Fieldwork: A Novel (31 page)

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
!

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 little 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."

"Uh-huh."

"Okay, all that I understand. Here's the thing I don't understand. You told me that a year and a half, two years later, she came
back
to Thailand. That would be … 1979 or so."

"That's right."

"So the thing I don't get is—why did she come back to Thailand?"

The question was not spontaneous. I had written it down on a Post-it note and attached it to the telephone in anticipation of Karen's call. I had thought about this a lot. I knew that Martiya spent two and a half years in a Dyalo village, and returned to Berkeley in 1977; and I knew that after eighteen months back home, Martiya decided to return to Thailand and
live in a Dyalo village
. As courageous as the decision may have been, it was also very unusual: Martiya was, by all accounts, a smart, ambitious student, a leader in one of the very finest doctoral programs in the world. Her thesis adviser was the legendary Joseph Atkinson. And at an age—thirty-one—when pressures to succeed and form a life and make a place for oneself in the world are not inconsiderable, Martiya decided that her life, her real life, the place where she wanted to be, was a tribal village in the north of Thailand. She was no longer interested in being an academic: she returned to the village no longer under the aegis of the Anthropology Department. The government no longer covered her expenses. Joseph Atkinson specifically advised her not to go. And this time, she went without a return ticket. So I wondered: Why did she go back?

Well
, Karen said, redirecting the great eighteen-wheeler that was her conversation, she had asked herself the same thing. And this was
her
take on the situation.

Everyone in anthro knows it, it's an open secret, but coming home from the field is as tough as going out. Maybe even tougher. When you go out on the road, you're you; and when you come back, you're not you anymore, but they're still them. You get off of that plane thinking that the world is a big strange place and your brain is just churning, trying to figure it out, and even if the place where you're coming back to is the
Department of Anthropology
, your brain is still churning faster than everyone else's. It's like a chainsaw hitting a steel spike.

It had been hard for Karen coming home from the Philippines, but one thing had made it easier: Ted. She had met Ted just two days after she got back to Berkeley, and being swept-off-your-feet, can-I-possibly-get-enough-of-this-man madly in love—especially in love with someone like Ted, who knew how to love a woman, she had to say that about Ted, he did know how to love a woman, except that he didn't seem to know how to love just
one
woman—it was like somebody had turned up life's intensity meter all the way to maximum. Ted had listened to Karen talk about the Philippines for hours and hours, the two of them lying naked on Ted's bed, and Karen had to admit it, although she hated to, Ted had been a good listener. Christ, Ted was so goddamn smart, that was the thing: Ted had just homed in straightaway on what made her village
hers
, and how it worked, and what was interesting anthropologically, and what was interesting humanly, and after spending ten straight days in bed talking with Ted, it was like Ted had
been
there with her.

But Martiya didn't have Ted—and although not having Ted could only be considered a blessing in a woman's life, sometimes Karen wondered whether Martiya would have ended up Martiya the Tragic Murderess, if Martiya the Frustrated Grad Student and not Karen had sat next to Ted that day in the library. Because for Martiya, the hardest thing about coming home was that when she finally got back to California, after almost two and a half years in Dan Loi, nobody seemed much interested in the Dyalo at all. This was a keen irony, because after two and a half years complaining to Karen in letter after letter that she was bored, as soon as she left that village, she could think of nothing else.

She had figured that, at the very least, the other anthropologists in the department would want to ask her a million questions, but most colleagues just used her return as an excuse to tell stories about
their
experiences in the field—and those stories, unlike her own, were very boring.

Joseph Atkinson gave Martiya exactly three hours of solid, serious attention. He invited her out for dinner a week or so after she got back, and took her to a good restaurant in San Francisco, some place with flickering little rainbows on the very white tablecloth where the candle-light refracted through the heavy crystal. The food struck Martiya as tasteless, after Dyalo food, and a little heavy, but she didn't complain: at least Atkinson was giving her the chance to tell Dyalo stories. Martiya knew she wasn't conversing, she was delivering a monologue, but she had wanted to tell someone all this stuff for such a long time. She talked about the huge New Year's feasts, when the village exploded in dancing for three days, with wild drumbeats all through the night, and the complicated games by which the Dyalo young men paid court to the Dyalo maidens; and she told him how thrilling it was when, after almost two years, she could finally start to understand Dyalo poetry. When old Sings Soft had recited Dyalo love poems on a warm summer night under a full moon with all the village crouching low, not daring to breathe or even sigh, she had cried. She had seen Dyalo children born and Dyalo die, and they had started coming to her, of all people, for medical advice. She had so many more stories to tell, too, about the Yunnanese opium traders who came on muleback, and the flash that came when Martiya finally figured out the east-west/life-death/sunrise-sunset symbolic system that— well, it pretty much organized
everything
—and the time that the shaman who looked like George Washington exorcised her when she had this persistent headache, and
damned
if she didn't get better right away. But then she and Atkinson had dessert and coffee, and although Martiya would have liked to talk more, Atkinson took her home, and from that point on, whenever Martiya tried to tell a Dyalo story, Atkinson just said, "Save it for the thesis, kiddo."

Like all graduate students returned from fieldwork, Martiya was given the opportunity to lecture on her findings. There were exactly eighteen attendees for her lecture, entitled "The Ministry of Ghosts: Bureaucratic Form and Function in Dyalo Spiritual Life," and two of those attendees, Martiya well knew, went to
every
lecture, on account of the little buffet the department set up afterward, with takeout from the Chinese restaurant on Shattuck Avenue. A third was Karen. Even now, when Karen lectured on animism to her undergraduate students, she found herself using examples from that lecture. If Martiya had stuck with it, Karen said, she would have been a superstar.

No one who lived with the Dyalo, Martiya began, could fail to note the very frequent references in Dyalo conversation to the things called
tsi
. The word meant, more or less, "spirits" in English, but the word had a somewhat greater range of meaning in Dyalo: in certain contexts, the word meant "god," as when the Dyalo spoke of Wu-pa-sha
tsi
, the creator of the wind, water, rain, and thunder, while in other contexts, the word had a strictly technical sense, as when the Dyalo spoke of someone afflicted with "
wu-neu tsi
," or a headache.
*
All of the various
tsi
were invisible to the Dyalo, at least with the eyes, but nevertheless were absolutely real to the people of Dan Loi. To deny the existence of the
tsi
was to deny one of the most basic aspects of the natural world. Not long after she arrived in the village, Martiya asked how many
tsi
there were in the world. "There are as many
tsi
in the world as clouds in the sky or grains of rice in the fields," was the response: the
tsi
were uncountable, and the question made as little sense to the Dyalo as the question, "How many bacteria are there in this room?" Lots.