Fieldwork: A Novel (21 page)

By the time Karen and Martiya got back to the States—this must have been 1977, three years or so after they left—Karen was really involved with Ted, and Karen and Martiya didn't live together again. Naturally they stopped writing each other—they lived just across town—and suddenly they were farther apart than when they had been in remote tribal villages, across oceans. They saw each other in the halls of the department, or met once every week or two for coffee, then once a month, then less, and by the time that Martiya did the unthinkable and bought herself a ticket back to Thailand, Karen was already at Penn, and she only found out that Martiya had gone back to Asia when a letter in Martiya's neat sloping handwriting, return address Thailand, arrived in her departmental postbox, the first letter from Martiya in almost a year.

For about four years, from 1979 to 1983, Karen and Martiya were only in vague contact. Karen was in Pennsylvania and Martiya was back in Thailand. There were one or two letters a year. Then came Karen's divorce, and losing the job at Penn and the move to Madison, and one evening as the wind whipped down from the North Pole, Karen, feeling very, very alone, wrote a long letter to Martiya, seven single-spaced pages, double-sided, complaining about those snows which started in November, and the long nights watching TV and eating ice cream straight from the tub. Something about Wisconsin made her feel fat, she said, in every sense: gross, heavy, immobile, sluggish. Three weeks later, Martiya replied, inviting Karen to visit her in Thailand over winter break—

And in
any
case (Karen said, still on the telephone, my ear aching now),
oh my
, she had been talking for hours, she had to go, but she'd tell me more when we talked again, and I was so nice to listen to her yak, but,
listen
, the reason why she was calling was, last fall when she got her new condo, she'd just put
everything
into the storeroom—books and papers and notes and twenty-three years' worth of
Ethnology
; and one of the very best things about talking to me had been that it gave her an excuse to go down there and put a little order into her stuff. She knew she had Martiya's old letters somewhere, because she really was a packrat, and it had taken a little time, but in the end, she found a sheaf of old letters from her classmate and friend. She couldn't find all of the letters, chiefly because Ted never sent them to her and the lazy bastard probably
still
had them in storage, but she did find a bunch of them down in the basement, mainly from Martiya's first year out in the field. She stayed up all night reading them and chuckling and remembering, and
man
, was that a long time ago, first fieldwork. It's like nothing else.

Karen sent the letters priority mail; about ten days later a fat manila envelope stuffed with hundreds of photocopies arrived. It was fortuitous timing, because the next day Rachel and I went on vacation. I took the letters with me.

When Rachel had accepted the job at the school, Mr. Tim had mentioned that one of the perks of the position was the fabulous vacations. "Oh, my!" he said. "You will go
everywhere
!" Now, for the Thai New Year, Mr. Tim, good to his word, was taking his lover to tour the romantic ruins of Angkor Wat. Others were headed to Burma, to Laos, to Vietnam, to China. Mr. Robert was headed to central Thailand for a two-week course in Vipassana meditation; he would spend his vacation learning to hear the sound of his heartbeat. Even our neighbor, Baiyom, was headed back to her little village a half day's journey to the south, where, she announced, she intended to do nothing but eat and fart.

Rachel and I rented a houseboat in the floating village of Pak Nai.

It was a wonderful vacation. The banks of the river marked the boundaries of a national park, in which only a few of the hill tribes were permitted to settle, and so the whole village floats midstream on bamboo rafts: perhaps two or three dozen huts, the market, the temple, a typical Thai village. In the mornings, we awoke just after dawn, dove off the porch of our houseboat, and cavorted like river dolphins in the sparkling waters; then we climbed into our canoe and paddled off to the floating market and bought mangoes, finger bananas, and bottled water for breakfast. The policemen, pants rolled up to their knees, sat on the edge of their houseboat flopping their feet in the cool waters and saluted us as we cruised by. Could there have been a greater pleasure at the height of the hot season than to dive off the front porch of our rented houseboat and hear the hooting of the kiss-me birds greeting the full moon? Or a sweeter memory than dawn, when we were woken by the serene paddling of the monks, stopping by our houseboat to collect alms?

During the days, I read Martiya's letters to Karen Leon. I had them in a three-ring binder. "Dear Karen," Martiya wrote; and "Karen honey," and "Hi Kit-Kat!" I lay out in the sun and read letters about Martiya's boring dreams, and letters interpreting Karen's boring dreams; then letters describing Martiya's Dyalo hut and letters about Dyalo food; letters describing how hard it was to learn the language. The correspondence was of necessity one-sided, because Karen didn't send me her responses. The letters covered the better part of a year, September 1974 until August 1975. Each eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch page was the photocopy of a slightly smaller unlined stationery sheet. Each letter was dated: some letters were written on consecutive days, other letters were separated by as much as two weeks. Most of the letters were about three to four pages. There were fifty-three letters in all.

We had been in Pak Nai for about two days when I conceived the idea that we move there.

"No, I'm serious," I said. "We
could
stay. I'd sell an article every couple of months, we'd be fine. We could have kids here, they'd grow up speaking perfect Thai and swim like fish."

"When they got to be teenagers, we'd just build them a houseboat of their own, because they'd be such pests," Rachel said.

"Exactly."

I should have left things there, but the more I thought about the idea of living in Pak Nai forever, the more excited I became; it was something about Martiya's letters that made it seem like a swell idea. Another day passed, and I presented the idea to Rachel again.

"Seriously, why couldn't we stay here?"

"Because we'd go out of our minds after about two weeks? Because my family lives ten thousand miles from here? Because your family lives twelve thousand miles from here? Because there's not even a telephone here? Because we wouldn't have jobs? Because we wouldn't have money?"

"But we'd have a great time. We'd learn terrific Thai, we'd really, really figure these people out, not like in Chiang Mai."

"I don't want to spend my life floating."

"Rachel," I said, "I've thought it over and we really should move to Pak Nai."

She gave me that look that women give men when they want to have a serious discussion. She said, "I don't want to move to Pak Nai. I'm twenty-eight years old, and before long, I want to marry and have children. Then I want to raise my children in a normal house, not far from their grandparents. Do you want these things? Because I do, and they're not going to happen in a floating bamboo hut."

That's when I dived into the water to forestall further discussion. I didn't mention my plan to live in Pak Nai again. By the time we went back to Chiang Mai, I was sunburned and thoroughly sick of the place, anyway: there wasn't anything to eat there but fish, and I was dying to check my e-mail. I thought that maybe one of the Walkers had written to me, or Karen Leon. Maybe she'd found more letters from Martiya.

ABOUT FIVE MONTHS
after her arrival in a Dyalo village, Martiya, in a letter to Karen Leon, admitted something dark and terrible—that she was beginning to feel a little like Eskimo Kathy. She was referring to a story told and retold in the Berkeley Department of Anthropology. "You know about Eskimo Kathy, don't you?" the grad students had asked each other; Kathy, the grad students whispered, was just like us once, before she went off to study the Eskimo.

The story went like this. Kathy was a delicate little thing, hardly bigger than a child, who had dreamed of living with the Eskimo since the fifth grade, when she wrote a report entitled "People of the Snow" for social studies. When Kathy went off to realize her long-standing dream, she chose the most isolated, northern Eskimo village she could find, where the Eskimos still lived as Eskimos. There she explained to the Eskimo chief that she was just a child in the ways of the Eskimo and finagled herself an invitation to share his family's igloo for the winter. She settled in; the sun went down, not to return until the spring; the last boat left until the warm weather would liberate icebound Eskimoland; and Kathy discovered that she didn't like her Eskimo family. It was as simple as that, really. Some human beings just don't like each other. The Eskimos yammered about the stupidest things, and they would not stop yammering. The Eskimo had four hundred words for snow because it was
all they ever talked about
. Nobody had ever told Kathy that an igloo was so tiny, and the Eskimo chief smacked his lips maddeningly as he ate his boiled fox and seal blubber stew. And what was worse, Kathy overheard the wife of the Eskimo chief admit to her sister that they did not like the clumsy, ugly
kapluna
either. "She is so stupid!" the Eskimo chief's wife said.
That
really rankled, after Kathy had spent all those hours building rapport with the chief's wife by patiently learning to sew real Eskimo
muqluq
s. Kathy had thought her
muqluq
s were very nice. She didn't think she was stupid. She thought,
Let the Eskimo chief's wife try taking the GRE.

There were seven months of subzero temperatures still to come, and outside the igloo's tiny port, absolute Arctic darkness. Dark daybreaks yielded up dark mornings; it was dark at midday and the afternoon was dark, too; she took her afternoon tea in darkness, and then what was dusk to the south was here just more—darkness; dark twilights preceded dark evenings; and then the nights were very, very dark. Kathy became desperate, and she hit on a plan: she would have the Eskimo make her a little igloo of her own. She would decorate it just the way she liked, and she'd cook her seal blubber outdoors even if it was really cold, so the igloo would never smell bad. She began to dream about her igloo at night. But her proposal only made things worse, as her Eskimo host refused her very reasonable idea.
Nobody declines the hospitality of an Eskimo chief! She could sleep on the glacier like a seal, if she wasn't happy in his home!
The offended Eskimo chief now refused even to speak to the anthropologist, and made a gesture so offensive that the anthropologist would not speak to him. It was only December. The graduate students never knew just what happened next. Kathy never talked about it. She came back to Berkeley the next spring only long enough to empty her apartment of its possessions. She chain-smoked, having run out of cigarettes in Eskimoland in mid-December, and muttered something about it being much, much colder in the North than everybody thought.

Isolated by her linguistic incompetence, often only mildly interested in the people, and increasingly plagued by a desire
just to be alone
, Martiya, after five months in a Dyalo village, began to dwell obsessively on Eskimo Kathy's story. Martiya arrived in Dan Loi believing that because of her childhood in a Pipikoro village, because she had been a curious and excited traveler, and because of her sensitivities to indigenous peoples as a student, she would find anthropological fieldwork easy; or if not easy, then compellingly interesting. She was wrong. It was not easy and only intermittently interesting. This discovery was a crushing blow to her ego: her father had warned her in his mild way before leaving that she might not find fieldwork wholly to her liking. Piers had said that the best fieldworkers were those with small, discreet, camouflaged personalities—people not entirely unlike Piers van der Leun himself— and Martiya was always a
presence
. "Daddy!" Martiya had said very loudly in the Brazilian café in Berkeley where they were eating lunch.

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?"

"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.