Hav (35 page)

I told him that he could explain to me first what all this Initiative stuff was about. Why 2012? He was only too pleased to explain. It was a campaign, he said, to have the Roof-Race recognized as an Olympic sport in time for the 2012 holding of the Games.

‘I must first tell you what has in recent years happened to the Race' (and as that receptionist had audibly articulated the exclamation mark in ‘Lazaretto!', so Yasin made it clear to me that ‘the Race' had a capital ‘R'). ‘You may or may not know that since the year 2000 it has been thrown open to competitors from around the world. It is now a major event on the international sporting calendar. Like the Bull Run at Pamplona — just as an example, you understand — it attracts entries from everywhere, and our Government is anxious that it should become a universally recognized feature of modern Hav. With the Myrmidon Tower, it will be something that comes to everyone's mind when Hav is mentioned.'

He sounded as though he had it by heart. ‘You've said all this before, haven't you?' I said.

He laughed and shrugged. ‘Oh Miss Morris, you've been in this game too long. But there we are, it's my job. I'm no longer the young man skidding down the Staircase; I am a Myrmidonic Civil Servant Grade 3. Anyway, it's like I say: they wanted it be a world-class event, and so when the Grand Bazaar was rebuilt they decreed that it must be reconceived too. Health and safety, don't you know.

‘Actually they had first wanted it abolished altogether, but you know how much it meant to Havian people — there was such an outcry that the Perfects themselves intervened. But they did remodel the whole course, to make it generally acceptable to world opinion.'

‘They took all the character out of it, you mean. I've just been up to see it.'

‘That is not for me to say. I am only the Race spokesman. Suffice it to say that the course has now been judged, by independent international experts, to conform to the highest safety standards. This being so, the Government has decided that it should occupy a similar status to the Cresta Run at St Moritz in Switzerland. That's also confined to a particular place, but open to all comers, and we feel confident that Hav will soon be ready to accommodate big sporting crowds — the new airport, Lazaretto and all that, all the necessary infrastructure.'

But, said I, St Moritz was a bit different because the Cresta was a winter sports event.

‘Quite true, and as a matter of fact we have thought of using artificial snow machines to make the Roof-Race a winter sport too. It was thought too risky in the end, so instead we are pressing for the Race to be accepted as a sport in the summer Olympics for 2012. We've hardly started the campaign yet. We've only just opened this office. But the Government is going to use all its influence, especially of course among our economic associates, to see that we win. It will be a triumph for Hav. Lazaretto is sponsoring it, and with the new Balad airport, and of course with Havberry products becoming household names around the world, it will put us on the map at last.'

‘You want to be on the map?'

‘Not much. But that's my job.' He looked at me a little wistfully, I thought. ‘But actually, Jan — I may call you Jan, mayn't I? — actually I hate the whole thing. I'm just paid to say all this. For me the Roof-Race was always a private affair. It was just for us, us Havians. Also it was exciting — it was, wasn't it? And of course the danger was part of it. Nobody complained in the old Hav about the danger, did they? It's only since the Intervention, and all that — making a profit out of everything, giving Hav its proper place in the world, all that balls. Health and safety, all that nonsense.

‘I'll tell you what I'd really like to happen. It's too late to do anything about the Roof-Race. Trying to revive it as it was couldn't work, and the new course means it's something totally different and new, really nothing to do with the old one. But if they really must put Hav on the sporting map — give it a Cresta Run, as it were — I think they should have a car rally on the Escarpment. We'd call it the Escarpment Rally.'

Now he was warming up. ‘I know the country well, as you will remember — remember whizzing down to pick up my cousin, the first time we ever met? I know the country well, and I've already worked out a route. We can use the Tunnel itself. They've taken out all the rails — the Chinese bought the lot, to ship away as scrap metal. Think of it: all those hairpin bends inside the mountain!

‘I'll tell you what, Jan. Are you free this afternoon? Why don't I take you up there, and you can see for yourself? We will run our own Escarpment Rally.'

A great idea, I thought. Anything is grist to my mill, and besides, I hadn't forgotten that he was one of the two young men who had taken me to the
séance
long ago.

‘Well then, suppose we meet here around two. My car's in the multi-storey. OK? I've got a group coming any minute now from the airport, but I should be through with them by then. Ideology bring them in, you know, on their way to Lazaretto. Stay and hear my recitation, if you like.'

I declined, and at that moment there arrived half a dozen rather worn-looking tourists, clearly just off a long flight, most of them American it seemed, and ushered by a tour guide in Havian rig. I hastily left, but lingered for a few moments by the door, to hear Yazin say, in his fruity official voice: ‘Welcome, welcome. Before your helicopter takes you to enjoy yourselves at our great resort, I am so happy and privileged to be able to tell you something about an exciting new initiative that we are embarking upon here in Hav . . .'

I left, closed the door quietly behind me, and returned to the Bazaar for another coffee.

When I returned to the Roof-Race office Yasar was outside waiting for me. How did the recitation go, I asked him?

‘It went. They loved it. I know it by heart,' and as we walked out of the Medina to the car park he added: ‘They always love it. Who wouldn't? One of them said the Messenger sounded a bit like Robin Hood — oh, and one of them said they'd read about it in your book. I didn't know you'd written a book? I hope I don't come into it.'

Fortunately for me we reached the car park then — and fortunate for me too, I could not help thinking, that my book was banned . . .

His car was a trim little Honda Type R (built at their new Izmir factory, he said) and the minute he swung it out into the highway I knew I was in for a sharp ride. We whizzed — his word! — round the foot of the Castle on to the H1, and then up past the airport. Before the Havberry plant we turned off, and then we were on a rough road that went through the salt-flats towards the old Palast. This, he said, was where his rally route began.

I thought it seemed more suitable for motorbikes than for cars, but no, no, no, he said, not necessarily, and suddenly he put his foot down and we leapt over the flats leaving a vast cloud of sandy salty dust billowing behind us. There was no other traffic on the track — the big salt-wagons, he said, had their own tarmac road down the coast to the harbour — and the only signs of life were trucks moving among the flats and the big grey salt elevators steaming. This would only be the preliminary phase of the event, Yasar told me, and all too soon it was over, and we were bounding and bouncing up the first slopes of the Escarpment.

Here were the caves of the Kretevs. They were lifeless. Nobody was there. Not a tumble-down lorry stood about, no raggedy swarm of children ran after us, no bright washing hung from laundry lines. ‘No bears,' I said as we bounced and joggled over the hard bumps.

‘No bears, no Kretevs, no snow raspberries, no life. That's what the Intervention did to us. Only these holes in the ground.'

They did look like holes, too, like rabbit warrens perhaps, or abandoned badger setts, with the same scrabbled signs of old activity around them. I found it hard even to imagine the curious community that used to be there, so full of life and love, with their cosy troglodyte homes and their weird relationship with the bears. Could any of their tradition survive, I wondered, among the comfortable conformities of the new Balad? And then I remembered what the women had said about the guest workers, and thought that perhaps all was not lost. . .

Yasar seemed to have read my mind. ‘Don't fret,' he said, grimly clutching his bucking steering-wheel and desperately changing gear around corners — his paunch made it a little difficult. ‘Don't you worry, the Kretevs will find a way. They always have.'

We did not stop when we reached the top of the ridge, high above the sea to our left. Instead we raced down to the flat ground on the other side, and then, turning to the east, made an exhilarating run at top speed along the northern lee of the Escarpment — thirty miles or so along the tussocky moorland, flying over mounds and declivities, swooping around bumps, with such a roar and a rattling and a whoosh that Yasar was laughing aloud beside me. ‘I call that the Frontier Run,' he said at last, breathlessly braking the car to career around a rock. ‘We've been following the old frontier all the way. Now back to the station.'

We turned in our tracks to run westward along the flank of the ridge, and soon I saw where we were. All alone there stood the remains of the Frontier Station, where the Express used to stop to pick up the Tunnel Pilot, and where I had first met the young Yasar. It looked picked clean, as it were. The roof and gates and platform shelters had all gone. So had the railway lines. It might never have been a railway station at all, and it looked as though nobody had been there for years. ‘Sometimes I see Kretevs here,' Yasar said. ‘God knows what they're up to. They scare me rather — they look like ghosts.'

He swung the car into the cutting where the railway had run, stopped, and switched off the engine. Now the only sound was the ticking of its engine cooling, and the rush of the wind. ‘Look up there,' Yasar said, pointing to the top of the Escarpment before us. I looked, I looked hard, and I could just make out, like a careless stroke of pencil lead in a drawing, a thin black line silhouetted against the sky. It was the Megalith, the high point of the old Staircase, from where I had looked back, all those years before, to see the warships of the Intervention approaching. In my mind I could see the scene as if it were yesterday. I could almost hear the blast of those black aircraft, heralding the change of all things in Hav.

‘Right,' said Yasar then. ‘The tunnel run.' Revving the engine hard, he slipped the clutch and we shot helter-skelter into the darkness. The Hav Tunnel, built by Roman Abramoff of the Imperial Russian Railways, used to be famous as the most daring feat of railway engineering ever undertaken, because it descended (or ascended) such a startling distance in so short a time. It avoided a precipitate surface gradient by a series of a dozen or more hairpin bends, so close together that they amount in fact to a spiral. ‘Nothing like this had ever been attempted before', said Branger's
Railway Engineering
in 1878, ‘and will probably never be tried again. It was Abramoff's final
tour de force
.' And when Norman Foster's celebrated Millau Viaduct was opened in France in 2005, even then the
Civil Engineering Gazette
declared it to be reminiscent, in its sheer technical virtuosity, of Abramoff's Hav Tunnel.

This was the prodigy we now threw ourselves into, in our little Honda, and no train ever descended those loops so fast. It was pitch-black in the tunnel, except for the beams of our headlights, eerily sweeping the rock walls, and the noise of our engine was deafening, echoing all around us and reverberating, I imagine, back through all the bends behind us and up to the tunnel mouth. Neither of us spoke. Like a projectile we plunged down the inside of that mountain, with never a glimpse of daylight ahead. Once a bird, startled by the noise and the headlights' beams, sprang from the wall with a frenzied flutter of its wings and disappeared into the gloom. Sometimes I felt we were twirling, like a bullet in a rifle barrel, and this sensation recalled to me the moment, only a day or two before, when we had suddenly been hurled upwards in Car 7 of the Myrmidon Tower.

The two experiences oddly merged in my mind. Both journeys, one in the light, one in the darkness, seemed somehow paradigmatic of a journey through Hav itself. The absolute nature of both, something gravelike about them, was like Hav's blanketing enigma. The solitary bird of the tunnel, the myriad bright fish of the Tower, suggested impotent reminders of life. It was a bit like being buried alive. Even my companions were a little disturbing in their charm. Something about Biancheri made me feel uncomfortable. Something about Yasar was evasive. Was it Yasar in the Tower, Biancheri in the Tunnel? The bird in the aquarium, the fish coming out of the rock? It took us only five minutes or so to rush through that tunnel, but it seemed to me that all the nagging ambiguities of Hav, all the unanswered questions, swirled around my head as the car swirled through the darkness.

Suddenly the daylight burst upon us. ‘Voilà!' cried Yasar, looking at his watch. ‘How was that? Five minutes flat!'

The rest of the ride, down the track of the old Staircase, seemed an anti-climax. Yasar relaxed, and slowed down. However, I hadn't freed myself of those peculiar sensations in the Tunnel. It was as though I had emerged from an anaesthetic, with snatches of a dream lingering in my head.

‘Tell me something, Yasar,' I said. ‘What was it you wanted me to remember, when we went to that
séance
of the Cathars?'

There was a long silence, until we came to the bottom of the track and joined the smooth road back to the city. Then he stopped the car.

‘That's the end of the rally route,' he said emotionlessly, as though he had suddenly lost interest. ‘And what's that you asked me?'

‘I asked what it was you wanted me to remember, when you took me to the
séance
with George that time.'

‘I don't know any George, and believe me, Jan, I never took you to any
séance
. You must believe that. Whatever you say about it, I will deny. No George, no
séance
. You're talking about twenty years ago, and your memory must be at fault. And I'd be much obliged if you didn't raise the matter with Fatima, either. Okay? Okay?'