Fieldwork: A Novel (34 page)

"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.

"It was almost a compulsion for her to stay in that village. She hated to be away from Dan Loi, something physical. I remember we once attempted a vacation together. I took her down to Phuket, because I am very fond of the seaside, and it was like traveling with a ghost. She wouldn't eat, she had trouble sleeping, she didn't talk to me. We had a big fight, she said, ‘I'm sorry, Gilles.' I said, ‘Can't you even try?' She said, ‘I am trying, I don't know what's wrong with me.' "

"You know that when she was young she used to travel quite a bit, don't you?" I asked.

"She told me about her adventures, but that was not the woman I knew. When I knew her, her world was that village. But there is something thrilling about
une femme obsédante
. Her passion for that village gave her something very addictive. I would come to her hut, and she'd be so excited. ‘Gilles, it's fantastic what the shaman knows,' she would say. And that was just the shaman. There was always something. You know, she wanted to write a book about the Dyalo. She was not in a hurry to write it, but she worked on it, and she allowed me to read it every so often."

"How was it?"

"She had something to say."

"Martiya never thought about publishing that book?" I asked.

"Of course she did. Martiya was very ambitious. But she wasn't in a hurry. She had her own sense of time, and she wanted to finish the book, and she knew it would take her a long, long time."

Gilles sipped his tea. Then he said, "Do you know where that book is now?"

"No."

"If you find it, I would like to have a copy. It would be like meeting an old friend."

Gilles invited me to walk with him a few minutes. He took such a stroll every afternoon.

Before we left the house, Gilles closed every one of the windows, then checked that they were closed. He confirmed that the gas was off. "This is a wood house, you know," he said. He had a handful of papers that he wanted to leave on his desk. He changed shoes, and although it was easily eighty degrees and humid, he wanted to wear a light jacket. But when we were walking, he moved at a good clip. Our destination, Gilles said, was a small temple, perhaps a kilometer away, whose frescoed walls he admired.

He talked while we walked. In November 1988, Martiya heard rumors of an extremely unusual marriage in Wild Pig village, between matrilineal first cousins, and she decided to hike up there to investigate. Gilles accompanied her. When the couple arrived at the village, Martiya learned that the rumors were false: the marriage was prohibited by Dyalo custom and never happened. But as the day was late, Martiya suggested to Gilles that they spend the night in the hut of the headman.

The headman was a newcomer to the village named Hupasha, a handsome man on the cusp of middle age; his dark hair was streaked with gray, and Gilles could recall, even many years later, his kindly, intelligent eyes. He spoke only Dyalo, and although Gilles could understand a little of the language, he could not follow the headman's thick Burmese accent. Gilles quickly grew bored and, after the simple dinner of rice, chilies, and vegetables, excused himself to the front porch. Gilles read by the light of a hurricane lamp as he waited for Martiya to come out. Occasionally, he heard laughter from the inside of the hut. Gilles fell asleep without Martiya.

He woke up when she came out later that night and lay down beside him. "I asked her what she had talked about all night. She said that she had been talking about her childhood. ‘And what was so interesting about that?' I said. She told me that in her whole time with the Dyalo, the headman was the first to ask about her childhood."

The next day, Gilles and Martiya went back to Dan Loi village.

"That man was Martiya's lover," Gilles said.

"I thought that was the first time she met him," I said.

Gilles stopped walking. We had been walking quickly and he was breathing rapidly. His matter-of-fact tone had concealed more intense emotions than I realized. There are only two emotions one can recall, even after a long time, with perfect and unerring accuracy: embarrassment and jealousy.

"It was the first time; they would be lovers later," Gilles said. He started walking again.

A few monks in yellow robes tended the temple garden, and Gilles was friends with all the stray cats who lived in the woodpile. "That one is a very bad cat," he said, pointing to a small yellow tabby.

"Why?" I asked.

"A bad character." He rubbed the cat's forehead affectionately, as it curled around his shins and purred. "A very bad character. Like me."

From the pockets of his coat, Gilles pulled out a tin of anchovies and another of tuna, both imported from France. (Gilles later explained to me that he didn't care for the smell of fresh fish in the house.) He opened the tins and offered the cats some food. "
Tiens
," he said. He spoke to the cats in French for a few minutes. He told one cat to share and told another cat that he was beautiful. Then he came and sat beside me on the steps of the temple.

Despite the very great distance between a Dyalo village in northern Thailand and Berkeley, Gilles said, Martiya had remained close to her father. Not a year or at most two passed without an extended visit from one to the other, and in the last several years of his life, Piers spent part of his long academic vacations in Dan Loi. After his death, a handwritten outline for a proposed grammar of Dyalo—a language whose acquisition and mastery Piers referred to as his "hobby"—was found in his office in Dwinelle Hall. Whenever Piers took leave of his daughter to return to California, he inevitably took Gilles aside and, in his crisp, Dutch-accented but otherwise impeccable French, asked Gilles to "look after my girl."

In May of 1987, a massive heart attack on the tennis courts took Piers's life. Martiya went back to Berkeley.

Martiya called Gilles from California in tears. She had spent the day going through her father's things. In his study, his briar pipe remained half packed with ash and tobacco, his silver pen lay uncapped and open across a proposed submission to
Ethnolinguistics
which the editor had asked him to review. The journal made Martiya think of her father's silly weakness for puns: he had always referred to
Ethnolinguistics
as a Piers-reviewed journal. He had left a sweater on the back of his chair, a gray cardigan. She put the sweater on and wore it around the house, padding from room to room. She kept only her father's pipes for herself. Martiya put the house on Etna Street up for sale.

In this way, Martiya severed her last connection to Berkeley and returned to Dan Loi. Just one week after her return, she turned forty.

Back in Asia, Martiya complained to Gilles that her cottage was smaller than she had recalled, and darker. She told Gilles that the hut, which she had once considered cozy, now seemed as tight as a coffin. Gilles remembered visiting her and being startled by the manic energy with which she burst out of the bedroom and into the study. The hut wasn't small, Gilles said: it was almost as large as the
sala
of his house. What's more, it opened up onto a spectacular vista: just beyond the threshold of the hut was her large patio, beyond that all the village, and beyond
that
the huge dip of the valley, those foothills which if followed would lead to Burma, to China, and to the highest mountains in the world. Now Martiya complained that there was no place for her here: she was tripping over her books, her desk, her chair. The chimney smelled. She could not even turn around.

The sensation of claustrophobia continued even beyond the tight confines of her hut. It had been twelve years now since she had first set foot in the village, and, disciplined as ever, she continued in her routine: she pursued her longitudinal studies of village life, visiting every day with village families, continuing to observe the panoply of Dyalo rites, attending law cases. Yet even in the rice fields, where she stood with the shaman George Washington, chasing out the jungle spirits who threatened Rice, with nothing around her in any direction at all but open mountain air, she felt trapped—the same sensation of panic, and nervous sweat, and nausea rising up in her as she felt in her study.

Martiya told Gilles that she had not realized how much her father's presence in that house on Etna Street had offered her. She had never said to herself, "I have moved to a small Dyalo village in northern Thailand where I will stay forever." She had always said to herself, "I am doing fieldwork, extensive fieldwork, in Dan Loi, and when I am ready I will leave." To leave meant to return to her father's home, to Berkeley, there to begin again. Now contemplating her life, she asked herself, "Where would I go?" That she had no answer terrified her.

Gilles remonstrated with her when she complained. "A woman of your intelligence, of your abilities, has options, Martiya. You do not have to stay in that village. You could finish your doctoral thesis in two months and become a professor. It is still possible. We could go to France. The world is so big, and you're still young."

But Martiya didn't listen. Did Gilles understand what it meant to be
alone
in the world? She had no family at all but some vague relatives of her father's in Holland. She was forty years old. She had been in the village more or less since the age of twenty-seven. She had no skills, knew nothing of the world really but this little village. Martiya's normally bright face was now habitually drawn and gloomy. She complained that her attempt to see the native's point of view was a failure. She could not escape herself. She understood nothing of these people, and what's more, her sustaining curiosity had failed her: what she did not understand, she no longer cared to understand. She had no place to go.

At the onset of the rainy season of 1987, almost precisely a year after Piers's death, Gilles had dinner with Martiya in Dan Loi. He was about to leave for his annual visit to France. She was, he said, calm, and had proposed that the two of them take a vacation together when he came back. This was a breakthrough, Gilles thought, the first sign of progress in almost a year. Neither Gilles nor Martiya said it, but it was understood by both that this vacation would be the first step in constructing a new life together, away from Dan Loi.

"Do you want to go now?" he asked.

Martiya said no. "I want to see the rice planting," she said. The rice planting was one of Martiya's favorite moments in the Dyalo calendar. That night they had a bottle of wine, and Gilles noted the occasion in his wine log.

That bottle of wine, a Côtes du Rhône, proved the last that Martiya and Gilles would share.

Two of the cats began to fight over an anchovy, hissing at one another.
"Il y en a assez pour tout le monde,"
Gilles said.
"Ça suffit."

Gilles went back to France, and spent a month, as usual, with his parents and son. Usually when he was away, he and Martiya would exchange a few letters, and Martiya, when she was in Chiang Mai or elsewhere, would call him; Gilles couldn't call Martiya, after all, in the village. But this year, Gilles heard from Martiya only once: about two weeks before he was to return, she called him in the middle of the night, awakening him and his family. When Martiya realized the hour at which she called, she excused herself and said that she would call the next day. She didn't, and Gilles had no way of reaching her. Her voice had been agitated, and Gilles was worried.

"Why, exactly?" I asked.

Gilles hesitated, then said, "I thought she might be with another man."

Gilles decided to cut his trip back by a week. Although he could not call Martiya, there was a telephone at the café where she usually read her mail, and he left a message for her there that he was returning. He told her to meet him at the airport. But when he arrived at Chiang Mai, there was no sign of her. The next morning, Gilles went up to Dan Loi.

The monsoon had broken that year with unusual force, and the road to Dan Loi had been washed out. Several kilometers from the village Gilles was forced to abandon his motorbike and hike into the village on foot. He arrived just as the evening sky was turning black. The great bowl of the valley spread out from Martiya's front porch like the pit of an exhausted mine. Martiya looked up at Gilles as he entered the hut, and for a long terrible moment didn't seem to recognize him.

"Gilles," she said. "I should have—I'm sorry …"

Gilles had never seen her this way before. She began to tremble. Gilles went to her but the look in her eyes stopped him. She breathed deeply and calmed herself. She offered Gilles a seat and, seeing his soaked clothes, began to make tea. She lit the small gas burner with a match, poured water into her old kettle, and placed it on the blue flame. When the two were settled with mugs in their hands, she looked at Gilles, then swung her eyes away from him. Her moment of composure was gone, and she began to tremble again.