Contact! (7 page)

While we were talking on the porch a great cloud of dust approached us from the drive, and there emerged in stately motion two large mules. They were pulling a kind of sledge, a cross between a bobsled and Cleopatra's barge, and sitting on it, very old and dignified, was a Negro in a straw hat. Round the corner he came in imperial state, the mules panting, the sledge creaking, the dust billowing around us, and as he passed the porch he raised his hat by its crown and called: ‘G'd evening, boss, sir; g'd evening, Missus Parker.' ‘Good evening, Uncle Henry,' they replied.

He was an old retainer of the Parkers who lived almost entirely on their kindness. He was given a house and a few acres, firewood and storage space and a loan when he needed one. The planter would not see him in distress for the world. But to suggest that he might invite the old man into his house, or even shake hands with him, would be more than an impertinence, but might well be construed as a
deliberate insult. Uncle Henry will always have a home, but, after all, the race must be preserved.

Family home

After a while I felt quite familiar with the social structure of St Andrew's, New Brunswick. Who was this, for instance, smiling at me so kindly from the Wren House on Queen Street? Why, who but Miss Lelia Wren, who lives with her sister Miss Frances in the house their family has occupied for 150 years. Who is at the helm of that white boat out there? Mr Hered Hatt the scallop fisherman, of course–everyone knows that. In no time at all I was acquainted with Mr Ian Mackay, who owns the Shiretown Inn, and with Mrs Bobby Cockburn, whose late husband's pharmacy was one of the town's prime power centres, and very soon the Venerable Nantlais Jones was waving to me from his handsome Buick Park Avenue limousine, which has CLERGY in ecclesiastical lettering on its windscreen. Hardly has one well-known householder introduced me to her stately collection of teddy bears (‘That's Boogy, that's Oogy, that's Daddy Bear in the corner') before another is telling me how effective birth control pills have proved in the propagation of her hibiscus plants.

It was like exploring a rambling old family home, the streets its corridors, the houses its rooms, the citizens its extremely gossipy owners and retainers. One morning I arranged to meet two of the town's many widows and, idly passing the time beforehand by wandering through the town cemetery, I found both those ladies' names already inscribed upon gravestones, below their departed husbands'.

Key West, 1960s

Key West is full of people with nothing much to do, but a talent for lounging gracefully in doorways. If I stood on the waterfront on a sunny morning I would soon find other idlers wandering to my side to stare at the water with me, and sometimes gentlemen would buttonhole me with dark questions. Was I looking for rare fish? Had I spoken to Mr Alvark? Was it right, what the papers were saying about convertibility? Did I realize that the deputation from Ecuador was arriving next day? What did the British government think about labour restrictions in Peru? Most of them had wild gleams in their eyes, and having said their queer bit, shuffled away like disappointed saboteurs. Slow and old is the island city of Key West; also surreptitious, bland and turtle-like.

All in the family

At the railway station at Assiut an elderly Copt had come to meet me. We sat in the station cafe for a preliminary cup of coffee, and he undid the buttons of his tight linen jacket and wiped his head fastidiously with a silk handkerchief. ‘I come from a family of priests,' he said by way of introduction. ‘There have been Christian priests in my family since AD 48, when St Mark paid his visit to Assiut; and before that my family, through unnumbered centuries, provided priestly acolytes for the local god of Assiut, Leci. Come, finish your coffee while I settle this infamous account.'

Marching with us!

One evening we were driving down a road on the outskirts of Chattanooga when we saw a dirty marquee. From it there came strains of music, with accompanying desultory snatches of women's voices, so we stopped at once and went inside. At the end of the tent a very fat woman was lying on the ground quivering and shaking, sometimes tremulously, like a jelly, sometimes with sharp stabs of impulsive movement. Two fierce women were supporting her head, and standing above them, waving his arms like a Paganini, prancing crazily here and there, a youth was strumming on a guitar. In the background a small girl was banging a hymn tune on an upright piano, and a group of black ladies, respectably dressed, looking a trifle bored, and sometimes pausing to exchange gossip or look out of the tent flap, was half-heartedly singing some sacred words: ‘I'll never go hungry or know poverty/ So long as the good Lord is marching with me./ Marching with me! Marching with thee!/ So long as the good Lord is marching with me.'

Presently the prostrate patient, with heavings and convulsions, tried to gasp a few words, and at this the attendant harpies were galvanized. Seizing the patient by the front of her dress, they yanked her into a sitting position and hissed urgent instructions into her ear. She was still jerking incessantly. ‘Take Him in, take Him in!' they hissed, and were soon screaming, ‘Take Him in! Roll it! O Jesus, the glory of it!' until the patient herself, jerking and jumping, managed to croak from her constricted throat a few unintelligible syllables.

When we left the marquee she was still unhealed. The
guitarist still whirled about her. The piano still tinnily clanged. The lady choristers whined their listless hymn. And the convulsed patient, all her draperies loose by now, was still being urged to ‘Let Him in, sister! Glory, glory, roll it, roll it!' by the demon women at her side.

Economic imperative

In the worst times of the Irish troubles, when Belfast was more or less in a state of war, I once saw a patrol of five or six British infantrymen moving cautiously and watchfully through the city centre in the prescribed mode–guns cocked, helmeted heads constantly turning right and left, lead man well in front, rearguard walking backwards with his finger on the trigger. As they passed an office of the National Westminster Bank one of them peeled away, while the others crouched there covering his back, ready for instant fire. He put his card in the bank's cash dispenser, he tucked his money away in a pocket of his camouflage suit, and they proceeded grimly on their prowl.

Sporting pleasures!

My first floodlit cricket match, in Sydney, was a terrific affair. Australia were playing New Zealand, and passions ran high. If a wicket fell or a catch was missed the crowd burst into magnificent displays of emotion, throwing hats, paper, cups and balloons into the air, shouting, whistling, clapping, booing and cheering. I was exhilarated! In the course of the
game I happened to look over the balcony into an open space outside the stadium, and there I saw a succession of young men being hauled in, handcuffed by plainclothes policemen, briskly questioned, photographed there and then and shoved into a windowless van from whose interior emerged muffled thumps of protest. A few yards away, within sight of the police but on the safe side of a high wire-mesh fence, three small boys were getting their own kicks by sniffing aerosol cans.

The French swimmer

To my right, as I sat beside the harbour at La Rochelle, there came into my field of view a swimming man. He was in his fifties, I would guess, but stout and muscular, and he was swimming with an absolute rhythmic exactitude. A slow and powerful crawl, one two, one two, deep wallowing in the water went his head, up came his podgy arm, out emerged his face for breath, running with salt water–a slight pause at the top of his stroke, and he was down again half submerged. He never wavered. The pace of his stroke was metronomic, and it suddenly occurred to me that he was on the way somewhere, as one might walk to work, or take a bus. He was the first swimmer I ever saw who was using his crawl as a means of transport. I watched him intently, and once I thought I caught his eye, as he rolled around for breath out there; but if I did it was an entirely dispassionate eye, like the lens of a submarine's periscope. It took him some time to pass me, until he disappeared round the headland to my left, and for some time afterwards I fancied I could hear the reg
ular flop and splashing of his stroke, as one sometimes hears the tread of a ship's engines when it has long sailed out of vision. Since then, whenever I hear such a beat of engines in the night, I think, there goes the French swimmer on his way.

Thrashing as they went

On Ascension Day they beat the bounds of St Michael's Church in Oxford, to establish once again the parish limits and emphasize the old pre-eminence of the Church. Once I followed the course of this antic but moving ceremony. Led by the vicar, a little raggle-taggle group of choirboys and parishioners paraded through the city centre, now and then pausing at immemorially ordained spots to thrash a wall with canes and shout ‘Mark! Mark! Mark!' (in the old days they used to thrash the choirboys too, to impress the boundaries on them once and for all). The route they pursued was involved, but the vicar and his crew were not perturbed. Once they scrambled over a high wall, once they marched deadpan through Woolworth's, and once they beat the wall of a banana store in the market. They followed the line to the bitter end, thrashing as they went, as fifteen generations of parsons and giggling choristers had loyally done before them.

Forty tailors and a camel driver

In a little upstairs factory in a Cairo backstreet forty tailors work, year after year, on the vast and splendid carpet, lavishly embroidered with gold thread, that covers the sacred
shrine of the Kaaba in Mecca. A new one is woven every year, and is taken to the holy city at the time of the great pilgrimage, escorted by soldiers of the Egyptian army. When I visited the factory the tailors were nearly all Turkish by origin, and nearly all related to one another, and nearly all very old, and some of them represented the third or fourth family generation to work there. They sat at trestle tables in a long rickety room and stitched away there like the tailors of myth. They held their eyes very close to their work, and some of them wore little steel-rimmed spectacles on the ends of their noses. Their director, a portly and paternal official, sauntered up and down the tables with me, and the tailors, working away with their reels of gold thread, threw pleasantries as we passed. I asked one how old he was. As old as the hills, he said, but the director said with pride that he was actually a hundred years old–‘And so,' he added, peering round the room and indicating another benevolent ancient, ‘so is the one in the corner, the one with the hat on.' All the old men grinned and nodded.

As we climbed down the staircase to the street, I noticed an elderly Egyptian sitting morosely on a stool outside the door, like a disconsolate watchman, with a white scarf around his head and a string of prayer beads in his lap. Who was he, I wondered. They said that until a few years before the carpet had been taken to Mecca each year on a magnificently caparisoned camel, and the man on the stool had been the camel driver. His unique occupation was gone, and he had never been the same man since. ‘Poor fellow,' they said, ‘he never leaves the factory'–and when we looked at him, I noticed, he shifted his big feet uneasily.

Singin' in the dawn

Once very early in Beijing I strayed over a bridge to a leafy path beside a moat. I was led there by a curious cacophony of shouts, singing and twanged instruments, and I found it to be a place of self-fulfilment. Resolutely facing a high stone rampart above the moat, like Jews at the Wailing Wall, all along the path men and women were rehearsing their own particular accomplishments privately in the dawn. As we sing in the evening tub, so the people of Beijing go to that wall. Here was a man, his face a few inches from the masonry, declaiming some heroic soliloquy. Here a woman was practising an astonishing range of arpeggios. A splendid bass was singing a romantic ballad, a poet seemed to be trying out a lyric, an elderly man with a bicycle was plucking the strings of an antique lute. I thought of joining in, so universal did these impulses seem, sending To Be or Not to Be reverberating down that wall, or perhaps reciting some of my own purple passages: but I restrained myself, as a Foreign Guest, and just whistled my way home to breakfast.

‘I hope you see it truly'

A young forester walked by, as I picnicked by Loch Ness, and I asked him if he had ever seen the monster. He did not smile at the question. He had lived there always, he said, but he had not seen it yet. For him, though, its existence or nonexistence was not important, because he interpreted it as a didactic figure of faith. ‘It teaches us to believe in something we canna see–you understand me?' He thought a great deal
about the matter, he told me, and often looked out there on the half chance of glimpsing the creature. I said I seemed to see it every five minutes, but again he did not laugh. ‘Well before you go home,' he said meaningfully, looking me straight in the eye, ‘I hope you see it
truly
…'

Not altogether intelligible

The holy land of the Yezidis is in the Kurdish country of Iraq, and I was taken to meet some in their village north of Mosul. They follow an unusually cloudy religion concerned with the worship or perhaps propitiation of the devil. They seemed to me distinctly vague about it all, but although they were very hospitable I was haunted throughout my visit by the fear of committing some dreadful spiritual solecism. I must never, I had been told, utter the name Satan, for it is anathema to the devil: if somebody does speak it, the really convinced Yezidi must either instantly kill the transgressor, or commit suicide. Lettuces were strictly taboo: it is said that the Evil One once tried to hide inside a lettuce, but found its leaves insufficient to conceal him. Radishes were also unpopular, I was told, and the colour blue was something the Yezidis particularly loathed. They are most welcoming in everyday affairs, though, and if I wandered up the village stream the housewives at their washing would smile at me and make jokes (which, being expressed in a corrupt version of medieval Kurdish, were not altogether intelligible to me).