Fieldwork: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

widely known for their linguistic gifts, but Piers van der Leun was extraordinary even by Dutch standards. Piers spent a summer in Sweden as a young child, Elena recalled, and came back speaking perfect Swedish. "My brother could look at the map of Kenya and speak Swahili," Elena said. He was educated as a linguist at the University of Leiden, and then, like many young Dutch men of his generation, joined the colonial administration in Indonesia. The colonial government in Jakarta took care to survey and record all of the minor languages of their vast holdings, on the sound principle that even the smallest ethnic rivalry can easily flare up into a matter of sufficient gravity to involve the local government: on joining the colonial service, Piers, at his own request, was given the task of mastering the half dozen tribal languages known collectively as the Uma, spoken in the southern portion of Kulawi District of the island of Sulawesi, not far from the mighty Lariang River.
    The languages were fiendishly difficult, and mastering them required all of Piers's gifts: they were beautiful subtle things, which he pieced together preposition by preposition, verb by verb. In the hut which the colonial administrator provided him, he kept enormous tables of nouns, pronouns, and a provisional grammar. He invented an alphabet, and in a shorthand of his own devising transcribed hours of their speech. The loneliness of the jungle suited him: he sent back to Holland rhapsodic letters describing the exoticism of the native customs, and the ecstasy of their shamanic visions. When the old newspapers from Amsterdam finally arrived by post and Piers read accounts of Europe tottering on the brink of another war, he thought of his gentle tribesmen and the beautiful languages in which they conducted endless philosophical debates, and he would smoke his pipe and write a long letter to his sister. In one letter, he wrote, "I am where I want to be. How many men can say that?"
    Elena van der Leun later sent me photographs of Piers taken when he was in his early thirties, some time before he met Areta, well before the war. Piers is standing in what I took to be the jungle, a tall man stooped beside a tree dripping with vines. He has a pipe in his mouth, and a wisp of smoke is visible beside his ear. He has a handsome, round face. His eyes are gentle but weak. If this description is vague, so was the face: it is the face of a smiling man with a calm and easy interior life, a man who cannot even
imagine
a woman who simply will not stop crying. Not long after the picture was taken, Piers van der Leun's uncomplicated life as a bachelor scholar came to an end. Even in the most remote corner of Kulawi District, one cannot escape the world.
    In the fall of 1938, Piers was invited to a general colloquium on the Australasian languages at the University of Jakarta. The field of ethnolinguistics was in its infancy, and every man at the conference table felt himself a pioneer. Piers presented a paper on the language of the Tobaku villagers, and argued that similarities between the language of the Tobaku and the language of the Pipikoro implied a common ancestral tongue. His work was received enthusiastically, and after the presentation he found himself in long conversation with a Malaysian linguist, one of the few Asians at the conference, who was fascinated by Piers's methodology. Eleven months later, Piers married the Malaysian linguist's eldest daughter.
    "I only met her after the war, and of course she looked so tired," recalled Elena van der Leun. "Her hair was gray already and she was too thin. But she must have been a lovely little thing before the war. It was possible to see that, even after what she had gone through. Piers wrote me letters about her and I could imagine the silk black hair and the delicate features and the white skin—Martiya had her mother's skin. She had very large round eyes, particularly for an Oriental. I think somewhere in her past