Contact!: A Book of Encounters Page 4

  That day’s sentry looked up at me as I left Wiesenthal’s office. He was a blond long-haired youth with a gun on his lap, lounging there on a bench with his feet upon a chair, chewing something; and as he insolently stared at me, and at the old gentleman saying goodbye to me at the door, I felt an uneasy frisson.

  More organic patriots

  Being myself a sort of self-adopted Swiss patriot, I made a pilgrimage once to the lakeside field of Rütli, which is the traditional birthplace of the Swiss nation. On the Sunday I walked down the track from the heights above, thousands of more organic patriots were making their way to or from the hallowed site, most of them evidently people from the mountain country around. I offered a cheerful good morning to everyone I met, and could not help admiring the utter lack of ingratiation, the courtesy tinged with decidedly suspended and unsmiling judgement, with which most of them responded. I was struck too by the proportion of twisted, stooped or withered old people among them–people of a kind that had almost vanished from the rest of western Europe. They were one generation removed from the goitre, that talismanic affliction of mountain peasantries, and the faces of those crooked ancients–hard hewn, bashed about, gaunt–seemed to speak of centuries of earthy hardship, isolation and suspicion. I could not help remembering, too, that in Switzerland the very last European witch was publicly burnt.

  Fishing lady

  On the edge of a swamp in Louisiana an old Negro woman in a floppy straw hat was fishing in the oozy water with a home-cut rod. She had already caught a few fish, and they were floundering in the shallows, tied up in a net. She told me she had been dropped there that morning from the train which passed nearby; her husband worked on the railroads, and in the evening, when the train came back again, it would slow down past the swamp and allow her to scramble aboard a freight car. She asked me to drive a little way down the road and fetch her some Coca-Cola. I bought her four bottles, and the last I saw of her she was standing on the boggy bank in her huge hat, with the rod in one hand and a bottle raised to her lips with the other, a portly statuesque figure against a gloomy background of cypress trees.

  Coffee time

  I was once standing at the entrance to the celebrated whores’ alley of Hamburg, beneath the flickering neon sky of the Reeperbahn, when an unexpected figure passed through its portals, weaving a bustling, purposeful, businesslike way among the pallid lechers loitering inside. It was a waiter from a neighbouring cafe, nattily dressed in white and carrying a cup of coffee neatly on his polished tray, with two lumps of sugar hygienically wrapped. He made his way dexterously to one of the brothel windows and, peering into the gloom to pick his customer from the row of ghoul-like prostitutes inside–dim, apparently phosphorescent images of flesh, paint and pink nylon–he handed her the tray with a polite little bow and returned to the world outside.

  In London, 1980s

  Somewhere in Oxford Street, towards the end of the afternoon, a sort of hallucination seemed to overcome me, and I found myself in a nightmare limbo. I was aghast. Who were these fearful people, of no particular race, of no particular kind, so crude and elvish of face, so shambling of gait, so shabby of clothes, so degraded and demeaned of bearing? Where were they shoving and sidling their way to? What culture did they represent, what traditions inspired them, what loyalty did they cherish, what God did they worship? I seriously doubt if a less prepossessing citizenry can be found anywhere on earth than the citizenry frequenting such streets of London.

  Magnifique!

  When I was dining one night in a restaurant in the French island of Martinique, an extraordinary girl burst into the dining room and began dancing a kind of ferocious screeching rumba. She wore an enormous tricorn hat and a red swimsuit, and when the management objected to her presence she instantly threw herself into a spectacularly flamboyant tantrum. She screamed, shouted, sang ear-splitting snatches of songs, threw plates about, dropped her hat, made savage faces at the customers, knocked tables over and reduced the whole room to helpless laughter until at last, to crown a splendid entertainment, somebody dialled the wrong number and obtained, instead of the police, the fire brigade, whose clanking red engines skidded to a halt outside our windows and whose helmeted officers, trailing axes and hoses, stared in bewilderment through the open doors at the hilarious chaos inside. ‘It was magnificent!’ was the general verdict as, wiping our eyes and resuming our victuals, we watched that uninhibited performer withdraw.

  West Pointer

  It was Saturday afternoon at West Point, and many of the cadets were preparing to go out. I saw one emerging from her barracks in what I took to be her semi-dress uniform–a trim grey trouser suit with a shiny peaked cap, very smart and flattering to her lithe figure. I followed her down the path towards the Eisenhower statue–left right, left right, head up, arms swinging, brisk as could be to where her father was waiting to greet her: and then, talk about symbolisms! He was your very image of a kindly homespun countryman, a figure from an old magazine cover, wearing boots and a floppy brown hat, his face shining with pride and happiness. She broke into a run, her cap went askew for a moment, and into his strong American arms she fell.

  An Irish experience

  I was in Dublin for the first time in my life, and I took a stroll along the extended breakwater, bleached in sun and sea wind, that protects the mouth of the Liffey from the exuberance of the Irish Sea. Gazing about me pleasurably, presently I saw implanted across the causeway the clubhouse of the Half Moon Swimming Club, and immediately beside the door of the building there was a bench, facing directly down the mole, as though in judgement. Even from a distance I could see that four or five heavy pinkish figure occupied this seat, motionless but glistening in the sun, like Buddhas, and I could feel their eyes steadily focused upon me as I approached them down the causeway until at last, reaching the purlieus of the club, I raised my own eyes modestly to meet those divinities face to face. Five old, fat, gleaming Dubliners looked back at me severely, and they were all entirely nude.

  Young Iceland

  Children play a disproportionate part in Icelandic life, it seems to me. Nothing is more surprising than to hand over one’s fare in a country bus and find it accepted by a character apparently not much more than four years old, who grumbles with absolute adult authenticity if you haven’t got the right change. And in the Althing, the Icelandic parliament, a common sight is a minuscule page hastening in with a quotation for the Foreign Minister, perhaps, or a statistic for the Minister of Finance: he is likely to be wearing a check shirt, a green jersey and corduroy trousers, and as often as not he interrupts the flow of debate by banging the door behind him. Nobody minds. Drat the boy, one seems to hear them murmuring. And his father was just the same.

  After Perón

  General Perón’s dictatorship of Argentina had ended, but in the plush fin-de-siècle cafe I chose for my lunch in Buenos Aires his presence was still palpable. Around me gaggles of elderly women were sipping Cinzano with soda water and nibbling biscuits, nuts and bits of flabby cheese, but in the dimmer recesses of the room various lonely men were deep in the contemplation of La Prensa. When I asked my waiter if there were still many Peronistas about he nodded darkly but wryly, with a flicker of his thumb, towards those several grey solitaries in the corners, who certainly had a brooding conspiratorial look to them but were probably, in fact, looking through the small advertisements for second-hand canoes.

  The proclamation

  A stone’s throw from the holiday madhouses of Waikiki there stands a row of rickety tables beside the sea, shaded by straw matting, where elderly Honolulu citizens while away their Sunday mornings with chess, chequers and inexplicable card games. I was sitting there in reverie one morning, happily lost in the sun and the salt breezes, when a prickly old gentleman on the benches beside me touched me on the shoulder. ‘You look a little melancholy,’ he said kindly. ‘Aintcha read the proclamation?’–and he pointed to the notice painted on a weatherboard above us. ‘This is a Public Park,’ it
said. ‘Have Fun!’

  Reassurance

  I was in the Isle of Man for the first time in my life, to write an essay about it. I had bought a book about Manx folklore and, finding an open-air cafe beside the sea, settled down to read it with a plate of prawns and a Guinness. The sun was lovely, the prawns were excellent, the Guinness went down like a treat, and I congratulated myself upon my choice of profession. Presently a lady came over to my table and handed me a pamphlet. ‘Oh, thank you,’ I said, ‘how kind of you. What’s it about?’ ‘Oh my dear,’ she emolliently replied, ‘it is only to reassure you that God is always with the lonely.’

  No reply

  Nowhere on earth is so inexorably improving as Washington, DC. When we came down from the top of the Washington Monument even the elevator operator dismissed us with a parting injunction. ‘Let’s all work’, he said, ‘to clean up our country for the two-hundredth anniversary just coming up.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ we dutifully replied, ‘you’re darned right–you hear that, kids?’

  He had not, however, finished yet. ‘And I’m talking,’ he darkly added, ‘about the mental aspects as well as the physical.’

  We had no answer to that.

  Possibilities of misfortune

  The Kashmiris are a hospitable people, but not inspiriting. They seem to be considering always the possibilities of misfortune. In the autumn the fall of the leaf seems a personal affliction to them, and the passing of the year depresses them like the fading of their own powers. Then in the chill evenings the women disappear into their private quarters, and the men light their little baskets of charcoal, tuck them under their fustian cloaks and squat morosely in the twilight, their unshaven faces displaying a faint but telling disquiet. There was a touching pathos, I thought, to their style. ‘How do you like your life?’ I asked one new acquaintance there, when we had progressed into intimacy. ‘Excellent,’ he replied with a look of inexpressible regret. ‘I love every minute of it’–and he withdrew a cold hand from the recesses of his cloak, and waved it listlessly in the air to illustrate his enjoyment.

  My dinner companion

  Marvellously lithe and light-footed are the people of Helsinki, big but agile, jovial at smorgasbords or loping across their snowfields like Tibetan holy men. Their children, slithering about with hockey sticks, give the heartening impression that they came into the world on skis. Their wives are neat as pins, and gossip sharply in expensive coffee shops. They are a people that nobody in the world could possibly be sorry for. They are sharp as nails, and twice as spiky. But here’s an odd and provoking fact. When I wanted something to read with my dinner some unexpected instinct guided my choice, a kind of reluctant nostalgia, a niggling trace of respect and affection, and when I sat down to my pig’s trotters I found myself dining with Turgenev: and all that brave and courteous citizenry, I felt, could not offer me quite such company.

  Diplomats and a pianist

  I once went to the British embassy in Washington, DC, to see the pianist Vladimir Horowitz presented with the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society, brought to him on a cushion by a marvellously suave young secretary and handed over with a graceful ambassadorial speech about violent times and the meaning of art. Mr Horowitz seemed pleased, but instead of replying in kind sat down at the piano and played in a highly vibrant and indeed imperial manner ‘God Save the Queen’, making full use of the sustaining pedal.

  There was a pause at the end of it, and instantly, as the last notes faded, I clicked the scene in my memory: and so I have held it there like a flash from a dream, the ambassador benignly at attention, the young diplomats rigid all about, the American guests clutching their champagne glasses, the great room aglow with carpets and portraits, the pianist’s hand raised in a last grandiloquence–an ornate little vignette of Washington, where life so often shimmers through a gauze curtain, insubstantially.

  Impact!

  King Sobhuza of Swaziland, one of the world’s last absolute monarchs, offered me a kindly greeting. His subjects fell on their knees, or even on their faces, when he passed, but I looked him Jeffersonianly in the eye, and shall never forget the moment. He had the most remarkable, most twinkling, most mischievous, altogether most entertaining face in the world. He seemed to radiate an amused but resolute complicity, as though he knew what a charade life was but was determined to make the most of it. He was dressed that day in European clothes; when he wore his tribal costume, a stunning assembly of feathers, bright textiles and talismanic brooches, the effect must have been terrific.

  Style

  I joined an eminent, kind and cultivated actress in taking a cab to an address on Second Avenue in Manhattan. Said the cab driver: ‘Whereabouts is that on Second Avenue, lady?’ Without a flicker in her elegant equanimity she replied: ‘Don’t ask me, bud. You’re the fucking cab driver.’

  On an Oxford evening

  Loitering around Magdalen College on a classic May evening I saw a company of players making their way through the trees for a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They were moving swiftly in their cowls, ruffs and velvets, all among the elms, and a few shy deer watched them pass between the tree trunks. Their footfalls were silent on the turf, their voices reached me faintly on the warm air, and they disappeared into the shadows merrily, with Puck occasionally practising his jumps, and Titania lifting her crimson skirts, and a few lumpish fairies skirmishing in the flanks. I never caught the spell of the theatre more hauntingly, as I watched them across the fence, and felt like Hamlet when the players came to Elsinore–‘You are welcome, masters, welcome all.’

  The moment of victory

  An old woman, horribly crippled, struggles down the last few steps of the Chapel of St Helena, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. It is a faintly illuminated crypt. Her progress is agonizingly slow, but she is determined to reach the altar by herself. Painfully with her two sticks she shuffles down the stone steps, each one a torment. Prayers are mingled with her breathing. When at least she reaches the bottom, though, and I peer into the darkness to watch her, she abruptly leans down and places her sticks beside her on the ground. Then, straightening herself as far as her old crooked frame will allow her, she raises her arms above her in triumph and exuberance, more like some whipcord young athlete at the moment of victory than a poor old woman, distorted and arthritic, who would soon have to face the steps again.

  At Schwab’s

  Hardly a Hollywood memoir is complete without a reference to Schwab’s, ‘The World’s Most Famous Drugstore’, and it is still heavy with the old mystique. Elderly widows of émigré directors reminisce about Prague over their breakfasts. Young men in jerkins and expensive shoes ostentatiously read Variety, or greet each other with stagey endearments. Ever and again one hears exchanges of critiques across the hubbub–‘I love her, she’s a fine, fine actress, but it just wasn’t her…’–‘Well, but what can one expect with Philip directing, she needs definite direction’–‘True, but shit, it just made me puke, the way she did that last scene…’ I took to sharing a table with the divorced wife of a Mexican set designer who shared my enthusiasm for Abyssinian cats.

  A royal court

  I had an introduction to a Mogul princess, of the dynasty which made Delhi its capital in the seventeenth century and built the very walled city in whose labyrinthine recesses she lives. I found her ensconced in her front sitting room between portraits of her imperial forebears: a short, decisive old lady with a brief mischievous smile and an air of totally liberated self-possession. Her antique mansion is a beguiling shambles in the old Islamic style: a couple of rooms in the Western manner for the convenience of visitors, the rest more or less medieval–wide decrepit courtyard, dusty trellised vine, thickly populated chambers all around. There are granddaughters and sons-in-law and undefined connections; there are skivvies and laundrymen and assorted sweepers; there are children and dogs and unexplained loiterers in doorways. Forty or fifty souls constitute the tumbled court of the Begum Ti
mur Jehan, and through it she moves commandingly in green trousers, issuing instructions, reminiscing about emperors, traitors or ladies of the harem, and frequently consulting her highly organized notebook, all asterisks and cross-references, for addresses or reminders.

  Politicians

  I love to watch the politicians ushering their constituents around the Capitol in Washington, DC, benign and avuncular, and to observe the endearing combination of the condescending and the wheedling with which they shake hands with their respectful electors at the end of the tour–‘We sure are obliged to you, Congressman’–‘We certainly are, sir’–‘I shall never forget this day, Congressman’–‘Fine, fine, great to have you along…’ Meeting a likely looking gent in a Capitol corridor, I tried a gambit myself, as a speculation. ‘Morning, Senator,’ I said. ‘Hullo there, young lady,’ he instantly replied. ‘Having fun?’–and off he strode to his office, chomping, alas for my purposes, not an actual, but at least a metaphorical cigar.

  Perfect understanding

  Long after the end of the British Empire, some of its manners balefully survived. In Patna I had occasion to go to the Secretariat to ask permission to take photographs of the city, and found myself before a functionary of such classic insolence, such an unassailable mixture of resentment, patronage, self-satisfaction and effrontery that for a moment I felt like picking up his inkwell and throwing it at him. But I bit my lip and restrained myself, and as I glared back at him there the scales dropped from my eyes: his image blurred and reassembled before me, his colour paled somewhat, and I saw before me his true archetype and inspiration, the lesser English civil servant–now, as in imperial times, the insufferable master of his art. I thanked the man profusely and assured him that I understood perfectly why I would have to make an application in triplicate to the Divisional Officer, who would unfortunately not be on duty until the following Wednesday afternoon.