Fieldwork: A Novel (37 page)

People asked David Walker to sing another
farang
song, and he said no. Then one by one, some still murmuring the songs of Sings Soft,

others too tired to recall another verse, the drunken villagers fell asleep.

The next day, a number of the guests asked David about the beautiful
farang
song, and he spent the day preaching not far from Sings Soft's grave, with the result that three villagers asked to be baptized.

The Opium Man handed me the pipe, and I smoked again. The smoke was sweet, with a taste a little like caramel toffee. With every pipe, I felt as if I were gradually rising higher in the air. My breathing was slow and steady. The Walkers had told me that the Dyalo, upon accepting Christianity, were required to stop growing poppies and smoking opium.
If Christianity could convince a man to do that
, I thought to myself,
well then! That's some religion indeed
.

Khun Vinai told me that he didn't see Martiya again for almost a year after Sings Soft's funeral. That was the year that Kiss-My-Lips was sick. One night Sang-Duan woke to hear Kiss-My-Lips groaning and thrashing about, trembling and bleeding from the mouth. This was the first of her seizures. Khun Vinai had a modern outlook on things, and he took her to Chiang Mai for treatment at the hospital, and while the doctors ran their tests, Sang-Duan insisted on pursuing traditional Dyalo remedies—medicinal herbs and shamanic intervention. Whether it was these or the doctors' prescriptions, the seizures stopped, and life settled into its normal rhythms: banana pancakes in the mornings; box lunches for trekkers; and at night, the Happiest Words in All the World.

Then Martiya came to visit Khun Vinai.

It was just as Gilles had said: there was something about her eyes. They were wild and unfocused, then distracted and staring. Yet Vinai also said that he had never seen her so beautiful. Her cheeks were pale with a hint of bright pink, and her lips were scarlet like the flame tree.

Sang-Duan looked at her husband.

"I cannot turn her away," Khun Vinai whispered to his wife in the kitchen.

That evening, Sang-Duan served Martiya, and the family ate together from common dishes.

Khun Vinai had never seen Martiya more charming. She told stories from her childhood which made the children howl with laughter, and her imitations of the villagers were so spot-on that Khun Vinai would have sworn that Farts-a-Lot or the shaman George Washington was right in front of him. Only Sang-Duan was not amused by Martiya, looking at her all night long with the same distrustful stare.

That night, Kiss-My-Lips suffered another seizure. In the past, her seizures, although terrifying to watch, had passed quickly, after only five minutes or so. But this seizure, it was clear, brought the young girl to the edge of death before she came to. When finally the worst was over, and the girl was sleeping calmly, Sang-Duan turned to her husband.

"Vinai, you must," she said.

"How can I?" he asked.

"You must. I will not live with Rice. Do not bring the anger of Rice into the hut of our children. For I fear Rice, as I fear Lightning, and I fear Death."

Khun Vinai did not sleep the rest of the night. He watched the sun rise over the hills, then went to Martiya's hut. He found her awake, sitting cross-legged on the terrace, staring out over the fields.

Martiya saw the look on his face, and said, "And you too, Vinai?"

"I can't," he said.

Martiya gathered her bags and went back to Dan Loi village.

Khun Vinai stood up, and the Opium Man, seeing that his work for the evening was done, followed him. Khun Vinai did not linger at the door. He said, "Goodbye, my friend. We'll talk more tomorrow." Then he and the Opium Man were gone.

My bed was not particularly comfortable, but I think even on a down mattress with silk sheets I would have lain awake for a long time: insomnia is another of the effects of the drug. I found myself thinking about Martiya alone in that Dyalo village. How must she have occupied her days? How can an anthropologist do fieldwork if she can no longer talk with the people she intends to study? What
else
was there for Martiya to do in that village?

Her life, I imagined, had been reduced to her
gin-kai
. She was alone in the mornings, then she carried water back to her solitary hut. She ate alone. She read all day. Then, on those nights when she wasn't with Hupasha, she must have lowered the wick on her hurricane lamp and climbed into bed not having spoken to a soul since the morning. I thought about Martiya's letter to Tim Blair. She had met a man, she wrote, and was madly in love. Having no one with whom she might share her thoughts, she had decided to write to Tim himself. What she didn't tell Tim Blair was that her lover was
all
she had.

I finally fell asleep that night, and I dreamed of Martiya. Opium produces dreams of unusual vividness, and this dream was as real as any event of the daytime. I was in the kitchen of my house in Chiang Mai, making coffee, and Martiya was there also. I have never seen a photograph of the woman, but I knew that it was Martiya. I was excited to talk to her. "You must be Martiya van der Leun," I babbled. "I'm so happy to finally meet you. I've been looking for you everywhere, you have no idea how hard it's been to find you. Would you like a cup of coffee?" Martiya didn't say anything, and I stared at her. Her face was pale, and she was trembling. She was terrified. "It's okay," I said. "Have some coffee and you'll be fine." Then she began to whimper, but I couldn't make out what she was saying. "Just speak up a little," I said. "Please." But she wouldn't speak louder, and when I woke up, the only word that I was sure that I had understood was "Rice."

THE NEXT DAY,
Khun Vinai went back to Chiang Rai, still looking for roofing tiles. I spent the rest of the day in the hammock. I had nothing to do but wait—and watch the hills. By dusk the mountains were gray and the far mountains were indigo, and the farthest mountains just silhouettes. Sunset was a reddish-yellow spectacle, dramatic and fast. Then the night was moonless and almost perfectly dark. I heard bullfrogs in the paddies, and vast choruses of crickets, and the kiss-me birds croaked their mechanical
whoo-tuk-tuk, whoo-tuk-tuk
. It was dinnertime, but I wasn't hungry. Khun Vinai's truck drove up, and later, from the lodge, I heard voices, and a television. Then I saw a yellow light swinging back and forth. The light wandered from the porch of the lodge toward the car shed, then arced back up the side of the hill. Then the light came closer and I realized it was Khun Vinai, carrying a flashlight. When he got to the hammock, he sat down on a small chair just behind my head. He turned off the flashlight, and we sat for a long time in darkness.

After her arrest but before trial, Khun Vinai said, Martiya's visitors were limited exclusively to her lawyer, her family, and representatives of the American consulate. The pretrial detention lasted for almost two years. Then, after her conviction, Martiya, like all new prisoners, was forbidden guests for another year. So it was almost three years before Khun Vinai was allowed to see her.

Josh O'Connor would visit Martiya a decade later at the new prison just past the ring road. But the old prison, where Khun Vinai saw Martiya, was an altogether tougher place: Khun Vinai had never been in prison himself, but he knew women who had, and they talked about crowded cells, sometimes filled with upwards of fifty or sixty women, cells so small that the inmates were forced to sleep on the floor in shifts. The toilet was just an open trough along the far wall. The women cooked for themselves over a kerosene stove in the corner, and daily life was a constant battle against fleas, cockroaches, lice, and rats.

On the first day that he was allowed to see her, Khun Vinai went down to Chiang Mai. The prisoners entered the visiting room on their knees. It took Vinai a second to recognize Martiya, although she was the only
farang
: the prison authorities required that the women shave their heads for the first five years of their incarceration. She was "thin as a snake," Khun Vinai said, and her face was lined. She had very large ears. She recognized Khun Vinai, however, and her face flushed. She crawled in his direction, and as she crawled, she began to cry. Then she arrived at the table and lifted herself up on the stool, carefully keeping her head below his.

"Vinai," she said, after a moment. "Oh, Vinai."

Khun Vinai forced himself to smile. He had no idea at all what to say.

"Vinai, it's not your fault."

"No," he agreed.

"It's just that when they said there was a Dyalo man, I thought you were … I thought he had come."

Vinai didn't understand. "Who?" he said.

"Hupasha."

Vinai let her cry. He wasn't offended. The Dyalo have no taboo on staring, and he examined her strange, bony skull; her pale, thin face; her ruined hands. Only her eyes were familiar: when Martiya eventually wiped aside the last of her tears, her light blue eyes met Vinai's. No Dyalo woman in a Thai prison would have met Khun Vinai's gaze so fully.

Sang-Duan had prepared a box of food for Martiya, and Vinai was glad for the distraction. "This is for you," he said.

Martiya accepted the gift gravely. She examined the fresh mangoes, the bananas, the bag of mountain rice, and the six-pack of Coca-Cola. "These will be wonderful," she said. "Thank you."

Martiya was no longer crying. She even smiled, and there was something protective about her smile, as if Khun Vinai had just come out of the prison cell on
his
knees. The two sat without talking, neither knowing just where to begin.

"How are your kids?" Martiya finally asked.

Khun Vinai seized on the topic gratefully. "They're fine," he said. "My little son, he loves elephants too much. The other day …"—and as Khun Vinai talked, Martiya grew increasingly agitated. She began to shift her weight from side to side and to nod her shaven head. The corners of her eyes narrowed. Then she interrupted him. She leaned forward and laid her pale hands on his forearm.

"Vinai, tell me—is Rice happy in Dan Loi village?" she said.

"Rice is happy in Dan Loi village," he said.

"And the people still make
dyal
?"

"Yes," he said. "They still make
dyal
."

She closed her eyes and exhaled. Her shoulders slumped. "Good," she said. She relaxed. She sat without moving. She didn't look at Vinai. They sat in silence for a few minutes. More than once, Khun Vinai started to speak—and then checked himself. Martiya didn't move.

Twice in my life I have seen a ghost.

The first time was in South India, in the holy city of Gokarna. Every morning I took my
chai
at a stall near the temple, where I exchanged smiles with the same gentleman, a gray-haired man in a loincloth. Once I mentioned this elderly figure to the
chai-wallah
. He asked me to describe him, and when I was done he roared with laughter.
That
man had been dead some twenty years. I thought that perhaps the
chai-wallah
was only teasing me, but others in the village confirmed what he had said.

The second time I have been in the presence of a ghost was that night on Khun Vinai's hammock.

Khun Vinai told me that he ended up spending several hours with Martiya in the visiting room of Chiang Mai Central Prison. The guards allowed them all the time they wanted, and Martiya spoke at length.

The night was so dark that I couldn't see Khun Vinai's face. But there were two voices beside me, and one of them was the voice of a dead woman.

"I didn't have a choice," she finally said. "Vinai, if I hadn't done something, they would have taken the
dyal
away. They wanted to take Hupasha away. What else could I have done?"

She looked at her hands.

"Hupasha came to me one night. I was in my hut, but I wasn't expecting him. I hadn't seen him in a week or two. He'd go away, and I'd miss him so much. That's when I knew he had my souls, because I missed him so badly. So when he came that night, I was very happy.

"But Hupasha wasn't himself, I knew right away. We always had a little game. He'd shout, ‘Tie up your dog!' when he came to my hut, and that made us laugh, because I didn't have a dog. But that night he came and he didn't say anything, he just came up to my hut and asked if he could come in. I asked him why he was talking to me like a stranger, and he didn't say anything. So I asked him if he was going to talk to me or if he was just going to sit there like a rock all night long. And he told me that he had decided to become an Adam-person.

" ‘You too?' I said. And I started to laugh, because, well, I had thought it was a big deal what he was going to tell me. I thought his daughter had died, but
this
just didn't seem to me a terribly big deal. People change, even Dyalo men, although I wish they wouldn't. But he was very interested always in what the Adam-people said, and he always liked to hear David Walker and the others preaching, talked to them about their ideas. Good for him, I always said. I mean, it would certainly be wrong if I was interested in the foreigners and he wasn't. He wants to read the Bible, that's fine. I never wanted to control him or tell him what to do. He was far too smart for that, far too
strong
for that. So I just said, ‘Congratulations. Don't scare me like that next time.'

"But I thought about things for a moment, and I asked him how was he going to keep Rice happy if he didn't make
dyal
. He said that he wouldn't keep Rice happy. And I said, ‘You aren't? What are you going to eat?' Because that's such a basic Dyalo idea, that you need to keep Rice happy. And he said that now he would ask Ye-su-tsi to make the fields grow. ‘What does Ye-su-tsi know about Rice?' I said. But he didn't say anything.

"I asked him why he was doing all this, and he said he no longer wanted to be a slave to Rice. That he wanted to be a free man.

"Then he said he wouldn't see me anymore in the fields because it would make Ye-su-tsi angry if he made
dyal
. He said that Adam-people don't make
dyal
. So I said, ‘Okay, we won't make
dyal
,' but he said that it didn't matter, that I was still his
gin-kai
. That they only give honor to Ye-su-tsi, and sing Ye-su-tsi songs.

"I asked him who taught him this, and he said it was David Walker.

"So he went home and I went back to work, and I waited for him to come back to my hut again, because I figured this all would blow over, and one week went by, and then another. I started to feel a little worried, and then another week went by. I decided I would go up to Wild Pig and see him, and talk to him again.

"I found him in his rice fields. What beautiful fields we had made! He was so handsome working. It was a glorious day, with a clear, hot sun. He saw me and he stopped working, and I knew before he even said a word that he wanted me. And I wanted him too. He was a beautiful man, simply beautiful. Things would be fine. But he said, ‘Martiya, why are you in my rice fields?' I'll never forget his voice, it was so cold.

"He said that, and I got angry.

"I said, ‘I gave up my life to learn your language, so that I can talk to you. And then you came along, and I give up my man to be with you also, one good man, who had all my souls, who would have taken me away from here. This village was all I had, and I gave up this village for you, too, this village which I wanted. They came to me and said:
It is either us or Rice
. And I said, ‘Give me my man.' And now you say that the rice fields we made together are
yours
?'

"He didn't have anything to say to that, there was nothing he could say. He walked away. I walked home through the fields. I had planted the rice, and now it was high.

"That night I was all alone in my hut, and I began to shiver. My teeth were chattering. My whole body was trembling, and the next thing I knew, Lai-Ma was there. She was frightened of Rice, but she came.

"She was stroking my head. She said that I was taken by the spirits in the night. And I said, ‘I was?' And she said, ‘The spirits caught you and you fell down, and you screamed.'

"I guess that's when I first knew how angry Rice was. How angry Rice could be."

"I wish I could say that I was very brave, but I wasn't. If Lai-Ma hadn't been there, I don't know how I would have eaten, how I would have got water, how I would have bathed myself. I spent most of those days sleeping. That little hut was so small. And I couldn't breathe. My chest ached. The only person I wanted to see was Lai-Ma. She was so kind. When I was with her, I calmed down, just a little. But she had things to do. She had her fields.

"And so I would sit there at that desk. I had these conversations with myself. I'd say, ‘Let's go. Let's go now. Don't wait.' And then this voice would be in my head, it was my voice, but dark, it would say, ‘Martiya, where would you go? How could you leave?'

"I didn't think I could live without Hupasha, without the rice fields. I thought about the
dyal
all the time. What a mistake he made, to give up Rice.

"The first time we made
dyal
, Hupasha came to my house. I didn't expect him. I hadn't seen him in a year, but I had thought about him. He took my breath away, he was so handsome. He shouted, ‘Tie up your dog!' and then he didn't say one more word. Took me to his rice field. It was a dark night, he led me on the path, up over Big Hill, in the direction of Wild Pig village. I couldn't see a thing, just held on to his hand, we walked for hours. Then the moon rose, just as we got to his rice fields. Just an empty field. I never felt so happy in my life. So this was the
dyal
, I thought. This was it.

"We planted rice by moonlight. I followed him. He walked in front of me. Hupasha would step forward and rear back and pound the dibble stick into the earth, drive the thing a foot or two feet deep into the earth, and I would breathe in and step forward. We had a rhythm, the two of us, and my part was so delicate and simple, just to take the seed and let it drop; then we'd step forward.

"Then he reached for me. And I saw Rice. Either you know Rice or you don't. Rice is like steam rising from the fields, like silver flames. I didn't know where I ended, where he began. The field was on fire with Rice. His touch, his smell—where does such a good thing come from? I had never before understood what the Dyalo meant when they said, ‘Only a woman can make rice.' Later they would tell me, ‘Stop making
dyal
. Walk away from
dyal
.' I couldn't.

"I made
dyal
, and I got home to the village and all I thought about was
dyal
. And it's not true that you can only make
dyal
once a year, at planting time. Rice is always there. I used to ask, ‘What happens if you see your
gin-kai
when it's not the
dyal
?' ‘But, Martiya, that is not our custom.' ‘But if a woman sees her
gin-kai
, what would happen?' ‘Martiya, she would be a slave to Rice.' I never thought to ask why that would be a bad thing.