by Tash Aw
“What did you think might have happened? That I fell prey to a wanton taxi driver? I just overslept, that’s all.”
Din did not answer for a while. Margaret imagined his inscrutable smile. “Okay, 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 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 from the small storeroom into which she threw everything that she did not use on a daily basis, things that accumulated 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 preadult period, buried under old college textbooks but lying (more or less) on top of a box labeled 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 recognized 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 recognize the other people in the photos if she met them today. She certainly had not recognized 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 color. 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 recognized 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 recognize 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. Margaret studied it at length; the slight curve of it was unmistakable—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 shops, their bamboo blinds lowered against the sun. A hundred and fifty years ago, when Dutch Batavia was at its zenith, these shops contained bags 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 terra-cotta 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 ringed 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 smoldering 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 drains and the pools of stagnant gray 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 made from smooth gray concrete had shiny glass in the windows and a facade 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 semicircular 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 around; 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, reemerging 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 cots. The shutters were open but here in the shadow of their enormous neighbor 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 honor?”
“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 stocky man with broad, hairy forearms and thick farmer’s 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 into 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 and dehydrated. “That was so long ago.”
“Ah-ha! You admit it!”
She turned to Rudy. “Just ignore him. It’s all rumors. 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 outward.
“—started a rumor. 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 leaned 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 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. Right 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 refolded 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 anymore.”
Mick did not reply; a moment of silence passed between them, the staccato tapping of Rudy’s typewriter the only noise in the airless morning. 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 anymore.”
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 U.S. channels. CBS doesn’t use me anymore; 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 adjac
ent building. There were more people around 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 facade 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.
