Fieldwork: A Novel (4 page)

The Dutch are widely known for their linguistic gifts, but Piers van der Leun was extraordinary even by Dutch standards. Piers spent a summer in Sweden as a young child, Elena recalled, and came back speaking perfect Swedish. "My brother could look at the map of Kenya and speak Swahili," Elena said. He was educated as a linguist at the University of Leiden, and then, like many young Dutch men of his generation, joined the colonial administration in Indonesia. The colonial government in Jakarta took care to survey and record all of the minor languages of their vast holdings, on the sound principle that even the smallest ethnic rivalry can easily flare up into a matter of sufficient gravity to involve the local government: on joining the colonial service, Piers, at his own request, was given the task of mastering the half dozen tribal languages known collectively as the Uma, spoken in the southern portion of Kulawi District of the island of Sulawesi, not far from the mighty Lariang River.

The languages were fiendishly difficult, and mastering them required all of Piers's gifts: they were beautiful subtle things, which he pieced together preposition by preposition, verb by verb. In the hut which the colonial administrator provided him, he kept enormous tables of nouns, pronouns, and a provisional grammar. He invented an alphabet, and in a shorthand of his own devising transcribed hours of their speech. The loneliness of the jungle suited him: he sent back to Holland rhapsodic letters describing the exoticism of the native customs, and the ecstasy of their shamanic visions. When the old newspapers from Amsterdam finally arrived by post and Piers read accounts of Europe tottering on the brink of another war, he thought of his gentle tribesmen and the beautiful languages in which they conducted endless philosophical debates, and he would smoke his pipe and write a long letter to his sister. In one letter, he wrote, "I am where I want to be. How many men can say that?"

Elena van der Leun later sent me photographs of Piers taken when he was in his early thirties, some time before he met Areta, well before the war. Piers is standing in what I took to be the jungle, a tall man stooped beside a tree dripping with vines. He has a pipe in his mouth, and a wisp of smoke is visible beside his ear. He has a handsome, round face. His eyes are gentle but weak. If this description is vague, so was the face: it is the face of a smiling man with a calm and easy interior life, a man who cannot even
imagine
a woman who simply will not stop crying. Not long after the picture was taken, Piers van der Leun's uncomplicated life as a bachelor scholar came to an end. Even in the most remote corner of Kulawi District, one cannot escape the world.

In the fall of 1938, Piers was invited to a general colloquium on the Australasian languages at the University of Jakarta. The field of ethnolinguistics was in its infancy, and every man at the conference table felt himself a pioneer. Piers presented a paper on the language of the Tobaku villagers, and argued that similarities between the language of the Tobaku and the language of the Pipikoro implied a common ancestral tongue. His work was received enthusiastically, and after the presentation he found himself in long conversation with a Malaysian linguist, one of the few Asians at the conference, who was fascinated by Piers's methodology. Eleven months later, Piers married the Malaysian linguist's eldest daughter.

"I only met her after the war, and of course she looked so tired," recalled Elena van der Leun. "Her hair was gray already and she was too thin. But she must have been a lovely little thing before the war. It was possible to see that, even after what she had gone through. Piers wrote me letters about her and I could imagine the silk black hair and the delicate features and the white skin—Martiya had her mother's skin. She had very large round eyes, particularly for an Oriental. I think somewhere in her past there must have been white blood, since Martiya has blue eyes.

"Piers wrote me long letters about Areta—I don't have them anymore, but I remember. He was just mad for her. He had been invited up to Sabah State by her father, where he met her, and then they wrote each other every day. It was not something one did very often in those days, marry a native woman, but Piers, he did not care. She was a student of English literature—Malaysia was an English colony at the time, you know, not one of ours—and the two of them spoke always in English. He told me that she just chattered away about any old thing. He said he was falling in love with a singing bird. It was the only time in his life that I heard Piers say something so romantic."

There was a strange hiss on the telephone line and Elena said, "Do you hear me?" and I said, "Yes," and Elena went on. "I think he must have been quite exciting for her too. Piers in those days was tall and quite adventurous, and for a girl who had spent her entire life in Penang reading
novels
, the idea of living in the jungle with tribesmen must have been very exciting. The two of them were married and spent almost a year together. I think it was for Piers a very happy time. That's why they spent so long in the jungle later, because they always—"

Elena paused and started to cough. I could hear another cigarette being lit. I admired her ability to smoke and cough at the same time.

"And the war came." Elena sighed. "We had such a hard war here in Holland, but it must have been worse there. Because of his languages Piers was assigned to some sort of unit doing I don't know what. He spent most of the war in a Japanese prison camp. He was very lucky to live. And Areta's family was almost entirely dead after the war. I don't know what she did to survive. She certainly never told me, I don't think she ever told Piers. After the war, they found each other and he took her back here to Utrecht. You need to let go of bad things, and I don't think she ever let go of her bad things. Don't you think you need to let go of bad things?"

"Yes, yes, I think so," I said. How could I say anything else? "You need to let go of bad things."

"
Of course you do.
In any case, we were very poor here after the war, there wasn't even always enough to eat, but we took them in. Piers couldn't work he was so thin and tired, and Areta didn't work. Piers would go off to the library in the morning, just to get away of the house, and when he'd come back Areta would be waiting for him near the door. She would not say a word, just wait for him—as if she couldn't bear to be out of his sight for a minute. Piers as a boy had a dog like that once, but I don't think he realized how his wife waited for him. But then, whatever he'd say, she'd start a fight, a terrible fight. I remember one time she made
rijsttafel
for him for lunch as a surprise. He came back from the library, as usual, and in those days he looked so pale even after just a morning out. She ran to him with her usual excitement at his arrival, she was frantic, and announced proudly that she had made lunch for him.

"Piers said something to her. I don't know what he said, but it didn't suit her. I think he had eaten at the university. Areta looked at my brother with those huge round eyes. The disappointment went far beyond lunch. She had made all morning cooking for another man, a man that she had once loved, and my poor brother had taken his body. She was furious with this man who had stolen her lover. And she had nothing else in all the world, absolutely nothing else. She took the plate of
rijsttafel
and let it drop on the ground. Not angry, the plate just fell from her arms as if she forgot how to carry it. What a mess. Then she went to her bedroom and closed the door. When Piers went out that afternoon, she came out of her room and started waiting for him again by the door.

"Piers, he had no idea what to do. He tried talking to her and then shouting at her. Had he been a different sort of man he might have hit her. It might have done her some good. But he wasn't
that
sort of man. I said to send her away, but he couldn't. Piers felt he had a responsibility toward Areta, but I don't think he loved her anymore, at least not the way he used to. He was too tired for that kind of love, we all were. She was too."

"Was Piers still affectionate with her?" I asked. "She must have been very lonely."

"
Of course
she was lonely …" Elena van der Leun's voice flashed with irritation, and I realized that I had just taken the wrong side in a half-century-old family quarrel. But after a second Elena spoke again. "Piers was not a man very skilled with a woman. It was clear to us, and it must have been clear to her, that he wasn't as passionate about her as he once was. Who would have been? Finally, Piers got well enough to think about work. The university awarded him a grant to return to Indonesia and continue his studies, and he accepted. Areta seemed happy about the move. She spoke about how excited she was to get back to the East. We were sad to see Piers go, but not sorry to say goodbye to the couple. Six months later, Martiya was born."

Not long ago, I spent five days on an old barge floating down the Mekong toward the ancient holy city of Luang Prabang, alone with a Lao crew, the only other passenger a Dutch electrical engineer named Dirk, another tourist. I spoke no Lao and would have been content with silence, but day after day I was forced to endure long lectures on the Dutch welfare state, and the superiority of Dutch electro-engineering, Dutch social policy, Dutch drug policy, Dutch foreign policy, and Dutch policing to their American counterparts. An immensely wide, open sky filled the night; the river rushed on to Vietnam and the South China Sea from mystical Tibetan headwaters; and life would have been strange and weird and wonderful, altogether thrilling, if only Dirk had stopped prattling on about the ease with which a competent Dutch engineer (such as himself) could hook up a generator and set running lights aboard the boat. Before Areta is entirely dismissed as lunatic, hysterical, or wicked, let it be said in her defense that the practical, kindly Dutch can be
unbearably
irritating, as everyone who has had intercourse with them will testify. Irritation over time, more so even than cruelty, can mount to madness.

Poor Areta! Installed in that damp little hut in a Tobaku village on the edge of the ebony forest, did Piers lecture her on the temporal sequence of conditional clauses in Tole'e? Did he whistle tunelessly while he wrote in his lexicon of Pipikoro words, as the rain hemmed them in like prison bars? Did he suggest she take long walks and learn the native names of flowers? I tried to find somebody who could testify to what
she
might have suffered over the next few years, trapped in a cabin on the edge of the wilderness with what everyone described as a
very nice
Dutch man. But there was no one. Her father was murdered by the Japanese. A few relatives survived the war, but they didn't survive the turmoil of independence and the Communist purges. Perhaps there is someone else somewhere out there who personally remembers Areta van der Leun besides her sister-in-law Elena, but I could not find that last remaining witness.

Martiya van der Leun always told friends that she had a wonderful early childhood in the jungle village. Every woman was her mother, and every lap was open to her. Her stories are like all early childhood stories, disjointed, dreamlike. She had a dog named Pue', which means ghost. He was a black dog and very fluffy. Once, she stole a coconut from a little boy and ran into the forest to hide. Pue' was with her, and she grew very scared. She spent a night alone in the forest with Pue', and the village headman found her in the morning. Then the shaman was called, to see if she was really alive or had died in the night and was only a spirit. Everyone in the village was very happy that she was alive and not a phantom, and there was a feast, and the villagers ate the big pig that she had loved. Once, she cut her toe and her father and mother took her to the hospital in Palu. In Palu, she had ice cream for the first time, and cried because she wasn't allowed to bring ice cream home to her friends in the village.

Every year there were six months hard rain, and even Martiya knew her mother was unhappy. Her father smoked a pipe and wrote lexical tables and then wandered to the village headman's house to drink rice whiskey or palm wine; her mother paced the house. She dressed Martiya in all her clothes and played frantic games of dress-up: she told Martiya the terrifying story of Sita and Ravana, and kidnapped Martiya from the veranda to the bedroom. They put Pue' in a cape and called him Rama, but Pue' was too dirty to be allowed in the house, and Sita was forced to rescue herself. Areta never learned Uma well and took Martiya with her to the big village down the road to negotiate on market day. Areta would smoke clove cigarettes and give Martiya a fistful of rupiah. The five-year-old girl would wander from market stall to market stall, buying cassava and taro and chili peppers and eggs. She handed over all her money to the Chinese merchant, who took what he wanted and handed her back the rest. Her mother had told her not to buy from the Chinese, but the Chinese always gave her a piece of sugarcane. The merchants all knew that she was the
tuan
's child and always charged her white man's prices. She would walk with her mother under the huge umbrella in the rain back home, their sandaled toes slipping in the mud. Areta sometimes told Martiya about the house in Penang in which she grew up, with hardwood floors covered in rugs and an entire library of books and a globe that spun on a copper base. A real English house! Her father was a sultan's brother! Once, as a child, Areta had decided that she wished to play the gamelan. Her father arranged lessons for her. Her teacher was old and Hindu, and arrived at the house dressed in a perfectly white dhoti. Although she was not a Hindu, of course, he began every lesson with a Sanskrit prayer, which she repeated, and he kissed the instrument before playing. Areta became quite competent at the gamelan. Now, of course, she would not remember the fingerings, but she hoped that Martiya would have the opportunity to play an instrument—not one of the crude pipes they played in the village, but something with which she might make real music.