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THREE: “FOR NIXON?”

I GOT BACK TO CHIANG MAI and wrote my piece about the sculptor, then for the Bangkok Times I wrote fifteen hundred words about a jazz trio that played nightly in the lobby of the Amari Hotel. I phoned both the Dutch and the American consulates, looking for details into Martiya’s case, but neither consul had much to tell me: official records of both governments were sealed; the personnel who might have recalled details of her case had long since transferred to new posts. She must have been represented by a lawyer at trial, I figured, but I had no idea how to find him; I called another lawyer, who informed me that the details of legal proceedings in Thailand are not available to the public. Elena van der Leun had told me all that she could: her biography of Martiya ended effectively at age six, with Martiya’s arrival in California. Piers spent the rest of his career at Berkeley, but Elena did not know much beyond that: there had been a fight over an inheritance; Martiya had been very far away. I let the story slide.

Martiya’s story interested me, but Thailand was full of strange stories and inexplicable mysteries: one morning when I woke up, from my balcony, I found a troupe of elephants marching through the neighborhood, led by a wiry mahout; a baby elephant looked at me with huge, curious eyes; and then the elephants disappeared from view past the bend in the road that led toward the Westin Hotel. I couldn’t explain the elephants either, or why they were walking around my middle-class Chiang Mai suburb. That fall, Rachel explained to chubby Morris how to add up numbers, even big ones, and she tried to teach Maria how to tell time, who found the whole business so tricky that for a while just looking at a clock was an invitation to tears. When the class arrived at the unit on families, Najda, a little angel who took great delight in ratting out the wrongdoings of the other children, gravely explained to Miss Rachel that she lived with her mommy from Thailand and her other mommy from Malaysia and her daddy from America all in the same house; the situation, Najda explained with precocious tact, was “very sensitive.” There was a haunted house for Halloween, until the third-graders got too rambunctious and stepped on the papier-m‰ch? ghosts and had to have a time-out; on the first full moon in November, like everyone in Thailand, we thanked the spirits of the waters by decorating hearts-of-palm kratong with flowers, incense, and candles and setting them adrift on the muddy-brown river.

The rainy season tapered off and the cool season began: the cool season is northern Thailand’s spring, and Chiang Mai was filled with flowers—glorious orange trumpet, which snaked along the garden wall, and aromatic hibiscus, a half-dozen varieties of lily, and everywhere delicate golden lantana, tender clumps of brilliant red and orange, climbing up telephone poles and sprouting miraculously in the sewage-occluded gutters. Rachel wore frangipani in her hair, until told that in Thailand that flower was reserved for mourning. Then for about two weeks in early December, the city was overwhelmed by butterflies taking advantage of the brief interval between the pounding rain of the monsoon and the punishing sun of the hot season to mate and die.

But Josh’s vivid description of Martiya, the idea of a murdering anthropologist carefully constructing field notes while in a Thai prison, and the only white woman who could rightfully call herself topo’uma— all these lingered with me. On Friday afternoons, I picked Rachel up at school with the motorcycle. School let out at half past two; the last lingering thunderstorms of the monsoon broke at three; and by four the roads were dry enough to drive. We’d head out into the hills. We took the ring road past the fast-food restaurants and the large open lots where vendors sold spirit houses and giant bronze Buddhas; past Carrefour, the mammoth French hypermarch?; past one mall, then the other. Then, just at the edge of the first rice paddies, we passed the prison where Josh had met Martiya and Martiya had died. Seeing the squat building with the limp, rain-drenched Thai flag inspired in me an indistinct sense of guilt, like the time my grandmother gave me an amaryllis that I forgot to water.

In December, Rachel and I went back to her family’s house in Seattle for Christmas. Her whole family was there, all of her sisters, and the twins. Every day it rained, except for the day it hailed, and the sky lay close to the ground like a coffin lid. Rachel’s father took me aside to ask, man to man, when I was going to get a real job. Martiya’s story gave me an excuse to escape. Just after the New Year, I flew down to California.

Piers van der Leun today can be found on the twelfth floor of Dwinelle Hall of the University of California at Berkeley, where he stands guard in the early mornings, surrounded by the other linguists emeriti who have their photographs on the wall outside of the secretary’s office. All the dead linguists gather here in the early mornings to smoke their pipes and drink honeyed tea and babble in all the world’s languages. One mentions reciprocal constructions in Bantu, and another replies that a similar grammatical structure is found, oddly enough, in Ojibwe. Their incorporeal forms drift down the hallway and settle in the department lounge, where the former authority on the phonology of the Indo-Turkic languages laments the difficulty of returning to his fieldwork. All the ghosts nod companionably: they know how difficult it is to discipline oneself in the afterlife, now that time is no longer at issue and tenure guaranteed. The recently arrived specialist in computational linguistics spills his coffee, and when the graduate students, caught in their own particular netherworld between life and death, arrive later in the day, they find the dark puddle and wonder who might have made such a mess.

Piers and Martiya van der Leun left Sulawesi in 1954, and Piers spent the remainder of his career at Berkeley. I learned this from Piers’s obituary, published in the Daily Californian, May 1987. The van der Leuns lived in a Craftsman house on elm-shaded Etna Street. Piers continued his research, returning every other year to Indonesia, but passed most of his days on the twelfth floor of Dwinelle Hall, revising his verb tables and refining his lexicon. The lexicon was published in 1967, and was praised by a reviewer in the Bulletin of Oriental Linguistics as a “significant step forward in Australasian linguistics.” From his old office, one can see the Bay Bridge and San Francisco; a bay view was a mark of status and distinction within the department.

I visited the former chairman of the department of linguistics, who, despite advanced age, still kept office hours. He greeted me with a strange exuberance when I knocked on his door, and I had the impression that very few people visited him between two and four on Wednesdays. He had bulging black eyes. He recalled Piers van der Leun and Martiya, but I began to doubt the quality (if not the quantity) of his memories when he referred to Piers as an Indo-Europeanist, and Swiss. If the former chairman’s other recollections are accurate, Piers played tennis quite a bit and introduced Martiya to the game. The university in the 1950s, the former chairman digressed, was an entirely different place from the university today: young ladies wore tennis skirts and young men dressed neatly, often with a tie, carrying their tennis rackets over their shoulders as they left the fraternity house, but of course wearing white shorts on the courts as university regulations demanded. Occasionally, someone might show up in class still wearing tennis clothes. This was frowned upon, but nobody saw the need officially to forbid the act.

A long silence passed, which I assumed the former chairman spent in the organization of his unruly memories. I glanced around his office. One wall was covered in books, another in photographs, many of them showing the chairman shaking the hands of famous people—I would have asked the chairman how he came to meet both Ronald Reagan and Frank Sinatra, but I was afraid that he would have no more idea than I did.

Martiya perhaps attended the local junior high school, then Berkeley High School, then might have matriculated at the university. The former chairman had remarkable tufts of hair protruding from his magisterial, elephantine ears. He suggested I speak with his daughter, “my oldest girl,” who had known Martiya slightly better, the two having graduated hypothetically in the same class at high school. The former chairman asked me which university I was associated with, and looked at me blankly when I explained that I was interested in the life of Martiya van der Leun. “Ah, yes,” he said finally. “Wasn’t she old Piers van der Leun’s daughter?” When I said goodbye, he wished me luck on my grant application. A quick Internet search revealed that the former chairman had a linguist’s mastery of the grammars of all the Indo-European languages, and had published new results within the last year.

The chairman’s daughter lived in Boston. When I got her on the phone, she confirmed the general outlines of Martiya’s career—it is amazing the things people will tell a polite stranger—and then said something about it being the crazy time of the year, with the holidays and all. Martiya’s name came brightly to her lips, as if Martiya had been one of those high school personalities it is impossible to forget. Every high school has one. Martiya had indeed graduated in her class at Berkeley High and then matriculated at UC Berkeley. A cell phone was ringing in the background, and I could hear a small child crying. “I’ve got to run,” she said. She took my e-mail address and, to my surprise, wrote me the next day, just a few lines suggesting that I speak with Martiya’s college boyfriend Tim Blair, today a professor of English at San Francisco State University.

A lot of journalism is like this: I felt a little like the baton in a relay race of faulty memories and distant recollections. But Tim Blair remembered Martiya very, very well. I could sense it even over the telephone. “Holy shit,” he murmured when I told him that Martiya was dead, a suicide in a Thai jail. He invited me to coffee at his house on Potrero Hill.

Tim Blair and I sat in his book-lined study. There were rectangular piles of handwritten papers on the floor around his desk (“Don’t mind my ball and chain,” he said, gesturing at the papers ruefully. “I’ll get this thing out of here one of these days”) and photographs of his sons on the wall. Tim Blair settled himself onto a leather couch covered with an afghan, and I was assigned to an easy chair. He stroked his silver beard slowly; his mustache dangled across his upper lip. He was one of those men with a well-formed skull suited to baldness, the kind of skull that under exceedingly different circumstances might have made an excellent calabash, smoothly rounded and long in the forehead with a deep bowl sufficient for a good many draughts of palm wine. There was something just a little aggressive about Tim Blair and the way he hunched his elbows on his knees. He chewed his pink lower lip.

“Tell me,” I finally said, the “tell me” an interrogatory trick—I was relying here on Barbara Walters’s How to Talk to Practically Anyone About Practically Anything—to win my subject’s trust. “Tell me,” I repeated, making good focused Barbara-counseled eye contact, “how did you come to know Martiya?”

Tim Blair looked at me severely for a second. I thought that perhaps I had mispronounced her name. He crossed his legs and cracked his knuckles. I had a small notebook balanced on my knee. “You know she voted for Nixon, don’t you?” he said finally. “Christ, man, that blew me away.”

“Nixon?” I wasn’t sure where all this was going, but I wrote “Nixon” in my notebook, and underlined it.

“Twice.”

“Twice?”

“She voted for the bastard twice.”

I added an exclamation mark after the word “Nixon.”

Tim continued. “Hell, she was just a shade shy of the goddamn John Birch Society. She said that her granddad was killed by Communists and she didn’t want to see all of Southeast Asia red. She was the kind of kid who got pretty heated up about politics. We’d walk through campus and she just went after the peace protesters.”

He uncrossed his legs and leaned back into the sofa. “One time, I remember, we were in the Anthropology Department lounge and this guy was talking about the Montagnards in Vietnam, and he was running off at the mouth, attacking American policy, calling it genocide and all that. She went after him. ‘Why the hell do you think the Hmong are fighting for us?’ she asked him. ‘Do you think they’re stupid? Do you think they don’t know what’s in their best interests?’ He just looked at her blankly, this guy, staring at this dark-haired girl, saying what you just did not say in the Anthropology Department at Berkeley in those days. She was vicious and smart, and that was sexy.” Tim lingered on the word “sexy.” “I was the idiot who was running off at the mouth. That’s how I met her, that’s when I fell for her. Boom! She never held it against me that I was an idiot. But she really believed what she was saying. She said that the first thing the Communists were going to do when they took over was to drag all the indigenous people down from their villages and put them on communal farms. Or shoot ’em. And it was true. It was the first thing they did.”

Tim continued without further prompting. I scribbled as quickly as I could. In college, Tim and Martiya were both anthropology majors. They were together, hardly a minute apart, most of their junior and senior years. Tim made clear that it was all a long time ago, and yet the memories of his time with Martiya were still charged, perhaps precisely because it was a long time ago and these were the memories of his youth. Every now and then I interrupted Tim, asking him for details about their time together, looking for something that would make Martiya come to life. But those novelistic touches were in his telling hazy and indistinct. For reasons Tim could not quite articulate, a course in the ethnology of southern India was a particularly romantic memory. They took a lot of naps on the college lawns, and when they woke up they spent long hours playing with her hair. “Being with Martiya, you got to realize that it was kind of like a m?nage ˆ trois. Her damned hair had a will of its own. One day it’s flat and the next it’s big, and everything about her changed, depending on the hair.”

“How so?”

“She wasn’t ever very subdued, but when the hair was flat, she’d be more thoughtful. But when the hair was big, she was a real hell-raiser. When the hair was big, she’d say, ‘Let’s get in the car and drive.’ When the hair was flat, you’d find her in the library.”

“Why do you think Martiya was in the Anthropology Department?” I asked.

He furrowed his brow. “In those days, anthro was for a lot of folks who didn’t feel at home anywhere else. It wasn’t a big department, and it had a personal atmosphere. Everyone knew everyone else. All the professors would have parties, and I guess it’s one of the few places on campus where Martiya could find people who really got how she had been raised. She was kind of a celebrity in the department, and I think she liked that. Also, she was curious. One of the most curious people I’ve ever met. There aren’t that many curious people out there.”

I wrote “Martiya—curious” in my notebook.

Tim puckered his lips. “I’m not sure ‘curious’ is the best way to put it, actually,” he said. Reluctantly, I added a question mark to the word. “Martiya was a self-improver. Ambitious. She bought the Norton Anthology of English Literature and read her way through it, fifty pages a day, from one end to the other. Then she got on this poetry-memorizing thing where she tried to memorize fifty lines of poetry a week. Then it was swimming—she hadn’t learned to swim as a kid and she decided she needed to know how to swim. Soon she was swimming laps three-quarters of an hour every day.”

The phone rang and Tim got up to answer it. His wife was on the line, and he said, “Hi, babe,” and “Uh-huh,” and “Okey-dokey,” and “He said that?” and “Sonovabitch,” and “I’ve got to go, we’ll talk when you get home.” He didn’t mention that he was talking to a journalist about his ex-girlfriend. Then he hung up and sat down again. “The van der Leuns, big influence on me,” he said. I had the impression that much of what Tim was telling me now had been prepared before my arrival, as if the night before he had lain awake thinking. Piers van der Leun was a “distracted elderly scholar type, you know, really from another generation,” slightly ill at ease in California, especially in a California where the tennis whites to which he had so proudly accustomed himself were no longer the epitome of style. Martiya was “passionately devoted to her father.” Although she lived in her own apartment on the north side of the campus, she stopped by her father’s office almost every day in the late afternoon, and he would take her to the faculty lounge for coffee. Sometimes Tim would be invited. “My dad, he was the kind of guy who talked about nothing but baseball and union politics,” Tim said. “Don’t get me wrong. I love baseball, still union.” Tim threw an imaginary baseball to emphasize his loyalties. “But these two, they’d spend hours talking about grammars and lexicons and Chomsky and poetry and politics—I never heard people talk like that. And Professor van der Leun would ask my opinion about all sorts of things, and then he’d kind of hang on my response, as if there was nothing more important in the world than my opinion, this little twenty-year-old twerp from Modesto.”

Tim and Martiya went for long drives up the California coast. Tim had an old Pontiac that he could barely keep running, and a chocolate Lab named Chocolate, and they’d drive north, as far as they could go in a weekend. Knowing that you are happy when you are happy is a rare gift, and Tim knew how happy he was.

“ ‘All life’s grandeur / Is something with girl in summer,’ ” Tim Blair said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Robert Lowell. It’s true. You’re too young to know it. You’ll see.”

The couple drove along the coast and bought sharp cheddar cheese from an old cheese-maker in Point Reyes and white wine from a vineyard in Sonoma, then wandered—sometimes ending up on the banks of the Russian River, other times going as far north as Mendocino. Once they stopped on a bluff over the Pacific, near a grove of gnarled cypress trees, and spread a blanket out on the golden grass. “Do you see that ittybitty little island over there?” Martiya asked, pointing far, far off in the distance, to the other side of the Pacific.

“Yep.”

“No, not the big one. The really itty-bitty one.”

“Oh, the little one. I was looking at the big one.”

“No, the big one’s Java. You see all those lights? That’s Jakarta. The little one is Sulawesi. That’s where I was born.”

“Oh, I was looking at Borneo.”

“You’re looking towards Japan. That’s Borneo there.”

They were together a little over two years. After graduation, Piers van der Leun gave his daughter a small sum of money, to use as she wished. She announced her intention to travel around the world, and explained to Tim her intention to travel alone. “I thought it was crazy, this little girl wanting to go around the world by herself. But she was insistent. Piers asked me to talk to her, to change her mind. She told me not to wait for her. She was a powerfully determined girl. I never really knew why it was over. I guess now when I look back on it, I was too boring for her—she couldn’t imagine ever living in a house like this one.” He waved his hand in a broad arc which encompassed the bay windows and the hardwood floor covered in an old Persian carpet, the coved ceiling, and the family photos. Thirty years after the fact, Tim Blair was still explaining to himself why his college girlfriend left him. Through the windows I could see the bay, covered in whitecaps stirred up by a winter breeze.

“Tim Blair—too boring,” I wrote in my notebook.

“I got postcards and letters from her all year long, even though we’d broken up,” Tim said. “I got letters from the craziest places—from eastern Turkey and Afghanistan and the far northeast provinces of India. I didn’t write her back, because I never knew where she was going to be, so it was a kind of one-way conversation. All that year, I was dying for her just to write that she loved me and missed me, but she never did: she would just write these long letters about the people that she saw and the places she went, and how fucking interesting it was. I didn’t give a shit. Then the letters started to peter out, and I stopped missing her so much.

“I went to grad school on the East Coast, and, once, I came back to Berkeley for a conference—this was, oh, about two, three years later. I gave her a call, and we went out for coffee. She was enrolled in the Ph.D. program in the Department of Anthropology, and she was all excited because she had been awarded a grant to study some tribe in the north of Thailand. God, I can’t believe she was still in Thailand.”

Tim pointed to a picture on the wall. It was hidden by a bookcase, and I had to stand up to see it clearly. It was a portrait of himself thirty years earlier. There was a strapping young man in a T-shirt. He had shoulder-length curly hair. He had a goofy smile and was standing in a flower-filled pasture. Martiya, he said, had taken that picture.

“What does she look like now?” he asked me. “I mean, before she . . .”

“I didn’t meet her.” I told him what Josh O’Connor had told me.

“She had beautiful lips.”

I paused a second. I looked down at my notes. There was something I wanted to clarify. “For Nixon?” I said. “Really?”

“Twice.”

Tim heard from Martiya one more time. About fifteen years ago, he said, she wrote to him. The letter was postmarked Thailand. Memories of their time together made up the bulk of the letter. The tone was tender, even affectionate. She was living in a tribal village in northern Thailand: her research had been fruitful. She had been productive. She had to tell someone, she said: she had met a man and was madly in love. Her current happiness, Martiya told Tim, reminded her of their time together, and having no one with whom she might share these memories, she had decided to write to Tim himself. She hoped that he was equally happy.

Josh O’Connor had told me that Martiya had been in prison the past ten years. Tim Blair reported that she was a free woman, madly in love, as of fifteen years ago. Not long after she mailed this letter, by the time line I was constructing, Martiya had killed someone.