Contact! by Jan Morris Read Free Book Online

are a hospitable people, but not inspiriting. They seem to be considering always the possibilities of misfortune. In the autumn the fall of the leaf seems a personal affliction to them, and the passing of the year depresses them like the fading of their own powers. Then in the chill evenings the women disappear into their private quarters, and the men light their little baskets of charcoal, tuck them under their fustian cloaks and squat morosely in the twilight, their unshaven faces displaying a faint but telling disquiet. There was a touching pathos, I thought, to their style. ‘How do you like your life?’ I asked one new acquaintance there, when we had progressed into intimacy. ‘Excellent,’ he replied with a look of inexpressible regret. ‘I love every minute of it’–and he withdrew a cold hand from the recesses of his cloak, and waved it listlessly in the air to illustrate his enjoyment.
    My dinner companion
    Marvellously lithe and light-footed are the people of Helsinki, big but agile, jovial at smorgasbords or loping across their snowfields like Tibetan holy men. Their children, slithering about with hockey sticks, give the heartening impression that they came into the world on skis. Their wives are neat as pins, and gossip sharply in expensive coffee shops. They are a people that nobody in the world could possibly be sorry for. They are sharp as nails, and twice as spiky. But here’s an odd and provoking fact. When I wanted something to read with my dinner some unexpected instinct guided my choice, a kind of reluctant nostalgia, a niggling trace of respect and affection, and when I sat down to my pig’s trotters I found myself dining with Turgenev: and all that brave and courteous citizenry, I felt, could not offer me quite such company.
    Diplomats and a pianist
    I once went to the British embassy in Washington, DC, to see the pianist Vladimir Horowitz presented with the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society, brought to him on a cushion by a marvellously suave young secretary and handed over with a graceful ambassadorial speech about violent times and the meaning of art. Mr Horowitz seemed pleased, but instead of replying in kind sat down at the piano and played in a highly vibrant and indeed imperial manner ‘God Save the Queen’, making full use of the sustaining pedal.
    There was a pause at the end of it, and instantly, as the last notes faded, I clicked the scene in my memory: and so I have held it there like a flash from a dream, the ambassador benignly at attention, the young diplomats rigid all about, the American guests clutching their champagne glasses, the great room aglow with carpets and portraits, the pianist’s hand raised in a last grandiloquence–an ornate little vignette of Washington, where life so often shimmers through a gauze curtain, insubstantially.
    Impact!
    King Sobhuza of Swaziland, one of the world’s last absolute monarchs, offered me a kindly greeting. His subjects fell on their knees, or even on their faces, when he passed, but I looked him Jeffersonianly in the eye, and shall never forget the moment. He had the most remarkable, most twinkling, most mischievous, altogether most entertaining face in the world. He seemed to radiate an amused but resolute complicity, as though he knew what a charade life was but was determined to make the most of it. He was dressed that day in European clothes; when he wore his tribal costume, a stunning assembly of feathers, bright textiles and talismanic brooches, the effect must have been terrific.
    Style
    I joined an eminent, kind and cultivated actress in taking a cab to an address on Second Avenue in Manhattan. Said thecab driver: ‘Whereabouts is that on Second Avenue, lady?’ Without a flicker in her elegant equanimity she replied: ‘Don’t ask me, bud. You’re the fucking cab driver.’
    On an Oxford evening
    Loitering around Magdalen College on a classic May