Kitabı oxu: «Map of the Invisible World»
TASH AW
Map of the Invisible World
Dedication
For my sisters LL and SL
Epigraph
Did I not once upon a time have a lovable childhood, heroic and fabulous, to be written on leaves of gold, an excess of good fortune?
RIMBAUD, Matin
His voice lasted just a few moments. A fleeting tremor, never to be repeated.
PRAMOEDYA ANANTA TOER, ‘Yang Sudah Hilang’
‘My dreams are like other people’s waking hours…My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap.’
BORGES, ‘Funes, His Memory’
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Tash Aw
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
When it finally happened, there was no violence, hardly any drama. It was over very quickly, and then Adam found himself alone once more. Hiding in the deep shade of the bushes, this is what he saw.
The soldiers jumped from the truck on to the sandy soil. They dusted themselves off, straightening their hitched-up trouser legs and tucking their shirts into their waistbands. Their long sleeves were rolled up thickly above their elbows and made their arms look skinny and frail, and the belts they wore were so wide they seemed to stretch their waists to their chests. They laughed and joked and aimed pretend-kicks at one another. Their boots were too big and when they ran they looked like clowns. They were just kids, Adam thought, just like me, only with guns.
They hesitated as they approached the steps going up to the veranda, talking among themselves. They were too far away; he couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then two of them went up to the house and when they emerged they had Karl with them. He was not handcuffed; he followed them slowly, walking to the truck with his uneven gait before climbing up and disappearing under the tarpaulin canopy. From a distance he looked small, just like them, just like a child too, only with fair hair and pink skin.
Stop. Adam wanted to call out, to scream for Karl to come back. Don’t leave, he wanted to shout. But he remained silent and unmoving, shrouded by the dense thorny foliage. He could do this now: he held his breath and counted slowly from one to ten. A long time ago, he had learnt this way of controlling his fear.
The truck reversed and then drew away sharply, kicking up a cloud of sand and dust; on its side there was a crude chalk drawing of a penis next to the words YOUR MOTHER—. Overhead the skies were rich and low and black, pregnant with moisture. It had been like this for some days; it had not rained in a long time, but now there was a storm coming. Everyone wanted rain.
In truth it did not surprise Adam that the soldiers had come. All month there had been signs hinting at some impending disaster, but only he seemed to see them. For weeks beforehand the seas had been rough, the ground trembling with just the slightest suggestion of an earthquake. One night Adam was awakened from his sleep by such a tremor, and when he went to the door and looked outside the coconut trees were swaying sinuously even though there was no wind; the ground felt uncertain beneath his feet and for a while he could not be sure that it wasn’t he who was swaying rather than the trees. The ginger-and-white cat that spent its days bounding across the grass roof in search of mice and lizards began to creep slowly along, as if suddenly it had become old and unsteady, until one morning Adam found it dead on the sand, its neck twisted awkwardly at an angle, its face looking up towards the sky.
Then there was the incident in town. An old man had cycled from his village in the hills, looking to buy some rice from the Chinese merchant. He’d just come back from the Hajj, he said; the pilgrimage is an honour but it isn’t cheap. The crops had not been good all year; the dry season had been too long, and now there was no food left. He asked for credit, but the merchant refused point-blank. Last year there was a plague of rats, he said, this year there is a drought. Next year there will be an earthquake and the year after there will be floods. There is always something on this shit-hole of an island. No one has any money, everyone in town will tell you the same thing. Prices are high, but it’s no one’s fault: if you don’t have cash there’s nothing anyone can do for you. So the old man went to the pawnshop with his wife’s ring, a small gemstone that might have been amber, set in a thin band of silver. The Chinese pawnbroker peered at it through an eyeglass for a few seconds before handing it back. A fake, he said, shrugging, a cheap fake. An argument ensued, a scuffle; insults of a personal, and no doubt racial, nature were exchanged. Later that evening, when the hot heavy night had descended, someone – it is not clear who – splashed kerosene on the doors of the pawnshop and took a match to it. The traditional wooden houses of this island (of which not many survive) burn easily, and within half an hour it was engulfed in flames. There were no survivors. The Chinese shops stayed closed for three days; no one could buy anything. Suddenly there were fist-fights all over town. Communists were arriving from the mainland to capitalise on the unrest, everyone said. Gangs of youths roamed the streets armed with machetes and daubing graffiti on houses. Commies DIE. Foreigners Chinese go to hel.
It was like an article from the newspapers played out for real, the static images rising from the newsprint and coming to life before Adam’s very eyes. The charred timber remains of burnt-out buildings, the blood-red paint on walls. The empty streets. Adam knew that there were troubles elsewhere in Indonesia. He had heard there was a revolution of some sort – not like the ones in France or Russia or China which he had read about, but something fuzzier and more indistinct, where no one was quite sure what needed to be overthrown, or what to be kept. But those were problems that belonged to Java and Sumatra – at the other end of this country of islands strung out across the sea like seaweed on the shore. That was what everyone thought. Only Adam knew that they were not safe.
Karl had refused to do anything. He did not once consider leaving.
‘But–’ Adam tried to protest. He read the newspapers and listened to the radio, and he knew that things were happening all across the archipelago.
‘Why should we?’
‘Because of your…because we are, I mean, you are different’. Even as he spoke he knew what the response would be.
‘I am as Indonesian as anyone else on this island. My passport says so. Skin colour has nothing to do with it, I’ve always told you that. And if the police come for me I’ll tell them the same thing. I have committed no crime; I’m just like everyone else.’
And so they had stayed. They had stayed, and the soldiers had come. Adam had been right all along; he knew the soldiers would come for them. He had imagined himself being in jail with Karl in Surabaya or somewhere else on the mainland, maybe even Jakarta, but now he was alone. It was the first time in his life he had been alone – the first time in this life at least.
He waited in the bushes long after the truck had gone. He didn’t know what he was waiting for but he waited anyway, squatting with his backside nearly touching the ground, his knees pulled up to his chin. When it was nearly dark and the sea breeze started up again he walked back to the house and sat on the veranda. He sat and he waited until it was properly night, until he could see nothing but the silhouettes of the trees against the deep blankness of the sea beyond, and he felt calmer.
Night falls quickly in these islands, and once it arrives you can see nothing. If you light a lamp it will illuminate a small space around you quite perfectly, but beyond this pool of watery brilliance there is nothing. The hills, the scrubby forests, rocky shoreline, the beaches of black sand – they become indistinguishable, they cease to exist as independent forms. And so, sitting motionless in the dark, only his shallow breaths reveal that Adam is still there, still waiting.
2
This is Adam. He came to live in this house when he was five years old. Now he is sixteen and he has no memory of his life before he came here.
Sometimes he wakes with a start – not from any nightmare, but from an uncomfortable sensation that he is staring into a huge empty space, something resembling a yawning bottomless well, and that he is engulfed by its vastness. It is at this point that he wakes up, for he cannot bear this great emptiness. Scenes of his childhood do not come back to him, not even when he closes his eyes and tries to recreate them in his mind’s eye. In those moments between awakeness and sleep, when he has laid his head on his pillow, he tries to let his mind drift, hoping that on this night his past life will finally burst through the cracks and fill his dreams like warm swirling floodwater, thick with memories. It never happens, though, and his nights are clear and completely dreamless.
Occasionally – very occasionally – he has glimpses of a single image, something that flickers dimly for a few seconds and then fades away again: black moss on a bare concrete wall, splinters of wood on the legs of a desk, the ceiling of a long dark room, a piece of canvas, a tabletop riddled with the pinpricks of wormholes that seem to form the very surface of the table so that when he runs his fingers over them he feels only holes, nothing solid. There are some noises too. Rain clattering on a zinc roof like nails in a giant tin can. And a curious sort of murmuring, a monotonous hum of low voices half-whispering, half-talking. All he can discern are the sibilant s’s or sometimes sh’s, like a chorus of hushing. These sounds take place in a big room, something like a dormitory, which, needless to say, Adam cannot visualise. And once in a while, when he is doing something perfectly ordinary – cycling into town or feeding the chickens or swimming over the reefs looking at the remains of the shipwrecks – a single word will light up brilliantly in his head, just for an instant, like a flashbulb. Shell. Easter. Snow. He will know, instantly, that this word has come from his past life in the orphanage.
But these fragments of words and images never mesh together to form anything bigger or more intricate; they remain bits of broken mosaic that mean very little now to Adam. There are never any people nor faces nor bodies, nor even animals in his memories, if you can call them memories.
There have been times in the past when this lack of recollection has been very frustrating for Adam. A few years ago, when his pubescent hormones made him angry and confused and a bit crazy, he wanted to find out about his birth family. He accused Karl of withholding information, of taking away his former life, of shielding him from the truth. Whenever visitors asked him what his name was he replied, ‘My name is Adam and I have no surname.’ At the time he enjoyed Karl’s silence and inability to respond; the smile on Karl’s face would set and he would not speak, and the guests would pretend to laugh, to find this funny. But Adam realises that he was wrong to have done that, and it is he who is embarrassed whenever he remembers this awkward period in his life. There were no secrets to be found out, he knows that now. Life had to be lived in the present, Adam had learnt.
And this is what he tells himself, sitting on the steps of the porch of this dark and newly lonely house. When he first came to this place he had to learn how to live in an alien environment. Now he must re-learn how to do so. Looking into the house, the inside of which seems strange and distant once more, Adam tries to remember his first days here, how Past detached itself from Present and very quickly ceased to be relevant. Ten, eleven years – it was not so long ago. If he could remember how it happened then, maybe he could replicate it.
The whole of Adam’s life began to take shape the day Karl brought him here from the orphanage. Images sharpened, smells became pungent, emotions articulated themselves and the murky darkness of his past began to recede, slowly, into the distance.
Like a pet in a new home, Adam did not venture far from his room for the first few days (much later, Karl would indeed liken Adam’s early appearance to that of a hatchling, or a newborn kitten, which Adam did not like, but only because he knew it was true). There was too much to take in, too much that was alien and unconnected with what he had known before. The continuous crackling of the wireless; the distant voices speaking in languages he did not understand. The colourful spines of enormous books. The bizarre gadgets scattered around the house (things which he would soon learn were entirely prosaic – a typewriter or a pair of binoculars – but which at that time seemed surreal, even threatening). And above all, this foreign man who walked with a slight limp and seemed as wary of Adam as Adam was of him. He did not dare come too close to Adam, and although he smiled in a gentle manner Adam sensed an awkwardness in his regard, almost as if he was scared of Adam. Three times a day he left Adam’s food for him on the table next to the bed. ‘Thank you, sir,’ Adam would say as the man retreated, leaving him alone to contemplate his new surroundings.
One day this man (who was called Karl, Adam learnt) hesitated as he placed Adam’s dinner on the little square table. The smell of peppery vegetable broth filled the room and made Adam feel hungry. Karl said, ‘Please don’t call me sir. Call me father.’ And he left the room, even more swiftly than usual, as if terrified of what he had just said.
Ridiculous, thought Adam. He could not think of this man as his father; he would not do so. He looked so strange, unlike anyone Adam had ever seen before – a character out of some far-fetched myth: fair hair that was almost the same colour as his skin, eyes of an indistinct hue (sometimes green, sometimes grey, always translucent, like a mineral brought to life), a nose that seemed unreasonably and bizarrely triangular and cheeks that had a pink blush to them.These were features born of a cold climate, Adam knew, even then. He dismissed the thought and began to eat. No, Karl was not his father.
For long stretches during those early days, Adam would sit cross-legged on his bed, his back resting against the wall, and listen to the unfamiliar noises of this new house: to Karl’s footsteps padding gently on the floorboards; to the sound of music coming from the living room (he could not remember ever having listened to music before – certainly not music like this, so dense and foreign his ears could not process it). He lay in bed and listened to the insistent mewing of the cat which sat watching him from the top of the cupboard; and he listened, above all, to the distant, hypnotic washing of the waves on the rocks that lulled him to sleep.
He understood why he was here. He understood, too, that he was one of the lucky ones. He had been taken away to start a better life here. But at this point in time he did not feel lucky, nor did he really know what a better life would entail.
As he drifted off to sleep he wondered if he missed the orphanage, and wondered if it was this that made him sad. But he experienced no nostalgia or longing; instead he found that his recollections of the orphanage were already thick and hazy, opaque in his mind’s eye. Lying in bed listening to the constant wash of the waves he began to realise that the sadness he felt would not last forever; it was a different kind of sadness from anything he might have experienced previously. Somehow, he knew that in this new house, with this frightened, frightening man, he could overcome these sensations of sorrow. He had much to fear in this new life, but fear was no longer something huge and undefined and terrifying. It was something he could master. He knew that now. And so he would fall asleep. He slept a lot during those first days.
Eventually he began to explore the house, timidly at first, venturing from his room only when he could hear that Karl had gone out. As his fear of the objects in the house subsided he began to pull books from the shelves and look at the pictures. He could not read (that would come soon afterwards) but he spent much time looking at pictures of lakes and forests that he knew were far away in cold countries, for the trees and hills did not look anything like the ones he saw around him. The fair-haired children in these pictures wore nice thick clothes and looked strong-boned and happy, unlike the children Adam had known, who had not been very happy. They had been skinny, like Adam himself, and constantly tired, and some of the smaller ones had distended stomachs even though they had nothing to eat. Maybe it was easy to be happy if you had nice clothes and food and parents, Adam thought; maybe it would be easy for him to be happy from now on. He liked these pictures because they made him feel that he was like these children and not like the ones in the orphanage. These healthy European children looked like immature versions of Karl, and as Adam watched Karl working in the yard outside, he could imagine Karl skating on frozen ponds or walking in pine forests; and Adam realised that Karl, too, was a long way from home.
Adam also found books with pictures of pictures – paintings of women who looked almost like local women, but not quite: they were fleshier and their eyes were brighter, not tinged with jaundice or cataracts. They wore flowers behind their ears and looked straight at Adam, as if questioning him: Where was he from? Was he one of them, or something else? He did not like these pictures so much.
Gradually he allowed Karl to read to him. They would sit on the narrow cane sofa in the last light of the afternoon, in the hour before dusk took hold of the island, and Karl would read magical stories from across the islands of Indonesia. Adam learnt about brave little Biwar who killed a terrifying dragon; about the ungrateful Si Tanggang, who left his fishing village and rose from humble roots (such as ours, Karl had said) to become rich and famous, and finally refused to acknowledge his poor mother; and about the beautiful Lara Djonggrang, turned to stone by the covetous Bandung after she had tricked her way out of marrying him. As Karl read these stories Adam would gaze out at the retreating tide; the waves were always flat at this hour, barely a ripple, and pools of calm water would begin to form in the recesses of the reef. He liked the stories – he can remember each one to this day – but most of all he wished that Karl would read him stories about those fair-skinned children who were full of laughter. In their world people were not turned into statues or animals, and night demons were not called upon to take sides in ancient feuds. It was safer over there, he thought.
But still, he was lucky to be where he was. He knew he should not ask for anything else.
Adam also discovered music, played on the record player which he soon learnt to operate. The small box was made of chocolate-brown wood on the outside, light-coloured wood on the inside, and Adam would lift its lid and select (purely at random) six records which he would stack carefully on the tiny mast that rose from the platter. Every piece of music made him realise how devoid of it his life had been before he came to this house. As he listened to a woman’s lilting voice or a jolly melody played by a trumpet, he tried to remember if the children at the orphanage had ever sung the folk tunes that Karl often hummed, but he could recall nothing: a blanket of silence would fall over his memories, and suddenly the landscape of his past would become still and colourless, as if mist had drifted in from the sea on one of those cool days after rain when you can see nothing, just the faint outline of trees here and there.
Sometimes Karl would put his arm around Adam and squeeze his shoulders – a brief, warm hug to praise him for having chosen the records and starting up the player; he would see the edges of Karl’s eyes pinched into fine wrinkles by a smile and he would feel better, as though he had done something good and new and surprising. He had never known that he was capable of causing happiness.
Adam cannot recall the precise moment when he began to think of Karl as his father and not as some alien with skin the colour of dry sand and freckles on his face and arms. But he suspects that it took him a mere few weeks to ease into his new world, one in which this white man was no longer a foreigner but someone who was always present, who made Adam feel that this place was safe and unchanging and unconnected to the past.
My name is Adam de Willigen, he would say to himself during those first months, for it comforted him to do so. He would repeat the words aloud because he loved the sound and the rhythm they created;he loved contorting his lips into unfamiliar shapes in order to say them. It soothed him to hear his own voice too, and gradually he stopped thinking about what his surname might once have been. Nowadays whenever he hears his name he thinks, Adam de Willigen sounds just right.
Goede avond, mijn naam is Adam de Willigen. You see? He can speak Dutch too. Only rudimentary expressions, however, because Karl is opposed to the speaking of Dutch in this house. He believes that it is the language of oppression and that Adam should not grow up absorbing the culture of the country that colonised his own. ‘We are independent now,’ he explained, ‘we need our own culture.’ English was their compromise – Karl deemed it ‘useful to know’ – and Adam had daily lessons in it. On the rare occasions they had European visitors, English was the lingua franca, and on these occasions Adam surprised himself by feeling quite at ease speaking the language. His fascination for Dutch, however, continued for a very long time, his curiosity made stronger by the fact that Karl resolutely refused to speak it. Once, they received unexpected visitors, a Dutch couple who were fleeing their home in Flores and trying to make their way back to Holland. They had heard of Karl and his house when they arrived on the island and knew they would find a safe place to stay for a few nights while they arranged their passage back to Jakarta and beyond. They arrived with a single suitcase, looking sunburnt and dusty. Karl welcomed them courteously and surrendered his own room to them, but for two whole days there was a strained silence, for the man spoke little Indonesian (he had learnt only the unhelpful dialect of the Ngada of Flores) and his wife could speak none at all, save a few words of instruction to the cook before mealtimes. When they spoke Dutch it thrilled Adam to hear the sound of the rich, rasping words, but Karl responded briskly in English or else ignored them altogether. So that’s what it sounds like, Adam thought, and all of a sudden the individual words and short phrases he had learnt from looking at the Dutch books on the shelves began to make sense. He was upset by Karl’s refusal to speak Dutch and by his refusal to be more hospitable. Adam did not understand why Karl could not be friends with these people, for they were just like Karl. In those days he did not yet understand that Home was not necessarily where you were born, or even where you grew up, but something else entirely, something fragile that could exist anywhere in the world. Back then Adam was merely angry with Karl because he did not understand this, and many other things.
The night before the couple left to take the ferry, Adam saw the woman sitting alone on her bed, folding clothes and arranging them into her open suitcase. She smiled when she saw Adam and said, ‘Come.’ Adam sat with her while she continued packing her belongings into the case. A pile of thin cotton shirts lay next to her, and Adam watched as she picked them up one by one and folded them carefully before rearranging them into the case. They were tiny, made for an infant, and decorated with pale pink-and-red flowers. She began to speak, very softly, in Dutch, even though Adam couldn’t respond. As she spoke Adam thought of those healthy blond children in the picture books; somehow he knew that she was speaking of children. When she finished she touched his cheek very lightly and stroked his hair. She said something and shook her head; her smile was weak. ‘No understand?’ she said in Indonesian. She was right, Adam could not understand. He said, ‘Onthaal aan mijn huis.’ He had seen the words in a book and thought that he knew roughly what it meant. She broke into a deep, warm laugh. ‘Thank you, Adam de Willigen,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘Thank you.’
These scenes from his Present Life are re-enacted in his mind’s eye whenever he wishes. He is able to recall them with absolute clarity, the details as sharp and true as the day he witnessed them; he enjoys the power he wields over these memories, his ability to control them and carry them with him wherever he goes, whether walking in the ricefields or swimming in the sea. Even now, as he walks in the dark from the porch to the bedroom (he does not have to put on any lights – he knows this house too well), he finds that every episode in his life in this single-storey cement-and-timber dwelling can be summoned at will.
From time to time he still attempts to conjure up something from his time at the orphanage, to piece together the fragments that float in his head; but nothing materialises and he feels immediately chastened – he should never have been so foolish. He knows that, however hard he tries, the first five years of his life will continue to elude him, that he should stop trying and simply let go. And yet, now and then, he cannot resist the temptation. It stays with him like a splinter embedded deep in his skin, which niggles him from time to time but is otherwise invisible, as if it does not exist at all. And when that tingle begins he has to reach for it and scratch it, even though it will unearth nothing. In moments of quiet and solitude, such as this – stretched out on his bed, alone and frightened – he will sometimes delve into that store of emptiness.
Why does he do it?
Because amidst the fogginess of his non-memory there is one lonely certainty, one person whom he knows did exist, and it is this that lures him back.
Adam had a brother. His name was Johan.
The only problem is that Adam cannot remember the slightest thing about him, not even his face.
3
‘This is just so depressing,’ Margaret said as she flicked aimlessly through the day’s edition of Harian Rakyat before letting it fall limply on her desk. Even with the louvred windows open, the room was hot and still; the ceiling fan raised just enough wind to ruffle the pages of the newspaper. The headline read, ‘STUDENTS REVOLTING IN CLASSROOMS.’
‘They’re always revolting,’ she added. She had hardly bothered to read the paper. It was too hot and the news was always the same.
Din put a can of Coke on her desk. ‘I didn’t know there were still any students in the classrooms.’ He picked up the newspaper and sat at his desk. ‘Have you read this? There was a fire in the Science block on Thursday. Arson, they think. Did you see anything? I didn’t, and I was here all day. Look, they caught the culprit – he looks like one of your students, though it’s difficult to tell. These mug shots all look the same to me. They’re always nice clean-looking boys from the provinces with glossy hair and pressed shirts.’
‘Either that or they’re dead and lying face down in a pool of their own blood surrounded by policemen, in which case they could be anyone. The police can kill anyone nowadays and we just say, “Hey, there’s a dead body,” without really knowing, or caring, who it was. It could have been one of mine. I’m surprised I haven’t lost any yet. One of them told me the other day that they were making Molotov cocktails in the labs, for chrissake. And you know what really got to me? Not that they were making bombs on campus, but that they thought I wouldn’t care, that I would sympathise. What on earth are we doing in this place? It’s just too depressing for words.’
But in fact Margaret was not depressed. She had never been depressed in her life, a fact with which she consoled herself now and then, whenever life seemed particularly unbearable. ‘Tribes in New Guinea do not suffer from depression, therefore I do not suffer from depression’ was what she repeated to herself whenever she felt she was collapsing under the hopelessness of the world. True, she did not often feel like this, but just sometimes she would feel weighed down by a profound lassitude, something that seized her and drained her of all energy and hope and desire. This usually happened in those dead hours between coming home and going out again for the evening, and on the few times she felt it coming on she thought, ‘Uh-oh, I have to do something about this.’ And lately these dips in morale were accompanied by a funny tightening of the chest that made it difficult to breathe – just for a few minutes, but long enough for her to have to sit down and catch her breath. Maybe it was the humidity, maybe she was turning into yet another pudgy old white woman who couldn’t take the heat; maybe it was age, god forbid. But eventually she would haul herself to the shower, and, feeling better, she would step out into the still-warm evening. No: what she felt now was not depression but something akin to boredom, though she was not bored either. She didn’t really know how she felt.
‘You’re always saying that,’ Din replied, not looking up from his paper. ‘So why don’t you get out of here? You at least have a choice.’
‘You mean, admit defeat? You know me better than that.’
‘I don’t really know you very well at all. And I’m serious: why don’t you leave?’ Din didn’t look up from the newspaper but continued to hold it up before him so that it shielded his face. The back page bore a picture of a badminton player, his thick black hair slicked back in imitation of American movie stars, his smile reflected on the swell of a polished trophy. The headline trumpeted: PRAISE GOD FOR THE THOMAS CUP. Margaret could not tell from his placid, monotonous voice what he truly meant. Only by watching for small signs like the faint narrowing at the very edges of his eyes (pleasure) or the slight indentation of his dimples (sarcasm or contempt) could she read what he meant.
‘For the same reason as you,’ she said. ‘The job here’s not finished. I can’t just abandon these kids.’
‘So you do sympathise with them.’
‘If that’s your way of asking if I’m a communist, you know what my answer is.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t intend any offence, and you know that I don’t care about politics. I’m just interested to know why you stay here instead of going home.’
‘The States? Boy, you know how to annoy me. I was conceived on one continent, born on another and raised on four – five if you count Australia. I lived in America for less than ten years, not even twenty-five per cent of my life. Would you call that home? Why don’t you go home? I’ve heard Medan isn’t so bad. Or you could go to Holland – again. They educated you, after all.’
Din lowered his newspaper and Margaret studied his face for clues. There was nothing for a while, and then a completely blank, unreadable smile. It was something she’d begun to notice only recently and it made her feel uncomfortable. Her ability to discern moods in other people was something else she was proud of. She had been doing it – and doing it well – ever since she could remember, before she could talk, even. She thought of the opening line of her (unfinished) doctoral thesis ‘Tchambuli: Kinship and Understanding in Northern Papua New Guinea’, which lay in a locked drawer just below her left knee. That line read, ‘It is the nonverbal communication between human beings that forms the basis of all society.’ She had always believed that people (well, she) could read things that remained unsaid, just like tribes in the jungle who had little need for sophisticated language. She had never before come across someone like Din. Sometimes she found him completely Western, other times utterly Indonesian, sometimes primitive. She thought again of her thesis, locked away together with her passport at the foot of her desk. She had not looked at either in such a long time.
‘I have no family left in Sumatra and my Dutch was never very good,’ he said at last.
Margaret stood up and made a cursory attempt to tidy her desk. ‘Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t know why I’m so crabby these days. It’s just so frustrating.’
‘What is?’
Margaret lifted her arms to gesture out of the windows, but then just shrugged, sighing. ‘Everything. You know what I mean.’
Din nodded. ‘I think I do.’
Margaret turned away from him and looked out the window across the low sprawl of grey buildings. Everything looked grey to her now in Jakarta. The new squat concrete shops, the flimsy wooden shanties, the six-lane highways, the dead water in the canals, the banners that were strung up everywhere across the city, whose whiteness dulled quickly from the dust and smoke and the exhaust fumes that choked the air. She did not know when she’d stopped noticing the colours and the details of Jakarta, or when this greyness had begun to form like cataracts that clouded her appreciation of the city. On the building across the concrete square hung painted banners that urged NO IMPERIALISM CRUSH MALAYSIA or FRIENDSHIP TO AFRICA or EVER ONWARD NO RETREAT IN THE NAME OF ALLAH. She felt a sudden surge of irritation: Why was it that everything in this city was written in capitals? Whenever she went to dinner at the Hotel Java the entire menu was in bold upper case, every item screaming its existence at her, insisting that she choose it and not something else, every dish jostling with its neighbour in a cacophony of advertisement. NORTH SUMATRAN FAVOURITE FROM BANDUNG EVER POPULAR DISH OF TORAJA KINGS. As if this assault were not enough, the prices too were announced in oversized numbers, though it wasn’t clear to Margaret if this was an advertisement of how low they were or yet another mild form of extortion, the like of which Margaret experienced every day. Maybe she could no longer deal with the noise and the crowds and the bullying and the corruption, and had, therefore, stopped wanting to see the city in detail; maybe this was why she had begun to see everything in terms of greyness. She mulled over the possibility of this sometimes when she picked unenthusiastically at a TYPICAL EAST JAVA DELICACY in the lavish black marble surroundings of the Hotel Java. Was Margaret Bates becoming soft? In the end she decided that it was the city that had changed. Margaret Bates had not softened with age. And that was the problem, she knew that. Adaptation is the key to human existence, she used to tell her students. The Ability to Adapt: that was another of her strengths, along with her Resistance to Emotional Instability and her Reading of Moods. Yet here she was, frozen in time, waiting for the city to change back into something she recognised. It would not happen. She had known a different country, a gentler country, she thought. She hated that word, ‘gentler’ – it was maudlin and sentimental; it reminded her of the way old white fools would talk about their plantations and their brown servants. Suddenly she hated herself. ‘I have to do something about this,’ she said to herself, almost audibly, as she continued to look out of the window at the dirty grey banners. I cannot go on like this. I must change, I must change.
‘What did you say?’ Din asked, folding his newspaper at last.
‘Nothing,’ Margaret said, turning round. She looked at Din’s clear, slightly watery eyes and felt guilty at having snapped at him earlier. She wished that she was able to think things through before saying them. ‘Let’s get an early dinner. Then we can go to the Hotel Java or somewhere fancy, you know, have some drinks – something strong and colourful with a little umbrella in it. We can watch all those ridiculous rich people with their prostitutes.’
Din pulled his chair closer to his desk and flipped open a notebook. ‘It’s too early for dinner,’ he said, picking up a pen and removing its cap. He held the pen poised over the notepad but he did not write anything. ‘Besides, they won’t let me into the Hotel Java. Not like this, anyway.’ He held the collar of his shirt between his thumb and forefinger for a second before letting it fall.
‘I’m not taking no for an answer,’ Margaret said. She grabbed his hand and pulled him towards the door. ‘You’re with me, no one will say anything. It’s one of those disgusting privileges of being white in a place like this. Everyone says they hate Westerners, but as soon as an orang putih walks into the room they give them whatever they want. Every other blanquito I know breaks the rules and behaves badly, and tonight I intend to partake of this disgusting orgy.’
They crossed the highway on the overhead walkway. Beneath them the never-ending traffic beeped and hooted and revved as usual, a river of bashed-up, rusting steel whose current flowed everywhere and nowhere. The sun had begun to calm slightly, hazy now behind the perpetual layer of cloud; the sky was a dirty yellow, a yellow overlaid with grey, and soon, when the sun was setting, it would turn mouse-coloured and finally – swiftly – black. There was never any blue, nothing true or clear.
They walked along the road for a while trying to hail a taxi, but there seemed to be none today so they settled for a becak, ridden by an ancient Javanese whose face was so fleshless that they could see the outlines of his skull under the old-leather skin. He rode with surprising speed and agility, passing men and women pushing their cartloads of peanuts and scrap newspaper and fruit. Stallholders along the road cried out to them as the rickshaw went past; they offered watches, toys, magazines, bottles of Benzine. Often Margaret thought they would collide with something – a horse-drawn cart or a bare-framed jeep or a bicycle – but at the last moment their driver would casually veer past the obstacle. Every few minutes they went past an accident or a broken-down vehicle. There were few cars, few recognisable ones, anyway. Everything had been cannibalised, picked to pieces and reassembled to look like something else so that it was impossible to identify a car as a Datsun or a Fiat or a Skoda. Something could begin as a Mercedes, morph mid-chassis into a Cadillac and end up an open-sided lorry.
She looked across at Din, whose serious expression never seemed to alter very much. A more or less permanent frown drew his close-set, almond-shaped eyes even closer together and lent his slim features an air of mild anxiety. She liked him. He was certainly a great improvement over the last few who had filled his position; they had been, by and large, American post-graduate students earnestly pursuing dull projects on the Economics of Oil or International Aid in Newly-Independent Asia. Without exception, they had been spectacularly unsuited to life in South-East Asia. The longest-serving of them had stayed for two years, the shortest a mere three months. There were rumours that they might not have been bona fide students, that they were in fact working for the US Government, but Margaret could not substantiate these rumours. She did find it slightly odd that there was such a steady stream of American students wanting to be teaching assistants in Jakarta, but there was nothing to suggest that they were funded by anything more sinister than indulgent Ivy League scholarships. Once or twice, she had casually slipped into conversation the presence of the CIA in Indonesia, which was an open secret in town, but she was met by blinking incomprehension, so she let the matter rest. In this city you could never be sure if anyone was who they said they were and, frankly, Margaret couldn’t care less.
Din, however, seemed far removed from the sordid details of Jakarta life. He did not have a comfortable scholarship to fall back on, and Margaret felt guilty because there was no money to pay him properly. In fact neither of them had drawn any salary for this month and although he never complained she knew that even his small rented room would soon begin to weigh heavily on his finances. He said he had taken a room in Kebayoran, but she did not believe him; it would be far too expensive for him. She knew that he did not want her to think him destitute, just another semi slum-dweller. He wanted her to believe that he was an ordinary middle-class professional, and she was happy to go along with it. But she did not know how long he could continue like this. She did not want him to leave.
‘Do you ever miss Leiden?’ she asked. They were travelling alongside a canal filled with stagnant black water covered in a film of grease.
He shrugged. ‘Not really.’
‘But you said you liked it. You did really well there – academically, I mean.’
‘I didn’t like the cold.’ He could be like this, uncommunicative to the point of sullenness. Margaret wondered if he suffered from that respect of hierarchy that (she had noticed) seems to plague all Asians, so that she, being his elder and superior, could never be a companion with whom he could converse freely. It troubled her somewhat to think of herself as a Mother Superior figure, wizened and stern.
‘I can understand that,’ she said, deciding not to push too far. She wished he would relax in her company, and she began to imagine how the evening might proceed if she had her way. They would have something simple to eat at a street stall and then they would have drinks, lots of them, and at some point in the evening he would begin to confide in her, telling her all about his village sweetheart and the girls he had had in Holland; he would begin to trust her, think of her as his equal, his confidante, and the next morning, at work, they would be friends and colleagues and she would no longer feel awkward in his company.
She was not sexually attracted to him, she wanted to make that clear. She had worked out that he was twenty-four going on twenty-five; not quite twenty years her junior but certainly young enough to be her son in this country where girls of eighteen often had three children. Besides, she had long since shut out the possibility of romance. Once, in an age of endless possibilities, love had presented itself to her and it had seemed so simple, so attainable that all she had to do was reach out and claim it. Falling in love then had felt as easy as swimming in a warm salty sea: all she had to do was wade into it and the water would bear her away. But she had not done so, and now the tide had retreated, leaving broken bottles and driftwood and tangled nets. It was a landscape she had learnt to live with.
The lights had just come on in Pasar Baru. The air was filled with the steady hum of portable generators and strings of naked bulbs burst sharply into life, casting their harsh glare on to the faces of passers-by. There were not many people there yet, and Margaret and Din were able to stroll around for a few minutes before settling on a place to eat.
‘What do you feel like eating?’ Margaret asked.
‘Anything. It’s up to you.’
She’d known he would say that and had therefore already decided. ‘Why don’t we just grab some Nasi Padang? Since you’re Sumatran. It’ll make you think of home.’
They chose a place at random, sitting down at a fold-up table that wobbled when Margaret put her elbows on it. Din sat facing her, though he did not look at her face but stared into the space beyond her left shoulder. He looked clean and neat, as he always did, his plain white short-sleeved shirt uncreased even at the end of the day. He never seemed to perspire. This evening he was not wearing the thick black-rimmed glasses that he wore at work, and Margaret was glad because she had a clearer view of his eyes. ‘Isn’t this nice?’ she said. ‘The first time we have been out together.’ Even as she said so she was aware of the inappropriateness of it: she, a white woman, he a young Javanese man, together in public. They didn’t like this kind of behaviour, the Indonesians, she knew that. Perhaps this was why he was being so stiff. She looked around quickly but could see no other foreigners. A young woman came and took their order; she looked sexless in her baggy male clothing – oversized shirt, buttoned at the collar, and dirty pleated trousers – and disapproving. Margaret felt her own décolletage, modest though it was, suddenly too revealing.
‘Tell me about the research you started in Holland,’ Margaret said once they had ordered. They were on surer ground if they stuck to work matters; he liked talking about his work. ‘Pre-Islamic religion, wasn’t it?’
‘More or less,’ he said, his gaze shifting gently but noticeably so that he met her eye and held it. It caught her off-guard, this sudden switching of moods, and she blinked and smiled to hide her unease. She didn’t like being taken aback this way. ‘Actually it was a bit wider than that,’ he continued. ‘I was looking into writing a Secret History of the Indonesian Islands in the South East, everything from Bali eastwards. To me those islands were like a lost world where everything remained true and authentic, away from the gaze of foreigners – a kind of invisible world, almost. Such a stupid idea.’
‘Why stupid?’
‘Oh.’ He smiled, suddenly bashful again. ‘Such a big subject – too big for a little guy like me.’
‘I think it’s a wonderful idea. You shouldn’t give up.’
‘No, there’s no hope for someone like me. I was stupid to think I could do something like that, as if I were a Westerner.’ He spoke with no bitterness, but a despair so deep that it felt almost calm. He won’t be shaken from it, thought Margaret; it was so frustrating.
‘What a thing to say,’ she said, trying not to sound didactic. ‘You can do anything you put your mind to. I’m not saying it’s easy, but if you want something, you’ll get it. Don’t be so defeatist.’
The food arrived, dishes of watery curries of meat and vegetables. Margaret peered at the rice and noticed that it had been mixed with maize. ‘I think we have a civic-conscious vendor on our hands,’ she said. Since the previous year’s drought every meal was a lottery. Sometimes your rice would be rice, other times it would be a gritty bowl of ground meal, in accordance with government recommendations.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ Din said with a shrug. He spoke as if trying to convince himself of something. ‘My idea was that we needed a history of our country written by an Indonesian, something that explored non-standard sources that Westerners could not easily reach. Like folk stories, local mythology, or ancient manuscripts written on palm leaves–’
‘Lontar, you mean.’
‘Yes. When you think about the standard approach to history, all the historical texts, you’re really talking about Western sources. It’s as if the history of South-East Asia started with the discovery of the sea routes from Europe to Asia. Everything begins at this point in time, but in fact so much had already happened. The empires of Majapahit and Mataram had been established; Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism…I wanted to retell the story of these islands because I have a theory that their history is beyond the comprehension of foreigners – sorry, you’ll forgive me for saying that, I know–’
‘Forgiven–’
‘–and that history has to be told by a voice that is non-Western…’
Din continued talking, but Margaret had become distracted by a boy who had sat down three tables away. He was an Asian of indeterminate age – anything from fourteen to twenty-one – not malnourished like most of them were, but still somehow ragged. His dirty white T-shirt bore a logo of an animal on the front (a bear?) under blue and gold letters that said BERKELEY. He appeared at once lost and deeply focused. Was he looking at them? She glanced at him once or twice and each time he ducked away just as she turned her head in his direction. Establishing eye contact too freely was a mistake many foreigners she knew made, misjudging Asian regard. What their smiling faces suggested was not always accurate, and what your own smiling face transmitted was not always what you intended. There was nothing on his table; he had not ordered food or drink.
‘…and of course the unknown story of Muslim seafarers.’
‘Well,’ Margaret said, ‘why don’t you just go ahead and do it?’
Instantly Din fell pensive and silent as he played with the pool of curry in which he had drowned his rice. ‘No one will fund me. I asked everyone in Holland and they all said no. They think it’s about politics. And here, well, the President talks about grand projects, but we all know there’s never going to be any money. Not for people like me.’
Margaret did not answer. She looked at his slim sloping shoulders as he toyed aimlessly with his food. He had a way of making the morsels on his plate seem meagre and almost inedible. There was nothing she could do for him, she thought; perhaps she ought to give up. Perhaps she ought to have given up on this country a long time ago. It was still early in the evening, but she was already tired.
‘Let’s go for a drink,’ she said. She would shake off this lethargy, she knew she could.
Din’s face twisted into a half-frown. ‘Um, no thanks actually. I’m quite tired today. Maybe I’ll just go home.’
Margaret stacked the empty dishes on top of each other to signify the end of the meal. ‘Just come for one quick drink. You’ll enjoy it from an anthropological point of view if nothing else. Come on.’ She waved a few notes at the vendor.
‘Really, it’s very kind of you, but I don’t think I’d be comfortable at the Hotel Java.’
‘Rubbish. You’ll have a ball. I told you, I never take no for an answer.’ She smiled sweetly and knew that he would come: when she decided she wanted something, she was never refused.
As they got up to leave Margaret turned back to look one last time at the boy with the Berkeley T-shirt, but he was no longer at the table. She looked around at the stalls, expecting to see him half-hidden behind a pillar or milling in the crowds, but she could see nothing. He had been there at the table half a minute ago and now he was gone.
‘Well, what fun this is going to be,’ Margaret said brightly.
Built in 1962 to celebrate the Asian Games, the Hotel Java sits on the edge of a sweeping roundabout in an area that might be called downtown if this city had an uptown. Like so many of the brutalist concrete buildings springing up around Jakarta, the hotel’s angular lines and slightly industrial appearance were meant to remind the beholder of both Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus aesthetic: international yet functional. The roundabout in front of it is in fact a shallow, perfectly circular pool of water from which jets of water spurt majestically at a young peasant couple standing on a tall narrow plinth. The hotel and the fountain are just two of the many projects designed to impress visitors to Jakarta with the city’s dynamism, and were commissioned by Sukarno himself (‘the President’s majestic erections,’ Margaret called them). Not more than two years had passed and already the toilets in the hotel were unpleasant; some of the bulbs in the grand chandelier in the lobby had blown and hadn’t been replaced; the carpets were scarred by cigarette burns and the table linen dyed with old wine stains.
‘Looks as if the President’s erections are faltering,’ Margaret said as she looked at the chipped edge of the bar. She had had two martinis already. The first had gone straight to her head and the second had slipped down all too easily. She was trying to make the third one last, but it was difficult; she felt a flush in her cheeks and she wanted to drink quickly. She was already quite light-headed, she knew, but she felt strong again.
Din stood with his elbows on the bar, facing away from the room. He stared at the rows of bottles arranged on the mirrored wall facing him, as if examining every single label. He would take only a Coke, no matter how hard Margaret tried to persuade him otherwise. He wouldn’t even drink a Bintang. She was usually sensitive enough not to transgress cultural boundaries – but Din was different. Yes, he was Muslim, but he had lived for three years in Europe, and was not just another unsophisticated small-town Indonesian. If they both had a drink, she thought, the alcohol might help break down the boundaries that remained between them and they would be friends.
There was music, a band and a pretty Filipina in a tight white dress singing ‘Solamente Una Vez’ in bright, clear notes, rolling her r’s impeccably while shaking a pair of brightly coloured maracas to accompany the Cuban drums. The bar was not full but it was already very noisy, the air smoky and filled with men’s voices. There were a lot of men here and not many women; not many locals either. The only Indonesians present seemed to be women, and nearly all were prostitutes.
‘Here you have the Occident’s finest at play,’ Margaret said. ‘See those two guys? Pulitzer winners a few years back. They’re supposed to be reporting on one of the most urgent political situations in the world and what do they do? Chase after girls they can’t get at home. And that idiot over there, yes, that one canoodling with the Batak girl, he’s meant to be administering aid for the World Bank, but it doesn’t look as if he’s capable of administering anything but a strawberry daiquiri.’
‘Do you know everyone here?’ Din asked.
‘I recognise a few faces.’
A big pink-faced man with sandy hair and freckles came through the doors and headed straight for Margaret. He had a young local girl with him, tall for a Javanese and quite fair. ‘Margaret, how are you? Haven’t seen you in ages – not since last year’s fourth of July party at the Lazarskys’. Who’s the boyfriend?’
‘He’s not my boyfriend, he’s my colleague at the university.’ She was about to introduce Din when she noticed he had slipped away, heading for the toilet. ‘How’s the girlfriend, Bill?’
‘Fine,’ he said, putting a fleshy arm across his companion’s shoulders, ‘just fine. Her name’s Susanti, but I just call her Sue.’
‘Been together long?’
‘Guess so. Longest since I got here, at any rate,’ he laughed, patting his pockets in search of his cigarettes.
‘Wow. Two weeks? Congratulations.’
He smiled for a moment then broke into an over-hearty laugh. ‘You just kill me. You’re still just so…Margaret.’
‘See you around, Bill.’
A table and two chairs became free at the back of the room, in a shadowy corner where the light bulbs had gone out. Margaret went over and sat down, making a cursory attempt to fiddle with the bulbs. She preferred everything to be bathed in light, preferably sunlight. It was not that she was afraid of the dark: she just did not like it, for it frustrated her not to be able to make things out clearly. The windows looked out on to narrow streets away from the noise and great rush of traffic of the grand roundabout. There were not so many people here, just a few of the embassy drivers waiting for their bosses to finish dinner. They milled about in small groups, smoking and exchanging gossip. Most of them were smartly dressed in creased trousers and khaki shirts, but there were a number of other locals who were more difficult to place: bodyguards trying to look casual, perhaps, or local journalists bribing the drivers for information. Margaret tried to discern the differences between them. She was good at this, good at spotting what lay behind this Asian mask of inscrutability. She had learnt to do this in the jungle, with tribes who wore real masks and whose body language was indecipherable to outsiders, and she applied it with great success everywhere in Indonesia, even in this city of three million people. In America and Europe she had not been quite so successful; her antennae did not pick up the right signals with other occidentals. She had not really even been able to understand her parents.
‘So who was your friend earlier?’ Din said, joining her at the table.
Pulsuz fraqment bitdi.
