects did? Who cares if the gun goes off? Only the city itself, whose memories are so long, whose character is so elaborately creased or layered, and into whose idiosyncratic attitudes I find myself all too easily adapting.
4
Less than a month in Hav, and I feel myself a citizen already. I write now at my table upon the balcony of my own small apartment — bedroom, dining-room with fringed velveteen table cover, kitchen, bathroom whose magnificent shower, entitled ‘Il Majestico’, is tiled with majolica flowers and fruits. Above me lives my landlady, Signora Emilia Vattani, below me are the consulting rooms of an elderly Lebanese psychiatrist, and below that again is the Ristorante Milano, formerly I am told one of the best restaurants in the city, now just a genial Egyptian coffee shop.
If I go up to the roof of the house, where Signora V. maintains a genteel garden, with a pergola and two urns, I can see protruding above the rooftops to the west the spirally gilded onion domes of the Serai, the very centre of all life in Hav. The Russians built it, of course, as a deliberate expression of their own expansionism, but the great complex long ago became an exclamation of Hav’s own proud if ambivalent personality, and stands towards the city today as the Eiffel Tower does to Paris, or the Opera House to Sydney.
You know how curiously separate the Vatican feels, within the enveloping tumult of Rome? Well, the Serai is rather like that. It also reminds me of the Forbidden City in Beijing, old Peking, that fantastic retreat of the Emperors which the Communists have turned into the most extraordinary of public parks; for though in Russian times the Serai was closed to all but grandees and officials, and the public was kept at bay by formidable Cossacks, nowadays anybody can walk through its gardens, which provide indeed an agreeable short cut from Pendeh Square to the Medina. Often I take a picnic lunch there, and eat my salami and oatcake on a bench immediately outside the Governor’s Palace, in what was His Excellency’s private pleasance. It is still dingily delightful, with fountains sporadically spouting, arbours, gravel walks, and in one corner a little cottage orné, now used as a potting-shed, which was built by one of the early Russian governors as a present for his wife.
One hears tales of stately receptions here, with the wide French windows of the downstairs rooms open to the evening air, a military band playing on the terrace and half the nobility of Russia gossiping and flirting in those arbours. Tolstoy was a guest at such a function in 1885, and got into a furious argument with a cocksure captain of artillery, though in his second autobiography he simply says that he found the society of Hav ‘unappealing’. Rimsky-Korsakov, on the other hand, who arrived here as an officer on a Russian warship two years later, was enchanted with everything he saw, played one of his own compositions on a grand piano in that very garden, and years later adapted the melody of the Hav trumpet call for the recurrent theme in Scheherazade.
No ravishing tunes sound through the garden now, but still the atmosphere of the place is genial. The governors of Hav are elected for five-year terms of office, generally towards the end of their careers as state councillors, and to judge by photographs are usually portly gents of aldermanic style. I have not yet met the present incumbent, but once when Fatima Yeğen and I were sitting beside the fountains during her lunch break from the hotel we saw him emerge upon the balcony on the piano nobile, looking comfortably replete and holding a champagne glass in his hand. He caught sight of us and raised his glass. We waved. ‘Such a charming man,’ said Fatima. ‘When he was younger he was the handsomest man in Hav, bar nobody.’
The Palace and its gardens are flanked, right and left, by the offices of the administration, each with four onion domes to balance the grand central dome of the residence. The whole ensemble looks like a cross between the Brighton Pavilion and St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, and forms an anomalously exuberant centrepiece to the city. Though the candy colours of the domes are a little muted now, by dusty age and neglect, still seen down the streets of New Hav, or through the tumbled alleys of the Medina, when the sun is right they seem to shimmer there like huge billowing screens of silk. This fanciful and light-hearted ambience is strikingly at odds with what goes on beneath them, for I doubt if there are any government offices more morosely addled with bureaucracy than the administrative offices of Hav.
Ostensibly they are divided into ministerial sections. Actually, since it was the enlightened idea of the Imperial Russian Government to house all its officials on huge open-plan floors, two to each block, everything seems to have spilled over long ago into everything else, and it is almost impossible to know, if you have business to transact there, in what department you are at any one moment. Come with me now, for instance, into the ground-floor offices of the North Block, nominally the precincts of the Hav Census, the Salt Administration, the Arable and Pasture Board, the Office of Languages and the Muslim Department of Wakfs. Entering this room is rather as I imagine entering the hospital at Scutari might have been, before Miss Nightingale got there. Even in the middle of the morning it is dark inside, and scattered bare electric light bulbs burn, giving everything a cavernous or cellar-like appearance. Hundreds of electric fans are massed in clusters on long rods from the ceiling, and the windows are covered with loose matting to keep the sun out. The entire room is filled with a mass of identical wooden desks, several hundred of them surely. Some are protected by makeshift partitions of plyboard, cardboard or even loose canvas, while others are walled about with piles of books and ledgers. Many have been enmeshed in electric wires, plugged into light sockets above, which hang down like life-support systems to provide power for kettles, radios or winter heaters, while over them all runs a complicated pattern of pneumatic message tubes.