Contact! (4 page)

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 ingratiat
ingly 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 in
defatigably. ‘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.

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, busi
nesslike 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!'