Map of the Invisible World. Tash Aw

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 she touched his cheek very lightly and stroked his hair. She said something and shook her head; her smile was weak. ‘No understand?’ she said in Indonesian. She was right, Adam could not understand. He said, ‘Onthaal aan mijn huis.’ He had seen the words in a book and thought that he knew roughly what it meant. She broke into a deep, warm laugh. ‘Thank you, Adam de Willigen,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘Thank you.’

      These scenes from his Present Life are re-enacted in his mind’s eye whenever he wishes. He is able to recall them with absolute clarity, the details as sharp and true as the day he witnessed them; he enjoys the power he wields over these memories, his ability to control them and carry them with him wherever he goes, whether walking in the ricefields or swimming in the sea. Even now, as he walks in the dark from the porch to the bedroom (he does not have to put on any lights – he knows this house too well), he finds that every episode in his life in this single-storey cement-and-timber dwelling can be summoned at will.

      From time to time he still attempts to conjure up something from his time at the orphanage, to piece together the fragments that float in his head; but nothing materialises and he feels immediately chastened – he should never have been so foolish. He knows that, however hard he tries, the first five years of his life will continue to elude him, that he should stop trying and simply let go. And yet, now and then, he cannot resist the temptation. It stays with him like a splinter embedded deep in his skin, which niggles him from time to time but is otherwise invisible, as if it does not exist at all. And when that tingle begins he has to reach for it and scratch it, even though it will unearth nothing. In moments of quiet and solitude, such as this – stretched out on his bed, alone and frightened – he will sometimes delve into that store of emptiness.

      Why does he do it?

      Because amidst the fogginess of his non-memory there is one lonely certainty, one person whom he knows did exist, and it is this that lures him back.

      Adam had a brother. His name was Johan.

      The only problem is that Adam cannot remember the slightest thing about him, not even his face.

       3

      ‘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