Hav (11 page)

Even the ghosts of those who were happy here have left the seashore now.

There are a very few old Russians, still alive in Hav, who can just remember the bright pleasures of Little Yalta. The most prominent of them is Anna Novochka, who lives alone with a housekeeper in the very last of the old patrician villas of the western hills still to be inhabited. She is a dauntless old lady. Though she is now in her nineties, and almost penniless, she dresses always in bright flowing colours, blouses of swathed silk, brocade skirts which I suspect to have been made out of curtain fabric. ‘We Russians', she likes to say, ‘are people of colour. We
need
colour, as other people need liberty.'

I often go to see her, to take tea in her sparse and airy drawing-room (where pale squares upon the walls show where pictures used to hang), followed often enough, as we talk into the evening, by glasses of vodka with squeezed lime juice. She was not always called Novochka. Like many of the Russians who stayed in Hav after the Revolution, she adopted a new name of her own invention: she says it means ‘Fresh Start'. Her housekeeper is Russian too, but of more recent vintage; she came to Hav via Israel five or six years ago, and is, so Anna tells me, totally disenchanted with everything. She does look rather sour. Anna herself on the other hand is the very incarnation of high spirits, and in her I feel I am meeting the miraculously preserved mood of Imperial Hav itself.

For Russian Hav was nothing if not high-spirited. It was, of course, very artificial and snobbish, like all such colonies — ‘Why must you always be talking of Hav?' says Chekov's Vasilyev to his friend Gregory (in
An Affair
). ‘Isn't our town good enough for you then? In Hav you never hear a word of Russian, I'm told, nothing but French and German is good enough down there.' But it seems to have possessed a certain underlying innocence. The Russians eagerly accepted Hav, under the Pendeh Agreement of 1875 as their only outlet to the Mediterranean (having lost the Ionian Islands to the British half a century before), and as a stepping-stone perhaps towards those Holy Places of Jerusalem which meant so much to them in those days. They knew well enough, though, that strategically it was useless to them — its harbour hopelessly shallow, its position fearfully vulnerable. To these disadvantages they cheerfully reconciled themselves, and instead set out to make the place as thoroughly agreeable as they could.

Politically, of course, it was an absolute despotism — Hav had never been anything else — but the Russian yoke was light enough, minorities were not suppressed, opinions were given reasonable latitude. At the end of the nineteenth century indeed Hav became a favourite destination for young Russian revolutionaries on the run, until in 1908 somebody blew up the Governor's private railway coach, and Count Kolchok was obliged to accept a detachment of the secret police.

Even the grandiose buildings around Pendeh Square — more grandiose still before the Cathedral of the Annunciation and the Little Pushkin Theatre were burnt down in the 1920s — even those somewhat monstrous buildings are generally agreed to be fun. They may have been intended to blazon Russia's Mediterranean presence to the world, but at least they did so exuberantly, Anna says that in her girlhood, before the First World War, they used to be positively dazzling in their golds and blues, their gardens exquisitely maintained and the gravel of the avenue in front of the Palace raked and smoothed so constantly that it looked like ‘coral sand, when the tide has just gone out'. And the villas in the hills, where most of the richer Russians preferred to live, seem, if Anna's memories are true, to have been the happiest places imaginable.

‘You must realize there are so few of us. We were all friends — enemies too of course, but friends at the same time. Many of us were related. I had three cousins living in Hav at one time. Kolchok himself was a relative on my mother's side. And when
le haut monde
came down for the season from Moscow and St Petersburg, why, we knew all of them too — or if we didn't, we very soon did. It was like the very nicest of clubs. And everyone felt freer here, far from the Court, without estates to worry about, or serfs I suppose in the old days. We were Russia emancipated!'

In the high summer season Hav was terrifically festive. To and fro between the villas went the barouches and the horsemen, laughing in the evening. Trundling hilariously down the road to the sea went the bathing parties, stopping at the blue pavilion to clamour for lemonades. Ever and again the waltzes rang out from the garden of the Palace, and the coaches and cars jammed the great square outside, and the lights shone, and long after midnight one heard the footmen calling for carriages — ‘Number 23, His Imperial Highness the Grand Duke Felix . . . Number 87, the Countess Kondakov!' Little sailing-boats with canopies used to take the ladies and children for decorous trips around the harbour, to the Lazaretto pleasure-gardens, down to the Iron Dog, while the young men sometimes rented dhows to sail around the southern point and meet their families at Malaya Yalta.

‘Were you never bored, with so much unremitting pleasure?'

‘Never. But then I was only a little girl, remember. I see it all through the eyes of childhood. Never have I been so excited, never in all my life, as I used to be when we were taken to the station to see the first train of the season arrive. It was a fixed day, you know, announced beforehand in the
Court Gazette
and so on, and the first train was one of the great events of the year. We were allowed to stay up especially! We would all wear our best clothes, and all the barouches and luggage-traps would be waiting out there in the square — oh, I remember it so clearly! — and it used to seem like
hours
till the train arrived. We could hear it hooting, hooting, all the way through the Balad.

‘And then, when it came at last, the excitement! All the grand ladies in the latest fashions, fashions we'd never seen before, and the gentlemen in their tall hats, with carnation buttonholes, and Kolchok would be there to greet whatever princess or Grand Duke was on board, and then he'd go around welcoming old friends and kissing cousins and so forth, and everybody else would be embracing their friends and laughing, and we children would be hopping up and down with the fun of it. And then all the servants jumping off from the coaches behind, and the bustle and fuss of getting the luggage together, and out we'd clop from Pendeh Square like a kind of army. It was so colourful, you have no idea. When we got home, before we children were packed off to bed, we were allowed to have a cup of cocoa with the grown-ups.

‘My father said to me once, “Whatever you forget in life, don't forget the pleasure of this evening with our friends.” I never have, as you see. I can hear him saying it now! And now all those friends are gone, only one old woman living on and remembering them.'

Between 1910 and 1914 the supreme event of the Hav social calendar was the annual visit of the Diaghilev Ballet to the Little Pushkin Theatre. Diaghilev first came to Hav in 1908, was fascinated by the place, and was easily persuaded to bring his company from Paris for a week at the height of the season each year. Diaghilev in Hav became, for those few brief summers, one of the great festivities of Czarist Russia, and hundreds of people used to come by special train for the performances.

A huge marquee was erected in Pendeh Square for the week, and there after each night's performance dancers and audience alike dined, drank champagne, danced again and ate urchins into the small hours, in a magical aura of fairy lights and music, beneath the velvet skies of Hav. In 1910 the French novelist Pierre Loti, then a naval officer, was in Hav for one night during the first Diaghilev season, his ship having anchored off-shore. ‘It was like a dream to me', he wrote afterwards, ‘to come from my ship into this midnight celebration. The music of the orchestra floated about the square and rebounded, I thought, from the golden domes of the Palace. The ladies floated in and out of the great tent like fairies of the night — white arms, billowing silk skirts, shining diamonds. The men were magnificent in black, with their bright sashes and glittering orders, Diaghilev himself occupying the centre of the stage. And in and amongst this elegant throng there flitted and pranced the dancers of the ballet, still in their costumes — fantastic figures of gold and crimson, moving through the crowd in movements that seemed to me hardly human. When I walked across the square to the picket-boat awaiting me at the quay I saw a solitary figure like a feathered satyr dancing all alone with wild movements up the long avenue of palms outside the Palace. It was Nijinsky.'

It was said of Nijinsky that he was never happier than he was in Hav, and he is remembered still with proud affection. ‘I saw Nijinsky clear' is a leitmotif of elderly reminiscence in Hav, among Arabs and Turks as often as among the Europeans of the concessions. He used to love to wander the city by himself, an image so unforgettable that old people describe him as though they can actually see him still. Sometimes he would be on the harbour-front, watching the ships. Sometimes the trumpeter, arriving at Katourian's bastion, would find the great dancer already there. He liked to go to the station to see the train leave in the morning. And Anna one day, hunting among her souvenirs in a black leather box full of papers, pictures, twists of hair, postage stamps, imperial securities — ‘Securities! Some securities!' — produced for me a photograph of Nijinsky taken on an outing, it said in spindly French on the back, in 1912.

There were only two figures in the picture, against a background of sky and bare heathland. One was the Iron Dog, full face. Beside it, ramrod stiff, wearing a kind of peasant jerkin and baggy trousers, Nijinsky stared expressionless into the lens, his hair ruffled by the wind.

The Ballet Russe, they say, was deeply influenced by its association with Hav. Bakst the great designer was seduced by the peculiar colour combinations he found here — the Russian dazzle of golds, crimsons and bright blues set against skies, seas and heathy hills that expressed a different sensibility. Benois was so taken with the Hav costume — straw hat and
gallabiyeh
— that he introduced it into the fair scenes of
Petrushka
. Diaghilev himself seems to have been calmed and comforted by the city's blend of the heady and the sombre, the exhilarated and the brooding; he is buried in Venice, but Anna says she herself heard him say that he would like to lie in the little Russian graveyard overlooking the sea in the western hills of Hav.

The graveyard is forlornly neglected now, though its wind-break of dark cypresses makes it visible from far away, like a war cemetery. It lies on a slope of the hill, looking out over the western bay and Pyramid Rock; from its lower graves you can just see the faded baubles of Little Yalta. Dominating the plot is the tall obelisk that marks Count Kolchok's grave, with a portrait in bas-relief and a long Russian epitaph. There are a few lesser obelisks, and a couple of broken columns, and some mourning angels. Mostly, though, they are simple crosses, some of wood, that mark the last resting places of Hav's Russians. Often their inscriptions have long been obliterated, by the heat, and the winds off the sea; everywhere the coarse grass grows, and here and there the scrub off the heath has broken through the surrounding wall. Soon it will have obliterated all but those obelisks, and an elevated angel or two.

A quality of fantasy — around the great square — House of the Chinese Master — New Hav — a bit of a lark — the Conveyor Bridge

When Marco Polo came to Hav in the thirteenth century, he was struck not so much by the wealth or power of the city, but by something unusual to its nature. ‘This is a place of strange buildings and rites, not like other places.' Modern Hav is not perhaps exactly beautiful — it is too knocked about for that, has been infiltrated by too many shabby purlieus, frayed by too many reverses of fortune. But it does still possess some quality of fantasy, something almost frivolous despite its ancient purposes, and this is caused I think by its particular criss-cross mixture of architectural styles, which makes many of its buildings feel like exhibition structures, or aesthetic experiments. Add to this piquancy of melange a certain flimsiness of construction — Hav bricks are small and slight, Hav roofs look lightly laid upon their joists — and the impression is given of a monumental but neglected folly, built by a sequence of playful potentates for their own amusement down the centuries.

The one Hav prospect that occasionally gets into picture-books, having been painted by numberless artists of the T. Ramotsky school, is the view looking northward from the waterfront towards the castle. Deposited here without warning out of the blue, you really might be at a loss to know where on this earth you were. To the right stands the hulk of the Fondaco, built of red brick brought from Venice, with its four squat corner towers, its machicolations, and its arcading half-filled now with hoardings and concrete walls. In the background, splendidly blocking the scene, the hill of the acropolis is crowned with the ruin of the castle, Beynac's keep mouldering at the summit, Saladin's gateway good as new below. To the left rise the walls of the Medina, protruded over by wind-towers, minarets and the upper floors of the huge merchant houses beside the bazaars.

And in the centre, seen across the busy traffic of the quay, is the official complex created by the Russians to celebrate their presence on this southern shore. The square itself, with its equestrian emperor in the centre, is said to be bigger than the Grand Square at Isfahan upon whose proportions the Arabs originally based it, and is bounded left and right by double lines of palm trees; between the eastern avenue the tramline runs, between the western is the gravel footpath along which Loti saw Nijinsky dance, originally preserved for Russian officials and their ladies, now a favourite public dalliance. The waterfront end of the square is marked by a line of bollards, placed there by the Venetians and made from captured Genoese guns; at the other end, where the winding path to the castle starts, there is a handsome double terrace, with urns and lions couchant on it, and in the middle a big circular fountain which, for all its dolphins, nymphs and bearded sea-gods, alas no longer founts.