old Hav catalpas, sometimes so rich, if decrepit, that they lean right across the road and touch each other. Halfway to the sea, at a crest of the road, there is a little wooden pavilion, showing traces of blue paint upon it; at weekends a girl sells fruit, biscuits and lemonade there, to lugubrious Havian music from her transistor, and outside there are pretty little rustic tables and benches, and the remains of a flower-garden.
This is the road the Russians built, purely for their own convenience, in the days of Imperial Hav. Many a memoir mentions the little blue pleasure-pavilion on the road to the sea. And when, like the princes and Grand Duchesses; the generals and the courtesans of long ago, you emerge from the hills a few miles further on, there before you, on a wide sandy bay beside the glistening sea, stand the houses of the small bathing resort they used to call Malaya Yalta, Little Yalta. They are hardly houses really, only glorified bathing huts, to which the servants would hurry beforehand with food and wine, to get the samovars going and put out the parasols, but from a distance they look entertainingly imposing. Each with its own wooded stockade, they are merrily embellished with domes, turrets, spires, ornate barge-boarded verandahs and ornamental chimney-pots. It looks like a goblin Trouville down there, full of colour and vivacity: it is only when the road peters out at the remains of the boardwalk that you find it all to be a spectral colony, its fences collapsed, its verandahs sagging, its paintwork flaked away, its comical little towers precariously listing, and only three or four of its once-festive houses at the northern end remaining, occupied by sad families of Indian squatters.
Even the ghosts of those who were happy here have left the seashore now.
There are a very few old Russians, still alive in Hav, who can just remember the bright pleasures of Little Yalta. The most prominent of them is Anna Novochka, who lives alone with a housekeeper in the very last of the old patrician villas of the western hills still to be inhabited. She is a dauntless old lady. Though she is now in her nineties, and almost penniless, she dresses always in bright flowing colours, blouses of swathed silk, brocade skirts which I suspect to have been made out of curtain fabric. âWe Russiansâ, she likes to say, âare people of colour. We need colour, as other people need liberty.â
I often go to see her, to take tea in her sparse and airy drawing-room (where pale squares upon the walls show where pictures used to hang), followed often enough, as we talk into the evening, by glasses of vodka with squeezed lime juice. She was not always called Novochka. Like many of the Russians who stayed in Hav after the Revolution, she adopted a new name of her own invention: she says it means âFresh Startâ. Her housekeeper is Russian too, but of more recent vintage; she came to Hav via Israel five or six years ago, and is, so Anna tells me, totally disenchanted with everything. She does look rather sour. Anna herself on the other hand is the very incarnation of high spirits, and in her I feel I am meeting the miraculously preserved mood of Imperial Hav itself.
For Russian Hav was nothing if not high-spirited. It was, of course, very artificial and snobbish, like all such colonies â âWhy must you always be talking of Hav?â says Chekovâs Vasilyev to his friend Gregory (in An Affair ). âIsnât our town good enough for you then? In Hav you never hear a word of Russian, Iâm told, nothing but French and German is good enough down there.â But it seems to have possessed a certain underlying innocence. The Russians eagerly accepted Hav, under the Pendeh Agreement of 1875 as their only outlet to the Mediterranean (having lost the Ionian Islands to the British half a century before), and as a stepping-stone perhaps towards those Holy Places of Jerusalem which meant so much to them
This is the road the Russians built, purely for their own convenience, in the days of Imperial Hav. Many a memoir mentions the little blue pleasure-pavilion on the road to the sea. And when, like the princes and Grand Duchesses; the generals and the courtesans of long ago, you emerge from the hills a few miles further on, there before you, on a wide sandy bay beside the glistening sea, stand the houses of the small bathing resort they used to call Malaya Yalta, Little Yalta. They are hardly houses really, only glorified bathing huts, to which the servants would hurry beforehand with food and wine, to get the samovars going and put out the parasols, but from a distance they look entertainingly imposing. Each with its own wooded stockade, they are merrily embellished with domes, turrets, spires, ornate barge-boarded verandahs and ornamental chimney-pots. It looks like a goblin Trouville down there, full of colour and vivacity: it is only when the road peters out at the remains of the boardwalk that you find it all to be a spectral colony, its fences collapsed, its verandahs sagging, its paintwork flaked away, its comical little towers precariously listing, and only three or four of its once-festive houses at the northern end remaining, occupied by sad families of Indian squatters.
Even the ghosts of those who were happy here have left the seashore now.
There are a very few old Russians, still alive in Hav, who can just remember the bright pleasures of Little Yalta. The most prominent of them is Anna Novochka, who lives alone with a housekeeper in the very last of the old patrician villas of the western hills still to be inhabited. She is a dauntless old lady. Though she is now in her nineties, and almost penniless, she dresses always in bright flowing colours, blouses of swathed silk, brocade skirts which I suspect to have been made out of curtain fabric. âWe Russiansâ, she likes to say, âare people of colour. We need colour, as other people need liberty.â
I often go to see her, to take tea in her sparse and airy drawing-room (where pale squares upon the walls show where pictures used to hang), followed often enough, as we talk into the evening, by glasses of vodka with squeezed lime juice. She was not always called Novochka. Like many of the Russians who stayed in Hav after the Revolution, she adopted a new name of her own invention: she says it means âFresh Startâ. Her housekeeper is Russian too, but of more recent vintage; she came to Hav via Israel five or six years ago, and is, so Anna tells me, totally disenchanted with everything. She does look rather sour. Anna herself on the other hand is the very incarnation of high spirits, and in her I feel I am meeting the miraculously preserved mood of Imperial Hav itself.
For Russian Hav was nothing if not high-spirited. It was, of course, very artificial and snobbish, like all such colonies â âWhy must you always be talking of Hav?â says Chekovâs Vasilyev to his friend Gregory (in An Affair ). âIsnât our town good enough for you then? In Hav you never hear a word of Russian, Iâm told, nothing but French and German is good enough down there.â But it seems to have possessed a certain underlying innocence. The Russians eagerly accepted Hav, under the Pendeh Agreement of 1875 as their only outlet to the Mediterranean (having lost the Ionian Islands to the British half a century before), and as a stepping-stone perhaps towards those Holy Places of Jerusalem which meant so much to them
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