Contact!: A Book of Encounters Read online

  In the evening the entire population of Tirana seemed to emerge for the twilight passeggiata, strolling up and down the main avenue, sitting on the edges of fountains, milling around funfairs, wandering haphazardly across highways. I loved the louche insouciance of it all, the immense hum over everything, the quirks and surprises. Once I felt a small dry kiss on my arm, and turned to find a Gypsy child irresistibly importuning me for cash.

  Understanding the truth

  What would happen, I asked a fundamentalist predicant of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, if an African walked into one of his services?

  ‘I would have him removed. My church is for Europeans, and it would be wrong to allow a native to worship there. God divided the races for His own purposes, and it is not for us to doubt His wisdom.’

  ‘Or if a Chinaman turned up one day, or an Eskimo?’

  ‘No, my church is not for Asiatics. I would send them away. But now you must not misunderstand me,’ he added earnestly, tapping his knee with his forefinger. ‘I don’t say they shouldn’t have a service at all. If there was no other church for them to attend I would hold a service myself, not inside my church, of course, but in a field if necessary. I feel this very strongly: that no man, whatever his colour, whatever his race, wheresoever he cometh from, should be deprived of the opportunity of worshipping Him who is the creator of us all.’

  As I left the house the predicant clasped my arm, rather in the Rotarian manner, and pointed across the street outside, where an elderly black woman was hobbling out of a shop, screaming something in a searing treble over her shoulder. She crossed the pavement, closed one nostril with her finger and emptied her nose noisily into the gutter. Then, wiping her nose with her skirt, she turned round, still screeching, and disappeared indoors.

  ‘You see?’ said the predicant. ‘My dear friend, we are not unkindly, but you must live among them to understand the Truth.’

  Social status in the people’s dictatorship

  Mrs Wang had invited me to lunch at her Shanghai apartment, but it gave me no culture shock. True, we ate eggs in aspic, a kind of pickled small turnip and strips of a glutinous substance which suggested to me jellified seawater, and Mrs Wang evoked for me her hysterectomy by acupuncture (‘When they slit me open, oh, it hurt very bad, but after it was very strange feeling, very strange…’)–nevertheless her home seemed to me the bourgeois home par excellence. It had the statutory upright piano, a picture of two kittens playing with a ball of wool, a bookshelf of paperbacks and a daily help. It had a daughter who had come over to help cook lunch, and a husband away at the office who sent his regards. ‘We are very lucky,’ said kind Mrs Wang. ‘We have a certain social status.’

  Baleful eyes

  No infidel is allowed to enter the most celebrated shrine of Kerbala, the holy city of the Shias in Iraq, but I knocked at the door of a neighbouring house and asked if I might climb to its roof to see into its courtyard. The owner of the house was all smiles, but it turned out to be a simple inn, catering for pilgrims from Iraq, and as I walked up its narrow winding staircase I found myself passing a series of sparsely furnished rooms–a bed and a prayer mat and a hard cold floor. In each of these doorless cells there was a pilgrim, and as I climbed my way up those steep steps each turned his baleful eyes in my direction. I shall never forget the detestation that overcame the faces of those merciless old men when they observed an infidel on the stairs, nor the relief with which at last I escaped the gamut of their loathing and emerged upon the roof, with the golden dome of the mosque in front of me and the wide sunlit courtyard, crowded with robed pilgrims, spread before me like a chessboard.

  Passing the nut

  I was trekking alone between Namche Bazaar and Thangboche, in the Nepali Himalaya. I was walking fast, in pleasant heathland country, and presently I saw far ahead of me another solitary figure, moving in the same direction. It was a robust Sherpa woman, wearing long aprons and a high embroidered hat. Despite her hampering skirts she, too, was making good time, striding firmly along the track, but gradually I overhauled her until, in a narrow bend of the path, I was able to overtake her.

  She had given no sign that she knew of my presence, never turning round or looking over her shoulder, just ploughing steadily on like a colourful battleship. As I passed her, however, her left hand suddenly shot into mine. For a moment we touched. Neither of us spoke, and I was too surprised to stop, but I felt some small hard object pass from her hand into mine.

  I looked down to see what it was, passed so strangely from traveller to traveller, and found it was a small brown nut. When I turned round to thank her for it, she grinned and nodded and waved me on; so I pushed ahead up the hill, cracking its shell between my teeth.

  The master glass-blower

  Here stands the master glass-blower of Murano, in the Venetian lagoon. He stands grandly assured beside his furnace, watched by a wondering tour group, with a couple of respectful apprentices to hand him his implements, and his long pipe in his hand like a wand. With a flourish he raises it to his lips, and with a gentle blow produces a small round bubble of glass. A twist, a chip, another delicate breath, and there appears the embryo of an ornament. A twiddle of the pipe follows, a slice with an iron rod, a dollop of molten glass, a swift plunge into the fire, a gulp or two, a flourish in the air, a sudden snap of iron shears–and abruptly the glass-blower lays down his work with a gesture of artistic exhaustion, leaving the apprentice boys around him silent with respect, and the tourists, sweating in the heat, clustered awestruck about a huge glass harlequin, beady eyed and multicoloured, whose long spindly legs, swollen stomach, drunken grin and dissipated attitude breathe a spirit of unsurpassable vulgarity.

  An official of the glass factory shouts through the window to a pair of husbands who have evaded the tour, and are sitting comfortably on the quay outside. ‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen!’ he calls reprovingly. ‘Sirs! Your charming ladies are awaiting you in the vestibule. All the prices are marked!’

  Awful, really

  A hand touched my shoulder as I stood watching a crowd of masked and black-robed women crowding around a water hole in the Omani village of Ibri. ‘You shouldn’t stand about here, you know,’ a voice said in English, ‘you might catch something. The sanitation is ever so bad!’ It was an Omani Christian convert, product of a mission school somewhere, whom I had met earlier that day.

  He invited me to visit his nearby house. It stood behind a heavy gate, for there was ever such bad robbers in Ibri, he said, and as we entered I saw, half hidden in a dim and smoky recess, four or five black-shrouded figures almost motionless, and soundless but for a few moaning noises. I did not like to ask what was happening in there, but as we climbed the stairs my companion remarked casually, hitching up his shroud: ‘That’s my wife. She’s got something wrong with her inside, so a few friends came in to look after her.’

  We sat pleasantly in an upstairs room, watching the passers-by from a window and eating some rather stringy pomegranates. Yes, he sighed, Ibri was a funny place. The people was very funny. ‘It’s awful, really,’ concluded the apostate, removing a pip from between his two front teeth.

  Changing the guard

  Every other morning they change the guard outside the Presidential Palace in Santiago. An enormous military band plays, and the two guard companies, equipped with high boots, swords and resplendent spurs, march and counter-march with an almost ominous certainty. This is no toy-soldier parade. It feels all too real, as though the participating soldiery, dropping to firing positions by the flick of a command, might easily exterminate each other by numbers. It ends happily, though, for when the ceremony is over the two young subalterns of the guard, marvellously slim and elegant, salute each other with brisk respect, shake hands like brothers and stride off together into the palace. There is a moment or two of silence and then the band strikes up a waltz, and even the undemonstrative Chileans, standing woodenly all about, tap an occasional tight-laced toe.

  Looking after th
e place

  I was once driving through the Transvaal when I noticed a small obelisk on a hillock beside the road. I stopped, and found beside it an old Afrikaner farmer, crouched in what seemed to be silent meditation. He wore an unbuttoned waterproof jacket. A linen hat slouched around his ears and a mass of curly hair lay down his neck and oozed over his collar. He turned to look at me, and I found myself gazing into the bluest and clearest and hardest pair of eyes I had ever seen. The face that smiled at me was round and sun-burnt, engraved with innumerable deep lines, but the body was stringy as gristle. ‘Who’s the memorial to?’ I asked him as we shook hands. ‘One of our great Boer generals,’ he replied, and added simply: ‘I’m his son, I look after the place.’

  Thus I met, almost as in a reincarnation, one of the legendary Boer farmers of tradition. He gave me a packet of biltong, prepared by his wife (‘the most beautiful woman in Africa’), and we sat in the back of his car and drank some lukewarm coffee out of a Thermos flask. He suffered from no false modesty (‘I’m always giving, it’s one of my failings’) and he held violent and generally unshakeable opinions. Why, only a few days before he had sent a telegram to the Commonwealth Conference in London, warning the assembled leaders that communism, Catholicism and Jewry were secretly allied in a campaign to overthrow Western civilization. ‘But they’re blind, you know, blind. Churchill was just the same. I sent him a cable in 1942–it cost me £7–to warn him that Russia was anti-Christ, but he disregarded it. He never answered it at all. I suppose he read it?’ said that old Boer, screwing up the Thermos flask. ‘What do you think?’

  So we chatted pleasantly, and he told me that if I ever came that way again I was welcome to stay at his farm and eat his biltong and disagree with his arguments for as long as I liked. It was a pleasure, said he, to meet a visitor from Britain, and that reminded him: had I seen the incontrovertible evidence at Bloemfontein concerning the ground glass and the porridge in British concentration camps during the Boer War?

  Alien visitors

  One evening I heard music in the street, and looking out of my window I saw two strange figures passing. One was a young man in a tall brown hat, blowing on a shepherd’s flute. The other was attached by complex apparatus to a variety of apparently home-made instruments–bagpipes, drums, cymbals, a triangle I think–and in order to beat the biggest drum he had to move in an abrupt but creaky shuffle. Slowly and sporadically these engaging characters pottered down the pavement below me, tootling and drumming as they went. In Trieste that day they were like visitors from another, less inhibited world.

  You’re welcome

  Here is an exchange I heard during an anti-American protest demonstration at Ottawa:

  Police inspector: Are you a part of this demonstration, which is forbidden as you know to go any closer to the American embassy?

  Protestor: No, sir, we are just Canadian citizens exercising our right of free movement.

  Inspector: Why are you carrying that placard, then?

  Protestor: Oh, that’s simply an expression of my own personal views, as a Canadian citizen.

  Inspector: I see. All right, go ahead, then.

  Protestor: Thank you, sir.

  Inspector: You’re welcome.

  I was in a stingy mood

  In the ill-lit pedestrian tunnel that goes under the Elbe at Dresden I heard ahead of me the strains of a Viennese waltz, played by a pair of Gypsy violinists. I was in a stingy mood, and resolved to give them nothing. As it happened there was nobody else in the tunnel at that moment, and as I passed the musicians, still eloquently playing, I felt their eyes thoughtfully following me. I was decidedly self-conscious, knowing very well that I ought to put something in the open violin case at their feet, and as I walked towards the daylight my resolution wavered. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ I said to myself, so when I emerged into the open I dug a few coins out of my purse and re-entered the tunnel. Melodies from the Vienna woods were still sounding in its twilight, and the Gypsies were not in the least surprised to see me back. They had read me like a book, and were expecting me. I put my coins in their violin case, and they both bowed courteously, without a smile. I bowed back in admiration.

  Two Kiwis

  Carefully and kindly the keeper placed the creature in my arms, and I felt its feathers rustling against my hands so sharp and metallic that they almost felt like scales. The beady little eyes were blind and filmed, the strong wire-like legs scratched and struggled against my chest, and the long tube of a beak, nostrils at the end of it, protruded its way crossly under my arm. It was about the size of a hen. The keeper looked on almost paternally.

  Two Jocks

  I watched an elderly man with sparse gingery hair strolling hands in pockets towards a pub on an Edinburgh corner, followed forty or fifty yards behind by his extremely aged collie dog. Sometimes the man looked round with an encouraging smile, and the dog smiled gamely back, and so they progressed in perfect rapport, like figures in a Burns poem, until the pair of them disappeared together into the malty shadows of the pub.

  Four Londoners

  I had an appointment with the pelicans of St James’s Park, to whom each day a grateful Ministry of Works donates a ration of fish. Their keeper was waiting there with his bucket, and punctually at four o’clock a big white pelican waddled staidly out of the water and rubbed his beak ingratiatingly against the man’s legs. ‘This is Paul,’ he said. ‘He’s a very good-natured bird.’ Before long two others turned up, in rather a diffident, squint-eyed, lopsided manner, for they were newcomers to the park. ‘They’re funny birds, pelicans,’ said the keeper. ‘Some people like them, some don’t.’ But when he had fed them their fish, and they waddled away sated, he turned to me again. ‘They’ve had enough, you see. They aren’t greedy birds at all. I thought they behaved very well, didn’t you? Very well indeed, considering.’

  In academia

  I have never forgotten the Christmas parties arranged for us, when I was a child, by the canons of Christ Church, Oxford, in their great canonical houses facing Tom Quad. How tall the candles were! How rich but wholesome the cakes! How twinkling the Regius professors turned out to be, stripped of the awful dignities of office! What thrilling presents we were given–envelopes with penny blacks upon them, magnificent wax seals of bishops or chancellors! How happy the old clergymen’s faces looked as, breathlessly piping our gratitude–‘Thank you very much indeed, sir!’ ‘It was jolly nice of you, sir!’–we last saw them nodding their goodbyes, a little exhausted around the eyes, through the narrowing gaps of their front doors!

  Definitely not

  I was sitting upon a grassy incline in a park in Adelaide when two small boys, one rather smaller than the other, prepared to ride down the slope on their skateboards. There were a few beer bottles lying around, left over from the night before, and I heard the elder boy say to the younger, in an authoritative voice intended largely for my own ears: ‘Please don’t hit the lady–I don’t mind about the beer bottles, but definitely not the lady.’

  The captain of the Saratoga

  The captain of the USS Saratoga, a tall lean man of ecclesiastical bearing, sits in a raised padded armchair on the port side of his bridge, rather as though he is having his hair cut or is being inducted to his see, and by looking through its tilted windows he can see the big jet bombers on the flight deck below. This ship, the publicity officer at your elbow tells you, has enough paint on her to redecorate 30,000 average American homes. There are 2,000 telephones on board, three escalators, three soda fountains, nine barbers’ shops and 3,676 trouser hangers. ‘We generate enough electricity to service a city the size of Pittsburgh, an industrial city in the State of Ohio. Our machines peel a thousand potatoes an hour.’

  Below the windows the pilots scramble into their high cockpits. The captain rises from his chair, and a first violent roar of jet engines reverberates though the carrier. (‘This ship has seventeen decks,’ shouts the publicity officer indefatigably. ‘There are more than 7
,000 coffee cups on board the giant carrier, which is named from a battleground in the American Revolutionary War.’) Then, suddenly, there screams into the corner of your eye a lean silver aircraft, violently projected at breakneck speed down the deck and into the blue, and in a moment there seem to be aircraft everywhere, some careering down the angled deck, some straight towards the bows, flashing and roaring and streaming away into the blue. In a moment or two the whole flight is gone, and is vanishing in the general direction of Turkey. A flash, a blast of jets, a dozen young men hurled brutally into the sky, and a terrible page of history could almost instantly be written. No wonder the captain of the Saratoga, as he returns to the seat of his command, has the air of a thoughtful but authoritative divine.

  Young man with a gun

  Up a dingy flight of stairs in Vienna I went to visit Dr Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter and himself a victim of the camps. Short, balding, in his seventies then, he was surrounded in his cluttered apartment by certificates of merit and scrolls of gratitude. He had devoted his later life to tracking down the last of the Nazi murderers and seeing that they were punished–year after year, decade after decade–while those once-swaggering SS men grew frail and forgetful, and Wiesenthal himself entered old age fired still by his merciless search for justice–or revenge. If he had anything to do with it, he told me, no single Nazi murderer, however old and grey, would ever be allowed to die in peace. I thought his office unforgettably baleful. The files that filled its walls were dreadful registers of death and torture, and Wiesenthal talked disturbingly about the wicked men still alive and flourishing in Europe. There had been an attempt on his life a few weeks before my visit, and a police guard had reluctantly been given him by the Viennese, whose communal conscience about the Jews was less than clear.