Fieldwork: A Novel (35 page)

"What's happened?" Gilles said. "What's the matter?"

Martiya said nothing. A moment passed, then a minute.

Martiya broke the silence. She told Gilles that it wasn't his fault, but that there was another man.

"I had no idea that I could be so angry," Gilles said. The declaration contrasted with his calm face, his tone of voice, and the tins of tuna. "But I looked at her, and it was like being angry with one of
them
."

He gestured at the cats.

"You know what she said to me?"

I shook my head.

"She told me that the headman of Wild Pig village came to her hut. She said that she made
dyal
. She told me that she had made rice. She told me that she had gone into the headman's fields and made rice. I said, ‘And?' And she said, ‘Isn't that enough?' "

Gilles was silent for a long while. An adolescent monk strolled past us and nodded at Gilles, who nodded back.

"It wasn't what she was saying. It was her eyes," Gilles said.

"What was it about her eyes?"

"That evening in Martiya's hut was the strangest moment in all my life. Because I knew that woman, I knew her very well. But I don't know if she recognized me at all. There is only one word I can use to describe her eyes.
Possédés
."

Gilles went back to France a few months after he last saw Martiya. He wrote to her, asking her to get in touch with him should she need anything. Otherwise, he promised, she would not hear from him again; and, he wrote, he hoped she would leave him alone as well. He heard nothing from her, and Gilles, who had learned from the
bambou
to bend in a hard wind and not break, was sufficiently a man of the world to interpret her silence appropriately.

Several years after his return to Chiang Mai, Gilles fell into conversation with a young Thai botanist at the university. Knowing nothing of his connection to Martiya, the younger man mentioned the story of the anthropologist who had murdered a missionary in the hills. Gilles knew at once that he was referring to Martiya. Gilles would have visited Martiya in prison, but he couldn't find her. He tried the same tactics that I had: lawyers, judicial records, old friends, even Karen Leon. My visit to his
bambouserie
had been the first piece of news he had had of Martiya in years.

IN A SMALL CEREMONY
at the end of May, Rachel's class—with the exception of Nat—was graduated from the first grade. To underscore the festive mood of the moment, Miss Rachel ordered pizza from Pizza Hut, a food better than which none of the students could imagine. As Miss Rachel's consort, I had been invited to attend the celebration, and Rachel and I listened attentively as the kids told us about their summer plans: Morris was going back to America for the summer, where he would stay with his grandparents, then would be returning to Thailand in the fall. He imagined his summer, it was plain to see, as an endlessly glistening string of ice-cream cones. "My grandmom, she let me eat so much!" Morris said, eyeing the last slice of pizza in the cardboard tray. Najda, her father, and his two wives would all be spending the summer in Chiang Mai, where the family would await the birth of not one but
two
younger siblings. Maria's father, who worked for the DEA, was being transferred to Bogotá. Within a year, she'd be speaking perfect Spanish, just as she now spoke perfect Thai. Nat would be repeating the first grade, but the prospect of another year of the same-old, same-old hardly seemed to faze the boy. He ran around the classroom blithely, chewing, for some reason only Nat knew, on his sandals. Summer vacation! When you're six years old, the summer is an abyss of time, and not one of Miss Rachel's students really imagined that the fall would ever come.

Miss Rachel, however, had seen the fall coming all too clearly, and she had made it plain that her time as a first-grade teacher in Thailand, exciting as the adventure had been, was over. She wanted to go back to the States, and go back to school: her experience in the first grade had made her dream of cool, sleek offices populated with bald-headed, suited adults. We had had any number of serious conversations about the future, then we had fights and arguments and tears. The end of anything is always painful. At some point, we both knew that Rachel would be going home without me.

Up until the moment that Rachel left, we maintained the fiction that she was going home
before
me, not without me, that I was just staying in Thailand to arrange a few loose ends. But at the airport, Rachel said, "I'll see you soon, won't I?" and began to cry.

"Of
course
," I lied.

I spent the rainy season alone in our concrete house. It rained all day, every day. I fell into irregular hours, waking up at noon, falling asleep at dawn. I stopped going to yoga. I saw no one but people whom I had contacted on the off chance that they knew what Martiya had done. I wrote a series of listless, dull reviews—of films I can no longer recall, of restaurants whose food I described in a string of glossy clichés. I don't think I even bothered to visit the restaurants. I wrote a profile of the general manager of the Westin Hotel. It was work. I went back to my concrete house, and once, twice, three times picked up the phone to call Rachel and tell her I would be on the next flight to the States. But every time, some stray detail of the story brought me back, something I read in the notes I took when I met with Tim Blair, or an odd phrase from the loose-leaf binder of Martiya's letters.

The last six weeks of the school year had seen the story drift idly. Gilles Blouzon returned, as he did every year, to France, promising to be in touch. He wasn't. I called a dozen prominent figures at Chiang Mai University, trying to pursue the rumors that Gilles had heard; I found nothing. Martiya's village, Dan Loi? Try finding that hamlet on the map, or try finding someone who knows where it is: the Dyalo villages of northern Thailand are unincorporated entities—they splinter and fragment; villages spring up out of nowhere; others disappear. A number of trekking agencies offered to take me by elephant back through a dozen different hill-tribe villages in a dozen days, but not one could guarantee me that they knew where Martiya's village could be found.

I tried to convince myself that the thing was done. This was not only Rachel's advice, but Josh O'Connor's also: he had been shocked to hear I was still pursuing it. Josh's gelateria had been a huge success, and so had the Herbalife products. He bought himself a candy-apple-red Cadillac, hired a driver, and now tooled around Bangkok conducting business from his backseat by cell phone. He could hardly remember Martiya van der Leun. Even my mother told me to let it go. "It's important to have a balanced life," she said. She had been hearing me talk about Martiya the better part of a year.

In early September, I ran into Judith Walker and Tom Riley in the city center. We went for a cold drink at the same diner where Tom and I used to meet for breakfast. Judith and Tom were getting married, and if there exists a pair of human faces more excited and contented, I've never seen them. I gave them my congratulations. After a few minutes, Tom's cell phone squealed, and he got up to take the call outside. When he came back, he explained something complicated to Judith involving Bill and the jeep. The upshot was that he had to go. Judith's face fell, and as much to console her as for the pleasure of her company, I invited her to have another Coke with me.

"Well, okay," she said doubtfully.

But Judith and I ended up talking for a few hours. She played with her shoulder-length hair while she talked. "Do you like it?" she asked. "I'm going to grow it out for the wedding. Tom says he likes it short, but he's never seen me with long hair." Then she told me about her wedding gown, which would be ivory; her bridesmaids' dresses, which would be teal; and that she and Tom planned on going to the Holy Land for their honeymoon.

I asked Judith how old she was, and she told me that she would be nineteen on September twenty-third.

"So you never got to know your uncle David."

"No, not really. I was just six when he went Home. I remember a few things. I remember he was really tall, and had long hair, and he could do all sorts of animal impersonations. He could do an elephant and a horse and a monkey. When he had to baby-sit me or the other kids, he'd put us all in a circle and we'd make a zoo."

I had never really understood why Judith was living with her grandparents, and I asked her about it.

"It was just a little after Uncle David was called Home that my mom and dad decided they wanted to spend more time in the field," she said. "They've been living in Laos since then, near the Vietnam border. They're medical missionaries. I spent a couple of years with them there, but we decided that when it was time for high school, I'd live here with Grandma and Grandpa."

"That must have been tough, being away from your family and living with your grandparents," I said.

"You have no idea!" Judith laughed. "I love Grandma and Grandpa to death, but they're old and they're strict. Tom is the first boy they ever let me even be alone with. I didn't go to one party in high school."

"Who's the tougher one?" I asked. "Your Grandma or your Grandpa?"

"Oh, Grandpa, definitely. If it was up to Grandpa, I'd just stay home all the time. I'd probably never even have gone to school. Grandma sometimes says, ‘You've got to let that girl breathe.' But I understand, they're just worried, you know? Because of David." Judith's voice grew low, and she looked around the room. "Don't tell anyone, but sometimes in high school I snuck out the window at night."

Judith sat quietly for a minute. Then she said, "Mischa, do you know why that woman killed Uncle David?"

"No," I said. "I'm trying to find out."

"Can I tell you something?"

"Of course."

"And you promise you won't think Grandma and Grandpa are bad people?"

"Of course I promise."

"I once heard Grandma and Grandpa have a fight about David. A big fight. It was just a little after I got there. I wanted to go out after school and Grandpa didn't want to let me, and I don't know how it happened, but Grandma and Grandpa started fighting—I don't think I should be telling this to you."

I didn't say anything, and Judith kept going.

"In any case, they were fighting, and Grandma started yelling at Grandpa, ‘You're going to drive her out of this house, just like David.' And Grandpa, he got so mad. He said, ‘Don't talk to me about David. If you had done what any decent Christian woman would do, David would still be here today.' It was awful. I was upstairs in my bedroom, and even with the door closed I could hear them in their room. Grandma said, ‘You brought that woman into this house. Don't ever forget, you brought that woman into this house.' I always wonder still what they were talking about. Later that night I heard them singing hymns downstairs."

A few minutes later, Judith stood up to go. She looked at me searchingly for a moment, and I could see her grandmother's shrewd eyes inset in a still young, unlined face. "Last year it was this girl Sarah Kennedy's birthday? At school? She had a party at a guest house in the mountains, and I think you should go up there."

"Why?"

"Because I think the owner of the place used to be Martiya's guide in the mountains. His name is Vinai. I think he knows all about her."

Judith looked around the room again.

"But if you go,
please
don't tell Grandma and Grandpa that I told you about it. Because I told them that I was going on a Bible retreat."

I left for the Hiker Hut that same day, traveling by motorbike.

When I first began driving in Thailand, one of the teachers at Rachel's school—Mr. Robert, a devout Buddhist, as it happened—gave me a piece of pointed advice.
Distrust everyone
, he said,
for no one— absolutely no one—on the Thai highway is your friend.
A people renowned for their calm and delicate nature, the Thai are nevertheless among the most aggressive of all the world's drivers, yielding lunatic pride of place only to the pacifistic, vegetarian Hindu.

But the Thai system allows for a certain flexibility: my little Honda Dream hugged the far left-hand margin of the highway, and the unwritten rules of the Thai road allowed me to cruise along as slowly as I wanted, past bamboo shacks where old ladies in sarongs sold coconut milk and fanned themselves with giant palm fronds. On either side of the road leading out of the lowlands, there were rice paddies being worked by very little women in broad hats and high boots, trudging slowly across immense flat fields, bent at the waist. A Thai proverb summarizes the life of a peasant farmer: "Back to the sun, face to the earth."

Then the road snaked into the mountains. A twenty-minute climb; I passed three elephants, led by mahouts, walking trunk in tail; my ears popped—and northern Thailand exploded in light. The plain of Chiang Mai had been a gloomy checkerboard of rice and sludge; the mirrored temple roofs had reflected a dark sky. But as soon as I hit the hills, the weather changed. Sweet flimsy mountain clouds floated across an open sky, and I could smell wild jasmine, honeysuckle, hibiscus, and something strangely like lemon tea. The paddies were terraced on the mountain slopes like a wedding cake made of mud: each glossy layer reflected the emerald hills, the azure sky, and the wild palms. At the very top of the wedding cake, short crabbed trees in radiant red blossom marked the place where the jungle began. Somewhere along the way, a mountain summit had been leveled to make way for a stupendously large yellow Buddha, who looked out impassively from his high perch over the mountains and the plains, his cherry lips ladylike. Mysterious dirt roads forked out every now and again, leading off to God-knows-where. I wanted to follow them all.

When I came to the hot springs, following the instructions that Judith had offered me, I made a left turn and crossed a small bridge that led onto a narrow red-dirt road. This took me up through little villages filled with rooting pigs and houses on stilts with tin roofs. Small children looked at me gravely.

Then the country changed again, the green turning golden with altitude. Some parts of the hill were on fire, and other slopes were black and charred. This was the real mountain country. A little brown stream wandered by the side of the road. A young boy led a humped bullock by the nose. I decided to defy the odds and took off my sweat-drenched helmet. A warm wind tousled my hair.

I came to a long, low teak building nestled on the side of a hill, looking out over an exuberant field of yellow sunflowers. A sign read the hiker hut, in both English and Thai. Sprawled in a hammock in the shade of two big trees, a small silver-haired man plucked at his guitar. He didn't look up as I approached, and only when I was two-thirds of the way up the walk did he stop strumming. He put the guitar aside, rolled himself up to standing, and with an air of lazy cool asked me in English with only the slightest hint of an accent if he could help me.

It's very disconcerting the way the Thai laugh and smile at bad news. When I told Khun Vinai that Martiya was dead, he smiled. Maybe his smile meant:
She suffered for a long time and it's best this way.

But maybe it meant:
It served her right.

Or maybe it just meant:
Huh.

The Hiker Hut was a collection of little huts, each in the traditional style of a different hill tribe. There was an Akha house, with its roof like a plump hive of mountain grasses; and a Lisu hut, with an elegant long front porch; and a cylindrical Karen house, tall and stately. There was a Mien cottage, a Hmong hut, and a Palaung long house, large enough for a convention of Palaung stockbrokers on a junket.

I, of course, stayed in the Dyalo hut.

The thin cotton mattress was the only concession to Western taste; the Dyalo, I well knew, typically slept on the floor. But in all other respects, Khun Vinai later told me with pride, so perfectly authentic were his tribal huts that once a visiting British television program was able to produce an entire documentary about the lives of the tribal peoples without ever leaving the property.