Pianos and Flowers

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The Dwarf Tale-Teller of the Romanian Rom

  DR EDWINA MACLEOD WAS AN ANTHROPOLOGIST WHO had worked with Margaret Mead in Samoa. Mead, whose great work, Coming of Age in Samoa, first published in 1926 and regarded as one of the classics of cultural anthropology, enjoyed a considerable reputation as an interpreter of the mores of South Sea adolescents. Edwina was only an occasional collaborator, and features in none of the papers that Mead published, nor in any of her letters to the learned societies that supported her work. Mead had a stamp bearing her image and a high school named after her; Edwina attracted none of these accolades, spending her entire academic career in two low-ranking colleges in upstate New York. Her relative obscurity, though, meant that she avoided the criticism directed against her more illustrious colleague. According to a number of later detractors, Mead’s conclusions as to what Samoan teenage girls got up to was based on the testimony of a handful of unreliable informants, one of whom eventually admitted that they were feeding the anthropologist lurid stories as a joke. Anthropologists, it was suggested, are obvious targets of those who enjoy hoaxing others with fanciful stories. If life is dull – as it often is for teenagers – then the presence of a cultural anthropologist might be just too much of a temptation.

  Edwina’s first opportunity to do work in the field came in 1927, when she responded to an advertisement placed in The Proceedings of the Anthropological Society of Washington. This revealed that the society had an unexpended portion of a grant that had been allocated for research in South-East Asian anthropology. The grant in question had been taken up by one Professor George Hopkinson, who for some years had been researching into the social context of the outlawed, but then still surviving, practice of headhunting amongst the Buyaya people. Hopkinson had published several papers on ritual violence and the incorporation of otherness, based on his three years in the field. The grant was intended to run for a total of five years, and so two years’ worth remained unspent. This was a result of Professor Hopkinson’s failure to return from the field. Attempts had been made to contact him, to no avail, and the conclusion was reached that he had abandoned anthropology for some other pursuit. A puzzling note had been received by the local authorities in Luzon, written in Melanesian pidgin, and on a scrap of much-handled paper. This read: Hopkinson bilong America bilong anthropology he go long time bilong navy good bye. Nobody was sure what weight, if any, should be given to this message, although it seemed to confirm that Professor Hopkinson would not be returning. In the circumstances the society decided to make the remaining grant available to a scholar who would continue with the promising research that he had begun but left unfinished. It was into this breach that Edwina stepped, in spite of the anxiety that a number of her friends expressed about the project.

  “Why study headhunting?” asked one. “Surely it’s the sort of thing one should just leave well alone.”

  “And what’s there to study?” asked another. “One group goes off and chops off the head of a member of another group. So, what’s there to say about that?”

  She smiled patiently. “There’s more to headhunting than you might imagine,” she explained. “Headhunting is about defining community. In taking the head of an outsider and bringing it back to the village shrine, the boundaries of the domestic – the local – are clarified. The victim comes from beyond. In bringing him – or his head – into the fold, the community is entrenched as an actor. This is a collaborative venture in which the victim himself collaborates – although somewhat unwillingly. The we of the venture is set against the them. That’s an important element in the headhunting rituals and songs in which the village re-creates its history.”

  “So they sing about it too?” asked an incredulous friend.

  Edwina nodded her head. “Yes,” she said.

  Her research in the field went well, although the village to which she attached herself appeared to be more interested in weaving than headhunting. She did, however, transcribe a number of songs in which headhunting raids were commemorated, and these were duly published in the society’s Proceedings, along with a translation and commentary. Shortly before her return to the United States, a woman in the village, one of the weavers, with whom Edwina had become friendly, took her in secret to a shrine in the jungle and showed her the village treasures. These included what might have been several human heads, wrapped in reeds, and placed on a candelabra-type wooden stand. Pointing to one of these, the woman uttered the word Hopk, a term she was unable to translate and which remains something of a mystery.

  On her return to the United States, Edwina attended a number of anthropological conferences at which she gave well-received papers based on her field-work. It was at one of these conferences that she met another anthropologist, James Bunker Hall. He was dean of undergraduate studies at a liberal arts college in Ohio, and was the author of a major study of consanguinity in Appalachia. James was a friend of Edward Hopper, the artist, and displayed two of his early watercolours on the wall of his decanal office. It was through James that Edwina met the Hoppers, and formed a firm friendship. The two couples occasionally toured New England together and in the summer, when colleges were on vacation, would spend weekends on Cape Cod, walking on beaches and looking up at the cloud-swept skies that Hopper would later faithfully record in his painting.

  Edwina expected James to propose to her, and on several occasions she imagined that he came close to doing this. But he never did so, and in mid-July one summer he announced that he had been offered, and had accepted, a dean’s job at Tulane University in New Orleans.

  “I’ll look into something for you down there,” he said to Edwina. “There may be something at Baton Rouge, perhaps. Or Tulane. I’ll do what I can.”

  At first, he wrote regularly, every other week, but gradually his letters became less frequent – and less informative. Eventually they were replaced by the occasional postcard, on which a terse message might be scribbled. So busy. Students want this, that and the next thing. Never satisfied. One freshman in trouble with the cops. Another had all his clothing stolen in the French Quarter. All of it! Will write again soon, Bunk.

  But he did not. She thought of him often, and then less frequently. From time to time she would utter his name sotto voce, as the superstitious might intone a magic word. She blushed when she found herself doing that, and tried to put him out of her mind. Eventually he became no more than a slightly fuzzy memory – as a memory of happiness or contentment might be. She did not regret him, and she felt no anger or resentment. Love does not keep a tally, she reminded herself. Love does not count the replies it receives, or does not receive, to its letters or its postcards.

  Edwina is the woman seated in the foreground of the photograph, next to the other woman in the picture, who is wearing a shawl and waiting, against the advice of the popular adage, for a kettle to boil. The kettle, partly obscured by the smoke of the fire, is suspended from a curved iron spit, but seems far too high above the half-hearted flames below. Such a kettle might take a considerable time to come to the boil, one might imagine – perhaps a whole day, or even a dayand-a-half. The disconsolate look of those ranged around the camp fire certainly points in this direction – these are not people who are anticipating the serving of coffee within the next few minutes.

  Although Edwina was at the time an associate professor at a college near Buffalo, this particular photograph clearly portrays field-work being carried out far away from that welltended campus. Supporting documentary evidence points to its having been taken in 1936, in Romania, where Edwina spent more than a year on a project supported by a generous grant from one of her college’s benefactors. Part of this time was spent in Bucharest, but periods of up to a week at a time were spent in the field, not just in the metaphorical sense. In this photograph she is, indeed, in a field – probably one in the foothills of the Transylvanian Mountains. Bucharest would have been a long day’s train journey away, and the pleasures of its café society might well have been on the anthropologi
st’s mind as she sat waiting for the weak cup of acorn coffee that would in due course be offered.

  Edwina’s decision to undertake field-work in Romania followed upon a conversation she had in 1934 with a member of the council of the American Society of Social Anthropology, which held its annual conference that year in Boston. The council member was a noted professor at Harvard and the author of an important work on the life of Irish travellers, then known, as they still are in some quarters, as gypsies. This book had introduced readers to the lore and language of those whom many regarded with disdain. It showed that such groups had a culture and institutions that were complex and often misunderstood by a predominantly hostile majority community. In particular, it recorded the rich and vivid stories that Irish gypsies told one another around their firesides. These stories – peopled by all sorts of leprechauns, water spirits, and fairies of every description – were later to be more widely popularised by folklorists, but were well received by those who read this Harvard anthropologist’s pioneering work.

  “You should look at some of these gypsy communities,” the professor advised Edwina. “I’m sure that Margaret (Mead) would agree with me.”

  Edwina expressed an interest, and this led to a more specific suggestion from the professor.

  “Of course, you should go to the heart of the culture,” he said. “Go to the source, which is Romania. That’s where the real material is to be found.”

  Edwina wondered what aspect of gypsy life she should study, and this led to the response, “Well, there’s something I would look at if I were a bit younger …”

  And if you didn’t have your very comfortable chair at Harvard College, thought Edwina.

  “ … yes, if I were a bit younger, I’d go off and look at the Dwarf Tale-Tellers of the Romanian Rom.”

  Edwina was intrigued, and asked for more details.

  “The Dwarf Tale-Tellers,” the professor explained, “are a little-known phenomenon outside the world of Transylvanian gypsiology. Professor von Kruse, you may have met – no, perhaps not: I don’t think he was ever up in Buffalo – anyway, von Kruse did some work on them back in the early twenties.”

  She so resented the assumptions in this conversation. She accepted that her college was not in the same league as Harvard – nowhere near it, in fact – but she and her colleagues had their contribution to make and could do without the condescension of Ivy Leaguers. But these were thoughts you did not express, because everybody knew where academic patronage and power lay, and it was not in obscure colleges in up-state New York, nor anywhere similar, for that matter.

  “These dwarf tale-tellers?” she prompted.

  “Yes. Dobbie von Kruse did a very interesting piece on them. They are regarded by the Rom as being a particular repository of the old legends. Rather like those Homeric storytellers you still find wandering around in Serbia and Croatia. Yet Dobbie could barely scratch the surface, as he found very few of them and he had to get back to the States before he could record everything he wanted to record. Pity, that.” He paused, looking at Edwina as if to sum up her suitability for such a task. “Do you think you might be interested in going out there for a while? I could have a word with some people I know in Washington.”

  Have a word with some people I know in Washington! Those were exactly the words she wanted to hear, and she rapidly assured him that there was nothing she would like more – nothing – than a field trip to Romania.

  “Good,” said the professor. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  She took to Bucharest. She had a small flat in a fin-de-siècle building overlooking the river, and it was here that she had meetings with the person she described as her facilitator – a hard-up private scholar who had written a history of Romania and who seemed to have good contacts with everybody of any influence in the city and more broadly in the country as a whole. Yes, he could arrange for her to spend time with a Rom family. Yes, he could ensure that they were in touch with one of the elusive dwarf tale-tellers. Yes, he could provide her with such equipment as she required and the transport that would get her to the family’s campsite.

  Edwina already spoke basic Romanian, having spent six months learning the language before she embarked on the project. It would not be necessary, then, to take an interpreter, as long as the family with whom she was to stay could be persuaded to speak slowly and clearly. There would be no trouble with that, the facilitator assured her, as long as she was prepared to pay them to speak slowly. “These people will do anything for money,” he added. She thought that this indicated a somewhat uncharitable view, but she said nothing about it. “One thing you have to remember about Romania,” a friend at the United States Embassy in Bucharest had warned her, “is not to say anything – to anybody. This place is full of secret agents, of spies, informers, and assassins. You never know who is in the Iron Guard, or in their pay. Most people won’t even say good morning to the King, let alone confide in him.”

  On her first visit to her gypsy community, she was received politely enough by her host – the man wearing the hat and standing in front of the caravan yoke. When she asked him about the dwarf tale-teller, his eyes narrowed. Then he gestured to a nearby bush. “He is lying under a bush at the moment,” he said. “It is best not to disturb him just yet.”

  Anthropologists need to be patient, and so Edwina sat quietly until she saw the foliage of the bush parting and a small, indeed diminutive figure emerge. This small man looked at her for a moment, and then walked over to her host and started a conversation with him. Edwina tried to hear what was said, but could make nothing of it. At length, her host came over and said, “The dwarf is worried that you are unclean.”

  Edwina frowned. “But I am very particular about that sort of thing,” she said. “I had a bath this morning before leaving Bucharest.”

  “No,” said her host. “This is nothing to do with washing. Our people have a strong sense of purity and impurity. I keep explaining it to anthropologists.” He sighed. “They don’t all get it. We Rom have a concept of pollution that, I’m sorry to say, regards the lower part of the human body as unclean – along with all non-Rom people. So you, I’m afraid, are ranked alongside the lower part of the anatomy. This is not meant to be offensive in any way – it’s just the way things are.”

  Edwina became aware that there was a man wearing a greatcoat standing immediately behind her. He can be seen clearly in the photograph, although his features are obscured by shadow. “Who is that?” she asked her host.

  He glanced in the direction of the strange figure. “That is the man from King Carol’s secret service,” he said. “He is watching you because you are a foreigner – and an American one at that. He will be watching all the time you are here. I shall give him a tarpaulin to sleep under, so that he does not get soaked by the dew.”

  “Will the dwarf tale-teller tell me some of his traditional stories?” asked Edwina.

  The host shook his head. “That will not be possible,” he said. “Look at him. He’s standing out there in the middle of the field. That is because he thinks you are unclean.”

  Edwina looked up at the sky. You spent years equipping yourself to investigate the lives of people so different from yourself, and then they turn round and call you unclean. Ungrateful people, ungrateful. And I see no reason why I should pretend to like them. I shall return to Bucharest and write up my report. I shall describe just how awful they are. I shall tell the truth.

  She rose. The kettle was never going to boil. In Bucharest they would be serving coffee now, piping hot and smelling gorgeous. Tonight, she would go out for dinner with some new friends she had made. She no longer cared about the dwarf tale-teller and his people. She was unclean, and unclean people presumably cared very little for those who considered them unclean. Unclean – what a cheek! She would have another bath when she got back to the flat. It would take away the smell of the smoke that had drifted into her clothes. She would luxuriate and then go out and enjoy herself. Why not? Why shoul
d anthropologists not have as much fun as others? Why not?

  She walked away, leaving the smoking fire, the secret policeman, the tale-teller – leaving all of these people behind. Bunk, she muttered under her breath. Oh, dear Bunk, what are you doing right now, down there in New Orleans? Shall I come and visit you? Yes, I shall. We shall eat crayfish in hot sauce and listen to Dixie and talk about life and other things. Yes, we’ll do that, dear Bunk, dear Bunk.

  Duty

  CLAIRE AND DOTTY WERE TWINS, SEPARATED IN THEIR entry into the world by no more than a couple of minutes. The fact that Claire was older than Dotty by those few brief moments determined the shape of both of their lives. When we look in retrospect at the saliences of our lives, we realise, sometimes with astonishment, that this is how they are shaped: a single event; a chance word of advice; an apparently minor decision by another – any of these may dictate what happens to us and what we ourselves do. In the face of this subjection to chance, the role played by free will and what we see as our own choice may seem a small one.

  Their parents, Harold and Liza, were pleased with the arrival of twins. Their mother had experienced a difficult pregnancy and the doctor had warned that another could threaten her life. “You have been given two healthy daughters, Mrs Clarke,” he said. “Leave it at that.” Harold held Liza’s hand and kissed it in gratitude. He could not believe his good fortune, which seemed to him to be unreal, undeserved. “You’ve given me two girls,” he said. “I have you and two lovely girls; that is enough.”

  A few months later, after a sudden decline in her health, Liza was admitted to hospital in acute pain. An operation was performed, but without success, as Liza died four days later of septicaemia. Harold was left to care for the girls. He was a grocer in Glasgow, who had his own shop and all the cares that that brought. His sister, Peggy, who was a theatre nurse in Manchester, gave up her job to return to Glasgow. She kept house for him and took on responsibility for the twins.