Map of the Invisible World. Tash Aw

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СКАЧАТЬ he drifted off to sleep he wondered if he missed the orphanage, and wondered if it was this that made him sad. But he experienced no nostalgia or longing; instead he found that his recollections of the orphanage were already thick and hazy, opaque in his mind’s eye. Lying in bed listening to the constant wash of the waves he began to realise that the sadness he felt would not last forever; it was a different kind of sadness from anything he might have experienced previously. Somehow, he knew that in this new house, with this frightened, frightening man, he could overcome these sensations of sorrow. He had much to fear in this new life, but fear was no longer something huge and undefined and terrifying. It was something he could master. He knew that now. And so he would fall asleep. He slept a lot during those first days.

      Eventually he began to explore the house, timidly at first, venturing from his room only when he could hear that Karl had gone out. As his fear of the objects in the house subsided he began to pull books from the shelves and look at the pictures. He could not read (that would come soon afterwards) but he spent much time looking at pictures of lakes and forests that he knew were far away in cold countries, for the trees and hills did not look anything like the ones he saw around him. The fair-haired children in these pictures wore nice thick clothes and looked strong-boned and happy, unlike the children Adam had known, who had not been very happy. They had been skinny, like Adam himself, and constantly tired, and some of the smaller ones had distended stomachs even though they had nothing to eat. Maybe it was easy to be happy if you had nice clothes and food and parents, Adam thought; maybe it would be easy for him to be happy from now on. He liked these pictures because they made him feel that he was like these children and not like the ones in the orphanage. These healthy European children looked like immature versions of Karl, and as Adam watched Karl working in the yard outside, he could imagine Karl skating on frozen ponds or walking in pine forests; and Adam realised that Karl, too, was a long way from home.

      Adam also found books with pictures of pictures – paintings of women who looked almost like local women, but not quite: they were fleshier and their eyes were brighter, not tinged with jaundice or cataracts. They wore flowers behind their ears and looked straight at Adam, as if questioning him: Where was he from? Was he one of them, or something else? He did not like these pictures so much.

      Gradually he allowed Karl to read to him. They would sit on the narrow cane sofa in the last light of the afternoon, in the hour before dusk took hold of the island, and Karl would read magical stories from across the islands of Indonesia. Adam learnt about brave little Biwar who killed a terrifying dragon; about the ungrateful Si Tanggang, who left his fishing village and rose from humble roots (such as ours, Karl had said) to become rich and famous, and finally refused to acknowledge his poor mother; and about the beautiful Lara Djonggrang, turned to stone by the covetous Bandung after she had tricked her way out of marrying him. As Karl read these stories Adam would gaze out at the retreating tide; the waves were always flat at this hour, barely a ripple, and pools of calm water would begin to form in the recesses of the reef. He liked the stories – he can remember each one to this day – but most of all he wished that Karl would read him stories about those fair-skinned children who were full of laughter. In their world people were not turned into statues or animals, and night demons were not called upon to take sides in ancient feuds. It was safer over there, he thought.

      But still, he was lucky to be where he was. He knew he should not ask for anything else.

      Adam also discovered music, played on the record player which he soon learnt to operate. The small box was made of chocolate-brown wood on the outside, light-coloured wood on the inside, and Adam would lift its lid and select (purely at random) six records which he would stack carefully on the tiny mast that rose from the platter. Every piece of music made him realise how devoid of it his life had been before he came to this house. As he listened to a woman’s lilting voice or a jolly melody played by a trumpet, he tried to remember if the children at the orphanage had ever sung the folk tunes that Karl often hummed, but he could recall nothing: a blanket of silence would fall over his memories, and suddenly the landscape of his past would become still and colourless, as if mist had drifted in from the sea on one of those cool days after rain when you can see nothing, just the faint outline of trees here and there.

      Sometimes Karl would put his arm around Adam and squeeze his shoulders – a brief, warm hug to praise him for having chosen the records and starting up the player; he would see the edges of Karl’s eyes pinched into fine wrinkles by a smile and he would feel better, as though he had done something good and new and surprising. He had never known that he was capable of causing happiness.

      Adam cannot recall the precise moment when he began to think of Karl as his father and not as some alien with skin the colour of dry sand and freckles on his face and arms. But he suspects that it took him a mere few weeks to ease into his new world, one in which this white man was no longer a foreigner but someone who was always present, who made Adam feel that this place was safe and unchanging and unconnected to the past.

      My name is Adam de Willigen, he would say to himself during those first months, for it comforted him to do so. He would repeat the words aloud because he loved the sound and the rhythm they created;he loved contorting his lips into unfamiliar shapes in order to say them. It soothed him to hear his own voice too, and gradually he stopped thinking about what his surname might once have been. Nowadays whenever he hears his name he thinks, Adam de Willigen sounds just right.

      Goede avond, mijn naam is Adam de Willigen. You see? He can speak Dutch too. Only rudimentary expressions, however, because Karl is opposed to the speaking of Dutch in this house. He believes that it is the language of oppression and that Adam should not grow up absorbing the culture of the country that colonised his own. ‘We are independent now,’ he explained, ‘we need our own culture.’ English was their compromise – Karl deemed it ‘useful to know’ – and Adam had daily lessons in it. On the rare occasions they had European visitors, English was the lingua franca, and on these occasions Adam surprised himself by feeling quite at ease speaking the language. His fascination for Dutch, however, continued for a very long time, his curiosity made stronger by the fact that Karl resolutely refused to speak it. Once, they received unexpected visitors, a Dutch couple who were fleeing their home in Flores and trying to make their way back to Holland. They had heard of Karl and his house when they arrived on the island and knew they would find a safe place to stay for a few nights while they arranged their passage back to Jakarta and beyond. They arrived with a single suitcase, looking sunburnt and dusty. Karl welcomed them courteously and surrendered his own room to them, but for two whole days there was a strained silence, for the man spoke little Indonesian (he had learnt only the unhelpful dialect of the Ngada of Flores) and his wife could speak none at all, save a few words of instruction to the cook before mealtimes. When they spoke Dutch it thrilled Adam to hear the sound of the rich, rasping words, but Karl responded briskly in English or else ignored them altogether. So that’s what it sounds like, Adam thought, and all of a sudden the individual words and short phrases he had learnt from looking at the Dutch books on the shelves began to make sense. He was upset by Karl’s refusal to speak Dutch and by his refusal to be more hospitable. Adam did not understand why Karl could not be friends with these people, for they were just like Karl. In those days he did not yet understand that Home was not necessarily where you were born, or even where you grew up, but something else entirely, something fragile that could exist anywhere in the world. Back then Adam was merely angry with Karl because he did not understand this, and many other things.

      The night before the couple left to take the ferry, Adam saw the woman sitting alone on her bed, folding clothes and arranging them into her open suitcase. She smiled when she saw Adam and said, ‘Come.’ Adam sat with her while she continued packing her belongings into the case. A pile of thin cotton shirts lay next to her, and Adam watched as she picked them up one by one and folded them carefully before rearranging them into the case. They were tiny, made for an infant, and decorated with pale pink-and-red flowers. She began to speak, very softly, in Dutch, even though Adam couldn’t respond. As she spoke Adam thought of those healthy blond children in the picture books; somehow he knew that she was speaking of children. When she finished СКАЧАТЬ