Immediately outside my window is the circular Place des Nations, supervised by a large statue of Count Alexander Kolchok, the last and most famous of the Russian governors. It was erected, so the plinth says, ‘IN HOMAGE’, by the administrators of the Tripartite Mandate, and shows him in court dress, loaded with medals and holding a scroll. Very proper, because if it were not for Kolchok there would have been no mandate, and no Place des Nations either.
Lenin never came to Hav, so far as is known (though a film made by Soviet dissidents is supposed to show him shamelessly dissipated among the flesh-pots). When in 1917 the news of the Revolution reached Russian Hav, which had been a demilitarized zone throughout the First World War, Kolchok the Governor immediately declared the place a White Russian republic, and called for help from the Western Allies. A French brigade was sent from Salonika, and Hav remained in a kind of limbo until in 1924 the League of Nations declared its mandate over the peninsula, and appointed Kolchok, the last Governor under the old dispensation, the first Governor under the new. He it was who, until his death in 1931 (he is buried here), presided over the unique experiment in international reconciliation which was Hav between the wars.
The delegates at Geneva invited three powers to take control of the peninsula, and to establish commercial concessions there: France because, so Magda would say, there was no choice — the French army was already on the spot, and unlikely to budge; Italy, because the Italians demanded parity with the French as a Mediterranean power; and in a stroke of unexampled idealism, the Weimar Republic of Germany, which was not then even a member of the League. Hav kept its old Russian forms of government, but with an elected instead of a nominated assembly; and across the harbour from the Medina there arose the international concessionary quarter of New Hav. It is in the very heart of this circular settlement that I have my apartment, looking down on the Place des Nations and the triumphant Count.
Actually he does not look altogether triumphant, because the open space around him, once so elegant, is now sadly run-down, while he himself is patchy with verdigris and bird droppings. The formal gardens are overgrown and weedy, the railings sag, and as I look down now I see a couple of figures swathed in brown stretched out asleep upon the benches. Still, the statue remains the focal point of New Hav. A wide tree-lined ring road surrounds the Place des Nations, and from it run the three boulevards which divide the international quarter, Avenue de France, Viale Roma, and Unter den Südlinden — which is shaded in fact not by limes but by lovely Hav catalpas.
The grand plan of Hav was imposed by the League, but within each national segment, served by smaller streets, the concessionary powers could do as they liked. From the start, all three parts developed strong national characteristics, and even now I know almost without thinking, as I wander through New Hav, which quarter I am in. The smart restaurants, the fashion houses and the clubs have gone, to be replaced by Greek and Syrian stores, import-export agents, homelier eating houses and the offices of dubious investment banks; but it is the easiest thing in the world, early in the evening especially, when the cafés are filling up and the young people are strolling arm-in-arm beneath the shade of the trees towards the Lux Palace or the Cinema Malibran, to summon up New Hav in its brief but glittering heyday.
Here, for example, in some fusty draper’s shop I sense even now the charm of the boutique it used to be, and here a frieze of senators, helmeted soldiers and grateful Africans transports me instantly to Mussolini’s Anno XIV. How earnest the peeling Gymnasium, with its busts of Goethe, Schubert and Beethoven! How sadly plush the Hotel Adler-Hav, with its velvet upholsteries, its gilt sofas and the tarnished mirrors of its Golden Bar, ‘the longest bar on the Mediterranean’! The names of the streets, often the names of the shops too, still speak of other countries far away; and even today, though the faces you see around you are overwhelmingly Levantine often you will hear blurred deviations of French, German or Italian along these nostalgic pavements.
And of course there are a few living survivors of the international regime, which lingered on increasingly inchoate until the abolition of the concessions in 1945. Of these the best known is Armand Sauvignon the novelist, who came to Hav as a young attaché with the French administration in 1928, and wrote all his books here (his fictional Polova is really Hav). He is in his eighties now, a widower for twenty years, and lives amidst his large library in an apartment overlooking the French cathedral. He embodies in himself, as it were, the whole history of New Hav, start to finish, and talking to him is like reliving the whole brave but somehow unreal initiative, street by street, character by character. He has a long beaky nose, a creased brow, and an odd mannerism of pursing his mouth between sentences, and all these features combine to give his company a more or less continual irony.
His first job was to be French observer at the concessionary courts, which dealt with all cases involving nationals of the mandatory powers, but whose judges were appointed directly by the League. ‘Such a collection, you can have no idea! It was like a music-hall. We had judges, I swear to you, who never saw a court of law before. The convenor would hiss at them ‘Twelve years’, ‘Deport him’, or ‘Insufficient evidence’, and His Honour would gather his robes around him, put on his gravest face, and do what he was told. It was killing! We had a judge from Texas, I remember (you must realize Americans were not so worldly then), who used to bring his accordion with him to court, to entertain us between cases. In the evening it was the thing for us young attaches, the Italians, the Germans, ourselves — we were all good friends — to go out to the Palace of Delights in Yuan Wen Kuo; once after a particularly gruelling fraud case, I remember, hour after hour in the hot courts, we all went out there to relax, and who should we discover playing his accordion in the Hall of Fair Beauties but old Judge Bales, surrounded by girls and half-incoherent with opium!’
‘You seem to have lived merry old lives.’
‘In the early years, very merry. Things changed later, as the world changed. But when New Hav was really new we were intoxicated by it all. You must remember the Great War had not long ended, we were lucky to be alive at all, and here we were working together in this place almost as though our peoples had never been enemies.
‘Besides, in the twenties and thirties Hav was extremely smart. My Polova was no exaggeration. The Russian aristocrats were still in their villas here, living on the last of their jewels and ikons, and when the Casino was opened, about 1927 I think it was, anybody who had a steam-yacht in the Mediterranean came to Hav sooner or later. People used to take the train from Paris to Moscow especially to catch the Mediterranean Express down here — you should talk to the tunnel pilots, they have amazing things to recall.
‘You see that poor old hotel there, the Bristol? It doesn’t look much now, does it? but believe me it was as smart as any hotel in Europe for a few years. Noël Coward wrote most of Pastiche there, did you know? I met him at the Agency one evening, a tiresome person I thought him. Hemingway used to go there too — they will still mix you a very nasty cocktail called Papa’s Sting, I believe…
‘All the great performers came. Goodman, Chevalier, the Hot Club de France. We met them all. My first chief here was a very great swell, the Marquis de Chablon, and he virtually set up a court at our Residency. The Germans and the Italians had nobody so soigné, the governors after Kolchok were nonentities, so really the social whirl of Hav revolved around us. For a young man, and especially a young artist, it was a dream. Out of season we had to find our own pleasures — shooting on the escarpment, pony-racing, the Palace of Delights of course. But in the summer, my God! we lived like millionaires!’