Map of the Invisible World. Tash Aw

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СКАЧАТЬ fish, purple sea urchins and pulsating starfish; and beyond the coral there was the promise of shipwrecks, their silent corpses filled with treasure from a lost time. Later, Karl would tell him about each of the wrecks: one of them had been shipping opium to China, another had been decommissioned from the British Navy; the biggest one contained hundreds of bottles of precious wine from Oporto and Madeira, still drinkable. In this way Adam learned the history of Perdo; about the Opium wars, Catholicism and the destructive power of religion, and the unjust conquering of Asia by Europe.

      This is how Adam believed his new world would begin and end – in this place where he was safe from danger but connected to the possibilities of the world. It was then, however, that Karl began to talk about school.

      ‘Can’t I just stay at home and learn things from you, pak?’ cried Adam, trying to stem his growing unease. ‘What else do I need to learn?’

      ‘What you need to learn isn’t contained in textbooks. You need to learn how to live with other people your age – how to be like everyone else. You mustn’t become too privileged.’

      But Adam already knew that he was not like everyone else. That was why he was here in the first place, living on this island that was not his real home, with a father who did not look at all like him.

      Other children. The very sound of the words made him feel sick. For nearly a year he had had little contact with other children. He had seen them in town whenever he and Karl went for supplies, but he avoided their cold hard stares and clung to Karl’s side, never looking directly at them. He saw them crouching by the roadside, blinking the dust from their eyes as he swept by in the car. And further along the beach he sometimes saw them splashing in the shallows in the late afternoon when the sea was flat, the shadows of the trees reaching across the sand towards the water’s edge. Their faraway cries were shrill and threatening.

      * * *

      ‘Don’t worry, you’re just like the other boys,’ Karl said as he took Adam to school that first day. He spoke in a calm voice, yet Adam knew that Karl himself was not convinced by what he was saying. ‘You’ll enjoy being with compatriots your age. If ever you feel scared, tell yourself, ‘I’m just like everyone else here.’’

      The school was a one-room shack on the edge of town, a squat concrete block with a roof of corrugated iron. Adam loathed it from the beginning; its very appearance made him feel sick, and spots of colour appeared in his vision, as if he was going to faint. (I’m just like everyone else here.) There were about eighteen or twenty children crammed into the small classroom, all boys, save for one girl whose roughly cropped hair made her look like a boy. One side of her face was obscured by a birth-mark, a purple-red cloud that stretched from her temple to her jawbone. Adam had to stare closely before deciding that she was indeed a girl; she stuck out her tongue and threw a scrunched-up piece of paper at him. The other boys gathered round him and examined the contents of his new canvas satchel: an exercise book with buff-coloured covers, a pocket atlas and a new box of coloured pencils. His classmates tore the pages from his books and folded them into paper airplanes that they launched into the air with sharp spearing motions. Adam watched as bits of the atlas glided past him: the pink-and-green of the United States floated dreamily in circles until it stubbed its nose on the blackboard and fell abruptly to the ground; the whiteness of the Canadian tundra swept out of the window in an arc, into the dusty sunlight; and the silent mass of the Pacific Ocean that Adam loved so much, dotted with islands (Fiji? Tahiti?) lay on the cracked cement floor, waiting to be trampled upon.

      At the end of that first day he did not have the strength to cycle the entire journey home; he pushed his bicycle along the final sandy stretch, too tired even to cry. When he reached the house he let his bicycle fall to the ground; he sat on the steps to the house watching the pedals spin lazily to a stop. There were sea-eagles hovering against the powder-blue sky, barely trembling in the wind. Karl sat with him and put his arm round his shoulders. He shook his head and said, ‘It’s a privilege, you know.’

      ‘What is?’

      ‘Education. You saw those kids at school? What kind of families do you think they come from?’

      Horrible ones, Adam wanted to say. Filthy, mean, horrible ones.

      ‘Poor ones. Farmers or fishermen who can’t read or write, and yet everyone has had to pay to get into that school. They take a small packet of money or a carton of cigarettes to the education officer and beg him to put their child’s name on the school list, and if they don’t have cash they take a goat or some chickens or sacks of rice. There isn’t space for everyone, so the kids whose parents pay the most get in. I had to do the same – I paid the most because I’m, well, they look at me and their minds are made up.’

      ‘Because you’re foreign?’

      ‘Because I’m rich. Or at least that’s what they think.’

      Adam watched as Karl lifted the bicycle and set it upright; its handlebar and pedals were covered thickly with sand that fell to the ground in clumps. ‘The point is,’ Karl continued, ‘none of those people can afford to send their children to school. They’d rather have their kids with them, working in the fields or out at sea with them. Then they have to pay for uniforms, shoes, books. Why? Because they want their children to read and write, to have nice jobs in offices and drive cars in Jakarta. They might not realise it, but they believe in the future of this country.’

      The next day he sent Adam back to school again.

      The teacher taught them simple grammar and rudimentary arithmetic. She made them practise the letters of the alphabet and introduced them to new words, writing them out on the blackboard in short sentences that no one but Adam could make sense of. It did not seem to matter to her that almost everyone in the class was asleep or staring red-eyed out of the window at the grassy plains pockmarked with blackened heaps of half-burnt rubbish, where skinny goats picked through the piles of waste, dragging plastic bags out of the cinders. CITIZEN. REPUBLIC. PRESIDENT. REVOLUTION. WESTERN IMPERIALISTS. I am a citizen of the Republic of Indonesia. The President of the Republic of Indonesia is President Sukarno. President Sukarno led the revolution against the Western Imperialists who destroyed…

      ‘It’s hot,’ someone whispered, ‘I have to go home.’ Adam turned around and saw the girl with the birth-mark slumped on her desk, twirling a dry strip of coconut leaf in her fingers. She brushed the leaf lazily against Adam’s back. Are your parents expecting you home too?’

      Adam nodded. Close-up, he could see that the discoloured patch of skin on her face was not a birth-mark but a scar, an inky mass of tissue that looked almost smooth, like a pebble on the riverbank, crisscrossed by long-dead veins. She was a few years older than Adam but no taller; her fingernails were dirty and worn.

      ‘Actually, I only have a mother at the moment,’ she said.

      ‘At the moment?’

      ‘Yeh, my father’s in jail. Don’t know when he’ll be out. I’m an orphan! That’s what my mother says when she gets in a mood and starts crying. “I am a widow! I am nothing! My daughter is an orphan! O, my daughter is an orphan!”’

      Adam giggled. She was much darker than he was, yet she did not seem entirely like the other kids; she spoke with a different accent too.

      ‘My name’s Neng. What’s yours?’ She tickled his neck with the leaf.

      ‘Adam.’

      ‘I have to go and collect this month’s rice from the district office later. Want to come with me? It’s not a long walk. Besides, СКАЧАТЬ