At every single desk a man sits, hunched, sprawling or occasionally straight-backed at his work, and each seems to be engulfed in a hill of paper. Wherever you look, everywhere across that nightmare floor, there are heaps, wodges, stacks of paper — paper tied in huge bundles, paper stuffed into sockets, paper spread out on desktops, or cluttered in trays, or strewn across the floor, and through it all the bureaucracy seems to be impotently floundering. The room is in a condition of sluggish diligence. Typewriters clack somewhere, occasionally a telephone rings, girls move unhurriedly up and down those tattered ranks, collecting dockets or returning files, waiters in stained white jackets dispense Turkish coffee and glasses of water from silver-plated trays, and ever through the tubes above one can hear the message cylinders, rattling across the intersections towards some unimaginable clearing centre out of sight.
‘May I help you?’ asks a peripatetic supervisor, carrying a large and battered clipboard.
‘We are looking for the Department of Temporary Contributions.’
‘Ah, that will be our Monsieur Tarbat, let me see now, Section A10 I believe’ — he consults his board — ‘ah no, he has passed to Section K… it must be — let me see — I think perhaps it’s a branch of Domestic Registrations… I wonder now — patience, mesdames, forgive me —’
But at that moment we catch fight of our friend Boris, a keen member of the New Hav Film Society, accepting a coffee from a passing waiter. ‘Temporary Contributions?’ he laughs. ‘Forget it, nobody has bothered about them since the end of the concessions. Put it out of your minds — enjoy yourselves!’
‘Excellent advice,’ says the supervisor, moving on.
Behind the Serai, in a ceremonious half-circle, stand the former legations. These were built on the edge of the old parade ground when the Russians first opened Hav to diplomatic representation, and are now given over to less lofty purposes, the British consul (who is called the Agent, actually) living at the former British Residency above the harbour. The legations are like a little museum of lost consequence, so many of their proud sponsors having vanished with the great convulsion of the First World War, but they are also a display of fin de siècle architectural styles. Thus the French built theirs, now the Hav Academy of Music and Dancing, in a sprightly Art Nouveau style, rich in coloured glass and ornamental lamp brackets, while the Americans next door erected one of the earliest steel-construction buildings in Europe — a building which, though now turned into the somewhat disconsolate Hav Museum, still looks by Hav standards remarkably up-to-date. My own favourite, though, is the wonderfully eccentric mansion at the northern end of the crescent, which is built partly of wood and partly of massive rusticated stone, and is splendidly embellished with balconies, external staircases, decorative busts, half-timbering and twisted chimney-pots in a style I can only describe as thoroughly Balkanesque. This was the legation of the Montenegrins, during the short-lived monarchy of the Black Mountain.
Nicholas I, the one and only king of Montenegro, had close links with Russian Hav. Two of his daughters married Russian Grand Dukes, he was an honorary Field-Marshal of the Imperial army, and his Ruritanian capital of Cetinje was modelled upon the arrangements of the Czars. Every year, when the Russian aristocracy descended upon the peninsula by train from the north, Nicholas was disembarked upon its shores from the south, having sailed there in state on board the royal yacht Petar Njegos̆. In the years before Sarajevo he was one of Hav’s most familiar celebrities, contributing to all charities, attending all summer balls, gracing every garden party, sitting through every ballet and even having a street named in his honour—the Boulevard de Cetinje, an entirely unnecessary but properly dignified thoroughfare which the Russians cut through the Medina in 1904 in order to reach their bathing station beyond the western hills.
It was not surprising that when the Russians invited specified powers to open legations in Hav the Montenegrins were among the first to accept. No conceivable diplomatic interest required the representation of the Black Mountain in this inessential station, but the King welcomed the chance to build himself a villa in such a prime position, within the Forbidden City so to speak. The legation is generally claimed to be a replica of his own palace at Cetinje, but it is really no more than an idealized approximation, being, as it happens, rather bigger and much more comfortable.
At eleven every morning the guard changes outside the Serai. This is an engaging spectacle. Since the departure of the Russians the gubernatorial guards have always been Circassians, recruited in Turkey. They are a stalwart crew, and provide solaces of many kinds, so the common rumour says, for both the wives of high officials, and the high officials themselves. Their pageantry is fine. They move less like soldiers than stage performers, in a flourishing, curly style, marching to a modified goose-step, swinging their arms exaggeratedly, and wearing upon their faces stylized smiles of ingratiation, or perhaps self-satisfaction. Their orders I take to be shouted in Circassian, since nobody I have met understands a syllable of them, and they are armed with rifles inherited from the Russians for which there is, I am assured, no longer any ammunition.
No matter: the ceremonial life of the Serai is essentially easy-going anyway. The old protocol of the Russians has been whittled away, rule by rule, precedent by precedent down the years, and the nearest the Governor comes to any kind of grand-ducal progress nowadays is an occasional outing in his official barouche to pay a call upon the leader of one community or another. Then the guard lines up to see him off, smiling indefatigably, and the barouche is followed out of the Palace yard, across the avenue of palms, by a pair of jolly postilions wearing their astrakhan hats at a jaunty angle and equipped with gleaming swords.
But here, even in Hav, all is not picturesque flummery around the seat of power. Even the lovable Serai, it seems, has its anxieties. As it happened, when I was walking across the square one morning last week the Governor did come clopping out in his carriage, hauled by four high-stepping but rather shaggy greys, and followed by those stagy postilions. The guard saluted them as they passed, and they turned to the right, down the narrow street beside the South Block in the direction of the Medina. Hardly had they gone, however, than I heard a commotion of shouting and counter-shouting. I ran to the corner at once, and was in time to see one of the postilions, dismounted, thwacking a young man over the shoulders brutally with the flat of his sword. The youth slid to his haunches against the wall, his hands over his head. The postilion agilely remounted and cantered after the disappearing cortège.
I ran to the spot as fast as I could, and the young man looked up at me with a gaunt and melancholy face. ‘What’s happening?’ I cried. ‘Are you all right?’ But he answered me — how disconcerting! — with a spit.
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