Fieldwork

by Mischa Berlinski

  One sleepy morning, Karen decided to lie in bed a little longer as Martiya went out about her rounds. Martiya's hut was not what Karen had expected. She had remembered Martiya's epistolary descriptions of dreary and primitive Dyalo huts, but on her return to Thailand, Martiya had built for herself a new house, simple but comfortable, two light and airy rooms under a high-arched ceiling. There was a bedroom, and now, in the early morning, Karen lay in bed and watched the sunlight filter in through square windows to fall in long white rectangles across the bamboo-tiled floor. The view extended out over the whole of the valley, light green mountains darkening in the distance, each bend in the mountains suggesting to Karen intrigue and mystery. For a few moments, Karen imagined staying with Martiya here in the mountains: getting someone to sell the Ford Pinto and wire her the money, not even bothering to resign her lectureship, just staying, building herself a hut, if not in this village then in the next one over.

  When she was awake, Karen went into the other room of the hut, where Martiya kept her desk. This room, which Martiya called her study, stared out at the village itself. Long silk tai-lue tapestries, one red with blue, one yellow with green, one black with silver, hung along three walls; the other wall was dominated by a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Martiya, Karen said, read voraciously, and every month her father sent her books from California. On Martiya's desk, there were three lilies in a glass bowl.

  Karen was seized by a sudden desire to snoop, and she began to look through the volumes of hard-sided notebooks on the bookshelf. Martiya seemed to be writing a book. On the flyleaf of one of the notebooks was written a title, "The Dyalo Way of Life," and from what Karen could tell, the book was a memoir of daily life with the Dyalo. Karen thought of Colin Turnbull's famous memoir of life with the Pygmies, The Forest People. Karen read Martiya's memoir all through the morning, and when she was finished, she was convinced that the completed manuscript, still only a fragment, would be one of those rare literary documents that created for the reader the life of a whole people. She had spent several days now in a Dyalo village, but nothing that she had seen made the Dyalo come alive like Martiya's account. Hearing Martiya's footsteps on the terrace, Karen returned the notebook to its proper place and went with her friend to make lunch in the cooking hut.

  After lunch, every afternoon in the heat of the day, Martiya and Karen went swimming. There was a small clear pool at the base of a steep waterfall an hour's hike from the village. Although the pool was small, the water was deep, and local legend held that at the very bottom of the pool was a rock in the shape of the seated Buddha. To touch this rock was a means of making merit, of ensuring oneself in however small a degree a more favorable reincarnation. Karen was a strong swimmer; even so, she was never able to swim down deep enough to find the rock and examine it. But Martiya claimed to be able to do it. The trick, Martiya said, was to dive into the pool from the rock ledge that overhung the waters. Martiya dove and disappeared into the darkness, and Karen became slightly nervous waiting for her friend as the waters smoothed over and became calm, with Martiya still someplace deep underneath. Only when the waters were perfectly still did Martiya burst up out of the water, panting for breath, the sun reflecting off her dark hair and lean, flat face.

  A day or two before Karen was scheduled to return home, Dan Loi was blanketed in a heavy mist, which Martiya told Karen was almost unheard of at that time of year. But there it was: the village and valley were enshrouded in mist so thick that Karen could no longer see the summits of the near hills or even the shrine of Old Grandfather just down the road; the village became perfectly quiet except for the sad cawing of the kiss-me birds and the gentle drip of water from the heavy trees. It was a mist so thick that Karen would not have been surprised at all to see a dinosaur strolling down the red-dirt lane. Martiya told Karen that she liked the mist: it reminded her of rainy season, cozy mornings with her book, and of rice planting. But Karen thought that the mist transformed Dan Loi into just about the spookiest place she had ever seen, the way the villagers wandered out of the mist, then disappeared back into it. In the end, she was glad to get out of there.

  That visit to Dan Loi was the last time Karen saw Martiya. She had meant to go back to Thailand again, but not long after returning to Wisconsin, one of her grant applications—to study rainmakers in West Africa, an idea that came to her in Dan Loi, while watching the shaman—was finally approved. Between her own fieldwork and then the new job in Texas and then meeting Paul, which was altogether another story, and then the kids, the years slipped by. She and Martiya continued to write to each other, but with time the letters passed across the Pacific less and less frequently, until finally the correspondence came to a halt. Then a man named Gilles called, saying that Martiya was in jail.

  "I thought he was crazy," Karen said. "I tell you, I didn't believe him. I thought he was trying to get money out of me or something. I mean, he sounded so weird. But then I got so curious, and I wrote him and he wrote me back that she had killed a missionary, so I wrote her, and I wrote her again, and she never replied, and then you wrote me, and God, I feel so bad. I should have done something to help her when I had the chance."

  THREE

  BAMBUSA VULGARIS

  GILLES BLOUZON FOUND THE HOUSE WITH MARTIYA—an old teak house with a gabled roof that curled at the eaves. They'd been roaming on Gilles's motorbike, nothing more than a Sunday drive, and when he saw the old house, with its stupendous view of the plains, Gilles said to himself, "This is the house where I wish to pass my retraite." Buying property is a complicated business for the foreigner in Thailand, but Gilles was patient: it was in his retraite that he, like every Frenchman, imagined that his real life would begin. He signed the papers with a vision in his sleek, seal-like head: a sunny afternoon in cool season; Gilles in the garden, pottering away; and Martiya looking out on him indulgently from the window of the kitchen, where she was preparing a tasty Dyalo daube. But when Martiya left him, Gilles took stock not only of this failed romance but also of the general trajectory of his life and decided to leave the University of Chiang Mai, where he had spent the last five years as a professor of botany, a specialist in the life cycle of bamboo. He found a position at the University of Grenoble, and returned to France. This was in 1988. The teak house was shuttered and boarded up. A family of owls nested in the eaves.

  When Gilles left Thailand, he had resolved to sell the house; but selling property in Thailand is almost as complicated a business as buying it, and he held on to the house for almost ten years. This was good fortune: only months before Gilles was scheduled to begin his retraite, he was interviewed for The Guardian by a pretty Englishwoman named Vivian who was interested in the biological effects of deforestation in Bangladesh. Gilles married Vivian not long thereafter. I recognized Vivian's name, as will many of my readers: she is now The Guardian's Southeast Asian correspondent. She famously reported from Tianamen Square, and was the first journalist in Asia to interview Pol Pot's second-in-command. Gilles and Vivian now made their headquarters in the house that Gilles found with Martiya.

  I stood beside him in his garden.

  "All that," Gilles told me with a sweep of his hand. "All that I planted."

  Laterite blocks formed walkways through the jungle-like profusion. Gilles named species with a flick of his forefinger as we walked: ficus, banyan, monkeypod—these were the shade trees already on his property when he arrived; but it was Gilles who planted the Persian lilac, the jasmine, the jacaranda, the perfumed frangipani and the lantana, with its pungent smell of smoke and garbage. We paused beside a lipstick tree, and Gilles pointed out a flame tree, a flame vine, and a fire bush. Bougainvillea bloomed in purple, magenta, orange, white, pink, and crimson. A passion flower drooped—"He needs less sun," Gilles said, "I am going to transplant him"—but the golden trumpet, the pink trumpet, and the blue trumpet were all in blossom. Lilies and lotuses in tall vases floated on murky green waters.

  But the flowers, the trees, the shrubs, the vines, the
exotics, the water plants, the palms—coconut, palmrya, taliput, and fishtail—were all preamble to the bambou. Land being cheap in Thailand, Gilles had bought almost a half acre of adjacent property on which to indulge his passion.

  "Bambusa andinacea," he said as we walked, petting the stalks fondly as another man might stroke the muzzles of his favorite dogs. "The giant thorny bamboo. Bambusa pallida. Bambusa polymorpha. Dendrocalamus giganteus."

  The list went on.

  "Have you ever seen a bamboo flower?" Gilles asked abruptly.

  His excitement mounted, and it was easy to see what might have attracted Martiya, and subsequently Vivian, to the man. But I could also see why Karen Leon might have thought that he was a weirdo.

  "The bamboo, she is a sexually timid but intensely passionate grass," Gilles continued, not waiting for my answer and pointing at an abashed-looking green stalk. "Bambusa vulgaris, this one, she flowers once every one hundred fifty years, and when she flowers, she flowers everywhere! All of the bamboo, after decades and decades of calm, now suddenly decides it is time to wake up and flower. And then, once it has flowered and reproduced and the baby bamboo shoots, all of the old bamboo all over will die. All at once. How does bamboo everywhere know that it is time?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  "Of course you don't know! Nobody knows! I've been studying the bamboo a lifetime, and nobody knows. It is one of the most fantastic mysteries on Earth. Bamboo in Brazil and Bamboo in China, exploding at once in bamboo flowers. Nobody alive today has ever seen Bambusa vulgaris in flower! It last flowered in 1860. But it's coming! In just a few years—I hope I will be alive—it will flower again—I'm waiting—after all this time—the explosion—I think that I can feel it coming! But it will be a catastrophe, and nobody is ready. It will be a terrible thing.

  "A terrible thing!" he repeated. "We have some records, some documents, from the last time the bamboo flowered. But this time it will be much worse. When the bamboo flowers, it happens all at once, and everywhere that there is Bambusa vulgaris will drown in bamboo flowers. What do they look like? What do they smell like? No one knows. One thing we do know. The rats will love them. The bamboo flowers in the hot season, when everything else is dying and BOOM! the rats will eat like the pigs, they will gorge themselves, they will stuff themselves, and then they will reproduce, because that is what rats do when they are full. And when the rats reproduce and reproduce and reproduce—it means famine. And of course, nobody is prepared."

  Gilles shook his head at the improvident nature of his fellow man. His lecture on bamboo ended abruptly, and Gilles took me inside the house, where he would, he said, make me a tisane from things grown right in his own garden. Such a tisane, he promised, would increase my mental acuity, which I suppose he found lacking.

  Silk curtains held back the late afternoon sun, leaving the sala bathed in mustard-yellow shadows. Above us, a row of winged angels met in intricate aerial embraces, the delicate little things unmindful of the heavy wooden beam across their backs. All his life Gilles had traveled—there is, after all, no wild bamboo in France—and from every corner of the bamboo-occupied globe had acquired pretty things: Javanese batiks hung low across the teak walls, fresh roses were haphazardly arranged in a vase which Gilles explained was once the spirit urn of a little-known tribe in northern Côte d'Ivoire who lived surrounded by the most merveilleux bamboo groves in all West Africa. We sat crosslegged on the floor around a low wooden table drinking Gilles's bitter tisane from celadon mugs. I was feeling sharper already.

  Every time Gilles said the word "bamboo," his tongue flickered out from his mouth very slightly, and Gilles said the word "bamboo" very often. He was nevertheless a handsome man, all the charm in his face centered in his melancholy, sympathetic eyes. His hair was high and receded, and he had the first hints of long descending jowls. It was fully a man's face, and again I could imagine the appeal to Martiya of this worldly character when she first met him at a lecture he gave to the American University Alumni Association on, of course, the mating habits of bamboo. It was 1984 and Martiya was thirty-seven years old, Gilles perhaps ten years her elder.

  The relationship proceeded with all of the amatory languor of Dendrocalamus strictus; yet by Gilles's description it was nevertheless a warm and tender affair. Gilles in those days drove a motorcycle, and every weekend he rode up to Dan Loi. He spent hours telling her more than I suspect she wanted to hear about the bamboo, but she reciprocated by insisting that he master the intricate details of the Dyalo rice-planting cycle. It was from Gilles that I would later learn how the dyal worked.

  Every year at the start of the monsoon, Gilles returned to France for a month, to visit his aging parents and his son, and it was his practice to come back to Thailand with several cases of wine. It was, he said, the one thing from France that he missed while living in Asia. "And the cheese," he added, after a moment's thought, and had I not pressed him to continue his story, I think that list might have gone on. Gilles was not a great connoisseur, but it gave his methodical, scientific nature pleasure to record when each bottle was drunk, and under what circumstances. This was the closest that Gilles had to a diary. In anticipation of my visit, he had pulled down his wine logs from his years with Martiya.

  The first night that Gilles met Martiya, he wrote: "15 March 1984. Sancerre. Chiang Mai. With Martiya van der Leun, anthropologist." By the fall, Martiya had become "M," as in: "21 September 1984. Bordeaux Blanc. Chiang Mai. With M. to celebrate my new motorbike." The wine diaries were an odd, unwitting witness to the rhythms of Dyalo life. Martiya and Gilles toasted the Dyalo new year together every February: "15 February 1985. Champagne. Dan Loi. With M. Dyalo new year. Banging on drums." All through February and April, the Dyalo slashed the jungle and burned fields to prepare them for planting; when the fields were ready for planting, the village held the first of the dyal feasts: "17 April 1985. Macon Villages. Dan Loi. With M & George Washington, start of rice planting season."

  "Why didn't George Washington make dyal?" I asked.

  "The shaman never makes dyal, of course," Gilles said. "How would that be, if the shaman made dyal?" Gilles shook his head and pointedly refilled my cup of tea.

  All through the rainy season, the Dyalo weeded the rice fields, and occasionally Gilles, who liked digging in the dirt, would go out to help. He'd return in the late afternoon, covered in sweat: "17 May 1985. Very cold Sancerre Blanc. Dan Loi. With M, chicken curry, spent day working in fields." One night in June 1986, the headman shot a wild boar and gave a portion to Martiya; it was stewed and accompanied by a Burgundy. Every year, with the first mangoes in spring, Gilles opened a Sauternes. When Gilles found the house in which he anticipated taking his retraite, the couple drank a Muscat. By September, the maize was harvested ("16 September 1986. Bordeaux Blanc. Dan Loi. With M, corn chowder, new corn"), shortly thereafter the rice ("12 October 1987. St. Julien. Dan Loi. With M. Rice harvest"), and in December, the opium harvest coincided with the birthday of the king of Thailand: "18 December 1985. St. Julien. Dan Loi. With M. King's Birthday." They drank a Graves on 18 December 1986, for the same occasion, and a St. Estephe in December, 1987.

  The wine log went on and on: a bottle of wine once a week and a man with whom she might share the ordinary pleasures of life—that seems to have been Martiya's relationship with Gilles. It was a relationship of opposites: Gilles was methodical whereas Martiya was impulsive, an excess of phlegm balanced against an excess of choler. It wasn't bad. Toward the end of the affair, Gilles told me, he had begun to consider marriage. But it wasn't meant to be: the last bottle the couple drank together was just before the start of the planting season, April 1987. Gilles was headed back home for a month with his aged parents. They drank a Côtes du Rhône.

  The room in which I sat with Gilles was not the perfect rectangle it seemed: the northern wall was a few inches longer than the southern wall. It was a distortion, Gilles explained to me, that was not visible to the naked eye, but once Gilles had pointed it out,
the room did appear very slightly wider at one end than the other. The room seemed to pulse slightly and breathe, as if the eye longed to correct the very slight imbalance in the proportions. The effect was, as Gilles had said, immensely calming.

  On a low wooden table near the door, there was a photo of a handsome young woman with auburn hair. I would have imagined that she was Gilles's daughter, but Gilles had earlier mentioned that he had only a son, a banker in Paris, so I ventured a guess that it was Gilles's wife. Gilles confirmed my suspicion: Vivian was in Hanoi covering a conference of Asian-Pacific leaders.

  The brief discussion of Vivian's career brought us back to Martiya.

  "Was she ever lonely?" I asked.

  He shook his head. "She was a very self-sufficient woman, the most self-sufficient woman I've ever met. She could go weeks and months in the village and be very happy. I cannot do that. I need to talk to people, to tell stories. But Martiya was fine by herself."

  Gilles leaned forward and rearranged the lilies in the vase.

  "You can't imagine it was an easy life she led in that village," he said. "Even if she had the money to buy her own rice and pork and vegetables and did not go to work in the fields. But she had to carry those huge buckets of water up the hill every day—it gave her the most beautiful shoulders and arms, that work, like marble. Just to wash her clothes took her a half a day. She never allowed herself to wear dirty clothes, that was something she would not do, and she always wanted to wear nice clothes, those lovely Dyalo skirts and blouses, and so every day she was washing. And cooking in that village! She was an excellent cook, but it took time to cook as the local women did. It was the way my grandmother of course used to cook, making everything by hand in the kitchen, all afternoon, chopping, chopping, chopping.

  "Then there was her work, her real work. That's why Martiya spent so much time cooking, because that's where she could talk to the women. She'd spend three or four hours with the women, and then she'd spend three or four hours back in her hut, going over what they told her. Martiya trained herself to remember those conversations. She would talk to someone for an hour and then remember everything. But later she'd want to write down everything the women said, and think about what they said, and organize her notes, and then—this was the very hard part—really listen to the notes and to the voices, close her eyes and try to really hear what these voices had told her. You need time to listen like that. We don't listen like that ever. We miss so much of what everyone says.