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Map of the Invisible World
Tash Aw
From the author of the internationally acclaimed, Whitbread Award-winning ‘The Harmony Silk Factory’ comes an enthralling new novel that evokes an exotic yet turbulent and often frightening world.Sixteen-year-old Adam is an orphan three times over. He and his older brother, Johan, were abandoned by their mother as children; he watched as Johan was adopted and taken away by a wealthy couple; and he had to hide when Karl, the Dutch man who raised him, was arrested by soldiers during Sukarno’s drive to purge 1960s Indonesia of its colonial past.Adam sets out on a quest to find Karl, but all he has to guide him are some old photos and letters, which send him to the colourful, dangerous capital, Jakarta. Johan, meanwhile, is living a seemingly carefree, privileged life in Malaysia, but is careening out of control, unable to forget the long-ago betrayal of his helpless, trusting brother.‘Map of the Invisible World’ is a masterful novel, and confirms Tash Aw as one of the most exciting young writers at work today.


TASH AW

Map of the Invisible World


Dedication (#u918c28af-d421-5001-84ea-bd20729d64b5)
For my sisters LL and SL
Epigraph (#u918c28af-d421-5001-84ea-bd20729d64b5)
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 (#u98995e61-cc05-50a6-a764-3b83132d7ff3)
Dedication
Epigraph (#uce9bb5db-998a-5b15-adb8-eed147c09ecc)
Chapter 1 (#u214bae37-4df7-5575-a4c7-0d8ee346bf79)
Chapter 2 (#uffb20219-04ce-5843-8eab-3d14f4b08602)
Chapter 3 (#u6ac26899-57e3-5284-9477-a317115799c4)
Chapter 4 (#u59b06391-bc88-5f7f-aa1e-d97609e74954)
Chapter 5 (#ude013bd2-5882-5cf6-ad56-4ef2cfdd17e5)
Chapter 6 (#uf0a7ce36-a15c-5597-9f6f-f9efab0bf851)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Tash Aw (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

1 (#u918c28af-d421-5001-84ea-bd20729d64b5)
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 (#u918c28af-d421-5001-84ea-bd20729d64b5)
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 (#u918c28af-d421-5001-84ea-bd20729d64b5)
‘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.
‘What friend?’
‘That American man.’
‘Bill Schneider, you mean? He’s not a friend. He works at the Embassy. Not exactly sure what he does – something to do with finance. Well, OK, I think he arranges all the bribes from our wonderful country to your wonderful country to build all your wonderful projects.’
‘Like this hotel?’
‘Probably Although I think this hotel might have been funded with Japanese baksheesh – not that it makes any difference. Bill and his lot certainly have their fingers in the pie now. I tell you, that man is everywhere.’
They watched him drinking a tall glass of beer with a group of friends. He stubbed out his cigarette with clumsy little jabs and punched people on the shoulder to emphasise his jokes. He laughed a lot, always loudly. From across the room they could only catch snippets of what he was saying. ‘…last year the Yankees got unlucky, this year they’re gonna step up…I’m tellin’ ya, you can’t lose with a name like Yogi Berra…’
‘He can at least speak Indonesian,’ Margaret said, ‘and Russian too, which is a big help in this town.’
Din nodded. ‘His girlfriend is very pretty.’
‘He’s got bags of that je ne sais quoi that girls find so irresistible: US dollars. Do you want another Coke?’
Din shook his head. ‘Thank you, but I have to go. It’s a long way home for me.’
‘I think I’ll head home too. I’m sorry the evening was a bit dull.’
They walked through the grand lobby where smart-looking men in bush jackets and expensive women in shimmering dresses turned to look at them. They stood at the entrance for a moment or two, unsure of how to bid each other goodbye. A kiss? Out of the question. A hug? Still too intimate. Handshake? Too formal.
‘See you tomorrow, I guess,’ Margaret said, holding up her hand in a stilted wave.
‘Yes,’ he said, and a smile flashed across his face, not the infuriating unreadable one, but something thinner and tired. He looked curiously frail as he walked briskly down the curving driveway, past the long row of shiny black limousines, before disappearing into the stream of traffic. The lights in this part of the city made the sky look pale and hazy, even at night.
‘Margaret,’ someone called out. It was Bill Schneider again. He did not have his girl with him this time. ‘I saw you leave and I thought, “She can’t be leaving us so quickly!”’
‘Well, I am leaving, Bill.’
‘Wait.’ When he smiled he showed off the top row of his perfect teeth. ‘You remember what we talked about last time we met…’
Margaret looked him in the eye then looked away. ‘Yes.’
‘And…?’
‘And what?’
‘Well,’ he paused. ‘We need to know what you…think.’
She did not answer. A steady stream of limousines drew up before them; the revving of the engines and the exhaust fumes made her feel sick, and the whistling of the doormen rang sharply in her ears and made her incipient headache grow worse. She wanted to go home.
He stood watching her, not saying anything. Margaret felt he was prepared to stay there all night, waiting for her to answer, but in the end he said, ‘I’m sorry. This is not a good place to speak. You sure you won’t come back inside for one more beer? No, you’re tired, of course. Look, come by and see me in my office. Soon.’ He handed her a folded-up newspaper. She saw the same smiling badminton player she had noticed earlier in the day, one half of his face disappearing into a crease. Bill leant over to kiss her on the cheek. ‘Come soon, Margaret.’
‘Taxi, madam?’ asked the doorman.
‘No thanks, I’ll walk for a while.’ She went down to the road and stood watching the swirling traffic before her, assailed by the pleading cries of the child beggars and the shrill calls of the boys and girls lined up on the other side of the road. It hurt Margaret to look at them, so she turned away, trying to pretend that the noise was something mechanical and inhuman. The city had never seemed so enormous, so overwhelming, so chaotic, and its enormous overwhelming chaos was growing worse every day. Not wishing to walk any longer, she hailed a taxi that stank of clove smoke; She unfolded the newspaper and looked at the front page. Bill’s handwriting – a surprisingly elegant cursive – read: Page 5: PS Great to see you again. B
She flicked through the pages. More protests in Europe against the imprisonment of Mandela. Sukarno condemns Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Abebe Bikila promises gold for Africa. Brezhnev to provide more aid for Indonesia. Drug use in Malaysia reaching epidemic proportions; Britain offers no help. Communists arrested in outlying islands. It all looked familiar to her – surely she had read it all this morning?
She looked again at page 5. Below the article on communist arrests was a small picture. In the dim light at the back of the taxi it was difficult to make out the already blurred photograph of twenty or so men in a police cell. But there was one face, paler than the others: a European.

4 (#u918c28af-d421-5001-84ea-bd20729d64b5)
In 1841 the Nan Sing, a Chinese vessel sailing under the Dutch flag, set sail from Canton bound for Batavia laden with a cargo of porcelain, silk and tea. Caught in unseasonally bad weather just south of Cape Varella, it began to move south-eastwards, drifting for many days until, lured by powerful currents, it crashed on the notorious reefs off the rocky shores of Nusa Perdo. Exercising his ancient right of looting shipwrecks, the Sultan immediately ordered his fleet of little boats to recover the precious flotsam from the wreck of the Nan Sing. Enraged by this transgression, the Dutch authorities in Batavia demanded the return of the cargo and ordered the Sultan to submit to Dutch rule. When this was predictably refused, several skirmishes took place, escalating into a stand-off that lasted two days. There followed a further fifty years of shipwrecks, looting and half-hearted attempts by the Dutch army to bring the island under its control. No great energy was expended in the subjugation of Perdo because the island had neither spices nor sandalwood. Covered in scrubby bushes and dominated by a dead volcano, this unobtrusive island virtually disappeared in the constellation of more attractive islands around it, until, late in the century, the discovery of Kayuputih trees and rumours of rich gold deposits brought the white man back to these shores, and this time they did not leave. The Sultan died by his own hand and the island came under Dutch rule.
No one really knows how the island got its curious name, which does not seem consistent with the rhythms of the (now virtually dead) local dialect. Writing about Muslim sects in the eastern archipelago in the pre-war Revue des Études Islamiques, a French scholar called Gaston Bosquet suggests that the name of this island is a bastardisation of ‘pieds d’or’, a reference to the fascination held by early Western visitors for the shoes of gold cloth worn by the princes of the royal household in the seventeenth century, and to the idea that these explorers might have been walking on fields of gold. Given the relative poverty of this island, however, such explanations seem highly implausible (rumours of gold reserves turned out to be a myth). No more likely – though a touch more romantic – is the idea that members of a Portuguese reconnaissance expedition in the early sixteenth century foundered on the rocky coastline of the island, as so many were to do in the centuries that followed. Marooned hundreds of miles from the shipping channels between Malacca and China, they called this place the Lost Island, Nusa Perdo – a name that continues today. This might also explain why, in town, there are three local merchants whose surnames are Texeira, De Souza and Menezes, even though they look thoroughly Indonesian.
These were the stories that Adam loved above all others – the unofficial history of Perdo; he clung to them dearly, afraid they would desert him. He knew exactly why he found them so comforting – they gave him a reason to be different: maybe he, too, had foreign blood in him. And this was why he did not look like the other children on the island, why they hated him.
He often wished that he had the coarse curly hair of the local boys, as well as their sturdy square faces that made them look, well, rudimentary, more suited to the sharp changes of weather on the island. Sometimes, if he stayed out in the sun for too long, the skin on his forearms and knees would begin to smart, as if rubbed with fine sand, and by the end of the day it would feel hot and taut, properly burnt by the sun, just like Karl’s – a foreigner’s skin. On those occasions he wished that he had the other children’s darker, thicker skin that turned to leather by the time they were teenagers, shielding them from the elements. He wished he did not have his straight hair and brittle jawline and fragile cheekbones; he wished he did not stand out quite so much.
For one bucolic year after he moved into his new home, he did not have to worry about other children – or, indeed, about anything else. Much later in his life he would remember that first year with a mixture of nostalgia and regret, and he would experience that odd sensation of sorrow and yearning said to be a trait peculiar to people of the south-east, even though he himself was not genetically native to the region. But the truth was that life during this time was simple, blissful and untroubled, in a way that can only happen when two people are desperate to achieve happiness.
Their days were idyllic and filled with all the things that fathers and sons dream of sharing. They made kites in the shape of birds that sometimes swept effortlessly into the sky but more often crash-landed after the briefest of flights, much to Adam’s and Karl’s amusement; they played takraw in the yard, Adam’s plump legs proving surprisingly adept at juggling the hard rattan ball, Karl less so because of his one weak leg; they hollowed out lengths of driftwood and collected lengkeng seeds to play congkak, a game which Karl explained had been brought to these islands by Arab sea traders many hundreds of years ago; they found an old biscuit tin amongst Karl’s things that contained chess pieces, and drew a chalk chessboard on the floor of the veranda that had to be re-sketched every time the rains swept in and washed it away.
It was a Spartan happiness, it is true. Sometimes, Karl often told him, it is better not to own things, especially precious things, because they will be lost or taken away; things cannot last beyond your lifetime. Karl did not spend any money on toys, for example, or anything he deemed to be ephemeral or trivial. Once or twice, Adam had paused in front of the glass cabinets at the Chinese store in town, admiring the brightly coloured motorcars and plastic water pistols. ‘No one here can afford these toys,’ Karl had said, gesturing in the vague direction of the villages on the coast, ‘and yet they’re quite happy. We don’t need these things either – we’re just like everyone else.’
And so they pursued simpler pleasures. Adam learnt to wade into the shallows and, when the sea was calm, he’d paddle out over the reefs with Karl. He would float along quite calmly for a while but then he would be panicked by the enormity of the ocean, the endlessness of its possibilities, and he would start to flail around, desperate to regain the sureness of the shore, until Karl came over and held his hand. His previous world now seemed empty and colourless, but in this world there were kaleidoscopic fish, purple sea urchins and pulsating starfish; and beyond the coral there was the promise of shipwrecks, their silent corpses filled with treasure from a lost time. Later, Karl would tell him about each of the wrecks: one of them had been shipping opium to China, another had been decommissioned from the British Navy; the biggest one contained hundreds of bottles of precious wine from Oporto and Madeira, still drinkable. In this way Adam learned the history of Perdo; about the Opium wars, Catholicism and the destructive power of religion, and the unjust conquering of Asia by Europe.
This is how Adam believed his new world would begin and end – in this place where he was safe from danger but connected to the possibilities of the world. It was then, however, that Karl began to talk about school.
‘Can’t I just stay at home and learn things from you, pak?’ cried Adam, trying to stem his growing unease. ‘What else do I need to learn?’
‘What you need to learn isn’t contained in textbooks. You need to learn how to live with other people your age – how to be like everyone else. You mustn’t become too privileged.’
But Adam already knew that he was not like everyone else. That was why he was here in the first place, living on this island that was not his real home, with a father who did not look at all like him.
Other children. The very sound of the words made him feel sick. For nearly a year he had had little contact with other children. He had seen them in town whenever he and Karl went for supplies, but he avoided their cold hard stares and clung to Karl’s side, never looking directly at them. He saw them crouching by the roadside, blinking the dust from their eyes as he swept by in the car. And further along the beach he sometimes saw them splashing in the shallows in the late afternoon when the sea was flat, the shadows of the trees reaching across the sand towards the water’s edge. Their faraway cries were shrill and threatening.
* * *
‘Don’t worry, you’re just like the other boys,’ Karl said as he took Adam to school that first day. He spoke in a calm voice, yet Adam knew that Karl himself was not convinced by what he was saying. ‘You’ll enjoy being with compatriots your age. If ever you feel scared, tell yourself, ‘I’m just like everyone else here.’’
The school was a one-room shack on the edge of town, a squat concrete block with a roof of corrugated iron. Adam loathed it from the beginning; its very appearance made him feel sick, and spots of colour appeared in his vision, as if he was going to faint. (I’m just like everyone else here.) There were about eighteen or twenty children crammed into the small classroom, all boys, save for one girl whose roughly cropped hair made her look like a boy. One side of her face was obscured by a birth-mark, a purple-red cloud that stretched from her temple to her jawbone. Adam had to stare closely before deciding that she was indeed a girl; she stuck out her tongue and threw a scrunched-up piece of paper at him. The other boys gathered round him and examined the contents of his new canvas satchel: an exercise book with buff-coloured covers, a pocket atlas and a new box of coloured pencils. His classmates tore the pages from his books and folded them into paper airplanes that they launched into the air with sharp spearing motions. Adam watched as bits of the atlas glided past him: the pink-and-green of the United States floated dreamily in circles until it stubbed its nose on the blackboard and fell abruptly to the ground; the whiteness of the Canadian tundra swept out of the window in an arc, into the dusty sunlight; and the silent mass of the Pacific Ocean that Adam loved so much, dotted with islands (Fiji? Tahiti?) lay on the cracked cement floor, waiting to be trampled upon.
At the end of that first day he did not have the strength to cycle the entire journey home; he pushed his bicycle along the final sandy stretch, too tired even to cry. When he reached the house he let his bicycle fall to the ground; he sat on the steps to the house watching the pedals spin lazily to a stop. There were sea-eagles hovering against the powder-blue sky, barely trembling in the wind. Karl sat with him and put his arm round his shoulders. He shook his head and said, ‘It’s a privilege, you know.’
‘What is?’
‘Education. You saw those kids at school? What kind of families do you think they come from?’
Horrible ones, Adam wanted to say. Filthy, mean, horrible ones.
‘Poor ones. Farmers or fishermen who can’t read or write, and yet everyone has had to pay to get into that school. They take a small packet of money or a carton of cigarettes to the education officer and beg him to put their child’s name on the school list, and if they don’t have cash they take a goat or some chickens or sacks of rice. There isn’t space for everyone, so the kids whose parents pay the most get in. I had to do the same – I paid the most because I’m, well, they look at me and their minds are made up.’
‘Because you’re foreign?’
‘Because I’m rich. Or at least that’s what they think.’
Adam watched as Karl lifted the bicycle and set it upright; its handlebar and pedals were covered thickly with sand that fell to the ground in clumps. ‘The point is,’ Karl continued, ‘none of those people can afford to send their children to school. They’d rather have their kids with them, working in the fields or out at sea with them. Then they have to pay for uniforms, shoes, books. Why? Because they want their children to read and write, to have nice jobs in offices and drive cars in Jakarta. They might not realise it, but they believe in the future of this country.’
The next day he sent Adam back to school again.
The teacher taught them simple grammar and rudimentary arithmetic. She made them practise the letters of the alphabet and introduced them to new words, writing them out on the blackboard in short sentences that no one but Adam could make sense of. It did not seem to matter to her that almost everyone in the class was asleep or staring red-eyed out of the window at the grassy plains pockmarked with blackened heaps of half-burnt rubbish, where skinny goats picked through the piles of waste, dragging plastic bags out of the cinders. CITIZEN. REPUBLIC. PRESIDENT. REVOLUTION. WESTERN IMPERIALISTS. I am a citizen of the Republic of Indonesia. The President of the Republic of Indonesia is President Sukarno. PresidentSukarno led the revolution against the Western Imperialists who destroyed…
‘It’s hot,’ someone whispered, ‘I have to go home.’ Adam turned around and saw the girl with the birth-mark slumped on her desk, twirling a dry strip of coconut leaf in her fingers. She brushed the leaf lazily against Adam’s back. Are your parents expecting you home too?’
Adam nodded. Close-up, he could see that the discoloured patch of skin on her face was not a birth-mark but a scar, an inky mass of tissue that looked almost smooth, like a pebble on the riverbank, crisscrossed by long-dead veins. She was a few years older than Adam but no taller; her fingernails were dirty and worn.
‘Actually, I only have a mother at the moment,’ she said.
‘At the moment?’
‘Yeh, my father’s in jail. Don’t know when he’ll be out. I’m an orphan! That’s what my mother says when she gets in a mood and starts crying. “I am a widow! I am nothing! My daughter is an orphan! O, my daughter is an orphan!”’
Adam giggled. She was much darker than he was, yet she did not seem entirely like the other kids; she spoke with a different accent too.
‘My name’s Neng. What’s yours?’ She tickled his neck with the leaf.
‘Adam.’
‘I have to go and collect this month’s rice from the district office later. Want to come with me? It’s not a long walk. Besides, you have a bicycle…’ Her smile showed off two gaps in her teeth.
‘Umm, I don’t know. My father will be worried if I don’t come home.’
‘Come on, it won’t take long.’ She reached out and brushed the leaf softly across his cheek, giggling as she did so. ‘I know a shortcut back to where you live.’
By the time they left school the sky had dulled slightly with patches of silver-blue cloud, and it was no longer oppressively hot; the sea breeze had picked up, signalling the possibility of the sudden sharp showers for which Perdo is famous. Adam and Neng had just reached the end of the track that led to the main road when they saw a group of boys from school waiting for them, squatting at the edge of the broken tarmac in the shade of a sea-almond sapling.
‘Hi, friend,’ one of them said, standing up. He had taken his shirt off and tied its arms around his forehead so that it fell down his back like the head-dresses of Arab sheikhs that Adam had seen in books. This boy was bigger than the others, and when he spoke his voice cracked, alternating between a child’s high-pitched squeak and a manly croak. ‘This is the little orphan who lives with that European man. You’re his servant, yeh?’
‘No,’ Adam said, ‘he’s my father.’
The older boy threw back his head and laughed. There was a circle of dried-up spittle around his lips. Behind him Adam noticed that one of the other boys was playing with a dead bird, stretching its red-and-black wings across the sand as if willing it to fly. ‘Yeh, yeh. You lick the shit from his toilet.’ He pushed his fingers into Adam’s collarbone with a rough jabbing motion, making Adam lose his balance; his bicycle fell from his grip and dropped to the ground. The other boys laughed. ‘What a weakling,’ the gang leader said.
Adam tried to pick himself up but found that his legs had turned to jelly; his face felt hot and he could not speak. Pressure filled his head, and he felt like vomiting. His ears filled with a great rushing noise, the kind you might hear if you are standing on the seashore before a violent storm, when the froth of the waves blanks out all other noise and makes you lose all notion of where you are. He lay on the ground, kicking feebly at the coppery leaves of the sea almond that lay scattered on the ground. The people standing over him seemed blurred, wobbling as though shaken by gusts of wind. He began to shiver.
I am just like everyone else I am just like please I am just
‘Anyway,’ he could hear the man-boy’s croaky voice, ‘whatever the white man is to you, he’s rich. He can buy you another bicycle. This one’s nice.’ Adam saw feet moving around him and heard the chain of his bicycle ticking. Someone tugged the strap of his satchel, which came away from his body as if it no longer wanted to belong to him.
‘Stop!’ Neng shouted. She put her hands under Adam’s armpits and hauled him into a sitting position. ‘This is not fair. Leave the bike or I’ll kick your balls.’
‘O-oh, look who’s talking,’ the croaky voice said. ‘What you going to do, help this weakling? Look how tiny he is! Look at those little fat legs. He’s not worth getting beaten up over. Right, boys?’ The voice was steadier now, threatening.
‘At least he can read and write. You’re nearly an adult and you still can’t read.’ Neng was trying to yank Adam into a standing position but Adam’s legs were still weak.
‘You just want the bike for yourself, that right?’ The man-boy took a step towards Neng; he looked nearly twice as big as she was.
‘Just leave him alone.’
The boy raised his hand and hesitated a second before slapping Neng hard. ‘You’re just a dirty foreigner too,’ he said. ‘Look at you, a dirty monster.’ Neng stood blinking at him, as if she had not been struck.
‘Careful, Yon,’ a smaller boy said in a quiet voice. ‘She’s Madurese. You know what they’re like.’
‘I don’t care,’ the boy croaked. ‘These bloody foreigners, they come here and all they do is cause trouble, taking our land. They’re going to chase us off our own island soon, there’ll be nothing left for us. There’ll be more of them than us! That’s what my dad says. He’s fed up with them. Need to teach them a lesson from time to time, he says.’
‘Yon, c’mon, let’s take the bike and go. Don’t get mixed up with the Madurese. They’re big-time trouble.’
‘But this one’s only a girl. My dad says all Madurese women are prostitutes anyway. The sooner we teach her who’s boss around here, the better.’
Adam had managed to get up to a half-kneeling position, one leg still trailing on the ground, when he saw Neng raise her knee, swiftly, in one firm, neat motion; it thudded into the boy’s crotch with a loud squashy noise and he crumpled silently to the ground. He put his hand between his legs to protect himself but it was no use. Neng stood over him and continued to kick him in that same spot, sometimes hopping up and down to stamp on his crotch as if putting out a cigarette. His cries cut through the ringing in Adam’s ears and made him feel less sick; it was as if someone had doused Adam with cold water, and he was able to rise slowly to his feet. The other boys had backed off; Neng was straddling the bicycle and ringing its bell. ‘Come on,’ she said gaily to Adam, as if nothing had happened. She patted the horizontal bar in front of her. ‘You sit here, I’ll cycle. OK? Great. Off we go!’
Along the coast road the wind was fresh and tinged with the softness of impending rain. The clouds strained the sunlight that fell on the waves, and this made the sea look calm in places but dark and mysterious in others. It was often like this on Perdo, where the slightest shift in the weather could change the very nature of the island. On those days when the sun was high and unflinching the possibility of rain would seem ridiculous, and on rainy days, when water soaked through everything, you might believe that even if the sun were to reappear, it would never be able to dry the moisture from the earth. But there were other days, too – days such as today, when you could feel both the dry dustiness and the heavy moisture that made up the very air on this island.
Neng produced a banana from her pocket. It was blackened and squashed, the pulp beginning to ooze from its tip where it had been torn from its comb. ‘You look tired,’ she said, handing it to Adam. ‘Eat this. It’ll make you feel better.’
It was very ripe and mushy and sweet. Adam ate it quickly and wiped the stickiness from his fingers on his shorts. Maybe it was the fresh breeze, maybe it was his imagination, but the trembling in his chest began to subside, his heartbeat calming. He blinked; there was dust in his eyes and he turned his head from the wind. His face was very close to Neng’s now, and he could see the tiny imperfections, the fragile creases of skin on the scar on her face. She was smiling, and stuck out her tongue at him, just as she had done on the day. It was beginning to rain: the first heavy drops of a shower, falling through the leaves above them.
‘Hey, it’s getting late,’ said Neng. ‘You look tired. I think you should just go home. We’re not far from where you live.’
‘But I want to go with you – you know, to help you collect your rice.’
The bicycle slowed to a halt and Adam had to hop off it. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll go on my own. Your father will be worried. Besides, you look really tired. I don’t want to get the blame – I’ve been blamed for enough things already!’ She handed him the bike and began to walk off into the distance, heading away from the coast into the hills. The rain was falling heavily now, an earnest downpour that would not ease up for at least an hour, maybe two. Adam felt a sudden panic at being left behind, and started to follow her. She turned round and said, ‘If you follow me I’ll kick your balls too.’
He watched her splash through the puddles that were forming on the road; the rain fell like a thick curtain of mist, and within a few seconds she was out of sight.
As he cycled home, Adam felt the rain running in thin rivulets down his face and neck until his entire body was wet. Occasionally a gust of wind would sweep raindrops into his eyes and he would have to slow down and blink hard just to see where he was going; his plimsolls were soaked through and his toes felt clammy and gritty. But the rain and wind were not cold, and he was no longer tired. Funny, he thought: at this moment, he didn’t even fear what tomorrow might bring.
‘Where have you been, son?’ Karl said, rushing to meet him with an enormous towel that he held between outstretched arms, the way the fishermen hold their nets before flinging them out to sea.
‘Nowhere,’ said Adam, letting Karl towel his hair vigorously. ‘I just took my time. It was…it was raining.’
With his head wrapped in the darkness of the towel, Adam knew how unconvincing this sounded. For a moment, he considered telling Karl all that had happened. He was doing something wrong, he knew that. He knew he ought to share everything with Karl because Karl did the same for him; Karl had taken him in and shared his whole life with Adam, so why couldn’t Adam do this tiny thing for him? He also knew that if he was going to tell Karl he must do it immediately, otherwise the opportunity would be lost. Two, three, four, five seconds. The moment was gone.
Adam did not feel bad at all. Now that the moment was over it did not seem as if he had done anything wrong. Karl lifted the towel from his head and draped it across his shoulders, letting it fall around him like a cape. He looked at Adam unblinkingly, waiting for an explanation, but Adam merely stared out at the murky sea.
Karl said, ‘You should go and change out of those wet clothes.’
The next day, Neng was waiting for him in the shade of some trees, not far from where the main road curved towards the town; the dirt track that led to school ran like a tangent away from the road, disappearing into the bushes beyond. ‘Let’s skip school, maybe go for a walk. It isn’t going to rain today,’ Neng anounced, squinting at the sun.
They left the coast behind and began to cycle along the gravel tracks that led into the hills, and when the path became too steep they hid the bike behind some bushes and began to walk. The coarse earth crunched underfoot, the black volcanic sand sticking to Neng’s bare toes and covering them like tar. She talked endlessly, pointing things out to Adam: a flock of brilliant green parakeets fluttering like giant locusts in the distance; a boulder the shape of a hand with its fingers cut off; the coral reefs which, from up in the hills, resembled a map, a huge watery atlas.
She told him about herself, too. Her father was in jail because he’d killed someone, she said cheerily. Well, not exactly killed him, but the man he’d had a fight with had died, purely by accident. All Neng’s father had done was hit him; OK, he hit him quite hard, even her mother said so, but still, he wasn’t the only one. There had been lots of men fighting, it was just a street brawl outside the rice merchant, you know, just by the clock tower. But her father was the only one who was still in jail. Just because he’s Madurese. It was so unfair. He didn’t even want to be on this island anyway.
‘Then why did you come here?’ Adam couldn’t remember where Madura was, but it sounded far away. He tried to remember his lessons at home with Karl, when Karl had shown him where all the big cities and islands of Indonesia were.
She frowned, looking closely at him with squinted eyes as if she had spotted something nasty on his face. ‘God, you’re dumb. Transmigration. We were forced to, just like everyone else.’
They had had nothing in Madura; it was an overcrowded island where there were a few cows and too many people who had no food and no work. They had been promised work, she said, in a place where there were few people and much land. The government was building a new pumice mine and there were lots of jobs, and maybe the workers would be given some land of their own. Her parents didn’t even know what pumice was. Don’t worry, the official had told them; we will give you rice to eat every month and your kids will go to school. But the mine was never built. There was no land for them, and often no rice. They’d been in Perdo for three years, but there was no work at all.
‘What about you?’ Neng asked. ‘Where did you come from?’
Adam shrugged. He looked around, hoping to see those parakeets again, but there was nothing.
‘Sorry,’ she said, reaching out and touching him on the elbow. Her scar obscured her cheek and made her look as if she was only smiling with half her face. ‘I forgot you’re an orphan.’
‘That’s OK,’ he smiled. But he thought to himself: it was not OK. Why did he not know which part of Indonesia he was from? What dialect had his parents spoken? Even orphans had to come from somewhere. It was not that he had never dared ask Karl, but rather that it had never occurred to him to ask. He had known little of his past and cared even less, and he had liked it that way. So why was he now troubled by this lack of knowledge? Suddenly he felt guilty at having missed school without telling Karl.
‘Come on,’ Neng said, breaking into a run, ‘there’s something I want to show you.’ Beyond the trees the grassland gave way to a rocky plain covered with cacti and scrubby bushes; in the distance the land rose towards the point of the dead volcano that dominated the island. Neng disappeared behind some rocks, and when Adam caught up he saw that she had crawled into a natural depression sheltered from the sun and the rain, a scooped-out hollow so perfectly formed that it seemed man-made.
‘Here, look,’ Neng said, showing him a stash of objects. She picked up a small comb made from pink plastic and ran it through her spiky hair. ‘I found it on the road, just lying there waiting for me to pick it up.’
‘But that’s stealing,’ Adam said, repeating what Karl had once told him.
‘Don’t be stupid. If something is thrown away, it means its owner doesn’t want it any more – in that case anyone has a right to take it. Idiot.’ She showed him other things she had found: a small motorbike made of tin, rusting where the paint had worn off; a cracked mirror; a book with a frayed paper cover showing a large sea-fish about to be attacked by a diver wielding a knife (there were some words in German, too, but Adam was not able to read them); and a doll with blue eyes and dark curly lashes. Its painted blond hair looked like a scar on its head, an imperfection. Neng picked it up and cuddled it as if it were a real baby, holding its head to her cheek and swaying from side to side; she sat down with her legs crossed and looked out of the miniature cave. They could see over the low trees to the tawny flatlands and the sea in the distance. ‘No one can see me in here,’ she said. ‘It’s my secret place.’ She leant over and kissed him on his cheek and he could smell the musty unwashed odour of her clothes and skin. He blushed, and withdrew slightly; her lips felt funny – dry and hot; he wasn’t sure he liked it. She giggled and continued to cuddle her doll.
From then on, they skipped school every day, cycling as far as they could or taking long walks into the interior. In the coves of the south coast they stood atop the steep fern-covered cliffs and saw the shipwrecks poking out of the surf; in a rainstorm in the hilly forests they were chased by wild goats; in a dried-up riverbed they found the giant stones for which Perdo is famous, those ancient boulders inscribed with fragments of scrolling words in a foreign language which Adam copied in a notebook and later found out were Spanish (and also nonsensical: ‘dream’ and ‘madman’). They met a team of scientists who were taking rock samples not far from where Adam lived; they wanted to build a mine, but they did not say what kind. One of them, an American, gave Neng and Adam three dollars each and an old T-shirt that said BERKELEY. Neng said Adam should have the T-shirt. She didn’t want it; she was happy enough as it was, not because of the money, but because her father would finally, FINALLY! have a job in this mine. That was what she kept repeating to Adam as they cycled home. She turned around and made funny faces at him, the bike zigzagging along the road. Above them, a flock of birds winged their way slowly southwards, small black flapping triangles against the blue-white sky. Maybe they were migrating to cooler climates, Adam said, to Australia, and Neng replied that he couldn’t possibly know such a thing. He did not know what kind of birds they were; and he did not know, either, that this would be the last thing he would say to Neng.
The next day she was not waiting for him at the bend in the road, and when he got to school she was not there. He asked around and everyone said, Oh yeah, that Madurese girl, her parents went back to Java or somewhere else, dunno, happens all the time with migrants, they weren’t born here so why should they stay?
Adam continued at school; his days were not the same without Neng. His nights, which had for some time been calm and heavy with sleep, became unreliable once more. The sensation of emptiness that punctuated his slumber returned, more frequently and powerfully than before. In his sleep he felt suspended in a void, and he would wake with a start, his legs jerking madly. When he awoke in the dark, he felt as if he had dreamt about his brother, but no image of Johan ever stayed with him, and he realised that his sleep had been as dreamless as ever. He had merely imagined dreaming of Johan – a dream of a dream. He thought he had banished fear from his life, but it was clear that he had not. He would go to the window and stare out at the inky blackness, at the shapes of the trees silhouetted against the night sky, and it would calm him a little to know that he was not in his Old Life with its unknown terrors but in his New Life with its known terrors, which were far less terrible.
One morning he awoke to find a large box on his bedroom floor, wrapped in colourful paper printed with a pattern of butterflies and bow ties. There were creases on the paper as if it had been left folded for a very long time.
‘Happy birthday,’ Karl said, appearing in this doorway. Adam suddenly realised he did not know when his birthday was. At the orphanage there had been no celebrations – at least none that he could remember. ‘I didn’t know when your birthday was so I decided that, from now on, we shall celebrate it on the anniversary of your arrival in this house.’ Adam had not realised that he had spent an entire year there; it seemed only minutes since he’d arrived.
‘Why are you doing that?’ Adam asked as Karl closed the shutters and door. It was a dull, drizzly morning, the sea mists remaining longer into the morning than usual.
‘You’ll see,’ Karl said, placing the box on Adam’s bed. ‘Go on, open it.’
Adam picked nervously at the wrapping paper until he saw a flimsy cardboard box, frayed and torn at the edges. It bore a picture of a curly-haired woman gaily spraying her underarms with deodorant. She wore bright red lipstick to go with her bright red dress and she showed off a bright red flower in her hair.
‘That’s just the box,’ Karl said, taking it from Adam. ‘Here, I’ll show you.’ He reached inside and produced a glass-like object, not quite a globe. ‘It’s a magic lantern. Let me show you how it works.’ He switched on the table-lamp and placed the lantern on top of it. All at once the walls of Adam’s bedroom faded away and suddenly he was in a forest in Europe. A thicket of pointy trees engulfed his cupboard and from the trees a handsome blond boy emerged, riding a horse that glided over yellow moorland. The sunlit sky swirled over this scene, golden and streaked with fantastic clouds. There was a castle too, honey-coloured, but it was sheared off by a wide arc and faded into pearly blankness.
‘Sorry, that’s where the disc fits into the lamp,’ Karl said, reaching for the lantern and fiddling with it. For a moment the hollow gloom of Adam’s room returned once more but then, once Karl had adjusted the lantern, the dream resumed. A princess with pale blond hair and a blue gown stood atop the half-castle, pleading with the youth to come to her.
‘His name is Golo,’ Karl said. He was reclining on the floor, his arms folded behind his head as he stared at the magic sky. And the lovely maiden is called Genevieve. Isn’t she pretty?’
Adam nodded. He too lay down on his bed and looked at the sky. The rain drummed lightly on the roof and in the distance there was the faint rush of rough seas.
‘It used to be mine,’ Karl said. ‘I was about your age, I suppose, maybe younger. We had already left Indonesia and were living in The Hague. I had trouble sleeping. Every night there was a scene. My nanny – my Dutch nanny – would come into my bedroom and put the magic lantern on for me. I loved Golo, I wanted to be him. I would lie in bed hoping my mother would come and kiss me goodnight. I’d imagine her saying, “All right, my child, I’ll kiss you once last time, like Genevieve, but then you must go to sleep.” She never came, but at least I had my magic lantern to make me feel better.’
That night Adam ate his birthday dinner of meat loaf and fried potatoes as quickly as he could. He got into bed and turned the lights off, his room transformed once more into an enchanted forest. He thought about Neng, about the time she had tried to kiss him; he knew that she would never come back. He felt a bitter numbness that seemed familiar, as if left over from his Past Life in the orphanage, and he knew he had to blank it out before it took hold. He took a deep breath and counted slowly from one to ten. He had to eliminate this feeling from his New Life.
‘Good night, my son,’ Karl said, opening the door and breaking up the forest. ‘I know you’ve been having a difficult time, but just remember, we’re very lucky people. I hope you’ve had a nice birthday.’
Adam nodded as Karl turned the light out. ‘Wait,’ Adam said quietly in the darkness. ‘What day is it today? What’s my birthday?’
Karl paused at the door. ‘It’s August seventeenth.’
Later Adam would learn that August 17th was also Independence Day. On his birthday there would always be rousing songs on the radio as well as the President’s speech, the whole of which Karl would insist they listen to. There would be red-and-white flags hanging from the eaves of houses, and in the evening there would be festivities in the villages – food and dancing – that continued late into the night. Before he went to bed Adam would put on his magic lantern and stare at the swirling scenes that he knew so well, and he would listen to the far-off sounds of laughter and smell the faint sweetness of grilled meat and charcoal smoke that carried on the sea breeze.
No, Adam thought: he was not just like the other boys.
Slow down, Johan, slow down.
They drove through the silent city at speed, neon lights staining the night with electric temptations. PUSSY CAT $$$ SHANGHAI DREAM COPACABANA FANTASY GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS.
Please, Johan, slow down, Farah said. You’ll kill yourself one day if you keep driving like this.
At darkened intersections he ran the lights without even looking. He never looked out for other cars, he never looked out for anything. Don’t worry, he said, it’s OK it’s late, there are no cars. He drove with his head held back as if blown by the wind, but there was never any wind in this city.
Shit, Bob said in the back seat, this is great. He cowered as they careered round the roundabout, the new tyres of the Mercedes squeaking. Farah gripped the door tightly and said again, Please, Johan, for god’s sake, but she knew that there was no use talking to him when he was in one of these moods.
Hey, Johan, hey, guys, Bob said. Let’s go down to the river and see what’s happening with the girls. Friday night, all the Mak Nyahs will be out. Come on, let’s go.
No, Farah said. I don’t want to go. Johan, please.
Come on, Sis, be a sport. Let’s have some fun. What do you say, Johan? Everyone knows that those Pondans have the best tits in town. I want to see their little dresses with their asses sticking out oh, yes, sir.
Johan smiled and shrugged. OK, why not.
They slowed to a crawl as they left the lights of the broad tarred road and turned into a narrow lane, then into another alley, then a long thin road that ran along the shallow muddy river that hardly seemed a river at all, just a trail of sludge between two huge mudbanks.
Kill the lights, Johan, kill the lights quick.
The Merc crept along silently, hardly a rumble from its engine. Shadows stirred in the deep shadows under the old rain trees. There were a few cars parked along the road but it was difficult to tell if anyone was in them.
Get an eyeful of that baby, Bob said, sticking his head out of the window. The girls emerged from the darkness, singly or in pairs, linking their arms as they sashayed towards the car. There were all kinds of girls – Chinese girls, Malay girls, Indian girls and especially girls who were boys – but in the eternal nocturne of this street they were just girls.
Which ones are real, which are fake? Farah said. I can never tell.
Aduh, you’re really stupid, aren’t you? Bob giggled. What do you mean?
I mean, which ones are really girls? Don’t tell me you know which ones are, you know-
Transvestites? Johan said.
Yes, boys pretending to be girls.
Is it important? Johan laughed. He had a cold, hard laugh tonight. Farah did not like it when he got this way. Why do you need to know? Don’t tell me you want some action?
You’re disgusting.
Johan said, They aren’t boys pretending to be girls, they’re boys who are girls. Some of them aren’t even boys any more, they’re real girls…just like you.
Ceh. Farah shook her head. Don’t say that, they’re not like me.
Wow-ee, Bob cried. Hey girl, show us your tetek.
The prettiest ones are further up, Johan said, by that Austin under the big tree.
They stopped the car. There were about a dozen girls on the street. They felt safe now, they knew this car was not a police car. A couple of them walked in front of the Merc, swinging their hips and flicking their long glossy hair. Their calf muscles were taut and sinewy in their high heels and they swung small beaded handbags over their shoulders. Hey, boys, they cried, love your big car. Come here, boys, come and see what Mummy has for you.
Come on, Johan said and stepped out of the car.
Shit no way – Sis, stop him! That boy is crazy!
Johan come back, come back, Farah pleaded, it’s dangerous. But he was already some distance away, walking like he always did in his bright springy way with his hands in his pocket.
Johan, Farahs voice was an urgent whisper. Her footsteps in the dark: she was running. He did not look back. Ahead of him he knew there was a crumbling brick wall, just the right height to hide a couple crouching down behind it. And by this wall there would be a girl, always the same girl.
Hello, this girl said. Hello handsome. She was not tall and not short, the same height as Johan. She had slim shoulders and sturdy hips and she never concealed her face under a thick layer of powder, not like the other girls. I haven’t seen you in a while, she said, lighting a Winston. Where you been?
I’ve been around.
Is that your new girl?
No, that’s my sis.
Pretty.
Actually, she’s my adopted sister. Farah, Regina, Regina, Farah.
Hello.
Hello, princess. Regina took a long drag of her cigarette. It glowed like a jewel for a second or two before fading again. Listen, children, nice to see you, but I have stuff to do. You know. The cops have been down here already tonight touching the girls up and taking our money, so…
Yeah sure, see you around.
Who’s that? Farah whispered. Oh my god, Johan. Please don’t tell me you’ve been seeing prostitutes.
In the dark he made a slight movement with his shoulders, like a shrug but not quite. As they went past the Austin a girl got out of it, smoothing her hair away from her face. The bangles she wore on her wrist filled the air with a lovely metallic symphony, but the car suddenly started up and its lights filled the road with a sharp glare and suddenly there were people running for cover, dashing across the pool of light that swept along the lane before leaving it in darkness once more.
Shit, a baritone voice called out, I thought it was the cops again, now my hair’s all ruined.
Hair? Call that topi keledar hair? Darling, it’s a crash helmet, just take it off next time.
Where did you guys go? said Bob. Let’s get out of here. He was quieter now, sitting with his arms folded and his hands tucked tightly into his armpits as if it were cold. I want to go home. I’m tired.
No, Johan said. Not yet. The Merc emerged from the alley and burst into life once more.
Some time afterwards, when they were still driving, they reached that moment in the night when there were no more lights on the streets and the air that came in through the windows no longer felt hot and sticky, Johan said:
Do you ever get this feeling, Farah?
What feeling?
That your life is not your own. That you can’t control it.
No, what do you mean?
I mean, do you ever feel that your real life is somewhere else, that someone has stolen it and taken it to another place far away from here?
Farah looked at him and shook her head. No, Johan, Mummy says we’re not allowed to talk about that. Let’s go home.
No, said Johan. Anywhere but home.
In this fast young city he did not want to sleep, he did not want to stop. This was a place that had no past, only the present. What happened yesterday was just a dream; last week was forgotten, last month never existed at all. Every night was the same. Your life started afresh at six-thirty, repeating itself like a clock. There was no escape. It was always like that in this city.

5 (#u918c28af-d421-5001-84ea-bd20729d64b5)
The telephone stopped ringing just as Margaret opened her eyes. It had been ringing for a very long time. Her head hurt terribly. She squinted at the clock: nine-forty. She could not remember the last time she had woken up so late. She was turning into a grand old white housewife, she thought to herself as she padded her way slowly to the bathroom; she wished there was a bell she could ring so that some dusky, half-dressed youth would appear bearing two aspirins on a silver tray. She had fallen asleep in the rattan armchair in the sitting room and had remained there for some time before being woken by a stiff neck. She had summoned just enough energy to stumble into her bedroom and had fallen into bed without showering, and now she felt suffocated by her own cold sweat, as if someone had coated her skin with a thin layer of wet paint.
The phone rang again as she dressed. Now that she was awake and fully conscious, the phone seemed curiously dangerous. She picked it up slowly and put it to her ear but did not say anything; she barely even breathed. There was silence, as if the person on the other end was holding their breath too, and the air in her bedroom began to feel stifling. The line clicked and went dead. ‘Probably just the exchange playing up again,’ she said aloud. The sound of her own voice reassured her, and she began humming to herself, a vacuous tune that she soon realised was the song she’d heard at the Hotel Java the night before. Somehow, she knew the phone would ring again, and this time she would not be so cowardly. Dressed now, the pain in her head dull rather than stabbing, she reached for the phone as soon as its harsh drilling started up.
‘Hell-o,’ she said loudly, challenging the mystery caller.
There was a half-second’s pause. ‘Margaret?’ Din’s voice sounded timid, almost scared.
‘Yes, hi, Din, it’s Margaret here. Did you try calling me earlier? Just a second ago?’
‘Um, no,’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Sure,’ she said, sliding her feet into her shoes. She was sure it was he who had rung, it must have been. ‘You recovered from the horror of last night?’
‘It was interesting, actually, I was thinking about it on the way home. I’m glad you took me along. Maybe we’ll do it again some time.’
‘Sure. Maybe.’
‘Are you sure everything’s all right?’
‘Why shouldn’t it be all right?’
‘Well, it’s just, you’re always on time, that’s all. You’re usually here before me, so I thought I’d ring you to see if you were OK.’
‘What do you think might have happened? That I might have fallen prey to a wanton taxi driver? I just overslept, that’s all.’
Din did not answer for a while. Margaret imagined his inscrutable smile. ‘OK then,’ he said calmly, ‘maybe I’ll see you later.’
‘Yeah, maybe.’ She let the phone fall into its cradle with a crash and walked into the sitting room. The swirling green faux-marble Formica tabletop was half-covered in bits of paper and photographs. Margaret had not bothered to put them back into the box that lay at the foot of the low cane armchair. Last night, her head heavy with drink, she had wanted to look at all those dead images. She had not seen them for a very long time, and it had taken her a while even to remember where the box was. She had recovered it in the small storeroom into which she threw everything that she did not use on a daily basis, things that collected in layers as the years went by. And so, working her way through the archaeological dig of her life, she had found it preserved like a rare fossil in the pre-adult period, buried under old college textbooks but lying (more or less) on top of a box labelled Childhood in New Guinea. Once consigned to this storeroom, things rarely resurfaced; geckos laid their eggs on the spines of books and mice crawled into boxes to die. Margaret had no idea why she had spent a good hour and a half on her hands and knees, struggling with the flashlight wedged between her chin and shoulder, to free this box from its tomb of memories. She had looked at the pictures until it was very late, until she was alone in the night, when even the scooters and dogs and radios had fallen silent. She had been surprised to see how little she had changed, and had felt an unexpected surge of happiness when she recognised herself in the pictures. She had grown older, of course, but the similarities between the fifteen-year-old Margaret and the forty-something Margaret were obvious: the slight, adolescent build, the firm unfleshy arms, the hair pulled back neatly from the face, the chin raised in a perpetual challenge, the pouting smile. It was definitely Margaret.
She wondered if she would recognise the other people in the photos if she met them today. She certainly had not recognised her father when he lay on his deathbed. She had flown back to New York and driven upstate through an incipient snowstorm to be with him, kept warm only by the vestiges of the Jakarta heat. She had found him in a room that stank of disinfectant in a nursing home on the outskirts of Ithaca, his face pale and mottled, bleached of colour. The few wisps of hair on his head had grown too long and fell like threads of fine white silk across the scabs on his scalp. He looked like just another old man, like the ones playing cards in the hall. He was barely sixty but the cancer had taken hold.
When he smiled she felt a terrible pain in her chest; she had never believed that sadness could be a physical sensation. During that brief weak smile, she had recognised her father, the one whose image she had always kept in her mind’s eye. And she was glad when he closed his eyes again, for he became an old man once more, someone foreign whose pain, too, was foreign to her.
Here, in the photos, he was just as Margaret remembered him: lean and deeply tanned, barefoot and wearing a sarong, often staying in the background, ceding the spotlight to his wife. Margaret had not seen her mother for ten years and wondered if she would recognise her now.
Margaret put all the photos except one back in the box, and tidied the table. She picked up the newspaper article that Bill Schneider had given her, looking at it once more under the magnifying glass. It didn’t help. The picture only became fuzzier, its indistinct dots revealing no further clues. There was one white man in the crowd of twenty Indonesian ones, that was for sure. They were in a cell, or the back of a dark room. The flash of the camera had surprised a few of them; their faces were raised open-mouthed and dazed, looking straight at the viewer. The others just sat cross-legged, their heads bowed to their chests. Right at the back, the solitary white figure sat calmly with his back propped up against the wall, his head turned at an angle as if examining something on his leg. A small part of his neck was revealed, like a fragment of a precious mosaic, and Margaret studied it at length; the slight curve of it was unmistakeable – or was she just imagining the similarity? She had spent most of the night comparing the photo in the newspapers to her old photos but could not reach a conclusion.
The streets were already teeming by the time she stepped out into the dusty sunlight. Along the shady lanes near her house the drains were no longer overflowing but filled with shallow puddles of oily water, blocked by dams of rubbish rotting slowly in the heat. Two mangy dogs picked listlessly through the tangle of tin cans and empty sacks and vegetation as Margaret walked past a row of shop-houses, their bamboo blinds lowered against the sun. A hundred and fifty years ago, when Dutch Batavia was at its zenith, these shops contained sacks of spices and tea and fragrant wood bound for Europe where there was no limit to their prices; this was the port from which European fantasies were stoked to frenzied extremes, but you could sense none of the past glory in the streets of Old Jakarta. The voices of prosperous merchants did not echo in the narrow lanes, the clink of gold coins had disappeared a century ago. Even in the south of the city, in the place that some people called ‘New’ Jakarta, Margaret could see only decay. She had witnessed its growth, the simple, functional houses built seemingly overnight, stretching in rows like crops, punctuated by enclaves of big houses, where the roads suddenly widened and high cement walls hid immense Western-style mansions, the bright terracotta tiles on their faux-Tuscan roofs just visible above the walls. But everything aged so quickly here, Margaret thought; Jakarta had a way of dragging everything into its slimy mess, of making new things look old. Moss grew on surfaces of smooth cement; the sun and the rain wore down metal and stone and made them look dirty. In Jakarta she could never really escape the feeling of being in a slum.
She wandered into the square bounded by the last of the great buildings of Old Batavia, stumbling slightly on the remnants of the cobblestones. She flagged down a jeep-taxi in front of the porticoes of the once-handsome, almost-derelict old City Hall, watched by a group of soldiers who huddled in the shade of a wooden lean-to, sharing a kretek between them. ‘Hey, lady, got a cigarette?’ one of them shouted out without much enthusiasm, as if anticipating Margaret’s cursory shake of the head. She knew he wanted Marlboros or Camels, proper cigarettes, not the cheap kretek he and his friends were smoking. Not long ago she’d always carried a pack of Lucky Strikes with her. You could bribe anyone with American cigarettes. That was the curious thing about the human animal, she thought: even in times of famine they would sooner reach for luxuries than a sack of rice. A stick of tobacco laced with noxious chemicals was worth more than a meal for a child, that was why she’d always had cigarettes with her, but they had become so difficult to buy, so expensive, even for a foreigner.
The jeep jerked its way through the traffic, heading slowly south to the heart of modern Jakarta. The weather was on the turn now: the damp air of the monsoon season was beginning to blow into the city, the risk of heavy thunderstorms growing with each week. For the past few months the winds had been dry and dusty, the moisture bleached from the city, every object like tinder, ready to catch fire. Sometimes the air was so dry it was hard to believe that this city lay on the coast of a tropical island. The flimsy houses in the slums they now passed reminded Margaret of dead leaves on a bonfire, heaped up on top of one another, waiting for a single match or smouldering cigarette butt. There were always fires in the slums in the dry season, and every week for the last three months she had passed the blackened remains of houses, charred fragments of timber and corrugated iron, that just lay there, day after day, becoming part of the cityscape. And yet in a few weeks’ time they would be damp and slimy from the blocked-up drains and the pools of stagnant grey water that collected after the rains, and Margaret would forget the desiccating heat of August. How quickly we forget, she said to herself, how quickly we forget.
‘Stop here, please,’ she called out. The taxi shuddered to an abrupt halt outside one of the smart modern buildings on the fringes of the newly laid-out Merdeka Square. The giant rectangular box was made from smooth grey concrete; it had shiny glass in the windows and a façade of fashionable honeycomb shapes. Air conditioners hummed faintly behind closed doors as she crossed the immense foyer, her sneakers squeaking on the shiny terrazzo floor. Behind a semi-circular desk a security guard dozed in his chair, his head hanging limply to one side, his hands clutching a thin exercise book to his belly. There was no one else about; a solitary swallow fluttered aimlessly against the vaulted ceiling, desperately trying to find its way back out of the building. Margaret continued until she reached the back door, re-emerging into the heat. In the shadow of the big new building stood an older, smaller one, its timber upper floor giving it the air of a village house. There was hardly any space between the two structures – no lawn or yard, just a narrow drain. Typewriters clacked without enthusiasm in the stillness of the afternoon as Margaret went up the creaky wooden stairs. The radio was on, broadcasting one of the President’s speeches – a repeat, Margaret noticed – his voice urgent, persuasive, utterly convincing. There were a few men in the room at the top of the stairs, two of them hunched over typewriters, the others napping in flimsy reclining chairs or on canvas camp beds. The shutters were open but here in the shadow of their enormous neighbour there was never much light, just a perpetual gloom.
‘Hello, Sailor,’ she said.
‘My dear god,’ one of the men said, leaning back in his chair, ‘it’s Jakarta Jane, sweetheart of the forces. To what do we owe this most splendid honour?’
‘Nothing, just thought I’d pop by to say hello,’ Margaret said, easing herself into a chair.
‘I’ve never known Margaret Bates to “pop by” to say hello. What do you want?’ He had an open smile, his youthful face surprisingly creased with lines. He was a thick-set man with broad hairy forearms and thick agricultural fingers that looked thoroughly unsuited to writing or typing.
‘Do I detect a note of cynicism there, Mick?’
‘Not a note, a whole goddamn symphony. Rudy – get Margaret a beer, will you? And one for yourself too. In fact, one for everyone. We need no further excuse for a beer now that Margaret Bates is here.’
The other man, a stout young Indonesian, retrieved three bottles of Krusovice from a fridge that stood against a bare wall like a piece of modern art. He brought one over to Margaret, bowing slightly as he did so.
‘Hey, Rudy, did you know that Sukarno himself tried to get her to bed? He had such a hard-on for her.’
‘Do shut up, Mick.’ Margaret smiled and accepted the cold bottle of beer. Her headache had faded to a dull throb and she was feeling hot, dehydrated. ‘That was so long ago.’
‘Ah-ha! You admit it!’
She turned to Rudy. ‘Just ignore him. It’s all rumours. You know what you boys are like, forever looking for scandal. Journalists will be journalists – especially if they’re Australian.’
Rudy shrugged his shoulders indifferently, but continued looking at Margaret.
‘I had another job back then, it was different. I met the President a few times at official functions,’ Margaret began to explain, without knowing why she felt the need to. ‘He seemed to like me, and he remembered me. You know what powers of memory he has. I was friendly with his staff, so journalists used to ask me to arrange appointments at the Palace. All these dirty boys–’
Mick put the bottle to his lips with comic lasciviousness, his tongue curling outwards.
‘–started a rumour. You know the President’s reputation with women. Well, just for the record, he was always very correct with me.’
‘Um-hmm,’ grunted Mick as he drank his beer.
‘Very pleased to make your acquaintance anyway,’ Rudy said before returning to his typing.
‘So what do you need from me this time, darling?’ Mick asked.
Margaret picked up a slim, loosely bound book from Mick’s desk and began flicking through it – a collection of Chairil Anwar’s translations of Rilke. ‘Do you find him faithful to the original?’
‘He’s better with Gide. With Rilke it’s like he’s trying too hard, like he wants to be in tune with Rilke. There’s no such clunkiness with Gide, it’s like they know each other. Anwar would have been great with Rimbaud. They’ve so much in common – that unfettered lifestyle, don’t-give-a-damn hair…Shame he never discovered him. They’d have been the perfect couple.’
‘Bill Schneider accosted me at the Hotel Java last night.’
Mick leant back in his chair. ‘Damn, I thought you’d come to talk about Rilke. What the hell were you doing with that man? Bill Schneider – even the name makes me want to retch.’
‘He gave me this.’ She handed over the page which she had torn from the newspaper. ‘Have you heard anything?’
He looked at the page briefly. ‘What’s so special? There’s a civil war brewing, darling. Commies are being arrested and killed all the time – even in godforsaken little islands. Where is Perdo? Never even heard of it.’
‘Look at the picture carefully. There’s a European in there. Just there,’ she said, stabbing at a spot on the page with her finger. ‘That’s not usual. There aren’t that many foreigners hanging around in Indonesia, Mick. One of your sources must know something about this.’
Mick picked up the paper and looked at it again, holding it up at an angle to catch the dim light. ‘Why did Bill Schneider give you this?’
Margaret shrugged. ‘Beats me.’
‘It’s someone you know, isn’t it?’
‘Uh-uh,’ Margaret shook her head. ‘No idea who it is.’ She did not know why she lied.
Mick smiled as he put the bottle of beer to his mouth. ‘Hmmm.’
‘Honest,’ Margaret said, trying to sound bright (she was good at sounding bright, she told herself, she was even better at being flippant). She retrieved the piece of paper and re-folded it neatly. ‘I just thought, well, this poor guy’s out there, stranded, his Embassy probably doesn’t even know, he’s about to be flung in jail or even worse, a shallow grave along with lots of communists. I guess Schneider just thought that with the contacts I have – well, used to have – I might be able to do something. But I can’t. It’s not the same any more.’
Mick did not reply; a moment of silence passed between them, the staccato tapping of Rudy’s typewriter the only noise in the airless afternoon. Margaret looked down at the folded piece of paper in her lap. The newsprint was blurring and the paper itself was becoming oily and limp from the humidity and the moisture on her fingertips. She wanted to reach for her bottle of beer, but suddenly the simple act of stretching out for it seemed impossibly difficult. Her head began to hurt again, the heavy numbness giving way once more to waves of stabbing pain in her temples. ‘I mean,’ she said at last, quietly, ‘I just don’t get mixed up in that kind of thing any more.’
Mick smiled and said, ‘Your beer’s getting warm.’
‘Please, Mick, can you help me? I need to find this man. I feel I need to do something.’
‘Dear old Margaret, always the do-gooder.’ He frowned and ran both hands through his dark wavy hair, rubbing his scalp as if he had an itch. ‘I don’t know, it’s getting difficult for our guys to gather information. Even our local fixers get in trouble with the army. There are soldiers everywhere, looking for trouble. Worst thing is that we don’t have enough cash to bribe everyone. We haven’t got enough money coming through from the US channels. CBS doesn’t use me any more, the BBC’s gone silent. ARTC are the only ones coming up with the goods for me right now. I just don’t know, Margaret.’
‘Please.’
Mick sighed.
‘For old times?’
‘We never had any old times, you heartbreaker.’
She stood up and tried hard to smile. ‘Oh, we would have gotten married and had twelve kids, if only you didn’t’ – she mouthed – ‘like boys.’
‘Oh, you wound me. I die, I faint, I fail.’
‘Truth hurts. Call me.’
She made her way slowly back through the adjacent building. There were more people about now, neatly dressed office workers carrying piles of papers as they walked unhurriedly across the lobby of the building. They glanced at Margaret with sleepy, bloodshot eyes. Some of the women were wearing the jilbab, their heads covered in scarves that came down to their waists, shrouding their slight torsos and revealing only their calm powdered faces. Margaret became aware that the squeaking of her sneakers was the only noise she could hear echoing in the cool emptiness of the space. She could hear no one else’s footsteps, and even the distant drone of the air conditioning had fallen silent.
Outside, the city was white and dusty with heat. She put on her sunglasses and began to walk. ‘Hey, lady,’ men called out, ringing the bells of their becaks to get her attention. She moved away, ignoring them. She wanted to walk; she wanted to move her body and clear her mind and not succumb to this immovable pain in her head. She continued past the dirty white façade of the Catholic cathedral, its spires rising forlornly into the sky. There was a thin patch of fresh whitewash on the walls next to the entrance, but she could still read the messy red graffiti underneath: Crush Christian Imperialists.
‘Hey, lady, hey,’ the becak drivers called. ‘Hey, pretty lady. Oi! ’ A group of three or four of them followed her in their shaded rickshaws, shouting incessantly. Suddenly their cries were all she could hear. The sound of the cars and the buses and scooters faded into a vague, distant roar, like the sound of the sea as you approach the coast but cannot yet see the water. She had to get away from these men, she thought, and crossed the road, wading calmly into the traffic, picking her way westwards to the barren expanse of Merdeka Square. She headed towards the construction site of the soon-to-be National Monument. The gigantic column was pushing slowly into the sky, its thick base shrouded in scaffolding. Monstrous pieces of machinery lay scattered around it, silent and unused like ruins of a lost civilisation. The earth in the square was bare and easily turned to mud by the heavy rains of the monsoon, but now, after a few months without rain, it was crumbling to dust, and she kicked up little red clouds as she walked briskly along in the heavy heat. It felt like a desert here, Margaret thought, uninhabitable by man.
She continued briskly, feeling the heat on her head. Stupid to come out without a hat, she thought, but she was not a delicate white flower that wilted under the sun. She marched on through this deserted island in the middle of the swirling city, trying to ignore her headache. A mangy dog trotted alongside her for a few moments and then sloped off to find shelter. In the distance, in the meagre shade of a spindly acacia, she noticed two boys, shirtless, their backs propped up against the tree trunk. She was not in the mood for hassle, but a quick glance confirmed that there was nowhere to go: all around her there was just a great emptiness with no pathways to divert her trajectory, no cover, no excuse to change direction. Besides, she thought, if she changed tack now they would spot her and know that she was avoiding them, and then they would come after her. She knew this for certain; she had lived here so long and knew these people so well that she could predict what would happen. The best thing to do was to carry on as if they were not there. They might be too lazy or tired to harass her. They were just kids: what could they do? In any case she must show that she was not afraid.
‘Hey, cutey,’ they shouted as she went past. She noticed at once that they did not call her ‘Auntie’ or ‘Mother’ or any other respectful term by which she was often addressed by young men. She should have been flattered but wasn’t; she carried on briskly. Instantly, they were at her side, flanking her as she lengthened her stride. Their frames were slight, even fragile at first glance, yet Margaret saw that they had the expressions and wiry musculature of older boys. Quickly she determined their age: fourteen or fifteen, old enough to be dangerous.
‘Hey – Dutch? British? American? Give us money, US dollars.’ They spoke with the rough accents of the Bimanese or Sasaks; these boys were from the outer islands, not Jakarta.
She continued looking straight ahead. ‘I don’t have any money with me. If I did I would give you some, but I don’t. Now go away, leave me alone.’
Thrown by her fluency in Indonesian, they were quiet for a moment. ‘One dollar,’ one of them said, holding up his index finger. ‘Just one dollar.’
‘No.’
‘OK, rupiah. You have rupiah.’
‘I told you, I have no money.’ They were still a long way from the edge of the square, a long way from the sea of traffic in the distance.
The first boy stepped in front of her and stopped dead. ‘You’re lying.’
He stood very close to her, looking straight into her face. He had a scar running across his forehead, a purple-white streak against the almost iridescent bronze of his skin. The pungent odour of his sweat filled Margaret’s nostrils and she could almost feel the sticky heat from his body. She looked him straight in the eye and was glad for the extra protection of her sunglasses. ‘I am telling you to leave me alone.’
His face broke into an ugly sneer, his lips parting to reveal surprisingly strong white teeth. ‘Why?’
‘Because I say so.’
‘So what? Give me rupiah.’
‘No.’
Out of the corner of her eye she saw another three or four youths jogging towards them, street kids, just like these two, shirtless and barefoot. She moved to one side and resumed walking, faster now: she had to get to the edge of the square.
There were bodies around her, but she kept striving for the road, for the noise of the traffic. Someone reached out and touched her, a hot clammy hand on her bare forearm. Don’t run, she told herself, don’t run. There was a tug at her shirt, then a pinch on the side of her stomach. She broke into a run, kicking up a cloud of dust. The low roar of the traffic grew louder and she heard someone shout out behind her, a single sharp adolescent’s cry, but she did not turn back until she had reached the side of the great wide road with the comforting cacophony before her. She was breathing hard: she could not remember the last time she had had to run. She hurried across the road, enjoying the angry beeping of the scooters, and when she reached the other side she looked across at the square. Suddenly it seemed far away and unthreatening, shrouded in a veil of dust.
She blinked. The sun had begun to fall from its midday peak, the light becoming silvery and blurred through the thick haze of exhaust fumes and dust. The shapes of the boys in the distance shimmered in the heat, floating, it seemed, on a watery surface. ‘Margaret Bates,’ she said aloud, wanting to hear her voice: it sounded hoarse and slightly shaky. ‘Pull yourself together. Right now.’ It was nothing serious, she told herself. You let your guard down for a second and when you do that in a city like Jakarta you’ll get into scrapes, Margaret Bates, you know that full well. It’s no big deal.
They were just boys, just boys.
She continued walking for a few hundred yards until she reached an unkempt lawn that lay like a haphazardly placed rug in front of a large, handsome villa. The white paint of the house had faded to a dirty grey; the columns that divided its façade into neat squares were carved with graffiti, and swiftlets nested in the eaves. Shaded by rain trees, the building felt ancient and damp, and the cool darkness of its deep verandas instantly made Margaret feel better.
‘Good afternoon,’ the woman at the reception said to her, standing up quickly as if she recognised Margaret, as if she had been expecting her.
‘I was wondering if I could look through the old issues of whatever newspapers you have – not that old, in fact, quite recent.’
‘Of course,’ the woman said. She wore a neat beige knee-length skirt and a white blouse. Pinned on her shirt was a plastic brooch of a bumblebee with a smiley face, and in her perfectly straight hair there was a hair-band of the same yellow as the bumblebee’s cheerful cheeks. ‘This way, please.’
Margaret followed her into a large sombre room that smelled of camphor and damp wood. No one else was in the reading room, and most of the bookshelves were empty, or else stacked with nondescript cardboard boxes. There were no windows on the ground floor; above them was a narrow gallery decorated with cheap modern oil paintings of cockfights and buffaloes and paddy fields. The arched windows of the gallery were dirty and stained, and panels of glass missing here and there.
‘It is all ready for you, over there,’ the woman said, pointing at a recess at the far end of the room.
‘But I need something quite specific,’ Margaret said.
The woman smiled a broad toothy smile that looked unnervingly like the bumblebee’s. ‘You will find it all there.’
The alcove was in fact larger than she had thought, and dominated by a table on top of which various newspapers had been arranged in neat piles: the Harian Rakyat, Indonesia Raya, Sinar Harapan. It looked as if they had been specially laid out in the hope that she would come along and consult them. She settled down to a pile of Harian Rakyat from the mid-fifties. Ten years did not seem like such a long time and yet the font and indeed the writing style seemed archaic to her, so innocent and free. The pages were brittle and yellowed and foxed by the humidity, and the few pictures that appeared in them were as blurred as Impressionist paintings. She squinted in the dim light: maybe she needed glasses. Every time she came upon an article on the repatriation of Dutch citizens she paused, searching for names or faces. She had no idea which names or faces she was looking for, but she knew that sooner or later she would come across something that would help her.
‘Here you are, madam.’ Margaret looked up and saw the bumblebee smiling at her. The woman put a glass of almost fluorescent iced syrup on the table next to Margaret and went away again. Margaret hesitated, but she was suddenly very thirsty. She sipped it cautiously at first, and, finding it not as sweet as it looked, finished it in a few gulps. She let a piece of ice slip into her mouth and sucked on it as she continued looking through the newspapers, her tongue feeling pleasantly numb. She worked her way briskly through each pile, pausing occasionally.
Repatriation Continues
JAKARTA, 6 December 1950 – The repatriation of Dutch families from Indonesia is continuing in earnest. Numbers of Dutch nationals leaving Indonesia are estimated to be on the increase. Today a special KLM flight left from Halim Perdana Kusumah airport filled with the latest families departing for the Netherlands. Most of them are happy to be leaving Indonesia, just as we are that they are leaving. Photo: Mother and child wait to board plane. Isn’t that a cute Teddy Bear! Don’t cry Teddy Bear!
Revolt in Ambon
AMBON, 16 January 1951 – Following the disbanding of the colonial army in July last year, a small number of former soldiers have refused to join the new Armed Forces of Indonesia. It is estimated that no more than 40 of these traitors have turned down the chance to participate in President Sukarno’s building of the great Republic of Indonesia and arrangements have been made to ship them away to the Netherlands. ‘I have to leave my family behind and I will be very lonely in the Netherlands, but I have no future in Indonesia,’ says one of these traitors whom we will only call Tomy To Tomy and his friends we say Good Riddance!
Death in the Plantations
Special Report by Affandi Suprianto
NUSA PERDO, 2 December 1953 – In this little-known corner of Indonesia a war is being fought to rid the country of the last vestiges of Dutch colonialism. On a 200-hectare Kayuputih plantation…a battle that symbolises the hardship of ordinary Indonesians…neo-slavery and oppression…Following the death of his daughter Santi, aged 4, plantation worker Adrus Utina…concession-owner Joos van Eerde…funeral costs…pleas unanswered…misunderstanding…subsequent dismissal…fellow workers protested…all rewarded with dismissal…burning of warehouses…accidental shooting…ultimatum…following morning the van Eerde family fled the compound…plantation under the control of the workers’ co-operative…revolution beginning even in outlying islands…
My Wonderful Life: Renowned Artist Jos Smit talks about Heartache and Happiness
BALI, 19 January 1957 – He has had successful exhibitions in Sumatra and his beloved Bandung, and his reputation is now sky-high. Collectors of his work are said to include the President himself, but acclaimed artist Jos Smit’s career would never have begun if he had not come to Indonesia. Now settled in Bali, he is convinced that he has found his spiritual home. ‘I suppose for me it is what Tahiti was to Gauguin – beautiful colours and light, not like the grey grey grey of Holland…tradition of painting…many famous Westerners, Spies and Bonnet, whom everyone knows but other minor figures like Karl de Willigen too.’ As for his nationality, he is utterly sure that he made the right choice, even though he sometimes feels sad for the loss of friends. ‘I took an Indonesian passport as soon as I could, in 1950. All other Dutch Indonesians should have done the same but they didn’t have the courage. I had no hesitation. For nearly ten years I have only spoken Bahasa Indonesia. I can’t even speak Dutch any more! The only regret I have is that sometimes I speak to people and I can see in their eyes that they think I’m Dutch, not Indonesian.’ When asked about other former Dutch contacts who might still be in Indonesia, such as de Willigen, he says, ‘I have had no contact with them for years. They are probably all back in Holland, or else dead.’
United States Peace Programme-aid package for Indonesian Army
JAKARTA, 6 September 1958 – Photo: President Sukarno attends reception at US Embassy in Jakarta (L-R, the President, Ambassador Howard P. Jones, General Nasution).
Margaret examined the hazy image. In the background there hovered a number of people, including the unmistakeable figure of Bill Schneider, his already-thinning hair neatly combed, eyes alert, watching every detail. He looked exactly the same as he did today; clearly, life in the tropics suited him.
She rubbed her eyes. It was getting late, the room darkening quickly in the blue twilight. She rearranged the newspapers haphazardly and went to find the librarian. The reception desk was empty, cleared completely of papers and books. ‘Hello,’ Margaret called, but no one answered. The swiftlets that nested in the eaves of the roof were coming alive in the gathering dusk, fluttering from their nests in search of insects. Margaret left the building and began the long walk home. Her head no longer hurt and she felt ready to face the city.
She walked through the narrow alleys of Glodok, the air filled with the aroma of incense and cooking and blocked drains: a powerful, even heady combination. Never go there at night, foreigners cautioned, but Margaret always found it pleasant here, especially in the evenings. The ceaseless sounds of human industry – the clatter of pans and dishes, the dull thud of sacks unloading from lorries, the indistinct clinking of hardware – comforted her, for in the half-darkness it was easy to imagine that here, in this warren of streets, the city had not changed in two hundred years. Trapped in the maze of dead-ends and unnamed streets, she could not see tower blocks or concrete monuments or glass statues; and under the cover of night the decay of the buildings around her became less noticeable, making the city seem gentler, more human.
Further north the old square was quiet and empty now, the colonnades of the great buildings filled with a deep gloom. The soldiers she had seen earlier were gone, replaced by people trying to find a place to sleep. Suddenly she was eager to get home, and glad she was not far. She longed for a cold shower, a proper modern American one with powerful jets of water that would strip the dust and grime from her hair and face and make her skin tingle when she stepped into it, but instead she knew that she would have to stand under the dribble of her makeshift shower that consisted of a hose and a watering can. The water would be tepid, heated in its thin pipe by the sun, but still, it would be good enough. And then she would have a whisky, a strong one, and then she would fall asleep and forget about today, about everything.
She hurried along the final stretch until she reached the low wooden gate in front of her house. She could hear the distant ringing of her telephone as she fumbled in the dark for her keys, running across the yard. It was not until she was almost at the front door that she realised there was someone there, a body slumped on the steps. It was a boy, a teenager, crouched over in an almost foetal position. Margaret came up close and saw that he was asleep. Disturbed by the insistent ring of the telephone, he began to stir. He shifted uncomfortably; across his white T-shirt the word BERKELEY was emblazoned in large letters. Though closed, his eyelids trembled lightly, rapidly, as if troubled by dreams.

6 (#u918c28af-d421-5001-84ea-bd20729d64b5)
One day, not long after he turned thirteen, Adam ran away from home. He woke up that morning and decided he would look for his mother.
For some weeks before this he had been feeling strange, not at all himself. He would be agitated by the smallest thing: the mewing of the fat white cat outside his window, or the squeaking of his bed-frame every time he turned over on the too-thin mattress, or his cupboard door that never closed properly – things he would not normally have noticed. He was irritated by Karl, too – by his uneven club-footed gait, by the pinky-whiteness of his skin which seemed obtrusive against the dull green landscape and, above all, by the way Karl sometimes mumbled to himself: indistinct words in an indistinct language under his breath without even realising he was doing it. ‘Was I talking to myself again?’ Karl would say, clearing his throat and attempting to laugh whenever he noticed Adam glaring at him. ‘Just a silly poem I remember from a long time ago.’ But it did not matter what he said, for Adam would try to ignore this, but as soon as the dreadful half-whisper started, Adam felt a curious sensation in his head, a pinprick that welled up quickly into a hot, almost burning feeling that filled his skull, pressing especially insistently behind his eye sockets. He would no longer be able to read or concentrate on what he was doing and would be so overcome by this pressure in his head that he would have to retreat to his bedroom. There, on his bed with his pillow over his face, he would still be able to hear Karl’s voice.
As if guilty by association, Karl’s music soon began to annoy Adam too. It made no difference what it was: the moment Karl moved towards the record player, Adam’s back would stiffen. Violins that had previously thrilled him now sounded harsh and screeching; operatic voices, amusing before, were suddenly ridiculous. Adam took to leaving the house altogether. Heading for the sea, he would clamber over the rocks and make his way as far up the shoreline as possible until even the faintest strains of Karl’s dying heroines were drowned out by the hush of the waves. One or two outrigger canoes would be floating on the steel-blue sea, their sails trembling gently in the breeze; small nets would be flung from the boats, the fishermen hauling in meagre catches of mackerel and skipjack and anchovies. Adam would sit watching until his head felt clear and calm once more, the anger draining from his body.
‘What’s wrong with you? Why are you so angry?’ Karl called out after him the first time he got up and left the room, mid-aria, and ran down to the sea. That was what it was, this thing that filled his head: anger. Until this moment, since beginning his New Life with Karl, Adam had never truly known what it was to feel angry. He wondered whether this anger meant that he was somehow changing, and if so, how. He would lie awake in bed thinking, Why am I angry? and, finding no answer, would become angrier still.
At school he suddenly became conscious of what he was: an orphan. He had never been aware of this status, for many of his classmates seemed to be orphans too. Every so often someone would drop out of school to work in the ricefields or help with the nets, and Adam would learn that their father had drowned at sea or their mother had died in childbirth; now they were an orphan. On this island it seemed entirely normal to have lost at least one parent. But one day they had a new teacher, a young Sasak who had studied at the Universiteit van Indonesie. He taught them the difference between orphans who had lost one parent and those who had lost both. There was a word that distinguished the two: piatu. It was important to be precise with our Indonesian language, the teacher said; we have to use it carefully and with pride. This revelation troubled Adam greatly. Had he been orphaned once or twice? Was he a true orphan, more pitiful than the others? He went home and consulted Karl’s dictionary, kept on the highest, dustiest shelves like some forgotten, forbidden relic. Perhaps he would be less of an orphan in Dutch. He would discover that in every language but his own he would be an ordinary, unremarkable orphan. He remembered the Dutch for ‘orphan’ and found it quickly, but the definition was full of words he did not understand and left him more frustrated than ever.
One evening, just before dinner, Karl put on some music – a Keroncong song’s repetitive stringy notes. They sat down to their meal: over-cooked mutton curry and rice.
‘Not hungry, son?’
Adam did not answer; he did not even bother to shake his head. With his spoon he built mounds of rice on his plate and then mashed them into the shallow pool of curry before rebuilding and remashing them. The edge of his plate was decorated with faded purple flowers whose stems disappeared into the brown swamp that Adam had created.
‘Adam,’ Karl said, ‘please don’t play with your food. A lot of people on this island are surviving on one meal every three days, and I mean one meal of rice mixed with tapioca.’
Adam dabbed at the curry. He found a morsel of meat and tried to cut it using the side of his spoon, but the mutton was tough, full of tendons.
‘Use a knife, Adam, you’re making a mess.’
Adam went to the kitchen and returned with a blunt butter knife. He began to saw at the piece of mutton listlessly, as if he had already given up.
‘Please,’ Karl said, ‘don’t hold your knife like that. Put it between your thumb and forefinger – you’re not holding a pencil.’
Adam looked straight ahead, avoiding Karl’s gaze and glaring instead at the piano. Then he smacked the knife down on the table, catching the side of his plate and upending a thick glob of curry onto the linoleum tablecloth. He felt his eyes well up with hot tears, his head prickling with that burning sensation that he now knew to be anger; and this time the anger seeped downwards too, filling his chest and belly.
‘Don’t you leave the table, Adam,’ Karl said, his voice still calm. ‘You’re going to stay here and finish the meal that you are lucky to have. If there is something you are not happy about, say it – but don’t you dare leave food on the table.’
Adam had already risen, his chair pushed back, his hands clutching the side of the table. He remained in this state of limbo for some time, making no attempt to wipe away the thick streams of tears flowing down his cheeks.
‘I want to know,’ he said at last. ‘I want to know about my family.’
Karl sighed. He placed his fork gently on the edge of his plate and then leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. He held up his hands and looked at his palms, intently, as if trying to decipher the secrets of his own life. He lowered his face into his hands and sighed again. ‘I found you at the orphanage, that’s all. You know the whole story. There’s nothing more to tell.’
Adam looked away from Karl. ‘Everyone has a history, you told me that yourself. I want to know about my life – my real life.’
‘But this,’ Karl said, gesturing weakly with both hands at the space around him, ‘this is your life. Isn’t this enough?’
There was no breeze that evening. The rose-coloured lace curtains over the always-open windows did not stir. Adam stared at their pattern of chrysanthemums and palm leaves. The room suddenly felt airless and utterly still.
‘Your mother was not local.’ Karl spoke in a measured monotone, as if he had rehearsed saying these words a thousand times before. ‘Some people said they had seen a fair-skinned woman in the village the day before you were found. She had the complexion of a Sumatran or a Malay and she spoke differently, with a big-city accent – Jakarta, some people thought, but no one was sure; it was difficult to understand what she was saying. Someone asked her where she had come from and she said, “From a place far away.” She asked directions to the orphanage. She had a baby. It was so silent and still that some people thought it was dead. There was a toddler too, a little boy with glassy eyes that never blinked. The villagers saw the woman walking along the paths leading out to the hills, along the ricefields that were very green that year. The next day she was gone and there were two children at the orphanage. This is all I know.’
Adam noticed that he had, quite suddenly, become curiously clearheaded and calm. His breathing had slowed down to a bare whisper. He wondered why he could not react more powerfully to what he had just heard – it did not seem like a revelation but a mere affirmation of something he already knew; it confused him that he should feel soothed, not agitated, by this news.
‘So she went back to Jakarta,’ he said eventually.
‘I haven’t a clue. She could just as well have been from Surabaya or Medan or even Singapore. This is what they told me when I came to the orphanage. They mentioned nothing else – no father, nothing.’ Karl reached across and laid his hand on Adam’s arm; Adam felt it on his skin, cold and clammy and heavy. ‘Son, please believe me, that is all I know.’
‘What about,’ Adam said, hesitating, ‘what about my brother?’
‘They say he was taken somewhere far away – Kuala Lumpur, they thought. The people who adopted him did not want to say where they were taking him.’
Adam looked at Karl’s furrowed brow and tired, red eyes. He moved from the table and felt Karl’s grip on his arm loosen and fall away limply. Karl remained at the table staring blankly at the remnants of their dinner that lay on the chipped china plates, illuminated by the stark light of the single bulb hanging low over the table. It was as if they both knew that by the next morning Adam would be gone, and there was nothing Karl could do to stop him.
The idea of Jakarta or any other big city held no terror for Adam. For several weeks now he had been reconstructing his own metropolis, rebuilding it in his mind’s eye as he went about his daily chores. While sweeping the yard he summoned a vast flat plain circled by distant hills; while feeding the chickens he painted an aquamarine sky, troubled by rich rain clouds. After dinner he would hurry to bed, longing for that intense, magical hour during which he could return to the focal point of his Jerusalem: a neat modern bungalow with whitewashed brick walls, a roof of red-clay tiles and a compound filled with plants in pots. This was the house in which his mother lived. There were a few cats – sleek blue-grey ones – which his mother would pick up now and then and caress. There was a child too – his brother Johan – but it was more difficult for Adam to picture this boy, who resisted Adam’s attempts to bring him to life and so remained consigned to the shadows. Adam concentrated instead on building the streets around his mother’s house. They were clean and modest, busy with scooters and becaks and bicycles, lined with houses like his mother’s, simple and unadorned, lived in by decent people; but beyond this unsullied heart the city grew darker, murky with unseen danger. There were wide avenues that stretched into the distance, running into nothingness; there were great silvery buildings full of people doing things that Adam could not comprehend; there were areas of brilliant colourful light and slums where there was no light at all. Sometimes the streets were full of urchins and millionaires, sometimes there would be no one.
He imagined this city into existence, and now it seemed more tangible than the barren place in which he lived. He knew he had to leave. He knew he had to find this faraway city.
The ferry was not as big as he had expected and there were many people waiting to board. The bus journey from the other side of the island had not been so bad, and he had a pocketful of dollars that he could feel pressing on his thigh. Setting off from home that morning he was so light-headed with excitement that he almost felt sick. It had been one of those rare cool mornings when the sun kept low behind a thin veil of cloud, and there was no dust in the air, just a hint of rain. But now, standing alone at the docks, the sun was high and he was hot and tired. The boat that lay just beyond the jetty seemed too flimsy to withstand the crossing to Java. It must once have been painted gaily in greens and yellows, but only a few curled flakes of paint still clung to the dark slimy timber. Its single deck was already full of people, but the crowd nonetheless insisted its way forward, bottlenecking at the gangway. There was no shouting, no agitation, just an eerie hum of voices as people tried to force their way onto the boat. Adam could not understand. There were men reaching across from the edge of the boat to take children whose mothers held them out pleadingly, and occasionally a bag would be tossed from the crowd onto the boat, from invisible owner to unidentifiable recipient.
Adam noticed a boy standing next to him. He was older than Adam and wore a clean T-shirt with a bright orange globe on it; he did not look like the other boys hanging around the docks. ‘You’ll want to hurry or you’ll miss your chance to go across,’ he said.
Adam squinted, shielding his eyes from the sun.
‘Everyone’s leaving because of the drought. They think it’s better over there, over in the big cities where there are foreigners, but it isn’t. I’ve come from there, I should know.’ He laughed as if he had told a joke and Adam could not tell if he was serious. ‘Oi! It’s one big turd, this whole country!’ he shouted in the general direction of the ferry and giggled. ‘There’s no escape!’
Adam began to move away.
‘Hey, do you want to get on board?’
‘No thanks,’ Adam said. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow.’ He did not know how he would achieve this; he had no idea where he would sleep or eat or hide from the crowds: tomorrow seemed an eternity away.
‘It will be the same story tomorrow, my friend,’ the boy said, catching up with Adam, ‘and the day after and the day after and the day after. But listen, I can get you on board.’
Adam stopped and looked at this boy. He looked normal, just like Adam. ‘How?’
‘I know people here. People who can get you on board.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure. All it takes is a bit of money. You have money, don’t you? We don’t need much – enough for a pack of cigarettes, plus something for me. Hey, fair’s fair, isn’t it? I’m only asking for some coffee-money, no more.’
Adam hesitated but found himself nodding.
‘Don’t worry, I like you. You’re my newest friend! Don’t give me anything now. When you get on the boat, a friend of mine will come and find you. I’ll tell him you’re my buddy – just give him enough cash to buy some kretek. How about that? My god, you’re so helpless, look at you. OK, don’t worry, don’t give him anything. We’ll do it for free. This is your lucky day – we’ll do you a favour. Just remember, if you ever get to Jakarta and make it big, remember me: Sunny.’ He pointed at the logo on his T-shirt. ‘That’s me, unmissable, unforgettable, just like the sun.’

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