Fieldwork: A Novel (6 page)

"How so?"

"She wasn't ever very subdued, but when the hair was flat, she'd be more thoughtful. But when the hair was big, she was a real hell-raiser. When the hair was big, she'd say, ‘Let's get in the car and drive.' When the hair was flat, you'd find her in the library."

"Why do you think Martiya was in the Anthropology Department?" I asked.

He furrowed his brow. "In those days, anthro was for a lot of folks who didn't feel at home anywhere else. It wasn't a big department, and it had a personal atmosphere. Everyone knew everyone else. All the professors would have parties, and I guess it's one of the few places on campus where Martiya could find people who really got how she had been raised. She was kind of a celebrity in the department, and I think she liked that. Also, she was curious. One of the most curious people I've ever met. There aren't that many curious people out there."

I wrote "Martiya—curious" in my notebook.

Tim puckered his lips. "I'm not sure ‘curious' is the best way to put it, actually," he said. Reluctantly, I added a question mark to the word. "Martiya was a self-improver. Ambitious. She bought the
Norton Anthology of English Literature
and read her way through it, fifty pages a day, from one end to the other. Then she got on this poetry-memorizing thing where she tried to memorize fifty lines of poetry a week. Then it was swimming—she hadn't learned to swim as a kid and she decided she needed to know how to swim. Soon she was swimming laps three-quarters of an hour every day."

The phone rang and Tim got up to answer it. His wife was on the line, and he said, "Hi, babe," and "Uh-huh," and "Okey-dokey," and "He said
that
?" and "Sonovabitch," and "I've got to go, we'll talk when you get home." He didn't mention that he was talking to a journalist about his ex-girlfriend. Then he hung up and sat down again. "The van der Leuns, big influence on me," he said. I had the impression that much of what Tim was telling me now had been prepared before my arrival, as if the night before he had lain awake thinking. Piers van der Leun was a "distracted elderly scholar type, you know, really from another generation," slightly ill at ease in California, especially in a California where the tennis whites to which he had so proudly accustomed himself were no longer the epitome of style. Martiya was "passionately devoted to her father." Although she lived in her own apartment on the north side of the campus, she stopped by her father's office almost every day in the late afternoon, and he would take her to the faculty lounge for coffee. Sometimes Tim would be invited. "My dad, he was the kind of guy who talked about nothing but baseball and union politics," Tim said. "Don't get me wrong. I love baseball, still union." Tim threw an imaginary baseball to emphasize his loyalties. "But these two, they'd spend hours talking about grammars and lexicons and Chomsky and poetry and politics—I never heard people talk like that. And Professor van der Leun would ask my opinion about all sorts of things, and then he'd kind of hang on my response, as if there was nothing more important in the world than my opinion, this little twenty-year-old twerp from Modesto."

Tim and Martiya went for long drives up the California coast. Tim had an old Pontiac that he could barely keep running, and a chocolate Lab named Chocolate, and they'd drive north, as far as they could go in a weekend. Knowing that you are happy when you are happy is a rare gift, and Tim knew how happy he was.

" ‘All life's grandeur / Is something with girl in summer,' " Tim Blair said.

"I'm sorry?"

"Robert Lowell. It's true. You're too young to know it. You'll see." The couple drove along the coast and bought sharp cheddar cheese from an old cheese-maker in Point Reyes and white wine from a vineyard in Sonoma, then wandered—sometimes ending up on the banks of the Russian River, other times going as far north as Mendocino. Once they stopped on a bluff over the Pacific, near a grove of gnarled cypress trees, and spread a blanket out on the golden grass. "Do you see that itty-bitty little island over there?" Martiya asked, pointing far, far off in the distance, to the other side of the Pacific.

"Yep."

"No, not the big one. The really itty-bitty one."

"Oh, the little one. I was looking at the big one."

"No, the big one's Java. You see all those lights? That's Jakarta. The little one is Sulawesi. That's where I was born."

"Oh, I was looking at Borneo."

"You're looking towards Japan. That's Borneo
there
."

They were together a little over two years. After graduation, Piers van der Leun gave his daughter a small sum of money, to use as she wished. She announced her intention to travel around the world, and explained to Tim her intention to travel alone. "I thought it was crazy, this little girl wanting to go around the world by herself. But she was insistent. Piers asked me to talk to her, to change her mind. She told me not to wait for her. She was a powerfully determined girl. I never really knew why it was over. I guess now when I look back on it, I was too boring for her—she couldn't imagine ever living in a house like this one." He waved his hand in a broad arc which encompassed the bay windows and the hardwood floor covered in an old Persian carpet, the coved ceiling, and the family photos. Thirty years after the fact, Tim Blair was still explaining to himself why his college girlfriend left him. Through the windows I could see the bay, covered in whitecaps stirred up by a winter breeze.

"Tim Blair—too boring," I wrote in my notebook.

"I got postcards and letters from her all year long, even though we'd broken up," Tim said. "I got letters from the craziest places—from eastern Turkey and Afghanistan and the far northeast provinces of India. I didn't write her back, because I never knew where she was going to be, so it was a kind of one-way conversation. All that year, I was dying for her just to write that she loved me and missed me, but she never did: she would just write these long letters about the people that she saw and the places she went, and how fucking
interesting
it was. I didn't give a shit. Then the letters started to peter out, and I stopped missing her so much.

"I went to grad school on the East Coast, and, once, I came back to Berkeley for a conference—this was, oh, about two, three years later. I gave her a call, and we went out for coffee. She was enrolled in the Ph.D. program in the Department of Anthropology, and she was all excited because she had been awarded a grant to study some tribe in the north of Thailand. God, I can't believe she was still in Thailand."

Tim pointed to a picture on the wall. It was hidden by a bookcase, and I had to stand up to see it clearly. It was a portrait of himself thirty years earlier. There was a strapping young man in a T-shirt. He had shoulder-length curly hair. He had a goofy smile and was standing in a flower-filled pasture. Martiya, he said, had taken that picture.

"What does she look like now?" he asked me. "I mean, before she …"

"I didn't meet her." I told him what Josh O'Connor had told me.

"She had beautiful lips."

I paused a second. I looked down at my notes. There was something I wanted to clarify. "For
Nixon
?" I said. "Really?"

"Twice."

Tim heard from Martiya one more time. About fifteen years ago, he said, she wrote to him. The letter was postmarked Thailand. Memories of their time together made up the bulk of the letter. The tone was tender, even affectionate. She was living in a tribal village in northern Thailand: her research had been fruitful. She had been productive. She had to tell someone, she said: she had met a man and was madly in love. Her current happiness, Martiya told Tim, reminded her of their time together, and having no one with whom she might share these memories, she had decided to write to Tim himself. She hoped that he was equally happy.

Josh O'Connor had told me that Martiya had been in prison the past ten years. Tim Blair reported that she was a free woman, madly in love, as of fifteen years ago. Not long after she mailed this letter, by the time line I was constructing, Martiya had killed someone.

THE SWIDDEN,
which had lain fallow all through the fall, again lay fallow. In Berkeley, I had tried to find Martiya's graduate thesis adviser, Joseph Atkinson, but he was, the department secretary said, a sick man, in and out of the hospital. I sent him an e-mail anyway, and received no response. I went back to Seattle, and Rachel and I went back to Thailand. It had been gray with a sleety rain when we left the States, but on the lawn outside the Chiang Mai airport, the airport employees were drinking whiskey, eating sticky rice, and playing the guitar.

The cool season came over Chiang Mai, and the Thai girls wore light cotton sweaters and shivered, although I was still comfortable in a T-shirt and shorts. It was a quiet winter. My editor at
Executive
asked if I wanted to write some film reviews. I saw no reason to be a snob. Rachel ate an omelette which did not agree with her and spent a week in the hospital, where the mysterious Dr. Bahn guided her recovery. Every morning, the Indian-born physician swept into her room, glanced at her chart, and settled himself into the chair beside her bed. He took Rachel's damp, green hand, and as he asked her the usual questions about her symptoms, continued to hold the limb sympathetically. He stayed at her bedside for almost an hour, and for the duration of his visit, her nausea abated. Her illness he treated as merely a manifestation of a deeper spiritual ailment, the cure for which, ideally, was the adoption of the Hindu rites of his childhood—that and antibiotics. He looked into Rachel's pale-blue eyes and talked—about Thai Buddhism, which in his view was nothing other than Hinduism itself in an elemental form about how animals recover from illness in the forest; about the forest and its sad destruction; and about the recent death of his father, and the beauty of the experience, despite its exceptional sorrow. The ghost of his father, he told us, was not yet at peace, and never left him.

"He's here, in this room?" asked Rachel.

"Oh yes," Dr. Bahn said. This was not something that should concern us: his father had been a most lovely man.

Rachel got better, and we took her class to the zoo. At the Chiang Mai zoo, feeding the animals is encouraged, and we bought bananas for the monkeys, peanuts for the elephants, and ice cream for the first-graders. Morris was thrilled. "My mother," Morris said, in the fluent mélange of his father's English and his mother's Thai that he spoke when excited, "she tell me I'm no allowed eat ice cream. She say, ‘Morris, you too fat!' " We got the ice cream from Dairy Queen, and Morris looked at his Blizzard with huge, passionate eyes. "I love you, Miss Rachel," he said finally.

Warm, easy winter days passed. Rachel and I started taking yoga lessons from an Austrian named Gunther, a former chef from Linz, who offered courses in a gazebo in his flower-strewn backyard, which was patrolled by a domesticated duck named Donut. Gunther had a great rivalry with the other German-speaking yoga teacher in Chiang Mai, a Bavarian who called himself Vivekananda. "Of course Vivekananda is very good yoga teacher," Gunther said, rubbing Donut's beak. "But I do not so much like his spirit."

Then one day in late January, we woke up sweating. The cool season was over, just like that, and not long after, Martiya's story broke open, like a coconut struck by a machete. Martiya's graduate adviser, Joseph Atkinson, had written me back. "Dear Mischa Berlinski," he began. "Hell yes, I remember Martiya van der Leun."

Rachel, like many women, had total faith in her ability to spot a romance, based on little more than a tender tone of voice or a lingering glance. She was convinced that Martiya van der Leun and her former professor were once lovers.

Handsome, dark-eyed, tall, a dramatic scar across his neck, the celebrated hero of numerous adventures in the African bush, Joseph Atkinson was a man of about sixty when a pretty undergraduate named Martiya van der Leun enrolled in his senior honors seminar. The seminar, entitled "Games People Play," was a semester-long examination of the role of play in human society. All human societies, Atkinson observed, from the Inuit to the French to the Pygmy, play; it was a fundamental human institution. But what do human beings consider play? It is not an easy word to define. The course considered work as a form of play, and play as a form of work; the games of children and the games of adults; games with consequences like baccarat, and games without, like tag; formal games like baseball, and informal games like hide-and-seek; games that mimicked war and games that mimicked daily life, as when children played house. Martiya wrote a long paper for Atkinson on the games children played in the Pipikoro villages of southern Sulawesi, drawing from her own experiences as a child. The notable feature of Pipikoro play, Martiya wrote, was the extreme complexity of the games played by even the youngest Pipikoro children: her catalogue of the rules of
makulu
ran to over thirty pages. Atkinson thought that with substantial revisions, the paper might be suitable for publication. Martiya visited him during office hours. Atkinson wrote that Martiya was small and vivacious: she had very pretty feet, and in warm weather she wore open-toed sandals; she was feminine but not womanly. She asked him about the Doyo, the tribal people he had studied in Africa.
Really
? The
only
white man? She asked him what it was like to have dengue fever, and what tribal warfare was like. She even asked him about faculty meetings.

Rachel had been brushing her teeth as I read her Atkinson's letter, and she rinsed her mouth from the tap. "God knows only a lover would be interested in a faculty meeting," she said, spitting into the sink. "She was hot for him."

"You think?"

"Absolutely."

Rachel's logic had a certain force, and I imagined the sun-splashed sexually charged afternoons in the professor's study, as the small, vivacious undergraduate with pretty feet interrogated the learned but still manly professor. Did she play idly with her hair while Atkinson described the Doyo death rituals? Were there tribal masks on the wall? Did a woven kente cloth cover the couch? When she came by his office, did she perch herself daintily on the very edge of his couch and say, "Professor Atkinson, tell me a little about your work?"

Although he published only a handful of books—
The Doyo Way of Life
;
Water, Wind, and Rain
;
The Life of Ralupeda, Doyo Shaman
— Atkinson's influence dominated generations of anthropologists, including Martiya's. Anthropologists talk of the "school of Atkinson" as they talk of the school of Malinowski, or Evans-Pritchard, or Lévi-Strauss; and every freshman taking Anthropology 101 learns to construct the complicated Atkinson kinship groups. Atkinson wrote a vigorous, masculine prose, which is how I came to imagine the man himself. I wasn't surprised to learn that Atkinson, even at a place so filled with strangeness as Berkeley, was well known for his carefully cultivated eccentricities, as when he showed up for the initial meeting of the survey course in cultural anthropology, a lecture attended by nearly eight hundred startled undergraduates, wearing nothing but a handsome, three-foot long embroidered penis sheath. On another occasion, campus police were summoned on reports of a tall, nearly naked man wandering near Sather Gate with a finely honed spear. The situation was
not
calmed when Atkinson coolly explained that he was hunting the dean of students. Atkinson's e-mails to me were typically time-stamped around four in the morning California time, and I imagined him wrapped in a tattered bathrobe that exposed his bony knees, sitting at his computer, unable to fall back to sleep. The Internet makes possible some strange friendships. Atkinson made clear to me that for reasons of literary vanity, he did not wish to see his letters published, but I was free, he said generously, to summarize their contents.

From the first, Rachel disliked Atkinson. She thought he was an egotist and arrogant, but then, I countered silently, no one without a certain egotism can spend so long in the West African jungle. I liked Atkinson's forthright prose, and I admired the way that he had defied his father in order to pursue a scholarly career: Atkinson's father, a Chicago commodities broker, sent him to London in the early 1930s to learn the tea trade; but Atkinson promptly enrolled in the celebrated doctoral program in anthropology at the London School of Economics under the legendary Bronislaw Malinowski, and reconciled with his father only after Atkinson's older brother died in combat in the South Pacific.

In his middle twenties, Atkinson went to live with the Doyo in French West Africa for five years, and emerged finally with the book that won him a professorship at Yale, where he spent almost two decades before moving to California. He wrote books about West Africans filled with hard midwestern facts. He described and described again the Doyo—how they married, how they died, how they made millet beer, and how they fought their tribal wars; famously, he himself fought in a Doyo tribal war, and emerged with a scar across his neck and upper body. Atkinson made sure the handsome silver eel-shaped wound was showing in the publicity photos on the back of all his books. Those photos, taken when Atkinson must have been in his early fifties, showed a large, well-muscled man with tight curly hair, silver at the temples, wearing an open-necked shirt. His eyes were hooded, toughening up a face that otherwise might have been delicate. His ridged arms were crossed at the chest, and his hands were large and strong. "He's not
my
type," Rachel said, looking at the picture. "But I can see what Martiya saw in him."

After she graduated, Tim Blair had told me and Atkinson confirmed, Martiya decided to travel. "Things were over with Atkinson," Rachel said. She twirled a strand of her long hair meditatively. "Martiya must have had the affair with Atkinson, saw that things weren't going anywhere, and left. It explains why she broke up with the bald guy in San Francisco too."

"You think?"

"She saw the writing on the wall. What do you do when you're twenty-three with a guy who's almost sixty? It was a we're-both-moving-on-but-we-care-for-each-other breakup, not an I-hate-you-how-could-you get-my-sister-pregnant breakup," she said.

Rachel's elegant hypothesis was consistent with the facts: from the road, Martiya wrote to Atkinson as she had written to Tim, long letters describing the Second-Class Waiting Room of the Udaipur train station; or the Kurdish wedding to which she had been invited. Atkinson told me that when she came back to Berkeley, Martiya asked him what he thought she should do with herself. Atkinson loved giving young people advice: he told Martiya that her curiosity and intelligence would make her a superior scholar in any number of disciplines, but in his opinion,
kiddo
, she was a natural anthropologist. Martiya followed her professor's counsel and enrolled in the Ph.D. program in the Department of Anthropology, where Martiya asked Atkinson to supervise her doctoral thesis.

"Well, naturally," Rachel said. "She wasn't
stupid
."

Martiya had originally intended to write her doctoral thesis on the Pipikoro. She knew the language, she argued, and her childhood intimacy with the people would allow her to present the culture vividly. But Sulawesi was politically unstable in the early 1970s, which made grants hard to come by. Joseph Atkinson, too, was opposed to her plans: the Pipikoro were not an unknown people in scholarly circles; her own father's research there had been significant. He proposed instead that she study the Dyalo of northern Thailand. No ethnographic portrait of the Dyalo existed. A detailed description of their way of life would prove a valuable contribution to the literature and a good place to start a career. Atkinson told her: "Listen, don't be a martyr. Thailand is a great place to do research. The food is good. The climate's swell. There are lots of flowers and butterflies. Nobody's going to try to
eat
you." Martiya won a research fellowship to study the Dyalo, largely on the strength of his letter of recommendation.

"Uh-huh," Rachel said knowingly.

While still in Berkeley, Martiya prepared for her time with the Dyalo as best she could. Very little guidance was typically offered to graduate students at UC Berkeley in the Department of Anthropology before they set out to do fieldwork. I spoke by telephone with Lee Cheng, who in 1967 set out from Wheeler Hall to study Saharan nomads, today the L. Stein Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. "The philosophy really was that the field was something you did on your own," he said. "The department had the attitude that nothing much could prepare you for anthropological fieldwork, and if you couldn't do fieldwork, then you had no business being an anthropologist. It was a real rite of passage." If you couldn't figure out how to get out to the jungle, the desert, or the savannah; if you couldn't figure out what to ask the natives; if you couldn't figure out how to build rapport with recalcitrant and suspicious locals—perhaps, the department implied, it was time to think about a nice career in sociology, where the data were unlikely to carry a spear. A story circulated in the department about the grad student who asked her hoary and accomplished adviser for his counsel on the field. The professor handed her a copy of the thickest ethnography on his shelf, one of the magisterial works of Kroeber. "I send thee forth, that thou might do likewise," he solemnly intoned. An elderly professor much interested in the Australian aborigines advised Martiya to pay particular attention to forbidden animals and eldest daughters: long years of scholarship, he continued, and a lifetime in the field had taught him that these were the soft spots of tribal, nay,
human
culture itself. "Don't do what I did and act like an old animal around the forbidden daughters," he said with a sad, greasy chuckle. Atkinson advised her to bring a bottle of tequila, a shot of which, he said, inevitably made everyone just a little more easy when discussing incest taboos, a perennial topic of anthropological inquiry.