Free Hav by Jan Morris Page B

as we talked, flicked his own ash into what looked like a solid-gold ashtray.
    â€˜You seem surprised. I am not what you expected? Tell me frankly, what did you expect?’
    Someone blackly bearded, I said, and sage, and dressed in the robes of holiness.
    â€˜Then you would have been perfectly satisfied with my father. He was all that! Nobody was much sager than my father! But I decided long ago that I would be myself. As you would say, the world must take me or leave me.’
    And did not this worldly persona make him enemies?
    â€˜Oh yes, I should say so. Imagine what they think of me in Iran, or even in Saudi Arabia! They hate me very much. Do you know that I have never been allowed to make the holy pilgrimage to Mecca? If I went there they would tear me limb from limb.’
    Coffee arrived, flavoured with camomile, together with biscuits on little scallop-edged plates, and the Caliph asked if I would like to see something of the house. ‘You know its history, I dare say? Count Kolchok built it for his mistress, the dancer Olga Naratlova, who came to Hav with Diaghilev. Everything was taken from the house when Kolchok died, but I have had her portrait painted in memoriam ’ — and he showed me on the wall above our sofa a large and sickly representation, doubtless taken from a photograph, of a dark turn-of-the-century beauty, full-length, leaning in a dress of satiny red against a truncated column.
    â€˜What became of her?’
    â€˜Ah, you must ask the Bolsheviks. She went home to Russia in 1918, and was never heard of again.’
    Poor Olga. She sounds a lonely figure, hidden away here in such secluded luxury, and she is lonely still, for hers is the only portrait in the whole of the Caliph’s house — ‘And just think what the Ikhwan would say, if they knew I had her !’ Otherwise the house, or as much as I saw of it, was severely undecorated. Spindly gilded armchairs and sofas were the nearest it got to creature comfort, unless you count the elaborate television, video and hi-fi equipment which the Caliph kept in his private sitting-room (‘You may not be aware of it, but the Caliphate is a principal shareholder in Hav TV, so it is necessary for me to keep in touch . . .’).
    On we went, among the grand, beautifully kept but still desolate rooms, through the office where two male secretaries sat surrounded by files and typewriters with a telex in the corner; we were bowed to here and there by silent Assyrians, interrupted once by the Wazir for a brief reminder about that evening’s later arrangements (‘A most excellent fellow,’ said the Caliph. ‘Did you like him? He would make a fine husband for you’) until on the terrace at the back of the house we stood before the small octagonal mosque, a marble miniature of the Dome of the Rock, which the Caliph had built, he told me, for his private use.
    Two more Assyrians guarded it. ‘I dare say you are also surprised’, said the Caliph, ‘to find all these Assyrians. They are new to the Caliphate. I recruit them in Iraq, where as you may know for some generations they served the British military authorities, guarding camps, airfields and so forth. They are Christians, you see, with no particular allegiance to any state or power, and so very suitable to our needs. You must realize, Miss Morris, that my situation is precarious. Many people hate me, many people wish to use me.’
    While the Western powers took no notice of him, he said, the Communists courted him. He had been to Moscow several times. He had many followers in Bokhara, Tashkent, and more recently in Kabul. ‘You may perhaps have seen my picture at the May Day parade in Red Square in 1983? The late Mr Andropov was always especially good to me.’ As for the Muslims of the Middle East, some of them loathed him, some would die for him, he claimed. ‘The Iranians have twice tried to have me killed, once with a bomb in