Fieldwork: A Novel Read online

  Seeing Josh, and realizing quickly that he was the anonymous stranger who had summoned her from her cell, Martiya came over and sat down, not waiting for an invitation. Had he doubted the woman's identity, her eyes would have resolved all doubts: How many women in a prison in northern Thailand could have had such striking blue eyes? She glowered at Josh, and Josh for once was at a loss for words under her intense stare.

  "Ms. van der Leun …" he finally said.

  The woman interrupted him straightaway. She spoke very slowly. "Christ, can't you people just leave me alone?"

  Josh had prepared for this interview carefully, but this was not a reaction he had anticipated. He said, "Ms. van der Leun, I think you might have made a mistake."

  Again, Martiya interrupted him. "I'm not the one who might have made the mistake here, buddy. You people are driving me nuts." She looked at Josh with open contempt. She took in his large body, his damp shirt, his uncombed hair. "My God, you are disgusting," she said.

  Josh looked at me. "I had figured she might have gone a little, you know, cuckoo, from her time in prison, or maybe she'd beg and plead with me to take her home. I'd already decided how to handle that. I was going to be gentle but firm, and give her the name of a friend of mine who's a lawyer. But the way this woman was staring at me, I was pretty glad there was a table between us."

  To Martiya, he said, "I'm sorry, but just who do you think I am?"

  "They sent you, didn't they?"

  "They?"

  "You're not a missionary?"

  Josh was not without a certain sense of irony, and suddenly the tension of the visit, the heat of the day, and now this furious but intensely proud little woman all seemed to him absurd. He began to laugh. He couldn't help himself, he told me.

  "Oh no," Josh said. "You got it all wrong, sister. I'm here to give you money."

  He said this with such enthusiasm that Martiya smiled back, despite herself. She ran a hand through her gray hair. The fight left her. In a mildly embarrassed voice, she explained to Josh the source of her confusion. One of the evangelical societies working in the north of Thailand had conceived the project of converting the prisoners to Christianity. Who needed the Lord's blessing more? Twice a year, every year for the last ten years, she had been summoned to the visiting room, only to find the same bearded, middle-aged man—"the same bozo," she said— informing her that the Lord had forgiven her for her crimes and sins, if only she would accept Him. She had asked the missionaries to leave her alone, she said, but they were relentless. "I thought you were one of them."

  Josh shook his head. "No," he said.

  He had decided beforehand to be direct. He told her that her aunt, Elena van der Leun, had hired him, and that her uncle had died. Martiya had inherited some money, Josh said, and he was there to arrange the details of the bequest.

  Martiya was silent for a minute. She looked around the room. "I haven't seen Uncle Otto since I was nine years old," she said. "He knew how to ride a horse. He was a wonderful horseman. He promised he'd buy me a horse when I was twelve. I guess he just did."

  Martiya sat quietly for a long while. She picked idly at the string tied around her right wrist. Then she spoke. The vast bulk of the money— not much by occidental standards, a small fortune in a Thai prison—was to be given to a charity which aided the hill tribes, the rest deposited in her prison bank account. Then, with all the authority of a corporate executive late for a tee time, rather than a prisoner condemned to life, Martiya rose from her seat and extended her hand. The appointment was over.

  Josh had one last thought. "Would you like me to call your lawyer?" he asked. "Money can change a lot of things here. Maybe he can …"

  Martiya smiled at Josh. "I can't leave now. I'm only beginning to understand how it really works around here. And where would I go?"

  She thanked Josh for his time and walked back through the metal door into the dark prison hallway.

  "It's a true story," Josh said. "It happened just like that."

  By now, the sidewalk where we were eating was full. All of the tables had been taken, families eating together. A tuk-tuk painted with a picture of an elephant passed on the street, then another with a picture of a blue-skinned Hindu god. A pineapple vendor strolled by absentmindedly, leaving behind him a dark trail of melting ice, the bell on his little cart ringing out a cheerful tune. A few old ladies sat on the stoop, chewing betel and spitting black on the sidewalk, and inside one of the Chinese shop-houses, I could see a half dozen young men in tank tops working late, stripping down motorcycle engines.

  The prime minister's nephew had been right: the meal was spectacular. Josh had ordered thin delicate noodles for us, which came to the table draped in a sweet peanut sauce, and a steaming yellow crab curry with saffron. We had clams stir-fried with the tiny roasted chilies the Thais call "rat-shit peppers." We ate until we thought we would burst. Then an enormous whole fish arrived at the table, bathed in a caramelized orange sauce. I groaned, but when Josh flaked the fish off the bone with a surprisingly dexterous motion of his plump wrist and feathered it onto my plate, I ate the fish too. "Here, you've got to have the cheek, it's the best part," Josh said.

  I wanted to know why Josh had told me this story, but he was incapable of conversing and eating at the same time. Only when he had scraped the last grain of rice off of his plate, sighed contentedly, and re-filled his glass did his attention return to the interrupted narrative.

  His work at the prison completed, Josh returned to Bangkok by the night train. He wrote the family in Holland, and made the appropriate arrangements for the dispersal of the inheritance according to Martiya's wishes. He had done his job.

  "But I couldn't stop thinking about her," Josh said. "So I did some looking around. I went to the library and looked through back issues of the Bangkok Times. I couldn't find anything. I thought about her all the time."

  Josh told me that Martiya remained on his mind for almost a month after his visit to Chiang Mai. Then slowly, his visit to Chiang Mai Central Prison was assimilated into his stock of drinking stories. He regularly won a healthy round of laughter as he recounted her saying, "My God, you are disgusting." I had laughed at that point in his recital also. It was hard to imagine that anyone could confuse Josh with a missionary. That he knew so little of this wry old murderess only added to the drama of the tale.

  Then Martiya came back into his life.

  Almost a year after his visit to the Chiang Mai prison, Josh received another call from Wim at the Dutch embassy. Now the story was approaching the present time: this was only several weeks before our dinner. A package had arrived for him at the embassy; the return address, in neat Thai lettering, M. van der Leun, c/o Chiang Mai Central Prison, etc. Josh asked Wim to send it over. He supposed it was something to do with the inheritance. But when the envelope arrived, it was larger than Josh had expected. He opened the package cautiously and found two small manuscripts, each about fifty handwritten pages, densely covered on both sides of the page. The manuscripts had been bound with white twine. The first one was entitled "Notes Toward a Political Anthropology of Prison Life in Northern Thailand"; the second, "The Economic Organization of a Thai Women's Prison."

  There was also a cover letter. Josh fished around in his bag, brought out an envelope, extracted a folded piece of paper, and handed it to me. I unfolded it.

  Chiang Mai Central Prison

  Chiang Mai

  Dear Mr. O'Connor:

  I have never properly thanked you for your visit, or apologized for my anger. Please accept my gratitude now, and my apologies.

  Paper! Pens! Stamps! What is a would-be scholar's life without them? Your assistance has made it possible for me to complete my research. I have been penniless for such a long time, and I can not tell you the frustration I suffered not being able to complete the attached manuscripts, for lack of these basic necessities. Now I must call on you one more time. I would like to see both of the attached manuscripts published. They must, of course, be
properly typed, which is impossible for me in my present circumstances, as you can imagine. The "Notes," etc., are intended for the Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science; the paper entitled "Economic Organization," etc., I'd like to see sent to Ethnology. It will be necessary to explain the conditions under which the papers have been written as they both lack a scholarly apparatus. If the papers are accepted, please keep whatever modest fees may result as a token of my appreciation.

  I thank you, in advance, for your time: I have no one else at all to whom I might entrust these documents. It is a melancholy thought.

  Yours most sincerely,

  Martiya van der Leun

  I read the letter, and then I read it again. Bangkok, the noisy street, the market stench, the passing cars—all these faded away for a moment. I looked at the signature on the letter. It was a messy, almost violent scrawl, the only unclear words on the page. Otherwise her handwriting was a series of fluid, graceful loops.

  "That's really something," I said.

  "Isn't it?" Josh agreed.

  "What were the manuscripts like?"

  "That's the thing. They were terrific. I opened up the envelope and I spent the whole evening reading them. When I was in college, there was this girl, she was an anthropology major, you know? and anyhow, I ended up taking a couple of anthropology classes—just Anthro 101, and then a seminar on the Hindus of the Himalayas—but the point is, even I could see right away that this woman—Martiya, not the girl in college— Martiya was a serious anthropologist. I mean, I don't know if she was a professional, but I thought what she wrote was excellent."

  "So tell me already, who is this woman?" I asked. I was still waiting for the punch line to the story.

  "That's the thing," Josh said. "That's just it. The next morning, I decided to find out more. I was just curious, I'd been curious all year. I called up the prison, and I figured either I would talk to one of the prison administrators or I'd go back up to Chiang Mai and see her again. But when I got the warden on the phone, he hemmed and hawed for a minute and then he told me that Martiya was dead."

  "She was dead?" I still had the letter in my hand, and I looked down at it. The ink was light blue and sharp against the page.

  "Yeah, that's the thing. The warden told me that she was dead. She killed herself. She ate a ball of opium and killed herself."

  "Wow," I said.

  Josh nodded. His face was creased in a gesture of unexpected dignity.

  Josh looked at me over his glass of whiskey. He thought that there was a good story here, he said, something for somebody who lived in the North. He didn't have the time to pursue it himself, but he knew that I did. He was offering me the story as a gift. "Maybe you can write it up for the Times."

  "Maybe you're right." I had one more question for Josh. "What did you do with the manuscripts?"

  "I did just what she asked. I sent them off a week ago."

  Josh had nothing more to tell me about Martiya van der Leun, and I had no more questions. He didn't say it, but I think that he had been troubled by the news of Martiya's death. Martiya's letter remained on the table between us, and from time to time I glanced at it.

  A little later, the bill arrived at our table. Josh offered to pay, but looked very relieved when I insisted.

  TWO

  THE PENDULUM-EDGE OF THE SOUL

  WHEN JOSH FIRST TOLD ME about Martiya van der Leun, Rachel and I had been living in Thailand for almost exactly a year. The two of us came to Thailand not long after the Internet start-up in San Francisco where I had been working went out of business; Rachel had just graduated from college. We were bored and heading fast toward broke, when Rachel found an article on the Internet about how to find a job teaching in international schools around the world. The chief requirements for such posts apparently were a native command of English and a healthy pulse. "I've got that," Rachel said, and like a migrating swallow, her résumé flew to the farthest corners of the globe: to an oddly luxurious all-boys boarding school in Uganda, which asked that all the teachers make a personal commitment to Christ ("I'm willing," Rachel said. "Did you see the pool?"); to a delightful all-girls school in Switzerland; to Tajikistan, where, the school's Web site said, the security situation had stabilized dramatically in recent months; and to Thailand. A week later, the headmaster of the Water Lily International School in Chiang Mai called at three in the morning to offer Rachel a position as a first-grade teacher; she accepted immediately and announced that we were moving to Asia. I bought a copy of Thai Made Simple and began to study. Three months later we were in Chiang Mai, Thailand's second city, way up in the wild North.

  We arrived in Chiang Mai strongly under the influence of the English travel writer Norman Lewis, whose elegant memoirs we had read before leaving California. Chiang Mai, Lewis wrote, was the "most delectable of Oriental towns," which "remained beneath a thin veneer of development Thailand's most pleasing city."

  The roofs of old Chiengmai, curling at the eaves, lay upon the city like autumn leaves, and from these arose the spires of many temples, spreading the faintest of haloes into the misted sky.

  When I read this to Rachel, she said, "Wow," and then said, "Go on." I did:

  There could have been no more poetic scene than the line-up soon after dawn of the archers with their crossbows, members of a clan enjoying the privilege of shooting at the stationary outlines of fish in the intensely green waters. All these men in their ancient garb presented roughly identical features to the rising sun as they muttered a prayer at the instant of releasing an arrow.

  No more poetic scene, my bony pink ass: all that lay upon the city when we arrived was a thick layer of smog; the "intensely green waters" of the river Ping were the color of chocolate milk; and when I asked after the archer caste, I was informed that such a social class did not exist, and even if it did, the polluted waterway which bisected the city nowadays supported no life whatsoever. Old Chiang Mai in the years since Lewis's visit had been encased in concentric rings of concrete, Chinese-style shop-houses whose roofs did not curl at the eaves. In the antique town center, a large number of automotive dealerships showcased a splendid variety of Japanese motorcycles, pickup trucks, and tires.

  We were looking for a gabled teak house of the sort that Lewis so admired, but our real estate agent, a nervous little woman recommended by one of Rachel's colleagues at the school, refused to show us such houses. I suppose it was as if a wealthy but naïve Japanese tourist had arrived in New York and tried to rent an apartment in one of the exotic housing projects of the South Bronx. Such accommodations, she insisted, would be entirely unsuitable. A teak house would not have air-conditioning, and we would sweat. There would be big, big bugs and things that crawled and crept. What we needed, our agent insisted, was a modern concrete house, and it was in a modern concrete house in a suburb of modern concrete houses that we were eventually installed. Only the many temples matched the grandeur of Lewis's description, and from certain vantage points when the smog receded under the force of the late-monsoon winds, we conceded grudgingly that if we squinted we could see in the sky fuzzy rings like cigarette smoke which might be called haloes. These rings, we later learned, were produced by the burning of garbage.

  Our disgruntlement with Chiang Mai persisted intensely for a month or so, until we installed a badminton court on our crabgrass lawn. From a local sporting goods dealer we bought a net, a pair of rackets, and a shuttlecock. To a warped and decaying mango tree we tied one end of the net, and the other end of the net we proposed to affix to a bamboo stake. But we were unable to cut the bamboo properly and were on the verging of retiring back to the house in failure when a very short, round-faced woman with enormous ears wearing a sarong and carrying a machete as long as her arm came running up to us. She was screeching violently. I wondered for a second if we were not perhaps interfering with a sacred bamboo grove. The creature was precisely the size and shape and almost the color of Yoda, an impression intensified by her village dialect of Thai, which see
med curiously to invert what Thai Made Simple had said was standard Thai word order. "Baiyom am I!" she howled. "Cut you I will!" In lunatic miscomprehension, Rachel and I reared back. But our fears were misplaced, as with a flashing whack of her rusting machete the Baiyom thing hacked into shape just the bamboo pole we needed. We had made our first friend.

  In the Thai culture, we learned, hacking down a bamboo pole together is tantamount to a dinner invitation, as that evening to our surprise Baiyom arrived at the door of our house leading a delegation of neighbors. They came not from the other large concrete houses but from the simple one-room shacks beside the main road. On a low tray of woven bamboo Baiyom carried a bowl of cold cucumber soup, a spongy chili omelette, and a low mound of rice. The troupe settled themselves on the floor of the empty living room of our new home and admired the elegance of the concrete walls and plastic parquet flooring. One wall of the living room had been covered by the house's owner with floor-to-ceiling wallpaper depicting some alpine setting—cows, pines, snowy peaks. The scene elicited a low buzz of excited wonder from our new neighbors. They also inspected our bedroom and our bathroom, the guest bedroom and the kitchen, opened up all the closets, and tested the cooling properties of the refrigerator by touching the metal grilles. The group stayed until the early hours of the morning, singing folk songs, applauding loudly when we managed to lisp the simple three-word chorus, and asking repeatedly how much we paid in rent.

  Everything the guidebooks had told us of Thai manners and gentility, Baiyom that evening proved wrong: the guidebooks had told us that one never demonstrates the soles of the feet in Thailand, but Baiyom stretched herself out full length on our parquet floor, her broad-bottomed calloused feet on open display. The fey and delicate Thai nature? Baiyom at the end of the meal let out a series of long belches, her little lips distended. "A good home this is," Baiyom declared. "Happy you are. Good fun we are making." The next evening, the group came again, and then the next; the heavy fog of our discontent lifted. To be persistently grumpy around these people just seemed churlish.