Fieldwork: A Novel (29 page)

But Mr. Walker didn't tell me what he always told the people. He just stared at the flooded parking lot.

"Mr. Walker, I'm sorry, I don't understand," I said. "Why didn't Mrs. Walker like it when Martiya spent the night?"

"Well, Norma had her ideas. Martiya was a very attractive young woman, and you know women, Norma was very sensitive."

"Jealous?"

"You could say jealous. Son …"

He didn't finish the sentence. His voice was tight. I sought a way to phrase my awkward demand. Inspiration arrived: "Mr. Walker, did you
sin
with Martiya?"

Mr. Walker looked at me. I was afraid that he would say, "Son, that is absolutely none of your business." But he didn't. He just held his handsome moss-green eyes steady with mine until I blinked and looked away. He sat straight up and tall. Later, Rachel would ask me why he kept talking, and I told her that it was my impression that Mr. Walker was a man who loved honesty and hated evasion. He said, "David was a champion, too, you know, a great champion of the Lord, and he sinned also. I love Norma, you know that, son. I love Nomie more than words, but even a great champion sometimes sins."

It took me a moment to realize that he was talking about David, the biblical hero, and not his son.

I'll never know the details of Mr. Walker's sin. Perhaps in those long afternoons in Mr. Walker's study, with Norma out at the market, the kids at school, and his parents at the church, Mr. Walker laid a hand on Martiya's slender thigh. Perhaps she let it rest there; or perhaps she said, "Mr. Walker, you are a happily married man!" Or perhaps Mr. Walker's sin consisted only of desire. Whatever happened, it was too much for Norma.

Mr. Walker shook his head, but he kept looking straight at me. "But I've been punished for my sins, son, don't you ever think that I haven't been."

A trilling sound set Mr. Walker's hands into motion. He started tapping his breast pockets and his pants, until finally he produced the cell phone and began stabbing at it with his gnarled fingers, squinting anxiously at the display, muttering to himself. "Gift from the kids," he said, as the thing continued to sound. Finally, unable to find the correct button, he just handed the phone to me.

I pushed the appropriate button and said hello.

It was Norma on the other end of the line. She hardly seemed surprised to have called her husband and found me. "Oh, honey, what have you done with my husband?" she asked.

"He's right here," I said, and handed the phone to Mr. Walker.

The two of them conversed a moment in Dyalo, until Mr. Walker handed the phone back to me. "Is it done?" he asked.

I examined the display, confirmed that the line was cut, and returned the phone to its owner, who slipped it into the breast pocket of his shirt.

"I hate that thing," he said. "The kids told me that if I want to keep driving, I need a cell phone. For the emergencies. But they make the things so darn small—"

We had been talking now for almost an hour, and Mr. Walker began to gather his bags. By now, the waters had receded. Everything looked cool and clean and shiny.

Not long after Martiya returned to Berkeley, David Walker went to see
Star Wars
; not long after that, he went off to follow the Grateful Dead. When Martiya came back to Thailand, she didn't call on the Walkers; and northern Thailand is sufficiently large, and Martiya's village sufficiently remote, that they had no idea she was there at all. David came home in 1985, on fire to spread the Word. Three years later, he found Martiya in her village; and two years after that, he was dead.

Norma's call had broken Mr. Walker's patient mood of recollection. He took his groceries in hand and started off in the direction of his car. He had gone about two paces when he turned around.

"David was a good boy," he said. "Tell me what we ever did to her."

NOT LONG AFTER MY CONVERSATION
with Mr. Walker, I had reason to visit the Chiang Mai University Library, on business not related to this account. I have always felt that university libraries must be some of the most erotic places on Earth. They are, after all, filled with young people, most of them attractive, and most of them bored out of their skulls. The Chiang Mai University Library is no exception, but it is an eroticism of a particularly sweet sort: a young girl with her long black hair pinned back in an elaborate bow looks up from a chemistry text and with an exasperated sigh pines for distracted Noi across the table. Will he invite her later for noodles? Outside the windows, the palm trees sway, and on the lawns little groups of students giggle. On the wall, the queen of Thailand, the patroness of learning herself, smiles serenely: she, too, was young once, and remembers those precious first minutes at the Royal Palace all those years ago when she was introduced to a handsome young prince who hardly paid her any mind at all!

I finished my business after a few minutes, but something about the place made me reluctant to go straight home, and on a whim I went to the anthropology shelves. The ethnographies were organized geographically, and my eye wandered from continent to continent, from the ferocious Yanomano of the Amazon to the elegant, erudite Dogon of the Sahara to a slender volume explicating the life of a Sicilian village in the 1920s. Chinese villages lay side by side with the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest; Siberian shamans cohabitated with the Pygmies. I felt dizzy for a moment. Spend five minutes in the anthropology stacks of a major university library and gasp at the size of the world, the sheer wonder and diversity of its inhabitants! What sturdy, impressive men and women wrote those volumes! Before I had met Martiya, I had never thought of them at all. Each one had mastered an obscure language, submerged himself or herself in the foreign; those shelves were a testament to curiosity. Every book was the product of an obsession.

The library catalogued the works of Bronislaw Malinowski apart from those of his fellows, which, now that I think about it, is not wholly inappropriate: perhaps it was a kind of homage on some anonymous librarian's part. For it was with Malinowski that the art of ethnography began. I slipped his greatest and most famous work down from the shelves and began to read, surrounded by those sweetly courting undergraduates. And although what follows might seem another digression, it isn't: Malinowski's ghost was there in Dan Loi with Martiya van der Leun.

Born in 1885 into a distinguished family of Kraków aristocrats and intellectuals, Bronislaw Malinowski was originally educated in the hard sciences of mathematics and physics. Sometime in his early twenties he suffered a physical crisis and was advised by his physician that the nervous strain of his studies could overwhelm his fragile constitution. Famous photographs of the man in later life suggest immediately, even to my untrained eyes, why his doctors were concerned: he was a thin-lipped, owl-eyed creature with a long, beaky nose, hollow cheeks, and a very high forehead receding into thin, worried hair. It is the face of an intensely intelligent sparrow or badger. The striking thing about many of these photographs is the contrast between this nervous, high-strung little man and his surroundings: Malinowski is photographed on the most mellow tropical beach imaginable. He is dressed in a round pith helmet and shorts. Tall palms sway in the distance. The sand is white, and a gentle wave is breaking on a gentle shore. Malinowski is surrounded by the natives, who regard him with affectionate, tolerant, bemused stares: the women stand topless, with large pendulous breasts reaching almost to their grass skirts; men and women, black as coal, sport enormous, simply stunning afros. Some of the afros must be a
foot
of hair in every direction—which makes sense, given that the people of the Trobriand Islands didn't have scissors. The sun is very bright. Malinowski looks miserable.

Malinowski found himself in those tropical islands—the Trobriand Islands, as it happened, off the coast of New Guinea, a place which even the Australians considered impossibly remote and horrible—having been beguiled, as the natives might have said, by the magical influence of a great sorcerer, the Englishman Sir James Frazier, whose contagion was transmitted via Malinowski to Joseph Atkinson, then again to Martiya van der Leun. Having been denied the pleasures of mathematics and physics by his doctors, it was to Frazier's
The Golden Bough
that Malinowski turned for diversion and consolation; and it was after reading Frazier, with his long lists of fascinating and barely comprehensible primitive rites and rituals, that Malinowski conceived a desperate urge to see a preliterate culture with his own eyes. For unless we understood our
own
culture, Frazier convinced Malinowski, we could not possibly understand ourselves; and we simply cannot understand our culture from the inside. "We cannot possibly reach the final Socratic wisdom of knowing ourselves if we never leave the narrow confinement of the customs, beliefs, and prejudices into which every man is born," Malinowski wrote, explaining his desire to live in the South Seas. By removing himself entirely from his own society and living with the people of the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski proposed to come to know
himself
. The greater the immersion in Trobriand society, the more profound his own insights would be. The result of such immersion would be an ethnography, on the one hand, a real contribution to the world's knowledge of its inhabitants, an exhaustive description of a people; and, on the other hand, a transformation of the observer's soul.

That, at any rate, was the theory.

But there is something in those photographs of Malinowski on the beach that isn't quite right, a kind of vague grimace on Malinowski's face. The man looks … constipated. Hideously so, as if it's been weeks since he snuck off to fertilize the jungle, and he's carrying around way more tribal soup than he's comfortable with, and it's hot,
really
hot, the kind of hot that makes you feel woozy, and it's not even ten in the morning yet; he's sunburned, and he's cranky, and there is sand everywhere, and those people were banging on drums all night long, don't they know any other rhythm than
thumpety-thump-thump
, and the nearest effective purgative is on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

Could the opium from his medicine kit be interfering with his digestion? Perhaps.

The impression offered by the photographs is not mistaken. Malinowski—the most famous ethnographer in the history of anthropology, a man said to be possessed (by his contemporary R. R. Marat) of the uncanny ability to wriggle his way into the soul of even the shyest savage—was, in fact, miserable. In 1967, Malinowski's widow, doing the reputation of her late husband absolutely no favors, published the diaries he kept while working in the Trobriands. The truth was out: it seems that Malinowski didn't love anthropological fieldwork quite as much as everyone thought. Malinowski, to judge by his own words,
loathed
the Trobriand Islands, and
detested
the Trobriand Islanders. "As for ethnology: I see the life of the natives as utterly devoid of interest or importance, something as remote from me as the life of a dog," Malinowski confided to himself. The natives are variously referred to in the diaries as "fuzzy-headed savages" and "brutes." There are stories in which Malinowski strikes recalcitrant locals. Fieldwork, even for the great Malinowski, was terribly boring, frustrating, dangerous, difficult, enervating, and lonely. Forcing himself to quit the mosquito nets every morning and interview one more damned naked savage about the magical rites found in the coral gardens takes the full measure of Malinowski's discipline. "At bottom," Malinowski wrote, "I am living outside of Kiriwina … strongly hating the niggers."
*

There is in this something that confirms common sense: no liberation of the spirit should come easy.

The Curiosity saved him. Malinowski, however much he may have disliked island life, spent the better part of five years living with the Tro

briand Islanders because the Curiosity had seized him. He had noticed a Very Strange Thing—and if he wished to understand it, there were no books of which he could avail himself, no authorities to consult. The only way to satisfy the Curiosity and understand the Very Strange Thing was to stay on the island and ask more questions. The literature of anthropology is absolutely thick with such stories: the exotic location, the deep boredom, the malarial fever, the muffled cry—"As God is my witness, I will get off of this rock!"—then some small element in the local culture that quickens the pulse. The unpleasantness of the local life is forgotten or ignored as the Curiosity takes hold; a hitherto-unknown hot monomania bubbles and steams in the anthropologist's previously tepid soul.

The Very Strange Thing that Malinowski noticed was a practice called
kula
. It is a captivatingly simple idea. For the inhabitants of the village in which he was ensconced, Malinowski noticed, far and away the most beloved of a man's possessions were his necklaces and armbands; indeed, so valuable were a man's necklaces and armbands that they were never, ever, worn, the armbands in any case being too small even for a child. Whatever the appeal of the necklaces and armbands, it was certainly not to Malinowski's eyes an aesthetic attraction: they were brutish-looking handmade things, bits of shells strung on a rope. In his book, he published pictures of the necklaces and armbands: they are the sort of things that David Walker might well have found on sale outside a Grateful Dead show, handmade by a girl named Moonbeam.

But how the Trobrianders loved their necklaces and armbands! They gloried over them for hours, and told stories of their illustrious lineage, how they had come to possess them and who had possessed them before; the necklaces and armbands were comforts in times of sorrow and additional reasons to take pleasure in life in times of abundance. A dying man would ask to be presented with his necklaces and armbands as proof that all the aching and struggle had been worthwhile; when a Trobriand Islander in a philosophical moment thought of the things that really,
really
mattered—not just the day-to-day grind of fishing and gardening and canoe-making, not just the frivolity of feasting or lovemaking—but when he took stock of the things that
counted
, one of the things he would surely think of were his necklaces and armbands.

Then he would give them away.

It was all
very
perplexing to Malinowski. It was the strangest thing that he had encountered in his entire life. It made him curious. One day, a villager would boast that
his
necklaces and armbands were the finest in all the Trobriand Islands; the next day, he would prepare his long outrigger canoe and head off into the pounding surf. The Trobriand Islands are roughly arranged in the shape of a doughnut, and distances between islands are considerable; voyages by canoe between islands were long and hazardous, and certainly uncomfortable. Yet not to go was unthinkable. A man and his kin would paddle off in their long canoe, sailing for days under an unflinching equatorial sun to arrive at some village on some other island along the perimeter of the doughnut, where the man from Malinowski's village would find one of his long-standing partners in
kula
and present him with a necklace or armband. If the direction of travel was counterclockwise, the man got an armband; if clockwise, a necklace. What's more, although it breaks a man's heart to give away his favorite necklace or armband, he must do it with high style—disdainfully, haughtily, as if such a treasure were no more than a trinket. The conch is blown. There is a feast. And then the man returns home. Sometime in the future—never right away—the gift is repaid. The men from the faraway village on the faraway island arrive in Kiriwina, and if they originally received an armband, they now present an equally fantastic necklace; if they received a necklace, they present an armband. The conch is blown. There is a feast. In this way, necklaces and armbands forever circulate in opposite directions around the circle of the Trobriand Islands, pausing for a time in this village or that, then moving along.

The Curiosity took Malinowski. Only necklaces could be exchanged for armbands, and nothing else. They were not money. To possess a beautiful necklace or armband conferred status upon a man, but only for as long as it was in his possession. The Curiosity would not let Malinowski go. How did the villagers
see
these necklaces and bracelets? Why did they risk their lives on these long voyages only to give away what they so treasured?

To understand
kula
, Malinowski spent almost five years on those islands off the coast of New Guinea. Judging from his diaries, the intensity of his dislike for island living never abated; but, then, neither did the Curiosity. Malinowski's final analysis of
kula
is the magisterial
Argonauts of the Western Pacific
, and it is a sad book. His analysis runs to some five hundred pages, and covers in depth everything from the appropriate hand gestures with which the necklaces and armbands are offered to the magic spells required to avoid the Flying Rocks of the open sea. But, oddly, and to my great frustration, the simple question—why? why do they do it?—remains unanswered. Suppositions have been offered elsewhere in the anthropological literature. But one has the sensation on finishing
Argonauts
that Malinowski had come to see the
kula
as so normal an activity that, although it certainly merited describing, it no longer needed explaining. For the reader alone, the Curiosity remains.