Hav (31 page)

And apropos of that, did she remember when, thanks to her, I had gone with Yasar and George to that secret
séance
? What had become of them?

Fatima fell silent for a moment then, while she looked about for a sugar-spoon.

‘I'll tell you what,' she said. ‘Why don't you borrow my car for the day tomorrow, take a turn around, see what you want to see, and then in the evening we can have a nice long chat. What do you think? You can stay another night, can't you?'

I thought so. I had my blue pass, after all. So after accepting a warm dry kiss from Miss Yeğen, off I went along the gloomy corridor to bed. There seemed to be no other guests at the Impériale that night, and all I heard as I dozed off was a gurgle of antique plumbing, and a distant barking of dogs. No steam-whistle from the station, when the Hav Express pulled in. No clanking of wagons or porters' shouts. Not another sound, until the carrillon woke me like a bad dream in the morning.

Myrmidon Rural Enterprises

Continuing my investigations — the Chinese factor — country life — Myrmidon style — ‘out of the bright heroic past'

Surely hers wasn't one of the Tunnel Pilot's cars, was it, I asked Fatima Yeğen in the morning, like the one I had bought all those years before?

She laughed a tinkly girlish laugh. ‘No, no, Miss Morris, what a scream you are! They all went to the scrap heap long, long ago, like the railway itself.' And when we went out to the hotel garage after breakfast, there awaited me a stylish new Shanghai coupé, white, with a sunshine roof and CD player — ‘all mod cons,' tinkled Miss Yeğen again, ‘almost like Lazaretto!'

There was a map on the passenger's seat. ‘I think you'll need this,' she said, and spread it out for me on the roof of the car. She was right. Except for the shape of the peninsula itself, the very topography of Hav looked different. Slap across it, from one coast to the other, there now ran a dual-carriageway motor-road (H1), following the route of the filled-in Spartan Canal and linking the city with the new port at Yuan Wen Kuo. There was no sign now of the International Settlement — ‘vanished like a dream', said Miss Yeğen — and what had been the heart of the old city, where the Serai had been, and the palaces, was apparently now absorbed within a large rectangular slab labelled Medina. And the Balad, the old Arab quarter? ‘Ah well,' said Miss Yeğen, ‘I won't tell you that. Give yourself a surprise!'

And the rest of all I had known? The castle survived, of course, and there was evidently still a settlement on San Spiridon, the Greek island, but the old Russian pleasure-place of Malaya Yalta was not even marked, and the old motor-road up to the Escarpment was coloured in green (‘Unsuitable for motor traffic').

Miss Yeğen sighed heavily as I folded up the map. ‘Such changes! So much gone! But never mind, there's lots for you to see still. Enjoy yourself! “Laugh and be happy” is my motto! Tell me all about it tomorrow!'

And so, finding reverse gear with some difficulty, since the symbols on the knob were all in Chinese, I eased the car backwards into Centrum Square and continued my investigations.

I hit the H1 north of the castle hill. One way led to the Medina (20 km, said a road-sign), the other to Yuan Wen Kuo (32 km, with a picture of a steamship puffing smoke). I turned to the east, and now and then saw traces of the old canal running now one side, now the other of the highway. It was a grey morning, and the landscape was much as I remembered it: bare rolling moorland, with occasional woodland clumps, running away to the distant line of the Escarpment. Here and there patches of wild flowers, brilliant in bright blues and yellows, were revealed when sunshine momentarily broke through the clouds. No animals crosssed my path — no animals seemed to be in the moors — but streams of bulky trucks with trailers, interspersed with plush black limousines, passed in both directions along the road.

This part of the peninsula never was much populated, because of its harsh flinty soil, but it came as a shock to me when, descending a long gradual slope to the eastern shore, I found there was no sign of Yuan Wen Kuo, only a shack or two off the road and a few dingy shops.

An elderly Chinese was sitting in a bamboo chair outside one of the buildings, looking rather like a Chinaman in an old western, so I pulled off the highway and asked him what had happened. Surely the whole town, which I remembered as a perfectly ordinary Chinese settlement, had not been destroyed in the Intervention?

‘No, dirleddy, much destroyed but not all. Rest all moved. Rest gone north — that way,' and he pointed to the big road behind me.

‘All
moved
?' I repeated incredulously. It sounded like an Old Chinese Fable. ‘
Everything
? Palace of Delights? Yellow Rose Store? Big Star Floating Restaurant? They all just got up and went? Like magic?'

He thought this very funny. How he laughed, and pulled his beard, and puffed his pipe, and tilted back on his chair! No, no, no, he explained to me, very carefully. The town of Yuan Wen Kuo had been peaceably moved fifteen years before, to become the port town of the new deep-sea harbour, and the old place had been abandoned in a very short time — ‘one month, two month, everyone gone. Now not much to do here except watch the cars go by.

‘But Yuan Wen Kuo now very rich, dirleddy, big ships, rich people, many streets. Go and see! Back to big road, turn right. You soon be there. No, no, no, Yuan Wen Kuo no move by magic — ha, ha, ha . . .' and I heard him chuckling still, waving his pipe at me, as I turned the car around and returned to the H1.

A mile or two further on the new Yuan Wen Kuo hit me. It was recognizably Chinese still, with its garish signs and its ceaseless sense of movement, but Chinese in the twenty-first-century manner, brash, angular, blazing, like a miniature Shanghai. This Yuan Wen Kuo had been shifted from the arcane protection of its neighbouring hills, and the principle of Feng Shui, which had governed Chinese building aesthetics for so many years, had evidently been abandoned. Nothing remained of the Palace of Delights, and I saw no sign of the Kuomingtang-Communist rivalries that used to fester and flourish here. Gone, too, was the shambled homeliness I used to find so soothing, and the energy of the place was altogether more concentrated, more controlled. It was a small town still, but ostentatiously, even brutally modern, and I noticed that the ship on its civic greeting —
WELCOME TO YWK, GATEWAY TO HAV
— was certainly not a traditional steamer, like the ones on the highway sign, but a fiercely stylized and deeply loaded container ship. It all reminded me of one of the New Towns of Hong Kong, only rather more restrained.

I parked the car in a multi-storey park, in the middle of the town, which formed part of a sprawling civic centre, flew a large helmet-flag and was plastered everywhere with garish posters. There was a concert hall and a children's playground with trampolines. An open-ended arcade ran through the building, with a gilded canopy above the entrance, and an excessively uniformed Chinese commissionare stood at its wrought-iron gates. It looked dauntingly expensive, but Han Tu Chu Mall was not, as I expected, lined with antiquarian shops full of ivories, and scented boutiques. It was occupied entirely by the headquarters of corporations — The Hav East Corp, Peninsula Exchange, Achilles International, the Sunrise Company — all with offices too in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipeh or Singapore, and with showily opulent premises here. Corinthian pillars, dual marble staircases, discreet but impressive name-plates, elegant receptionists to be seen sitting at vast semi-circular desks — the whole repertoire of high capitalist display offered me a steely greeting as I walked down the arcade, and made me feel I was not in a small Chinese settlement a thousand miles from Beijing but in some powerful financial outpost of Chinese power. I remembered then that long ago Chevallaz had told me of Chinese money behind the old Casino, and when I reached the commissionaire at the other end of the mall I asked him if the Casino still existed.

‘I have heard about it, dirleddy, of course,' he said, ‘my father used to talk of it, but I believe it disappeared beneath the works of the port. But they still call this Casino Cove, you know. You might perhaps enquire at the Port Captain's office — straight down here, past the post office on the waterfront, not to be mistaken.'

I thanked him. He bowed. ‘Ask for Mr Chimoun,' he added. ‘He would be well informed about the old Hav. It was before my time!'

Mr Chimoun! I hastened down the street, past the ornately decorated Post Office with sculpted storks along the roof, past the Black Tortoise Refreshment Restaurant and the Tiger Tea-House, until I reached the waterfront. This was different from the quays down at Hav City. A squadron of fishing-boats was tied up at one side of the cove, but the big ships lay off-shore in their dozens, swarmed about with lighters and motor-launches. The quays were piled high with containers, in piles as big as houses, with mobile cranes and transporters moving ceaselessly among them.

The Port Captaincy occupied a severely functional Modernist block. The Chinese official behind the reception desk had never heard the name Chimoun. Not very enthusiastically he shuffled through the pages of a directory, and then shouted across the hall to a colleague: ‘Hey, Li, ever hear of a guy called Chimoun?'

‘Old guy?' asked Li.

‘Old guy?' asked the man of me.

‘Old by now, I suppose,' I said, ‘but he used to be Port Captain.'

‘Try Transient Services,' Li said, ‘they use some old-timers there'; and so I found myself led along bleak corridors, past conference rooms and offices full of computers, until I reached a door marked ‘Transient Enquiries (A)', and there sure enough they directed me to Mr Chimoun. ‘That's Mr Chimoun over there. Chimoun! Chimoun! CHIMOUN! Someone to see you!'

For Mr Chimoun the Port Captain of twenty years before, who had born himself like an admiral and felt himself a doge, who had looked out from his stately headquarters on the old Fondaco Quay with so grand an air of possession — Mr Chimoun was now a deaf old clerk bent over a ledger-like volume, like an illustration by Boz. He stumbled over to me pushing his spectacles up his nose, and responded with a blank stare when I told him who I was. I thought he might have had a stroke, or a nervous breakdown, or had lost his memory, but no; after a baffling moment of silence he said perfectly lucidly: ‘We can't talk here — we'll go to the canteen.'

As we walked there he said, rather testily I thought, ‘Yes, yes, of course I know who you are. You came to see me just before the Intervention. You met Harry Gunther, didn't you? He told me about it, Richards too. Yes, yes, of course I know about you.'

In the bare and empty staff canteen bright-painted Chinese thermos flasks, lined up on the counter, were all that showed of catering or hospitality. Chimoun poured us each a cup of lukewarm tea, and we sat in a corner. ‘Now then,' he said, ‘what do you want to know?'

To be honest I didn't know
what
I wanted to know, although I was sure there must be something; but he forestalled me anyway.

‘Because', he said, ‘whatever it is, I can't discuss it. You want to know what Gunther and Richards were doing on the quay? You want to know about Biancheri? You're going to put it all into a book, aren't you, and make money out of it, and let me down? Well I'll tell you, Ms Morris, I've suffered enough already, since the Intervention, I've paid my price; you see me now a poor clerk of the Chinese, when once I had the whole port of Hav at my command, and I'm not going to say more. I am myself engaged, during my spare time, in compiling a documentary history of medieval Hav — purely as a labour of love. That perfectly occupies my mind. It's by the favour of the Perfects that I have this humble job at all, and I'm not going to risk losing it.'

‘You won't even talk about the old Casino?'

‘There's really nothing to say about that. You knew Biancheri, you probably met Antony Ho, what more do you want to know? It's moved on to bigger things now, anyway, as you've doubtless discovered for yourself. You're staying at the Lazaretto, I suppose? Well then, you must have some inkling of it.'

‘Yes, but—'

‘No, no, Ms Morris, more I will not say. I am grateful for your visit — I see very few foreigners these days, except for crews and transients. I won't offer you another cup of this horrible tea (they grow it here now, you know, out on the Escarpment), and so must wish you goodbye, with memories of happier times. Mind how you go, Ms Morris. Mind what you write.'

‘Good luck with the medieval documents,' I said, ‘and go easy on the Crusaders.' But I don't think he heard, or he would have asked me what I meant by that, and I wouldn't have known.

I remembered that from the old Casino Cove there used to be a rough road westward across the peninsula towards the Balad, so I followed my nose back along the motorway until I discovered signs of it running away unmarked across the moors. I took it, hoping to see whatever there was of countryside in the new Hav. It took me across the old grazing land, in the foot-slopes of the escarpment, and I did see some signs of pastoral life. There were farm-huts sometimes along the way, and occasional herds of wizened-looking cattle, guarded by no less bloodless cow-herds. All the huts seemed to be empty. The herdsmen stood motionless beside the track, leaning on sticks or picking their noses, and watched my passing without visible interest. They all seemed to be old, and possibly half-witted, and I decided that the agricultural sector was low on the list of Myrmidonic priorities.