Contact!: A Book of Encounters Read online

  Dialogues on the Orient Express

  ‘I’ve always said,’ observed one American matron to another, ‘I’m not going to be a possessive mother, because his was’–and she jerked her head in the direction of her husband in the next seat. The two ladies eyed him speculatively. ‘He’ll be no good to us in Venice,’ said the other. ‘He’ll be lost with those gondolier people.’

  Young English wife, on her honeymoon, I guessed: ‘Oh, look at the castle. Isn’t that a lovely castle?’ Young English husband: ‘It’s a castle. A castle is a castle. You’ve seen castles before.’ She relapsed into thoughtful silence. He returned to his thriller.

  Said an American man, to me: ‘You gotta read this book. I’ve been reading it all the way since London. It’s called God Owns My Business. God Owns My Business, that’s the title. The guy who wrote it, he’s a very low-key man, but he’s got a sign above his store, “Christ Is My Manager”. When do we get to Innsbruck? We might get a hamburger there.’

  If you prick us?

  I shared a taxi one day with a lady in a blue silk turban, who was visiting Washington and was about to meet her daughter for lunch at a Hot Shoppe. Down the great thoroughfares we drove, and all the memorials of the American splendour passed us one by one, granite and concrete, obelisk and colonnade. My companion drew my attention now and then to a White House or a Treasury, but it was as we passed the Capitol itself, and were deploring the state of the world in general, that she spoke the words I best remember: ‘I sometimes wonder, oh, what kind of a world are we bringing our children into, when you have to pay a quarter for a doughnut?’

  Twenty-five cents for a doughnut! Even Americans bleed.

  The sprig of rosemary

  I was driving along a road in Portugal when I spied a tray of oranges for sale outside a cottage. It was blazing hot, and I stopped to buy some. Nobody attended the fruit, so I selected three oranges for myself and knocked on the cottage door. Nobody came. There was no sign of life. I peered through the window, I walked around the back, and in the end I opened the front door. It was very dark inside, but when my eyes accustomed themselves I saw that fast asleep in a corner of the room was a small old lady. I coughed and shuffled my feet, and without a start she awoke. Her very first reaction was to smile. Her second was to reach for her straw hat on a nearby chair and put it carefully on her head. She accepted my few coins for the oranges but then, hustling me kindly outside, took two apricots from another box and gave me them as a present. All the time she smiled, and bustled around looking for other kindnesses to perform. When we had said goodbye, and I had returned to the car, she came running out of the garden gate again, smiling still, clutching her hat on her head, to give me a sprig of rosemary.

  Different responses

  My family and I lived for a time near the Swiss frontier in France. On the French side the gendarmes were jolly, careless, and often had wine on their breaths. On the Swiss side the police were cool, diligent, courteous and unsmiling. My car in those days was a Rolls-Royce, grand, decorative and elderly. The French gendarmes were delightedly amused by this vehicle, and sometimes asked permission to sit at its wheel, or try the squashy grey leather seats behind. To the Swiss border police, on the other hand, a Rolls-Royce was an image of wealth, and a quaint middle-aged example like mine, not old enough to be a valuable antique, certainly not new enough to be a status symbol, seemed to confuse their responses. They habitually greeted us with a mixture of respect and condescension, covering all contingencies.

  Flying the flag

  The Aboriginal flag of gold, black and yellow was hoisted above Sydney Town Hall, but was soon pulled down again. By the time I reached the park the Aboriginal Day rally seemed to have fizzled out, too, and all I found was a small huddle of dark-skinned people around an open bonfire, surrounded by litter on the edge of the green. They greeted me with wan concern, offering me beer out of an ice bucket, sidling around me rather and occasionally winking. A small thin boy with cotton wool stuffed in one ear wandered here and there leading a black puppy on a string. Others kicked a football about in the gathering dusk. A strong smell of alcohol hung over us, and the man with the bucket urged me quietly, again and again, to have one for the road. Had the rally been a success? I asked. ‘Yeah,’ they said, and looked into the fire.

  The Frenchest person

  The Frenchest person I ever met was Yves Saint-Laurent, the couturier. He was utterly French. He told me that the only books he ever read were eleven volumes of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, over and over again, but that the twelfth and last volume he had never read at all–saving it up, I suppose, for a last splurge of Frenchness on his deathbed chaise longue. Everything that was French seemed to be embodied in him, even a bit of the old gloire, for there was a distinctly grand manner lurking behind his melancholy shyness, and he lived in a grand style too. Saint-Laurent liked to call himself an artisan, and the little world of craftspeople he had built up around him, the dedicated world of cutters, shoemakers, milliners and tailors, seemed to me a true ornament of French civilization, and a vindication of French pride. He told me that all I needed for elegance was one dress, a pair of jeans, some blouses and a raincoat. I asked him if he was consciously contributing to the splendour of France, and he smiled rather distantly. He was, he said, he was.

  A fine scoundrel

  A celebrated, or notorious, rebel leader in Oman was Suleiman bin Hamyar, who owned the only motorcar in the Green Mountains. I saw him arriving in it one day for a political parley at the village of Nizwa, and the sight of his American convertible careening recklessly out of the road-less mountains was wonderfully inspiriting. The roof of the car was closed, but on the boot there sat a Negro slave, armed with a rifle, with his feet sticking through the back window into the inside of the car; and when it stopped this slave jumped off like lightning, as promptly and neatly as any duke’s footman, and opened the door with a flourish.

  I walked across to meet the old sheikh, and he greeted me with an expression of unfathomable foxiness, suggesting to me instantly some infinitely clever beast in Aesop, about to hoodwink a goat. Suleiman was a big man with a powerful face, rather Dickensian in concept, and a triangular grey beard. On his head was a twisted blue and white turban. His aba was blue, gold-edged and filmy. In his hand was a cane with a carved end, on his belt a curved dagger of splendid ostentation.

  My own instincts told me that this fine scoundrel should be instantly decapitated, for the public good, but I was rather glad, all the same, when he later reappeared from the parley intact, and was driven away into his mountains with only minor (and I felt sure temporary) modifications of his manner.

  Enjoy yourself!

  It took many hours, on a Sunday evening, to drive from Trieste the few miles into Tito’s Yugoslavia. I can see now the hundreds of cars lurching and overheating in the gathering dusk, the ad hoc hamburger bars beside the road, the occasional truck bullying its way up the queue by sheer weight and horsepower, pale weary faces at the windows of buses and at last the dim-lit frontier post, and a joyless official with a red star on his cap. A slow flicking through the pages of our passports, a silent gesture of release, and away with us into the communist half of Europe. ‘Cheer up,’ I said to the frontier official once. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ the man lugubriously replied.

  The helmsman

  Our helmsman, although he is surrounded by talkative friends and relatives of all ages, is ever attentive to his craft and courteously watchful of me: and sometimes, indeed, sailing in such a ramshackle sampan crablike against the current from one island to another, to the laboured chugging of diesel engines and the creaking of timbers–sometimes I feel I would like to be assimilated into Chineseness myself, and sail these waters under Chinese helmsmanship for good.

  A literary test

  In Newfoundland in those days it was necessary to find a guarantor before one could cash foreign money orders. Knowing nobody in town, and finding that the public library had a copy of a book
of mine about Venice, I introduced myself to the librarian and asked her to endorse a travellers’ cheque. How could she confirm, she sensibly demanded, that I was who I said I was? By a simple literary test, I suggested: surely nobody else on earth could recite by heart the last line of my book on Venice, which she had upon her own shelves.

  Solemnly she reached for the volume. Nervously I stood at her desk while she turned to the final page, and ran her eye down the paragraph to the end of it. ‘Well?’ she said. I cleared my throat. The concluding words of my book were not very stately. ‘No wonder,’ I mumbled then, feeling distinctly disadvantaged, ‘No wonder George Eliot’s husband fell into the Grand Canal.’ Without a flicker that librarian of old St John’s closed the book, returned it to the shelf and authorized my money.

  Judgement

  ‘What’s this?’ demanded a Soviet customs official curtly one day, extracting a typescript from my baggage and simultaneously eyeing my then epicene figure. ‘It’s a psychological novel,’ said I. ‘Oh, a psychological novel,’ he replied in a voice of infinite understanding, as though I had shared a confidence with him; and carefully repacking the script in my suitcase, he waved me through.

  Byronic

  A symbolic figure of the South African tragedy in the years of apartheid was Christopher Gell, one of the most inspiring of the liberal activists, whose name was almost legendary, who was a unique source of guidance and information, and who lived as it happens in an iron lung. From there he cocked a perpetual snook at the Afrikaner Nationalists. A well-trodden path led to his little house, and brought a constant stream of people interested in the African Risorgimento, and anxious to meet this strange Byronic figure.

  Gell received them in his lung. He was tall, painfully cadaverous, immensely vivacious. He wore glasses and had one arm suspended above him in a kind of sling. Books and elaborate filing cabinets lined the room, and his table was littered with proofs and pamphlets and letters. Often the telephone rang and Gell launched himself into a farrago of opinion, prejudice and argument till the voice of the man at the other end of the line sounded breathless and dispirited, Gell’s face was wickedly aglow and the conversation ended in intellectual annihilation.

  Then he turned to you. ‘Now then, let me put you straight about these bloody Nats.’ He presented his case with tremendous energy, witty, outrageous, caustic, irrepressible, pausing sometimes to scribble a name down for you or dash off a note of introduction, swearing, joking, laughing, in a most extraordinary flood of stimulation and conviction. Slowly, though, his damaged physique ran down. His breathing became gasping and spasmodic, his face more strained with effort, and the gusto drained from his body before your eyes, like the symbolism of a Gothic painting. He would still be talking as you left him, though, and his anxious humorous eyes would be looking at you in the little mirror above his head. ‘Of course we’re intolerant,’ he would say as you left him. ‘We have to be. We’d never get anywhere with these stiffs if we weren’t.’

  Doubly damned

  At the Rock Hotel in Gibraltar I overheard two very old-school American matrons commenting upon the grumpy hotel porter who had just dumped their bags unceremoniously on the lobby floor. ‘What an unpleasant man!’ said one. ‘What can you expect?’ responded the other. ‘He is British, my dear, and male.’

  Dung and diplomacy

  One day I walked up to the royal palace in Brussels, and just as I arrived a plenipotentiary emerged from its gates in a big black car after a diplomatic presentation to the King of the Belgians. A footling squadron of cavalry awaited him in the ceremonial square outside. Its officers wore romantic white cloaks. Its troopers, in slightly cockeyed bearskins, as in musical comedies, included some sceptical-looking horsemen of the old-sweat school, and at least one rosy-cheeked woman. When they clattered and bounced away with the ambassadorial Cadillac, a municipal road-sweeping truck came trundling around the place where they had mustered, cleaning up the horse shit. Its driver told me he spent his days doing it. There were so many embassies, missions and international institutions in Brussels, he said, that the palace cavalry was always at it–and sure enough, as he spoke, the horsepersons, having disappeared round the corner with their fluttering lances, came ridiculously back again with another couple of limousines.

  Steamboat Gothic

  Longwood is the oddest of the mansions of Natchez, Mississippi, where Southern myth and prejudice are very powerful. The house was begun shortly before the Civil War, a wild architectural extravaganza, and Northern workmen were brought in to work upon it. Soon after the war began they dropped their tools and left, leaving the house unfinished to this day, with their hammers and wheelbarrows and paintboxes still lying about, ladders propped against walls, scaffolding still in place. Octagonal, domed and balconied, it stands in a wooded garden as a grotesque monument of Steamboat Gothic, its glassless windows gaping. Only the ground floor is inhabitable, and in it there lives all alone Mr John Price, white-haired and nearsighted, who once entertained us to a very enjoyable lunch.

  This was a feat, for he seems usually to live entirely on marshmallows and fig rolls, but a jolly cousin of his came in to do the cooking, and the results were capital. Mr Price had no tablecloth handy, but a sheet on the table served just as well, and we ate Southern fried chicken in enormous quantities, and blancmange and cheese, finishing with either fig rolls or marshmallows, I forget which.

  War story

  An Australian boy once told me that his father had recently taken part in a military parade. ‘What kind of a hat did he wear?’ I asked for something to say. One of those hats, he replied, which were flat on one side but turned up in the other. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘like they used to wear in the Great War.’ There was a silence for a moment, and then the boy spoke. ‘I hate the Great War,’ he said, and my heart turned.

  Chinese jingles

  Early in a performance I attended in one of the regime’s Children’s Palaces, by an orchestra of children under the age of five, the virtuoso lead xylophonist happened to get herself a full tone out of key. She never appeared to notice. Nor did any of the other performers, all dimples, winsome smiles and bobbing heads up there on the stage. On they went in fearful discord, tinkle-tinkle, clang-clang, simpering smugly to the end.

  At El Kharga

  El Kharga is one of the five isolated oases which lie well to the west of the Nile in the Egyptian desert, and it has always been a place of exile. Nestorius was banished there, and Athanasius too, it is said. In our time political prisoners are immured in a detention camp at the oasis, and I once encountered some of them. They were patients in the local hospital, lying on straw palliasses on the floor of a bare ward. A murderous lot they looked, all the more sinister because bandages and plasters covered their eyes and supported their limbs–one and all were enemies of the state, and their interrogations had not been easy. I talked to them warily of this and that, the conditions of their detention and their hopes of release, and they told me that every morning they were given a lecture of indoctrination by a representative of the regime. Something in their eyes, though, told me they were far from brainwashed, and now and then a particularly savage old dissident lying in a corner intervened with a caustic witticism, delivered in the most cultured of English accents and with the bite of an incisive mind. Thus Nestorius might have spoken, I thought, during his exile at El Kharga.

  The European

  I met a man so allegorically Dutch that I deliberately engaged him in what I hoped would be allegorically Dutch conversation. He was a tall man with military moustaches, deep-blue eyes and a proper burgher’s paunch, but he did not talk about Rembrandt, tulips, dykes, the German occupation, Queen Beatrix, the new season’s herrings, Admiral de Ruyter or what was playing at the Concertgebouw that evening. No. He talked about unemployment, too many Asian immigrants, keeping his weight down and his hopes, earlier in life, of being a professional footballer. He was a citizen of the Netherlands, but I have met him all over western Europe, and that�
��s what he always talks about.

  Hero of the Soviet Union

  The most dramatic as well as the most diligent conductor in the world is to be seen in action at the Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Odessa. He is an elderly man, but passionate. All around him as he works peculiar things are happening. Behind, in the half-empty auditorium, a constant buzz of homely conversation underlies the score, and three ill-shaven Levantines in the second row seem to be in the throes of opium dreams, squirming and sighing in their seats. In front, the stage is alive with minor mishaps–trap-doors mysteriously closing and opening, fans being dropped, iron accessories clattering, while the cast of La Traviata smile resolutely across the footlights with a treasury of gold teeth.

  The conductor is unperturbed. Majestically he sails through the confusions of the evening, impervious to them all, sometimes grunting emotionally, sometimes joining in an aria in a powerful baritone, throwing his fine head back, bending double, conspiratorially withdrawing, pugnaciously advancing, with infinite variations of facial expression and frequent hissed injunctions to the woodwind. Nobody in the socialist bloc fulfils a norm more devotedly.

  The choice

  ‘Are you a man or a woman?’ asked the Fijian taxi driver as he drove me from the airport.

  ‘I am a respectable, rich, middle-aged English widow,’ I replied.

  ‘Good,’ he said, ‘just what I want,’ and put his hand upon my knee.

  A Gypsy kiss