Love Over Scotland - Alexander Hanchett Smith [129]
“I have at last begun my researches. Ling, the young man who has been assigned to look after me, is proving very helpful, 270 A Letter to Edinburgh
even if he has a tendency to moodiness. I am not sure, though, of his reliability as an interpreter, as he has a strong contempt for everybody to whom we speak and he keeps arguing with them very loudly in dialect before he translates. This leads me to believe that he is distorting the answers and giving me a highly flavoured account of what is being said. Let me give you an example. The following is a transcript from my notebooks. The informant, informant 3, is the wife of a minor pirate, a rather depressed-looking woman with six children, all of them under twelve. Her house is on the edge of the village.
“DM: ‘Please ask her to tell me how she pays for the family provisions.’
“Interpreter speaks in Chinese for four or five minutes. Informant 3 is silent. Interpreter speaks again, raising his hand at one point as if to strike informant 3. Informant 3 speaks for two minutes, and then is silenced by a threatening look from interpreter, who translates: ‘My husband is a selfish man. He likes to keep the money he earns under his bed. There is a trunk there which is locked with a key which he keeps tucked away in his sarong. That is where the money is. He gives me a small amount each week on Monday and I go to the market to buy provisions. There is never quite enough, but if I ask him for money he shouts at me. People are always shouting at me.’
“Interpreter: ‘This is a very self-pitying woman. Her husband is a good man. It must be very difficult to be married to a woman like this. That is all she has to say.’
“DM: ‘Please thank her.’
“Interpreter: ‘That will not be necessary.’”
“So you will understand, James, how very difficult it is for me to get accurate information. However, I persist!
“But now let us move on from such matters to more intriguing issues. There are, I think, several mysteries here, and I find myself increasingly drawn to them. One of these is the question of what happened to the Belgian anthropologist who apparently preceded me here and whose doings, alas, remain obscure. Nobody seems willing to talk about him, and when I raised him with Ling I met a very unambiguous brick wall. The poor man died while doing A Letter to Edinburgh 271
his field work, and the other day I chanced upon his grave when I was walking down a path that led to the sea. I found myself in a clearing in the jungle and there, under a tree, was a rather poignant marker which simply said: HERE LIES AN ANT. I found this very puzzling. Why should he be so described?
“Then I had an idea, and yesterday I went down that path again. I had the feeling that there were eyes on me, and indeed at one point when I turned round I’m pretty sure that I saw a quick movement in the bush. I was frightened, I’ll admit, but not too frightened to abandon my mission. So I continued, still with that feeling that somebody was not far away. From time to time, I stopped and mopped my brow – the jungle is frightfully sticky, rather like the humid part of the hot house in the Royal Botanic Garden at Inverleith (Edinburgh references are so reassuring, James, when one is in the real jungle; it makes one feel that one could turn a corner and suddenly find Jenners there, which would be wonderful, but too much to ask for, alas!). Eventually, I reached the clearing and there was the grave and its rather sad little marker. So far from home, poor man; so far from everything that Belgians appreciate (whatever that is). Such a very poignant place.
“I sat down near the grave and, rather unexpectedly, the words of a hymn came into my mind. It was the hymn which dear Angus Lordie composed (you know how peculiar he is), and which he once sang at a dinner party in my flat in Scotland Street. If I remember correctly, he called it ‘God Looks Down on Belgium’ and the words went through my mind, there by that poor man’s grave. “God’s never heard of Belgium/But loves it just