The rainy season tapered off and the cool season began: the cool season is northern Thailand's spring, and Chiang Mai was filled with flowers — glorious orange trumpet, which snaked along the garden wall, and aromatic hibiscus, a half-dozen varieties of lily, and everywhere delicate golden lantana, tender clumps of brilliant red and orange, climbing up telephone poles and sprouting miraculously in the sewage-occluded gutters. Rachel wore frangipani in her hair, until told that in Thailand that flower was reserved for mourning. Then for about two weeks in early December, the city was overwhelmed by butterflies taking advantage of the brief interval between the pounding rain of the monsoon and the punishing sun of the hot season to mate and die.
But Josh's vivid description of Martiya, the idea of a murdering anthropologist carefully constructing field notes while in a Thai prison, and the only white woman who could rightfully call herself topo'uma— all these lingered with me. On Friday afternoons, I picked Rachel up at school with the motorcycle. School let out at half past two; the last lingering thunderstorms of the monsoon broke at three; and by four the roads were dry enough to drive. We'd head out into the hills. We took the ring road past the fast-food restaurants and the large open lots where vendors sold spirit houses and giant bronze Buddhas; past Carrefour, the mammoth French hypermarché; past one mall, then the other. Then, just at the edge of the first rice paddies, we passed the prison where Josh had met Martiya and Martiya had died. Seeing the squat building with the limp, rain-drenched Thai flag inspired in me an indistinct sense of guilt, like the time my grandmother gave me an amaryllis that I forgot to water.
In December, Rachel and I went back to her family's house in Seattle for Christmas. Her whole family was there, all of her sisters, and the twins. Every day it rained, except for the day it hailed, and the sky lay close to the ground like a coffin lid. Rachel's father took me aside to ask, man to man, when I was going to get a real job. Martiya's story gave me an excuse to escape. Just after the New Year, I flew down to California.
Piers van der Leun today can be found on the twelfth floor of Dwinelle Hall of the University of California at Berkeley, where he stands guard in the early mornings, surrounded by the other linguists emeriti who have their photographs on the wall outside of the secretary's office. All the dead linguists gather here in the early mornings to smoke their pipes and drink honeyed tea and babble in all the world's languages. One mentions reciprocal constructions in Bantu, and another replies that a similar grammatical structure is found, oddly enough, in Ojibwe. Their incorporeal forms drift down the hallway and settle in the department lounge, where the former authority on the phonology of the Indo-Turkic languages laments the difficulty of returning to his fieldwork. All the ghosts nod companionably: they know how difficult it is to discipline oneself in the afterlife, now that time is no longer an issue and tenure guaranteed. The recently arrived specialist in computational linguistics spills his coffee, and when the graduate students, caught in their own particular netherworld between life and death, arrive later in the day, they find the dark puddle and wonder who might have made such a mess.
Piers and Martiya van der Leun left Sulawesi in 1954, and Piers spent the remainder of his career at Berkeley. I learned this from Piers's obituary, published in the Daily Californian, May 1987. The van der Leuns lived in a Craftsman house on elm-shaded Etna Street. Piers continued his research, returning every other year to Indonesia, but passed most of his days on the twelfth floor of Dwinelle Hall, revising his verb tables and refining his lexicon. The lexicon was published in 1967, and was praised by a reviewer in the Bulletin of Oriental Linguistics as a "significant step forward in Australasian linguistics." From his old office, one can see the Bay Bridge and San Francisco; a bay view was a mark of status and distinction within the department.
I visited the former chairman of the department of linguistics, who, despite advanced age, still kept office hours. He greeted me with a strange exuberance when I knocked on his door, and I had the impression that very few people visited him between two and four on Wednesdays. He had bulging black eyes. He recalled Piers van der Leun and Martiya, but I began to doubt the quality (if not the quantity) of his memories when he referred to Piers as an Indo-Europeanist, and Swiss. If the former chairman's other recollections are accurate, Piers played tennis quite a bit and introduced Martiya to the game. The university in the 1950s, the former chairman digressed, was an entirely different place from the university today: young ladies wore tennis skirts and young men dressed neatly, often with a tie, carrying their tennis rackets over their shoulders as they left the fraternity house, but of course wearing white shorts on the courts as university regulations demanded. Occasionally, someone might show up in class still wearing tennis clothes. This was frowned upon, but nobody saw the need officially to forbid the act.
A long silence passed, which I assumed the former chairman spent in the organization of his unruly memories. I glanced around his office. One wall was covered in books, another in photographs, many of them showing the chairman shaking the hands of famous people — I would have asked the chairman how he came to meet both Ronald Reagan and Frank Sinatra, but I was afraid that he would have no more idea than I did.
Martiya perhaps attended the local junior high school, then Berkeley High School, then might have matriculated at the university. The former chairman had remarkable tufts of hair protruding from his magisterial, elephantine ears. He suggested I speak with his daughter, "my oldest girl," who had known Martiya slightly better, the two having graduated hypothetically in the same class at high school. The former chairman asked me which university I was associated with, and looked at me blankly when I explained that I was interested in the life of Martiya van der Leun. "Ah, yes," he said finally. "Wasn't she old Piers van der Leun's daughter?" When I said goodbye, he wished me luck on my grant application. A quick Internet search revealed that the former chairman had a linguist's mastery of the grammars of all the Indo-European languages, and had published new results within the last year.
The chairman's daughter lived in Boston. When I got her on the phone, she confirmed the general outlines of Martiya's career — it is amazing the things people will tell a polite stranger — and then said something about it being the crazy time of the year, with the holidays and all. Martiya's name came brightly to her lips, as if Martiya had been one of those high school personalities it is impossible to forget. Every high school has one. Martiya had indeed graduated in her class at Berkeley High and then matriculated at UC Berkeley. A cell phone was ringing in the background, and I could hear a small child crying. "I've got to run," she said. She took my e-mail address and, to my surprise, wrote me the next day, just a few lines suggesting that I speak with Martiya's college boyfriend Tim Blair, today a professor of English at San Francisco State University.
A lot of journalism is like this: I felt a little like the baton in a relay race of faulty memories and distant recollections. But Tim Blair remembered Martiya very, very well. I could sense it even over the telephone. "Holy shit," he murmured when I told him that Martiya was dead, a suicide in a Thai jail. He invited me to coffee at his house on Potrero Hill.
Tim Blair and I sat in his book-lined study. There were rectangular piles of handwritten papers on the floor around his desk ("Don't mind my ball and chain," he said, gesturing at the papers ruefully. "I'll get this thing out of here one of these days") and photographs of his sons on the wall. Tim Blair settled himself onto a leather couch covered with an afghan, and I was assigned to an easy chair. He stroked his silver beard slowly; his mustache dangled across his upper lip. He was one of those men with a well-formed skull suited to baldness, the kind of skull that under exceedingly different circumstances might have made an excellent calabash, smoothly rounded and long in the forehead with a deep bowl sufficient for a good many draughts of palm wine. There was something just a little aggressive about Tim Blair and the way he hunched his elbows on his knees. He chewed his pink lower lip.