The last six weeks of the school year had seen the story drift idly. Gilles Blouzon returned, as he did every year, to France, promising to be in touch. He wasn't. I called a dozen prominent figures at Chiang Mai University, trying to pursue the rumors that Gilles had heard; I found nothing. Martiya's village, Dan Loi? Try finding that hamlet on the map, or try finding someone who knows where it is: the Dyalo villages of northern Thailand are unincorporated entities—they splinter and fragment; villages spring up out of nowhere; others disappear. A number of trekking agencies offered to take me by elephant back through a dozen different hill-tribe villages in a dozen days, but not one could guarantee me that they knew where Martiya's village could be found.
I tried to convince myself that the thing was done. This was not only Rachel's advice, but Josh O'Connor's also: he had been shocked to hear I was still pursuing it. Josh's gelateria had been a huge success, and so had the Herbalife products. He bought himself a candy-apple-red Cadillac, hired a driver, and now tooled around Bangkok conducting business from his backseat by cell phone. He could hardly remember Martiya van der Leun. Even my mother told me to let it go. "It's important to have a balanced life," she said. She had been hearing me talk about Martiya the better part of a year.
In early September, I ran into Judith Walker and Tom Riley in the city center. We went for a cold drink at the same diner where Tom and I used to meet for breakfast. Judith and Tom were getting married, and if there exists a pair of human faces more excited and contented, I've never seen them. I gave them my congratulations. After a few minutes, Tom's cell phone squealed, and he got up to take the call outside. When he came back, he explained something complicated to Judith involving Bill and the jeep. The upshot was that he had to go. Judith's face fell, and as much to console her as for the pleasure of her company, I invited her to have another Coke with me.
"Well, okay," she said doubtfully.
But Judith and I ended up talking for a few hours. She played with her shoulder-length hair while she talked. "Do you like it?" she asked. "I'm going to grow it out for the wedding. Tom says he likes it short, but he's never seen me with long hair." Then she told me about her wedding gown, which would be ivory; her bridesmaids' dresses, which would be teal; and that she and Tom planned on going to the Holy Land for their honeymoon.
I asked Judith how old she was, and she told me that she would be nineteen on September twenty-third.
"So you never got to know your uncle David."
"No, not really. I was just six when he went Home. I remember a few things. I remember he was really tall, and had long hair, and he could do all sorts of animal impersonations. He could do an elephant and a horse and a monkey. When he had to baby-sit me or the other kids, he'd put us all in a circle and we'd make a zoo."
I had never really understood why Judith was living with her grandparents, and I asked her about it.
"It was just a little after Uncle David was called Home that my mom and dad decided they wanted to spend more time in the field," she said. "They've been living in Laos since then, near the Vietnam border. They're medical missionaries. I spent a couple of years with them there, but we decided that when it was time for high school, I'd live here with Grandma and Grandpa."
"That must have been tough, being away from your family and living with your grandparents," I said.
"You have no idea!" Judith laughed. "I love Grandma and Grandpa to death, but they're old and they're strict. Tom is the first boy they ever let me even be alone with. I didn't go to one party in high school."
"Who's the tougher one?" I asked. "Your Grandma or your Grandpa?"
"Oh, Grandpa, definitely. If it was up to Grandpa, I'd just stay home all the time. I'd probably never even have gone to school. Grandma sometimes says, ‘You've got to let that girl breathe.' But I understand, they're just worried, you know? Because of David." Judith's voice grew low, and she looked around the room. "Don't tell anyone, but sometimes in high school I snuck out the window at night."
Judith sat quietly for a minute. Then she said, "Mischa, do you know why that woman killed Uncle David?"
"No," I said. "I'm trying to find out."
"Can I tell you something?"
"Of course."
"And you promise you won't think Grandma and Grandpa are bad people?"
"Of course I promise."
"I once heard Grandma and Grandpa have a fight about David. A big fight. It was just a little after I got there. I wanted to go out after school and Grandpa didn't want to let me, and I don't know how it happened, but Grandma and Grandpa started fighting—I don't think I should be telling this to you."
I didn't say anything, and Judith kept going.
"In any case, they were fighting, and Grandma started yelling at Grandpa, ‘You're going to drive her out of this house, just like David.' And Grandpa, he got so mad. He said, ‘Don't talk to me about David. If you had done what any decent Christian woman would do, David would still be here today.' It was awful. I was upstairs in my bedroom, and even with the door closed I could hear them in their room. Grandma said, ‘You brought that woman into this house. Don't ever forget, you brought that woman into this house.' I always wonder still what they were talking about. Later that night I heard them singing hymns downstairs."
A few minutes later, Judith stood up to go. She looked at me searchingly for a moment, and I could see her grandmother's shrewd eyes inset in a still young, unlined face. "Last year it was this girl Sarah Kennedy's birthday? At school? She had a party at a guest house in the mountains, and I think you should go up there."
"Why?"
"Because I think the owner of the place used to be Martiya's guide in the mountains. His name is Vinai. I think he knows all about her."
Judith looked around the room again.
"But if you go, please don't tell Grandma and Grandpa that I told you about it. Because I told them that I was going on a Bible retreat."
I left for the Hiker Hut that same day, traveling by motorbike.
When I first began driving in Thailand, one of the teachers at Rachel's school—Mr. Robert, a devout Buddhist, as it happened—gave me a piece of pointed advice. Distrust everyone, he said, for no one— absolutely no one—on the Thai highway is your friend. A people renowned for their calm and delicate nature, the Thai are nevertheless among the most aggressive of all the world's drivers, yielding lunatic pride of place only to the pacifistic, vegetarian Hindu.
But the Thai system allows for a certain flexibility: my little Honda Dream hugged the far left-hand margin of the highway, and the unwritten rules of the Thai road allowed me to cruise along as slowly as I wanted, past bamboo shacks where old ladies in sarongs sold coconut milk and fanned themselves with giant palm fronds. On either side of the road leading out of the lowlands, there were rice paddies being worked by very little women in broad hats and high boots, trudging slowly across immense flat fields, bent at the waist. A Thai proverb summarizes the life of a peasant farmer: "Back to the sun, face to the earth."
Then the road snaked into the mountains. A twenty-minute climb; I passed three elephants, led by mahouts, walking trunk in tail; my ears popped—and northern Thailand exploded in light. The plain of Chiang Mai had been a gloomy checkerboard of rice and sludge; the mirrored temple roofs had reflected a dark sky. But as soon as I hit the hills, the weather changed. Sweet flimsy mountain clouds floated across an open sky, and I could smell wild jasmine, honeysuckle, hibiscus, and something strangely like lemon tea. The paddies were terraced on the mountain slopes like a wedding cake made of mud: each glossy layer reflected the emerald hills, the azure sky, and the wild palms. At the very top of the wedding cake, short crabbed trees in radiant red blossom marked the place where the jungle began. Somewhere along the way, a mountain summit had been leveled to make way for a stupendously large yellow Buddha, who looked out impassively from his high perch over the mountains and the plains, his cherry lips ladylike. Mysterious dirt roads forked out every now and again, leading off to G
od-knows-where. I wanted to follow them all.
When I came to the hot springs, following the instructions that Judith had offered me, I made a left turn and crossed a small bridge that led onto a narrow red-dirt road. This took me up through little villages filled with rooting pigs and houses on stilts with tin roofs. Small children looked at me gravely.
Then the country changed again, the green turning golden with altitude. Some parts of the hill were on fire, and other slopes were black and charred. This was the real mountain country. A little brown stream wandered by the side of the road. A young boy led a humped bullock by the nose. I decided to defy the odds and took off my sweat-drenched helmet. A warm wind tousled my hair.
I came to a long, low teak building nestled on the side of a hill, looking out over an exuberant field of yellow sunflowers. A sign read the hiker hut, in both English and Thai. Sprawled in a hammock in the shade of two big trees, a small silver-haired man plucked at his guitar. He didn't look up as I approached, and only when I was two-thirds of the way up the walk did he stop strumming. He put the guitar aside, rolled himself up to standing, and with an air of lazy cool asked me in English with only the slightest hint of an accent if he could help me.
It's very disconcerting the way the Thai laugh and smile at bad news. When I told Khun Vinai that Martiya was dead, he smiled. Maybe his smile meant: She suffered for a long time and it's best this way.
But maybe it meant: It served her right.
Or maybe it just meant: Huh.
The Hiker Hut was a collection of little huts, each in the traditional style of a different hill tribe. There was an Akha house, with its roof like a plump hive of mountain grasses; and a Lisu hut, with an elegant long front porch; and a cylindrical Karen house, tall and stately. There was a Mien cottage, a Hmong hut, and a Palaung long house, large enough for a convention of Palaung stockbrokers on a junket.
I, of course, stayed in the Dyalo hut.
The thin cotton mattress was the only concession to Western taste; the Dyalo, I well knew, typically slept on the floor. But in all other respects, Khun Vinai later told me with pride, so perfectly authentic were his tribal huts that once a visiting British television program was able to produce an entire documentary about the lives of the tribal peoples without ever leaving the property.
I spent the better part of the afternoon lying in the hammock that Khun Vinai had vacated, reading the Bible. After all those meetings with the Walkers, I had realized with a shameful start that I had never read much of the Good Book. His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written that no man knew, but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: And his name is called The Word of God. That's from Revelation. I wondered what that sounded like in Dyalo.
There were two other guests at the Hiker Hut, a young blond couple. From the hammock where I had installed myself, I watched them mount the hill and climb into their Akha hut. I had dinner with them that evening. I didn't really have a choice: there was only one restaurant in the village, managed by Khun Vinai's wife, and it would have seemed strange if I had said no. They were both from Denmark, and they told me a lot of things I didn't know about the hill-tribe villages: all of the villages in this valley, Henrietta said, were part of a program sponsored by the king of Thailand to substitute other crops for opium. The whole thing was an American idea. That's why there were so many strawberry and tomato fields. Later, I tasted the strawberries. They were bitter and chalky. I had my doubts.
After dinner, we walked back up the hill, and I excused myself to my Dyalo hut, pleading exhaustion. I took a shower and dried myself off and dusted myself with mentholated prickly heat powder and wondered what I was supposed to do with myself now. Then I heard a soft shuffling step on my stoop, and a knock on the door.
TWO
THE HAPPIEST WORDS IN ALL THE WORLD
I KNOW THE HAPPIEST WORDS in all the world.
The happiest words in all the world are "Opium Man," when accompanied by a little knock on the door of your hut and the old Akha man's shuffling step. "Come in," you say. Then the Opium Man lies down on the bed with you, both of you on your sides, facing each other, a little paraffin candle between you. Only a lover lies in bed with you like the Opium Man. He pulls a sticky pouch of black opium from his pocket, and lights the candle and prepares the pipe, heating the opium over the open flame, working it carefully until it is a perfect sizzling ball, then plunging the bolus into the pipe. It is not even necessary to lift your head while you smoke: the Opium Man holds the pipe while you inhale. I know all about the Opium Man, because opium makes you endlessly inquisitive. I speak to the Opium Man in my halting, hesitant Thai, and he replies in his thick Akha accent. The Opium Man can be talkative or silent, as he wishes, because he has the self-assurance that comes from being truly desired. I know about his little village and his pigs, his daughters and the bride-price he is expecting for them; I know that it is difficult for the sad Akha to follow the Akha zha when they wander down from the mountains to the Thai villages of the plains, where the lowland merchants cheat them and the children mock their rustic ways. The Akha man, himself a smoker, asks me questions, and I tell him about Martiya van der Leun.
When Vinai knocked on the door of the little hut, the pipes that I had smoked in anticipation of his arrival had wrongly rendered him a familiar figure, an old friend. He stood half a head shorter than me, and I am not particularly tall; but when he lay on the bed with the Opium Man, he sprawled and seemed big. He said he was a member of the Rotary Club of Chiang Rai, and asked if I was a Rotarian also. He seemed disappointed when I said I wasn't. I had decided that he was as distant and elegant as a headwaiter, then he belched; I had decided that he was tight-lipped, then he spoke for hours. It is a cliché to speak of the inscrutable Oriental—but clichés exist for a reason. Talking to Vinai, who was himself Dyalo, gave me some sense of how difficult it must have been for Martiya to penetrate the life of a Dyalo village. All those strange smiles.
Khun Vinai took my place on the bed. He was distracted, and said something about roofing tiles. He had driven all the way to Chiang Rai that afternoon, but the tiles he was looking for hadn't been available. He had wasted his afternoon.
The Opium Man made him a pipe, and Khun Vinai smoked it down in a single lungful. He held the smoke a long time, and then exhaled long tusks that hung below the ceiling of woven grass. He relaxed visibly. This was not the first time that I had smoked opium—I had, after all, lived in the Golden Triangle for almost two years—but the drug this time was different. The last time that I had smoked, with Rachel, a half-dozen pipes had rendered me pleasantly sleepy and lethargic. But now I was almost trembling. The only light in the hut was the Opium Man's candle, casting long pale shadows on the thatch wall.
Finally Vinai spoke, "Martiya, she is my good friend. It is too sad story, Martiya's story. I miss her too much."
Then he lapsed back into a long silence.
Khun Vinai propped himself on one elbow and looked at me. From my angle on the floor, I saw his bare feet, horny and calloused; then his short legs in a pair of khaki trousers; then a polo shirt with a little alligator above his heart; then a well-shaven Dyalo face, with mellow dark eyes, an unlined forehead, and a head of uncombed spiky gray hair.
Once he began to talk, all his reserve melted. Like many a man who reckons that he has made a success of his life, he was eager to tell his story. For twenty minutes or more, Khun Vinai narrated in my direction, occasionally making eye contact, but more often than not directing his conversation to a spot above my head on the bamboo wall. He spoke fluent English, but for an unflagging reliance on the present tense. I listened patiently, waiting for him to get to Martiya, and eventually he did.
As Khun Vinai spoke, I took notes:
— born in Dyalo vill., north of Burma's Shan state. So remote, hunt monkeys in forest with poisoned bow and arrow
— youngest of five children, only child in his family to surv
ive to adulthood. Mother afraid spirits, sure that Khun Vinai die as well, insist he flee
— no possessions but the clothes on his back & his grandfather's gourd pipe, fled across the border to Thailand. Just fourteen.
— CHIANG MAI. Made a living—manual laborer and porter. Learned Thai, and some English also, contact w/ westerners
— Good w/languages—brought him 1974 to Martiya vdL's attention
— A dollar a day to go Dan Loi!!!
— How $ me then! Today—Toyota tr., then—no eat
The next morning, I would translate the last line of the notes above as: "You have no idea how much money this was to me then. Today, I drive a Toyota truck, but in those days, I barely had enough to eat."
On his left wrist, Khun Vinai wore a Rolex. Although his watch probably came from Chiang Mai's counterfeit bazaar, just like my Cartier, poverty had clearly taught Khun Vinai the value of things.
Khun Vinai told me he spent almost two years with Martiya in Dan Loi. He was like Martiya's shadow in the village: the two spent day after day together, interviewing the villagers or taking genealogies. When Vinai realized just what Martiya was trying to do in Dan Loi, when he had finally figured out just why Martiya was asking all those questions and just what Martiya was writing down in her notebooks, Vinai became an enthusiastic partner in her work. When her Dyalo became conversational, Martiya would interview the women privately about those things which they will not discuss freely in front of men; and he would talk to the men. At night, they would compare their findings.
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