Tash Aw - Map of the Invisible World

“So who was your friend earlier?” Din said, joining her at the table.

“What friend?”

“That American man.”

“Bill Schneider, you mean? He’s not a friend. He works at the embassy. Not exactly sure what he does — something to do with finance. Well, okay, I think he arranges all the bribes from our wonderful country to your wonderful country to build all your wonderful projects.”

“Like this hotel?”

“Probably. Although I think this hotel might have been funded with Japanese baksheesh — not that it makes any difference. Bill and his lot certainly have their fingers in the pie now. I tell you, that man is every where.”

They watched him drinking a tall glass of beer with a group of friends. He stubbed out his cigarette with clumsy little jabs and punched people on the shoulder to emphasize his jokes. He laughed a lot, always loudly. From across the room they could only catch snip pets of what he was saying. “… last year the Yankees got unlucky, this year they’re gonna step up…. I’m tellin’ ya, you can’t lose with a name like Yogi Berra….”

“He can at least speak Indonesian,” Margaret said, “and Russian too, which is a big help in this town.”

Din nodded. “His girlfriend is very pretty.”

“He’s got bags of that je ne sais quoi that girls find so irresistible: U.S. dollars. Do you want another Coke?”

Din shook his head. “Thank you, but I have to go. It’s a long way home for me.”

“I think I’ll head home too. I’m sorry the evening was a bit dull.”

They walked through the grand lobby where smart-looking men in bush jackets and expensive women in shimmering dresses turned to look at them. They stood at the entrance for a moment or two, unsure of how to bid each other good-bye. A kiss? Out of the question. A hug? Still too intimate. Handshake? Too formal.

“See you tomorrow, I guess,” Margaret said, holding up her hand in a stilted wave.

“Yes,” he said, and a smile flashed across his face, not the infuriating unreadable one, but something thinner and tired. He looked curiously frail as he walked briskly down the curving driveway, past the long row of shiny black limousines, before disappearing into the stream of traffic. The lights in this part of the city made the sky look pale and hazy, even at night.

“Margaret,” someone called out. It was Bill Schneider again. He did not have his girl with him this time. “I saw you leave and I thought, She can’t be leaving us so quickly!”

“Well, I am leaving, Bill.”

“Wait.” When he smiled he showed off the top row of his perfect teeth. “You remember what we talked about last time we met …”

Margaret looked him in the eye then looked away. “Yes.”

“And …?”

“And what?”

“Well,” he paused. “We need to know what you … think.”

She did not answer. A steady stream of limousines drew up before them; the revving of the engines and the exhaust fumes made her feel sick, and the whistling of the doormen rang sharply in her ears and made her incipient headache grow worse. She wanted to go home.

He stood watching her, not saying anything. Margaret felt he was prepared to stay there all night, waiting for her to answer, but in the end he said, “I’m sorry. This is not a good place to speak. You sure you won’t come back inside for one more beer? No, you’re tired, of course. Look, come by and see me in my office. Soon.” He handed her a folded-up newspaper. She saw the same smiling badminton player she had noticed earlier in the day, one half of his face disappearing into a crease. Bill leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. “Come soon, Margaret.”

“Taxi, madam?” asked the doorman.

“No thanks, I’ll walk for a while.” She went down to the road and stood watching the swirling traffic before her, assailed by the pleading cries of the child beggars and the shrill calls of the boys and girls lined up on the other side of the road. It hurt Margaret to look at them, so she turned away, trying to pretend that the noise was something mechanical and inhuman. The city had never seemed so enormous, so overwhelming, so chaotic, and its enormous overwhelming chaos was growing worse every day. Not wishing to walk any longer, she hailed a taxi that stank of clove smoke. She unfolded the newspaper and looked at the front page. Bill’s handwriting — a surprisingly elegant cursive — read: Page 5: PS Great to see you again. B

She flicked through the pages. More protests in Europe against the imprisonment of Mandela. Sukarno condemns Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Abebe Bikila promises gold for Africa. Brezhnev to provide more aid for Indonesia. Drug use in Malaysia reaching epidemic proportions; Britain offers no help. Communists arrested in outlying islands. It all looked familiar to her — surely she had read it all this morning?

She looked again at page 5. Below the article on Communist arrests was a small picture. In the dim light at the back of the taxi it was difficult to make out the already blurred photograph of twenty or so men in a police cell. But there was one face, paler than the others: a European.

I n 1841 the Nan Sing , a Chinese vessel sailing under the Dutch flag, set sail from Canton bound for Batavia laden with a cargo of porcelain, silk, and tea. Caught in unseasonably bad weather just south of Cape Varella, it began to move southeastward, drifting for many days until, lured by powerful currents, it crashed on the notorious reefs off the rocky shores of Nusa Perdo. Exercising his ancient right of looting shipwrecks, the sultan immediately ordered his fleet of little boats to recover the precious flotsam from the wreck of the Nan Sing . Enraged by this transgression, the Dutch authorities in Batavia demanded the return of the cargo and ordered the sultan to submit to Dutch rule. When this was predictably refused, several skirmishes took place, escalating into a standoff that lasted two days. There followed a further fifty years of shipwrecks, looting, and halfhearted attempts by the Dutch army to bring the island under its control. No great energy was expended in the subjugation of Perdo because the island had neither spices nor sandalwood. Covered in scrubby bushes and dominated by a dead volcano, this unobtrusive island virtually disappeared in the constellation of more attractive islands around it, until, late in the century, the discovery of kayu putih trees and rumors of rich gold deposits brought the white man back to these shores, and this time they did not leave. The sultan died by his own hand and the island came under Dutch rule.

No one really knows how the island got its curious name, which does not seem consistent with the rhythms of the (now virtually dead) local dialect. Writing about Muslim sects in the eastern archipelago in the prewar Revue des Études Islamiques , a French scholar named Gaston Bosquet suggests that the name of this island is a bastardization of pieds d’or , a reference to the fascination held by early Western visitors for the shoes of gold cloth worn by the princes of the royal household in the seventeenth century, and to the idea that these explorers might have been walking on fields of gold. Given the relative poverty of this island, however, such explanations seem highly implausible (rumors of gold reserves turned out to be a myth). No more likely — though a touch more romantic — is the idea that members of a Portuguese reconnaissance expedition in the early sixteenth century foundered on the rocky coastline of the island, as so many were to do in the centuries that followed. Marooned hundreds of miles from the shipping channels between Malacca and China, they called this place the Lost Island, Nusa Perdo — a name that continues today. This might also explain why, in town, there are three local merchants whose surnames are Texeira, De Souza, and Menezes, even though they look thoroughly Indonesian.