Tash Aw - Map of the Invisible World

“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 adjacent 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.

“Hey, lady, hey,” the becak drivers called. “Hey, pretty lady. Oy! ” A group of three or four of them followed her in their shaded rickshaws, shouting incessantly. Suddenly their cries were all she could hear. The sound of the cars and the buses and scooters faded into a vague, distant roar, like the sound of the sea as you approach the coast but cannot yet see the water. She had to get away from these men, she thought, and crossed the road, wading calmly into the traffic, picking her way westward to the barren expanse of Merdeka Square. She headed toward the construction site of the soon-to-be National Monument. The gigantic column was pushing slowly into the sky, its thick base shrouded in scaffolding. Monstrous pieces of machinery lay scattered around it, silent and unused like ruins of a lost civilization. The earth in the square was bare and easily turned to mud by the heavy rains of the monsoon, but now, after a few months without rain, it was crumbling to dust, and she kicked up little red clouds as she walked briskly along in the heavy heat. It felt like a desert here, Margaret thought, uninhabitable by man.