Hav (20 page)

By acumen and experience Yuan Wen Kuo survived the Ottoman period — Chinese money from Hav became highly influential in Constantinople — and the town came vigorously into its own again with the arrival of New Hav, which was mostly built by Chinese contractors, and which offered endless opportunities for Chinese speculators. The Palace of Delights (which with its more discreet annexe, the House of Secret Wonders, had existed in Ibn Batuta's time) arose anew as a great pleasure-dome in the middle of Yuan Wen Kuo, and among the Europeans of the concessions became
the
place to go for a racy evening out. As for our own times, they tell me that hardly a development in the Gulf, hardly a new hotel in Abu Dhabi or a university in Oman, fails to send home its quotient of profit to the Chinese financiers of Hav.

The Palace of Delights, by the way, is still there, an ugly concrete block set in a scrubby garden, and is still in its modest way a place of pleasure: there is a restaurant in it, and a concert hall, and there are rival information departments set up by the local factions of Communist China and Taiwan — each with its glass-fronted cabinet full of propaganda booklets, each staffed, as I discovered when I once laboured up the bare concrete steps to their offices, by young men and women with time on their hands to explain their respective points of view until Tuesday week. In its great days, though, the Palace of Delights was something altogether different. I know several people who remember it from the days between the wars, and they make it sound terrific.

There was not just one restaurant then, but a regular covey of them, each serving a different Chinese cuisine, on a different floor, to the music of a different band. Then four or five night clubs pullulated until dawn, and there were fortune-tellers, and beauty parlours, and shops of many kinds, and performing animals, and photographers to take your picture dressed as mandarin or empress, or alternatively not dressed at all. Magicians made rabbits vanish on staircases, fire-eaters stalked the corridors, there were story-tellers, gambling-booths, sideshows offering freaks or dancing-girls or distorting mirrors. You could get married at the Palace of Delights. You could find an amanuensis to write a letter for you, or a wizard to cast you a spell. I have been told that more than a thousand people worked there, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s the profits were immense.

The clientele of the House of Secret Wonders (which has been pointed out to me as a low wooden building, now half-collapsed and covered with tangled creeper) is claimed to have been too distinguished to list — Armand says that in his last years Kolchok himself was a regular customer. The most intriguing rumour I have heard concerns a tall young Englishman with a pale gingery beard, who was said almost to have lived in the place for several months in the years before the First World War. He seemed to be well-off, he had lodgings in a Chinese apartment house along the road, and he apparently had nothing whatever to do with Europeans. After a time he vanished, and people forgot all about him; it is only in recent years that he has been tentatively identified as that queer and beguiling recluse Sir Edmund Backhouse, who lived for most of the rest of his life in Beijing, and deceived the whole world of oriental scholarship with his fake scrolls and fantasies.

I often go to Yuan Wen Kuo. I like to have lunch on the Boating restaurant in the harbour, and spend the afternoon sketching from its deck, kept cool, with lemonades and thoughtfully adjusted canopies by its obliging owners. I love to watch the fisher-people at work, especially when on festival days they dress up their boats with huge heraldic flags, pennants and trailing crimson dragons, giving them a wonderfully piratical splendour.

Actually, piracy used to be notorious among the Hav Chinese. Fast pirate craft roamed the eastern Mediterranean out of Yuan Wen Kuo, ravaging the Syrian trade routes, preying upon the traffic of the Dardanelles, raiding isolated villages on the coasts of Cyprus and Lebanon. Even the Venetians, partners in profit to the Hav Chinese, often had occasion to complain about their piracy on the high seas, and in the fifteenth century there were persistent rumours of collusion between the terrible Uskok pirates of the Adriatic and those of Yuan Wen Kuo; a Chinese seaman was among those beheaded after the capture of an Uskok ship by the Venetians in 1458, and to this day in the Yugoslav village of Senj, the old Uskok headquarters, people of faintly oriental cast are said to be descendants of Hav Chinese (though some withered scholars scorn the whole story as merely a semantic confusion between Hav and the Dalmatian island of Hvar . . .).

‘I suppose you think,' said M last night, ‘that there are no pirates left in Yuan Wen Kuo? You're wrong. I'll introduce you to one right now.' In the twilight we walked up the hill to one of the grand houses at the eastern end of the ridge, immediately below the semaphore, and there we were immediately invited in for coffee by X, as I had better call him, who is one of the Chinese directors of the Casino. This was a very urbane experience, Old Money in the truest sense, since it was originally made out of the silk trade with the Venetians. X is Harvard-educated, his wife was at the Sorbonne, and their house is full of books, pictures Western and Chinese, advanced hi-fi and little Hav terriers. Marvellous vases and ceramic beasts stand about the rooms, and it would not surprise me to learn that some paintings of the Hav-Venetian school are hidden away upstairs. We had our coffee alfresco, looking down over the sea, and it was true X talked in an authentically piratical way about financial coups and deeds of daring — about his success in exploiting the insecurities of Hong Kong, his lucky investments in Singapore during the Japanese occupation, his personal loans to the Castro administration and his profitable stakes in Tanzania. I did not like to ask him if Hitler really had come to Casino Cove, or how well he had known Howard Hughes, but presently M said, ‘Go on, tell Jan about Tiananmen.' X, who was otherwise anything but taciturn, at first seemed reluctant, but ‘Go on,' said Madame X too, ‘tell her, where's the harm now? It might be useful, anyway.' And this is what I learnt from Bluebeard's lips.

For years, said X, a group of rich men in Yuan Wen Kuo, calling themselves the Crimson Hand, had supported an active partisan movement against the Communist government in Beijing. They had nothing to do with the Kuomingtang in Taiwan. They were fanatical monarchists, dedicated to the restoration of the Manchu dynasty to the imperial throne of China. Many of the mysterious events reported out of China could be attributed, X said, to them: for example, the supposedly accidental plane crash which in 1971 killed Marshal Lin Biao, Mao's appointed successor. It was rumoured that they had links with the Gang of Four, and that if all had gone well for them the Cultural Revolution would have been climaxed by the deposition of Mao and the restoration of the imperial dynasty to its throne in the Forbidden City.

In 1960 their directors in Hav had conceived a spectacular coup: they decided to abduct the old man who had been, briefly in his childhood, the last Emperor of China, then working as a humble clerk in Beijing. They would bring him to Hav as the rallying-point of a great monarchist movement which would, they hoped, sweep all through the world of the overseas Chinese. It would not be a difficult operation, they thought. The Chinese authorities were proud of pointing out Pu Yi, so docile, so well-adjusted to events, as he took the morning bus from his home in the suburbs to his work at a ministry office. Foreigners often saw him, sitting there in his blue work suit, and sometimes spoke to him. His responses were always ideologically correct.

The Crimson Hand's plan was to have a pair of partisans board that morning bus and ride with it until Pu Yi got out at his usual stop at the northern end of Tiananmen Square. He would then be seized in the confusion of the crowd, bundled through the mêlée of the morning commuters into a waiting taxi, and spirited away to Hong Kong and eventually to Hav. Everything was arranged, the get-away taxi, the route to Kwangchow and thence to Hong Kong, where the Crimson Hand had many friends. A dozen dummy runs were tried. Diversions were arranged in Tiananmen Square — a couple of bicyclists were to collide, some subversive leaflets were to be found upon the pavement.

But the very moment they laid hands on Pu Yi as he stepped through the opening door of the bus, they themselves were grabbed by the four harmless-looking passengers stepping out before him, and by two equally innocuous commuters behind their backs. The last of the emperors might be politically cooperative but never for a moment, forty years after his deposition, did the authorities let him out of sight, and the secret policemen of his final bodyguard had not failed him in their duty. The conspirators were quietly executed; Pu Yi continued to take the bus to work until his retirement and peaceful end.

‘I hear the Crimson Hand is lying low these days,' said M.

‘So I understand,' X replied, ‘and yet I have it on very, very good authority that they are grooming their own successor to the throne of the Manchus right here in Hav — rather like' (he said to me) ‘your friend the Caliph!'

‘Can you imagine?' laughed Madame X, pouring us more coffee.

‘
Can you imagine?
' mimicked M, as we walked down the hill again. ‘In that house you can imagine anything, can't you? You can imagine X himself as Emperor of China!'

But down in the town the Crimson Hand seemed an improbable fancy. It was almost midnight, yet all was as usual among the Hav Chinese: the tireless crowds and the smell of cooking, the piles of roots and powders, the dead ducks and the live ones, the bright bare lights in hotel lobbies, the rickshaws and the limousines, the clic-clac and the threshing fish, and so
ad infinitum
. . .

A horrible thing — without religion — Topolino — walking to the hermits — ‘on the terrace' — the Cathars — a séance — Mahmoud disappointed

A very strange and horrible thing has happened in Hav. Somebody broke into the old Palace chapel and slashed two of the priceless portraits of the Hav-Venetian school which hang inside. The city buzzes with it. The vandals left no explanatory message, but simply daubed a large red tick beside each ruined painting, as though to say that their mission had been accomplished.

Who could have done it? Why? I suggested diffidently to Mahmoud that the motive might have been religious. He dismissed the idea. ‘Hav', he said, ‘is not a religious place.'

St Paul would have agreed. There are three references to Hav in his epistles, and none of them are complimentary. Besides complaining about its inhabitants' feckless ineptitude — ‘for be not like the people of Hav, who cannot cut wood nor build houses' — he calls them Godless, lustful and not to be trusted. It used to be said that a Pauline epistle to the Havians themselves existed somewhere, in an Anatolian monastery perhaps, or hidden away at Athos: if so, it would make uncomfortable reading for this citizenry.

The Crusaders also found the indigenes of the promontory, by then a mixture of Arabs, Africans, Syrians, Greeks, Turks and Kretevs, spiritually uninspiring. Beycan, in a letter to Raymond of Toulouse, described them as ‘worthless and incorrigible', and a contemporary illuminated picture of the castle at Hav shows the inhabitants outside its walls looking horridly gnomish and dog-like. Even the Muslims, it seems to me, have never quite converted this city, though they have been calling it to prayer for nearly a thousand years: the mosques are full enough on Fridays, the Imam of the Grand Mosque is powerful, the presence of the Caliph is never forgotten, but one never feels here the mighty supremacy of the faith, the grand saturation of everyday life, that gives Islam elsewhere in the East its sense of absolute ubiquity. One can hardly imagine a Hav taxi-driver pausing to say his prayers at midday, just as he is unlikely to have dangling at his windscreen an icon of the Virgin Mary or his patron saint — only a plastic model of the Iron Dog, or a little pair of running shoes.

Of course nearly every faith is represented here. There are mosques Sunni and Shia (tucked away in the depths of the Balad). There is a small Buddhist temple at Hen Chaiu Lu, and one sometimes sees its yellow-robed acolytes buying saffron at the morning market. The synagogue is in the old Scuola Levantina of the Venetian Jews; two aged monks are alleged to survive from the Russian monastery of the Holy Ghost, destroyed in the great fire of 1928. The Anglican church may be full of oil-drums, but the Roman Catholics still worship at the French cathedral, the Orthodox Greeks are in Saladin's mosque, the Lutherans still have their chapel next door to the old Residenz, and sundry Maronites, Copts and Nestorians maintain their places of worship, tentative or robust, here and there across the city. The Indian squatters of Little Yalta have built themselves a rickety little Hindu temple by the sea. Once when I was wandering through the Balad in the evening I heard loud enthusiastic singing in an unknown tongue, and walking up an alley to investigate found a happy congregation of black people in full flood of Pentecostal conviction.

But I think it may be true, as Mahmoud said, that Hav as a whole, Hav
in genere
so to speak, is without religion: and as a pagan myself I enjoy this wayward scattering of spirituality, this carefree pragmatism, which makes me feel that I might easily run into those fundamentalists in the Cathedral of St Antoine one day, or find nonagenarian Russian monks helping out with the Buddhist rites.

However I have repeatedly heard of a remarkable deviation from this general rule. Signora Vattani first told me of the hermitage in the eastern moors. She told me that before the war there arrived in Hav from nowhere in particular a strange young Malian nicknamed Topolino, ‘Little Mouse', after a small Fiat car popular then.

He dressed himself in a rough brown habit, like a Franciscan, and began giving extempore pavement sermons: and though he was really neither a monk nor a priest — just a layabout, Signora V. says — though his political views seemed almost communist and his religious ones inchoate, though he was disgracefully impertinent to the Italian Resident, and for that matter to the late Signor Vattani, besides using terrible language in his homilies, nevertheless he was taken up by some of the Italian families of the concession and established a kind of cult. He lived somewhere in the Balad, but was often to be encountered in his tattered brown cassock at soirées and cocktail parties, and even made an appearance sometimes at Palace festivities. For two years running, Signora Vattani says, he took part in the Roof-Race. His favourite preaching-place was the quayside immediately outside the Fondaco, which he used to denounce as a symbol of Italian imperialism.