by Tash Aw
“Oh, not quite that defenseless, particularly when there’s ‘still work to be done.’ Hmm, let me guess what kind of work that might be. Under-the-counter gifts of Rolex watches to your friends? A little Cartier necklace for the wife, perhaps? Or maybe just good old-fashioned cash …”
He put his hands in his pockets and chuckled his farm-boy laugh again. They were standing beside a model of an offshore oil rig. The sea was a clear crystal blue and the waves washed calmly onto a white sandy beach; beyond the beach there was a silvery petroleum-processing plant.
“I know what you’re going to say,” Margaret continued. “‘We’re fighting a war out there! A war that will decide the future of the world! We cannot let Indonesia fall to communism’—right?” She dug him in the rib cage; she had intended merely to tickle him but misjudged her lunge and ended up catching him heavily between two ribs. He only flinched a little.
“It’s kind of silly, the things we do in the name of ideology,” he said, staring at the men in hard hats on the deck of the rig. Margaret saw the reflection of his face in the glass; his lips were parted as he smiled, but his eyes seemed to be narrowed in a frown.
“Seriously, Bill,” she said, continuing to watch his reflection. “Do you actually have any friends?”
“Sure, I know lots of people here.”
“No, I mean people who aren’t of use to you in your work, people you like … you know, real friends.”
“Look at that,” he said, touching his index finger to the glass. A turtle floated in the water, a single leatherback drifting calmly in the ocean. “He looks kinda happy, don’t you think?”
“Guess so. Lots of fish for him to eat—look.” She pointed at a shoal of mackerel suspended in the glassy ocean.
Bill put his hand on hers. It sat awkwardly, covering her thumb and index finger, but otherwise it felt smooth and broad. Their hands obscured the oil field and cast a shadow on the sea, as if a rainstorm was imminent; she could no longer see the fish in the sea, and the fishermen casting nets from their boats seemed suddenly in danger.
She looked at the freckles on his wrist and his sturdy, waterproof Timex.
“We’re not late for the speech, are we?” she said.
“Nope.” He moved his hand slightly, angling the watch toward him to check the time. “I have my car outside.”
A man walked briskly past them, heading for the stairs. “Hurry home, folks, the show’s about to begin.” He seemed barely old enough to have graduated from college—no older than thirty, in any case; his hair was Scandinavian blond, and his chinos were ironed with a sharp crease down the front.
“Thanks, Larry,” Bill said. “Sure you don’t want to come and listen to the speech with us? We have front-row seats.”
Larry frowned, his pale features twisted in confusion. “You gotta be crazy, Bill. No way—I’m planning to stay home and enjoy the president’s speech on the radio, like any sane human being. I’ll leave the live show to you old pros. Nice meeting you, ma’am.” He made a pinching motion in the space in front of his forehead, doffing an imaginary hat as he disappeared down the stairs.
“Who was that escapee from nursery school?” Margaret asked.
“Oh, Larry. He’s a friend.” Bill looked at Margaret and smiled. “I mean, he’s a colleague. He works at the embassy.”
“Enough said. I don’t think I need to know more.”
Bill put his hand lightly on her waist as they left the building. It was very hot and there did not seem to be any shade in the street.
As they approached the palace in his car it became more difficult to negotiate their way through the crowds. People were strolling in the middle of the roads, large groups of young men sauntering casually or skipping along with their arms over each other’s shoulders as if they were on a day out, a picnic at the seaside. Their red and white bandannas and painted faces were meant to make them look frightening, but Margaret found it difficult to take them seriously. They looked like children on their way to a tea party where they would play musical chairs and pin the tail on the donkey (it was so easy to imagine the bandanna as a blindfold). It was precisely because they wanted to look like Dayak warriors, thought Margaret, that she found them so ridiculous. She could not help giggling whenever she saw their snarling faux-fierce faces on the street—they looked frail and pathetic in their flip-flops and nylon shorts and faded T-shirts that said COME ALIVE! YOU’RE IN THE PEPSI GENERATION. There were groups of young women too, soberly dressed in slacks and blouses, carrying banners that proclaimed them to be revolutionary women of God or young women striving for the goodness of mankind. You could always tell the university students too—they were just a little neater, in spite of the effort some of them made to appear scruffy, to blend in with their brothers on the streets. Margaret scanned the crowd for any of her former students. She could say that with some confidence: former. There had not been classes for some weeks now, and she doubted she would ever teach again. A group of women went past, singing the president’s name in a childish monotone.
“What happened to your girlfriend, Bill?” Margaret said, looking out the window.
“What do you mean? I haven’t got a girlfriend.” The car had slowed to near-walking speed as Bill eased through the crowd.
“Come on, I mean that girl you were with a few days ago at the Hotel Java. Susie, or whatever her name was.”
“Oh, that one. It never really got off the ground. I wasn’t very serious—I never am with local girls. Hell, it’s difficult.” He cast a quick glance at Margaret, frowning slightly, then looked away again, concentrating on the thick soup of people ahead of them. “You must think I’m a real jerk, but it’s not easy, you know, doing my job, being with the embassy… . It’s hard just being in this city. Oh, shoot, you don’t know what I’m trying to say, do you? I can see it on your face. You’re okay here, you get along in this place. You adapt. I mean, really adapt. Me, I’m different, Margaret. I know what you think of me. I’m just this brute, this ugly Yankee who doesn’t get life abroad, who’s so American he’ll never understand foreigners—”
“I don’t think that.”
“The funny thing is that I’ve always felt this way with you. Even all those years ago in college, the very first time I met you, I thought, I’m never going to be like this girl. Even if I graduate summa cum laude and know how to translate Turgenev, I’ll still feel like a redneck next to her. I’ll never have what she has. And in Jakarta I feel like that even more. Look at you—you have no idea what I mean.”
The car came to a halt. The roads had been closed, and they were still some way from the palace. “I do know what you mean,” said Margaret.
At the roadblock there were about twenty soldiers manning a barricade of rusty old drums and barbed wire. Two Soviet tanks stood nearby and an armored carrier against which more soldiers leaned, smoking their cigarettes and watching the crowds pass. Bill rolled down the window, but none of the soldiers seemed interested enough to approach the car.
“We need to get through,” Bill called out. “We have an appointment at the palace. Let us pass immediately or else we will be late.” When Bill spoke Indonesian he sounded stilted, magisterial; Margaret had always thought it was a language that suited him, but she was not so sure now.
The soldiers laughed; Margaret was not sure what they were laughing at.
“This barricade is barricading our progress,” Bill continued in his efficient embassy voice. “We have the right to proceed immediately.”
One of the soldiers walked toward the car. He cradled his machine gun in his arms with such ease that it seemed to be part of his body. “American,” he said. Margaret could not tell if he was asking them or merely stating something he already knew.
“Yes, American. From embassy people,” Bill said, tapping his watch. His Indonesian was faltering. “Must pass now, with quickness, appointment palace.”
The soldier half-smiled, half-sneered. His eyes were invisible behind his sunglasses.
“Please, sir, could you let us through?” Margaret leaned over and smiled at the soldier. “We are guests at the palace and it would be very rude of us to be late for the president’s speech. We’ve been looking forward to it for such a long time.”
“Yes,” Bill added sternly. “People no rude.”
The soldier turned to look at his friends, momentarily uncertain of what to do.
Margaret said, “If you need to check with your superior, please do so. You can say that we are with the U.S. Embassy. We have papers, if you need to see them.”
“Hurriedly, pressure, now.”
“Shut up, Bill.”
The soldier turned back to face them. “Who says you can go to the palace on the president’s speech day?”
Bill smacked both hands on the steering wheel and let out a sharp sigh. “We have authority got. Minister important. Minister Hartono immediate. Call his office quick to confirmation.”
The soldier laughed, his teeth flashing brilliantly in the sunshine. “Hartono. Hartono!” He called out to his friends, repeating the name several times. Margaret could hear their staccato laughs, punctuated by smokers’ coughs. “The man of whom you speak, the man who is one of your dirty corrupt puppets, he is no longer a minister. He is no longer one of the people who work for you.”
“Unbelieve. Call Minister Hartono now.”
The soldier shrugged. “Your puppy dog Hartono has been … removed from office. We are not expecting him to return.”
“This lies! Yesterday I telephone speak him.”
“And this morning he is in prison. I’m asking you to leave now, sir, but I am not going to ask you politely again.” There was a slight change in the way he held his gun; a minute shift, but enough for Margaret to notice it.
“Okay, okay, okay,” Bill said. They reversed the car slowly into the gathering crowd, suddenly lost: There was nowhere to go. Everywhere they looked they saw only a shifting wall of people. No right turn, no left turn, no straight ahead. The city had disappeared in this growing swell of bodies. The car inched along. Every so often a passing kid would drum on the hood with his palms, and sometimes people would boo and jeer comically as they went past. Ameri-ka, piss off home. That kind of thing. Bill told her to roll the window up, and so she did. She was not afraid.
And now she found herself trapped in the car, wearing a skirt, sitting next to a man who was protecting them both with a single revolver. She could not remember when it was, or how it was, that her life had changed so much that she could be reassured by a man with a gun. She had lost track of how long they had been in the car before the riot began; she had forgotten when it was, precisely, that she first thought: I’m a goner. She used to be able to remember such details, the exact moments in time when important things happened to her. There had been a time in her life when she could recall entire conversations, the tone and inflection of someone’s voice as they spoke, the way they pronounced a single word. The way they said, quietly, I shall never forget you.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember. She tried to shut out the hollow banging of feet on the roof of the car and replace the noise with the voices that she had known in the past. There, she could just about do it. She had to hang on to what remained of her memories, she told herself, for they would return. Surely they would return.
· 16 ·
The paintings were, at best, naive, Margaret thought as she tried to stifle a giggle, breaking instead into a choking cough.
“Shh.” Karl raised a finger to his lips and frowned at her with an expression of theatrical severity. They were being shown around the home of a famous artist, a flamboyant German with a penchant for “parrots and boys,” according to Margaret’s mother.
“And this one, ah, this one, I am ashamed to say, is my humble attempt at capturing the spirit of Bali,” the artist said, indicating a gouache of the inevitable rice terraces presided over by a kindly demon. “But sadly I don’t know if I am ever successful in achieving what I hope to achieve.” He spoke in a manner that suggested neither recognition of failure nor humility.
“Oh, Walter,” Margaret said, “show Karl something more racy. Mother says you have the naughtiest paintings of men and women bathing in rivers.”
Their host raised an eyebrow and smiled. “I have many pictures of great sensuality, it is true, but none of those are by me. I’d rather show you my own work—and besides, you’re far too delicate and innocent to appreciate those images.”
“I’m not delicate,” Margaret protested.
“Yes, but your new friend is,” Walter said, drawing his hand in a wristy, tender twirl in front of Karl’s face before moving on. “This, my dear young friends, is one of my early works. Done when I was still living in Germany. You might like it, dear boy, coming as you do from a country full of rural traditions.”
“Yes, it’s very … arresting,” Karl said, moving closer to the painting and feigning interest. Margaret coughed and looked away, beyond the veranda, across the valley to a ridge of palm trees. If she looked at Karl she would burst out laughing, she knew that.
“Margaret, really, look at this,” Karl urged, taking her arm and guiding her toward a small, frameless oil painting of a darkened farmhouse, the fields around it lit by yellow moonlight. Misshapen, skinny black-and-white cows stood in the pastures, and over this surrealistic idyll there drifted a young bride and groom, suspended in the night sky.
Margaret giggled. “Oh, isn’t it whimsical,” she said, recovering quickly.
“This little tableau,” said Walter, “is full of my conflicting emotions toward my homeland. Nostalgia, longing, but also fear and self-loathing and darkness—all those things are contained in this tiny piece. I did not realize this when I painted it many years ago. When one is young”—he raised his eyebrow and turned to look at Margaret—“one does not see such things. But now, in the long autumn of my life, I can appreciate all the happiness and indeed the despair that has colored my life.” He waved his hand at the painting as if to prove his point.
As soon as they had left the compound Margaret dissolved into fits of hysterical laughter. Her body heaved with the sheer pleasure of laughing out loud, hot tears filling her eyes. Karl put his arm around her shoulders and she could feel the comforting warmth of his body as he shook uncontrollably with mirth too. “Regard this petit tableau,” he said, mimicking Walter’s languid vowels. Margaret opened her mouth to speak but was unable to stitch her words into a sentence. Wiping her eyes, she thought, This is what it means to be happy. Her entire life stretched out before her, an eternity waiting to be filled with the same delirious, light-headed joy. She felt as if the clouds had parted on a cool, overcast day and the sun shone down on a small patch of earth upon which she, and only she, existed. How had she survived the first fifteen years of her life without knowing such dizzy pleasure? she wondered.
They reached a spot on the ridge where a line of trees thinned out to offer them a view of the valley. “Could we stop for a moment?” Karl said, sitting down on the grass. It had not rained in a while and the grass was already looking dry, flecked with brown.
“You know, I’ve never sat on the grass in the Indies before,” Margaret said as she sat down beside him, crossing her legs in a half lotus. “It feels weird—a very European thing to do.”
“Never?” he said, running his palm over the grass lightly, as if enjoying the texture of a fine rug.
She shook her head. “It’s not that surprising. I mean, there are bugs and snakes and things in Asian grass. It’s not welcoming the way European grass is, you know—not that I know what European grass is like. I’d like Europe, I think—pleasant green meadows of delicate flowers and forests that aren’t teeming with animals that eat you. And those lovely, clean cities with sewage systems—I mean, Paris sounds wonderful.”
Karl looked across the valley, the smile still set on his face, but his eyes had gone blank. “I love sitting on the grass here. Or on the sand, the way locals do.”
“Sitting on this grass,” Karl said, “I can almost remember being an infant in Buru. Almost. I pretend I can. But I can’t really.”
Margaret looked across at him and put her hand on his. He did not look at her, but continued staring down at the children splashing in the gentle current of the shallows. He did not blink, and there was a hollowness in his gaze that made Margaret feel that she ought to do something to fill that emptiness and make his eyes shine again.
“Can’t you remember anything?” she said. “I can. I can remember things that happened to me when I was two.” She laughed, but he did not respond.
