Fieldwork: A Novel

by Mischa Berlinski

  Martiya responded to all of the letters immediately, as she always did. She wrote to her father, telling him proudly how much progress she was making with the language. She wrote to Joseph Atkinson, telling him that the very last thing he ever wanted to see was her with a hoe— there was no saying in which of his orifices that implement might end up. She wrote to Karen, telling her all about her dreams. She'd had this one about being in San Francisco but everyone was speaking in Dyalo. Then she wrote a long description of her day, finishing with her sitting in a café in town responding to her correspondence. She was very nervous, she said, because she was about to take a huge risk with her fieldwork. The bills she ignored.

  Then Martiya wrote herself a letter. The Dyalo wouldn't be able to read it, of course, but putting it all down in black-and-white on the page made the sad news seem more real, more substantial. She inserted the letter into the envelope in which her father had written to her. The postage stamps gave it a nice look, she felt—official and serious. Martiya ate a large lunch, and then, sleepy in the afternoon heat but determined, made her way home to Dan Loi, hitchhiking her way back up into the hills, then walking up the dusty trail.

  By the time she got to the village in the late evening, she was a mess: her clothes were covered in dirt, her long hair matted and di-sheveled. This was because several times she had lain down in the path and rolled herself in the mud. She was barely coherent as she stumbled into the hut. Martiya had always had the gift of producing tears on demand; this had won her a number of parts in her high school plays. Now, she had only to enter into the hut, settle herself onto her mat, and allow a few soft tears to tumble from her large eyes to attract Lai-Ma's attention. Lai-Ma could no more resist comforting the evidently distraught Martiya than she would have been able to ignore one of her own children.

  "Tell me what has happened," Lai-Ma said, settling herself beside Martiya and running her weathered hand through the anthropologist's wild, mud-streaked hair. The whole hut, from little Ping to Farts-a-Lot, sat watching Martiya, as she stared into the last red coals of the cooling fire.

  "He was so young," Martiya said. "Such a young man."

  "Who?" Lai-Ma said. "What has the East Wind brought?" For reasons Martiya did not yet know, the Dyalo associated winds from the east with inauspicious tidings.

  Martiya buried her face in her hands. Dyalo grief was no restrained affair, she knew, and she decided that it would not be inappropriate to wail. She began to weep and moan. She wasn't quite sure how to rend her garments, but she gave it a try and succeeded in ripping her T-shirt. She pulled out the tattered envelope from her father, opened it up, and in a distraught voice read out in English the terrible news that she had received: the rain-slick road, the car, the long vigil at the hospital, then the most brutal of all blows—and although no one in the hut could understand what she was saying, the awesome display of communication from the white man's land impressed everyone. Finally, with a masterful display of self-possession, Martiya explained in Dyalo what bad fortune had blown in on the bad East Wind.

  Even Farts-a-Lot looked moved and sad.

  The next day she announced that she would leave Dan Loi immediately to gather up the nine lost souls of her beloved. She left that afternoon.

  Pell's wake was held on one of the Andaman Islands. The splendid white beach, the long-tail boats, the swaying palms, the light blue sky: it seemed to Martiya just the kind of place where Pell would have been happy. He had always so loved the ocean. She spent almost three weeks traveling through the south of Thailand, swimming every day, organizing her field notes, and transcribing her dictation. She was pleased and surprised to discover that she looked forward to getting back to village life.

  When finally Martiya got back to Dan Loi, the villagers could not have been nicer. The Dyalo to express their sympathies with Martiya's loss brought her fruits and vegetables from their gardens, and George Washington, thinking it might cheer Martiya up, offered to teach her certain magic rites and rituals that he had hitherto thought inappropriate to share with an outsider. Pell's death had brought down some unseen barrier between Martiya and the villagers: Martiya may be white and weird, the villagers seemed to say, but she mourns her dead just like we do. She is a courageous little thing. Even the headman, who had greeted her arrival in the village with little more than a grunt and had hardly spoken a word to her in six months, took Martiya aside one day to offer his most profound condolences. With restrained dignity, he told Martiya of the death of his first wife, of the days of weeping that had followed, and the comfort given by the absorption of her souls into his own, until finally his wife had found the confidence to depart to the land of the dead. The headman was the possessor of the only clock in Dan Loi, a large silver wristwatch bought in Chiang Mai many years earlier with the proceeds of a particularly felicitous opium harvest. The thing had long since stopped functioning, but the headman, who was only dimly aware of its intended usage, still wore it proudly. It glinted now in the sun as he waved his hand in a broad arc around Martiya's head, as if tracing out a halo. "Don't be afraid," he said. "Don't be afraid at all. Pell is here." Martiya felt herself comforted, and when Martiya explained to the headman that Pell in life never could stand the presence of strong spirits and in death found Farts-a-Lot's bottles of rice whiskey intolerable, the headman paternally offered to see what he could do.

  Indeed, Pell's death presented a substantial challenge to Farts-a-Lot's comfortable life. Farts-a-Lot now drank in the days at his cousin's house on the other side of the village, and when he returned late at night, Lai-Ma insisted that they lie side by side without touching: to make love now would insult Pell's spirits. Pell alive had been such a passionate man, Martiya had explained to Lai-Ma, such a vigorous man, and he had not yet accommodated himself to the notion that those pleasures were gone. It was only natural now that the choice bits of meat from the stew pot were offered to Pell, rather than to Farts-a-Lot. Lai-Ma shushed Farts-a-Lot when he began to sing.

  In the end, it was Farts-a-Lot himself who offered to build Martiya a private place for her to be alone with her husband. The decision was widely seen in the village as a generous act. A grieving widow ought to have a place to be alone with her husband: this was Dyalo custom; not to do so would anger the spirits of the dead. With unaccustomed vigor, Farts-a-Lot cleared a space sufficiently far from his own house that Pell would have his privacy, then went into the forest to cut down the beams, posts, and poles that would make the frame of the house, then hired an elephant from a nearby Karen village to haul back the heavy boards. Farts-a-Lot insisted that the whole family, including the children, help make the roof from wild cogon grass, and all day long the family sat tying bunches of grass to bamboo strips. It took two days to make the house, and when it was done, George Washington came to inspect it. Martiya could hardly believe that it would soon be hers: she was even more excited than when she moved into her first apartment at college. Just like the hut she would soon be leaving behind, the new hut lay close to the ground on low wooden poles, the thatch walls let in the breeze, and the floors were uneven. But she had the only door in all Dan Loi. She had insisted on that. It was just a few planks roughly bound with heavy twine, with neither a hinge nor a lock, but when the door was closed, she would be on one side and the village on the other.

  The hut had only to please Pell and it would be hers. George Washington, with all the dignity he inevitably possessed, entered the hut first and pulled an egg from his pocket. He threw it hard on the wood floor, where it broke, the spilled yolk indicating its acceptability to the unseen forces. Had the egg remained intact, the house would have been rejected and set on fire. Then George Washington called for the chicken. He took the terrified bird by the feet and began to murmur. The chicken's scrawny wings fluttered; small downy feathers floated to the earth. George Washington pulled his machete from his scabbard and with a single stroke sliced off the bird's head. Blood sprayed across the floor and walls, bright red splotches against the brown bamboo
. Martiya offered George Washington his customary fee for such services. He refused. "You are our guest here," he said.

  That night, Martiya slept in her own hut with the door closed. She had a lot of work to do in Dan Loi, but now she was sure that she could do it. She lay on her mat and read by the light of her hurricane lamp for a long time. When she finally grew sleepy, she closed her book and blew out the yellow flame.

  She had never felt so happy in all her life.

  FOUR

  RAIN

  SO MUCH OF LIFE consists of long puttering spells: when I look over my letters from those first few weeks of the rainy season, I find e-mails to and from my editor at the Bangkok Times, who asked me to write about the artist-in-residence at the University of Chiang Mai. To my mother, I wrote that Rachel and I took a class one Saturday afternoon in Thai cooking, and another in Thai massage. There was a letter to my grandmother, in which I told the story of the fourth-grade teacher at Rachel's school, a quiet Burmese woman, who broke her wrist in a tuk-tuk accident. Mr. Tim, I continued, asked me to take over her class while she convalesced, and for a week I taught school, an experience so exhausting that I didn't think once of anthropologists or missionaries, just savages.

  None of these e-mails was exciting, but the events they depict were the real events that made up my days. Not one e-mail mentions Martiya or the Walkers; but not a day in that early monsoon passed when I didn't rifle through Martiya's letters (which ended shortly after her arrival in her new hut), or look through the extensive notes of my conversations with the Walkers. But as it happened, almost a month passed in which I made no progress, until I ran into Thomas Walker in the parking lot of the supermarket on the Chiang Mai–Lamphun Road.

  I had never before seen Mr. Walker outside of the big pink house, and the sight of him in those waist-high slacks staring at the steel sky from under the supermarket awning took me aback: I was used to seeing him putter in a narrow triangle between the living room, his study, and the dining room; and although I had heard stories of him in China, in Tibet, in Burma, in Oklahoma; although Mrs. Walker had told me he was headed off to Mandalay—I hadn't really believed that he existed outside that house. Now he held a large bag of groceries in his left hand and was looking for his car keys, the man who in his youth had stolen sweets from the pockets of the future Tigi of Gartok.

  I waved as I walked across the lot, but he seemed not to recognize me until I was right upon him; then he smiled and said, "Well hello, young man! I was telling Nomie just the other night that she must have scared you away!"

  "Not at all," I said, and suddenly I could think of nothing else whatsoever to say. Judging by Mr. Walker's silence, he was in the same position. The two of us stood there for a moment bobbing our heads, and I think that if it hadn't started to rain at that moment, Mr. Walker would have excused himself a second later and retreated to his car, and I would have gone to buy my coffee and bananas.

  But it did start to rain. There were three huge cracks of thunder like the sound of the giant wooden blocks that the Thai slam together to frighten crows in the rice field. Then, with no transitional drizzle, rain so fierce that I could not see the other side of the parking lot.

  We stood for a few moments watching the downpour. Mr. Walker had done his shopping but was going nowhere, not in this weather. He said something to me, but the rain was too loud for me to hear him, and he shouted it over again. I finally understood that he was saying, "Let's go get a Coca-Cola." Mr. Walker's long fingers gestured in the direction of the tarpaulin-covered noodle stand abutting the supermarket, where long pale ducks hung on hooks above vats of boiling water.

  We sat under the plastic tarpaulin drinking our Cokes. I asked about Judith and Tom Riley, and whether he and Mrs. Walker had had a good trip, but Mr. Walker just smiled back at me in mute incomprehension. The rain was that loud. Soon, the parking lot began to flood, and by the time we were done with our Cokes and the rain had dwindled to a last few furious drops, the water in the lot was nearly knee-high, every car in the lot submerged to just under the headlights.

  Mr. Walker snorted through his nose. "Ever seen rain like this?"

  "Yesterday," I said, but Mr. Walker hardly seemed to notice.

  "Rains like the dickens here four months out of every twelve. Every day it'll rain here until September. Parking lot here gets flooded, I've been seeing it now some twenty years. It's not a mystery what you need to do to prevent this flooding, let the customers get home. All you have to do is build the lot on an incline, dig out a drainage ditch, and cement in that hillside. But they've got a different mentality here. That's the difference between a Christian and everyone else, you see. Only Christianity tells a man you've got to take precautions and come in from the rain, build a solid home, because the rains are coming."

  I could have been any vague acquaintance who had met Mr. Walker by chance in that parking lot and drunk a Coke with him, and he would have been delivering the same speech, which I could only hear through David Walker's bored adolescent ears: "Is Dad giving the Flooded Parking Lot Speech again?" Not that I entirely disagreed with Mr. Walker: a parking lot shouldn't flood every time it rains.

  "You see, your animist or your Buddhist—they don't believe they have a relationship with God. They don't know how to find Him. So their fundamental point of view on life, you see, is powerless. It doesn't occur to them that they can change things, make things better. Dyalo knew we could help them, though. Right from the start. Back when we first came, family after family asked us, ‘Two thousand years! Why did it take you so long to come with God's word?' And we—"

  Mr. Walker stopped talking, and his eyes looked past me out into the parking lot. He rattled the ice cubes in his glass of Coca-Cola.

  "I'm sorry?" I said, thinking that he had asked me a question which I had failed to hear.

  He sat silently for long enough that I thought of telling him it was nice to see him again and going into the store to do my shopping. But then Mr. Walker, with a note of absolutely uncharacteristic nervousness in his voice, said, "So did you find out anything about that woman?"

  For a moment I wondered why he was so nervous. Then I realized that it was Norma. He was nervous that Norma might even suspect that he was discussing Martiya. I had never spoken to him without his wife in the next room, or without wandering into his study unexpectedly. But that's why, when he had seen me, he had asked me to have a Coke with him—so he could talk about the woman who had murdered his son without his wife nearby. I felt a sudden surge of sympathy for the man: a lifetime of outstanding bravery, and in his old age, Thomas Walker lived in fear of his wife.

  And then I realized something else: the answer that he had given me when I asked why Martiya had killed David hadn't satisfied him either. He had told me that the devils and demons had made her do it—but he wasn't convinced. Like those Melanesian Islanders who interpreted the cargo planes of the United States Navy as benevolent deities descending from heaven and built their own landing strips to attract the generous bird gods, he had fit David's death into his own system of the universe. But no schema mundi was big enough to accommodate this sorrow. Mr. Walker was hoping that I could tell him something he didn't know.

  "A friend of Martiya's sent me a pile of her old letters," I said.

  "And?"

  "I don't think they have much to do with your son." I told him about the letters, about Martiya's hut, and Pell.

  "I knew old Farts-a-Lot," he said.

  "You did?"

  "Biggest pain in the backside you ever met. Last saw him a few years back. He was a Christian for a while, backslid. Couldn't keep away from the lao-kao." He used the Thai word for rice whiskey. "Did you know she used to come by the house?"

  "When?"

  "Back in the early days here in Thailand. Back in the 1970s."

  Back when David was alive. Before David went away on Dead Tour. "Did she come by the house often?" I asked.

  "Oh, yes sir, she used to come by the house all the time. Sh
e used to come to our house and ask us questions, and we'd tell her about the Dyalo as best we could. I met her at the bank."

  "The bank?" These little prompts kept Mr. Walker talking. I think they were a psychological device by which, should the necessity arise, he would be able to justify the conversation to Norma: "Why, honey, I was just answering the young man's questions. Curious little guy."

  "Yep. I was standing in line with my daughter Linda-Lee, we were chatting in Dyalo like we do, and this woman starts staring at us. Farang woman, and she says to us, not in the best Dyalo, but we could understand, she says, ‘You are Dyalo speakers too!' I could hear her American accent, so I said back to her in English, ‘Of course!' We got to talking, and when we heard about her work we invited her back to the house for dinner."

  After David's death, all of the Walkers would say that they saw something rotten or malicious in Martiya when she first showed up at the house in the fall of 1977, but in truth only Norma said anything at the time.

  The other Walkers, when they sat around talking about her after she left, decided in the collective fashion of large families that they liked her, probably in the same kind of way they more or less liked me: the Walkers could never really be at ease with anyone who hadn't vigorously accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior—that was simply too big a chasm in understanding to overcome—but they found her lively and interesting, with an odd take on the Dyalo, as when she described them as "strictly exogamous from the clan." Laura Walker, who despite a lifetime of acquaintanceship with the Dyalo had always found them a foreign people, was especially taken with the confusions of the young anthropologist, and sent her home with a freshly baked loaf of banana bread. Raymond Walker remarked on Martiya's beautiful green-gray eyes. The younger Walkers—David, his siblings, his cousins—liked Martiya too: they had never met anyone like her, somebody so clearly of their generation but not of their world. When they said grace before dinner, twelve-year-old Margaret noticed that Martiya did not close her eyes. Seeing Margaret and catching her staring, Martiya had smiled—an expression so inappropriate to prayer time that Margaret wondered whether God would still bother to bless the meal. If God didn't bless the meal, Margaret later asked her mother, would it still be worth eating, with protein and calories and stuff? Margaret also noticed that Martiya wore dark red lipstick, which interested her intensely.