Fieldwork: A Novel by Mischa Berlinski Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    "Tell me," I finally said, the "tell me" an interrogatory trick—I was relying here on Barbara Walters's
How to Talk to Practically Anyone About Practically Anything
—to win my subject's trust. "Tell me," I repeated, making good focused Barbara-counseled eye contact, "how did you come to know Martiya?"
    Tim Blair looked at me severely for a second. I thought that perhaps I had mispronounced her name. He crossed his legs and cracked his knuckles. I had a small notebook balanced on my knee. "You know she voted for Nixon, don't you?" he said finally. "Christ, man, that blew me away."
    "Nixon?" I wasn't sure where all this was going, but I wrote "Nixon" in my notebook, and underlined it.
    "Twice."
    "Twice?"
    "She voted for the bastard
twice
."
    I added an exclamation mark after the word "Nixon."
    Tim continued, "Hell, she was just a shade shy of the goddamn John Birch Society. She said that her granddad was killed by Communists and she didn't want to see all of Southeast Asia red. She was the kind of kid who got pretty heated up about politics. We'd walk through campus and she just went after the peace protesters."
    He uncrossed his legs and leaned back into the sofa. "One time, I remember, we were in the Anthropology Department lounge and this guy was talking about the Montagnards in Vietnam, and he was running off at the mouth, attacking American policy, calling it genocide and all that. She went after him. ‘Why the hell do you think the Hmong are fighting
for us
?' she asked him. ‘Do you think they're stupid? Do you think they don't know what's in their best interests?' He just looked at her blankly, this guy, staring at this dark-haired girl, saying what you just did not say in the Anthropology Department at Berkeley in those days. She was vicious and smart, and that was sexy." Tim lingered on the word "sexy." "I was the idiot who was running off at the mouth. That's how I met her, that's when I fell for her.
Boom!
She never held it against me that I was an idiot. But she really believed what she was saying. She said that the first thing the Communists were going to do when they took over was to drag all the indigenous people down from their villages and put them on communal farms. Or shoot 'em. And it was true. It was the first thing they did."
    Tim continued without further prompting. I scribbled as quickly as I could. In college, Tim and Martiya were both anthropology majors. They were together, hardly a minute apart, most of their junior and senior years. Tim made clear that it was all a long time ago, and yet the memories of his time with Martiya were still charged, perhaps precisely because it
was
a long time ago and these were the memories of his youth. Every now and then I interrupted Tim, asking him for details about their time together, looking for something that would make Martiya come to life. But those novelistic touches were in his telling hazy and indistinct. For reasons Tim could not quite articulate, a course in the ethnology of southern India was a particularly romantic memory. They took a lot of naps on the college lawns, and when they woke up they spent long hours playing with her hair. "Being with Martiya, you got to realize that it was kind of like a ménage à trois. Her damned hair had a will of its own. One day it's flat and the next it's big, and everything about her changed, depending on the hair."
    "How