Contact! (9 page)

When we started our journey back the family was fast asleep in the back seat, in a tangle of ungainly abandon, and the driver and I smiled at each other. ‘Dig those crazy guys,' said he, as another festive party rollicked by.

Tactful parent

During my stay in Darjeeling I often saw a young American dressed in the habit of a Buddhist monk. He was studying at a nearby seminary, I was told, and wore the brown cloak, the sandals and the hair bun as to the manner born. Nobody appeared in the least surprised by this anomalous figure, and his father, who was paying him a visit from the States, seemed entirely at home with the turn of family events. ‘I'm going to drink, Jimmy,' I heard him saying to his son one day, puffing at his cigar and raising his glass, ‘I'm going to drink to all these wonderful, wonderful people of Darjeeling!' (And ‘Say,' he tactfully added as he put his glass down, rather hastily I thought, ‘is this Indian wine?
Delicious!
')

A small magnifico

I was strolling through the souk in Qatar when there emerged from a doorway beside me the smallest man I had ever seen. He was about four feet high, stout and prosperous looking, dressed in the resplendent regalia of an Arab gentleman–splendid brown aba, milk-white keffiyeh, black head-band, dagger and beads. With a flourish and a toss of his head this marvellous figure strode down the steps of his
house and swaggered away through the souk, as bold and assured as any gigantic African chieftain or Renaissance aristocrat. His proud head bobbed away among the packing cases, and a breath of the incense that perfumed his beard hung in the bazaar behind him.

A large magnifico

‘Back again,' said the magnifico at the cafe on the last ridge before Cetinje and the heart of Montenegro. We had met before, you see. He is always there, it seems, summer or winter, like a major-domo of these uplands, or a Chief of Protocol. He wears black breeches, and a wide belt like a cummerbund, and he stands about seven feet tall, and speaks in a basso profundo, and tosses slivovic back like lime juice, and is in all respects the very model of a modern Montenegran.

‘Ain't that right?'

In Montana once I found the road blocked for a mile or more by a mass of sheep. Some were moving very slowly, some were nibbling the sparse grass beside the highway, some were sitting down and one or two seemed to be fast asleep. At the head of this leisurely procession were two cowboys, mounted on fine black horses. The men were very weatherbeaten, dirty and bearded, with their tangled hair escaping from their hats and their fingernails black and broken. They had been rounding up the sheep in the surrounding mountains, to bring them down for shearing and to escape the coming winter storms. ‘We been fourteen days in the hills,' said one, ‘and seven days on the move. Sheep ain't very fast movers. Boy, will I be glad of a bed!

‘As for this horse,' he added affectionately, ‘all he wants is a good hot cup of coffee and a place to put his feet up. Ain't that right, boy?'

In a trance?

When I was alone in the Himalaya one day I saw a man. I saw him first in the extreme distance, across an absolutely blank snowfield at about 19,000 feet, to which I had climbed from the glacier below for the sake of the view. At first I could not make out what he was–only a black swaying speck, indescribably alone in the desolation. As he came closer I could see that he could only be human, so I plunged through the loose snow to meet him, and presently, there near the top of the world, thousands of feet and many miles above the trees, we met face to face. It was the strangest encounter of my life.

He was a holy man, wandering in the mountains, I suppose, for wandering's sake. His brown, crinkled, squashed-up face looked back at me expressionless from beneath a yellow hood, and seemed to find nothing strange in my presence there. He wore a long yellow cloak and hide boots, and from his waist there hung a spoon and a cloth satchel. He carried nothing else, and he wore no gloves. I greeted him as best I could, but he did not answer, only smiling at me distantly and without surprise. Perhaps he was in a trance.

I offered him a piece of chocolate but he did not take it, simply standing there before me, slightly smiling. Presently we parted, and without a word he continued on his unfaltering journey, making, it seemed, for Tibet without visible means of survival and moving with a proud, gliding and effortless motion that seemed inexorable. He did not appear to move fast, but when I looked round he had almost disappeared, and was no more than that small black speck again, inexplicably moving over the snows.

The truth of it

In a churchyard in County Monaghan I stood beside the grave of Seamus McElwain, a young IRA man whose whole life had been a succession of bloodshed and imprisonments until he had been killed by British soldiers in a neighbouring meadow. His epitaph was in Irish, and on the cross, together with the relief of a bird escaping through a mesh of barbed wire, was affixed a coloured photograph of him, a good-looking dark-haired boy in a dinner jacket. The tears came into my eye as I stood there (the wind rustling the hedges all around), and a gardener working nearby asked me if perhaps I was a McElwain myself? But I said I was simply crying for them all, whatever side they were on. ‘That's the truth of it,' he said, ‘that's the truth.'

Urgent inquiries

Wide eyed and open handed the Fijians greet me, in their tidy thatched settlements off the highway, or among the mangrove swamps where the women, hitching their skirts up to their waists, scoop about indelicately for shellfish. ‘Where are you going? What is your name? Are you married? Where do you live? Have you any children? Would you like a banana? How many people live in London? Do you sleep alone?' Their inquiries are directed urgently at me: the Fijian for curiosity is
via kila
–knowledge want. I told the maids in my Suva hotel that I was scared of them, because they stared at me so hard, and in the evening I found a little bowl of flowers placed beneath my window in appeasement. ‘Aaah,'
they said, shaking their big kind heads in remorse, ‘we no wish to frighten you.'

Their forebears used to be cannibals, but I would not mind being eaten in Fiji. The pot would be spiced, the cooking gentle, and the occasion in most ways merry.

On the waterfront

After a day around the docks with the notorious Manhattan longshoremen, still among the more obstreperous of the city's workers, I thought of them with more sympathy. That evening I took a coffee and doughnut in a diner down there, and tried to imagine what it would have been like to be a poor Irish immigrant half a century ago, looking for work on that hard and dirty shore. When the man on the next stool scowled across the napkin stand and said nastily, ‘You want all the sugar?' I told myself he was the victim of historical circumstance, and said I was most awfully sorry.

Empire builders?

I loved to sit on a Hong Kong ferry and contemplate the remaining Britons of Hong Kong. They were trapped for me there, like historical specimens, deep in their tabloids or compiling their shopping lists. What a line they represented, I used to think! What generations of exile culminated in their persons, listlessly looking out across the passing harbour, or doing the crossword puzzle! Their forefathers blazed a way across the world, veld to outback, pioneering in
shacks, beachcombing on reefs, disciplining recalcitrant Sioux or bayoneting fuzzy-wuzzies; and there they were beside me, the last of the long parade, indifferent to their origins, unconscious of them, perhaps, unexcited on the slat-seated ferryboat between Kowloon and Victoria!

The boat shudders; the gangplanks clatter down; the blue-shirted Chinese seamen swing open the iron gates; and in a trice, as the crowd streams off the vessel, those unobtrusive imperialists are so utterly overwhelmed by their Chinese fellow citizens that you would hardly guess there was a Briton left in Hong Kong at all.

Icelandic allegory

Beauty and the Beast
is an Icelandic allegory. Everybody who goes to the island is struck by the splendour of the girls. Pick a choice example now–the shop girl, say, who is packing your stuffed puffin in the souvenir shop, or pricing your lava-stone powder box. What a gorgeous strapping girl she is, what a terrific golden girl, with her wide-apart eyes, her hair bleached in Arctic sunshine, her exquisite complexion mixed out of snow and pink blossom!

Take your eyes off her for a moment, though, and observe the young man shambling down the street outside–towards his trawler, perhaps, or off to his fearful shift at the fish factory. He is the original Viking, I suppose. His forehead and his chin symmetrically recede, his cheeks are wolfishly sunken, his eyes blaze, and there is to his loping walk a suggestion of immense loose-limbed power, as though a tap on his shoulder would unleash his double
bladed battleaxe and send him off to Greenland with horns on his head.

Wedding pictures

When King Hussein of Jordan married it was supposed to be a ceremony of liberated modernity. However, as I joined the society ladies for the occasion I could not help feeling that we were close in spirit to the huddled jealousies and school-girl excitements of the harem. At the head of the stairs were two bold lancers in scarlet tunics and white breeches, as the eunuchs would have stood sentry in an earlier age, and the body of the room was a seething mass of women. They were dressed magnificently, a glitter of satins and brocades and furs, a mosaic of lipsticks and mascaras, a tinkling kaleidoscope of earrings, a flurry of sequinned handbags. Chanel and Dior thickened the air. How often and how brazenly did the women of the court eye each other's coutures! How heavily accentuated were the outlines of their eyes, like eyes seen through diaphanous curtains in forbidden corridors of the Seraglio! How scratchy and talon-like were the fingernails, how pinkly fleshy the figures, and how passive and doll-like those emancipated ladies looked, in serried and perfumed phalanx, as if some lascivious Sultan were about to pass through their ranks, picking a beauty here and a beauty there with a lordly gesture of his forefinger!

But presently a cameraman in a crumpled jacket suddenly pressed his way past the guards and said (as it were), ‘Just one more, ladies, please, give us a nice smile now.'

A holy clock

In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem a little chapel stands shrouded in black curtains beside the site of the sepulchre itself. One morning I found myself all alone before this shrine, and as I stood there in the silence I thought I heard a faint ticking noise from the inside. For a moment I stood hesitant, thinking it might be the working of a perpetual censer, or perhaps the swinging of an ornate lantern on its chain. But it was so regular and so insistent that I pulled the heavy curtains aside and looked in, and there on the altar, all alone among the ikons and candlesticks, a red moon-faced kitchen clock ticked away robustly, for all the world as though it were timing the eggs. I laughed with pleasure at this unexpected discovery, and there was an answering chuckle behind my back. Standing among the tall pillars of the rotunda, all but hidden in the shadows, there stood a gigantic Abyssinian priest in an attitude of serene meditation. When I turned to look at him a white gleam in the darkness testified to the smile upon his black bearded face.

Silly question

Wildness, freeness, recklessness–not in Vienna! I went to a police court there one day and, noticing one of the accused studying a road map between hearings, asked him if he was planning an escape. ‘No,' he said, ‘I am deciding the best route to visit my aunt at Graz.'

Expertise

I visited the Pioneer Museum, in Fremont County, Wyoming. During my visit a schoolmistress was taking a group of children round the exhibits, and I heard her drawing their attention to a chair that stood in a corner of the gallery. It was made all of bleached white horn: legs, seat, back and all. ‘That is an example', she was saying, ‘of the craftsmanship of the very first pioneers to come to Fremont County. Isn't that beautiful, children?' ‘Yes, ma'am,' most of them replied, but after the main body had moved on to the Shoshone relics, a section of the museum I preferred to circumvent, I noticed a pair of laggard urchins trailing along behind. They had not heard their teacher's encomium of the chair, but they too paused as they passed it, and inspected it with no less knowledgeable admiration. ‘Jeez,' said one to the other. ‘Take a look at that elk.'

First time lucky!

I crossed to Hoboken on the very last voyage of the very last Manhattan railroad ferry, and the shabby old boat was full for the occasion with reporters, cameramen, roistering office workers, people with banners and leaflets and comic hats and crates of champagne, and a trio of Salvation Army girls singing unaccompanied hymns indefatigably above the hubbub. I sat down on a grubby bench beside an elderly habitué of the ferry. ‘You sound kinda British,' he said. ‘Funny place for you to be, ain't it? You ride this boat regular?'

‘Never before in my life,' said I.

‘Well, you don't say. Some people have it easy. I've had to ride this ferry forty years to make the last crossing. You come over and do it first time!'

Advice

By and large, it seemed to me, British businessmen in Hong Kong pursued their various careers in a pleasant state of half-speed ahead, eating well, enjoying their friends, gossiping in the club bar, taking the junk out on Sundays–‘Whatever you do,' they used to tell me, ‘don't go out with Bill [or Simon, or Ted], you'll be drunk before you get out of the harbour.'

Racial tension

Six or seven miles out of Pretoria, on my way to catch an early flight, I saw a black figure running helter-skelter down the road towards the city. A moment later another followed, and then two or three more, and they panted by us, with serious faces and bulging eyes, like participants in some strenuous sunrise celebration.

‘What are they doing?' I asked my driver.

‘Those Kaffirs? They're on their way to work. They've probably got to start at seven, and they've got a long way to go, so they've got to run fast. It won't do them any harm.'

‘You don't like Kaffirs?' I surmised.

‘Kaffirs?' he replied with a genial twinkle. ‘I love them like they was vermin.'

Kurds on the move

How's this for a glimpse? Once, once only, I encountered a tribe of Kurds on the move. It was spring, the grasslands were thick with flowers, and in the distance the mountain barriers stood blue and purple and formidable, with a fleck of snow on their summits and a cloudless sky above. Against this heavenly background the Kurdish nomads moved triumphantly across my field of vision. Their herds of sheep and floppy-eared goats scrambled and jostled in the sunshine, and behind them the bold horsemen lorded it across the plain, riding their stocky horses like avenging marauders, rifles across their backs, bandoliers across their chests, sheepskin jackets slung about them grandly. The women walked alongside, carrying the baggage; the children scampered or lagged behind; the great herds eddied about and spilled over the landscape; and the effect of the procession, glimpsed in so wide and airy a setting, was that of a community of unusually cheerful brigands crossing a steppe to commit an atrocity.

Before fame hit him

A couple of days after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norkay became the first climbers ever to reach the summit of Everest, I was near the foot of the mountain on my way home. It was a still, oppressive, grey morning, and I saw away up the glacier, coming down from the mountain, a solitary figure moving swiftly and gracefully down the valley, swinging and buoyant, like some unspoilt mountain creature. A wide-
brimmed hat! High reindeer boots! A smile that illuminated the glacier! An outstretched hand of greeting! Tenzing!

He took off his big hat, smiling still, and sat down upon a rock. He was going to rest and wash, he said, and then traverse a neighbouring ridge towards his home village, where his mother lived. We had breakfast together, and he pulled from his wallet a snapshot of himself with a number of little Tibetan terriers. ‘Given me by the Dalai Lama,' he explained with pride, and taking a pen from his pocket he slowly wrote his signature (the only word he could write) across the bottom of it and handed it to me with a deprecatory grin. The last I saw of him there, he had stripped his lean lithe body to the waist and was soaping himself with water from a tin basin. It looked a chilly operation.