Fieldwork: A Novel (25 page)

The euphoria was as real and unexpected a thing as the tears. She'd be walking back from the fields in the late afternoon, alone on a mountain path, she'd climb over a rock and see the big green valley spread out below, and suddenly her delicate stomach would rise up behind her lungs and constrict her breath with a happiness so intense she could feel it. Just like her unexpected bursts of sadness, these unexpected bursts of concentrated happiness were a new thing, unanticipated and strange.

Martiya had the good fortune to arrive in the village at a time when both men and women still wore the traditional dress, and in the early evenings, when Martiya saw the villagers wandering barefoot back from the fields in their hand-woven clothes—the women in their brightly colored shifts and flashing silver jewelry, long black skirts fringed in brilliant crimson and gold trailing to their ankles; the black turbaned men in simple gray tunics, their only adornment always across their shoulders on a rattan string, the jaw of some tiger or bear dead now many generations, a family heirloom—sometimes when she saw the villagers, Martiya thought that she had tumbled off of the Earth itself. This was a different world. Farts-a-Lot was an exception, with his thick beetle brow and tiny suspicious eyes, but the Dyalo were generally a handsome people, tall, with dignified faces and rich black hair. They moved gracefully and were athletic and strong. They had features that were familiar but which she couldn't quite place: not cute like the Thai or hard and nervous like the Lahu, but mysterious and aristocratic, with pale skin somewhere between the color of honey and the color of wheat bread, high cheekbones, long noses, and elegant arching lips. Now that Martiya had been in the village six months, she started to notice that the Dyalo never slouched, and they used their bodies in just slightly unfamiliar ways: the men walked barefoot to the rice fields with their backs very straight but their legs slightly bowed; the women threshed the paddy into the large bamboo baskets with an explosive motion of their hips and shoulders; in the evenings, everyone squatted on their heels and rocked. They were an intensely attractive people. Martiya liked Dyalo hands, which were long-fingered and muscular. The Dyalo had adopted the Thai game of
takraw
, a cross between volleyball and Hacky Sack played with a small woven bamboo ball, and Martiya thought that there was no more charming sight in all of Asia than when, in the late afternoons, the young men leaped like graceful acrobats to kick the fluttering ball over the high net. Then Martiya stood with the Dyalo girls, all dressed in their colorful handmade shifts and bright white headdresses, all of them laughing and shouting
"Koo-koo"
at every graceful point.

While the young men played and the young women watched, Martiya and Vinai went from hut to hut, taking genealogies. This was an essential piece of anthropological drudge-work. Anthropologists tend to see the drama of family life as little more than a complicated game played by complicated rules; only by working through dozens of family trees could an outsider decipher just what conventions governed courtship, marriage, kinship, inheritance, legitimacy, incest, and relations between clans. Martiya liked the way the genealogical work balanced gossipy love talk, with its inevitable talk of beautiful brides, with the underlying rigor of the genealogical chart, which kept the conversation focused and disciplined and forward-moving, like an escalator. She soon found herself trying to juggle:

organizing themselves in accordance with

every potential match governed by

and

never forgetting

Thank God
, Martiya thought, the Dyalo weren't polygamous.

The genealogical work inevitably provoked questions about Martiya's own love life, and at first Martiya was not sure just how to explain her particular position as an unmarried, independent adult. There was simply no place in the Dyalo mind for such a remote and isolated creature. Indeed, so strange were the looks that Martiya received when first questioned about her marital status that to save the time and trouble of explaining the complicated kinship rules of her own culture, she invented a fictitious husband waiting for her back home. It had started out as a simple white lie, on a stifingly hot and humid afternoon when her patience was low, but very quickly Martiya realized the advantages of the story. Some of her most successful attempts at building rapport with local women had been when she had discussed her wedding, her bride-price, and her relations with her in-laws, a subject that was almost an obsession among Dyalo women. Martiya named her husband Pierre, for no reason at all, and Pierre, which the Dyalo pronounced "Pell," very quickly became something of a character in the village. Like all villagers everywhere, the people of Dan Loi were naturally gossipy, and stories about Martiya's man were legion: Pell was as tall as two Dyalo men, with a head of brilliant blond hair and the strength of a water buffalo; Pell was so wealthy that he ate pig every day, which was necessary on account of his ferocious sexual appetites. On one of Martiya's visits to the lowland, she bought a magazine with photographs of Hollywood celebrities, and clipped a picture of Robert Redford. "This is Pell," she told the women when she came back to the village. The women puzzled over the strange figure, trying to interpret the photograph and the man. Nobody in the village had ever seen blond hair before, or knew that humanity came in such a pale color.
Is he a ghost
? they asked—and it took Martiya a moment to realize that the question was asked with absolute sincerity.

The stories became more elaborate as time went on: Martiya, the villagers said, had been forced to flee from her own village because Pell had beaten her so cruelly; but he had beaten her so cruelly because she had taken a lover. As these stories spread through the village, women whom Martiya hardly knew now sought her out and invited her to tea in their huts, where they asked her one question over and over again:
Was it true about the size of the white man's penis?

Absolutely, Martiya said.

As big as this?
the women asked, and spread their hands apart.

As big as
this
, Martiya said, spreading hers wider.

Koo-koo
, the women said.
*

Martiya could only take about two hours of genealogical work a day before she began to fear that her brain might explode. (And her back: the Dyalo did not have chairs, and these conversations with Dyalo matrons would be conducted either sitting directly on the hardwood floors of Dyalo homes or teetering on the edges of tiny stools. Martiya would balance her notebook on her knees, while the Dyalo women would engage in household busywork: finely chopping peppers and onions, sorting herbs, preparing poultices of medicinal leaves, tying together brush grass to make brooms or roofing tiles, or weaving industriously at a loom.) The stories she heard were frequently of the
so-my-sister's-second-cousin-decided-to-marry-her-father's-brother's-third-son
type, and it took all of Martiya's mental discipline to remember that behind these dry accounts of interlinked clans, there were couples; and behind the couples, humanbeings who lived and loved.

Or were there? Did the Dyalo see anything the way she did? The Dyalo, after all, didn't even
have
a word for "love," a fact Martiya recalled from her readings about Dyalo life before leaving Berkeley, and con

firmed upon arrival in Dan Loi. Perhaps, Martiya thought, the Dyalo simply had no notion of romantic love at all.

Just when Martiya had convinced herself that the gulf between her emotions and the Dyalo's was unbridgeable, like social intercourse between cats and porpoises, somebody would inevitably tell her a story that would suggest entirely the opposite. There was, for example, a couple who lived on the far edge of the village. The wife had elegant high cheekbones, long wavy black hair, and a distracted, flirty, inefficient saunter, as if her neighbors' thatch huts were shop windows and in place of two buckets of water, a pair of invisible shopping bags from Saks Fifth Avenue dangled from the ends of her long arms; in her letters to Karen, Martiya always called her "Miss Dan Loi." Her husband had the spare good looks of the star of a Hong Kong kung-fu movie. They made a pretty pair, and were expecting their first child.

The gossip about the couple was this: in her village, two days' walk in the direction of the rising sun, past Scary Mountain and Wild Pig village, she had been the eldest daughter of a wealthy family, her slender arms covered from wrist to elbow in silver bangles. He, by contrast, came from one of the poorest families in Dan Loi, one of those families who lived on the far edge of the village and, in the last few weeks before the rice was harvested, lived only on jungle roots.
That
kind of people,
that
kind of story: when they met, the instant ardor of the couple was matched in intensity only by the disapproval of her family.
Of course
the match was prohibited—or, rather, the boy was told that if he wished her hand, he would need to compete with all the other suitors for her bride-price. Her father was stern, her mother sterner, her grandmother sternest: such a boy, they sniffed, was
entirely
unsuitable. There were considerations of clan, and another far more appropriate suitor, a fat patrilateral cousin, had sniffed in her direction. Now the story took the wonderful, the utterly
human
, twist. The girl, saying nothing, secretly began to meet her lover in the jungle; and every time they met, she gave him a handful of silver. She gave him all her bangles, and then stole her sisters', and then her mother's, and then her uncompromising old grandmother's. She took everything in the household that wasn't nailed down, including a piglet, and gave it to her lover, and in this way, she stole her own bride-price from her own intransigent family. The marriage followed forthwith. Really, what choice did anyone have? Martiya herself was charmed by the story, and charmed also by the laughter of her Dyalo informants as they recounted the story.

No sooner had Martiya decided that the Dyalo were no more distant from her emotional experience than second cousins twice removed than they would present her with striking evidence to the contrary. It was late at night, and Martiya was lying on the hard floor of her thatch hut, when a loud scream pierced the wet night air, a repetitive throbbing moan that lasted upwards of a minute. She had been in the village several months. It was one of the eeriest noises Martiya had ever heard. She lay under her rough blanket, wondering whether she should investigate. The noise repeated itself a few minutes later, and Martiya asked herself: What would Malinowski do? She had almost convinced herself that Malinowski seemed the kind of man who valued his sleep, when the strange voice howled again. In the dark, she dressed herself, while the other occupants of the hut slept through the noise. With the aid of her flashlight, she wandered through the village. The dogs of the village barked as she passed. She found Vinai's hut and woke him from a deep sleep. Together, Martiya and Vinai traced the noise to a hut on the edge of the village. The hut was lit by a flickering yellow hurricane lamp. Vinai told Martiya to stay outside, and went inside; a moment later he came for her. She might watch, he said, as the shaman's demon rider came upon him.