Fieldwork: A Novel (7 page)

There was no anthropological literature on the Dyalo, but in the vast holdings of Wheeler Library she found a slim memoir by a Welsh traveler named Swinton who had lived with the Dyalo in the first half of the century in the remote wilds of China's southern Yunnan Province. He offered a very brief description of the people: the Dyalo, Swinton reported, were found in small villages across southern China, northern Burma, and northern Thailand; Swinton estimated that there were perhaps a hundred thousand Dyalo speakers in the world. The Dyalo, he said, were slash-and-burn farmers and fiercely independent. To emphasize his point, Swinton told a story of a village in which the headman had been shot by his subjects with hunting rifles after he overstepped the bounds of his modest office. The Dyalo had no written language, although Dyalo poetry was subtle and beautiful. Swinton wrote, "The Dyalo language, reflecting the thinking of the Dyalo people, has neither a word for ‘love,' nor ‘sin,' nor ‘salvation.' In Dyalo, it is impossible to ‘forgive' someone. It is a brutally honest language." Swinton noted the Dyalo custom of selling their daughters into marriage, and Swinton wrote that the Dyalo were obsessed with spirits and ghosts, which they reckoned existed all about them in great numbers.

When Martiya herself went off to live with the Dyalo in the fall of 1974, she had very little more than this description to go on.

Joseph Atkinson and I gossiped about Martiya through February and into early March, as the very hot season came over Chiang Mai and the grinning, good-natured elephant outside the Westin Hotel turned brown. The hotel's gardener watered the topiary daily but was unable, as the days grew warmer, to keep the animal green: first the elephant's trunk, rearing high, changed color, then his massive, drooping ears. Day by day, the line of brown drifted southward across his mighty back. Finally, only the tail, protected during the searing hours of the late afternoon by the long shadow of the hotel itself, kept its original winter hue. Hot! Every visit to the Westin, every new letter from Atkinson, saw the hotel doorman, dressed in elaborate silken costumes appropriate to the court of great King Chulalongkorn, swing open the heavy glass doors with ever less alacrity, the pained look on his smooth face suggesting that all that movement in the heat was an affront to common sense. My underwear clung damply to my butt.

But inside the hotel it was cool, dark, carpeted, and quiet, which was why I liked to read my e-mail there in the morning: in the Westin, my otherwise sluggish thoughts seemed fresh, like sprigs of winter mint. I had made friends with perky pretty little Gai, the receptionist at the Business Service Center, and she let me check my e-mail there for free, when her boss, Miss Tong, wasn't looking. Gai considered Miss Tong's insistence on charging a
regular
customer unseemly. What, after all, was friendship for? Miss Tong, Gai said bitterly, was
kee nieo
—literally translated, a sticky shit. That this is a grave insult in Thailand says a considerable amount about the Thai character to those inclined to consider the Freudian themes of anal expulsion and retention.

Joseph Atkinson wasn't my only correspondent, of course: my mother wrote me; Josh found a job managing Thailand's first
gelateria
. My editor at
Executive
wondered if I would be interested in writing a couple of thousand words about a vineyard in Loei Province, the first in Thailand.
Of course
I would, my interest in viticulture being longstanding. But Joseph Atkinson's e-mails were the ones that I clicked open first and read over and over again.

I always printed out Atkinson's letters for Rachel to read, before exchanging a conspiratorial smile with Gai and strolling homeward. Midway between the Westin and my house, not far from the 7-Eleven, where I stopped to drink a mango Slurpee, there was a hospital, and on the façade of the hospital hung a hand-painted canvas sign at least two stories high advertising discounts on plastic surgery. I no longer recall the text of the advertisement, but the face depicted there struck me. It was the face of a young woman, with the pale skin favored in the Thai ideal, long dark hair, and eyes as round as Meyer lemons. As was typical of Thai commercial art, the woman was neither entirely Asian nor occidental, but in-between, her face bearing the drama of Western features but none of their vulgarity. She was the product of a surgeon with the deftest touch. It was this woman's face that in my imaginings I associated with Martiya.

From the field, Martiya wrote Atkinson still more long letters. Martiya's first letters from Thailand were ebullient, he said. They made him recall his own early days in Africa, when, leaving behind gloomy London and snowbound Chicago, he first saw the land the Doyo called the Beautiful Kingdom of the Yellow Sun. Atkinson was proud to have urged her to go. She wrote exuberantly of the beauty of Thailand: the flooded lime-green rice paddies bordered by swaying palms; coconuts, mangoes, and durian for sale by the side of the road; the ornate temples with flashing mirrored roofs; wandering Buddhist monks with shaved heads in saffron robes; the cut galangal in bushels drying in the midday sun, the humid air earthy, like a root; and the sleepy, sweating water buffalo reluctantly plowing the fields. Her descriptions of Thailand, Atkinson admitted, were clichéd, but no less touching for the fact.

Atkinson gave Martiya a letter of introduction to an elderly Thai anthropologist at the University of Chiang Mai. He treated her intention to live in a Dyalo village as a silly eccentricity. He had been able to study the Karen adequately, he maintained, on visits that lasted at most a day or two, and she would not find tribal living to her taste. Did she realize, he asked, that the Dyalo had neither electricity nor running water? And the food! One need not even mention the food. The thatched roof of a Dyalo hut would leak in the rainy season. The Dyalo themselves smelled bad, although this would be less oppressive to a
farang
. Martiya was persistent, however, and her Thai host eventually conceded: if she insisted on wandering down the path of folly, the least he could do would be to recommend a guide. In this way she was introduced to a young Dyalo man named Vinai, who spoke a rough-and-ready English in addition to his native Dyalo and fluent Thai.

Choosing the right village is an essential part of the anthropological adventure, and for almost three months Martiya and her guide wandered the mountains of northern Thailand. They traveled by motorbike and on foot, first along the paved arteries which pulsed out from Chiang Mai, then branching onto the network of dirt roads which led from village to village. Where the roads ended, they walked, along paths which, Vinai maintained, had once been the migratory routes of wild elephants. Martiya got a sense of the new world in which she found herself. The Akha, she learned, wore silver headdresses, and exposed their twins, thinking them possessed by evil spirits. Karen virgins dressed in white. The Hmong lived at the summits of the mountains, and while the Hmong greatly admired the Yao, they enslaved the Lahu. The Hmong had grown rich as opium traders and the Lahu were often opium-addicted. The primitive Mrabri no one ever saw: they had never learned to build houses and drifted through the jungle like ghosts, taking shelter every night under makeshift lean-tos. Under every T'ai Lue house there was a loom. The Lua were sullen and stared at Martiya suspiciously. Everyone, her guide said, admired the poetry of the Lisu and the quality of their singing. The Mao were quiet folk and, like the Swiss, spoke slowly. Martiya and Vinai roamed from the Burmese to the Lao border, looking for the ideal village to study. In the end, Martiya settled herself in a Dyalo village called Dan Loi, not far from the Burmese border, and set to work.

The field did to Martiya what the field always does: it scoured her and revealed the person underneath the encrusted layers of culture and ingrained habit and prejudice. Martiya came back to Berkeley three years later, tanned and strong, and began to write. She showed a few of the chapters of her doctoral thesis to Atkinson. They were superb, he said, absolutely superb. First-rate analysis, a deep connection with the subject, and intensely well observed. But Martiya wasn't convinced: she complained that she hardly
knew
the Dyalo and was being asked to write their definitive story. Every graduate student—every
good
grad student, Atkinson qualified—feels that way, but Martiya for some reason felt it more keenly than most. Atkinson told her that he understood, that it was only after he had defended his Doyo village from a raid by a neighboring tribe, actually holding a spear in his hand, that he felt he understood the people, that he could write about them.

"So what should I do?" Martiya asked.

Write the thesis, kiddo. It's just three hundred pages of blah-blah-blah.

After about a year, she told him she wanted to go back to Thailand. She needed more data. Atkinson told her that he couldn't oppose this idea more profoundly. "Are you nuts?" he asked. She left nevertheless.

She never finished the doctoral thesis. He never heard from her again.

Not long after my e-mails with Atkinson had tapered off, the phone rang in the middle of the night. My first thought wasn't that someone was dead or needed my kidney—I just cursed Rachel's Grandma Irene. I don't think Grandma Irene ever really bought into the outlandish notion that as the sun was rising over the Puget Sound, the same sun, harsher and so much hotter, had long since set over the rice paddies of the Golden Triangle. She called us at all hours of the night.

But I was wrong. It turned out someone
was
dead.

The fan blew hot air across our damp backs. Our first hot season in Thailand, Rachel had asked me if we were growing apart, because I didn't hold her in the night anymore. "It's got to be a zillion degrees, Rachel, are you crazy?" I said. She looked at me doubtfully. That night, I held on to her tightly, breathing hotly on her neck. She pushed me away, and now we slept, during the hot season, on far sides of the bed. I was having a dream when the phone rang, a complicated one—interpret it as you will—in which I had just gotten a job as a waiter in a French café and needed to acquire a waiter's suit with a vest and tailcoat. No tailor in Chiang Mai would make it for me. I licked my lips when the phone rang, and for a second I wasn't sure if it wasn't the tailor from the dream calling me back.

"Hello?" I think I said. I wasn't taking notes.

On the other end of the line there was a woman's voice. "Mischa?" the voice said. "Mischa Berlinski? It's Karen!" She said it like back in college, we were once best friends. "Karen Leon! Martiya's friend!" the voice added.

"Karen," I said. Karen Leon was an anthropologist from Texas to whom Joseph Atkinson had suggested I write. In my e-mail I had included my phone number and invited her to call me.

"I just got back to Austin and I read your e-mail and I had to call
right away
. How
is
Martiya? I wrote her and she never wrote back, and I wrote
again
and I've been
so
worried."

A very long pause circumnavigated the world.

"Don't you know?" I said, and then I thought: How could she?

"Know what?"

"I guess you don't know."

"No," she said. Her voice dropped a register, from trumpet to trombone.

"She's dead." If she'd called in the morning, I might have been more gentle.

"Oh," Karen said. It was almost a groan.

I didn't know where to begin. "She killed herself. In jail. She ate a ball of opium."

"
That
killed her?"

"Yes." It didn't seem like enough. "That's what I was told."

"Well, are you sure or not?"

I felt a little defensive. "Yes, I'm sure," I said. "She's dead." "Oh."

One of my neighbor's fighting cocks crowed, and from Texas, I heard a car alarm. The sounds must have crossed each other somewhere under the Pacific.

"It's hard news," I said.

"It's just so …"

"I was shocked too," I added. It seemed like the right thing to say. "Did you know … did you know Martiya well?"

"Oh, yes. I mean, no. I mean, I haven't seen her in years. But we were once close, before …" Her voice drifted off. My neighbor's fighting cock crowed again, and a dog barked.

"Would you like to talk about Martiya sometime?" I asked. In the letter I had sent to Karen I had explained that I was a journalist interested in the story of Martiya van der Leun, but no more than that. "It's just that she had so many people who admired her here, and I want to get her story straight. I mean, maybe when you've had a little time to—" "They admire her? Really? After what happened?"

"I don't really know what happened," I admitted.

"Don't you
know
? I thought that's what you were writing about."

"No, I don't know."

"I can't believe you don't know."

"I don't," I insisted.

"Martiya
killed
someone," Karen said. The intimate excitement had returned to her voice. "Martiya shot a missionary named David Walker. From a whole family of missionaries. She shot him in the back two times with a hunting rifle."

"Do you know why she shot him?"

There was a long pause on the line, and then Karen said, "That's why I was calling
you
."

THE VICTIM'S FAMILY
was easy to track down:
everyone
in Chiang Mai seemed to know them.

Waiting for Rachel to finish class one afternoon, I mentioned the Walkers to Mr. Tim, the headmaster at the school. Mr. Tim was a fat Canadian with a straggly beard and a nervous, high-pitched laugh who had come to Chiang Mai after leaving his wife and the walk-in closet in which he had been encaged; every morning over coffee during second-period break, he recounted to the teachers the passionate details of his love affair with a stunningly lovely but stormy transvestite accountant named Saroi. I don't know precisely the attraction to a homosexual of a man who looks like a woman, even a beautiful woman. Come to think of it, I'm not sure why a beautiful transvestite would be attracted to an obese Canadian either. In any case, Mr. Tim was a favorite of students and staff alike: kids sent to his office for discipline were allowed to help themselves from a sack of lemon candy that Mr. Tim kept in his desk; no teacher ever complained that Mr. Tim was overzealous in the examination of curricula or student progress.

"
Interesting
people," he said. He didn't know the Walkers himself, but his counterpart at Chiang Mai's other, better, international school, with whom he maintained a collegial contact, did. Mary Walker, a grandchild of the Walker clan, had been in the fourth grade there several years earlier. The poor child stuttered, and her folks were in his office all the time. They struck him as nice quiet people. At Thanksgiving they made him a sweet potato pie—"Heaven knows where they found sweet potatoes
here
!"—and that little girl, he said she was just lovely to look at. The other kids were so mean to her on account of her stutter. But there was something not right with the parents. They were very
serious
people. Mr. Tim's voice grew low and conspiratorial. He didn't believe that they were missionaries
at all
. "Somebody told me that the family actually worked for the CIA—and I
believe
it."

"Really!" I exclaimed.

"Oh yes!" said Mr. Tim. "Now, I don't know all the details of the story, but once, Mary got into a fight with another girl, whose father was—Persian? I think her mother was—Norwegian? Strange couple. NGO people. In
any
case, Mary walloped the other girl but good. The other girl deserved it. The father, this Persian man, he came into the school furious, and made some kind of silly, hot-blooded remark about Americans, and somehow this got back to the Walkers. One week later, the Thai authorities
deported
him. And then Mary stopped coming to class, and her parents sent the school a note saying that they had decided that Mary would do better at home. Then somebody told me that the Walkers were the last Americans to leave China after the revolution, and somebody
else
told me that they used to live in Burma, and, well, it just all made sense to me."

It made sense to me too.

Gunther the yoga teacher knew all about the Walkers: he, too, had heard stories. Sometimes at the end of a yoga session, Gunther's wife would bring out cups of hot ginger tea and we would sit in the gazebo, gossiping. On hearing the Walker name, he stiffened. "I haff never met them," Gunther said. "But I hear so many things. I do not like this kind of Christian who liff in a big house with so many servants, and then tell the people how they must liff. Is that for you to be Christian?" Gunther looked at me severely. I shook my head. Gunther himself lived in a big house with many servants and told many people how they must live, but it did not seem the right moment to mention that. He breathed deeply to a
chakra
three fingers below his belly button and continued: an Episcopalian pastor from Delaware with a bad back several years earlier had taken one of his classes, and this man, Gunther said, had known someone who had known the Walkers very well indeed. "He tells me that the Walkers give the Christians money and medicine but let the people who are not Christian alone. I do not like this spirit so much at all. I teach yoga, luff, and compassion to everyone who come here." Gunther looked at me again. "So you still like the Walkers so much?" he said. I sipped my tea and protested meekly that I had never even met them.

From Thai and
farang
alike I heard stories, often improbable and sometimes mutually impossible. Our landlady, an elderly Thai who stopped by weekly to oversee the gardener, told me in a hushed whisper that she had heard that an earlier generation of Walkers had once commanded a guerrilla army of anti-Communist Christian converts in southern China: she used an unfamiliar Thai word to describe the Walkers, which, when I looked it up in the dictionary, I found meant warlord, or anyone resistant to the rule of the king, and hence outside the boundaries of civilization itself. A parent at the school had heard that they were the most generous philanthropists in the north of Thailand. According to a development worker I met by chance in a bar, they lived in ostentatious wealth offered up by pious contributors in humble clapboard churches across the Midwest. All my informants agreed that the Walkers had been in Asia a very long time, but details varied: the Walkers had lived, some said, in China; others said in Burma, in Laos, in Thailand. Nobody knew the details. Everyone seemed to have met or heard a story about a different Walker, and I couldn't keep the names straight. I was told that the Walkers were the nicest people you could hope to meet, the real salt of the earth, doing God's work; I was also told that the Walkers were opportunistic, fanatical, power-mad neocolonialists. They were at once a huge family riven by dissension, and they were close-knit. All I knew was that Martiya van der Leun shot the scion of the family two times in the back with a hunting rifle.

I had never met a missionary before, and so contradictory was the impression produced by all these stories that I had little idea what to expect. I had grown up in Manhattan. The only serious Christian I had ever met was my co-op's handyman, a black man named Leon who was born again when I was about eleven after he went to a revival meeting in New Jersey. The phrase "born again" had confused me considerably at the time, and played on my imagination in horrific ways. All through my childhood and adolescence, Leon and I were friends, and I recall that once, after Kristin Skamanga dumped me, he told me in a serious voice, "It don't matter about that little girl, 'cause Jesus loves you—you know? He loves you with all His heart."

Beyond Leon, I knew no Christians who took their faith seriously. The missionary himself was a figure only from the short stories of Somerset Maugham, and I had imagined that the missionaries were faded relics of an earlier time, like Maugham's colonial administrators who drank gin slings on the veranda overlooking the jungle at the Club. An appointment to meet real missionaries like the Walkers thus struck me as intensely exotic, as if I had been invited to visit Bhutan. The stories about the Walkers, like the stories about Martiya, thrilled me: I hoped that they were all true.

Later, when I came to know the Walkers well, I decided that they were stranger, far stranger, than those who had traded rumors and spun idle gossip imagined.

Asking a mother about her murdered son is a delicate operation, like removing a stray lash from a child's eye. I had Mrs. Walker on the phone and was just starting to probe gently when she cut me off. "Oh, honey, you're here in Chiang Mai?" she asked. "Then you just come by the Mission one of these days and we'll talk. There'll be someone around. There always is."

Norma Walker said to drive north along the palm-fringed winding river road, past the Baptist church, then to take a right at the bar called Brasserie. "Do you know the place?" I certainly did: Rachel and I drank tequila there sometimes on Thursday nights when a long-haired guitarist named Tuk played note-perfect Jimi Hendrix and Santana covers with his backup band, the Tukables. I didn't mention the tequila on the phone. Norma Walker said that not long past the bar there would be a noodle stand on the left and another on the right. The compound was down the red dirt road just past the second noodle stand. I said that I'd be there the next day at one.

I arrived early. The cement wall surrounding the Walker compound was topped with broken glass; a discreet brass placard beside the closed gate read: south china christian mission. At the end of the alley, a tuk-tuk driver had parked his rickshaw under the shade of a banyan tree and was asleep, sprawled in the back of his carriage. I could hear his snores.

From the outside, the compound had looked huge. But when I rolled back the front gate of the compound along its rusted track and stepped inside, the place was disappointingly gray and dusty, almost dingy. A pair of trailers sat on cement blocks along one wall; and along the other wall there was a large concrete house painted a pale chewing-gum pink. An exterior staircase led to the house's second story, and then to its third— but the third story did not yet exist. Sturdy metal poles sprouted from the flat roof like antennae. The staircase simply wandered heavenward. Only a flowering jacaranda relieved the melancholy hot-season severity of the place, and snow-white blossoms drifted limply over the dead grass and dried mud. On the front stoop of the house, a small black cat with yellow eyes was licking her paws. I knocked on the door and wiped my forehead with my sleeve. I waited a moment and knocked again.

A voice sang out from the other side of the door, "Oh, Tom, just let yourself in." It was Mrs. Walker's voice.

Tom, Mischa—close enough. I slipped off my sandals and arranged them neatly beside the other shoes: the rubber sandals, the tennis shoes, the mud-caked leather work boots, the worn-down flip-flops, and the knee-high galoshes. I opened the unlocked door and stepped into the house.

An old woman looked up at me from a couch set at an angle to the front door. She was fleshy, and just slightly more of her pink-gray skin slipped out from under her faded blue housedress than I was meant to see: hints of puffy knees expanded to puffy calves lined with varicose trails leading down to puffy ankles. A puffy face rested on a puffy neck. Only her pale-green eyes were sharp, but they were very sharp, and they looked me up and down critically. "Oh, you are not Tom Riley
at all
," she concluded, after a considerable period of judgment.

"No," I admitted, and to cover the silence which fell over the room, I added, idiotically, "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry," the woman replied evenly. "I'm not Tom Riley either, after all."

Having established to our mutual satisfaction that my failure to be Tom Riley implied no moral fault, she paid me no further mind, as if expecting that I knew the routine around here.

"I'm so sorry to bother you," I finally said. "But I called yesterday. I'm Mischa Berlinski. And you must be Mrs. Walker."

"I am," the woman said. "Only, you can call me Nomie. Everyone does."

"Okay, Nomie," I obliged. I was
still
standing in the doorway, so I added, "I was going to come at one."

"Then you're right on time," Nomie said. "Don't mind me if I don't get up. Mr. Walker will be with you in a moment. You just make yourself comfortable right there."

She gestured to a couch opposite her own, and closing the door behind me, I took my place. On the phone the day before, I had indicated no preference as to which of the Walkers received me.

On the couch beside Nomie there was a ball of bright-blue yarn, which the old woman began to play with, spooling out several inches of thread, wrapping it around her thick fingers, and then rolling the yarn back onto the skein. She was not a woman to whom I would have otherwise applied the adjective "kittenish." She seemed absorbed in the operation, but she must have noticed me staring at the ball, because she said, "The doctor told me this would be good for the arthritis."

"Does it help?"

"I'm not sure just yet, but I do pray for some relief."

There were no portraits of family, no bookshelves on the whitewashed walls. The only furniture was the fake-leather couch where Nomie sat, the fake-leather couch on which I had installed myself, and a wooden rocking chair. In the far corner there was an upright piano, its closed lid supporting a small tank in which three large goldfish swam frantic laps, like athletes in training for a goldfish Olympiad.

"Can I offer you a cool glass of orange Tang?" Nomie asked.

For the first and only time in my adult life, I was seized by the desire for a cool glass of orange Tang. I was aware suddenly that my throat was desperately parched, and I didn't just want but
needed
a cool glass of orange Tang. "That would absolutely hit the spot," I said.

Nomie looked down at the ball of yarn in her hand, which she continued to knead. Then she spoke very loudly in an utterly foreign language. It was a language with
sounds
I had never heard before, like whale song, or Martian. Her voice swooped and glided, and she inserted vowels and diphthongs which seemed to come from the deepest recesses of her gullet. The only word I understood was "Tang," pronounced like the Chinese dynasty.

There was a pause and then a sympathetic feminine voice shouted out, "Okey-dokey, Grandma." A few seconds later, a young woman entered the room, carrying a tray of glasses and a tall glass pitcher beaded with perspiration. She set the tray down on the coffee table. "Cool Tang!" she said.

The young woman poured me a glass of orange Tang from the pitcher. "Thank you," I said. I took a sip, and for a second my mouth was flooded with long-forgotten memories of kindergarten. "You know, I had forgotten how much I like Tang."