Contact! (8 page)

The croupier

I remember clearly the appearance of one of the most famous of the Nevada croupiers. He was a tall man who wore a check shirt, open at the neck, narrow trousers sustained by a belt with an ornate buckle, and a black eyeshade. His face was withered and wrinkled like a tortoise's, his nose hooked and slightly crooked, his eye sharp and pale, his mouth thin but humorous, conveying an impression of very calculated bonhomie. His ears were long and protruding and his long thin neck was entwined with a mesh of muscles, like Laocoön and the snake. Coldly and knowingly this man presided over the game, taking or paying mechanically with never a flicker of emotion, only the slightest hint of a nod, or the suspicion of a gesture, or the embryo trace of a beckon in the direction of the management. In front of him the piles of big silver dollars (common currency in Nevada then) glittered like stage properties; and once in a decade, I dare say, there passed through his hands a dollar made of gold, withdrawn with heart searchings from beneath some aged indigent's mattress.

Mormon faithful

Whenever I think of Salt Lake City, with the pinnacles of the Mormon Temple shining there beneath the mountains, I think of bright clothes and urgent smiles, the voices of the vast Mormon choir ringing across Temple Square on Sunday morning, the unquenchable cheerfulness of the people, the general air of satisfied competence, and the extraordinary
blandness of the old lady who told me one fine summer morning that for high religious purposes she had been tracing the course of her ancestry, and had succeeded in establishing it as far back as 64
BC
, ‘Only a few years,' as she rightly remarked, ‘before Caesar went to England, but of course the ancient Americans had been civilized for centuries, as the blessed prophet Moroni told our founder–that's him, that's the prophet Moroni, right up there on the Temple tower–see?'–and I looked up there, shading my eyes against the sun, but could perceive only the vague outline of that antique saint, holding what looked like a trumpet.

His Highness

One fine Arabian morning I walked into the palace of the Sultan of Muscat and Oman, on the shores of the Indian Ocean in Dhufar. Through the great gate of the outer courtyard I passed, and the slaves bowed low, into the polished hall of the palace, lined with bearded and begowned retainers, their rifles in their hands, until there approached me from the darkened recesses of the building a small dignified figure in a brown and gold aba, a turban on his head, a sword at his side, a heavy scent of frankincense emanating from his person. ‘Good morning,' said His Highness the Sultan Said bin Taimur.

He was only forty-four, but the voluminous dignity of his robes, his stately bearing and his luxuriant beard all combined to make him look much older. His eyes were large, dark, long-lashed and very serious. His mouth, though kindly and humorous, looked to me capable of an occasional
sneer. It was an antique, melancholy face, such you might see in old pictures of the East, and as profoundly enigmatical as the Pyramids. Later I was to encounter him in less autocratic mode, and then his eyes had a soft, thoughtful, almost sleepy look beneath their heavy eyelids, reminding me rather of an elaborately turbaned Cheshire Cat.

Feudalism

If you go down a gold mine, in the South Africa of the 1950s, you will find that racial feudalism extends even to the face of the reef. A black man brings you your boots, helmet and overalls; and a black man hands you your face rag as you enter the hoist; and a black man blows his whistle and drives you in his trolley along the underground corridor; and a black man helps you off with your jacket when, as you approach the stope, the heat of the pit suddenly blasts you. A white Afrikaner overseer grins you a welcome there, but in front of him, flat on his back in an alcove of the rock, is the African driller, helmeted and bathed in sweat at the very war front of the mine. He holds his big drill with his feet, and he lies there like some hefty freak or prodigy, a handless painter or a three-legged man, his whole body shaking with the vibration of the drill, and the very air about him shuddering with its noise. He pauses in his work as you approach, but the supervisor gives him a flicker of his torch, and he is off again, smiling broadly through his dirt.

Merciless fish

At sea in the Caribbean an elderly sailor pointed out to me the dark shadow of a shark, loitering beside the hull of our ship, and this is what he told me: ‘It's got no marcy, no marcy at all. Big blue fish, so you can't see 'um in de water, he's sly! No marcy, see, not a drop of marcy!'

Nanny talk

The nannies of the London park were there in their battalions, elderly complacent nannies and perky young ones and hard old professionals with starched faces. ‘So I said to her, I said, “No, madam, it is not and never has been my job to make the tea…”' ‘It's never been the same since Lady Sarah passed over but, there, times have changed, haven't they, dear?' ‘No, Jeremy darling, keep away from the doggy, dear…' ‘“Give him his tea?” I said, “I haven't been looking after children for thirty years without knowing when it's teatime,” I said, and with that I walked out…' ‘Try rubbing his back, Mabel, that usually brings it up, doesn't it, dear?'

Chief of the Egyptians

Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, lived blamelessly with his buxom wife and five children in a modest Cairo house that was plain to the point of ugliness. No rude or ranting orator greeted me there, behind some big officious desk. On the contrary, the Chief of the Egyptians was relaxed
and friendly, in shirtsleeves, his vest showing between the buttons, and he gave me coffee and talked pleasantly and intelligently for as long as I liked. Nasser like to call himself the first indigenous ruler of Egypt since the Pharaohs, and he was indeed a genuine through-and-through Egyptian, born of peasant stock on the banks of the Nile. ‘What a reasonable sort of man,' I said to myself as we talked across the plain deal table, sipping thick chamomile coffee from cups edged with blue roses and gilt.

I was not deceived, though. For many long years Nasser led an underground revolutionary movement, and I knew he had talents of deception and conspiracy of a very high order. His horizons were limitless, and he liked to talk about circles of power, national destinies, the interventions of fate and that sort of thing. The hours slipped smoothly by as he expounded his theories, the coffee cups came and went, until at last the President rose from the table, his sandals flip-flopping across the linoleum, to see me to the door in his shirtsleeves and wave me goodbye into the night. The sentries saluted obsequiously.

Anglo-Sudanese

Good living is a Sudanese tradition, but it came as a disagreeable surprise to me in a Khartoum bar one evening to meet a young Sudanese, just down from the university, drunk not in the Sudanese but in the British manner; facetious with the sweaty banter of his British companions, not with any African drollery, with his tie loosened precisely as theirs was and a cigarette sticking to his lower lip. His
grandfather had charged across the plain at Omdurman, brandishing a spear and screaming, but when this modern Sudanese slurred into the maudlin it was the maudlin of smoky pubs and potato crisps. I was shocked. But the British administrators of the Sudan have a wonderful knack of making you feel slightly ashamed of yourself, and I thought of that unlovely young man when I later read in a pamphlet of theirs: ‘A new nation is being born, and in the difficult world of today the new arrival needs all the sincere sympathy and disinterested help you can give or get it.'

I blushed: but it did not matter, for all the electric lights had gone out.

An exotic

Sen Tenzing was a Sherpa who had become well known as a porter with British mountaineering expeditions in the 1930s. He had always been a man of lively tastes, and by the time I met him in Kathmandu, when he was elderly, much respected and semi-retired, his appearance was wonderfully distinctive. On his head he wore a brown balaclava helmet with a peak, like the hats the Red Army used to wear. His grey sports shirt had polished major's crowns upon its epaulettes. Over woollen long johns he wore a voluminous pair of blue shorts, and on his feet were elderly trainers. A confused variety of beads, tokens and Tibetan charms dangled around his neck and a bracelet hung upon his wrist. In one hand he flourished an ice axe, in the other a fly whisk. It was not for nothing that Sen Tenzing, in the old days of gentlemanly climbing, had been affectionately christened
by his British employers ‘The Foreign Sportsman'.

Mr Beebe

Virginia City, the most famous old mining town of Nevada, has been kept boisterously alive by gambling, and by the presence there of Mr Lucius Beebe. Mr Beebe owns and edits a revived newspaper of the Gold Rush days, the
Territorial Enterprise
, and he lives grandly in a small Victorian mansion, keeping Rolls-Royces and St Bernards. Almost before we had settled in at our hotel he was aware of our presence by bush telegraph, and before long he was showing us the town, wearing a hat with a flat crown and very broad brim, a shirt with a wide and handsome check, an elegant pinstriped suit and a waistcoat embellished with a gold watch-chain. Mr Beebe is a fine sight at any time, but is at his best when he strides into a gambling house with his St Bernard at his heels, pausing for a moment beside a roulette wheel to throw a handful of silver dollars on the table with a satisfying clang, shrugging his shoulders with cheerful nonchalance when he loses the whole lot, bending an ear to a tattered prospector from the hills who has some slight financial worry, raising a negligent hand of greeting to an acquaintance here and there, listening patiently to the report of activities of a man who plans to get even with him for something he published in the paper last week, ushering his guest into the dimness of the bar with a truly Bostonian courtesy before hitching his ample frame on to a bar stool and ordering an enormously large whisky. During our stay in the town Mr Beebe lent us one of his Rolls-Royces, for our convenience.

Battle hardened

‘Lucky you got me,' Chicago taxi drivers nearly always seemed to say, if you wanted to visit the tough black neighbourhoods. ‘Not many guys would take you. I tell you, I was a Marine for four years, I fought in eight major battles, eight
major
battles, and believe me if any of these blacks get in my way I'll just run 'em down, just like that. Lock your door now. Like I say, it's lucky you found me. Not many guys would come out this way.'

Celebrating with Breughel

If ever you attend a rustic wedding in the Orange Free State you will realize how close the Afrikaner can be to the world of the old Dutch masters. The reception is held in the church hall, and the room is packed, and hot with robust gaiety. At the top table sit the bride and groom, flushed and rotund, she in an ornate white headdress, he intolerably corseted in black. Here are the bride's parents, wrinkled and sharp of face, and here also the two small bridesmaids, their plump country figures wrapped in pink and blue, posed self-consciously beside a potted palm. Big black servants scurry about with cold drinks and sweetmeats. ‘It's all done to plan,' says your host complacently. ‘All the tables are numbered, you see, so that everyone knows just where to sit–no confusion, you see, no pushing or shoving, everyone can have a good time.' And everyone does. Now and then somebody makes a speech, generally disregarded, and the bride and bridegroom sometimes simper at each other at the
demand of amateur photographers, and a hubbub of enjoyment and mastication fills the hall. Each trestle table makes a party of its own and eats its pastries with gusto, and shouts cheerfully for the Africans with the drinks; and the whole scene is warm and homely and animated, with the sheen of red velvet dresses, the fizz of bottled pop, smiling weathered faces, white satin, excited little girls and a smell of flowers and scent and sandwiches.

Shoeshine

The waiter at Colombo put down my breakfast and said he hoped I would have an enjoyable day. I told him I was going to make a pilgrimage to the grave of my father-in-law, a planter who had died in Ceylon during the war.

‘By God,' he said at once, ‘that's good, that's very good–parents is a bigger thing than the Lord Buddha himself,' and picking up my shoes, to clean them for the occasion, he bowed gracefully and withdrew.

We did not linger

With an American colleague I once went to a ceremony at Alexandria at which some new Czech weapons were to be handed over to the Egyptian forces. In those days many German specialists and advisers were working for the Egyptian army, and as we waited for the ceremony to begin we noticed a crowd of Egyptian officers milling around a tall figure in a black beret at the corner of the grandstand. We
elbowed our way across and found ourselves face to face with as obvious and disagreeable a Nazi officer as ever I saw. His face was congealed with hauteur; his movements were stiff and mechanical, like a robot's; and icy cold were the eyes with which, flicking his cane against his long legs, he turned to look at us. The jostling Egyptians crowded admiringly all around him, but my colleague was a Jew, and we did not linger.

A family outing

It was a festival day of some kind, and in the evening I asked a taxi driver in Beirut to take me for a run around the neighbouring hills, to observe the village goings-on. He brought along his family for the ride–a plump smiling wife in black, a little boy in jeans and a very small baby girl with enormous brown eyes. The driver had spent some years in America, and his English was sprinkled with rather dated Americanisms–‘Say, what you say we stop for a sundae?' or ‘How d'ya feel like a Coke, baby?'–as we progressed through the balmy evening. We frequently stopped in villages for some quick refreshment among the celebrations. Candles were burning in many windows, and there was a constant crackling of fire-works and whizzing of rockets. Gangs of young men strolled about the hilly streets, singing and shouting. Innumerable friends and relatives of the taxi driver emerged from houses to impede our progress, and we had so many bottles of pop that the baby was visited by a staccato series of burps. ‘What feast day is this?' I asked the driver. ‘Christmas, friend,' he replied (it was the middle of July).