Fieldwork: A Novel

by Mischa Berlinski

  "Really!" I exclaimed.

  "Oh yes!" said Mr. Tim. "Now, I don't know all the details of the story, but once, Mary got into a fight with another girl, whose father was—Persian? I think her mother was—Norwegian? Strange couple. NGO people. In any case, Mary walloped the other girl but good. The other girl deserved it. The father, this Persian man, he came into the school furious, and made some kind of silly, hot-blooded remark about Americans, and somehow this got back to the Walkers. One week later, the Thai authorities deported him. And then Mary stopped coming to class, and her parents sent the school a note saying that they had decided that Mary would do better at home. Then somebody told me that the Walkers were the last Americans to leave China after the revolution, and somebody else told me that they used to live in Burma, and, well, it just all made sense to me."

  It made sense to me too.

  Gunther the yoga teacher knew all about the Walkers: he, too, had heard stories. Sometimes at the end of a yoga session, Gunther's wife would bring out cups of hot ginger tea and we would sit in the gazebo, gossiping. On hearing the Walker name, he stiffened. "I haff never met them," Gunther said. "But I hear so many things. I do not like this kind of Christian who liff in a big house with so many servants, and then tell the people how they must liff. Is that for you to be Christian?" Gunther looked at me severely. I shook my head. Gunther himself lived in a big house with many servants and told many people how they must live, but it did not seem the right moment to mention that. He breathed deeply to a chakra three fingers below his belly button and continued: an Episcopalian pastor from Delaware with a bad back several years earlier had taken one of his classes, and this man, Gunther said, had known someone who had known the Walkers very well indeed. "He tells me that the Walkers give the Christians money and medicine but let the people who are not Christian alone. I do not like this spirit so much at all. I teach yoga, luff, and compassion to everyone who come here." Gunther looked at me again. "So you still like the Walkers so much?" he said. I sipped my tea and protested meekly that I had never even met them.

  From Thai and farang alike I heard stories, often improbable and sometimes mutually impossible. Our landlady, an elderly Thai who stopped by weekly to oversee the gardener, told me in a hushed whisper that she had heard that an earlier generation of Walkers had once commanded a guerrilla army of anti-Communist Christian converts in southern China: she used an unfamiliar Thai word to describe the Walkers, which, when I looked it up in the dictionary, I found meant warlord, or anyone resistant to the rule of the king, and hence outside the boundaries of civilization itself. A parent at the school had heard that they were the most generous philanthropists in the north of Thailand. According to a development worker I met by chance in a bar, they lived in ostentatious wealth offered up by pious contributors in humble clapboard churches across the Midwest. All my informants agreed that the Walkers had been in Asia a very long time, but details varied: the Walkers had lived, some said, in China; others said in Burma, in Laos, in Thailand. Nobody knew the details. Everyone seemed to have met or heard a story about a different Walker, and I couldn't keep the names straight. I was told that the Walkers were the nicest people you could hope to meet, the real salt of the earth, doing God's work; I was also told that the Walkers were opportunistic, fanatical, power-mad neocolonialists. They were at once a huge family riven by dissension, and they were close-knit. All I knew was that Martiya van der Leun shot the scion of the family two times in the back with a hunting rifle.

  I had never met a missionary before, and so contradictory was the impression produced by all these stories that I had little idea what to expect. I had grown up in Manhattan. The only serious Christian I had ever met was my co-op's handyman, a black man named Leon who was born again when I was about eleven after he went to a revival meeting in New Jersey. The phrase "born again" had confused me considerably at the time, and played on my imagination in horrific ways. All through my childhood and adolescence, Leon and I were friends, and I recall that once, after Kristin Skamanga dumped me, he told me in a serious voice, "It don't matter about that little girl, 'cause Jesus loves you—you know? He loves you with all His heart."

  Beyond Leon, I knew no Christians who took their faith seriously. The missionary himself was a figure only from the short stories of Somerset Maugham, and I had imagined that the missionaries were faded relics of an earlier time, like Maugham's colonial administrators who drank gin slings on the veranda overlooking the jungle at the Club. An appointment to meet real missionaries like the Walkers thus struck me as intensely exotic, as if I had been invited to visit Bhutan. The stories about the Walkers, like the stories about Martiya, thrilled me: I hoped that they were all true.

  Later, when I came to know the Walkers well, I decided that they were stranger, far stranger, than those who had traded rumors and spun idle gossip imagined.

  Asking a mother about her murdered son is a delicate operation, like removing a stray lash from a child's eye. I had Mrs. Walker on the phone and was just starting to probe gently when she cut me off. "Oh, honey, you're here in Chiang Mai?" she asked. "Then you just come by the Mission one of these days and we'll talk. There'll be someone around. There always is."

  Norma Walker said to drive north along the palm-fringed winding river road, past the Baptist church, then to take a right at the bar called Brasserie. "Do you know the place?" I certainly did: Rachel and I drank tequila there sometimes on Thursday nights when a long-haired guitarist named Tuk played note-perfect Jimi Hendrix and Santana covers with his backup band, the Tukables. I didn't mention the tequila on the phone. Norma Walker said that not long past the bar there would be a noodle stand on the left and another on the right. The compound was down the red dirt road just past the second noodle stand. I said that I'd be there the next day at one.

  I arrived early. The cement wall surrounding the Walker compound was topped with broken glass; a discreet brass placard beside the closed gate read: south china christian mission. At the end of the alley, a tuk-tuk driver had parked his rickshaw under the shade of a banyan tree and was asleep, sprawled in the back of his carriage. I could hear his snores.

  From the outside, the compound had looked huge. But when I rolled back the front gate of the compound along its rusted track and stepped inside, the place was disappointingly gray and dusty, almost dingy. A pair of trailers sat on cement blocks along one wall; and along the other wall there was a large concrete house painted a pale chewing-gum pink. An exterior staircase led to the house's second story, and then to its third— but the third story did not yet exist. Sturdy metal poles sprouted from the flat roof like antennae. The staircase simply wandered heavenward. Only a flowering jacaranda relieved the melancholy hot-season severity of the place, and snow-white blossoms drifted limply over the dead grass and dried mud. On the front stoop of the house, a small black cat with yellow eyes was licking her paws. I knocked on the door and wiped my forehead with my sleeve. I waited a moment and knocked again.

  A voice sang out from the other side of the door, "Oh, Tom, just let yourself in." It was Mrs. Walker's voice.

  Tom, Mischa—close enough. I slipped off my sandals and arranged them neatly beside the other shoes: the rubber sandals, the tennis shoes, the mud-caked leather work boots, the worn-down flip-flops, and the knee-high galoshes. I opened the unlocked door and stepped into the house.

  An old woman looked up at me from a couch set at an angle to the front door. She was fleshy, and just slightly more of her pink-gray skin slipped out from under her faded blue housedress than I was meant to see: hints of puffy knees expanded to puffy calves lined with varicose trails leading down to puffy ankles. A puffy face rested on a puffy neck. Only her pale-green eyes were sharp, but they were very sharp, and they looked me up and down critically. "Oh, you are not Tom Riley at all," she concluded, after a considerable period of judgment.

  "No," I admitted, and to cover the silence which fell over the room, I added, idiotically, "I'm sorry."

  "Don't be
sorry," the woman replied evenly. "I'm not Tom Riley either, after all."

  Having established to our mutual satisfaction that my failure to be Tom Riley implied no moral fault, she paid me no further mind, as if expecting that I knew the routine around here.

  "I'm so sorry to bother you," I finally said. "But I called yesterday. I'm Mischa Berlinski. And you must be Mrs. Walker."

  "I am," the woman said. "Only, you can call me Nomie. Everyone does."

  "Okay, Nomie," I obliged. I was still standing in the doorway, so I added, "I was going to come at one."

  "Then you're right on time," Nomie said. "Don't mind me if I don't get up. Mr. Walker will be with you in a moment. You just make yourself comfortable right there."

  She gestured to a couch opposite her own, and closing the door behind me, I took my place. On the phone the day before, I had indicated no preference as to which of the Walkers received me.

  On the couch beside Nomie there was a ball of bright-blue yarn, which the old woman began to play with, spooling out several inches of thread, wrapping it around her thick fingers, and then rolling the yarn back onto the skein. She was not a woman to whom I would have otherwise applied the adjective "kittenish." She seemed absorbed in the operation, but she must have noticed me staring at the ball, because she said, "The doctor told me this would be good for the arthritis."

  "Does it help?"

  "I'm not sure just yet, but I do pray for some relief."

  There were no portraits of family, no bookshelves on the whitewashed walls. The only furniture was the fake-leather couch where Nomie sat, the fake-leather couch on which I had installed myself, and a wooden rocking chair. In the far corner there was an upright piano, its closed lid supporting a small tank in which three large goldfish swam frantic laps, like athletes in training for a goldfish Olympiad.

  "Can I offer you a cool glass of orange Tang?" Nomie asked.

  For the first and only time in my adult life, I was seized by the desire for a cool glass of orange Tang. I was aware suddenly that my throat was desperately parched, and I didn't just want but needed a cool glass of orange Tang. "That would absolutely hit the spot," I said.

  Nomie looked down at the ball of yarn in her hand, which she continued to knead. Then she spoke very loudly in an utterly foreign language. It was a language with sounds I had never heard before, like whale song, or Martian. Her voice swooped and glided, and she inserted vowels and diphthongs which seemed to come from the deepest recesses of her gullet. The only word I understood was "Tang," pronounced like the Chinese dynasty.

  There was a pause and then a sympathetic feminine voice shouted out, "Okey-dokey, Grandma." A few seconds later, a young woman entered the room, carrying a tray of glasses and a tall glass pitcher beaded with perspiration. She set the tray down on the coffee table. "Cool Tang!" she said.

  The young woman poured me a glass of orange Tang from the pitcher. "Thank you," I said. I took a sip, and for a second my mouth was flooded with long-forgotten memories of kindergarten. "You know, I had forgotten how much I like Tang."

  "I'm so glad! We like it too," she said with a giddy, musical laugh. She had the kind of face one finds smoothing out the virgin sheets of an unruffled bed in an Ikea catalogue, unthreatening to women but nevertheless appealing to men, with short dark hair sensibly cut and light-blue eyes. She sat down on the far couch, then turned toward Nomie. "Grandma, have you seen Tom Riley lately?" she asked.

  "I thought he was Tom Riley, at first."

  "He was supposed to be here ages ago. We were talking about going to the zoo. I wanted to see the monkeys." The young woman turned back to me. "I forgot my manners! Grandpa says I should just put them on a little chain. I'm Judith."

  The couches were close enough that by standing up and leaning far forward we could shake hands. Nomie explained that I was there to meet with Mr. Walker.

  "But didn't Grandpa go to Burma this morning?" Judith asked.

  "No, he's going to Mandalay tomorrow, so it's lucky that you came today," Nomie said. "But you can't keep Mr. Walker too long because he needs a rest in the afternoons."

  Mandalay! I thought about asking if I could go too. "I hope you don't mind my prying," I said, "but what is Mr. Walker going to do in Mandalay? Does he go often?"

  Nomie stopped kneading the ball of yarn.

  "Why, he's going to preach, of course!" Nomie said, in the same voice that she might have used to declare that books have pages—or the universe a Maker. It was almost certainly the first time in my life that I had heard anyone use the word "preach" in a wholly literal sense. It was a pleasant shock to discover that these missionaries were, in fact, missionaries, like the first sight of palm trees in the tropics. "We hold a Bible conference there every few months, and if Mr. Walker didn't go …" Her voice drifted off. "I don't go on those trips myself anymore because of the arthritis, but Mr. Walker!"

  A gentle knock on the front door interrupted Nomie.

  "Tom!" Judith said.

  Nomie cleared her throat. "Tom Riley, don't you make me move from this spot one more time," she said. "You just let yourself in."

  Tom let himself in. He took a step into the room and closed the door behind him.

  "Whew!" he said. "It is …"—he paused, and we all waited— "… hawt out there!"

  He was a large man, a very large man, tall, with immensely broad shoulders and thick legs. He would have been big anywhere, but in Thailand he was mammoth.

  "But you should be used to it!" protested Judith. "You're from Tennessee!"

  "All I know is that I'm hawt."

  "Have some Tang," Nomie said.

  "I'd love some," Tom said. He bent over and took a glass of Tang from the tray. He righted himself slowly, and I reckoned to myself that the little glass of Tang was going to do nothing to quench this big man's big thirst. But he took a sip with the utmost delicacy, licked his lips, and declared, "That's better."

  Tom now noticed me for the first time. "I'm Tom Riley," he said.

  His hand swallowed up my own in a surprisingly gentle handshake. "It's really great to meet you," he added, in a voice as soft as his grasp. He took the seat next to me on the couch, sinking deep into the cushions, and as if he had sat in the prow of a canoe in which I occupied the stern, I felt myself rising up.

  "Tom is staying with us a little while," Nomie explained. "He's helping Mr. Walker with his Bible."

  "Tom's a linguist from Tennessee," Judith added. "He knows more about the Dyalo than pretty much anyone."

  Tom's huge face reddened. "Don't believe everything these folks tell you. There's not a heck of a lot I can tell a Walker about the Dyalo."

  Judith said, "Really, Tom! Just the other day you were telling us about those … those agglut … aggluttin …"

  "Agglutinating pronouns."

  "Exactly! They were so interesting. Mischa, you have to ask Tom about them someday. He'll tell you about them for hours. Hours and hours and hours."

  Tom looked at his very large bare feet. He said, "I've come here to learn from the Walkers, not the other way around."

  The modest declaration hung in the air a moment, until Nomie glanced at her watch and cluck-clucked. "Well, you're surely not going to learn about lunch if we don't get things moving around here," she said. "Judith, honey, why don't you go and hunt down your granddad while we talk? Now that Tom's here, I have a feeling the boys will be wanting to eat soon."

  Judith got up and scampered away down the hallway. She was humming. Nomie continued to turn the ball of wool in her hands. "Mr. Walker gets to working, he just loses his sense of time," she said. "And he just loves the Psalms. A peace comes over him when he reads the Psalms."

  "I see it in the work," Tom said.

  "It's beautiful work," added Nomie.

  "Ah-men," Tom said.

  "But what exactly is Mr. Walker doing with the Psalms?" I asked.

  Tom looked at me. "Why, don't you know?"

  "Now, Tom!" Nomie said. "Not everyone is in the Mis
sion Community, not everyone follows the work." Those people who didn't, her voice implied, were of distinctly marginal importance.

  "I suppose, but …"

  Nomie looked up from the blue ball of wool. "Mr. Walker is translating the Bible into Dyalo," she said. "Line by line and word by word. It's his life's work. It's his legacy. His father got it All started, and his brother Samuel did so much of the Work, but they've gone Home now, and Mr. Walker is Finishing Up." I have capitalized at my own discretion, but believe me—she really spoke that way. It was something in the way she looked upward as she spoke that offered the emphasis.

  "He's doing a beautiful job," Tom added. "He's an artist."

  Nomie's mouth opened slightly. "Oh no, Tom. He's Inspired. Like his father and his brother."

  "Yes, but Mr. Walker is a great man, and it takes nothing from the Lord to admit it," Tom said defiantly. He turned to me. "The Dyalo didn't even have an alphabet before Mr. Walker's father gave them one. Can you imagine? Mr. Walker's father invented an alphabet for the Dyalo. She's a beauty. Wonderful vowels."

  "Tom should know! Alphabets are Tom's specialty," Nomie said.

  Tom looked modestly at the ground, and then at his watch. I was on the verge of saying "Oh, really? A specialist in alphabets?" and asking "What brings you here to Thailand?" but was preempted by the strains of "Nearer My God to Thee," coming from the vicinity of Tom's groin. It was his cell phone. "Hey, Bill," he said. Then he stood up from the couch and, covering the mouthpiece, said, "Y'all excuse me? I'll wash up a little before lunch." Tom walked slowly down the hall, still talking to Bill on the phone.