Mischa Berlinski: Fieldwork

"She was the last one to come into the room," Josh said. "I knew her from the photo — but she looked bad. I think she must have been in her middle fifties — she was my mom's age. But this was an old woman."

Many years in the northern Thai sun had destroyed that delicate skin which Josh had admired in the picture. The dark hair had turned gray, and the once-sensual lips were cracked and thin. Yet the woman who approached Josh still had the faraway air of a handsome woman. She was not dressed in prison pajamas, like the others, but in a hand-woven tunic in the tribal style. She had white string tied tightly around each of her wrists; this was her only ornamentation. Martiya carried herself straight-backed and head-high. Josh had not expected such a small woman.

Seeing Josh, and realizing quickly that he was the anonymous stranger who had summoned her from her cell, Martiya came over and sat down, not waiting for an invitation. Had he doubted the woman's identity, her eyes would have resolved all doubts: How many women in a prison in northern Thailand could have had such striking blue eyes? She glowered at Josh, and Josh for once was at a loss for words under her intense stare.

"Ms. van der Leun …" he finally said.

The woman interrupted him straightaway. She spoke very slowly. " Christ , can't you people just leave me alone?"

Josh had prepared for this interview carefully, but this was not a reaction he had anticipated. He said, "Ms. van der Leun, I think you might have made a mistake."

Again, Martiya interrupted him. "I'm not the one who might have made the mistake here, buddy. You people are driving me nuts." She looked at Josh with open contempt. She took in his large body, his damp shirt, his uncombed hair. "My God, you are disgusting," she said.

Josh looked at me. "I had figured she might have gone a little, you know, cuckoo, from her time in prison, or maybe she'd beg and plead with me to take her home. I'd already decided how to handle that. I was going to be gentle but firm, and give her the name of a friend of mine who's a lawyer. But the way this woman was staring at me, I was pretty glad there was a table between us."

To Martiya, he said, "I'm sorry, but just who do you think I am?"

" They sent you, didn't they?"

"They?"

"You're not a missionary?"

Josh was not without a certain sense of irony, and suddenly the tension of the visit, the heat of the day, and now this furious but intensely proud little woman all seemed to him absurd. He began to laugh. He couldn't help himself, he told me.

"Oh no," Josh said. "You got it all wrong, sister. I'm here to give you money."

He said this with such enthusiasm that Martiya smiled back, despite herself. She ran a hand through her gray hair. The fight left her. In a mildly embarrassed voice, she explained to Josh the source of her confusion. One of the evangelical societies working in the north of Thailand had conceived the project of converting the prisoners to Christianity. Who needed the Lord's blessing more? Twice a year, every year for the last ten years, she had been summoned to the visiting room, only to find the same bearded, middle-aged man—"the same bozo," she said— informing her that the Lord had forgiven her for her crimes and sins, if only she would accept Him. She had asked the missionaries to leave her alone, she said, but they were relentless. "I thought you were one of them ."

Josh shook his head. "No," he said.

He had decided beforehand to be direct. He told her that her aunt, Elena van der Leun, had hired him, and that her uncle had died. Martiya had inherited some money, Josh said, and he was there to arrange the details of the bequest.

Martiya was silent for a minute. She looked around the room. "I haven't seen Uncle Otto since I was nine years old," she said. "He knew how to ride a horse. He was a wonderful horseman. He promised he'd buy me a horse when I was twelve. I guess he just did."

Martiya sat quietly for a long while. She picked idly at the string tied around her right wrist. Then she spoke. The vast bulk of the money— not much by occidental standards, a small fortune in a Thai prison — was to be given to a charity which aided the hill tribes, the rest deposited in her prison bank account. Then, with all the authority of a corporate executive late for a tee time, rather than a prisoner condemned to life, Martiya rose from her seat and extended her hand. The appointment was over.

Josh had one last thought. "Would you like me to call your lawyer?" he asked. "Money can change a lot of things here. Maybe he can …"

Martiya smiled at Josh. "I can't leave now. I'm only beginning to understand how it really works around here. And where would I go?"

She thanked Josh for his time and walked back through the metal door into the dark prison hallway.

"It's a true story," Josh said. "It happened just like that."

By now, the sidewalk where we were eating was full. All of the tables had been taken, families eating together. A tuk-tuk painted with a picture of an elephant passed on the street, then another with a picture of a blue-skinned Hindu god. A pineapple vendor strolled by absentmindedly, leaving behind him a dark trail of melting ice, the bell on his little cart ringing out a cheerful tune. A few old ladies sat on the stoop, chewing betel and spitting black on the sidewalk, and inside one of the Chinese shop-houses, I could see a half dozen young men in tank tops working late, stripping down motorcycle engines.

The prime minister's nephew had been right: the meal was spectacular. Josh had ordered thin delicate noodles for us, which came to the table draped in a sweet peanut sauce, and a steaming yellow crab curry with saffron. We had clams stir-fried with the tiny roasted chilies the Thais call "rat-shit peppers." We ate until we thought we would burst. Then an enormous whole fish arrived at the table, bathed in a caramelized orange sauce. I groaned, but when Josh flaked the fish off the bone with a surprisingly dexterous motion of his plump wrist and feathered it onto my plate, I ate the fish too. "Here, you've got to have the cheek, it's the best part," Josh said.

I wanted to know why Josh had told me this story, but he was incapable of conversing and eating at the same time. Only when he had scraped the last grain of rice off of his plate, sighed contentedly, and re-filled his glass did his attention return to the interrupted narrative.

His work at the prison completed, Josh returned to Bangkok by the night train. He wrote the family in Holland, and made the appropriate arrangements for the dispersal of the inheritance according to Martiya's wishes. He had done his job.

"But I couldn't stop thinking about her," Josh said. "So I did some looking around. I went to the library and looked through back issues of the Bangkok Times . I couldn't find anything. I thought about her all the time."

Josh told me that Martiya remained on his mind for almost a month after his visit to Chiang Mai. Then slowly, his visit to Chiang Mai Central Prison was assimilated into his stock of drinking stories. He regularly won a healthy round of laughter as he recounted her saying, "My God, you are disgusting." I had laughed at that point in his recital also. It was hard to imagine that anyone could confuse Josh with a missionary. That he knew so little of this wry old murderess only added to the drama of the tale.

Then Martiya came back into his life.

Almost a year after his visit to the Chiang Mai prison, Josh received another call from Wim at the Dutch embassy. Now the story was approaching the present time: this was only several weeks before our dinner. A package had arrived for him at the embassy; the return address, in neat Thai lettering, M. van der Leun, c/o Chiang Mai Central Prison, etc. Josh asked Wim to send it over. He supposed it was something to do with the inheritance. But when the envelope arrived, it was larger than Josh had expected. He opened the package cautiously and found two small manuscripts, each about fifty handwritten pages, densely covered on both sides of the page. The manuscripts had been bound with white twine. The first one was entitled "Notes Toward a Political Anthropology of Prison Life in Northern Thailand"; the second, "The Economic Organization of a Thai Women's Prison."