Fieldwork: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

lifestyle magazine, hired me as their critic: I was the car critic, although I did not even have a driver's license; I was the music critic, although I cannot carry a tune; and I was the men's bespoke suit critic, although I am a—but perhaps enough said.
    Our life was easy, calm, and cheap; we stayed the year in Chiang Mai, and I convinced Rachel to stay another. A new class of first-graders sat in the very small plastic desks and learned all about telling time. I wrote about the substantial advantages of double breasting and single piping. We got by.
    Then Josh told me about Martiya van der Leun and my soul, too, began to swing.
    Such is the power of a good story.
    My hotel in Bangkok was quiet owing to the celebration of the Queen's Birthday. A mimeographed note had been slipped under my door: "On Thursday Aug 12, Her Majesty Queen Sirikit is highly adored by all Thai citizens who splendidly celebrate her Birthday each year." As a result, the notice continued, not all of the hotel's normal services would be available: room service was closed; the hotel astrologer, normally on hand between two and five in the afternoon, would not be offering readings; and the Tivoli Café would not lay out the usual breakfast buffet of waffles and congee. Although the notice did not mention it, the operator who handled outgoing long-distance calls was also unavailable. This was a cause of some frustration to me, as I had decided when I left Josh to call Elena van der Leun, Martiya's aunt in Holland, that very evening and follow up on his story.
Executive
ran a true-crime piece almost every month, and I thought that if I could figure out who Martiya had killed, I could pitch the story while still in Bangkok. But every time I picked up the rotary phone that connected me with the old-fashioned hotel switchboard, the line rang endlessly, and I imagined the telephone operator slipping off hand in hand with the astrologer to lay a wreath of orchids at one of Bangkok's numerous royal shrines. I spent the evening in the hotel bar, watching an Elvis look-alike competition held in the queen's honor.
    The next morning, I got Martiya's aunt on the phone. It was the first of several conversations. Elena van der Leun spoke to me warily at first, her very excellent English cloaked in a sharp Dutch accent. She had a throaty old voice, cured by a lifetime of cigarettes, so that everything she said sounded a little like two pieces of sandpaper being rubbed together. She had plenty of time to linger by the phone and chat. There was only one ground rule for our conversations: Elena van der Leun told me that she did not know the details of her niece's crime, and she did not wish to speculate. This, of course, was what I most wanted to know. But, the crucial point aside, she was eager to talk.
    So much in Martiya's dramatic life, Elena insisted, could be explained by the simple fact that her parents were not happy together. "A child needs the happy family," Elena declared. "It is the base." But Martiya's base was unstable: her mother and father met and married impetuously before the war, passed difficult wars apart, and after the war were unable to recapture the intensity of emotion that had brought them together. When Martiya was born, in 1947, in a small village in the central highlands of Celebes, a large island in the Indonesian archipelago now called Sulawesi, both parents looked to the child to reinvigorate a dying marriage. The rainy season in central Sulawesi can last as long as six months, and all winter long the family was trapped together in a cottage on the edge of a great ebony forest. The family paid local villagers to haul their water and cut their cassava and taro. They bought rice at the market. Areta van der Leun read novels. Piers van der Leun kept busy with his tape recordings and verb charts and lexicons. Areta van der Leun paced the corners of the house wearing an old lava-lava. Martiya's base teetered and then toppled.
    The Dutch are