Mischa Berlinski - Fieldwork

"A terrible thing!" he repeated. "We have some records, some documents, from the last time the bamboo flowered. But this time it will be much worse. When the bamboo flowers, it happens all at once, and everywhere that there is Bambusa vulgaris will drown in bamboo flowers. What do they look like? What do they smell like? No one knows. One thing we do know. The rats will love them. The bamboo flowers in the hot season, when everything else is dying and BOOM! the rats will eat like the pigs, they will gorge themselves, they will stuff themselves, and then they will reproduce, because that is what rats do when they are full. And when the rats reproduce and reproduce and reproduce — it means famine . And of course, nobody is prepared."

Gilles shook his head at the improvident nature of his fellow man. His lecture on bamboo ended abruptly, and Gilles took me inside the house, where he would, he said, make me a tisane from things grown right in his own garden. Such a tisane , he promised, would increase my mental acuity, which I suppose he found lacking.

Silk curtains held back the late afternoon sun, leaving the sala bathed in mustard-yellow shadows. Above us, a row of winged angels met in intricate aerial embraces, the delicate little things unmindful of the heavy wooden beam across their backs. All his life Gilles had traveled — there is, after all, no wild bamboo in France — and from every corner of the bamboo-occupied globe had acquired pretty things: Javanese batiks hung low across the teak walls, fresh roses were haphazardly arranged in a vase which Gilles explained was once the spirit urn of a little-known tribe in northern Côte d'Ivoire who lived surrounded by the most merveilleux bamboo groves in all West Africa. We sat crosslegged on the floor around a low wooden table drinking Gilles's bitter tisane from celadon mugs. I was feeling sharper already.

Every time Gilles said the word "bamboo," his tongue flickered out from his mouth very slightly, and Gilles said the word "bamboo" very often. He was nevertheless a handsome man, all the charm in his face centered in his melancholy, sympathetic eyes. His hair was high and receded, and he had the first hints of long descending jowls. It was fully a man's face, and again I could imagine the appeal to Martiya of this worldly character when she first met him at a lecture he gave to the American University Alumni Association on, of course, the mating habits of bamboo. It was 1984 and Martiya was thirty-seven years old, Gilles perhaps ten years her elder.

The relationship proceeded with all of the amatory languor of Dendrocalamus strictus ; yet by Gilles's description it was nevertheless a warm and tender affair. Gilles in those days drove a motorcycle, and every weekend he rode up to Dan Loi. He spent hours telling her more than I suspect she wanted to hear about the bamboo, but she reciprocated by insisting that he master the intricate details of the Dyalo rice-planting cycle. It was from Gilles that I would later learn how the dyal worked.

Every year at the start of the monsoon, Gilles returned to France for a month, to visit his aging parents and his son, and it was his practice to come back to Thailand with several cases of wine. It was, he said, the one thing from France that he missed while living in Asia. "And the cheese," he added, after a moment's thought, and had I not pressed him to continue his story, I think that list might have gone on. Gilles was not a great connoisseur, but it gave his methodical, scientific nature pleasure to record when each bottle was drunk, and under what circumstances. This was the closest that Gilles had to a diary. In anticipation of my visit, he had pulled down his wine logs from his years with Martiya.

The first night that Gilles met Martiya, he wrote: " 15 March 1984 . Sancerre. Chiang Mai. With Martiya van der Leun, anthropologist." By the fall, Martiya had become "M," as in: " 21 September 1984 . Bordeaux Blanc. Chiang Mai. With M. to celebrate my new motorbike." The wine diaries were an odd, unwitting witness to the rhythms of Dyalo life. Martiya and Gilles toasted the Dyalo new year together every February: " 15 February 1985 . Champagne. Dan Loi. With M. Dyalo new year. Banging on drums." All through February and April, the Dyalo slashed the jungle and burned fields to prepare them for planting; when the fields were ready for planting, the village held the first of the dyal feasts: " 17 April 1985 . Macon Villages. Dan Loi. With M & George Washington, start of rice planting season."

"Why didn't George Washington make dyal ?" I asked.

"The shaman never makes dyal , of course," Gilles said. "How would that be, if the shaman made dyal ?" Gilles shook his head and pointedly refilled my cup of tea.

All through the rainy season, the Dyalo weeded the rice fields, and occasionally Gilles, who liked digging in the dirt, would go out to help. He'd return in the late afternoon, covered in sweat: " 17 May 1985 . Very cold Sancerre Blanc. Dan Loi. With M, chicken curry, spent day working in fields." One night in June 1986, the headman shot a wild boar and gave a portion to Martiya; it was stewed and accompanied by a Burgundy. Every year, with the first mangoes in spring, Gilles opened a Sauternes. When Gilles found the house in which he anticipated taking his retraite , the couple drank a Muscat. By September, the maize was harvested ( " 16 September 1986 . Bordeaux Blanc. Dan Loi. With M, corn chowder, new corn" ), shortly thereafter the rice ( " 12 October 1987 . St. Julien. Dan Loi. With M. Rice harvest" ), and in December, the opium harvest coincided with the birthday of the king of Thailand: " 18 December 1985 . St. Julien. Dan Loi. With M. King's Birthday." They drank a Graves on 18 December 1986, for the same occasion, and a St. Estephe in December, 1987.

The wine log went on and on: a bottle of wine once a week and a man with whom she might share the ordinary pleasures of life — that seems to have been Martiya's relationship with Gilles. It was a relationship of opposites: Gilles was methodical whereas Martiya was impulsive, an excess of phlegm balanced against an excess of choler. It wasn't bad. Toward the end of the affair, Gilles told me, he had begun to consider marriage. But it wasn't meant to be: the last bottle the couple drank together was just before the start of the planting season, April 1987. Gilles was headed back home for a month with his aged parents. They drank a Côtes du Rhône.

The room in which I sat with Gilles was not the perfect rectangle it seemed: the northern wall was a few inches longer than the southern wall. It was a distortion, Gilles explained to me, that was not visible to the naked eye, but once Gilles had pointed it out, the room did appear very slightly wider at one end than the other. The room seemed to pulse slightly and breathe, as if the eye longed to correct the very slight imbalance in the proportions. The effect was, as Gilles had said, immensely calming.

On a low wooden table near the door, there was a photo of a handsome young woman with auburn hair. I would have imagined that she was Gilles's daughter, but Gilles had earlier mentioned that he had only a son, a banker in Paris, so I ventured a guess that it was Gilles's wife. Gilles confirmed my suspicion: Vivian was in Hanoi covering a conference of Asian-Pacific leaders.

The brief discussion of Vivian's career brought us back to Martiya.

"Was she ever lonely?" I asked.

He shook his head. "She was a very self-sufficient woman, the most self-sufficient woman I've ever met. She could go weeks and months in the village and be very happy. I cannot do that. I need to talk to people, to tell stories. But Martiya was fine by herself."