Hav (17 page)

Later it used to be said that the whole of the salt-flats, with their mesh of channels, conduits and drying-basins, were originally nothing more than a gigantic maze, fulfilling some obscure ritual purpose, and of course it has been repeatedly suggested that the caves of the Kretevs, which have never been scientifically explored, are not really caves at all, but only the visible entrances of an artificial labyrinth riddling the whole escarpment. How proper it seemed to Russian romantics, that the Hav tunnel should spiral upon itself so mazily within the limestone mass!

There is an innocuous little maze of hedges and love-seats in the Governor's garden, and one or two are rumoured to be hidden within the courtyard walls of houses in the Medina. Otherwise there are no Hav mazes extant, and for that matter none historically confirmable from the past. Yet the spirit of the maze has always fascinated the people of Hav, and the tokens of the maze-maker, as they have been fancifully transmitted down the ages, are inescapable in the iconography of the city: the mallet, with which Avzar at the beginning of time beat his iron labyrinth into shape, the honeycomb which is seen as a natural type of the maze, the bull-horns which are doubtless a vestige of the supposed Minoan link.

Some scholars go further, and say that the conception of the maze has profoundly affected the very psyche of Hav. It certainly seems true that if there is one constant factor binding the artistic and creative centuries together, it is an idiom of the impenetrable. The writers, artists and musicians of this place, though they have included few native geniuses, have seldom been obvious or conventional. They have loved the opaque more than the specific, the intuitive more than the rational. Pliny said they wrote in riddles, and declared their sculptures to be like nothing so much as lumps of coral. Manet on the other hand, visiting Hav as a young man in 1858, wrote to his mother: ‘I feel so much at home in this city, among these people, whose vision is so much less harsh than that of people in France, and whose art looks as though it has been gently smudged by rain, or blurred by wood-smoke.'

For myself I suspect this lack of edge has nothing to do with mazes, but is a result of Hav's ceaseless cross-fertilization down the centuries. Hardly has one manner of thought, school of art, been absorbed than it is overlaid by another, and the result, as Manet saw, is a general sense of intellectual and artistic pointillism — nothing exact, nothing absolute, for better or for worse. You can see it at the museum in the folk-art of the peninsula, which is a heady muddle of motifs Eastern and Western, realist and symbolical, practical and mystically unexplained; and you can see it all around you in the architecture.

The Arab buildings of Hav, for instance, were less purely Arab than any others of their age. It was not just a matter of incorporating classical masonries into their buildings, as often happened elsewhere: the Corinthian columns of Hav's Grand Mosque were made by the Arabs themselves, and on many of the tall merchant houses of the Medina you may see classical pilasters and even architraves, besides innumerable eaves and marble embellishments, derived from the House of the Chinese Master. The one great Chinese building in the peninsula is a mish-mash of architectural allusions. The British built their Residency as if they were in India. And we have seen already with what adaptive flair architects Schröter and Huhn, when the time came, mixed their metaphors of Hav. It is the way of the place — “rivers of history”! You remember the quotation?

Very early in Hav's history the arts began to show symptoms of cultural confusion. ‘The language of these people,' Marco Polo wrote, ‘which is generally that of the Turks, contains also words and phrases of unknown origin, peculiar to hear.' They were, linguists have only recently come to realize, words of the troglodytic language, a fragile offshoot of the Celtic.

The earliest known poet of Hav was the Arab Rahman ibn Muhammed, ‘The Song-Bird', who lived in the thirteenth century: in his work occur words, inflexions, ideas and even techniques (including the alliterative device called
cynghanedd
) which seem to show that in those days a Celtic poetic tradition was still very much alive in this peninsula. It has even been lately suggested that Rahman may have been in touch with his contemporary on the far side of Europe, the Welsh lyric bard Dafydd ap Gwilym. Here in Professor Morris David's translation are some lines from the Song-Bird's poem ‘The Grotto':

And here in my own translation is part of Dafydd ap Gwilym's poem ‘Offeren y Llwyn', ‘The Woodland Mass':

Coincidence? Or perhaps, more probably than actual communication between the two poets, some empathy of temperament and tradition. Celtic words had disappeared from the Hav poetic vocabulary by the seventeenth century, but still the poet Gamal Misri was writing of the natural world in a way quite unknown among other Muslim poets of the day, and dealing with religious matters in idioms astonishingly close to those of his contemporaries far away on the western Celtic fringe — idioms that would have cost him dear in Egypt, Persia or Iraq. This is his startling evocation of the Attributes of Allah, again in David's version:

Visual artists, too, even in the great days of Islamic Hav, did not hesitate to risk the disapproval of the faithful by painting living portraits — not simply stylized representations, such as you find in Persian miniatures, but formal portraits of real people, sitting to be painted as they would in the West. The so-called Hav-Venetian school of painting, which flourished throughout the sixteenth century, was unique, producing the only such genre in the Islamic world, and there are no examples of its work outside Hav. Even in the city they are very rare. A few are thought to be in private hands, but the only specimens on public display are five hanging in the former chapel of the Palace, which is open to the public at weekends. They are very strange. Large formal oil-paintings of merchants and their wives, dressed in the Venetian style but looking unmistakably Havian with their rather Mongol cheeks and hard staring eyes, their painters are unknown, and they are signed simply with illegible ciphers and the Islamic date. They are hardly, I think, great works of art. They look as though they have been painted by not terribly gifted oriental pupils at the atelier of Veronese, say, being very rich in colour and detail (pet terriers, mirrors, the House of the Chinese Master in one background, the harbour islands in another) but queerly lifeless in effect. I suspect myself that the artists were Chinese; for they remind me of paintings done for European clients in Canton in the eighteenth century, though their technique is far more sophisticated and their subjects are altogether more sumptuous. The Havians are immensely proud of them, and forbid their copying or reproduction — but that may be only a relic of the days when their very existence was kept a secret, lest Islamic zealots harm them.

I really do not think Havians excel at the musical art. They are adept enough at Western forms, and addicted to Arabic pop, but the indigenous kinds seem to me less than thrilling. Dr Borge was as good as his word, and took me last week to the ‘place he knew', which turned out to be a dark café in one of those morose unpaved streets of the Balad, between the railway line and the salt-flats. Here, he said, the very best of Hav folk-music was to be heard. The night we went the performers were a particular kind of ensemble called
hamshak
, ‘sable', because they specialized in elegiac music, and this made for a melancholy evening. They were all men, dressed in hooded monk-like cloaks supposed to be derived from the habits of Capuchin confessors who came here with the Crusaders. Their instruments were rather like those of the folk-music group at the Victor's Party, only more so: reedier, wheezier, janglier still, and given extra density by two drummers beating drums made of furry animal skins (‘Hav bear skins,' said Dr Borge, ‘— no, I am only joking'). We drank beer, we ate grilled fish with our fingers, and through the sombre light of the place the music beat at us. Sometimes, apparently without pattern, one or another of the musicians broke into a sad falsetto refrain (‘Reminiscent isn't it', said the young doctor, ‘of
cante hondo
?'). Sometimes, in the Arab way, the music suddenly stopped altogether and there was a moment of utter silence before the whole band erupted once more in climactic unison.

It was more interesting than enjoyable. It
was
rather like
cante hondo
, having sprung I suppose from the same musical roots. But the clatter of the tambourines and the clash of the cymbals reminded me irresistibly of Chinese music, such as one endures during the long awful hours of the Beijing Opera, while the plaintive notes of the flutes seem to come from some other culture entirely. Could it be, I wondered, that in Hav music, as in Hav medieval poetry, some dim Celtic memory is at work? Anything was possible, the Philosopher said; and when after the performance I put the same question to the band leader, a suitably cadaverous man with an Abraham Lincoln beard, his eyes lit up in a visionary way. ‘Often I feel it', he said, ‘like something very cold out of the long ages' — a sufficiently convincing phrase, I thought, to catch his inspiration's meaning.

Out of the long ages certainly comes the genius of Avzar Melchik, the best-known Hav writer of the twentieth century, whose personality I can most properly use to cap this brief digression into criticism. If there is nothing overtly Celtic in his work, there is much that is undeniably mazy — even the given name he adopted, you may notice, is that of the great maze-man of legend.

Melchik, who died in 1955 (the year in which he was tipped as a likely rival to Haldór Laxness for the Nobel Literature Prize), wrote in Turkish and in French and sometimes in both at the same time, alternating passages and even sentences between the languages. He was never in the least Europeanized, though — Armand dismisses him as a mere provincial — and his novels, if you can call them novels, are all set in Hav. They are powerful evocations of the place, through which there wander insubstantial characters, figures of gossamer, drifting for ever through the Old City's alleys or along the waterfront. Melchik so detested the invention of New Hav that he refused to recognize its existence in his art, and though his stories are set in the 1940s and 1950s, the Hav that they inhabit is essentially Count Kolchok's Hav, giving them all a haunting sense of overlap.

There is no doubt that Melchik was obsessed by the idea of the maze. Every one of his books is really its diagram. But in his most famous work, and the only one widely known in the West, he turns the conception inside out.
Bağlilik
(‘Dependence') is the tale of a woman whose life, very gently and allusively described, is a perpetual search not for clarity but for complexity. She feels herself to be vapidly self-evident, her circumstances banal, and so she deliberately sets out to entangle herself. But when at last she feels she is released from her simplicities — has reached the centre of the maze in fact — she finds to her despair that her last state is more prosaic than her first.

Soon after finishing
Bağlilik
Melchik died. He was unmarried, and lived a life of supreme simplicity himself in a small wooden house, hardly more than a hut, on the edge of the Balad. It is now kept up as a little shrine, with the writer's pens still on his desk, his coat still hanging behind the door, and beside the china wash-basin, for all the world as though he has just been called into another room, the copy of Pascal's
Pensées
which he is said to have been reading on the last day of his life. An elderly woman acts as caretaker, paid by the Athenaeum, and told me when I visited the house that she felt the shade of Melchik ever-present there. ‘When I make myself a cup of coffee in the kitchen, I often feel I should make one for him too.'

‘And do you like this ghost?'

She thought for a moment before she replied. ‘Have you been to his grave?' she asked. ‘Perhaps that will answer the question for you.'

So I went there. Melchik was a Maronite Christian, and he is buried in the Maronite cemetery behind the power station. His grave is not hard to find — it stands all by itself at the northern corner within a hedge of prickly pears. You can see nothing of it, though, so formidable is this surrounding barrier, until you are within a few feet: and then you find it to be, not a slab, or a cross, or an obelisk, but a twisted mass of iron, like a half-unravelled ball of metallic wool, mounted on a stone slab with the single word ‘
MELCHIK
' just visible within the tangle. He designed it himself.

I saw what the caretaker meant. Could one exactly
like
such a spirit? Nothing, I thought, so cut-and-dried: but even there, all the same, where Melchik was represented only by those crude bold letters within the meshed and worried metal, I felt his presence burning.

Few places, I must say, honour their emblems more loyally than Hav honours its generic and imaginary maze. This city may not look especially labyrinthine, but behind its façades, I am coming to realize, beneath its surfaces bold, bland or comical, there lie a myriad passages unrevealed. Perhaps even the subterranean short cuts of the Roof-Race enthusiasts are only allegorical really!