Fieldwork: A Novel (36 page)

I spent the better part of the afternoon lying in the hammock that Khun Vinai had vacated, reading the Bible. After all those meetings with the Walkers, I had realized with a shameful start that I had never read much of the Good Book.
His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written that no man knew, but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: And his name is called The Word of God.
That's from Revelation. I wondered what that sounded like in Dyalo.

There were two other guests at the Hiker Hut, a young blond couple. From the hammock where I had installed myself, I watched them mount the hill and climb into their Akha hut. I had dinner with them that evening. I didn't really have a choice: there was only one restaurant in the village, managed by Khun Vinai's wife, and it would have seemed strange if I had said no. They were both from Denmark, and they told me a lot of things I didn't know about the hill-tribe villages: all of the villages in this valley, Henrietta said, were part of a program sponsored by the king of Thailand to substitute other crops for opium. The whole thing was an American idea. That's why there were so many strawberry and tomato fields. Later, I tasted the strawberries. They were bitter and chalky. I had my doubts.

After dinner, we walked back up the hill, and I excused myself to my Dyalo hut, pleading exhaustion. I took a shower and dried myself off and dusted myself with mentholated prickly heat powder and wondered what I was supposed to do with myself now. Then I heard a soft shuffling step on my stoop, and a knock on the door.

I KNOW THE HAPPIEST WORDS
in all the world.

The happiest words in all the world are "Opium Man," when accompanied by a little knock on the door of your hut and the old Akha man's shuffling step. "Come in," you say. Then the Opium Man lies down on the bed with you, both of you on your sides, facing each other, a little paraffin candle between you. Only a lover lies in bed with you like the Opium Man. He pulls a sticky pouch of black opium from his pocket, and lights the candle and prepares the pipe, heating the opium over the open flame, working it carefully until it is a perfect sizzling ball, then plunging the bolus into the pipe. It is not even necessary to lift your head while you smoke: the Opium Man holds the pipe while you inhale. I know all about the Opium Man, because opium makes you endlessly inquisitive. I speak to the Opium Man in my halting, hesitant Thai, and he replies in his thick Akha accent. The Opium Man can be talkative or silent, as he wishes, because he has the self-assurance that comes from being truly desired. I know about his little village and his pigs, his daughters and the bride-price he is expecting for them; I know that it is difficult for the sad Akha to follow the Akha
zha
when they wander down from the mountains to the Thai villages of the plains, where the lowland merchants cheat them and the children mock their rustic ways. The Akha man, himself a smoker, asks me questions, and I tell him about Martiya van der Leun.

When Vinai knocked on the door of the little hut, the pipes that I had smoked in anticipation of his arrival had wrongly rendered him a familiar figure, an old friend. He stood half a head shorter than me, and I am not particularly tall; but when he lay on the bed with the Opium Man, he sprawled and seemed big. He said he was a member of the Rotary Club of Chiang Rai, and asked if I was a Rotarian also. He seemed disappointed when I said I wasn't. I had decided that he was as distant and elegant as a headwaiter, then he belched; I had decided that he was tight-lipped, then he spoke for hours. It is a cliché to speak of the inscrutable Oriental—but clichés exist for a reason. Talking to Vinai, who was himself Dyalo, gave me some sense of how difficult it must have been for Martiya to penetrate the life of a Dyalo village. All those strange smiles.

Khun Vinai took my place on the bed. He was distracted, and said something about roofing tiles. He had driven all the way to Chiang Rai that afternoon, but the tiles he was looking for hadn't been available. He had wasted his afternoon.

The Opium Man made him a pipe, and Khun Vinai smoked it down in a single lungful. He held the smoke a long time, and then exhaled long tusks that hung below the ceiling of woven grass. He relaxed visibly. This was not the first time that I had smoked opium—I had, after all, lived in the Golden Triangle for almost two years—but the drug this time was different. The last time that I had smoked, with Rachel, a half-dozen pipes had rendered me pleasantly sleepy and lethargic. But now I was almost trembling. The only light in the hut was the Opium Man's candle, casting long pale shadows on the thatch wall.

Finally Vinai spoke, "Martiya, she is my good friend. It is too sad story, Martiya's story. I miss her too much."

Then he lapsed back into a long silence.

Khun Vinai propped himself on one elbow and looked at me. From my angle on the floor, I saw his bare feet, horny and calloused; then his short legs in a pair of khaki trousers; then a polo shirt with a little alligator above his heart; then a well-shaven Dyalo face, with mellow dark eyes, an unlined forehead, and a head of uncombed spiky gray hair.

Once he began to talk, all his reserve melted. Like many a man who reckons that he has made a success of his life, he was eager to tell his story. For twenty minutes or more, Khun Vinai narrated in my direction, occasionally making eye contact, but more often than not directing his conversation to a spot above my head on the bamboo wall. He spoke fluent English, but for an unflagging reliance on the present tense. I listened patiently, waiting for him to get to Martiya, and eventually he did.

As Khun Vinai spoke, I took notes:

The next morning, I would translate the last line of the notes above as: "You have no idea how much money this was to me then. Today, I drive a Toyota truck, but in those days, I barely had enough to eat."

On his left wrist, Khun Vinai wore a Rolex. Although his watch probably came from Chiang Mai's counterfeit bazaar, just like my Cartier, poverty had clearly taught Khun Vinai the value of things.

Khun Vinai told me he spent almost two years with Martiya in Dan Loi. He was like Martiya's shadow in the village: the two spent day after day together, interviewing the villagers or taking genealogies. When Vinai realized just what Martiya was trying to do in Dan Loi, when he had finally figured out just why Martiya was asking all those questions and just what Martiya was writing down in her notebooks, Vinai became an enthusiastic partner in her work. When her Dyalo became conversational, Martiya would interview the women privately about those things which they will not discuss freely in front of men; and he would talk to the men. At night, they would compare their findings.

When Martiya was ready to go home, she took Khun Vinai aside. She said, "Vinai, you did half of the work up here, I think you should take half of the leftover grant money." At first he refused. But Martiya insisted. "She takes a fifty-baht bill, lights a match, and burns the money," he said. "She is about to burn another bill, when I say okay. I take the money. It is almost twenty-five hundred dollars. That's how I start Hiker Hut."

Khun Vinai took the pipe from the Opium Man, inhaled, and passed the pipe back. "I owe Martiya everything," he said. "I always tell people that without Martiya, I probably am dead."

Martiya went home to California, then came back to Thailand. Over the next decade, Martiya and Khun Vinai saw each other frequently. They developed a friendship. When Khun Vinai married, Martiya was present at the wedding feast. Khun Vinai recalled Martiya dancing all night around the bonfire, and then in the morning, because Khun Vinai had no close female relatives in Thailand, he had invited Martiya to participate in the ritual kidnapping of the bride from her family's hut. This Martiya had done with great style, shrieking like a real Dyalo woman as she grabbed Sang-Duan from her bed. Then, when Sang-Duan gave birth to Khun Vinai's first child, a lovely girl, Martiya had been present also at the soul-gathering ceremony, where the child's souls were bound up in her body on the twelfth day of life. It was Martiya who accidentally gave the girl her nickname, when she remarked, innocent of yet another Dyalo taboo, that the girl had kissable lips. Sang-Duan's mother had been horrified by the remark, but Vinai thought Martiya's gaffe hysterical, and the name stuck: the girl was Kiss-My-Lips. A few years later, Khun Vinai's first son was born, and a few years after that, another girl, and Martiya helped gather up the souls of those children as well.

Khun Vinai paused as we exchanged places. I took up his place in front of the Opium Man, and he took mine, on the floor. The Opium Man set to work preparing my pipe, kneading the black bead of opium between his fingers, melting it over the open flame, then kneading it again. He was a perfectionist. The door of the hut was open, and by the bright light of a full moon I could see the valley in the distance, and silhouettes of palms. I heard the wind passing lightly over the rice fields.

Khun Vinai first met David Walker at the funeral of Sings Soft, the great poet and singer. People came from every village in northern Thailand and even beyond: nobody seemed to organize anything, but within three days of his death the village was flooded with newcomers, most of whom made camp on the far side of the village, not far from the Old Grandfather shrine. Even David was there. Only Martiya was missing, and Khun Vinai wondered where she might be: Martiya loved Sings Soft as much as anyone.

The funeral went on all day and all night, Khun Vinai said.

"We take a water buffalo, and we put a spear in his heart like this. And when he is dead, we pour water down his throat like this, so he make no sound. Because Sings Soft hates ugly sounds. And we say, ‘This is so our friend Sings Soft can eat in the Land of the Dead.' We say, ‘Sings Soft, you are dead. We don't want you anymore. Go to the Land of the Dead.'"

The villagers washed the water buffalo and covered it with rice from Sings Soft's fields. They made a feast, and all day long they ate and drank rice whiskey. Then, just as dusk was falling, they took a hawk which a young boy had caught in the forest, and released the bird. The bird flew away. The villagers said, "This is so all nine souls of our friend Sings Soft head straight to the Land of the Dead. Bird, take the souls of our friend Sings Soft with you."

All night long, the villagers drank and sang. Sings Soft had written marriage songs, death songs, funny songs, songs for boys who wanted girls, songs for girls who wanted boys, songs to accompany the hunt for wild pigs in the forest, songs for the harvest of rice—and after each song, someone would sigh softly and say something like, "I remember that song. It was when my youngest sister was married. She's gone to the spirits now, poor thing, but what a lovely song that was!" Then somebody else would sing another.

Then one man shouted, "David Walker, do you know any of the songs of Sings Soft?"

David stood up. He said, "My friends, I know no songs from Sings Soft."

"Then sit down," shouted one drunk man from Big Rock Village. Everyone laughed. "
I
know a song from Sings Soft," the drunk man said, and proceeded to sing one of Sings Soft's bawdier songs, the story of a young boy who fell in love with a pig.

Now a Dyalo funeral involves large quantities of rice whiskey and beer, and sometime after moonrise but well before the end of the party, Khun Vinai sat for a minute on one of the big rocks near Old Grandfather's shrine. He wondered just where Sings Soft's souls were at that very moment, whether they had already gone to the place where souls go, or whether they had lingered on to hear the beautiful things the people had to say. Khun Vinai had settled into his thoughts when he heard a rustling in the bush. When he looked up, Martiya was there.

"Martiya, my friend," he said. "Why aren't you at the soul-saying-goodbye ceremony of our friend?"

"I have been listening from behind Old Grandfather's shrine," Martiya said.

"But why haven't you come out into the open and sung a song for Old Grandfather?"

"Vinai, my friend, you don't know? I am not at the funeral because I have been seeing my
gin-kai
, and the villagers think that I am unclean."

Khun Vinai was shocked. "You have been seeing your
gin-kai
?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I couldn't stay away from him."

"Where did you see him?"

"In his fields. In his hut."

"But don't you know that—"

"Of course I know, Vinai. Lai-Ma told me that if my shadow falls on her fields, the harvest would fail. They're quite scared of me. Some of them wanted to kick me out of the village."

Khun Vinai didn't know what to say. He had heard stories of other women who had seen their
gin-kai
, but had never met one. He was frightened now to be on a lonely rock with Martiya. She saw the fear in his eyes and said, "Go back to the funeral."

Khun Vinai stood up to go. Then he did a very brave thing. He said, "Come to Hiker Hut soon," and Martiya promised that she would.

When Khun Vinai had returned to the funeral, the villagers were again demanding that David sing a song of Sings Soft, and David was saying all over again that he didn't know any. Then the shaman said, "Our friend Sings Soft was too happy to listen to a song, same as to sing one song himself. Sing a song now for his spirits, before he leaves us."

And the people said, "Yes, sing."

And David said, "This is a song of my ancestors for the dead." He sang: