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

THE SWIDDEN, which had lain fallow all through the fall, again lay fallow. In Berkeley, I had tried to find Martiya’s graduate thesis adviser, Joseph Atkinson, but he was, the department secretary said, a sick man, in and out of the hospital. I sent him an e-mail anyway, and received no response. I went back to Seattle, and Rachel and I went back to Thailand. It had been gray with a sleety rain when we left the States, but on the lawn outside the Chiang Mai airport, the airport employees were drinking whiskey, eating sticky rice, and playing the guitar.

The cool season came over Chiang Mai, and the Thai girls wore light cotton sweaters and shivered, although I was still comfortable in a T-shirt and shorts. It was a quiet winter. My editor at Executive asked if I wanted to write some film reviews. I saw no reason to be a snob. Rachel ate an omelette which did not agree with her and spent a week in the hospital, where the mysterious Dr. Bahn guided her recovery. Every morning, the Indian-born physician swept into her room, glanced at her chart, and settled himself into the chair beside her bed. He took Rachel’s damp, green hand, and as he asked her the usual questions about her symptoms, continued to hold the limb sympathetically. He stayed at her bedside for almost an hour, and for the duration of his visit, her nausea abated. Her illness he treated as merely a manifestation of a deeper spiritual ailment, the cure for which, ideally, was the adoption of the Hindu rites of his childhood—that and antibiotics. He looked into Rachel’s pale-blue eyes and talked—about Thai Buddhism, which in his view was nothing other than Hinduism itself in an elemental form about how animals recover from illness in the forest; about the forest and its sad destruction; and about the recent death of his father, and the beauty of the experience, despite its exceptional sorrow. The ghost of his father, he told us, was not yet at peace, and never left him.

“He’s here, in this room?” asked Rachel.

“Oh yes,” Dr. Bahn said. This was not something that should concern us: his father had been a most lovely man.

Rachel got better, and we took her class to the zoo. At the Chiang Mai zoo, feeding the animals is encouraged, and we bought bananas for the monkeys, peanuts for the elephants, and ice cream for the first-graders. Morris was thrilled. “My mother,” Morris said, in the fluent m?lange of his father’s English and his mother’s Thai that he spoke when excited, “she tell me I’m no allowed eat ice cream. She say, ‘Morris, you too fat!’ ” We got the ice cream from Dairy Queen, and Morris looked at his Blizzard with huge, passionate eyes. “I love you, Miss Rachel,” he said finally.

Warm, easy winter days passed. Rachel and I started taking yoga lessons from an Austrian named Gunther, a former chef from Linz, who offered courses in a gazebo in his flower-strewn backyard, which was patrolled by a domesticated duck named Donut. Gunther had a great rivalry with the other German-speaking yoga teacher in Chiang Mai, a Bavarian who called himself Vivekananda. “Of course Vivekananda is very good yoga teacher,” Gunther said, rubbing Donut’s beak. “But I do not so much like his spirit.”

Then one day in late January, we woke up sweating. The cool season was over, just like that, and not long after, Martiya’s story broke open, like a coconut struck by a machete. Martiya’s graduate adviser, Joseph Atkinson, had written me back. “Dear Mischa Berlinski,” he began. “Hell yes, I remember Martiya van der Leun.”

Rachel, like many women, had total faith in her ability to spot a romance, based on little more than a tender tone of voice or a lingering glance. She was convinced that Martiya van der Leun and her former professor were once lovers.

Handsome, dark-eyed, tall, a dramatic scar across his neck, the celebrated hero of numerous adventures in the African bush, Joseph Atkinson was a man of about sixty when a pretty undergraduate named Martiya van der Leun enrolled in his senior honors seminar. The seminar, entitled “Games People Play,” was a semester-long examination of the role of play in human society. All human societies, Atkinson observed, from the Inuit to the French to the Pygmy, play; it was a fundamental human institution. But what do human beings consider play? It is not an easy word to define. The course considered work as a form of play, and play as a form of work; the games of children and the games of adults; games with consequences like baccarat, and games without, like tag; formal games like baseball, and informal games like hide-and-seek; games that mimicked war and games that mimicked daily life, as when children played house. Martiya wrote a long paper for Atkinson on the games children played in the Pipikoro villages of southern Sulawesi, drawing from her own experiences as a child. The notable feature of Pipikoro play, Martiya wrote, was the extreme complexity of the games played by even the youngest Pipikoro children: her catalogue of the rules of makulu ran to over thirty pages. Atkinson thought that with substantial revisions, the paper might be suitable for publication. Martiya visited him during office hours. Atkinson wrote that Martiya was small and vivacious: she had very pretty feet, and in warm weather she wore open-toed sandals; she was feminine but not womanly. She asked him about the Doyo, the tribal people he had studied in Africa. Really? The only white man? She asked him what it was like to have dengue fever, and what tribal warfare was like. She even asked him about faculty meetings.

Rachel had been brushing her teeth as I read her Atkinson’s letter, and she rinsed her mouth from the tap. “God knows only a lover would be interested in a faculty meeting,” she said, spitting into the sink. “She was hot for him.”

“You think?”

“Absolutely.”

Rachel’s logic had a certain force, and I imagined the sun-splashed sexually charged afternoons in the professor’s study, as the small, vivacious undergraduate with pretty feet interrogated the learned but still manly professor. Did she play idly with her hair while Atkinson described the Doyo death rituals? Were there tribal masks on the wall? Did a woven kente cloth cover the couch? When she came by his office, did she perch herself daintily on the very edge of his couch and say, “Professor Atkinson, tell me a little about your work?”

Although he published only a handful of books—The Doyo Way of Life; Water, Wind, and Rain; The Life of Ralupeda, Doyo Shaman— Atkinson’s influence dominated generations of anthropologists, including Martiya’s. Anthropologists talk of the “school of Atkinson” as they talk of the school of Malinowski, or Evans-Pritchard, or L?vi-Strauss; and every freshman taking Anthropology 101 learns to construct the complicated Atkinson kinship groups. Atkinson wrote a vigorous, masculine prose, which is how I came to imagine the man himself. I wasn’t surprised to learn that Atkinson, even at a place so filled with strangeness as Berkeley, was well known for his carefully cultivated eccentricities, as when he showed up for the initial meeting of the survey course in cultural anthropology, a lecture attended by nearly eight hundred startled undergraduates, wearing nothing but a handsome, three-foot long embroidered penis sheath. On another occasion, campus police were summoned on reports of a tall, nearly naked man wandering near Sather Gate with a finely honed spear. The situation was not calmed when Atkinson coolly explained that he was hunting the dean of students. Atkinson’s e-mails to me were typically time-stamped around four in the morning California time, and I imagined him wrapped in a tattered bathrobe that exposed his bony knees, sitting at his computer, unable to fall back to sleep. The Internet makes possible some strange friendships. Atkinson made clear to me that for reasons of literary vanity, he did not wish to see his letters published, but I was free, he said generously, to summarize their contents.

From the first, Rachel disliked Atkinson. She thought he was an egotist and arrogant, but then, I countered silently, no one without a certain egotism can spend so long in the West African jungle. I liked Atkinson’s forthright prose, and I admired the way that he had defied his father in order to pursue a scholarly career: Atkinson’s father, a Chicago commodities broker, sent him to London in the early 1930s to learn the tea trade; but Atkinson promptly enrolled in the celebrated doctoral program in anthropology at the London School of Economics under the legendary Bronislaw Malinowski, and reconciled with his father only after Atkinson’s older brother died in combat in the South Pacific.

In his middle twenties, Atkinson went to live with the Doyo in French West Africa for five years, and emerged finally with the book that won him a professorship at Yale, where he spent almost two decades before moving to California. He wrote books about West Africans filled with hard midwestern facts. He described and described again the Doyo—how they married, how they died, how they made millet beer, and how they fought their tribal wars; famously, he himself fought in a Doyo tribal war, and emerged with a scar across his neck and upper body. Atkinson made sure the handsome silver eel-shaped wound was showing in the publicity photos on the back of all his books. Those photos, taken when Atkinson must have been in his early fifties, showed a large, well-muscled man with tight curly hair, silver at the temples, wearing an open-necked shirt. His eyes were hooded, toughening up a face that otherwise might have been delicate. His ridged arms were crossed at the chest, and his hands were large and strong. “He’s not my type,” Rachel said, looking at the picture. “But I can see what Martiya saw in him.”

After she graduated, Tim Blair had told me and Atkinson confirmed, Martiya decided to travel. “Things were over with Atkinson,” Rachel said. She twirled a strand of her long hair meditatively. “Martiya must have had the affair with Atkinson, saw that things weren’t going anywhere, and left. It explains why she broke up with the bald guy in San Francisco too.”

“You think?”

“She saw the writing on the wall. What do you do when you’re twenty-three with a guy who’s almost sixty? It was a we’re-both-movingon-but-we-care-for-each-other breakup, not an I-hate-you-how-couldyou get-my-sister-pregnant breakup,” she said.

Rachel’s elegant hypothesis was consistent with the facts: from the road, Martiya wrote to Atkinson as she had written to Tim, long letters describing the Second-Class Waiting Room of the Udaipur train station; or the Kurdish wedding to which she had been invited. Atkinson told me that when she came back to Berkeley, Martiya asked him what he thought she should do with herself. Atkinson loved giving young people advice: he told Martiya that her curiosity and intelligence would make her a superior scholar in any number of disciplines, but in his opinion, kiddo, she was a natural anthropologist. Martiya followed her professor’s counsel and enrolled in the Ph.D. program in the Department of Anthropology, where Martiya asked Atkinson to supervise her doctoral thesis.

“Well, naturally,” Rachel said. “She wasn’t stupid.”

Martiya had originally intended to write her doctoral thesis on the Pipikoro. She knew the language, she argued, and her childhood intimacy with the people would allow her to present the culture vividly. But Sulawesi was politically unstable in the early 1970s, which made grants hard to come by. Joseph Atkinson, too, was opposed to her plans: the Pipikoro were not an unknown people in scholarly circles; her own father’s research there had been significant. He proposed instead that she study the Dyalo of northern Thailand. No ethnographic portrait of the Dyalo existed. A detailed description of their way of life would prove a valuable contribution to the literature and a good place to start a career. Atkinson told her: “Listen, don’t be a martyr. Thailand is a great place to do research. The food is good. The climate’s swell. There are lots of flowers and butterflies. Nobody’s going to try to eat you.” Martiya won a research fellowship to study the Dyalo, largely on the strength of his letter of recommendation.

“Uh-huh,” Rachel said knowingly.

While still in Berkeley, Martiya prepared for her time with the Dyalo as best she could. Very little guidance was typically offered to graduate students at UC Berkeley in the Department of Anthropology before they set out to do fieldwork. I spoke by telephone with Lee Cheng, who in 1967 set out from Wheeler Hall to study Saharan nomads, today the

L. Stein Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. “The philosophy really was that the field was something you did on your own,” he said. “The department had the attitude that nothing much could prepare you for anthropological fieldwork, and if you couldn’t do fieldwork, then you had no business being an anthropologist.

It was a real rite of passage.” If you couldn’t figure out how to get out to the jungle, the desert, or the savannah; if you couldn’t figure out what to ask the natives; if you couldn’t figure out how to build rapport with recalcitrant and suspicious locals—perhaps, the department implied, it was time to think about a nice career in sociology, where the data were unlikely to carry a spear. A story circulated in the department about the grad student who asked her hoary and accomplished adviser for his counsel on the field. The professor handed her a copy of the thickest ethnography on his shelf, one of the magisterial works of Kroeber. “I send thee forth, that thou might do likewise,” he solemnly intoned. An elderly professor much interested in the Australian aborigines advised Martiya to pay particular attention to forbidden animals and eldest daughters: long years of scholarship, he continued, and a lifetime in the field had taught him that these were the soft spots of tribal, nay, human culture itself. “Don’t do what I did and act like an old animal around the forbidden daughters,” he said with a sad, greasy chuckle. Atkinson advised her to bring a bottle of tequila, a shot of which, he said, inevitably made everyone just a little more easy when discussing incest taboos, a perennial topic of anthropological inquiry.

There was no anthropological literature on the Dyalo, but in the vast holdings of Wheeler Library she found a slim memoir by a Welsh traveler named Swinton who had lived with the Dyalo in the first half of the century in the remote wilds of China’s southern Yunnan Province. He offered a very brief description of the people: the Dyalo, Swinton reported, were found in small villages across southern China, northern Burma, and northern Thailand; Swinton estimated that there were perhaps a hundred thousand Dyalo speakers in the world. The Dyalo, he said, were slash-and-burn farmers and fiercely independent. To emphasize his point, Swinton told a story of a village in which the headman had been shot by his subjects with hunting rifles after he overstepped the bounds of his modest office. The Dyalo had no written language, although Dyalo poetry was subtle and beautiful. Swinton wrote, “The Dyalo language, reflecting the thinking of the Dyalo people, has neither a word for ‘love,’ nor ‘sin,’ nor ‘salvation.’ In Dyalo, it is impossible to ‘forgive’ someone. It is a brutally honest language.” Swinton noted the Dyalo custom of selling their daughters into marriage, and Swinton wrote that the Dyalo were obsessed with spirits and ghosts, which they reckoned existed all about them in great numbers.

When Martiya herself went off to live with the Dyalo in the fall of 1974, she had very little more than this description to go on.

Joseph Atkinson and I gossiped about Martiya through February and into early March, as the very hot season came over Chiang Mai and the grinning, good-natured elephant outside the Westin Hotel turned brown. The hotel’s gardener watered the topiary daily but was unable, as the days grew warmer, to keep the animal green: first the elephant’s trunk, rearing high, changed color, then his massive, drooping ears. Day by day, the line of brown drifted southward across his mighty back. Finally, only the tail, protected during the searing hours of the late afternoon by the long shadow of the hotel itself, kept its original winter hue. Hot! Every visit to the Westin, every new letter from Atkinson, saw the hotel doorman, dressed in elaborate silken costumes appropriate to the court of great King Chulalongkorn, swing open the heavy glass doors with ever less alacrity, the pained look on his smooth face suggesting that all that movement in the heat was an affront to common sense. My underwear clung damply to my butt.

But inside the hotel it was cool, dark, carpeted, and quiet, which was why I liked to read my e-mail there in the morning: in the Westin, my otherwise sluggish thoughts seemed fresh, like sprigs of winter mint. I had made friends with perky pretty little Gai, the receptionist at the Business Service Center, and she let me check my e-mail there for free, when her boss, Miss Tong, wasn’t looking. Gai considered Miss Tong’s insistence on charging a regular customer unseemly. What, after all, was friendship for? Miss Tong, Gai said bitterly, was kee nieo—literally translated, a sticky shit. That this is a grave insult in Thailand says a considerable amount about the Thai character to those inclined to consider the Freudian themes of anal expulsion and retention.

Joseph Atkinson wasn’t my only correspondent, of course: my mother wrote me; Josh found a job managing Thailand’s first gelateria. My editor at Executive wondered if I would be interested in writing a couple of thousand words about a vineyard in Loei Province, the first in Thailand. Of course I would, my interest in viticulture being long-standing. But Joseph Atkinson’s e-mails were the ones that I clicked open first and read over and over again.

I always printed out Atkinson’s letters for Rachel to read, before exchanging a conspiratorial smile with Gai and strolling homeward. Midway between the Westin and my house, not far from the 7-Eleven, where I stopped to drink a mango Slurpee, there was a hospital, and on the fa�ade of the hospital hung a hand-painted canvas sign at least two stories high advertising discounts on plastic surgery. I no longer recall the text of the advertisement, but the face depicted there struck me. It was the face of a young woman, with the pale skin favored in the Thai ideal, long dark hair, and eyes as round as Meyer lemons. As was typical of Thai commercial art, the woman was neither entirely Asian nor Occidental, but in-between, her face bearing the drama of Western features but none of their vulgarity. She was the product of a surgeon with the deftest touch. It was this woman’s face that in my imaginings I associated with Martiya.

From the field, Martiya wrote Atkinson still more long letters. Martiya’s first letters from Thailand were ebullient, he said. They made him recall his own early days in Africa, when, leaving behind gloomy London and snowbound Chicago, he first saw the land the Doyo called the Beautiful Kingdom of the Yellow Sun. Atkinson was proud to have urged her to go. She wrote exuberantly of the beauty of Thailand: the flooded lime-green rice paddies bordered by swaying palms; coconuts, mangoes, and durian for sale by the side of the road; the ornate temples with flashing mirrored roofs; wandering Buddhist monks with shaved heads in saffron robes; the cut galangal in bushels drying in the midday sun, the humid air earthy, like a root; and the sleepy, sweating water buffalo reluctantly plowing the fields. Her descriptions of Thailand, Atkinson admitted, were clich?d, but no less touching for the fact.

Atkinson gave Martiya a letter of introduction to an elderly Thai anthropologist at the University of Chiang Mai. He treated her intention to live in a Dyalo village as a silly eccentricity. He had been able to study the Karen adequately, he maintained, on visits that lasted at most a day or two, and she would not find tribal living to her taste. Did she realize, he asked, that the Dyalo had neither electricity nor running water?

And the food! One need not even mention the food. The thatched roof of a Dyalo hut would leak in the rainy season. The Dyalo themselves smelled bad, although this would be less oppressive to a farang. Martiya was persistent, however, and her Thai host eventually conceded: if she insisted on wandering down the path of folly, the least he could do would be to recommend a guide. In this way she was introduced to a young Dyalo man named Vinai, who spoke a rough-and-ready English in addition to his native Dyalo and fluent Thai.

Choosing the right village is an essential part of the anthropological adventure, and for almost three months Martiya and her guide wandered the mountains of northern Thailand. They traveled by motorbike and on foot, first along the paved arteries which pulsed out from Chiang Mai, then branching onto the network of laterite back roads which led from village to village. Where the roads ended, they walked, along paths which, Vinai maintained, had once been the migratory routes of wild elephants. Martiya got a sense of the new world in which she found herself. The Akha, she learned, wore silver headdresses, and exposed their twins, thinking them possessed by evil spirits. Karen virgins dressed in white. The Hmong lived at the summits of the mountains, and while the Hmong greatly admired the Yao, they enslaved the Lahu. The Hmong had grown rich as opium traders and the Lahu were often opium-addicted. The primitive Mrabri no one ever saw: they had never learned to build houses and drifted through the jungle like ghosts, taking shelter every night under makeshift lean-tos. Under every T’ai Lue house there was a loom. The Lua were sullen and stared at Martiya suspiciously. Everyone, her guide said, admired the poetry of the Lisu and the quality of their singing. The Mao were quiet folk and, like the Swiss, spoke slowly. Martiya and Vinai roamed from the Burmese to the Lao border, looking for the ideal village to study. In the end, Martiya settled herself in a Dyalo village called Dan Loi, not far from the Burmese border, and set to work.

The field did to Martiya what the field always does: it scoured her and revealed the person underneath the encrusted layers of culture and ingrained habit and prejudice. Martiya came back to Berkeley three years later, tanned and strong, and gegan to write. She showed a few of the chapters of her doctoral thesis to Atkinson. They were superb, he said, absolutely superb. First-rate analysis, a deep connection with the subject, and intensely well observed. But Martiya wasn’t convinced: she complained that she hardly knew the Dyalo and was being asked to write their definitive story. Every graduate student—every good grad student, Atkinson qualified—feels that way, but Martiya for some reason felt it more keenly than most. Atkinson told her that he understood, that it was only after he had defended his Doyo village from a raid by a neighboring tribe, actually holding a spear in his hand, that he felt he understood the people, that he could write about them.

“So what should I do?” Martiya asked.

Write the thesis, kiddo. It’s just three hundred pages of blah-blah-blah.

After about a year, she told him she wanted to go back to Thailand. She needed more data. Atkinson told her that he couldn’t oppose this idea more profoundly. “Are you nuts?” he asked. She left nevertheless.

She never finished the doctoral thesis. He never heard from her again.

Not long after my e-mails with Atkinson had tapered off, the phone rang in the middle of the night. My first thought wasn’t that someone was dead or needed my kidney—I just cursed Rachel’s Grandma Irene. I don’t think Grandma Irene ever really bought into the outlandish notion that as the sun was rising over the Puget Sound, the same sun, harsher and so much hotter, had long since set over the rice paddies of the Golden Triangle. She called us at all hours of the night.

But I was wrong. It turned out someone was dead.

The fan blew hot air across our damp backs. Our first hot season in Thailand, Rachel had asked me if we were growing apart, because I didn’t hold her in the night anymore. “It’s got to be a zillion degrees, Rachel, are you crazy?” I said. She looked at me doubtfully. That night, I held on to her tightly, breathing hotly on her neck. She pushed me away, and now we slept, during the hot season, on far sides of the bed. I was having a dream when the phone rang, a complicated one—interpret it as you will—in which I had just gotten a job as a waiter in a French caf? and needed to acquire a waiter’s suit with a vest and tailcoat. No tailor in Chiang Mai would make it for me. I licked my lips when the phone rang, and for a second I wasn’t sure if it wasn’t the tailor from the dream calling me back.

“Hello?” I think I said. I wasn’t taking notes.

On the other end of the line there was a woman’s voice. “Mischa?” the voice said. “Mischa Berlinski? It’s Karen!” She said it like back in college, we were once best friends. “Karen Leon! Martiya’s friend!” the voice added.

“Karen,” I said. Karen Leon was an anthropologist from Texas to whom Joseph Atkinson had suggested I write. In my e-mail I had included my phone number and invited her to call me.

“I just got back to Austin and I read your e-mail and I had to call right away. How is Martiya? I wrote her and she never wrote back, and I wrote again and I’ve been so worried.”

A very long pause circumnavigated the world.

“Don’t you know?” I said, and then I thought: How could she?

“Know what?”

“I guess you don’t know.”

“No,” she said. Her voice dropped a register, from trumpet to trombone.

“She’s dead.” If she’d called in the morning, I might have been more gentle.

“Oh,” Karen said. It was almost a groan.

I didn’t know where to begin. “She killed herself. In jail. She ate a ball of opium.”

“That killed her?”

“Yes.” It didn’t seem like enough. “That’s what I was told.”

“Well, are you sure or not?”

I felt a little defensive. “Yes, I’m sure,” I said. “She’s dead.”

“Oh.”

One of my neighbor’s fighting cocks crowed, and from Texas, I heard a car alarm. The sounds must have crossed each other somewhere under the Pacific.

“It’s hard news,” I said.

“It’s just so . . .”

“I was shocked too,” I added. It seemed like the right thing to say. “Did you know . . . did you know Martiya well?”

“Oh, yes. I mean, no. I mean, I haven’t seen her in years. But we were once close, before . . .” Her voice drifted off. My neighbor’s fighting cock crowed again, and a dog barked.

“Would you like to talk about Martiya sometime?” I asked. In the letter I had sent to Karen I had explained that I was a journalist interested in the story of Martiya van der Leun, but no more than that. “It’s just that she had so many people who admired her here, and I want to get her story straight. I mean, maybe when you’ve had a little time to—”

“They admire her? Really? After what happened?”

“I don’t really know what happened,” I admitted.

“Don’t you know? I thought that’s what you were writing about.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“I can’t believe you don’t know.”

“I don’t,” I insisted.

“Martiya killed someone,” Karen said. The intimate excitement had returned to her voice. “Martiya shot a missionary named David Walker. From a whole family of missionaries. She shot him in the back two times with a hunting rifle.”

“Do you know why she shot him?”

There was a long pause on the line, and then Karen said, “That’s why I was calling you.”