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I have a student who sings to himself. He does not sing for an audience, only when he is waiting for buses and trains and outside my office for his appointed time, with the unselfconscious enjoyment of the young and musical. I was never one to sing where anyone can hear me. But that is not important. Where this student of mine and his singing come into my story is here: yesterday the song he sang had a refrain that went all I can hear, are songs that my mother taught me. He is not sure why I stared at him and sent him away, and I am not sure how I can explain, except to invoke the time of year and the day and the light and the name of my mother.
My mother did not teach me songs. What she taught me were stories, language, a lifetime of research. She could not make up for sixteen years absence entirely. There is no way to fit all that mothering into nine years with a teenager, a young woman. But she taught me her Romanian, as she wished to, as she wrote to me in the postcards she never sent, and she gave me the stories of her childhood and better yet, the stories of her travels. I am, at the end of it all, my father's daughter, and I have the history of her life.
So I sit, today, high in the Trinity special collections, when I should be making good use of my time in Dublin to reacquaint myself with the medieval, and instead I read the notes my mother wrote for me in my years at college, when my weekend returns were too precious to be spent evoking the past. I should not have brought them with me, I suppose. I would not, except for that accident of overhearing, and had I been as serious about my trip as I thought I was, I would not have taken this letter from my bag. The librarian will not be pleased with me if he sees them. Still, I am reading manuscripts of a sort, and he knows me of old, so perhaps he will not grudge me my seat and my reading so much this winter Tuesday, while the students are away and the tourists below us stare at the Long Room in awe.
“My beloved daughter,You asked me how I did my research, when I was no longer officially part of a university, of academic life. So, a story for you in your college room, from me at my library desk. I will not write this story at home I think, it should be told as it was made, from the desks of archives and libraries, not your father’s warm study or the kitchen table, as I write so many of my letters to you.
I began, I think, because there was nothing else to be done. There was only so long that I could hide, only so long I could give up my whole life and have nothing familiar. I could not have you, I could not have Paul, I could at least have my research and perhaps find the way to destroy him before he came for me again. I could not visit the archives of the Eastern Bloc, of course, and to return to Istanbul would risk dear Dr Bora finding me and contacting your father. I could not go to England, where the archives I would seek would bring me to the notice of Hugh James. So I began where I was, in Paris, in the Latin Quarter. The archivists of the Sorbonne libraries are more understanding than you, my daughter, who know them only as the guardians at the gates of your undergraduate research, may yet appreciate.
They took me in, in a way, one in particular, a lady very like my aunt Eva. Perhaps she is still there and perhaps I will look for her when next we visit you, in the hopes that she will remember the young stray she let in so long ago. I do not know what made her ignore my long-expired American faculty card and allow me into the archives and I never dared ask, for fear she would suddenly remember my thoroughly irregular status. Whatever it was, she took me to her colleagues of the Byzantine collection, and I began my search for Dracula.
And once I had been in one archive, one library, I could venture to others. You will find, as you continue your studies, as you already have here in Amsterdam, that for the dedicated researcher librarians and archivists will work wonders. So it was with the good staff of the Paris Universities. My friend the medievalist wrote me a letter to the officers of the Gregorian University in Rome.
Your Stephen already knows the importance of those letters that fly between supervisors and librarians and archivists. All libraries and archives are linked by these nets of letters, acquaintances and chance recommendations. His battles with the archives are, I think, what prompted your question? My battles with archives were few, aside from Athens, but the Institute is a law unto itself in every respect and no number of letters would help, then or now. I had no supervisor, no academic sponsor, but I came to my search with my doctorate in hand already, and I had as my allies the archivists of the Sorbonne and their recommendations carry as much weight as any tutor’s.
And so I finished my research in Paris, I packed up my few possessions in my small room in Montparnasse, and I travelled to Rome. And there the Jesuits would guide my research further, knowing as they do the intricacies of the Italian archives, sending me back and forth between themselves and Florence, Milan, Bolonga, all the rich libraries and archives of that country. And in each of those, I found another piece for my puzzle, another trail to follow, another ally among the scholars, until I turned back to you, my daughter, to your father, and joined your part of the story.
I will stop now, turn back to the pages of my books, and you back to yours. I send with this my love, and your father’s, and the reminder that there is a life beyond your libraries, beloved, and you live in Paris.”
It is getting dark, now, and the lights are coming on around the Library Square. Below, the life of the college and city goes on, and I must lift myself from the history of my family and consult the librarian on the discrepancies in my early printed books. She was right, my mother, there is a life beyond my libraries, and soon I will leave my work for the day, go back down the spiral stairs and the dark corridor that never fails to bring me memories of that frightening quest for my father. But I will quell those fears and remember my mother’s advice and meet my colleagues for dinner.
And next week, when I return to Oxford, I shall perhaps share some of this story with my young student, and hand on something of my mother’s history to a new generation of scholars. And perhaps I will ask him to play the song he was singing for me. Maybe we will understand each other a little better then.