Map of the Invisible World: A Novel

by Tash Aw

  In the weeks that followed she saw her lover once or twice a week (she was someone’s mistress, she thought, a real-life maîtresse: how exciting). She liked going to his pied-à-terre, which was warmer than her lodgings and not at all drafty. They went to the Louvre to look at paintings. He showed her a gallery full of portraits of heroic figures, Roman soldiers preparing for war, swords aloft, their women weeping in distress. There was another painting in the same style of a man lying dead in a bathtub. Margaret did not like these paintings, but she did not say so. She found them mannered and showy, and embarrassingly artificial; Karl would not have liked them, she thought. As she stood with Georges in front of a large canvas depicting a mass of beautiful classical warriors (Spartan, she thought, though she wasn’t sure and didn’t really care), she saw a young man making notes. He had made a sketch too, a crude one showing the principal figures as jelly like blobs with arrows showing their names. He looked up at her and winked, and then continued to scribble. He was writing in English, she noticed. The next day, when she returned on her own at the same hour, he was there again, in front of the same painting.

  “Are you English?” she asked, although he was obviously Mediterranean, not at all Anglo-Saxon.

  He shook his head. “Australian. You?”

  “Guess.”

  He narrowed his eyes and shook his head, smiling. “French? Dutch? Don’t know. Have I failed a really important test?”

  Margaret laughed. She was pleased he did not say “American.” She liked his dark eyes and timid smile.

  They were both young and lonely in Paris, which is a terrible place to be young and lonely. And so they became friends.

  Her days did not seem so long and empty now, and she no longer dreaded the winter nights that started midway through the afternoon. They went on long walks together, and Margaret was glad to have company, for it meant that she did not have to think about Karl and the places he had been. Their walks were sometimes guided by her new friend, sometimes haphazard; she no longer felt obliged to trace the invisible path of Karl’s former life in this beautiful, cold city. She was also glad to be able to speak in English, a language she’d never thought she would miss. It was silly of her to be glad of this, she knew, but she was glad all the same. Even better than speaking English was listening to it, and on their walks she would often remain quiet for long stretches, just enjoying the sound of her companion’s voice. He talked a lot; he knew many things about many things. He told her about Rimbaud, for example, who at twenty-two had joined the Dutch army as a mercenary to fight guerrillas in Aceh, but after a few brief weeks witnessing malaria, dysentery, snakebites, and amputations had fled the East Indies. Rimbaud believed that in life one will go where one does not want to go, do what one would rather not do, and live and die in not at all the way one ever had in mind. “Isn’t that so true?” Mick exclaimed. “Look at us!”

  Margaret also learned the following things: that her new companion was named Michael, that he was of Greek descent, and that there were many Greeks in Australia; that his ancestors were from Laconia but his parents had been uncommunicative rather than laconic; that, on leaving home on the eve of the battle from which he would never return, Leonidas, a great Laconian, advised his wife simply: “Marry a good man and bear good children.”

  Margaret could ask Michael anything and he would have the answer:

  “Do you know a poem by Victor Hugo—something about a lady-bug, and a boy who wants to kiss a girl?”

  “Of course. ‘La Coccinelle.’”

  “What happens in it? A boy thinks a girl wants him to kiss her, but instead all she wants him to do is to get rid of a ladybug on her neck. Is that right?”

  “Hmm. No. Let me think. No. The girl wants the boy to kiss her, but doesn’t say so. She says, ‘Something is tormenting me, look.’ And she offers her face and neck to the boy. But the boy sees only the insect and not the kiss. It’s about missed opportunities in life, about being too bashful and not taking your chance when it presents itself to you; about regretting things in old age—about not grabbing those fleeting moments of love, I suppose. Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, no reason. It just came into my mind.”

  In truth it didn’t really matter what she and her new Laconian friend spoke about. Margaret simply enjoyed the unfamiliar yet somehow comforting cadences of his voice, reminding her of another part of the world far, far away from Europe and even farther away from America. It reassured her to know that this other world was still there and that she had not forgotten it.

  This is how Margaret remembers meeting Mick. She remembers everything he said very clearly, even now, in this sprawling Asian city where he has become middle-aged and less talkative—laconic, or maybe just downright uncommunicative. She remembers sitting with him in a cheap restaurant near the Panthéon, eating soup and ham and bits of stale baguette, and the excitement she felt when he folded the newspaper and handed it to her, showing her a picture of Queen Juliana of Holland greeting Mohammed Hatta in Amsterdam (with her near-photographic memory, she can still recall the caption: LA HOLLANDE ET L’INDONÉSIE PROCÈDENTE AU TRANSFERT DE SOUVERAINTÉ, as well as the circular grease stain that had seeped through the picture).

  Mick was with her when she arranged her passage to Java, on the Willem Ruys, sailing from Rotterdam to Tanjong Priok. He also came to see her off at the Gare du Nord. She told him to come and meet her in Asia, and that if he didn’t, she would come looking for him and spank his bottom. They laughed. And Margaret remembered that she had said good-bye in this way to Karl; she remembered, also, that she believed she would never see either man again.

  “Don’t worry.” Mick smiled. “You’ll be lounging around in tropical splendor in some palace in Jakarta and I’ll just turn up on your doorstep.”

  “And what if you don’t?”

  He turned up the collar of his coat and folded his arms against the chill. “Then marry a good man and bear good children.”

  · 24 ·

  Oww.” Adam grimaced and flinched at Z’s touch.

  “Sorry,” she said, withdrawing slightly. The rich smell of camphor mixed with other medicinal fragrances filled his nostrils. Z dipped her fingers into the jar of ointment and reached for Adam’s rib cage again. “Think of something else—your home, or the sea. Something nice.” She touched him lightly, resting her fingertips on his skin for a few moments to let him get used to her touch, waiting for him to calm down. When she felt the tenseness of his body ease and the rise and fall of his breathing return to a steady rhythm, she began to spread the ointment across his rib cage. At first it seemed she was barely touching him, her fingers skimming over the tautness of his skin. Adam held his breath; he held up his arm, bent at the elbow, his hand bunched into a fist, as if shielding himself from imminent danger. He tried to relax but the tickly, pleasurable sensation of Z’s fingers running lightly over his skin made him want to giggle and gasp at the same time. He knew that if he laughed his ribs would tense up and hurt him again, so he remained caught in this funny in-between state: He wanted desperately to be soothed but could not allow himself to be.

  “I think you’ve cracked a rib,” said Z. “There’s a bad bruise just here.” She circled a forefinger softly on a patch of skin, and all of a sudden Adam recognized that she had alighted on the very epicenter of his pain, the precise root of the nausea that had filled his entire body. She continued to rub the ointment into his skin, more firmly now; a hot, comforting glow began to spread across his torso. He could still feel the pain in his ribs every time her hand passed over that spot, but it was duller, no longer sharp and surprising; it was isolated now, and he could anticipate how and when it would hurt him. Z’s fingers worked steadily in long, gentle strokes or in widening circles, away from the tenderness of his ribs, moving on to his back and the sides of his chest. He closed his eyes.

  “Something’s definitely broken in there,” she said, and laughed; and Adam could feel the warmth of her breath curling onto his skin, ti
ngling, curious. “You’re lucky not to have been seriously hurt. Did you know that nine people died in that riot? And that’s just the number released by the police—the ones they couldn’t deny because they had bullets in their backs. I don’t know how many more kids were trampled underfoot and left lying on the streets. You see? You were very lucky. Why on earth did you agree to go?”

  Adam said nothing. He remembered the promises Din had made, and how he did not really have a choice: What do you do when someone offers you something you had lost and never thought you would regain? He shrugged and began to explain that he had not understood that it would all turn out that way. He remembered how Din had looked, kneeling in the street, surrounded by soldiers: thin, defeated, frail, kicked into the dirt. And although he realized that Din had never cared for him, he could not shake this feeling of guilt. He had abandoned Din and left him to suffer on his own.

  He looked around him. The furniture in the bedroom was edged with scrolling gold shaped like waves curling into themselves; the floor was of clear, cool marble, and the high ceilings made everything seem silent and airy. And this was the problem: He liked being here, and he was glad, so very glad not to be out on the streets or in some prison cell or on the floor of another shanty; but he felt guilty that he was here and Din was not. Before this moment, guilt had been a concept, something he thought he understood when people spoke about it. He had never actually known what it was to feel responsible for someone else’s suffering.

  “Keep still,” Z tutted. “I knew Din was dangerous, but I said to myself, Don’t worry, Z, that Adam is a clever guy, he isn’t going to believe what Din tells him, he can look after himself. I was wrong.”

  “He was going to help me find my brother. All I had to do was help him with a worthy cause.”

  Z sighed. It seemed to Adam that she was frowning, concentrating hard on not saying anything, as if trying to restrain her impatience with his reasoning. He could not see the expression on her face; he could only feel her rhythmic massaging and the gentle pressure of her hand that did not change in the slightest. An ornate clock caught Adam’s eye; it sat on a chest of drawers, a heap of molten gold cascading down the slopes of a mountain. The ticking of its pendulum seemed to fall in with the insistent kneading of Z’s hands, like the metronome perched on Karl’s broken piano. Adam had always thought it funny that the metronome should work when the piano itself was broken.

  “Your problem,” she said after a while, “your problem is that you don’t know your own mind. You don’t know what’s in your head, you’ve never sat down and thought about what’s important to you, so you’re swayed by any passing notion. I don’t know you very well, but that’s how you seem to me: completely empty up here”—she lifted her finger momentarily and touched her temple, and then returned to massaging him. “Do you know what Din and his friends do? They put bombs in people’s cars, people whose views they don’t agree with. You heard about the assassination attempt on the president last year? We think it was Din’s group that was responsible, though we can’t be sure. They are trying to destabilize the country, which is already on the brink of complete collapse. The last thing we need is a full-scale civil war. But we will get it very soon. It’s coming. How can it not, with people like Din around? You weren’t stupid to have followed him—no, it was worse than that: You didn’t even think about it.”

  This is strange, thought Adam: He was soothed by Z’s scolding, by the steady, chiding tone of her voice. He did not want her to stop talking, even though her words embarrassed him. He felt drowsy, as if he was ready to fall into a rich, deep sleep, the first for a long time.

  Z shifted her weight on the bed slightly so that she was now sitting behind him, rubbing ointment into his shoulders, and Adam felt the mattress give way ever so slightly. He had never seen a bed as wide or as soft as this one. He imagined himself stretched out on it diagonally; he didn’t think his feet would hang over the edge. But then he found himself thinking of Din, crouching in a prison cell; and even worse, Karl, sitting with a dozen other people in a space no larger than Z’s bed, while Adam himself enjoyed such luxury.

  “And this whole business with your brother,” Z continued. “Did you really think Din could have helped you? Let me tell you something, in case you haven’t worked this out. You come from way out there”—she waved a hand casually in no particular direction—“so you won’t understand. In this country, in this day and age, someone like Din is no one. I wish that were not the case, but it is. People like him can die in the thousands and no one would care. He has no power over anything, probably not even his own life. That is the harsh truth, Adam. You are the same now. From the moment you lost your adopted father you joined the masses—just like Din. Money is the only thing that counts. Money gives you power. This is the rule in our new republic. It’s really very simple. This is what I want to change, but until then …”

  Over her voice he could hear the ticking of the clock encouraging her hands on his shoulders. “Until then what?”

  Z sighed again. “Until then, I suppose I just have to accept that I’m part of the system. Part of this.” She lifted her hands from his shoulders, and although he could not see what she was indicating with them, Adam knew that she meant the beautiful, big house they were in. He was very drowsy now. He wanted her to keep talking.

  “Yes, I’m a part of this whole disgusting system, a country divided neatly in two,” Z said, her hands moving up to his neck. A heavy blankness was beginning to fill his head, an intense, pleasurable numbness that seemed to cloud his vision and impair his hearing so that he found it difficult to concentrate on what she was saying. It was a struggle to discern her words; her voice had become a low, steady lullaby, measured against the tick-tock of the pendulum and the kneading of her hands. “The rich—like me, yes, like me—do anything we please. Everyone else has no hope. They live and die completely by chance, with no control over anything. Sometimes some of them have dreams—like Din, I suppose. They have plans for their lives. But soon they discover that these dreams are worth nothing, and neither are their lives. We, on the other hand, never have plans. Life is simple for us, we just acquire, acquire, acquire. Every day is the same for people like me. We never, ever dream.”

  “Don’t you?” Adam mumbled.

  “No. A dream requires an ideal of some kind. Take my father, for example. He has no ideals. He just takes what he can, as much as possible, and will continue to do so for the rest of his life. He came from a very poor family and he has one simple goal and that is to distance himself from that poverty. All his friends are the same; they don’t have ideals. You can’t get rich and dream of creating a beautiful country at the same time. So you have to give one of them up. And if you choose wealth, then you give up your dreams. This is the reality of it. Someone like Din could not have helped you find your brother, but my father could do it tomorrow, if he wanted to. And it is precisely because he doesn’t have dreams.”

  “And you? Do you have dreams?”

  Adam felt a weakening in her hands. Something is wrong, he thought; and when he turned to face her he saw that her eyes were moist. She sat on the bed next to him, her arm pressing gently against his. “Din and his crazy lot, at least when they think about the future they have a vision of something wonderful. It’s a stupid, misguided dream, but at least it comforts them. Me, I don’t have that. Look at this place. It’s not a home. Can you hear laughter, or music? No. There’s just me. And you.”

  She stared at the clock, frowning as if trying to make out the time. Adam thought that she was perhaps waiting for him to say something, but he was afraid he would upset her by saying the wrong thing, so he kept quiet. He shifted so that he was facing her; he smiled, trying to catch her eye, but she continued to look at the clock. In a quiet voice she said, “That’s the worst thing. People like me, we don’t have dreams. I talk a lot about changing things, but deep down I know nothing will change. Not ever. That is why I don’t dream, I don’t think about the futur
e. Because when I do, all I see is emptiness.”

  And this was when Adam realized that she was crying. She did not sob or sniff or weep hysterically or do any of the things Adam associated with crying. She did not move; her eyes simply filled with tears, and after a few moments she rubbed the back of her hand across her cheek, quite roughly, as if dislodging an irritation. When Adam reached out and put his hand on hers he found it damp and slightly sticky. His head still felt very heavy. He could smell the sour-sweet odor of her breath, and he could hear her breathing too, one exhalation to every five ticks of the pendulum. She raised her hand and brushed back the hair that fell across his forehead. You have lots of dreams, don’t you? she said. Or that is what Adam thought she said. And then she leaned forward and let her head rest on his shoulder; he could not tell if she was crying. She pulled him gently until he was lying flat on the bed, and he could not stop himself from falling into what he knew would be a very long and very deep sleep. He felt her head on his chest, and the gentle reverberations of her voice in his rib cage, which did not hurt so much anymore. Go to sleep now, she said. Go to sleep.