26 June
He was laughing a kind of high whinny with his eyes closed, his face inches away from mine. It had pulled me out of my dream with a slap of fright and then I realised where we both were and that he was actually still asleep. He had started talking loudly, in rapid Indonesian. I guessed he was dreaming about someone else, because when he dreams about me he speaks English. Usually it is about the time we went snorkelling together. He jerks his arms and legs around in the inexpert way that he did when we went to Bali and he says – snarkelling – I want to snarkelling – and he turns over and moves like a shrimp, feeling his way blindly around the bed.
Snorkelling was one of many firsts. The first glass of red wine, the first plane trip, the first dive into a real ocean. He spent one afternoon collecting tiny, unremarkable shells from the ocean floor and showing them to me and laughing with delight. Then I taught him how to float as the sun was going down.
Again Vic! Show me again!
His long body struggled to stay on the surface of the water beneath the pink delicious sky.
When he talks in his sleep I usually try to fit into the conversation to see how long I can make it last.
Who am I? I asked in Bahasa, which brought another disturbing peal of high laughter. Then he turned over and began mumbling. I tried again for at least a short volley but I couldn’t get him on my wavelength, so I turned on the lamp. The sleep covered his face like one of those masks from the cover of an old Greek playbook from high school. His eyes opened briefly, but there was nobody behind them. I wondered if there was a lot of difference between the conversations we have when he is asleep and those we have when he is awake. We have some difficulties with language, and then there is culture and religion, so there are moments when it feels like I’m talking to a stranger from the bottom of a lake or a glass jar.
Talking, laughing and snorkelling are not the only idiosyncrasies in his sleeping. He is also impossible to wake up. This includes hitting him, slapping him around the face, holding his eyes wide open, shaking, shouting – those things only work for a second and then he’s lying back dead as a burlap bag. I’ve even tried rolling him onto the floor. The only way to really wake him up is to pour water into his eyes – which he instructed me to do once, holding each eyelid open and tipping the water in from a glass.
The snorkelling holiday was a secret from his mother, who thought he had gone to train at a packaging factory in the mountains. When he got back he told her he had failed the training, and the next time we went away he told her the same thing.
They must really think you are a prize idiot, I told him. How can you fail at putting things in boxes? Twice?
He thought this was very funny, but I don’t envy his mother the burden of a stupid son. I imagine her heart sinking each time he returns home, cap in hand, looking at the ground.
It’s after three in the morning, which is as good a time as any to reflect on what the hell I’m doing here, especially as I can’t sleep, and he seems to be gearing up for another big night on the reef, or wherever else his dreams have taken him.
When we were in Bali there were some people who were unhappy when they saw us together. Middle-aged white men, to be precise, had glared at me and then looked away. I’ve used the same look on old white men who are with young Asian girls more times than I can count, but this is the first time I’ve been on the other end of it. If I could be bothered explaining, I would them that we did not meet in a bar or in any kind of sex industry establishment. We did not enter into any money-for-sex agreement. We are both surprised to have been together for longer than one night. I do not think I am causing this person any harm.
But I know it all sounds defensive. The truth is, I started it because it was too easy not to, and now I don’t want to stop. In the midst of all this moral righteousness, the prayers ringing out relentlessly in the street, the modest clothing, the demonstrations and the threats, the tired old ideas, almost anything seems all right. Another excuse. The truth is that after all these years of being outraged at old Western men parading around with their young Asian wives, girlfriends and whores, I have found myself in love with a very young man with no money. I can’t defend it.
I could say the same thing to the men at work who make snide, witless remarks when they know I am listening. To them I am Lady Chatterley gone mad and sleeping with the help, but most of them sleep with anything that moves: cleaners, bellboys, waitresses, students if they can get their hands on them. One of them is also sleeping with the boss.
In any case, do I have to explain to anyone about my lover with the large white teeth and electric black eyebrows? Smooth skin and dark eyes. A body that is sometimes lanky and other times solid. Tall. Apart from that high horsey laugh he does when he is sleeping, his voice is as sumptuous as silk. It is not so deep, but just right in a kind of chocolatey way. And stories are told with great earnestness.
No. Vic. Listen. It is like this. He tells me about men who are charmed by evil magicians – they are turned into black pigs and sent to steal from people’s houses.
Is it real or is it a story?
No, Vic. It is real.
Can you find black pigs like that in Jakarta?
Can, yes, but not all of them are really men.
Well how can you tell the difference?
He looks at me with stern impatience.
From the eyes, Vic! From the eyes!
Oh, I say. How do they carry the stolen things? In their mouths?
No. Listen. It is by magic. Like a mobile phone.
He closes his eyes and waves his arms around as he conducts the story of the enchanted pigs. I can see them sniffing furtively around the back alleyways of Jakarta. They sniff past the dead rivers and scraggly goats, which are almost hidden by the huge malls full of gold and glass and designer clothes. It is all built on sewerage and mud. The goats are for the hairy stew that the people who build the malls will eat, while they stay in little ply-board boxes and make these places, which they will never afterwards enter. The immaculate, uniformed doorman would not let them in if they tried, and in any case, a coffee there would cost them more than a day’s salary. While they are working, their children play in the dirt, with old nails and scraps of wood, and with the goats that disappear one by one until the last one is eaten. The houses are knocked down in the space of an afternoon when the work is finished.
As well as the supernatural pigs, Fajar has seen a jinni. When he was a child on camp in the mountains, he found it stretched out on a hammock between two trees, a giant in silk trousers, eyes closed, snoring loudly while grinning from ear to ear. If you are unlucky enough to attract jinn, they will make you miserable by taunting you and tempting you to do things you should not, and so Fajar ran away immediately, which caused him to get lost in the mountains and have to be rescued by the police.
It is like this, he says. Jinn can be very tricky – they will pretend to be a human being and cause big mischief – even copy the voice of somebody who is already dead and talk to you in this voice all day and make you crazy.
There is other magic to be found here, but mostly in the villages, where city people will travel when they have saved enough money to pay a magician to put a spell on someone, buy a love potion, or have a curse removed.
I don’t argue over his beliefs in magic, but his ideas about men and women are something I can’t hold back on. Because of the clothing, it is hard to ignore the gender inequalities here. Many of the women do not wear headscarves, but in any case, it’s not really the enforced covering up that bothers me, so much as the sheer ugliness of the women’s clothes, especially the hideous flesh-coloured toe socks that seem to be made of wetsuit material. This is so no one can see the bare skin of your feet when you are wearing sandals. There are also horrible stockings that are like thick opaque tights so no one can catch a glimpse of lower-leg skin.
I have seen some women wearing beautiful headscarves in other countries, but here most of them are a cross between a nun’s habit and a base
ball cap. They are hideously peaked and righteously functional and I hate them. I hate the frilly do-up-to-the-chin shirts. I hate the complete lack of sensuality that the women here are forced to display.
But then, I also hate the way young women are compelled to show their bodies in the West. When I get home after months away, I am shocked by how much women don’t wear.
I tried to explain this to Fajar but we went off down a rabbit hole, with him trying to justify women wearing burqas.
Well, Vic, she is saving her face for her husband.
Save – what the hell is wrong with someone seeing your face? When you get married do you want to be the only person who can see your wife’s face? It’s her FACE. She needs it for walking around and talking to people.
No. Vic. Listen. It is like this …
What about your face? I’m not happy with you showing that sexy face around. Another woman might want you.
Occasionally I’ll drop one out of the blue – most notably the time I corrected him for calling God ‘He’ because God is a woman. I have never seen a person more surprised. Ever.
No, Vic. Let me explain, he said kindly, on recovery. In Islam God is not a woman. It is impossible.
He uses that word – ‘impossible’ – a lot, and the other one he uses is ‘forbidden’. It is impossible. It is forbidden. To me, they are old words and up for very close scrutiny, but not for him.
In truth, I have never thought of God as a woman. I really just wanted to float the idea by him. I don’t think much about God at all, unless I am very worried about something and then I feel my scepticism melt away and I start making impassioned requests, a bit like a child travelling overseas – no postcard for months and then suddenly a collect call demanding money. God tends to look like a friendly old man when I do talk to him – he sometimes sits on a large boulder, looking out over the mountains. He is not overly concerned about anything I have to say, but usually appears to be listening.
Fajar has told me about the rock-in-a-hanky Muslims. These people hit their own foreheads in order to appear devout, like they have been praying with their forehead on the ground for such a long time that it has bruised. They hit themselves with a rock wrapped up in a handkerchief. We laughed together at that. We are never really on the brink of argument about religion – apart from small skirmishes, we mostly ignore it.
I want to know more about Indonesian politics, especially Suharto – someone told me that he stole an estimated five hundred billion dollars from the Indonesian people and I am trying to find out if it is true, or even possible. When I ask Fajar he thinks for a moment and replies in a near whisper:
It is probably true. I have heard that he had three hundred cows.
Whether Suharto stole all that money or not, he certainly did not spend any on railways or roads. The traffic is chaos – the craziest kind of impatient drivers honking and skating all over the roads and filthy exhausts and buses full of people packed in, poker faced, staring straight ahead. My section of the city is full of boarding houses, which are inhabited by business people from the country, students, travellers, drug dealers and one whore in my building who keeps me awake by clacking up and down the stairs in her high heel shoes talking on her mobile phone. The clacking stops just before the early morning call to prayer, when the caterwauling of what sounds like a hundred half-drunk, angry men bellowing into megaphones erupts across the city.
There are piles of garbage in the drains beside the roads and squashed rats slowly toasting in the screaming heat. The streets are lined with small warungs, selling mostly grey food fried in rancid oil. The place is insufferable. But the people smile out from every shabby corner with good will and good humour – Hello Vic; Hello sayang2; Hello sweetheart; Good morning Vic – and I walk down the road feeling a little like Yertle the Turtle – Queen of the Mud, often followed by ten or twenty children, sometimes stopping to drink coffee and canned milk on a small stool next to a drain.
The city doesn’t run – it grinds and bumps along on its bunions of poverty and ignorance, religious fanaticism, sexism, corruption. Beggars sit like buzzards, lining the footbridges. They are mostly women brandishing babies with the quiet confidence of having the right product, calling out to me in a staccato song of anticipation: Madam madam madam madam! I beam my friendliest smile and walk straight past them.
Madam, I babeeee!
That’s why I don’t give you the money, I want to say. Because you have your baby on a footbridge in the blazing heat, and somebody is pimping you out.
The news is passed down the line. The big heartless white woman who doesn’t care about babies has spoken. Their eyes quickly fill with hatred and scorn and their indignant calls chase after me as I make my way down to the street.
There is one particular woman I pass every day on the way to my office and I grow more and more agitated each time I see her. She sits on the concrete in the hot, damp weather with the faraway expression of cattle. If she meets my gaze it is with perfect blankness. A filthy baby lies on a square of cloth next to her and, next to that, a child scratches at an ulcerated leg. Someone has got her and the children in service. Those resigned shoulders could not have dreamed up this enterprise alone. One day I am surprised by my own sudden outburst as I walk by.
For God’s sake, get off the ground! Get Up! Get Up! Do something!
The woman looks straight through me, but the child moves forward, a little curious. There are people on the bridge and I am immediately ashamed and walk on. When I look behind again she is staring straight ahead – nothing just happened, nothing will ever happen. She doesn’t exist.
At the bottom of that footbridge there was a big accident once. Or I should say around three or four hundred minor accidents over twenty-four hours. What happened was some workers were building a busway station and, somehow, some oil was spilled onto the busy road. The workers didn’t clean it up or cordon off the area, they just left it there. A woman drove past on a motorbike and skidded through the oil and fell onto the road. The men kept on working without looking up. A young man was next, and then an older man. Eight people on motorbikes slid through the oil and toppled onto the road in the space of ten minutes. The next afternoon, coming out of my office, I was surprised to see that nothing had been done about the oil. I watched a motorbike take a big slide and woman come down hard on the asphalt. A few seconds later, another man skidded across the road and landed with a crack against a pylon. He got up and marched over to the workers, who were still oblivious to the fracas being created by their mess. The man grabbed one worker by the collar and started shaking him. A small crowd formed. A policeman appeared from nowhere and broke up the fight. He ordered the workers to put up a sign to block off the road and clean up the mess. I couldn’t understand how it had taken so long for the police to arrive and fix this problem.
When I asked about it at work, they raised their eyebrows as if to say, Oh you new people don’t understand anything. And they are right; I don’t understand a lot of things about this place.
I especially don’t understand the casual, unaffected way that the rich people seem to trample all over the poor. I walked into a mall one day, which was decorated with banners bearing shopping quotes from famous people including one from Imelda Marcos that read: Win or lose – after the election we go shopping! Right next to that, behind the big glass windows, some girls were having their long hair blow-dried and their toenails polished. They were small and pretty, perched on fluffy chairs, with credit cards nestling in Louis Vuitton handbags on their laps. There isn’t much difference between winning and losing when you are already in a fortress on top of a mountain and you have everything that belongs to everybody else locked up in your own impenetrable vault, and down in the street, where there should be hospitals and schools, there are more of these malls going up. It is only a few years after the riots that caused the ousting of the Suharto regime, and yet its ghosts are living the life and mocking the little people who make their opulent lifestyles possib
le. Fajar is one of the many people in this vast city who have no future. He shows all the tell-tale signs of urban poverty – calloused, oil-stained hands, a terrible haircut, that phone with the matchstick wedged in the side, faded, high-waisted underpants with a sprinkling of tiny holes in them. In cafes and restaurants I notice people looking at him in that Asian way that is almost imperceptible to a Westerner – a tiny flicker of the eye as he pulls out his tattered wallet, a slight sideways glance that tells me he is being over-polite to the waiter. I look at his impassive face and think how brave he is to be there with me in this other world that he has only walked outside of before.
When you are young, of course, it is easier to get away with almost anything, because of the perfect body and flawless skin and the belief that the future might bring anything at all. Fate could strike like magic and there you could be in another life that you never even dreamed about. When you get older, it’s harder. The disappointment starts to show through the cracks, and cheap clothes do not forgive an ageing body. It is only youth that can outshine poverty.
After we had been together for a few months, I started to buy him things that he needed, the way you would buy for a child. I would notice that something was broken or old or torn, and the next time I saw him I would give him a new one. There wasn’t a plan, as such, to make him look any different. In fact, the transformation was so gradual that I didn’t notice, until the day I bossed him into going to the dentist and he had his teeth cleaned after getting a filling. The teeth looked good. We were going up the escalators in the mall and he turned to me with a beaming smile and said:
Oh Vic! I feel very confident!
Keep them like that, I answered. When I am gone and you fall in love with an Indonesian woman you’ll have a nice smile to wear on your wedding day.
I was saying it for me as much as for him. We both needed reminding that this thing between us couldn’t last forever. He smiled back from the comfort of his white teeth and his new denim jacket, and I was startled to notice that he had movie-star good looks that had appeared out of nowhere, the same way a flower appears on a neglected plant after it gets a little attention.
Ramadan Sky Page 5