Map of the Invisible World: A Novel

by Tash Aw

  “Now tell me again how you got here, how you found me … Adam.” Margaret hesitated over the name. She pronounced it in the Indonesian way, because he looked Indonesian, but she was not entirely certain which language she should be speaking, or indeed how she should be communicating with this boy. He had started by speaking to her in English, with more than a hint of a Dutch accent, which disconcerted her; but when he switched to Indonesian, which he did quite frequently and randomly, she found his accent impossible to place—a real problem, given that she usually adjusted her accent to that of the other person (that was another of her strengths: Mimicry and the Creation of Rapport; her Balinese accent was especially quick and fluent). “Just take your time—I want to know everything.”

  He began to speak, his mouth still full of ham sandwich.

  “Please slow down,” Margaret said. “You’ll be sick if you continue eating like that; in fact, it’s making me feel ill just watching you.”

  Watching him was, in fact, an unsettling but not wholly unpleasant experience. He was an interesting case study: neutral Indo-Malay features with a suggestion of Minangkabau-Malay ancestry, an essentially clear complexion darkened by the Spartan life of the southeastern islands, which made him look at once refined and rudimentary, thus proving Margaret’s long-standing belief that the way we look—our basic features, stripped of clothing and mannerism—is affected by the conditions in which we live. It was as if a Sumatran nobleman had copulated with a tribeswoman from Irian, and this was the result. His hair was thick and slightly wavy, still damp from the shower she had insisted he take. It was shorn at the back and sides and combed over purposefully at the top with a side parting that looked like a fold in a great black sea, so precise she wanted to trace her finger along it.

  “Please forgive me,” he began and coughed—a stifled half cough, almost like punctuation, an expression of politeness. “I am very rude. I have many things to tell you. Or, more precisely, to ask you.”

  “Well, I’m all yours.” Margaret tried to remain calm. She wanted to appear interested but not intrigued, to hide the sudden flush in her cheeks and the rapid tick-ticking in her chest that made her breathing quicken. His intonation, his choice of words (or, more precisely), that somewhat mannered old-world formality, the slight abruptness, the nervous cough—she had heard these words before, many years ago. She had known these unmistakable speech patterns so well and had kept their echoes somewhere in the archives of her consciousness, like old record albums she thought she had lost. But here they were, clear and true, with only the slightest distortion, as if the vinyl had warped with age—or maybe it was just her; maybe she had warped with age.

  He began to relate to her, starkly and without any fuss, exactly what he had seen. “It has been nearly ten days since he was taken away. I do not know what they have done with him. This is him, I mean, he …” He put his finger on the photograph that was on the table. “This one, here.”

  The photo sat squarely in the middle of the smooth green Formica surface. Adam had put it there as soon as he had entered the house, and it had remained there untouched throughout his shower and his meal. Margaret had left it alone; it lay there like an unknown, perhaps dangerous object that warranted caution, even though she knew perfectly well what it was.

  “Here,” Adam said, sliding the photo toward her, his index finger still fixed to the same point. “This is my father.”

  “This one?” Margaret wondered if she sounded disingenuous to him.

  “Yes. He’s actually my foster father, which is why we, well, don’t look alike.”

  “Yes, I had deduced that. What’s his name again?”

  “Karl de Willigen.” Adam looked at her with a slight frown; he seemed anxious, a touch confused. “And this is you, isn’t it?” His index finger landed on another grainy figure, standing next to Karl. They were both dressed in sarongs; she wore a floral lace tunic, he a stiff, boxy white shirt and Balinese headdress. There were others too, Europeans, all in local costume. Margaret had never seen the photo before. It looked like a terrible fancy-dress party, she thought, embarrassing and offensive; she wished it had been a party, which would have made it less awful. A part of her wished that she had no recollection of these people or of this time of her life, but there was no escape: Her perfect memory retained everything.

  “Um-hmm, I suppose it is. The evidence is pretty unequivocal, isn’t it?” Hearing Karl’s name pronounced in exactly the same way he would have pronounced it—with the soft v and soft, breathy g made her head spin. She couldn’t handle that voice coming from this body. She looked at Adam and smiled. “It’s from a long time ago. I’ve changed so much; we all have. I’m sure Karl doesn’t look like he does here.” She laughed a breezy laugh.

  “Actually, my father still resembles his image in this photo. Very much so. It’s as if the years have come and gone and not changed anything.”

  “Really?”

  “I found this picture among his things.”

  “He keeps a photo of us—I mean, old photos—on his desk?”

  “No, it was in his boxes.”

  “Oh.”

  “In hunting for clues I violated his privacy, I know, but I was desperate. I found this picture and then also this one—” He produced another photo, this time of Margaret on her own. Her hair was short, much as it was today, only curlier and messier, neatened only slightly by a single clip that pulled the curls off her forehead. She was sitting cross-legged, all gamine elbows and knees; her cheeks were freckled from the sun, her eyes squinting as she pulled a face. She looked impossibly young and happy.

  “God, I look like Anne Frank,” she said.

  Adam turned the picture over and showed her Karl’s elegant handwriting: Margaret, Ubud, December 1938. “So I searched some more, looked in his address books and old notebooks and diaries from his time in Bali. He mentions you quite frequently—”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, so I knew who you were: Margaret Bates.”

  “What does he say about me—in the diaries, I mean?”

  “I didn’t really read them—I wasn’t prying, you understand, I was just looking for clues. I need to find my father. Well, anyway, I digress. I memorized your name and address at the university. It has taken me nearly a week to reach Jakarta. Luckily I had some money, U.S. dollars. My father had a secret hiding place in case of emergencies. He showed me where it was as soon as I got to the house. No secrets between us, he used to say. So I paid people to drive me. I bought cigarettes and liquor for truck drivers. It was hard. I did not know if you were still alive, if you even existed. Sometimes …” He paused and rubbed his eyes. He looked very tired all of a sudden. “Sometimes, when I was falling asleep on a bus or truck, I wondered if I had just dreamed you up.” He was playing with some breadcrumbs, rolling them between his fingertips until they became tiny sticky balls. “I remembered quite clearly my father speaking of you. Over the years he mentioned this person, ‘Margaret,’ and even though I was small I remember thinking that I would like to meet this American woman who had been my father’s friend.”

  Margaret reached across and patted him on his forearm, a somewhat tentative tapping rather than a soothing squeeze. The thin bones on the back of his hand twitched and for an instant Margaret thought he was going to cry. His shoulders were hunched over, making him seem rounded, even fat.

  He continued staring at the table and shook his head. “I can’t explain why I have just come to you, and more particularly why I have told you all this.”

  Margaret cleared her throat; she felt an odd sensation, something she did not immediately recognize. This boy looked so lost and forlorn and alone that she wanted to reach out to him and cradle him like an infant until he fell asleep. This is crazy, she thought: Surely it couldn’t be a parental urge she was experiencing. He was an adolescent Indonesian male whom she did not know. Earlier she had noticed his eyes; shiny black beads for irises, the whites unnervingly white, not tinged with jaundice like
so many other local kids. Her Ability to Analyze had deserted her and she did not know what to do with him.

  “It’s very late,” she said at last. “You must get some sleep. We can talk some more tomorrow morning.”

  He nodded and then looked at her with his perfect eyes. “Will you help me get my father back?”

  Margaret looked down at the rolled-up bits of breadcrumb on the table and nodded. “I want him back too.”

  · 8 ·

  Margaret first fell in love with Karl roughly twelve minutes after she set eyes on him. She was fifteen, he twenty-seven. She would fall in love with him several more times over the many years that followed that initial meeting, but those occasions were less precisely recalled, blurred as they were by the various instances of falling out of love with him.

  She remembers that first falling in love without any hint of sentimentality or nostalgia. It took her more than ten minutes but less than fifteen to decide that she was in love. She knew this because she checked her watch, which she had been given for her birthday that year and which she loathed, a stupid Mickey Mouse watch, his yellow gloved hands pointing the time (why on earth had her parents chosen such a thing? Didn’t they know her at all?). She also knew that it was not a theatrical coup de foudre (the like of which she would perhaps experience later) nor indeed a surge of primitive lust, but something far more conscious and deliberate. Margaret had simply decided to fall in love. She did not tumble helplessly into schoolgirl hysterics; she experienced no shortness of breath or palpitations or any of the more vulgar symptoms often associated with falling in love. At fifteen, she was already capable of making such decisions.

  They met at the local Barong dance, catching each other’s eye for a brief moment, Karl acknowledging her presence with a quick, shy nod, as if deferring to a more established member of an invisible hierarchy. Margaret responded by waving from across the bare dirt clearing where the dance was to take place. She continued to observe him for the duration of the event, noticing at once that he had the look of someone who had just arrived in Bali, someone struck by all the misty-eyed beauty of this fabled Eden. The symptoms were clear: the sudden serenity of expression; the inability to speak, to express oneself adequately because one did not have the vocabulary to capture what one saw or felt; the slowed-down walk that imitated the Balinese, conscious of the lack of grace in the Western posture.

  His sand-colored hair fell across his forehead and made him look adolescent, timid, and slightly lost. He sat cross-legged in the dirt, like the locals, his sarong (yes, he already had one) tucked neatly into his lap. He watched intently as the music started, piercing, discordant, eerie: notes and rhythms that could not be understood by the Western ear. There were cymbals, gongs, bells, and, most of all, the heavy drumming that surged and ebbed without pause. Fantastic figures appeared, shrieking horribly, their faces shrouded by masks inhuman and terrifying. Karl did not blink, not even once. He looked helpless, as if he had stumbled into an unknown world where nothing made sense, where he was a child once more. Margaret felt a sudden surge of something she had never felt before. Analyzing this feeling afterward, she would conclude that it was a combination of many things: feelings of superiority, of experience, of wanting to be a guide, a teacher; wanting to gather something vulnerable in her arms and nurse it to health; the urge to be physically close to something warm and clear and soft. She looked at her watch: It had been ten minutes since she had first spotted him.

  The dancers, all male, clad in traditional white sarongs, began to stab at themselves with their kiris, some of them falling on the ground, writhing in pain; others bent over double, shivering, the wavy blades pressed firmly against their chests. Their muscles were strained, sinewy, their skin slick with sweat. Their eyes were wide and hollow and some of them were crying; as ritual dictated, they had slipped into a trance. The air was filled with tortured groans, an immense demonic anguish. Margaret giggled. Karl was perspiring intensely, his expression beginning to match that of the dancers, at once empty and furious, like a child recently woken from sleep. She wanted to hold him and stroke his hair and assure him that it was all a dream, a bad, cheap, silly dream that didn’t mean anything.

  At last the temple custodians began to calm the men, reviving them from their entranced battle with evil by throwing holy water over them. Bunches of smoking coconut leaves were brought and stamped on to hasten this recuperation, and after a long time the crowd began to disperse. Bodies lay on the dirt, inert as corpses, their heads cradled in the loving arms of priests or friends. Margaret made her way over to Karl. He had managed to stand up but had not moved away. He looked dazed, surveying the carnage before him.

  “Was that your first time?” she said.

  “What? Sorry?”

  “Was that the first Barong dance you’ve witnessed?”

  Karl looked at her uncomprehendingly. “I think I fell into a trance too.”

  “Oh my god.” Margaret could not stifle a giggle. “That wasn’t a real trance. They know there are foreigners here. It’s never the same when there are lots of tourists.”

  “Right, sure. But … are there lots of Westerners here? I didn’t think so. I’m not a tourist though. I was born here.”

  “In Bali?”

  “No. Buru. I’m sure you don’t even know where that is.” His eyes were no longer glazed over, and he was smiling.

  “Of course I do. It’s part of the Moluccas. Just a stone’s throw from New Guinea, the last island in the world, where I was born—on the floor of a mud hut, if you must know. I spent most of my childhood there, with the briefest of forays back to the wilderness of America, then Fiji, with a stopover in Australia, then here. You’re not going to beat me when it comes to exotic origins, so just drop it.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  They started walking up the hill to the village. He had an easy, loose-limbed gait. “I left Buru when I was four. My parents went back to Holland. So I don’t really know it at all.”

  “Can’t you remember anything?”

  “Just fragments here and there.”

  “I can remember everything—and I mean everything. Okay, not coming out of my mother’s womb—I can’t remember that—but I can remember things that happened to me when I was two or three.”

  He looked at her with the clearest gray green eyes she had ever seen. He was not a tall man, she remembers thinking, almost as short as she was. “Mon Dieu,” he said. “That’s impressive.”

  She giggled. “Why did you say that? In French, I mean. Couldn’t you have said, ‘My god’?”

  He shrugged and smiled, blushing a little (she thought). “I’m sorry. I lived in Paris for a number of years and things just stick in your head, I suppose. I’ve just come from there, so every time I open my mouth I’m still half-speaking French.”

  “Speech patterns do have a way of sticking to you rather quickly. What were you doing in Paris?”

  “Studying. I was at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts. I’m an artist, a painter.”

  “Oh god, not another one.”

  “What do you mean?” He stopped walking, the smile vanishing from his face.

  “I didn’t mean anything in particular. There just seem to be an awful lot of painters here at the moment. Every other person who steps off the boat from Java seems to be an artist. They keep going on about the wonderful tropical light here, the lush vegetation, but it isn’t any different in northern Australia, so why don’t they go there? Because they want to paint bare-breasted women with doe-eyed expressions. Either that or they’re homosexual. Lots of strong, willing boys to paint here. We’re very welcoming in Bali, as I’m sure you’ve heard. Which camp do you belong to?”

  He looked away and blushed (definitely, this time).

  “Oh hell, I was just joking. Don’t take me too seriously, will you?”

  He struggled with the fold of his sarong, trying to tighten it around his waist. His shirt tails became caught up in the ugly knot he had made, which he now clutched in
one fist. “Are there too many artists here, do you think?”

  “No no no, I was just joking. Well, half-joking. There’s Walter, of course, and Rudolf, and several others whom you will meet in due course. Really not that many. Here, let me help—”

  “I’m fine—” He began to protest, but Margaret reached toward him with both hands and firmly took control of the errant piece of cloth, working deftly and quickly.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I’m sure you’re better than they are. Being born in Indonesia must help. The first four years of one’s life are terribly formative—with the accent on terribly. You didn’t have an unhappy first four years, I hope. I did. But that’s another story.” Looking down, Margaret noticed his shoes. They were slim and smooth, and she realized she had never seen an expensive pair of shoes before. She imagined them in a grand shop window on a grand avenue in Paris waiting for a delicate pair of feet to slip into them. “There you are, all done.”