Contact! (18 page)

The matter with me

‘
Wazzamatterwidyou?
' hissed the angry cab driver, as I stumbled bemused across 45th Street. ‘Hey, you in the green hat,' shouts the policeman from his horse, ‘can't you see that signal?' ‘You must wait for the green,' says the passing lady slowly and sympathetically, assuming I speak only Welsh or Lithuanian, and am new to the mysteries of science. But it takes time to readjust, when you return to Manhattan from idler climes.

To touch the owl

I notice that for mistily religious reasons women in Dijon touch the little figure of an owl in the rue de la Chouette as casually as they might pull on a glove–except that, since it is perched rather high on a wall, small ladies have to jump a bit to reach the bird, and children have to be lifted one after the other, their mothers never interrupting, all the same, the flow of their own conversations.

The friar's warning

At the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo the desiccated corpses of generations of citizens are on display, guarded by friars and climaxed by the body of a child labelled BAMBINA–SLEEPING BEAUTY GIRL. ‘Be very careful,' one of the friars said in a flat sort of voice when I left this macabre exhibit–‘watch out for robbers.' I thought there was a queer, occult look in his eye, and hardly had I left the sacred premises than two thugs on a motorbike snatched my bag and left me destitute.

One can always tell

If the hitch-hikers are American I generally stop for them. One can always tell. They try harder for their lifts, holding up well-lettered destination signs and offering ingratiating smiles. They are in the lift-getting business, and they do the job properly. When they are on board they generally work
for their keep, too. They tell me all about themselves, they learn all about me, they may give me a brief lecture upon the social customs of my own country, or kindly correct me when I appear to be going the wrong way. They are usually willing to oblige, too. ‘Are you going to Scotland?' one young man asked me when I stopped for him just outside London. ‘No, I'm going to Wales.' ‘OK, make it Wales'–and I drove him all the way to Bala, and left him smoothly chatting up the farmer's wife at a bed-and-breakfast place.

Marvellously goes the elk meat

My favourite place for a Christmas meal is the Operakällaren restaurant in Stockholm. There the restaurant's famous house aquavit is poured most generously by merry waiters of the old school, and everyone soon gives the impression of being acquainted with everyone else. Marvellously goes the elk meat, swiftly pass the herrings, one great salmon succeeds another on the buffet, and very soon I find myself on familiar terms with the Swedes at the next table, complimenting them on their fluent English, admiring little Eva's Christmas frock or little Erik's smart bow tie, exchanging grandmotherly confidences with Mrs Andersson, toasting them one and all with yet more aquavit. Stockholmers are not especially religious people, and I like to think they have been eating those Baltic herrings, downing those fiery liquids, since the days of the pagan kings.

The red tarboosh

Andrew Holden was one of the very last British officials of the Egyptian government, still a highly respected functionary of the Ministry of Finance when Egypt had long recovered its independence. By the time I knew him he was near retirement, but he still went to work each morning by tram, clinging to the outside like any other Cairene if he could not get a seat. The amiable Egyptians, helping him up the step, would make sure he had a place on the rear platform, where he could hang on to the pole, and there I can see him now as the tram swayed and clanked its way into town, so scholarly looking in his spectacles, so slight, so incongruously at ease–and on his head, tilted at a jaunty but not ostentatious angle, the red tarboosh which was the only badge of his commitment.

Dance music

One evening I came across a dance in a Cretan courtyard. The lights were very bright there. The deafeningly amplified music was a quavery sort of oriental theme. A high gate closed the yard, but along the wall of the road above, from windows and shadowy terraces all around, a crowd of villagers watched. Beneath the lights inside, a long circling line of Cretans, men and women, danced a strange dance. I was bewitched. Gracefully, jauntily, thoughtfully, swankily, the dancers tripped their complex steps, and the music blared through the pergola. Round and round they went, to and fro, and sometimes the man at the head of the line, detaching
himself momentarily from the rest, threw himself into a spasm, leaping, kicking his feet together, twirling about in an ecstasy of conceit and accomplishment, before the convulsion left him and he subsided into the music's rhythm. When I tore myself away the half-tone music of the loudspeakers tracked me far into the night.

The three days

One of the most demanding of Irish pilgrimages takes the faithful to a grim island in Lough Derg, a remote and dispiriting mountain lake, where they endure a three-day fast, a twenty-four-hour vigil, barefoot peregrinations over stony tracks and the compulsory recitations of 63 Glorias, 124 Creeds, 891 Paternosters and 1,458 Hail Marys. I was once at a wedding at Drogheda, away on the east coast, when I heard a woman ask a worldly young guest with a carnation in his buttonhole and a glass of champagne in his hand where he was going for his holidays that year. I expected Mykonos or Barbados, but no. ‘I thought of giving myself', he said, ‘the three days at Lough Derg.'

At a Breton window

My small daughter and I looked up from the waterfront of Douarnenez, in Brittany, to see an old woman smiling down at us from an open window. She had a shawl around her shoulders, her face was infinitely wrinkled, and her smile was so kind that it seemed to be reaching us from different times
altogether–from before the Fall, perhaps. ‘I want that lady,' my small daughter said.

Do I know her?

Now and then I chance to see in real life one of those nameless and numberless actresses of television, encountered in the Underground, perhaps, or browsing at a bookshop. At first I think I really know her. Who could she be? Is she a publisher, or a fellow author? Did we meet on an aircraft, or at a literary festival somewhere? Like one of those nagging fragrances one cannot place, or a tune whose words we can never quite remember, her presence tantalizes and disturbs me. But then with a touch of melancholy I realize that I know her only by proxy, through the medium of the TV screen. Some people in these circumstances introduce themselves anyway, and perhaps one should: I sometimes notice that if I chance to catch the woman's eye she will give me one of those closed-lip actress's smiles, turned up a little too resolutely at the corners of the mouth, as if she is dying to be recognized.

Salon life

A Jewish acquaintance of mine in Delhi, being a passionate horsewoman, established a sort of lien upon the social loyalties of a whole covey of equestrian maharajas, polo players to a man but as fascinated by the personality of their hostess as they were by her love of horses. They became a kind of salon.
They used to sit in her drawing room, itself a strange and wonderful melange of cultures, or sprawl on the lawn with long cool drinks, hanging upon her every word: dark mustachioed military figures, handsome but rather running to plump, and in their midst that small vivacious woman bestowing a chaff here, a compliment there, like a Jewish maharani herself.

Days of liberty!

I chanced to arrive in Paris when a student rebellion was reaching its climax, and was astonished to find the students surging to and fro between their makeshift barricades, handkerchiefs over their mouths, throwing things now and then and shouting slogans. They were all that old people dreamed themselves to have been when they looked back to their days of liberty, the days when they had causes to throw bricks for, when to be alive was grand enough, but heaven itself was to be young, radical, brandishing a stick and shouting a slogan in Paris!

Harry's Challenge

I had a pre-Christmas luncheon at Harry Ramsden's Fish and Chip Shop at Guiseley, where the menu was dominated by Harry's Challenge, a fish-and-chip dish so gigantic that if you got through it you were given a free pudding and a signed certificate. All the customers were the real thing–not another outsider among them, only celebratory office parties
hilarious over Harry's Challenge, and amiably extended families with grandmothers in hats, and burbling children with hand-held video games, and not a few stout parties who would have done better to cut down on the steamed ginger pudding. At one o'clock precisely there arrived outside the front door the Scissett Youth Band of Huddersfield, to serenade us lustily with all the old carols–none of your fancy ecumenicals–setting many a sensibly shod foot tapping to their rhythms and inciting me, as an inveterate whistler, to join in messily over my mushy peas.

In other circumstances

Trams are essential to the character of Vienna, but there are some places where they run against the flow of the traffic, and are likely to murder you. When I nearly lost my own life to one of them–‘
Quick! Comes the tram the other way!
'–sympathetic onlookers were quick to reassure me that Dr Kurt Waldheim himself had almost died a similar death (although that was of course, they respectfully added, before he became president of our republic…)

Below the ships

The longest escalator in Europe plunges beneath the Kiel Canal to take pedestrians to the other side. I stood there one morning looking down this dreadful shaft, which was all empty, dark and rumbling, wondering if anybody ever used it, when a cheerful girl rode up behind me on a bicycle.
Without a pause she tucked the bike under her arm, so to speak, and launched herself upon the moving staircase. I stood there watching her go. Down and down into the dark she went, all alone, smaller and smaller, clutching her bicycle, until she disappeared into the hole beneath the Kiel Canal. Above her the ships sailed on.

Colombian coffee

I once sat for half an hour over a coffee at a pavement cafe in Buenaventura, Colombia, and never did I see a more piteous and dispiriting citizenry pass by, in the sticky blaze of that tropical afternoon. A mutilated beggar crawled about my feet, silently holding out his hand. A shoeshine boy with a withered arm sat listless at the pavement's edge. A few tattered black men slouched about the surrounding tables. Two small boys played football with an old tin in the street. Sometimes a grey figure in white ducks shambled into the cafe, reaching into his money belt for the price of a brandy, sometimes the beggar scuttled off like a huge black crab towards some new arrival, and sometimes the waitress, with a clang of her bangles, screamed some raucous incantation into the kitchen. All around was filth, heat and degradation, malformation and truncation, stumps of arms and crooked arms and scabbed dry lips.

Through a glass darkly

The Yamut Turkoman tribes are the most daunting of the Iranian peoples. On Thursday mornings they hold a horse fair at the village of Pahlevi Dej, and there I went to see them. They converged upon the village in ones and twos, bolt upright on their horses, top heavy in their black fleece hats, in stately lolloping motion across their splendid landscape. Some brought their wives with them, demurely riding pillion and wearing purple or scarlet skirts with brightly flowered shawls. I saluted one formidable tribesman as he rode by; not for a moment did his pace flag, inexorably he continued his progress, kicking up little clouds of dust with each step, and looking distantly down at me from the saddle as through a thick glass plate.

Joking on the coastal route

Once on the
Hurtigruten
, the Norwegian coastal shipping service, an entire brass band boarded our vessel, with musicians of all ages down to small boys and girls. They were going to the next port up the coast and earned their passage by playing sombre but rousing marches in the forward lounge. The faces of the instrumentalists were quintessentially Norwegian: pale, long, incurious, handsome faces. One boy asked me where I was from, and when I told him he said, ‘I have a grandmother in Wales.' ‘You don't mean it!' I exclaimed in delighted surprise. ‘No,' he said, ‘I was only joking.'

Pan's blood

Delight is still the occupation of Corfu, and sweet airs of comfort abound. The peasants of old may have deserted their olives for occupations of easier profit, but the olive trees are still there, and the stony earth beneath them, and the scents of herbs in the evening. On our way back from Kavos we saw, in one of the wayside villages, a pick-up truck run over a cat. In a trice the corpse of the poor animal was removed for burial, and I was struck by the air of true sadness that fell upon the village bystanders. It was the sweet silent sadness, I thought, of the ages. When we drove away the little pool of cat's blood left in the street behind us suggested to me the blood of Adonis, or perhaps of Pan himself.

Canadian arrivals

Very early one morning I went down to Union Station to watch the transcontinental train passengers arrive out of the darkness from Vancouver. I knew exactly what to expect from this experience, but still it stirred me: the hiss and rumble of it, the engineers princely in their high cab, the grey faces peering out of sleeper windows, the proud exhaustion of it all–and then the thick tumble of the disembarking passengers, a blur of boots and lumber jackets and hoods and frosty breaths and bags and bundled children, clattering down the steps to breakfast, Grandma and Toronto.

Destiny in Missouri

‘Mr Truman? Certainly, he's expecting you,' said the pleasant secretary in Independence, Missouri, and in a moment there was his familiar figure, sitting at a big polished desk. Beside him there stood a large and splendid globe, in a frame stand, and from time to time during our conversation Harry Truman would reflectively spin it or point to parts of it in a manner that I can only describe as proprietorial. He was, as he reminded me, the president who, in the years after World War II, had decreed an interventionist foreign policy for the United States of America–the Truman Doctrine. When he twirled that globe he was retrospectively reshaping my world, abolishing my empire, and affecting the way I would live for the rest of my life.