But most of all, Mr. Walker told me, Martiya asked about the dyal, the rice-planting ritual for which the Dyalo were named. Her interest in the dyal, Mr. Walker told me, was almost an obsession.
Mr. Walker stared at his Coke bottle. Now the rain was just a soft mist.
"So you see," he said, "that's why Norma never liked that woman."
I didn't see at all. "She didn't? Not even then?"
"No."
"Did she ever say anything about her? Was there ever an incident or anything? Or was it just a feeling on her part?"
Mr. Walker stayed quiet a little while. "When you live with a woman a long time, you get to know what she's thinking, and I've lived with Norma for a long time. I always tell the people, the bond between a man and a woman, I always say it's not just a transaction or a partnership or what have you, it's the basis of a Christian life. The love of man and wife, it's a reflection of God's love. That what I always say. But it's a strange thing, though, because the firmer the bond is, the more united a man is to his wife, the more fragile that bond becomes. Do you see what I'm trying to tell you, son?"
I nodded. "What did Mrs. Walker say about her?"
"Sometimes I'd invite Martiya to stay in Ruth-Marie's room, now that Ruth-Marie was out of the house, if Martiya stayed late talking and she didn't want to drive in the dark or go to a guest house. Norma didn't like that at all, she always thought that Martiya was maybe a little superior. You know women, son, they have their territories. I always tell the people …"
But Mr. Walker didn't tell me what he always told the people. He just stared at the flooded parking lot.
"Mr. Walker, I'm sorry, I don't understand," I said. "Why didn't Mrs. Walker like it when Martiya spent the night?"
"Well, Norma had her ideas. Martiya was a very attractive young woman, and you know women, Norma was very sensitive."
"Jealous?"
"You could say jealous. Son …"
He didn't finish the sentence. His voice was tight. I sought a way to phrase my awkward demand. Inspiration arrived: "Mr. Walker, did you sin with Martiya?"
Mr. Walker looked at me. I was afraid that he would say, "Son, that is absolutely none of your business." But he didn't. He just held his handsome moss-green eyes steady with mine until I blinked and looked away. He sat straight up and tall. Later, Rachel would ask me why he kept talking, and I told her that it was my impression that Mr. Walker was a man who loved honesty and hated evasion. He said, "David was a champion, too, you know, a great champion of the Lord, and he sinned also. I love Norma, you know that, son. I love Nomie more than words, but even a great champion sometimes sins."
It took me a moment to realize that he was talking about David, the biblical hero, and not his son.
I'll never know the details of Mr. Walker's sin. Perhaps in those long afternoons in Mr. Walker's study, with Norma out at the market, the kids at school, and his parents at the church, Mr. Walker laid a hand on Martiya's slender thigh. Perhaps she let it rest there; or perhaps she said, "Mr. Walker, you are a happily married man!" Or perhaps Mr. Walker's sin consisted only of desire. Whatever happened, it was too much for Norma.
Mr. Walker shook his head, but he kept looking straight at me. "But I've been punished for my sins, son, don't you ever think that I haven't been."
A trilling sound set Mr. Walker's hands into motion. He started tapping his breast pockets and his pants, until finally he produced the cell phone and began stabbing at it with his gnarled fingers, squinting anxiously at the display, muttering to himself. "Gift from the kids," he said, as the thing continued to sound. Finally, unable to find the correct button, he just handed the phone to me.
I pushed the appropriate button and said hello.
It was Norma on the other end of the line. She hardly seemed surprised to have called her husband and found me. "Oh, honey, what have you done with my husband?" she asked.
"He's right here," I said, and handed the phone to Mr. Walker.
The two of them conversed a moment in Dyalo, until Mr. Walker handed the phone back to me. "Is it done?" he asked.
I examined the display, confirmed that the line was cut, and returned the phone to its owner, who slipped it into the breast pocket of his shirt.
"I hate that thing," he said. "The kids told me that if I want to keep driving, I need a cell phone. For the emergencies. But they make the things so darn small—"
We had been talking now for almost an hour, and Mr. Walker began to gather his bags. By now, the waters had receded. Everything looked cool and clean and shiny.
Not long after Martiya returned to Berkeley, David Walker went to see Star Wars; not long after that, he went off to follow the Grateful Dead. When Martiya came back to Thailand, she didn't call on the Walkers; and northern Thailand is sufficiently large, and Martiya's village sufficiently remote, that they had no idea she was there at all. David came home in 1985, on fire to spread the Word. Three years later, he found Martiya in her village; and two years after that, he was dead.
Norma's call had broken Mr. Walker's patient mood of recollection. He took his groceries in hand and started off in the direction of his car. He had gone about two paces when he turned around.
"David was a good boy," he said. "Tell me what we ever did to her."
PART FOUR. POSSESSED
ONE. THE CURIOSITY
NOT LONG AFTER MY CONVERSATION with Mr. Walker, I had reason to visit the Chiang Mai University Library, on business not related to this account. I have always felt that university libraries must be some of the most erotic places on Earth. They are, after all, filled with young people, most of them attractive, and most of them bored out of their skulls. The Chiang Mai University Library is no exception, but it is an eroticism of a particularly sweet sort: a young girl with her long black hair pinned back in an elaborate bow looks up from a chemistry text and with an exasperated sigh pines for distracted Noi across the table. Will he invite her later for noodles? Outside the windows, the palm trees sway, and on the lawns little groups of students giggle. On the wall, the queen of Thailand, the patroness of learning herself, smiles serenely: she, too, was young once, and remembers those precious first minutes at the Royal Palace all those years ago when she was introduced to a handsome young prince who hardly paid her any mind at all!
I finished my business after a few minutes, but something about the place made me reluctant to go straight home, and on a whim I went to the anthropology shelves. The ethnographies were organized geographically, and my eye wandered from continent to continent, from the ferocious Yanomano of the Amazon to the elegant, erudite Dogon of the Sahara to a slender volume explicating the life of a Sicilian village in the 1920s. Chinese villages lay side by side with the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest; Siberian shamans cohabitated with the Pygmies. I felt dizzy for a moment. Spend five minutes in the anthropology stacks of a major university library and gasp at the size of the world, the sheer wonder and diversity of its inhabitants! What sturdy, impressive men and women wrote those volumes! Before I had met Martiya, I had never thought of them at all. Each one had mastered an obscure language, submerged himself or herself in the foreign; those shelves were a testament to curiosity. Every book was the product of an obsession.
The library catalogued the works of Bronislaw Malinowski apart from those of his fellows, which, now that I think about it, is not wholly inappropriate: perhaps it was a kind of homage on some anonymous librarian's part. For it was with Malinowski that the art of ethnography began. I slipped his greatest and most famous work down from the shelves and began to read, surrounded by those sweetly courting undergraduates. And although what follows might seem another digression, it isn't: Malinowski's ghost was there in Dan Loi with Martiya van der Leun.