Contact! by Jan Morris Read Free Book Online Page A

evening I saw a company of players making their way through the trees for a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream . They were moving swiftly in their cowls, ruffs and velvets, all among the elms, and a few shy deer watched them pass between the tree trunks. Their footfalls were silent on the turf, their voices reached me faintly on the warm air, and they disappeared into the shadows merrily, with Puck occasionally practising his jumps, and Titania lifting her crimson skirts, and a few lumpish fairies skirmishing in the flanks. I never caught the spell of the theatre more hauntingly, as I watched them across the fence, and felt like Hamlet when the players came to Elsinore–‘You are welcome, masters, welcome all.’
    The moment of victory
    An old woman, horribly crippled, struggles down the last few steps of the Chapel of St Helena, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. It is a faintly illuminated crypt. Her progress is agonizingly slow, but she is determined to reach the altar by herself. Painfully with her two sticks she shuffles down the stone steps, each one a torment. Prayers are mingled with her breathing. When at least she reaches the bottom, though, and I peer into the darkness to watch her, she abruptly leans down and places her sticks beside her on the ground. Then, straightening herself as far as her old crooked frame will allow her, she raises her arms above her in triumph and exuberance, more like some whipcord young athlete at the moment of victory than a poor old woman, distorted and arthritic, who would soon have to face the steps again.
    At Schwab’s
    Hardly a Hollywood memoir is complete without a reference to Schwab’s, ‘The World’s Most Famous Drugstore’, and it is still heavy with the old mystique. Elderly widows of émigré directors reminisce about Prague over their breakfasts. Young men in jerkins and expensive shoes ostentatiously read Variety , or greet each other with stagey endearments. Ever and again one hears exchanges of critiques across the hubbub–‘I love her, she’s a fine, fine actress, but it just wasn’t her …’–‘Well, but what can one expect with Philip directing, she needs definite direction’–‘True, but shit, it just made me puke , the way she did that last scene…’ I took to sharing a table with the divorced wife of a Mexican set designer who shared my enthusiasm for Abyssinian cats.
    A royal court
    I had an introduction to a Mogul princess, of the dynasty which made Delhi its capital in the seventeenth century andbuilt the very walled city in whose labyrinthine recesses she lives. I found her ensconced in her front sitting room between portraits of her imperial forebears: a short, decisive old lady with a brief mischievous smile and an air of totally liberated self-possession. Her antique mansion is a beguiling shambles in the old Islamic style: a couple of rooms in the Western manner for the convenience of visitors, the rest more or less medieval–wide decrepit courtyard, dusty trellised vine, thickly populated chambers all around. There are granddaughters and sons-in-law and undefined connections; there are skivvies and laundrymen and assorted sweepers; there are children and dogs and unexplained loiterers in doorways. Forty or fifty souls constitute the tumbled court of the Begum Timur Jehan, and through it she moves commandingly in green trousers, issuing instructions, reminiscing about emperors, traitors or ladies of the harem, and frequently consulting her highly organized notebook, all asterisks and cross-references, for addresses or reminders.
    Politicians
    I love to watch the politicians ushering their constituents around the Capitol in Washington, DC, benign and avuncular, and to observe the endearing combination of the condescending and the wheedling with which they shake hands with their respectful electors at the end of the tour–‘We sure are