Fieldwork E-Book

Mischa Berlinski

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction Set in Thailand, a brilliantly original and page-turning first novel of anthropologists, missionaries, demon possession, sexual taboos, murder, and one obsessed young American reporter. When his girlfriend takes a job in Thailand, Mischa goes along for the ride, planning only to enjoy himself as much as possible. But when he hears about the suicide of a young woman, Martiya van der Leun, in the Thai prison where she was serving a life sentence for murder, what begins as mild curiosity becomes an obsession. It is clear that Martiya was guilty, but what was it that led her to kill? 'A killer novel... A great story... You can't stop reading.' Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly

Leseprobe

FIELDWORK

Mischa Berlinski was born in New York in 1973. He studied Classics at the University of California at Berkeley and at Columbia University. He has worked as a journalist in Thailand.

FIELDWORK

MISCHA BERLINSKI

Atlantic Books

LONDON

First published in the United States of America in 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 18 West 18th St., New York, NY 10011, USA.

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This eBook edition published in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Mischa Berlinski, 2007

The moral right of Mischa Berlinski to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

978 1 84887 308 7

Designed by Gretchen Achilles

Atlantic Books An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER

Contents

PART ONE A GOOD STORY

ONE “GOOD GOD, NO”

TWO THE PENDULUM-EDGE OF THE SOUL

THREE “FOR NIXON?”

FOUR “HELL YES, I REMEMBER MARTIYA VAN DER LEUN”

FIVE WHAT A MURDER MEANS

PART TWO THE STORY THE WALKERS TOLD OF THEMSELVES

ONE THE GATES OF GOLD

TWO EDEN VALLEY

THREE MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU

PART THREE THE NATIVE’S POINT OF VIEW

ONE PAK NAI

TWO DYALO VAN DER LEUN

THREE SUCH A YOUNG MAN

FOUR RAIN

PART FOUR POSSESSED

ONE THE CURIOSITY

TWO THE MINISTRY OF GHOSTS

THREE BAMBUSA VULGARIS

PART FIVE THE PENDULUM-EDGE OF THE SOUL

ONE THE HIKER HUT

TWO THE HAPPIEST WORDS IN ALL THE WORLD

THREE FAR OFF FROM THE GATES OF GOLD

EPILOGUE

A NOTE ON THE SOURCES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART ONE A GOOD STORY

ONE "GOOD GOD, NO"

WHEN HE WAS A YEAR out of Brown, my friend Josh O'Connor won a Thai beach vacation in a lottery in a bar. He spent two weeks on Ko Samui, decided that Thailand was home, and never left. That was at least ten years ago, and since then, Josh has done just about every sort of odd job a foreigner in Thailand can do: He taught English for a while, and was part owner of a nightclub in Phuket. He was a stringer for one of the wire agencies, and he took a few photos now and again for Agence France-Presse. Josh played the trumpet in the marching band in high school, and he parlayed the experience into a few years as the frontman for a Thai ska band called the King's Men. He founded a dating agency. He worked for a time for an environmental group attempting to stop construction of a large dam across the Mekong, and when the effort failed, he wrote publicity materials for a cement exporter. He hinted that many years ago, in a moment of real financial desperation, he smuggled a pound of hashish in his belly back to the States. I'm not sure that I entirely believe the story, but it was consistent with everything I know about Josh. Yet to see him, one would have no idea of his adventurous spirit: he was neither tall nor short but decidedly round; he was chubby-cheeked, curly-haired, and round-nosed, with bulging eyes and an oversized head. He had thick lips and a gap between his two front teeth which whistled very slightly when he spoke and made his speech nervous and breathy. His body was pear-shaped, with an enormous, protruding posterior: when he walked, he waddled like a duck; and when he laughed, as he did often, his whole body shook. "I'm attractive," Josh once told me, "to a lady who likes herself a big man." As it happened, there were a lot of little Thai ladies who did like themselves a big man, and Josh was never lonely. He was one of the happiest men I've ever met. It was Josh's conceit that he could order a meal better than any other farang in the kingdom.

I first met Josh when I was on vacation just out of college and back-packing through Malaysia and Indonesia, long before Rachel and I moved to Thailand. Josh and I were staying at the same hotel in Penang. He was on a visa run, down from Bangkok. Within about five minutes of spotting me in the hotel bar, Josh had sat himself down next to me and, in admirably direct fashion, informed me of his plans to start a pornographic production company in Vietnam. He had the funding, he said, contacts in the government, and an unbelievable star. These plans, like so many Josh O'Connor plans, eventually came to nothing, but his account was sufficiently compelling that whenever I'm in Bangkok, I always give him a call.

Now I was down from Chiang Mai, writing an article for a Singaporean arts magazine about an up-and-coming Thai sculptor, and Josh and I agreed to meet just after sundown in front of the Ratchawat market. I spent a long, sultry afternoon teasing a few good quotations out of my sculptor; then, just as the streetlights across Bangkok were flickering on, a motorcycle taxi deposited me in front of the 7-Eleven opposite the market, where Josh was already waiting for me, a goofy smile on his chubby face.

Plastic tables packed the narrow sidewalk. The sting of frying chili peppers made my eyes water, and from the market, now closing for the day, the sweet smells of jasmine, lilies, incense, and lemongrass mingled with the smells of rotting fish, molding durian, sweat, car exhaust, and garbage. On the corner, two competing noodle men served up bowls of guoy tieo in a ginger-and-coriander sauce; a little farther down the road, the curry lady had set up shop with huge vats of green curry and red, a jungle curry, a panang curry, and a spicy fish soup. A pretty girl cut up fresh mangoes and served them over sticky rice in a coconut sauce. There was somebody who grilled skewers of chicken over a small open flame and which he served with a peanut sauce.

But we were there for the fish family. All of the other vendors were ordinary, Josh said, nothing special, run-of-the-mill, the kind of stuff you'd find outside the market of any two-bit town from Isaan to the Malay border. But the fish lady and family, boy howdy, they were something else. "The prime minister's nephew told me about this place," Josh said, gesturing at the fish stall. Rows of silvery fish sprawled on a bed of ice, black-eyed, rainbow-gilled, and healthy-looking, as if they had just swum up minutes ago and were only resting; and below them massed ranks of clams, mussels, oysters, and ominous black anemones. "It's better than the Oriental Hotel."

We sat down, and Josh ordered for us. Twice our waiter walked away from the table, and twice Josh called him back to order still more food. Josh was at ease in his domain, leaning back in his chair like a pasha. It was August, the trailing end of the rainy season, when everything oozes. Josh pulled a piece of toilet paper from the roll on the table and gently blotted his face and hands, then opened his satchel and pulled out a half-empty bottle of Johnny Walker Black.

Josh was a natural raconteur, but he wasn't much for the old give-and-take of normal conversation: he asked after my day and listened to my reply with a distracted air, nodding occasionally, until he could be patient no longer. "That's just great," he interrupted. He took another slurp from his drink. "You know, I'm glad you're in town. I need someone who really knows the up-country."

This was Josh's subtle way of forming a segue from conversation to monologue: in all his years in Thailand, Josh had come to know the north far better than I did. There was hardly a corner of the kingdom that Josh didn't know, where he wouldn't be greeted by the abbot of the Buddhist temple—or by the madam of the best bordello—with a huge smile.

I waited to hear what Josh had to say. He paused for a second, as if gathering his strength. He leaned his heavy forearms on the plastic table. He pouted his heavy lips and flared his nostrils. He strained his round neck from side to side. Then he launched his story. There is no other way to describe it: a Josh O'Connor story is like a giant cruise ship leaving port, and when you make a dinner date with Josh O'Connor, you know in advance that you are going to set sail. It's part of the deal. It's a design feature, not a bug.

"Do you remember Wim DeKlerk?" Josh began.

He didn't wait for me to reply. In any case, I did remember Wim: he was a functionary at the Dutch embassy, and a drinking buddy of Josh's. The last time I was in Bangkok, I took Josh and Wim home from Royal City Avenue in a taxi, both of them singing Steely Dan songs at the top of their lungs. They were celebrating a stock tip that Josh had passed on to Wim from the prime minister's nephew. Apparently, Wim had made a killing.

"Well, about a year ago, I got a call from Wim. Some lady in Holland had called him, asking if he knew anybody who would go and visit her niece up at Chiang Mai Central Prison. This woman—the niece, not the lady in Holland, the niece is named Martiya, her aunt is Elena, both of them are van der Leun, are you following all this?—her uncle had just died, and the niece, Martiya, has inherited some money. Wim tells me the aunt wants somebody to go up there and take care of the details, you know, look this Martiya in the eye, explain what happened, make sure she understands everything. The aunt is about a zillion years old, doesn't want to travel, the niece won't reply to her letters, so she wants somebody to take care of this in person. Wim asks if I want to do it."

The story didn't surprise me: I remembered Wim telling me about his job at the embassy. Every day, he had told me, a worried parent called him from Amsterdam looking for a detective to help track down a child lost in the island rave culture; or a textile importer from Utrecht would call, asking him to recommend a crackerjack accountant to go over a potential business partner's books. Offering advice to Dutch people on how to get things done in Thailand was his specialty. Once, he told me, he had even helped a circus in Maastricht get an export permit for an elephant.

"Of course I said yes," Josh said.

That's why I always call Josh when I'm in Bangkok. Things like this really happen to him.

"So I give this woman in Holland a buzz before I go up to Chiang Mai," Josh continued. "She doesn't know anything. Last time she saw her niece, the niece was a little girl. Hadn't spoken to her in years. She hadn't gotten a letter from her in over ten years, not since she went to prison. In any case, she was from a distant branch of the van der Leun family. The niece grew up in California, had been there since she was little and was now an American. Before she went to jail, she lived in a village out near the Burmese border. You know that area? Southeast of Mae Hong Son?"

"Not really," I said.

"Nobody lives out there but the tigers. What was she doing out there? The aunt in Holland, she doesn't know. I figure she's one of those kids, got caught up in drug smuggling. ‘How long was she up there?' I ask. Turns out the niece's been in Thailand since forever. Maybe since the seventies. And she's no kid, the woman's over fifty years old. Strange, I think. ‘When's your niece getting out of prison?' I ask. Long pause on the phone. ‘Fifty years,' the aunt says. ‘So what's your niece doing in prison?' Long pause on the phone. Like she doesn't want to tell me. ‘She is a murderer,' the woman finally says, in a thick Dutch accent. What do you say to that? I said, ‘Who'd she kill?' Long pause on the phone. She doesn't know. That's all this Elena van der Leun can tell me. She wants me to go and tell her niece that her uncle is dead."

Josh paused as the waiter arrived at our table with a steaming cauldron of tam yam guum. The young waiter lit a paraffin candle under the tureen, and Josh served me and then himself. The soup was, as Josh had promised, delicious, delicately flavored with lime, cilantro, ginger, and lemongrass; the shrimp, which that very morning had been frolicking in the Gulf of Thailand, were huge and tender, with an explosive touch of sea salt. Josh ate the very hot soup with vigorous splashing movements of his spoon, and only when he had finished his first bowl and was reaching to refill it did he pick up the story again.

Several weeks after his talk with Elena van der Leun, Josh found himself in the waiting room of Chiang Mai Central Prison. Josh told me that he had been in Chiang Mai for three or four days, enjoying the luxury of his expense account, before he finally steeled himself to the task at hand: Josh was a generous man, but he did not like to be presented too directly with the misery of others, a squeamishness which made him regret having accepted Wim's offer. He had dreaded the visit, and day after day had done no more than note the location of the prison on the map, then distract himself from his unpleasant chore with a stiff drink, then another, after which the days dissolved into a blur. The morning of his prison visit, realizing that he could put off his errand no longer, he had awakened early and dressed himself neatly. He wore linen slacks and a white shirt, which when he left the hotel was crisply pressed but by the time he arrived at the prison was damp with sweat. A low sky like wet cement hid the hills which ring Chiang Mai.

"Oh man, I did not want to be there," Josh said. "I got out of that tuk-tuk, told the driver to wait for me, and it was like they were going to lock me up inside, that's what I felt like. Like I was never going to get out of there. Bang! The first gate closes behind me. Bang! The second gate closes behind me. Bang! That's the third gate."

Josh thumped hard on the table with every bang, and the other diners turned their heads.

"You ever been in a Thai jail?" Josh asked.

"No."

"The one here in Bangkok, it's a real shithole," Josh said knowingly. "Not a nice place. But this one in Chiang Mai, it wasn't bad. It wasn't what I expected."

Indeed, he said, the room in which the guards installed Josh could have been the waiting room for any provincial government ministry. Only the bars on the windows and the guard behind the heavy wooden desk betrayed the purpose of the place; that and a pervasive smell of urine and vomit. A large portrait of the king in full military regalia hung next to a clock whose loud ticks echoed through the room with impossible slowness. There were a half-dozen round metal tables, and at each table four plastic stools. Josh settled his tremendous bulk onto a stool much too small for a man of his size.

"I was the only farang in the room," Josh said. "There were just a couple of other people. A few hill-tribers, I don't know, maybe they were Hmong, or Dyalo, I can never remember all the costumes. They had that scared look people down from the hills always have. I remember one of them asked me if I had a cigarette, so I gave him one. There was some guy with tattoos up and down his arms, Buddhist sutras—you know, the way the gangsters have. Scary-looking dude. And some women, Thai women, chatting with each other, but looking around like they didn't want to be there. I guess nobody wants to be there."

Josh sat in the waiting room, which if not as horrible as he had imagined was certainly not cheerful, and reflected on the woman he was to meet. How was he to inform this stranger that her uncle was dead? Was this her last link to the world of the living? Josh wondered: What had brought Martiya van der Leun to this pass? A quick Internet search had revealed nothing about Martiya, and again, Josh thought it strange that anyone could have disappeared so thoroughly; even Josh, hidden as he was in Bangkok, turned up on the Internet if you Googled him, associated with articles he had written, photos he had taken, and the results of a couple of races he had run with the Hash House Harriers in much leaner days.

In the dossier of papers which Elena van der Leun had sent Josh, there was a photograph of Martiya as a young woman. While he sat in the waiting room, Josh pulled the picture out of the dossier and looked it over. The photograph, the only one that Elena could provide, was almost a quarter century old. It showed a slender, small-breasted young woman holding a long knife and leaning over a birthday cake. She was of indeterminate ethnic origin: her cheekbones were high and Asian, but her long black hair was curly and fell over her shoulders and neck. She was not looking straight at the camera, but it was nevertheless possible to see that she had keen, mischievous eyes, light blue and enormously round. Her lips were full and red, and her skin china-pale. It was not a beautiful face, Josh said, but expressive, intelligent, and curious.

"Do you still have the photo?" I interrupted.

"I sent it back to the family," he said. He refilled my drink, and his own.

With thoughts of the woman he was to meet, Josh occupied a half hour until the prisoners were allowed to enter. Then the iron doors of the antechamber swung open, and one by one the women who had been waiting on the other side wandered into the room, where they paired themselves with their guests. In other Thai prisons, Josh knew, the prisoners would have been made to enter the room on their knees as a sign of humility, but not here. The first woman to walk into the room was no older than a girl, a delicate-featured girl who might have been pretty but for the bruises. Wearing light-blue cotton prison pajamas, she spotted the man with the tattoos and raised her hands to him in the traditional Thai bow and nodded slightly. Because he did not rise from his stool, as she approached his table she was forced to bend over to keep her head below his, as good manners demanded. Without a smile or a hint of tenderness, she sat beside him and the two began to talk. Then two women came out hand in hand. They regarded the waiting room with wary eyes. Josh heard a burst of speech in some alien language from the tribeswomen behind him, and the two prisoners replied in the same strange tongue. The visitors and the hosts embraced unabashedly and settled themselves on the plastic stools, sitting cross-legged. They spoke to one another in low, urgent voices.

"She was the last one to come into the room," Josh said. "I knew her from the photo—but she looked bad. I think she must have been in her middle fifties—she was my mom's age. But this was an old woman."

Many years in the northern Thai sun had destroyed that delicate skin which Josh had admired in the picture. The dark hair had turned gray, and the once-sensual lips were cracked and thin. Yet the woman who approached Josh still had the faraway air of a handsome woman. She was not dressed in prison pajamas, like the others, but in a hand-woven tunic in the tribal style. She had white string tied tightly around each of her wrists; this was her only ornamentation. Martiya carried herself straight-backed and head-high. Josh had not expected such a small woman.

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 PrisonChiang 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 seemed 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.

Rachel's school proved also, if not a disappointment, then a surprise: it was one of those odd institutions which sprout up so often in Thailand—places in every detail familiar from a Western analogue, but somehow unsettlingly wrong. About a third of the students were Thai, the sluggish scions of very wealthy families determined to give their children a Western education; these kids tended to arrive at around eleven, their homework carefully prepared by their Anglophone servants. Most of these kids had flunked out of Chiang Mai's other, better, international school. Another third were the children of employees of the American consulate, and the rest the offspring of elderly occidental retirees and their obscenely young Thai wives. Parents' Day at the school always had a strange vibe, as the blissed-out old-timers and the mustachioed DEA agents working the Golden Triangle exchanged soothing remarks on how well the kids were doing in the new environment this year, while the Thai parents congregated in the corners of the gymnasium and looked snooty.

But if the kids and their parents were a weird bunch, the faculty was a whole lot weirder, a haphazard collection of perhaps eighteen expatriates, all of them in Chiang Mai for no apparent reason other than that they had just run out of space. There was an Australian gym teacher who insinuated slyly that his days down under were well and good done, mate; and the American from Vermont with a shaggy red beard who came to Thailand after it was discovered that his doctorate in sociology had been the product of plagiarism. He taught the kindergarten by means of a formal lecture, as if in memory of lost glory. He sat his class down, and explained briskly the history of the alphabet since the days of the Phoenicians. The kids sat in patient rows with big eyes, and understood nothing at all, until someone started to fidget and someone else started to cry. Mr. Robert from Missouri composed poetry in Thai, and was considering becoming a Buddhist monk; failing that, he said, he would devote himself in his old age to the Four Idyllic Occupations—reading, farming, fishing, and the gathering of firewood. There was an English teacher from Massachusetts who, if given half an opportunity, would discuss in extraordinary detail the inheritance he was expecting. He had already calculated the estate tax. He loathed the heat in Thailand and heavily spiced foods. I asked him once why he stayed. "I would go home, if only Mother would buy me a ticket," he said, with an air of Oriental fortitude. The Water Lily School was the kind of place where the stories all started "I was just coming for a year, to do something different, and I'm still here!" There is something about the life as a foreigner in Thailand that draws those who find themselves unwilling or unable to think about their 401(k)s; and in the leisure, freedom, and isolation that the Far East provides, these types swing inexorably toward the pendulum-edges of their souls.

But who am I to criticize? I was supporting myself, a little like Josh but with perhaps a touch less brio, by all manner of odd jobs: a Thai mogul paid me—don't even ask how this came about—to write summaries of American business books. This was the year that I learned how to motivate my employees and keep my supply chains supple and fluid, like jungle creepers. From time to time, I wrote features about colorful Chiang Mai characters for an English-language Bangkok newspaper, which, thinking that its audiences might prefer an authentic voice of Asia, published me under the nom de plume Somchai Wannapongsi; and Executive, a men's lifestyle magazine, hired me as their critic: I was the car critic, although I did not even have a driver's license; I was the music critic, although I cannot carry a tune; and I was the men's bespoke suit critic, although I am a—but perhaps enough said.

Our life was easy, calm, and cheap; we stayed the year in Chiang Mai, and I convinced Rachel to stay another. A new class of first-graders sat in the very small plastic desks and learned all about telling time. I wrote about the substantial advantages of double breasting and single piping. We got by.

Then Josh told me about Martiya van der Leun and my soul, too, began to swing.

Such is the power of a good story.

My hotel in Bangkok was quiet owing to the celebration of the Queen's Birthday. A mimeographed note had been slipped under my door: "On Thursday Aug 12, Her Majesty Queen Sirikit is highly adored by all Thai citizens who splendidly celebrate her Birthday each year." As a result, the notice continued, not all of the hotel's normal services would be available: room service was closed; the hotel astrologer, normally on hand between two and five in the afternoon, would not be offering readings; and the Tivoli Café would not lay out the usual breakfast buffet of waffles and congee. Although the notice did not mention it, the operator who handled outgoing long-distance calls was also unavailable. This was a cause of some frustration to me, as I had decided when I left Josh to call Elena van der Leun, Martiya's aunt in Holland, that very evening and follow up on his story. Executive ran a true-crime piece almost every month, and I thought that if I could figure out who Martiya had killed, I could pitch the story while still in Bangkok. But every time I picked up the rotary phone that connected me with the old-fashioned hotel switchboard, the line rang endlessly, and I imagined the telephone operator slipping off hand in hand with the astrologer to lay a wreath of orchids at one of Bangkok's numerous royal shrines. I spent the evening in the hotel bar, watching an Elvis look-alike competition held in the queen's honor.

The next morning, I got Martiya's aunt on the phone. It was the first of several conversations. Elena van der Leun spoke to me warily at first, her very excellent English cloaked in a sharp Dutch accent. She had a throaty old voice, cured by a lifetime of cigarettes, so that everything she said sounded a little like two pieces of sandpaper being rubbed together. She had plenty of time to linger by the phone and chat. There was only one ground rule for our conversations: Elena van der Leun told me that she did not know the details of her niece's crime, and she did not wish to speculate. This, of course, was what I most wanted to know. But, the crucial point aside, she was eager to talk.

So much in Martiya's dramatic life, Elena insisted, could be explained by the simple fact that her parents were not happy together. "A child needs the happy family," Elena declared. "It is the base." But Martiya's base was unstable: her mother and father met and married impetuously before the war, passed difficult wars apart, and after the war were unable to recapture the intensity of emotion that had brought them together. When Martiya was born, in 1947, in a small village in the central highlands of Celebes, a large island in the Indonesian archipelago now called Sulawesi, both parents looked to the child to reinvigorate a dying marriage. The rainy season in central Sulawesi can last as long as six months, and all winter long the family was trapped together in a cottage on the edge of a great ebony forest. The family paid local villagers to haul their water and cut their cassava and taro. They bought rice at the market. Areta van der Leun read novels. Piers van der Leun kept busy with his tape recordings and verb charts and lexicons. Areta van der Leun paced the corners of the house wearing an old lava-lava. Martiya's base teetered and then toppled.

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