Hav (18 page)

Of course all cities have their hidden themes and influences — New York has its Mob, Rome its Christian Democrats, London its Old Boy Network, Singapore its Triads, Dublin its Republican Army, all working away there, out of sight and generally out of thought, to determine the character of the place. The unseen forms of Hav, though, seem to me harder to define than any, so vague are they, so insidious, and I find it difficult to enunciate the feeling this is beginning to leave in my mind. It is a tantalizing and disquieting sensation. It is rather like the taste you get in the butter, if it has been close to other foods in the refrigerator; or like the dark calculating look that cats sometimes give you; or the sudden silence that falls when you walk into a room where they are talking about you; or like one of those threadbare exhausting dreams that have you groping through an impenetrable tangle of time, space and meaning, looking for your car keys.

Castle Gate, Medina

Summer — exiles — Freud — Anastasia — going native — varied refugees — meeting a Nazi — ‘and me!'

High summer is on us, and I see why the British loathed the Protectorate so. ‘Oh what a foretaste of hell this is,' poor Napier wrote home to his wife, and he was accustomed to the miseries of Karachi. It is not merely that Hav is hot — it is no hotter than anywhere else in the eastern Mediterranean — nor even that it is particularly humid. The trouble is an oppressive sensation of enclosure, a dead-end air, which can make one feel horribly claustrophobic.

They say the suicide rate is high, and I am not surprised. When I look out from my terrace now the citizenry below looks all but defeated — prostrate on park benches, or shuffling dejectedly along the pavements beneath floppy straw hats and parasols. Out in the Balad, where there are no trees, and not much greenery either, it is far worse; the dust lies thickly in those pot-holed streets, the shacks with their iron roofs are like ovens, and the people sprawl about like so many corpses, beneath shelters rigged up of poles and old canvas.

There is no air-conditioning in Hav, except at the Casino (and perhaps a few very rich houses of Medina and Yuan Wen Kuo). We depend still upon revolving fans, upon wind towers, upon the shades and awnings which now cover every window, and in the Palace at least, upon electrically operated punkahs — huge sheets of tasselled canvas waving ponderously about to stir a little fitful breeze through the stifling salons. Those massed fans are twirling desperately now beneath the high ceilings of the Serai, but even so, Hav being Hav, many of the more senior clerks take all their files into the gardens, and are to be seen scattered over the brown dry grass with their documents spread around them and thermos flasks close to hand. Signora V. spends most of the day sitting on the roof reading old magazines, and the urchin soup at the Fondaco café is served chilled, like a very exotic vichyssoise.

The English hated it; and yet there is to the flavour of this stagnant city, limp and hangdog in the heat, something peculiarly seductive, rather like that smell of rotting foliage you sometimes discover in the depths of woodlands — a fungus smell, sweet and dangerous. It is a curious fact that of the exiles who have come in modern times to spend a few weeks, a few months in Hav, nearly all have come in the summer time, when the city is at its cruellest.

Armand is of course the expert on Hav's exiles, and in the heat of noon the other day, as we drank lime juice at the little refreshment stall which has sprung up on the promenade, I asked him how he accounted for this odd preference.

‘It is simple.' (Everything is simple to Armand Sauvignon.) ‘Hav is like some exile itself, and never more so than in these terrible days of July and August.
Ergo
, like goes to like, and your wandering poet, your dreaming philosopher, your Freud or your Wagner feels most at home here when everything is at its worst.'

‘Drinking iced lime juice,' said I, ‘beneath a sunshade on the promenade.'

‘Ha!
Touché
! But they did not always live like us!'

Nor did they. By and large the Hav exiles have lived anonymously, or at least obscurely, during their time in the city. I went one day to the apartment in which Freud had his lodgings, when he came to Hav in 1876 to search for the testes of the eel. Seconded by the Department of Comparative Anatomy at Vienna University, he had already failed in this task at Trieste, but the Hav eel has the reputation of extreme virility, frequenting as it does the irrigation canals and brackish pools of those aphrodisiac salt-marshes, so he transferred his researches here. The newly installed Russian administration allowed him to use as a laboratory the old ice-house, not yet converted to Count Kolchok's purposes, and he found himself lodgings in the House of the Chinese Master.

To my surprise I discovered that he is remembered there still. Clambering up the spiral staircase, now strewn with litter and scratched with incomprehensible slogans, I found the eighth floor, in Freud's time one big apartment, divided into four tenements; but when I knocked at the first door, and asked if this was where the scientist had stayed, ‘Yes,' said at once the tousle-haired young woman who opened the door, ‘come in and see.' It was an ungainly room she showed me — wedge-shaped, with only a narrow wall at the inner end, and a single window at the other looking through the marble mesh outside to the roofs of the Great Bazaar — and it was in a state of homely chaos, which the woman casually did her best to reduce, picking up clothes and papers from the floor as we entered, and clearing a pile of sewing from the sofa to give us sitting space.

‘It was my great-grandmother's place then — she was Austrian, she came here as governess to a Russian family, but married a local man. Of course Freud was unknown in those days, and nobody took much notice of him. It was only in my father's time that people began to be interested.'

‘Lots of people come to see the place?'

‘Lots? Not lots. Perhaps seven or eight a year. Sometimes they are interested in Freud, sometimes in eels! My husband does not welcome them, but then it was my family that Sigmund lived with, not his.'

‘Sigmund!' I laughed. ‘You know him well!'

‘Yes, yes, I feel I do. He is very kindly remembered in our family — such a nice young man, we were always told, with his funny stories and his jokes. Besides, we have little things of his here that bring him close to me' — and opening a drawer she brought out a black leather box, embossed ‘S.F.', and showed me its quaint contents. There was a comb — ‘Freud's comb?' ‘Sigmund's comb, certainly' — and a silver-gilt pen, and a letter from the Trieste laboratory of the comparative anatomy department wishing him luck — ‘
After 400 Trieste eels, my dear old boy, you deserve to find your quarry among the salts of Hav
' — and a silhouette in an oval frame which portrayed, she said, Freud's mother. ‘And here', she said, ‘is a funny rhyme that Sigmund left for my great-grandmother when he went away.' It was four lines of German, in a clear script, which I will try to translate into verse:

For poor Freud, having dissected those 400 eels in Trieste, examined another 200 during his six weeks in Hav, and never did find a testes — a curious failure, remarks his biographer Ernest Jones, for the inventor of the castration complex!

It was historical chance, of course, that brought Anastasia to Hav in the height of summer — if indeed she came at all. Of all this city's exiles, voluntary or compulsory, real or legendary, she is the one Hav most enjoys talking about, partly because people here are still enthralled by the Russian period of heir history, but chiefly because romance says her vast collection of jewelry is still hidden somewhere in the peninsula.

As to whether she really came, opinions vary. Count Kolchok swore to the end of his days that she did not, and Anna Novochka also denies it: pure tosh, she says — ‘If she was ever here, would I not have known of it?' On the other hand there is a strong tradition in the Yeğen family that in August 1918 a girl arrived on the train in a sealed coach, all curtains drawn, together with three servants and a mountain of baggage — to be met at the frontier by a car from the Serai, while the baggage was picked up by mule-cart at the central station and taken to the western hills.

Others say Anastasia arrived on board a British warship, which anchored beyond the Iron Dog and sent her in by jolly-boat, while wilder stories suggest she struggled by foot over the escarpment, helped by Kretevs — even living for a time, so it was imagined in a recent historical novel, in one of their caves. I often meet people who claim that their parents met her, though never it seems in very specific circumstances, only at some ball or other, or at the railway station. There is a legend that she was at Kolchok's funeral — and a fable, inevitably perhaps, that she succeeded Naratlova as his mistress.

But nobody offers any very definite theories as to what became of her. Perhaps she went on to America? Perhaps, when Russian rule ended in Hav, she simply faded into the White Russian community here, adopting another name as Anna did? Perhaps she was murdered by the KGB? Perhaps she is still alive? Far more substantial are speculations about her treasure, which seems to have grown over the years until it now sometimes embraces most of the Russian crown jewels. The existence of this trove is taken very seriously. The Palace with its outbuildings has been combed and combed again. Little Malta, a very popular site, has almost been taken apart. Every weekend you see people with metal-detectors setting off for the derelict villas of the western hills, and Anna has a terrible time keeping intruders out of her garden — ‘and I ask you, if there was treasure in my flower-beds would I be living like this?'

I have an open mind about Anastasia, but it is intriguing to think that, if she really did escape to Hav, her exile might well have overlapped with that of Trotsky, who spent a secretive month here in the summer of 1929. This is well-documented. He was photographed arriving on the train (the picture hangs in the pilot's office), and he lived in an old Arab house just within the Castle Gate of the Medina — hardly a stone's throw from the Palace compound so recently vacated by Kolchok and his Czarist apparatus. Melchik has described the arrangements in his novel
Dönüş
(‘The Return'): the gunmen always on the flat roof of the house, the heavy steel shutters which closed off the central courtyard in case of a siege. When Trotsky went out, which was very rarely it seems, he was hemmed all about by bodyguards; when he left for France, at the start of the fateful wanderings that led him in the end to Mexico, it is said he departed on board a private yacht. The house is now occupied by a Muslim craft school, and the only reminders of Trotsky's stay are the shutters still attached to the courtyard pillars — very reassuring, the headmaster told me waggishly, when pupils show signs of rebelling.

It has been suggested that Hitler's probably apocryphal visit to Hav may have been sparked by Wagner's paradoxical fondness for the place. Paradoxical because there seems to me nothing remotely Wagnerian about Hav, and its summer discomforts (the composer's three stays were all in July) do not seem at all to his taste.

He was apparently compelled, though, by the brooding wall of the escarpment, by the mysterious anachronism of the Kretevs in their high caverns, and by the idea that in Hav the Celtic gods of the old European pantheon had somehow found their last apotheosis. He lived here in conditions of heroic austerity — none of his habitual silks and velvet hangings — in a wooden house near the railway station, burnt down during the fire of 1927 which also destroyed the Cathedral of the Annunciation and the theatre. There he was constantly visited, it is said, by wild men from the escarpment, Greeks from San Spiridon, Arabs and blacks; he even took to dressing Hav-style, they say, in striped cotton and straw hat.

But then the advantage of going native in Hav is that nobody knows what native is. Now as then, you can take your choice! Chopin, for example, when he came here with George Sand in 1839 after their unhappy holiday in Majorca, chose to live in the Armenian way, rented a house in the Armenian quarter of the Old City and briefly took lessons in Armenian with the city trumpeter of the day. On the other hand James Joyce spent nearly all his time at the Café München, the famous writers' haunt on Bundstrasse, while Richard Burton the explorer, as one might expect, went entirely Arab, strode around the city in burnous and golden dagger, flagrantly snubbed the British Resident, and was rumoured to have got up to terrible things in the darker corners of the Medina — he himself put it around that he had decapitated a man in a bath-house.

Almost the only visiting celebrity not to adopt the ways of the city, in one way or another, was Edward Lear the painter. He set up his studio respectably in a house overlooking the harbour, took on many pupils both English and Havian, and described Hav as ‘a very snuffyuffy, scrumdoochian kind of place'.