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
*I'm not making this stuff up. Really. See Otome Klein Hutheesing, Emerging Sexual Inequality Among the Lisu of Northern Thailand: The Waning of Dog and Elephant Repute (Leiden: Brill, 1990), pp. 147–53, for a discussion of what the author calls the "big phallus complex" among the Lisu, another of the northern Thai tribal peoples. I can confirm that it is, in fact, true about the size of the white man's penis.
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.
The shaman was a middle-aged man, slightly stooped, with a distinguished face that resembled nothing so much as a very tanned and Asiatic version of the picture of George Washington on the dollar bill. (Martiya was so struck by the likeness that she had shown a few of the villagers the dollar bill. She was startled to discover, as the Walkers had discovered, that the Dyalo, who had no tradition at all of portraiture, had tremendous trouble interpreting the engraved image. They looked at the bill with no greater level of comprehension than if she had written down the binomial formula, and when she asked them, "Isn't it strange how the shaman looks like the headman of my country?" the villagers looked at her in a way that made it clear the dollar bill wasn't the only thing that was weird. After all, the shaman was so much larger. But the resemblance was clearly there: the high forehead, that distinguished Virginia jaw, even the jowls.) She had seen the man just a few day before, in the communal kitchen: he had smiled at her in a friendly, dignified, presidential way, had asked Vinai what she was doing here, and then ambled off.