Читать книгу Map of the Invisible World - Tash Aw - Страница 9

‘This is just so depressing,’ Margaret said as she flicked aimlessly through the day’s edition of Harian Rakyat before letting it fall limply on her desk. Even with the louvred windows open, the room was hot and still; the ceiling fan raised just enough wind to ruffle the pages of the newspaper. The headline read, ‘STUDENTS REVOLTING IN CLASSROOMS.’

‘They’re always revolting,’ she added. She had hardly bothered to read the paper. It was too hot and the news was always the same.

Din put a can of Coke on her desk. ‘I didn’t know there were still any students in the classrooms.’ He picked up the newspaper and sat at his desk. ‘Have you read this? There was a fire in the Science block on Thursday. Arson, they think. Did you see anything? I didn’t, and I was here all day. Look, they caught the culprit – he looks like one of your students, though it’s difficult to tell. These mug shots all look the same to me. They’re always nice clean-looking boys from the provinces with glossy hair and pressed shirts.’

‘Either that or they’re dead and lying face down in a pool of their own blood surrounded by policemen, in which case they could be anyone. The police can kill anyone nowadays and we just say, “Hey, there’s a dead body,” without really knowing, or caring, who it was. It could have been one of mine. I’m surprised I haven’t lost any yet. One of them told me the other day that they were making Molotov cocktails in the labs, for chrissake. And you know what really got to me? Not that they were making bombs on campus, but that they thought I wouldn’t care, that I would sympathise. What on earth are we doing in this place? It’s just too depressing for words.’

But in fact Margaret was not depressed. She had never been depressed in her life, a fact with which she consoled herself now and then, whenever life seemed particularly unbearable. ‘Tribes in New Guinea do not suffer from depression, therefore I do not suffer from depression’ was what she repeated to herself whenever she felt she was collapsing under the hopelessness of the world. True, she did not often feel like this, but just sometimes she would feel weighed down by a profound lassitude, something that seized her and drained her of all energy and hope and desire. This usually happened in those dead hours between coming home and going out again for the evening, and on the few times she felt it coming on she thought, ‘Uh-oh, I have to do something about this.’ And lately these dips in morale were accompanied by a funny tightening of the chest that made it difficult to breathe – just for a few minutes, but long enough for her to have to sit down and catch her breath. Maybe it was the humidity, maybe she was turning into yet another pudgy old white woman who couldn’t take the heat; maybe it was age, god forbid. But eventually she would haul herself to the shower, and, feeling better, she would step out into the still-warm evening. No: what she felt now was not depression but something akin to boredom, though she was not bored either. She didn’t really know how she felt.

‘You’re always saying that,’ Din replied, not looking up from his paper. ‘So why don’t you get out of here? You at least have a choice.’

‘You mean, admit defeat? You know me better than that.’

‘I don’t really know you very well at all. And I’m serious: why don’t you leave?’ Din didn’t look up from the newspaper but continued to hold it up before him so that it shielded his face. The back page bore a picture of a badminton player, his thick black hair slicked back in imitation of American movie stars, his smile reflected on the swell of a polished trophy. The headline trumpeted: PRAISE GOD FOR THE THOMAS CUP. Margaret could not tell from his placid, monotonous voice what he truly meant. Only by watching for small signs like the faint narrowing at the very edges of his eyes (pleasure) or the slight indentation of his dimples (sarcasm or contempt) could she read what he meant.

‘For the same reason as you,’ she said. ‘The job here’s not finished. I can’t just abandon these kids.’

‘So you do sympathise with them.’

‘If that’s your way of asking if I’m a communist, you know what my answer is.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t intend any offence, and you know that I don’t care about politics. I’m just interested to know why you stay here instead of going home.’

‘The States? Boy, you know how to annoy me. I was conceived on one continent, born on another and raised on four – five if you count Australia. I lived in America for less than ten years, not even twenty-five per cent of my life. Would you call that home? Why don’t you go home? I’ve heard Medan isn’t so bad. Or you could go to Holland – again. They educated you, after all.’

Din lowered his newspaper and Margaret studied his face for clues. There was nothing for a while, and then a completely blank, unreadable smile. It was something she’d begun to notice only recently and it made her feel uncomfortable. Her ability to discern moods in other people was something else she was proud of. She had been doing it – and doing it well – ever since she could remember, before she could talk, even. She thought of the opening line of her (unfinished) doctoral thesis ‘Tchambuli: Kinship and Understanding in Northern Papua New Guinea’, which lay in a locked drawer just below her left knee. That line read, ‘It is the nonverbal communication between human beings that forms the basis of all society.’ She had always believed that people (well, she) could read things that remained unsaid, just like tribes in the jungle who had little need for sophisticated language. She had never before come across someone like Din. Sometimes she found him completely Western, other times utterly Indonesian, sometimes primitive. She thought again of her thesis, locked away together with her passport at the foot of her desk. She had not looked at either in such a long time.

‘I have no family left in Sumatra and my Dutch was never very good,’ he said at last.

Margaret stood up and made a cursory attempt to tidy her desk. ‘Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t know why I’m so crabby these days. It’s just so frustrating.’

‘What is?’

Margaret lifted her arms to gesture out of the windows, but then just shrugged, sighing. ‘Everything. You know what I mean.’

Din nodded. ‘I think I do.’

Margaret turned away from him and looked out the window across the low sprawl of grey buildings. Everything looked grey to her now in Jakarta. The new squat concrete shops, the flimsy wooden shanties, the six-lane highways, the dead water in the canals, the banners that were strung up everywhere across the city, whose whiteness dulled quickly from the dust and smoke and the exhaust fumes that choked the air. She did not know when she’d stopped noticing the colours and the details of Jakarta, or when this greyness had begun to form like cataracts that clouded her appreciation of the city. On the building across the concrete square hung painted banners that urged NO IMPERIALISM CRUSH MALAYSIA or FRIENDSHIP TO AFRICA or EVER ONWARD NO RETREAT IN THE NAME OF ALLAH. She felt a sudden surge of irritation: Why was it that everything in this city was written in capitals? Whenever she went to dinner at the Hotel Java the entire menu was in bold upper case, every item screaming its existence at her, insisting that she choose it and not something else, every dish jostling with its neighbour in a cacophony of advertisement. NORTH SUMATRAN FAVOURITE FROM BANDUNG EVER POPULAR DISH OF TORAJA KINGS. As if this assault were not enough, the prices too were announced in oversized numbers, though it wasn’t clear to Margaret if this was an advertisement of how low they were or yet another mild form of extortion, the like of which Margaret experienced every day. Maybe she could no longer deal with the noise and the crowds and the bullying and the corruption, and had, therefore, stopped wanting to see the city in detail; maybe this was why she had begun to see everything in terms of greyness. She mulled over the possibility of this sometimes when she picked unenthusiastically at a TYPICAL EAST JAVA DELICACY in the lavish black marble surroundings of the Hotel Java. Was Margaret Bates becoming soft? In the end she decided that it was the city that had changed. Margaret Bates had not softened with age. And that was the problem, she knew that. Adaptation is the key to human existence, she used to tell her students. The Ability to Adapt: that was another of her strengths, along with her Resistance to Emotional Instability and her Reading of Moods. Yet here she was, frozen in time, waiting for the city to change back into something she recognised. It would not happen. She had known a different country, a gentler country, she thought. She hated that word, ‘gentler’ – it was maudlin and sentimental; it reminded her of the way old white fools would talk about their plantations and their brown servants. Suddenly she hated herself. ‘I have to do something about this,’ she said to herself, almost audibly, as she continued to look out of the window at the dirty grey banners. I cannot go on like this. I must change, I must change.

‘What did you say?’ Din asked, folding his newspaper at last.

‘Nothing,’ Margaret said, turning round. She looked at Din’s clear, slightly watery eyes and felt guilty at having snapped at him earlier. She wished that she was able to think things through before saying them. ‘Let’s get an early dinner. Then we can go to the Hotel Java or somewhere fancy, you know, have some drinks – something strong and colourful with a little umbrella in it. We can watch all those ridiculous rich people with their prostitutes.’

Din pulled his chair closer to his desk and flipped open a notebook. ‘It’s too early for dinner,’ he said, picking up a pen and removing its cap. He held the pen poised over the notepad but he did not write anything. ‘Besides, they won’t let me into the Hotel Java. Not like this, anyway.’ He held the collar of his shirt between his thumb and forefinger for a second before letting it fall.

‘I’m not taking no for an answer,’ Margaret said. She grabbed his hand and pulled him towards the door. ‘You’re with me, no one will say anything. It’s one of those disgusting privileges of being white in a place like this. Everyone says they hate Westerners, but as soon as an orang putih walks into the room they give them whatever they want. Every other blanquito I know breaks the rules and behaves badly, and tonight I intend to partake of this disgusting orgy.’

They crossed the highway on the overhead walkway. Beneath them the never-ending traffic beeped and hooted and revved as usual, a river of bashed-up, rusting steel whose current flowed everywhere and nowhere. The sun had begun to calm slightly, hazy now behind the perpetual layer of cloud; the sky was a dirty yellow, a yellow overlaid with grey, and soon, when the sun was setting, it would turn mouse-coloured and finally – swiftly – black. There was never any blue, nothing true or clear.

They walked along the road for a while trying to hail a taxi, but there seemed to be none today so they settled for a becak, ridden by an ancient Javanese whose face was so fleshless that they could see the outlines of his skull under the old-leather skin. He rode with surprising speed and agility, passing men and women pushing their cartloads of peanuts and scrap newspaper and fruit. Stallholders along the road cried out to them as the rickshaw went past; they offered watches, toys, magazines, bottles of Benzine. Often Margaret thought they would collide with something – a horse-drawn cart or a bare-framed jeep or a bicycle – but at the last moment their driver would casually veer past the obstacle. Every few minutes they went past an accident or a broken-down vehicle. There were few cars, few recognisable ones, anyway. Everything had been cannibalised, picked to pieces and reassembled to look like something else so that it was impossible to identify a car as a Datsun or a Fiat or a Skoda. Something could begin as a Mercedes, morph mid-chassis into a Cadillac and end up an open-sided lorry.

She looked across at Din, whose serious expression never seemed to alter very much. A more or less permanent frown drew his close-set, almond-shaped eyes even closer together and lent his slim features an air of mild anxiety. She liked him. He was certainly a great improvement over the last few who had filled his position; they had been, by and large, American post-graduate students earnestly pursuing dull projects on the Economics of Oil or International Aid in Newly-Independent Asia. Without exception, they had been spectacularly unsuited to life in South-East Asia. The longest-serving of them had stayed for two years, the shortest a mere three months. There were rumours that they might not have been bona fide students, that they were in fact working for the US Government, but Margaret could not substantiate these rumours. She did find it slightly odd that there was such a steady stream of American students wanting to be teaching assistants in Jakarta, but there was nothing to suggest that they were funded by anything more sinister than indulgent Ivy League scholarships. Once or twice, she had casually slipped into conversation the presence of the CIA in Indonesia, which was an open secret in town, but she was met by blinking incomprehension, so she let the matter rest. In this city you could never be sure if anyone was who they said they were and, frankly, Margaret couldn’t care less.

Din, however, seemed far removed from the sordid details of Jakarta life. He did not have a comfortable scholarship to fall back on, and Margaret felt guilty because there was no money to pay him properly. In fact neither of them had drawn any salary for this month and although he never complained she knew that even his small rented room would soon begin to weigh heavily on his finances. He said he had taken a room in Kebayoran, but she did not believe him; it would be far too expensive for him. She knew that he did not want her to think him destitute, just another semi slum-dweller. He wanted her to believe that he was an ordinary middle-class professional, and she was happy to go along with it. But she did not know how long he could continue like this. She did not want him to leave.

‘Do you ever miss Leiden?’ she asked. They were travelling alongside a canal filled with stagnant black water covered in a film of grease.

He shrugged. ‘Not really.’

‘But you said you liked it. You did really well there – academically, I mean.’

‘I didn’t like the cold.’ He could be like this, uncommunicative to the point of sullenness. Margaret wondered if he suffered from that respect of hierarchy that (she had noticed) seems to plague all Asians, so that she, being his elder and superior, could never be a companion with whom he could converse freely. It troubled her somewhat to think of herself as a Mother Superior figure, wizened and stern.

‘I can understand that,’ she said, deciding not to push too far. She wished he would relax in her company, and she began to imagine how the evening might proceed if she had her way. They would have something simple to eat at a street stall and then they would have drinks, lots of them, and at some point in the evening he would begin to confide in her, telling her all about his village sweetheart and the girls he had had in Holland; he would begin to trust her, think of her as his equal, his confidante, and the next morning, at work, they would be friends and colleagues and she would no longer feel awkward in his company.

She was not sexually attracted to him, she wanted to make that clear. She had worked out that he was twenty-four going on twenty-five; not quite twenty years her junior but certainly young enough to be her son in this country where girls of eighteen often had three children. Besides, she had long since shut out the possibility of romance. Once, in an age of endless possibilities, love had presented itself to her and it had seemed so simple, so attainable that all she had to do was reach out and claim it. Falling in love then had felt as easy as swimming in a warm salty sea: all she had to do was wade into it and the water would bear her away. But she had not done so, and now the tide had retreated, leaving broken bottles and driftwood and tangled nets. It was a landscape she had learnt to live with.

The lights had just come on in Pasar Baru. The air was filled with the steady hum of portable generators and strings of naked bulbs burst sharply into life, casting their harsh glare on to the faces of passers-by. There were not many people there yet, and Margaret and Din were able to stroll around for a few minutes before settling on a place to eat.

‘What do you feel like eating?’ Margaret asked.

‘Anything. It’s up to you.’

She’d known he would say that and had therefore already decided. ‘Why don’t we just grab some Nasi Padang? Since you’re Sumatran. It’ll make you think of home.’

They chose a place at random, sitting down at a fold-up table that wobbled when Margaret put her elbows on it. Din sat facing her, though he did not look at her face but stared into the space beyond her left shoulder. He looked clean and neat, as he always did, his plain white short-sleeved shirt uncreased even at the end of the day. He never seemed to perspire. This evening he was not wearing the thick black-rimmed glasses that he wore at work, and Margaret was glad because she had a clearer view of his eyes. ‘Isn’t this nice?’ she said. ‘The first time we have been out together.’ Even as she said so she was aware of the inappropriateness of it: she, a white woman, he a young Javanese man, together in public. They didn’t like this kind of behaviour, the Indonesians, she knew that. Perhaps this was why he was being so stiff. She looked around quickly but could see no other foreigners. A young woman came and took their order; she looked sexless in her baggy male clothing – oversized shirt, buttoned at the collar, and dirty pleated trousers – and disapproving. Margaret felt her own décolletage, modest though it was, suddenly too revealing.

‘Tell me about the research you started in Holland,’ Margaret said once they had ordered. They were on surer ground if they stuck to work matters; he liked talking about his work. ‘Pre-Islamic religion, wasn’t it?’

‘More or less,’ he said, his gaze shifting gently but noticeably so that he met her eye and held it. It caught her off-guard, this sudden switching of moods, and she blinked and smiled to hide her unease. She didn’t like being taken aback this way. ‘Actually it was a bit wider than that,’ he continued. ‘I was looking into writing a Secret History of the Indonesian Islands in the South East, everything from Bali eastwards. To me those islands were like a lost world where everything remained true and authentic, away from the gaze of foreigners – a kind of invisible world, almost. Such a stupid idea.’

‘Why stupid?’

‘Oh.’ He smiled, suddenly bashful again. ‘Such a big subject – too big for a little guy like me.’

‘I think it’s a wonderful idea. You shouldn’t give up.’

‘No, there’s no hope for someone like me. I was stupid to think I could do something like that, as if I were a Westerner.’ He spoke with no bitterness, but a despair so deep that it felt almost calm. He won’t be shaken from it, thought Margaret; it was so frustrating.

‘What a thing to say,’ she said, trying not to sound didactic. ‘You can do anything you put your mind to. I’m not saying it’s easy, but if you want something, you’ll get it. Don’t be so defeatist.’

The food arrived, dishes of watery curries of meat and vegetables. Margaret peered at the rice and noticed that it had been mixed with maize. ‘I think we have a civic-conscious vendor on our hands,’ she said. Since the previous year’s drought every meal was a lottery. Sometimes your rice would be rice, other times it would be a gritty bowl of ground meal, in accordance with government recommendations.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ Din said with a shrug. He spoke as if trying to convince himself of something. ‘My idea was that we needed a history of our country written by an Indonesian, something that explored non-standard sources that Westerners could not easily reach. Like folk stories, local mythology, or ancient manuscripts written on palm leaves–’

‘Lontar, you mean.’

‘Yes. When you think about the standard approach to history, all the historical texts, you’re really talking about Western sources. It’s as if the history of South-East Asia started with the discovery of the sea routes from Europe to Asia. Everything begins at this point in time, but in fact so much had already happened. The empires of Majapahit and Mataram had been established; Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism…I wanted to retell the story of these islands because I have a theory that their history is beyond the comprehension of foreigners – sorry, you’ll forgive me for saying that, I know–’

‘Forgiven–’

‘–and that history has to be told by a voice that is non-Western…’

Din continued talking, but Margaret had become distracted by a boy who had sat down three tables away. He was an Asian of indeterminate age – anything from fourteen to twenty-one – not malnourished like most of them were, but still somehow ragged. His dirty white T-shirt bore a logo of an animal on the front (a bear?) under blue and gold letters that said BERKELEY. He appeared at once lost and deeply focused. Was he looking at them? She glanced at him once or twice and each time he ducked away just as she turned her head in his direction. Establishing eye contact too freely was a mistake many foreigners she knew made, misjudging Asian regard. What their smiling faces suggested was not always accurate, and what your own smiling face transmitted was not always what you intended. There was nothing on his table; he had not ordered food or drink.

‘…and of course the unknown story of Muslim seafarers.’

‘Well,’ Margaret said, ‘why don’t you just go ahead and do it?’

Instantly Din fell pensive and silent as he played with the pool of curry in which he had drowned his rice. ‘No one will fund me. I asked everyone in Holland and they all said no. They think it’s about politics. And here, well, the President talks about grand projects, but we all know there’s never going to be any money. Not for people like me.’

Margaret did not answer. She looked at his slim sloping shoulders as he toyed aimlessly with his food. He had a way of making the morsels on his plate seem meagre and almost inedible. There was nothing she could do for him, she thought; perhaps she ought to give up. Perhaps she ought to have given up on this country a long time ago. It was still early in the evening, but she was already tired.

‘Let’s go for a drink,’ she said. She would shake off this lethargy, she knew she could.

Din’s face twisted into a half-frown. ‘Um, no thanks actually. I’m quite tired today. Maybe I’ll just go home.’

Margaret stacked the empty dishes on top of each other to signify the end of the meal. ‘Just come for one quick drink. You’ll enjoy it from an anthropological point of view if nothing else. Come on.’ She waved a few notes at the vendor.

‘Really, it’s very kind of you, but I don’t think I’d be comfortable at the Hotel Java.’

‘Rubbish. You’ll have a ball. I told you, I never take no for an answer.’ She smiled sweetly and knew that he would come: when she decided she wanted something, she was never refused.

As they got up to leave Margaret turned back to look one last time at the boy with the Berkeley T-shirt, but he was no longer at the table. She looked around at the stalls, expecting to see him half-hidden behind a pillar or milling in the crowds, but she could see nothing. He had been there at the table half a minute ago and now he was gone.

‘Well, what fun this is going to be,’ Margaret said brightly.

Built in 1962 to celebrate the Asian Games, the Hotel Java sits on the edge of a sweeping roundabout in an area that might be called downtown if this city had an uptown. Like so many of the brutalist concrete buildings springing up around Jakarta, the hotel’s angular lines and slightly industrial appearance were meant to remind the beholder of both Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus aesthetic: international yet functional. The roundabout in front of it is in fact a shallow, perfectly circular pool of water from which jets of water spurt majestically at a young peasant couple standing on a tall narrow plinth. The hotel and the fountain are just two of the many projects designed to impress visitors to Jakarta with the city’s dynamism, and were commissioned by Sukarno himself (‘the President’s majestic erections,’ Margaret called them). Not more than two years had passed and already the toilets in the hotel were unpleasant; some of the bulbs in the grand chandelier in the lobby had blown and hadn’t been replaced; the carpets were scarred by cigarette burns and the table linen dyed with old wine stains.

‘Looks as if the President’s erections are faltering,’ Margaret said as she looked at the chipped edge of the bar. She had had two martinis already. The first had gone straight to her head and the second had slipped down all too easily. She was trying to make the third one last, but it was difficult; she felt a flush in her cheeks and she wanted to drink quickly. She was already quite light-headed, she knew, but she felt strong again.

Din stood with his elbows on the bar, facing away from the room. He stared at the rows of bottles arranged on the mirrored wall facing him, as if examining every single label. He would take only a Coke, no matter how hard Margaret tried to persuade him otherwise. He wouldn’t even drink a Bintang. She was usually sensitive enough not to transgress cultural boundaries – but Din was different. Yes, he was Muslim, but he had lived for three years in Europe, and was not just another unsophisticated small-town Indonesian. If they both had a drink, she thought, the alcohol might help break down the boundaries that remained between them and they would be friends.

There was music, a band and a pretty Filipina in a tight white dress singing ‘Solamente Una Vez’ in bright, clear notes, rolling her r’s impeccably while shaking a pair of brightly coloured maracas to accompany the Cuban drums. The bar was not full but it was already very noisy, the air smoky and filled with men’s voices. There were a lot of men here and not many women; not many locals either. The only Indonesians present seemed to be women, and nearly all were prostitutes.

‘Here you have the Occident’s finest at play,’ Margaret said. ‘See those two guys? Pulitzer winners a few years back. They’re supposed to be reporting on one of the most urgent political situations in the world and what do they do? Chase after girls they can’t get at home. And that idiot over there, yes, that one canoodling with the Batak girl, he’s meant to be administering aid for the World Bank, but it doesn’t look as if he’s capable of administering anything but a strawberry daiquiri.’

‘Do you know everyone here?’ Din asked.

‘I recognise a few faces.’

A big pink-faced man with sandy hair and freckles came through the doors and headed straight for Margaret. He had a young local girl with him, tall for a Javanese and quite fair. ‘Margaret, how are you? Haven’t seen you in ages – not since last year’s fourth of July party at the Lazarskys’. Who’s the boyfriend?’

‘He’s not my boyfriend, he’s my colleague at the university.’ She was about to introduce Din when she noticed he had slipped away, heading for the toilet. ‘How’s the girlfriend, Bill?’

‘Fine,’ he said, putting a fleshy arm across his companion’s shoulders, ‘just fine. Her name’s Susanti, but I just call her Sue.’

‘Been together long?’

‘Guess so. Longest since I got here, at any rate,’ he laughed, patting his pockets in search of his cigarettes.

‘Wow. Two weeks? Congratulations.’

He smiled for a moment then broke into an over-hearty laugh. ‘You just kill me. You’re still just so…Margaret.’

‘See you around, Bill.’

A table and two chairs became free at the back of the room, in a shadowy corner where the light bulbs had gone out. Margaret went over and sat down, making a cursory attempt to fiddle with the bulbs. She preferred everything to be bathed in light, preferably sunlight. It was not that she was afraid of the dark: she just did not like it, for it frustrated her not to be able to make things out clearly. The windows looked out on to narrow streets away from the noise and great rush of traffic of the grand roundabout. There were not so many people here, just a few of the embassy drivers waiting for their bosses to finish dinner. They milled about in small groups, smoking and exchanging gossip. Most of them were smartly dressed in creased trousers and khaki shirts, but there were a number of other locals who were more difficult to place: bodyguards trying to look casual, perhaps, or local journalists bribing the drivers for information. Margaret tried to discern the differences between them. She was good at this, good at spotting what lay behind this Asian mask of inscrutability. She had learnt to do this in the jungle, with tribes who wore real masks and whose body language was indecipherable to outsiders, and she applied it with great success everywhere in Indonesia, even in this city of three million people. In America and Europe she had not been quite so successful; her antennae did not pick up the right signals with other occidentals. She had not really even been able to understand her parents.

‘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, OK, 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 everywhere.’

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 emphasise his jokes. He laughed a lot, always loudly. From across the room they could only catch snippets 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: US 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 goodbye. 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 leant 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.