Fieldwork: A Novel

by Mischa Berlinski

  Now imagine trying to explain the point of all this to an illiterate Trobriand Island anthropologist, who has no idea what all the scribbles on the page mean, has never seen a book, and has no idea at all that he lives on a spherical planet with two ice-capped poles explored by brave men whose endeavors make for thrilling reading. The Trobrianders have never even heard of ice. Malinowski, whose pale skin was little suited to the tropical sun, was no less handicapped than this imaginary Trobriand anthropologist in his first attempts to beat back the Curiosity, which was like a brushfire in his soul: he knew nothing of Trobriand magic and magical ways, of Trobriand myth and cosmology, of the relations between distant Trobriand islands and tribes who engaged in this reciprocal gift-giving, of the wily ways of the sea and how to pass through the dangers of the deep in an outrigger canoe. All of these were essential to understanding the kula. No wonder the most difficult question of all—why?— escaped his penetrating analysis.

  Martiya was hardly better suited to her self-appointed task of understanding the Dyalo when the Curiosity took her; but of course I was hardly better suited to my self-appointed task of understanding Martiya.

  I did not find out what the dyal was for a long time, but rather than make the reader wait, I will interrupt briefly to explain this interesting custom, which will form such an important part of Martiya's story. I wish to preface this description with a reminder that I am not an anthropologist, have never seen the dyal, and do not speak Dyalo; what I offer here is at best a second- or third-hand description.

  The Dyalo language makes a formal distinction between the plant and the spirit that animates it; but the distinction is tonal and hard to reproduce in English, so I will make the same emphasis through capitalization: rice is a plant, a physical thing; but Rice is a spirit. The two exist in much the same relationship as humans and their souls: the spirit animates the thing, is eternal while the thing is not, passes from one thing to the next, has personality and will. Spirit and matter live in symbiosis: without spirit, matter is lifeless; without matter, spirit is restless, frustrated, and cruel. The Dyalo believe Rice "makes good" the rice at the moment the rice seed is planted. The rice seed, after all, is an inert thing: it sits for years in the rice barn and does nothing. But placed in the earth at the right time of the year, the seed germinates, and a miracle ensues: the rice plant grows. This miracle is the work of Rice. And the dyal, the villagers of Dan Loi believed, was what was necessary to convince Rice to do his fruitful work.*

  The Dyalo plant rice seed at the very onset of the rainy season. It is the hottest and most humid time of year. The previous few months have seen the fields prepared for planting: the Dyalo have tromped through the hills and chosen good sites. They have slashed the jungle down and cut the trees. What remained or was too tough for their machetes, they have burned, and for weeks, the mountain was black with smoke. The jungle itself, a Dyalo proverb says, is Rice's first demand.

  The very survival of a Dyalo family depends on the success of the rice planting. Bear in mind that rice is among the most difficult of all crops to raise successfully, especially in the mountains: mountain soil is often poor in nutrients, particularly nitrogen; the climate is unstable; and rice is a notoriously temperamental grain. Over the course of ten

  *Linguists disagree about the meaning and etymologies of the words "dyal" and "Dyalo." The debate, roughly summarized, boils down to whether "dyal" means "the rite of the Dyalo people," or whether "Dyalo" means "the people who do dyal"—that is, whether the people are named for the rite, or the rite is named after the people.

  thousand or more harvests, the Dyalo have noticed that rice fails with terrifying frequency. Two Dyalo, encountering one another on the path, do not ask, "How are you?" They ask, "Is your Rice happy?"

  Planting rice is a two-person, four-day job, more or less. The lead member of the planting team, who is always male, works with a dibble stick, a long bamboo pole attached to a metal plow head. His job is to dig the holes into which the woman, following behind, will drop a handful of rice seed. When the Dyalo had planted the opium poppies in December, husband and wife had worked as a team, an arrangement that seemed sensible enough to Martiya, the marriage, and by extension the immediate family, being the basic unit of Dyalo economics. For the rice planting, however, the men and women throughout the Dyalo country pair themselves up according to a very different system—the dyal.

  Here is how the dyal appeared to Martiya her first year in the village.

  The dyal began with the quiet departure of all of the married men from the village. One morning, the village awoke as normal. Martiya had breakfast with Lai-Ma, as usual, then went to talk to George Washington about the difference between the jungle spirits and the village spirits, one of the fundamental distinctions in Dyalo spiritual life, a continuation of a conversation of several days' standing. So quiet was the departure of the men—no goodbyes, no ceremonies, no sacrifices, no chanting—that Martiya hardly noticed them slip off into the forest; but by evening, the village was only women and children, with the exception of George Washington himself, and a few men too old to travel, who sat around looking dejected and sullen.

  That evening, the women dressed themselves in their finest clothing. They prepared elaborate meals. The mood in the village was suddenly light and gay. One of the women began to sing, and another woman, from another hut, joined her: the song was passed from hut to hut, one woman taking up the melody, others repeating the chorus. That evening, strange new men began to arrive in the village—Dyalo men who had left their villages to come to Dan Loi. Some of these men Martiya knew: they came from nearby Dyalo villages; but others were strangers, and when she asked about them, she learned that they had traveled upwards of a week. Some had even surreptitiously crossed national borders. Yet they entered the village with odd familiarity, greeting the women as old acquaintances.

  For the next week, the women of Dan Loi and their gin-kai (the phrase, appropriately enough, means "rice partner") planted rice during the day and feasted at night. For the duration of the week, the gin-kai lived as surrogate husbands: each lived in the house of the man he replaced; together with his "wife," they worked his fields; they ate the foods his "wife" prepared. They were addressed by their women always in the verbal form reserved for intimate family. These rice-planting partnerships, Martiya learned, were not transient things: men and women would always plant rice with the same partner, season after season, year after year, but it was taboo to see these planting partners the rest of the year.

  At the conclusion of the week, the gin-kai took their leave of the village. The rice crop had been planted. By nightfall, the men of the village began to return. The dyal was thus concluded.

  The dyal was like hitting the anthropological bingo: by the time the last man had wandered home, Martiya saw in the dyal not only a doctoral thesis but an article in Anthropos.

  It was Martiya's strong suspicion that the women and their rice mates were sexual partners. Martiya didn't know the right word to describe the rite. Was it adultery? A kind of bigamy? She wondered: Was sex an obligatory part of the dyal, or something that just sometimes happened? Why did successful planting require such a liaison?

  Although the institution of the dyal had no parallel in Martiya's personal experience, she was aware that similar practices were to be found in other parts of the world. In Martiya's small library of books, she had a paperback abridged edition of James Frazier's The Golden Bough, where, in a chapter titled "The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation," Martiya read about similar rites. The Pipile of Central America "kept apart from their wives ‘in order that on the night before planting they might indulge their passions to the fullest extent; certain persons are even said to have been appointed to perform the sexual act at the very moment when the first seeds were deposited in the ground.' " Similarly, "in some parts of Java, at the season when the bloom will soon be on the rice, the husbandman and his wife visit their fields by night and there engage in sexual intercourse for th
e purpose of promoting the growth of the crop." Analagous rites could be found also in Leti, Sarmata, in the Babar Islands, in Amboyna, and among the Baganda of Central Africa—and even in Europe, where Frazier notes the custom, found in Ukraine and Germany, of asking married couples to lie down and roll over the newly sown fields "to promote the fertility of the crops."

  It was one thing to read about such things in Frazier; another thing entirely to see them with her own eyes. What piqued Martiya's curiosity most intensely was the total reluctance on the part of the villagers of Dan Loi to discuss any aspect of the dyal with an outsider. One by one, Martiya had delicately asked questions of her favorite informants throughout the village; but even the old women who would gladly chatter for hours with Martiya about every other facet of village life, from childbearing to inheritance law to intimate secrets of the Dyalo bedroom, shied away when asked to discuss the dyal.

  The more Martiya studied the dyal, the greater the importance of understanding the custom seemed to her. It was a counterexample to some of the most important rules of Dyalo life: it was the only time in which the normally strict rules governing associations and the segregations of clans were relaxed. Partners in the dyal came from every and any clan, and were mixed up in no easily discernible way. The rice harvest was one of the only rituals, rites, or festivals in the Dyalo calendar binding far-flung Dyalo villages together. Martiya asked herself: How were the planting partnerships formed? Was the dyal a way of legitimizing and discharging sexual tension within the community of Dyalo villages? Fidelity was generally prized by the Dyalo and adultery commonly considered shameful—did the Dyalo make an exception for the dyal? In her time in the village, Martiya had already seen several feuds erupt as the result of an adulterous liaison, including one which had led to violence. Did jealousy ever ensue as a result of the dyal? How did husband and wife greet each other at the end of the dyal? How and when was the dyal explained to children?

  What did the Dyalo think happened when the rice was seeded? Why didn't the opium, the maize, or the gardens require similar rituals? If a woman became pregnant as a result of the dyal, how was the offspring treated? The sexual act at the heart of the dyal—was it ritualized? Was it accompanied by any particular prayers or magic rites?

  What was the connection in the Dyalo mind between the dyal and rice planting? Did the Dyalo believe the dyal necessary to the fructification of the rice? Or simply desirable? If necessary, how did they explain the failure of other peoples to perform the same rite?

  What was the native's point of view?

  Martiya hadn't the faintest clue.

  The only answer the Dyalo offered when she asked about the dyal was that this was what it took to keep Rice happy. And if Rice wasn't happy, the Dyalo would be hungry!

  TWO

  THE MINISTRY OF GHOSTS

  KAREN'S TRIP TO THAILAND in the winter of 1983 was just what her sagging soul had needed. Martiya met her at the Chiang Mai airport in a borrowed jeep, then drove her up to Dan Loi on the one-lane red dirt road, Martiya accelerating into the curves, one hand holding the wheel, the other hand tapping Karen's knee, Martiya saying, "Kit-Kat! It's so great to see you!," the old jeep making scary, creaking noises, suggesting to Karen that even if Martiya had wanted to hit the brakes, it wasn't entirely a sure thing that the vehicle would obey. Martiya had the habit of taking her eyes off the road to point out some thatch-roofed village on the far horizon and give commentary: "We're coming up on Moo Bat Yai, it's an Akha village, interesting headman, you've got to meet him, he's got three wives and they are driving him insane, funny thing is—the Akha aren't usually polygamous. Oh! See that hill there?" All the way up to Dan Loi, as the jeep barreled blindly around the curves with clouds of red dust trailing behind, Karen held her breath.

  But when they got to the village, the place was just one huge bougainvillea in bloom, that's what it felt like: bougainvillea everywhere, sprouting weedlike from the ditches beside the road, draped like a bright crimson curtain over all the huts. Martiya hadn't mentioned the bougainvillea in her letters, how colorful the village was, and how warm the winter sun. Just being with Martiya and walking through the village with her reminded Karen of the apartment on the north side of campus with the handwriting on the wall.

  Martiya had done what everyone else just dreams about: she had dropped off the face of the earth and, despite having fallen so impossibly far, had landed on her feet.

  Karen spent most of her first day in Dan Loi thinking about faculty meetings in Madison and that lonely kitchen with the formaldehyde floor, and scraping the ice off of the windshield when she went out to start the car in the morning; then she went with Martiya down to the communal cooking hut, where Martiya laughed with all the village women as she sat down and made dinner over an open fire, chopping garlic, onions, and chili peppers with a huge machete, then stir-frying everything up in a wok. Karen could understand nothing of the language, of course, but it was clear that Martiya was fluent: only someone quite fluent in a foreign language could laugh so unhesitatingly at the jokes. After lunch, Karen and Martiya went back up to Martiya's hut, where they sat outside on the patio in the early evening, drinking one of the bottles of white wine which Karen had bought at the duty-free shop. Martiya pointed out the Hmong village on the far side of the valley and there was nothing, really nothing, so green as the green of the rice fields. Have you seen it? Karen asked me. Then you know.

  The sun set, and all evening long as Karen and Martiya talked and talked and talked, the kiss-me birds sang in the trees, whoo-tuk-tuk, whoo-tuk-tuk. Later, as Martiya and Karen sat on the porch smoking a joint the way they used to back in Berkeley every night, fireflies swarmed through the village, an endless trail of flickering green lights swooping and diving through the warm night air. A little yellow moon hung in the sky like a man grinning in his sleep on account of a pleasant dream, and somewhere in the village someone started to sing, a tender baritone singing in that strange language, a song so sad that the whole village grew absolutely still.

  "You didn't tell me this place was so amazingly beautiful," Karen said.

  Martiya just smiled.

  Over their tea the next morning, Martiya and Karen watched the silver mist burn off the valley. It was cold season, although it wasn't cold for someone living in Wisconsin; but Martiya wore a big oversize sweater which made her look little, her arms lost somewhere in the long sleeves, and she tucked her legs underneath her, cuddling herself up into a ball. She was still as pretty as Karen remembered—not beautiful, but definitely striking, with those big eyes and high cheekbones, and the tumbling dark hair offsetting the small features. Against Martiya and the villagers, Karen felt big and slow and swollen, as if she had been inflated in the years since she had left the Philippines. No matter what, she had to get back out into the field.

  Karen told Martiya about all the people they had known in graduate school and where they all had ended up: Mike Pendleton was at Brown with tenure, and Sarah Lutz wrote a great paper on the Sigoni, really interesting stuff, she's a big talent, too bad about the acne, and that weird guy who did pre-Columbian? Who chewed with his mouth open and left those gross notes for Karen in her mailbox? Harvard. Yup. So unfair. Then Karen told Martiya all about Ted, and Martiya listened with her head cocked at a feline, feminine angle, so attentive you'd think she had spent the last few years here in the mountains just asking herself, over and over again, "And gosh, how are things going between Karen and Ted?"

  "I never liked Ted that much, to tell you the truth," Martiya finally said.

  "Really?" Karen had always thought that everyone liked Ted. That was one of the things that she had liked about Ted, the way everyone liked him.

  "There was something … something too clever about the guy, like he was trying to get away with something."

  "That's it. That's it exactly," said Karen.

  "And remember that business with the tipping? At restaurants?"

  "My God, that used to drive me nuts. That littl
e plastic thing he had in his wallet to work out the percentages. I got so embarrassed when he took that thing out."

  "And he had such shifty little eyes."

  Martiya made such a dead-on imitation of Ted's beady little eyes sliding back and forth that Karen started to giggle, and when Martiya started to imitate the way Ted's fishy one-size-too-small mouth twitched, Karen started to laugh. Then a few seconds later, when Karen started to cry, Martiya gave her a big hug and stroked her hair, and said, "It's okay, Kit-Kat. It'll be okay."

  Can you believe, Karen asked me, that this woman would spend the last ten years of her life in jail, for murder?

  Murder! Karen paused dramatically on the word. I jumped at the unaccustomed pause in the conversation.

  "Karen, hang on one sec—there's something I'm not understanding here—something I just don't get."

  "Shoot," said Karen.

  "You went off to visit Martiya in …" I checked my notes. "In 1982."

  "Eighty-three."

  "Eighty-three." I corrected my notes. "But Martiya left the village— she was done with her fieldwork—in 1977. She went back to California."