Map of the Invisible World: A Novel

by Tash Aw

  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 learned to operate. The small box was made of chocolate brown wood on the outside, light-colored 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 realize 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 colorless, 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 color 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.

  Goedenavond, 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 colonized 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 sunburned 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 learned 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 learned 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, or 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, “Welkomm aan mijn huis.” He had seen the words in a book and thought that he knew roughly what they 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 reenacted in his mind 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 rice fields 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 so well), he finds that every episode in his life in this single-story 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 materializes 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 amid the fogginess of his nonmemory there is one lonely certainty, one person who he knows did exist, and it is this that lures him back.

  Adam had a brother. His name was Johan.

  The only problem is that Adam cannot remember the slightest thing about him, not even his face.

  · 3 ·

  This is just so depressing,” Margaret said as she flicked aimlessly through the day’s edition of Harian Rakyat before letting it fall limply on her desk. Even with the louvred windows open, the room was hot and still; the ceiling fan raised just enough wind to ruffle the pages of the newspaper. The headline read, STUDENTS REVOLTING IN CLASSROOMS.

  “They’re always revolting,” she added. She had hardly bothered to read the paper. It was too hot and the news was always the same.

  Din put a can of Coke on her desk. “I didn’t know there were still any students in the classrooms.” He picked up the newspaper and sat at his desk. “Have you read this? There was a fire in the Science block on Thursday. Arson, they think. Did you see anything? I didn’t, and I was here all day. Look, they caught the culprit—he looks like one of your students, though it’s difficult to tell. These mug shots all look the same to me. They’re always nice, clean-looking boys from th
e provinces with glossy hair and pressed shirts.”

  “Either that or they’re dead and lying facedown 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 sympathize. 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 in front of 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 sympathize 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 offense, 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 percent 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 non verbal 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 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 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 gray buildings. Everything looked gray 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 colors and the details of Jakarta, or when this grayness 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 capital letters? 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 neighbor in a cacophony of advertisement. NORTH SUMATRAN FAVORITE FROM BANDUNG EVER POPULAR DISH OF TORAJA KINGS. As if this assault were not enough, the prices too were announced in oversize 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 grayness. 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 recognized. It would not hap pen. 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 the window at the dirty gray 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 around. 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. “L
et’s get an early dinner. Then we can go to the Hotel Java or somewhere fancy, you know, have some drinks—something strong and colorful 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 toward 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 in this disgusting orgy.”