Contact!: A Book of Encounters

by Jan Morris

  The first of the Morgans

  On the land of Mr Harold Childs, a horse breeder of Harolyn Hill in Vermont, is buried the stallion Justin Morgan, the only progenitor of that superb American creature the Morgan horse. Mr Childs kindly allowed me to visit the horse’s grave, down the hill below his house, and when I walked back he was waiting for me with a present. It was a short piece of lead piping. ‘Now this is true,’ he said. ‘Just here where we’re standing there used to be the stables where Justin Morgan was kept, and when we was digging up there on the hill we found this old lead piping, came straight down the hill here, and a branch of that pipe it came right across the yard here and took the water to the stables. Now that’s a fact.

  ‘Now I’m going to give you this bit of that pipe. You can say–and it’s true–that Justin Morgan drank from the very water that came through this bit of pipe. You take it away with you, now.’ I took it gratefully and I have treasured it ever since. ‘I shall mount it on wood,’ I said as I started the car to leave, ‘and I’ll have a card saying “From this pipe drank Justin Morgan, the first of all the Morgan horses”.’ Mr Childs tipped his hat politely, in the old American way. ‘Good idea,’ he said.

  Hell’s traffic

  Nobody could be much less Neapolitan than I am, and when at last we reached the hotel, limp with excitement, amusement and exhaustion, and I had paid our driver his exorbitant but entirely justified fare, I told the hotel receptionist that I wanted to go home. ‘Don’t say that,’ he replied. ‘Wait till you get up to your room, and everything will seem different.’

  So it did. Dusk was falling by then, the harbour was speckled with small fishing boats, and in the distance Vesuvius loomed hazy in the half-light. The docks were full of white cruise liners, and even as I watched one of them slipped away from the quay towards the open sea. For a long time I could see her lights, fainter and fainter to the west–treading her way, I liked to imagine, towards calm realms of order. But it did not make me in the least homesick. The receptionist was right. I rang for a bottle of wine, and we sat there on our balcony in perfect contentment, while hell’s traffic snarled convivially below.

  Frenchness like a cloak

  Nothing had changed in the corner restaurant, the one with the awnings and the menu in the polished brass frame. It remained quintessential France, as we islanders have loved and loathed it for several centuries. Madame remained the epitome of everything false, narrow-minded and unreliable. One waiter seemed, as ever, to be some sort of duke, the other was evidently the village idiot. At the table next to mine sat a prosperous local family out for Sunday dinner, well known to the proprietress and esteemed throughout the community–unsmiling, voluminously napkinned, serious and consistent eaters who sometimes, eyeing me out of the corners of their eyes, exchanged in undertones what were doubtless sly Anglophobics before returning sluggishly to their veal.

  I do not doubt the bill was wrong. I am sure Madame disliked me as much as I detested her. The veal was, as a matter of fact, rather stringy. But what a contrary delight it all was! How excellent still the vegetables! How much better the wine in France! How stately that duke! How endearing the idiot! With what real gratitude, evading the final scrutiny of the prefectorial table, and sweetly returning Madame’s shifty glittering smile, did I wrap the Frenchness of that cafe around me like a cloak, and return cherished to the autoroute!

  They thought not

  In Beijing the compound called Zhongnanhai is the very heart of the Chinese communist despotism. Its main entrance is to the south, with two great guardian lions. The Red Flag flies from a mast outside, and within the gate an inner wall is inscribed with the cabbalistic text ‘Serve the People’. You cannot see past it, though. Two armed sentries stand there, with two more over their shoulders. They look distinctly unwelcoming, as they stare motionless and expressionless into the street: and sure enough, when I asked them if I could take a stroll inside Zhongnanhai, they seemed to think not.

  The Smile Test

  The Smile Test is the system I employ to gauge the responsiveness of cities, and it entails smiling relentlessly, if not unnervingly, at everyone I meet walking along a street. I devised it in Vancouver, which remains a good place to test the system. Pay attention now, as we try it out in Robson Street, one of the raciest of the city’s downtown boulevards. Many of our subjects disqualify themselves from the start, so obdurately do they decline eye contact. Others are so shaken that they have no time to register a response before we have passed by. A majority look back with a blank but generally amenable expression, as though they would readily return a smile if they could be sure it was required of them, and were quite certain that the smile was for them and not for somebody else. A few can just summon up the nerve to offer a diffident upturn at the corners of the mouth, but if anybody smiles back instantly, instinctively, joyously, you can be sure it is a visiting American, or an immigrant not yet indoctrinated. Whenever I go to Vancouver people ask me how they’re doing in the Smile Test. I respond with a nervous smile myself.

  Suburban enchantment

  In the evening I saw Die Fledermaus, staged with a genuine rollicking panache, and so instinct with the magic of the waltz, the whirl of white skirts and the flick of tailcoats, that when I inspected the faces of the women around me, Soviet proletarians every one, I found them glazed with a true suburban enchantment.

  GORGE

  One person in particular at Iceland, the Sydney skating rink, seemed to me quintessentially Australian. He was about five years old, I suppose, blond, lively, tough and unsmiling. He could not, it seemed, actually skate, but he was adept at running about the rink on his blades, and his one purpose of the morning was to gather up the slush that fell off other people’s boots, and throw it at passing skaters. This task he pursued with skilful and unflagging zeal. Hop, hop, he would abruptly appear upon the rink, and, picking a likely target, staggering his way across the ice, inexorably he would hunt that victim down until slosh! the missile was dispatched–and hobble, hobble, quick as a flash he was out of the rink again, gathering more slush.

  He hardly ever fell over, he seldom missed, and he did everything with a dexterous assiduity. When I asked him his name he spelt out GORGE with his finger on the rail of the rink; when I asked him if he was enjoying himself he just nodded grimly; and in my mind’s eye I saw him thirty years from then, exploding into a company meeting perhaps with an irresistible takeover bid, or relentlessly engineering the resignation of a rival undersecretary. I kept my eye firmly on him as I walked out of Iceland, for instinct told me he was assembling slush for me.

  Seen from a bus

  I sit in a motionless bus near the Sugar Loaf, at Rio de Janeiro, at a place where a small park runs down to the sea. There are military offices nearby, and in constant twos and threes colonels and captains walk by carrying briefcases. My eye is captured, though, by a solitary middle-aged man hanging about at the edge of the park. He bears himself elegantly, slim and erect in a well-cut grey suit, but there is something wrong with him. It seems to be partly physical, partly mental and partly, perhaps, too much coffee. He can never get comfortable. If he sits on a bench, after a moment he gets up again. If he takes a turn around the grass, he abruptly stops. Sometimes he looks up at the hill above, but it seems only to disappoint him, as if he cannot see what he is looking for up there. He inspects the passing officers keenly (was he once a colonel or captain himself?) but he recognizes none. He gazes longingly out to sea, but the sun gets in his eyes. When my bus starts, and we move away from the park, I wave at him through the window, he waves abstractedly back–but not at me, I think, not at me.

  Very simple matters

  ‘Certainly,’ said the government spokesman, perusing my list of questions. ‘By all means, these are very simple matters. We can attend to them for you at once. As I told you, it is our duty! It is what we are paid for! I myself have to attend to an important meeting this afternoon–you will excuse me I hope?–but I will leave all these little m
atters with our good Mrs Gupta and all will be taken care of. I will telephone with the answers myself without fail–or it not myself, then Mrs Gupta will be sure to telephone you either today or tomorrow morning. Did you sign our register? A duplicate signature here if you would not mind, and the lady at the door will issue you with the requisite application form for a pass–it will make everything easier for you, you see. Have no fear, Mrs Gupta will take care of everything.’

  But neither he nor Mrs Gupta ever did ring.

  I smell

  I drove direct from the horrible purlieus of San Cristóbal, one of the worst of the Lima barriadas, to have tea at the Country Club in San Isidro. The odour of the slum went with me, clinging to my clothes and the soles of my shoes like some blasphemous travesty of incense, and as I sat there among the little black dresses and the sticky cakes, the greying distinctions and the foppish playboys, the starched nannies and the exquisite children on the lawn, the chic and the cultivation and the chit-chat of urbanity–as I sat there with the squalor still in my hair I could not help remembering, Pharisaical it seems in retrospect, Dr Johnson’s celebrated differentiation, I smell, you stink.

  Bastille Day

  For hours I had been hanging about the airport at Kharkov, fobbed off by supercilious airline employees through delay after delay in a bitterly cold and comfortless waiting room, until at last the patience of my Soviet passengers expired. They found a boarding ramp, pushed it on to the tarmac, climbed up to the aircraft and, brushing aside the horrified stewardesses, plumped themselves in their seats and called for vodka. I followed in their wake rejoicing, feeling as though we had stormed life’s varied Kremlins.

  At the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem

  I looked at Adolf Eichmann to see how he was reacting, half expecting to see some flicker of perverse pride crossing his face. But he was sitting well back in his chair, with his hands in his lap, blinking frequently and moving his lips, and he reminded me irresistibly of some elderly pinched housewife in a flowered pinafore, leaning back on her antimacassar and shifting her false teeth as she listened to the railing gossip of a neighbour. It was only towards the end of the morning, several hours, ten thousand words and an eternity of horrors later, that the old lady in the pinny began to sway and fidget a little in her chair, as though she were pining for a nice cup of tea.

  Waiting for Churchill

  Up on the mountainside, while the press of the world jostle for scoops and angles in the hostelries below, old Sir Winston lies in bed. He lies there in seclusion, the last of the giants, reading his newspapers and confounding his pleurisies while they wait for him to die. Some of my colleagues depict him demanding brandy, puffing cigars, writing his own health bulletins, calling for splendid enormous meals. For myself, when I was up the mountain one evening I thought I heard a sound from the villa, above the sweetness of the birds and the distant sawing of a woodman. It came from an upstairs window and it sounded to me uncommonly like a rich, quixotic, irrepressible, ageless Harrovian chuckle. ‘How come you heard that and nobody else? You got influence some place? Hey, garçon, two dries.’

  Home thoughts from Barbados

  The parishioners who came to the service were nearly all black people, sugar workers and their families from the island estates, but few of them were really strangers to me. Their white muslins and their wide straw hats once graced the English social fabric, and when they sat down expectantly for the sermon the rustle of their petticoats and the crackling of their starch filtered though to me across the pages of many an Edwardian memoir. I knew what hymns they would sing with gusto, for I had heard the same tentative starts and communal diapasons at many a grumbling British army church parade. The verger in his black cassock I had often met before, pointing out the ravages of death-watch beetle in the shires, and when the piano struck up its preliminary chord I knew from her air of proud command which of those old friends would be the one who always comes in half a beat before the beginning of the verse. ‘Amen, amen,’ murmured the congregation at the end of the sermon, and it was like the clatter of hobnailed boots on the stone-flagged floor of a dairy.

  End of a battle

  The Israelis had won. Tanks clattered by. Trucks came and went. Soldiers climbed aboard and waved goodbye to each other. It rained, and I prepared to move on too, but just then a rainbow came. ‘Look, a rainbow,’ I said to a bearded and taciturn sergeant not long from Romania, and added sentimentally: ‘Omen of peace!’ ‘It is not a reasonable analogy to the present situation,’ he replied, shifting his Sten gun on his shoulder. ‘God showed Noah the rainbow as a promise for no more floods in the future. When He merely wished to show that Noah could now leave the ark, He dispatched a small bird, carrying a piece of tree in its snout.’

  Among the treasures

  In the vaults of the Central Bank of Persia, before the Iranian Revolution, were kept the priceless and legendary Crown Jewels, in a huge underground strongroom. I was down there one crowded weekday, when it was open to the public, and came across an agreeable case of brooches and little jewelled watches. I stooped to examine them more closely, and as I did so the treasure house suddenly reverberated with the ear-splitting blast of an alarm hooter. Everyone froze. Not a word was spoken. The hooter went on hooting. For a moment nothing else happened, and then a smart young woman in green walked with composure across the room. She avoided the case containing the Gika of Nadir Shah, with its diamond ornaments of bayonets and gun barrels around a monumental emerald. She ignored the sceptre presented to Reza Shah by the people of Azerbaijan, with its gold lions rampant around a jewelled globe. She took no notice of the Sea of Light inherited from the first Mogul Emperor of India. Instead she walked calmly through the room, utterly silent but for the clicking of her heels, directly between the display cases to me. ‘May I please ask you,’ she said with an amiable smile, ‘to remove your elbow from that metal bar around the jewel case?’ I moved my arm. The hooter stopped. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and walked composedly back again.

  Affronted

  ‘Those Algerians!’ expostulated an elderly politician in Reykjavik, when our conversation turned to politics. He wagged his beard irritably, as elderly Nordic politicians do. ‘They’re nothing but troublemakers. They were up here, you know, making mischief–Einar Arnarson, I think it was, he put paid to them, he and Jon Olafsson and one or two others’–and suddenly it dawned upon me, as his sharp affronted eyes blazed into mine, that he was talking about the Barbary Pirates.

  A lovely dream

  The day I arrived in Harar, Ethiopia, I spent a happy hour in the market, sitting beside a courteous silversmith and watching the rural citizenry at its shopping. There was nothing ugly to be seen there, nothing sham, nothing pretentious. It was like watching an assembly of beautiful lithe-limbed animals, so easily did all those people move, so naturally, so discreetly; and as I sat there on my stone seat, the craftsman tinkling away beside me, or engaged in earnest but desultory haggling with half-naked but otherwise impeccable debutantes, I thought how fortunate were those creatures of nature, those children of the thatched hut and the empty places, those sisters of specious innocence. But alas, even there the dream would soon be over.

  Fair enough

  Would they be casting their votes as Jamaicans, I asked the Kingston Rastafarians, in the forthcoming elections? The idea horrified them. ‘Tell your Queen Elizabeth,’ they said, ‘that the suffering Ethiopians assembled here from the corners of the earth, yea verily from the four corners, it is written, the seventh year of the seventh epoch, yea verily the time has come, Abja!–tell her that we are aliens in this land, and cannot vote in elections imposed upon us by our oppressors. Fair enough?’

  Proverb in Formosa

  The Vice-President of Nationalist China, in his garden on the island of Formosa, folded his intricate old hands in his lap and projected a Chinese proverb at me. Beneath the trees on the edge of the lawn a stalwart servant waited in attentive silence, and a few soft raindrops were spattering
the foliage in a sly, oriental kind of way. ‘Among our people we have a saying,’ the Vice-President said. ‘“It is foolish to judge the character of a man by the complexion of his face.”’ And his pale eyes flickered at me, as an old experienced tiger’s eyes might blink in the forests of the night.

  Opposite directions

  Very early one morning two men met outside my tent on a mountainside in Wales. The younger of the two was a tatterdemalion Welsh shepherd, cloth capped, driving his sheep down to the road with a clatter and scurry, calling to his dog, shouting guttural Welsh encouragements and waving his thick stick like an apparition. The elder, a scholarly looking man in plus fours, was evidently a believer in rhythmic breathing, for as he walked he whistled to himself a monotonous Bach-like melody–two beats to each footstep, round and round, over and over again in an endless classical cadence. The two men passed each other as I gaped at them through my tent flap. The shepherd brandished his stick and grunted casually; the scholar interrupted his fugue to offer a greeting in a reedy academic voice; and so they disappeared into the rain, in opposite directions.

  At the theatre

  The audience at a Tokyo Kabuki theatre consists mostly of women in kimonos, following the drama with an informed avidity I have seen paralleled only among rugby crowds in South Africa. You sit there wedged between the brocades, baffled by the tortuosities of the plot, swathed in the sickly perfumes of Japan, while high above you in the balcony the narrator declaims his lines majestically from a tasselled lectern. The man beside him plucks dreamily or astringently at his ancient instrument, and on the magnificent stage the queer medieval figures sit and strut and gesticulate with falsetto voices and grand flamboyant costumes. All that is grand, awful or ablaze in the old Japan lives on, twitching and quivering, in the theatre of the Kabuki.