Contact! by Jan Morris Read Free Book Online Page B

obliged to you, Congressman’–‘We certainly are, sir’–‘I shall never forget this day, Congressman’–‘ Fine, fine, great to have you along …’ Meeting a likely looking gent in a Capitol corridor, Itried a gambit myself, as a speculation. ‘Morning, Senator,’ I said. ‘Hullo there, young lady,’ he instantly replied. ‘Having fun?’–and off he strode to his office, chomping, alas for my purposes, not an actual, but at least a metaphorical cigar.
    Perfect understanding
    Long after the end of the British Empire, some of its manners balefully survived. In Patna I had occasion to go to the Secretariat to ask permission to take photographs of the city, and found myself before a functionary of such classic insolence, such an unassailable mixture of resentment, patronage, self-satisfaction and effrontery that for a moment I felt like picking up his inkwell and throwing it at him. But I bit my lip and restrained myself, and as I glared back at him there the scales dropped from my eyes: his image blurred and reassembled before me, his colour paled somewhat, and I saw before me his true archetype and inspiration, the lesser English civil servant–now, as in imperial times, the insufferable master of his art. I thanked the man profusely and assured him that I understood perfectly why I would have to make an application in triplicate to the Divisional Officer, who would unfortunately not be on duty until the following Wednesday afternoon.
    Snow in Holland
    I was once in Amsterdam when the first snow of the winter fell. The men in the central junk market, among their stuffedbirds and rusty curios from Surinam, broke up the most hopelessly lopsided of their kitchen chairs and made bon-fires of them. A cold wind whistled in from the North Sea, huddling the more mature housewives in their mutation minks and driving the portly burghers to the felt-covered newspaper tables of the cafes, where they meditated ponderously over their coffees like so many East India merchants considering the price of apes.
    Joburgers
    I found the poor black inhabitants of the Johannesburg locations, in the cruel days of apartheid, hard to understand. Sometimes they were grave and courteous, and I was reminded of Ethiopian chieftains; sometimes they treated me with such bubbling flippancy that I thought they might be teasing me; sometimes a flash of malice entered their eyes, or something gave them such inexplicable amusement that they burst into a tumult of infectious laughter, or danced little jazzy jigs upon the pavement. When they spoke, they did so with explosive animation, but when they listened the whole of their being supplemented their hearing, they became one great ear, and their white eyes, their tense bodies, their eager fingers and their yellow striped socks all waited upon my words. And once in my hotel I heard tinny twangs of music from the street outside; and there beneath the arcades of President Street a solitary black man was lounging by, in a crumpled brown hat and blue dungarees, plucking away at a guitar as he walked, humming a high-toned melody, and expressing in his everygesture, in the very swing of his shoulders, the spirit of blithe indolence.
    â€˜The same again’
    Kabul in the 1960s is a tense, nervous, shifty capital, and edgiest of all at night, when the streetlights are dimmed, the brilliant Asian stars come up above the hills and only a few shrouded watchmen are left brooding on the doorsteps. Then the whole place feels sleepless and dry-eyed, like some insomniac conspirator. Sometimes a shot rings dead on the night, and sometimes a distant shout, and when a donkey pads softly by you can hear the two men upon its back, nebulous in white robes, murmuring to each other in low sporadic undertones. I once asked an old man of Kabul what would happen if another enemy attacked this capital as the British had catastrophically attacked it in 1845. Would