Fieldwork: A Novel

by Mischa Berlinski

  Now she feared that he might well have been right. The language was incomprehensible, and even after five months of total immersion she could not so much as ask for a glass of water and be understood. When her guide and translator, Vinai, repeated her questions in properly inflected Dyalo, she could not understand the responses. She was not certain, but it was her impression that the people of the village had begun to avoid her, or when they sought her out, it was to ask her for money. She had not expected that there would be quite so much mud. Everywhere Martiya went there was mud: the narrow path leading up and into the village was sludge, and the big road leading down to the highway was as slippery as a ski slope. There was mud in her hut, and dried mud on all of her clothes. The mud on the path between Martiya's hut and the communal kitchen was so thick it sucked off her shoe. Martiya had arrived in Dan Loi at the onset of the rainy season, and almost from the first the sun had disappeared behind the dark, menacing shroud of storm clouds which surrounded the village. There were mists and fogs and hazes and vapors, and when the rain wasn't pelting down from above, steam was rising from the rice paddies below. The monsoon that year was the heaviest in a generation: it rained and rained and rained and rained and rained and rained and rained and rained. The village was situated saddle-style on the back of a broken ridge high in the mountains, like all Dyalo villages, one half of the village facing west, the other east; but after three months in Dan Loi, Martiya had not yet once seen either sunset or sunrise, only at dawn and at dusk miasmic gray, through which Martiya and her Dyalo hosts passed like phantoms.

  Of all the prejudices of her own culture, the one Martiya found most difficult to shed was a desire for solitude. Just like poor, cold Eskimo Kathy, Martiya wanted a room of her own. She wanted a place where several hours a day she didn't have to wear an anthropologist's encouraging semi-grin. She wanted a place where she could type up her field notes on the portable typewriter she had lugged up into the mountains and look them over slowly and spread them out, a quiet place to transcribe the hours of dictation she took on her tape recorder. She wanted a place where she could interview her informants one by one, in privacy. She had learned the hard way that it was the height of bad manners for a woman's pelvis ever to be above the level of a man's head in a Dyalo village—this in a culture in which everyone sat on the floor—and she wanted a place where for a few hours a day she didn't have to waddle around like a goose. She wanted a place that she could clean up: when she tried to clean up the thatch hut where she lived with a village family, she was told that she was making the spirits angry. She wanted an office. She thought of her father's office in Dwinelle Hall, where she had sometimes studied after school as a teenager: the two huge desks, the bay view, the sparkling light, the chair with excellent lumbar support (before spending six months on the floor, she hadn't even known she had a lumbar), the lights which flicked on at the touch of a button, the way the door clicked closed, offering a clear and inviolable indicator to all the world of the occupant's desire to be left alone. Martiya, after about three months in a Dyalo village, began to fantasize about a quiet, clean office where she could sit on a real chair at a real desk all by herself.

  And most of all, she wanted to get away from Farts-a-Lot.

  It wasn't that the Dyalo weren't nice. They were very nice. They smiled a lot and at first everyone in the village had been vaguely curious about why she was there, and even offered her good things to eat—fried peanuts wrapped in a banana leaf, or a bunch of fresh bananas, or some watermelon, or a slice of bloody pork from a recently butchered pig. Martiya was quite sure that had a Dyalo anthropologist showed up at her little apartment in Berkeley, camped out on her couch, and asked her a lot of dopey questions on the order of "Why do you close the bathroom door when you defecate?" she wouldn't have been half as nice about it.

  When Martiya was in college, Tim Blair had taken her to a butterfly house. It was like a large greenhouse, with two sets of double-swinging doors to ensure that the butterflies never escaped. Now, Martiya had always liked butterflies just fine, pretty little things with brightly colored wings fluttering gently across a flowery meadow; but she had never really been around more than one or two butterflies at a shot, and as soon as she entered the butterfly house, she realized that when considered in large quantities, butterflies were insects. Big flapping bugs, with huge antennae, and buggy snouts, who wanted to land in her hair and crawl all over. That was pretty much when she knew it wasn't going to work with Tim, when he wanted to stop and play with each and every butterfly, and read the informative placards, and say, "Hey, Martiya! Check this guy out! He's got stripes!"; and all Martiya wanted to do was flee. Living with the Dyalo, Martiya was beginning to fear, was just a little like visiting the butterfly house: a few days in a village, an afternoon discussing an interesting rite, a field-clearing ceremony or two—that was fine. But what she hadn't thought about back in Berkeley was that there would be Dyalo around all the time, doing tribal things all the time, talking in their weird language all the time.

  And she could hardly blame them, really: they were here first. This was, after all, their home. She had come to them.

  Vinai had found the hut for Martiya. When she had first arrived in Dan Loi, he introduced her to the village headman and although the first meeting was not entirely satisfactory—I mean, she wrote to Karen, I have come a hell of a long way, and I didn't exactly notice a long line of other interested anthropologists declaring that they wanted to learn the ways of the wily Dyalo, not that I expected to be a blood sister straight off, but still, I was looking for more than a grunt … —Martiya was installed, just as she had requested, in a real Dyalo thatch hut with a real Dyalo family. The hut had uneven wood floors which left big splinters in Martiya's feet, walls of plaited bamboo which did almost nothing to block the unexpectedly chilly night winds, and a thatch roof that leaked, just as she had been warned it would. Drip, drip, drip. Martiya's hosts bluntly cautioned her that if she had sex in the hut, it would anger the spirits; and when she asked why the Dyalo did not build chimneys to allow their dwellings to evacuate the smoke from the cooking fire, smoke which caused her eyes to burn and covered her skin in a constant ghostly film of light gray soot, she was told, "It is not our custom."

  It would anger the spirits, or it is our custom, or it is not our custom: these, in fact, were the responses Martiya received, sooner or later, to almost every question she posed about Dyalo society those first few months in Dan Loi:

  Martiya: "Why is a woman not permitted to kill a rat?"

  Dyalo woman: "Because it would be shameful."

  "Why would it be shameful?"

  "Because it would anger the spirits."

  Martiya: "Why can't children drink cooked chicken's blood?"

  Dyalo Woman Number One: "Because it is our custom."

  Dyalo Woman Number Two: "Children can't drink cooked chicken's blood?"

  Dyalo Woman Number Three: "It would anger the spirits."

  Martiya: "Why does the second male son inherit property?"

  Sagacious Dyalo elder: "I do not have a second male son."

  "If you had a second male son, would he inherit property?"

  "But I don't have a second male son."

  Martiya, slyly: "Sings-Too-Loud has a second male son, doesn't he?"

  "Yes."

  "Will his second male son inherit property?"

  "Oh, yes!"

  "Why?"

  Triumphantly: "It is our custom."

  Martiya: "Why is it shameful for a man and his wife to sing the mourning song together?"

  "It would anger the spirits."

  Martiya: "Why is the spirit altar in every home situated on the upslope of the hill?"

  "Oh, that is our custom."

  "What would happen if the altar wasn't on the upslope of the hill?"

  "It would anger the spirits."

  Martiya: "Why is there a rotting dead bullock lying in the front yard of that house?"

  "Whose house?"

&
nbsp; "The house of Old-Snoring-Lady."

  "You must ask Old-Snoring-Lady. I am too shy to tell you."

  "Why are you too shy?"

  "It is our custom."

  The hut smelled like a gerbil cage, and sounded like one too: Dyalo nights were long and filled with strange scratching sounds, whispers, moans, baying dogs, croaking insects, and the tiny, terrifying footsteps of rats running along the rafters. By nine at night, the entire hut was sleeping except Martiya, who lay on her thin straw mat—she slept directly on the floor, Dyalo style—and wondered why she had never once in her life suffered insomnia before coming to a Dyalo village. The hut was lit at night only by an oil lamp, which meant that Martiya could not read before bed, and Martiya had always read before going to bed.* When the lamp was blown out, there was nothing to do but lie on the rough-hewn floor, slap idly at the mosquitoes that had succeeded in breaching the defensive perimeter of her mosquito net, and wonder just where the hell she had found herself.

  Her difficulties in understanding her host family were compounded by Vinai's refusal to spend more than a few minutes at a time in the hut. Apparently, Vinai was of the Dog clan, and some taboo prohibited members of the Dog clan from lingering in the homes of members of the Fish clan. Why? Was it some kind of servant-in-the-master's-house issue? Or some kind of spirit thing? Neither. The only answer she could get was: It is just our idiotic, incomprehensible bass-ackward fucking custom.

  The central figure in Martiya's life during her first few months in Dan Loi was her host, Farts-a-Lot.† He was the first person Martiya saw

  *"Bring a lot to read," Atkinson had told her, and so Martiya traveled up into the mountains with everything Philip Roth ever wrote; the plays of Sophocles and the Aeneid, which she was supposed to have read in her freshman year of college but hadn't; the novels of Somerset Maugham and Thackeray; Anna Karenina; The Trumpet of the Swan and Charlotte's Web, which Martiya had imagined reading (in her own Dyalo translation) to charmingly charmed Dyalo children around a mountain campfire; the works of Malinowski—Argonauts of the Western Pacific and The Sexual Life of Savages; Moby-Dick; a copy of Teach Yourself Chinese; a history of the Moghul empire that Martiya had bought entirely for the cover, a wispy Persian line drawing of a minaret and a peacock and a heavily bearded man reclining on his side plucking at a cither; and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was destined unfortunately to spend the bulk of Martiya's career in the mountains moldering under the leg of a severely uneven table, where I eventually found it.

  †Dyalo nicknames were blunt: in addition to Farts-a-Lot, she met Sings-Too-Loud, Bad Skin, Big Ears, Dead Breath, Fat Belly, Stupid Squirrel, Does-Not-Eat-Garlic, and Soft Eyes. All of these characters had real names, too, and there was the name of his clan; and when a man's first son was born, the names changed, "Son of Ong" becoming "Father of Moe." Throughout this account, I have followed Martiya's naming conventions: Farts-a-Lot was consistently referred to in her letters as "Farts-a-Lot," and is so called here; Lai-Ma in the letters remains "Lai-Ma."

  in the morning, and the last person she saw at night. Within days of her arrival in the village, Martiya discovered that his nickname was condign: Farts-a-Lot specialized in long, slow, soft, deadly sneakers, the kind her father used to call a "Dutch cigar." When Farts-a-Lot lit one of his Dutch cigars, Martiya wasn't sure if it was her imagination, but the hut seemed to turn a peculiar shade of green, and Farts-a-Lot grinned proudly. Farts-a-Lot was a short, skinny man, wiry and muscular, with light brown skin the color of bark, much occupied with the constant honing of his machete. Sitting nearly naked on the porch of the hut, Farts-a-Lot would pass hours dragging the knife across the whetstone positioned between his rhinoceros-hide feet, occasionally examining the blade with the edge of his thumb, scowling, farting, and sharpening some more. The process of honing a machete, Martiya quickly learned, produces a distinctive scritch-scritch sound, which by week two Martiya began to find intensely irritating. That damn thing must be as sharp as a samurai sword, Martiya wanted to say. Knock it off.

  But Martiya didn't know how to say anything in Dyalo.

  Scritch-scritch-scritch.

  Farts-a-Lot, in addition to his chronic gastric distress, was a drinking man, and on a ledge in his portion of the hut he kept a row of bottles of homemade rice whiskey, neatly lined up. In each bottle, there was some repulsive embalmed animal: a snake, a scorpion, a centipede, a few huge termites. These were added to the whiskey, Vinai explained to Martiya, as medicinal supplements, chiefly to increase Farts-a-Lot's potency, which, to judge by certain late-night mutterings around the hut, was faltering. Farts-a-Lot began drinking from his bottles in the morning, and by late afternoon, he was singing loudly the very authentic Dyalo songs that Martiya would have found fascinating in the ethnomusicology lab at Berkeley but here in Dyaloland found just shrill and tuneless. Then Farts-a-Lot would stagger for a while around the hut, belching loudly, before collapsing right on Martiya's mat. Although Martiya could understand not one word of what he said as he lay there, his greasy head on the pillow she had bought just for herself in Chiang Mai, his drift was clear: You like me, baby. I can tell.

  Martiya could not quite believe that, if Farts-a-Lot was the native, why, then, it followed that she had just traveled ten thousand miles to grasp Farts-a-Lot's point of view, to understand Farts-a-Lot's relation to life, to realize Farts-a-Lot's vision of Farts-a-Lot's world.

  The sun rises and sets on a regular schedule, the days organize themselves one somewhat like the next: Martiya had been in a Dyalo village six months, and her days had fallen into a routine.

  The Dyalo woke at dawn, and when they first woke up, for a few fleeting moments, Martiya's hutmates were no different from anyone anywhere else, utterly human: Farts-a-Lot yawned and stretched his arms; Lai-Ma, his wife, muttered to herself and stumbled out of the hut to pee. The children were slow to wake up and twitched in their beds; Farts-a-Lot scratched his hungover head; no one made eye contact; everyone lingered over the last of their dreams. Then Martiya had breakfast with her hutmates, a bowl of sour vegetable soup and a shot of rice whiskey, and with all the violent rapidity of tropical sunrise, the sense of strangeness and dislocation set in that would accompany Martiya every minute of every day that she lived in Dan Loi. The taste of the morning soup, more than the strange costumes and songs, and the weird language and the panoply of rites and sacrifices to please mean spirits, more even than the fact that Dyalo teenagers still lay in bed and played with their mothers' breasts—that soup made Martiya feel as if she was living with the people from National Geographic. The vile soup was recycled day after day, and spiced with bitter herbs and a creepy brown fungus; it tasted as if everything that was the Dyalo and Dan Loi had been distilled into a concentrated broth; it seemed almost alive, slithering on her tongue like an oyster; it was as intense as eau-de-vie. All morning long, no matter how many times she brushed her teeth, Martiya could taste the forest on her teeth. Sometimes Martiya thought the soup could talk. Welcome to the Jungle! it said.

  Martiya's first priority was learning the language, and after breakfast, when her mind was at its very freshest, she devoted herself to studying Dyalo. She had figured that being a linguist's daughter she would pick it up quickly, but like everything else in the village, it was more difficult than she had expected. Her chief problem was that she simply couldn't make the sounds that Dyalo required. Dyalo was a tonal language, which meant that the relative pitch of Martiya's voice would, in theory, govern the sense of what she was saying. But there are tonal languages, and then there are tonal languages: difficult Thai has five tones; fiendish Cantonese eight; but Dyalo had thirteen. Martiya left consonants unvoiced that should have been voiced—"pall" versus "ball"—and stumbled over vowels that seemed to require some kind of glottal flap that she wasn't sure she possessed. Communicating in Dyalo after only a few months in the village was like being asked to play a fugue on the first day of piano lessons.

  Martiya's most patient teacher
s were the household kids, Farts-a-Lot and Lai-Ma's progeny: the three-year-old boy who liked to eat bugs; the gap-toothed five-year-old girl who threw rocks; the eight-year-old girl with high cheekbones and huge eyes, simply the most beautiful child Martiya had ever seen; the eleven-year-old boy who shot birds in the forest with a slingshot; and the fourteen-year-old girl whom Martiya caught repeatedly going through her bags. She spent her mornings sitting with the kids, pointing at things. The first complete phrase Martiya learned in Dyalo was, "How do you call that in Dyalo?" Over and over and over again, she would point at something and trot out her phrase, and whichever of the children was sitting with her would say something back to Martiya in Dyalo, which Martiya would jot down in her notebook.

  "Wei shi shi ma?" she said, pointing at a dog.

  "Bao."

  "Wei shi shi ma?" she said, pointing at a basket.

  "Rai baht nee."

  "Wei shi shi ma?" she said, pointing at her teeth.

  "Paht."

  "Wei shi shi ma?" she said, getting up and walking a few steps.

  "Bainai."

  "Bao bainai?"

  Big smiles. "Bao bainai!"

  Yet even this fairly mechanical if laborious business proved a struggle: just learning the word for "rice," the most primal word of the Dyalo lexicon, had required a day. The three children she discussed the matter with gave her three different words, and when she asked Vinai what all the different words meant, he told her, "Rice." Martiya tried to think the problem through. Perhaps, she thought, it was a question of a particular type of rice. The production and consumption of rice was, after all, the central drama of Dyalo life. Martiya had read a book about rice in preparation for her voyage, and the world of rice was as variegated to the connoisseur as the world of wine: there was brown rice which hadn't been milled and white rice which had; normal rice, stickier rice, and very sticky rice; rice cultivated in knee-high paddies, in deep ponds, and on the dry slopes of high mountains; long-grain rice, medium-grain rice, and short-grain rice; rice whose seeds once came from Burma, rice whose seeds had been transported by the ancestors from old Dyalo homesteads in China; rice that was naturally resistant to caterpillars, and rice that was a caterpillar's delight. Martiya had expected that the Dyalo would have a number of words for rice. But that wasn't the problem here. The Dyalo did have words to describe all of those kinds of rice, but the words the children were using did, in fact, just mean "rice."