Map of the Invisible World. Tash Aw
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which she was often addressed by young men. She should have been flattered but wasn’t; she carried on briskly. Instantly, they were at her side, flanking her as she lengthened her stride. Their frames were slight, even fragile at first glance, yet Margaret saw that they had the expressions and wiry musculature of older boys. Quickly she determined their age: fourteen or fifteen, old enough to be dangerous.
‘Hey – Dutch? British? American? Give us money, US dollars.’ They spoke with the rough accents of the Bimanese or Sasaks; these boys were from the outer islands, not Jakarta.
She continued looking straight ahead. ‘I don’t have any money with me. If I did I would give you some, but I don’t. Now go away, leave me alone.’
Thrown by her fluency in Indonesian, they were quiet for a moment. ‘One dollar,’ one of them said, holding up his index finger. ‘Just one dollar.’
‘No.’
‘OK, rupiah. You have rupiah.’
‘I told you, I have no money.’ They were still a long way from the edge of the square, a long way from the sea of traffic in the distance.
The first boy stepped in front of her and stopped dead. ‘You’re lying.’
He stood very close to her, looking straight into her face. He had a scar running across his forehead, a purple-white streak against the almost iridescent bronze of his skin. The pungent odour of his sweat filled Margaret’s nostrils and she could almost feel the sticky heat from his body. She looked him straight in the eye and was glad for the extra protection of her sunglasses. ‘I am telling you to leave me alone.’
His face broke into an ugly sneer, his lips parting to reveal surprisingly strong white teeth. ‘Why?’
‘Because I say so.’
‘So what? Give me rupiah.’
‘No.’
Out of the corner of her eye she saw another three or four youths jogging towards them, street kids, just like these two, shirtless and barefoot. She moved to one side and resumed walking, faster now: she had to get to the edge of the square.
There were bodies around her, but she kept striving for the road, for the noise of the traffic. Someone reached out and touched her, a hot clammy hand on her bare forearm. Don’t run, she told herself, don’t run. There was a tug at her shirt, then a pinch on the side of her stomach. She broke into a run, kicking up a cloud of dust. The low roar of the traffic grew louder and she heard someone shout out behind her, a single sharp adolescent’s cry, but she did not turn back until she had reached the side of the great wide road with the comforting cacophony before her. She was breathing hard: she could not remember the last time she had had to run. She hurried across the road, enjoying the angry beeping of the scooters, and when she reached the other side she looked across at the square. Suddenly it seemed far away and unthreatening, shrouded in a veil of dust.
She blinked. The sun had begun to fall from its midday peak, the light becoming silvery and blurred through the thick haze of exhaust fumes and dust. The shapes of the boys in the distance shimmered in the heat, floating, it seemed, on a watery surface. ‘Margaret Bates,’ she said aloud, wanting to hear her voice: it sounded hoarse and slightly shaky. ‘Pull yourself together. Right now.’ It was nothing serious, she told herself. You let your guard down for a second and when you do that in a city like Jakarta you’ll get into scrapes, Margaret Bates, you know that full well. It’s no big deal.
They were just boys, just boys.
She continued walking for a few hundred yards until she reached an unkempt lawn that lay like a haphazardly placed rug in front of a large, handsome villa. The white paint of the house had faded to a dirty grey; the columns that divided its façade into neat squares were carved with graffiti, and swiftlets nested in the eaves. Shaded by rain trees, the building felt ancient and damp, and the cool darkness of its deep verandas instantly made Margaret feel better.
‘Good afternoon,’ the woman at the reception said to her, standing up quickly as if she recognised Margaret, as if she had been expecting her.
‘I was wondering if I could look through the old issues of whatever newspapers you have – not that old, in fact, quite recent.’
‘Of course,’ the woman said. She wore a neat beige knee-length skirt and a white blouse. Pinned on her shirt was a plastic brooch of a bumblebee with a smiley face, and in her perfectly straight hair there was a hair-band of the same yellow as the bumblebee’s cheerful cheeks. ‘This way, please.’
Margaret followed her into a large sombre room that smelled of camphor and damp wood. No one else was in the reading room, and most of the bookshelves were empty, or else stacked with nondescript cardboard boxes. There were no windows on the ground floor; above them was a narrow gallery decorated with cheap modern oil paintings of cockfights and buffaloes and paddy fields. The arched windows of the gallery were dirty and stained, and panels of glass missing here and there.
‘It is all ready for you, over there,’ the woman said, pointing at a recess at the far end of the room.
‘But I need something quite specific,’ Margaret said.
The woman smiled a broad toothy smile that looked unnervingly like the bumblebee’s. ‘You will find it all there.’
The alcove was in fact larger than she had thought, and dominated by a table on top of which various newspapers had been arranged in neat piles: the Harian Rakyat, Indonesia Raya, Sinar Harapan. It looked as if they had been specially laid out in the hope that she would come along and consult them. She settled down to a pile of Harian Rakyat from the mid-fifties. Ten years did not seem like such a long time and yet the font and indeed the writing style seemed archaic to her, so innocent and free. The pages were brittle and yellowed and foxed by the humidity, and the few pictures that appeared in them were as blurred as Impressionist paintings. She squinted in the dim light: maybe she needed glasses. Every time she came upon an article on the repatriation of Dutch citizens she paused, searching for names or faces. She had no idea which names or faces she was looking for, but she knew that sooner or later she would come across something that would help her.
‘Here you are, madam.’ Margaret looked up and saw the bumblebee smiling at her. The woman put a glass of almost fluorescent iced syrup on the table next to Margaret and went away again. Margaret hesitated, but she was suddenly very thirsty. She sipped it cautiously at first, and, finding it not as sweet as it looked, finished it in a few gulps. She let a piece of ice slip into her mouth and sucked on it as she continued looking through the newspapers, her tongue feeling pleasantly numb. She worked her way briskly through each pile, pausing occasionally.
Repatriation Continues
JAKARTA, 6 December 1950 – The repatriation of Dutch families from Indonesia is continuing in earnest. Numbers of Dutch nationals leaving Indonesia are estimated to be on the increase. Today a special KLM flight left from Halim Perdana Kusumah airport filled with the latest families departing for the Netherlands. Most of them are happy to be leaving Indonesia, just as we are that they are leaving. Photo: Mother and child wait to board plane. Isn’t that a cute Teddy Bear! Don’t cry Teddy Bear!
Revolt in Ambon
AMBON, 16 January 1951 – Following the disbanding of the colonial army in July last year, a small number of former soldiers have refused to join the new Armed Forces of Indonesia. It is estimated that no more than 40 of these traitors have turned down the chance to participate in President Sukarno’s building of the great Republic of Indonesia and arrangements have been made to ship them away to the Netherlands. ‘I have to leave my family behind and I will be very lonely in the Netherlands, but I have no future in Indonesia,’ says one of these traitors whom we will only call Tomy To Tomy and his friends we say Good Riddance!
Death in the Plantations
Special Report by Affandi Suprianto
NUSA PERDO, 2 December 1953 – In this little-known corner of Indonesia a war