"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.
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 mélange 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."