LITMIR.BIZ

       5

      The telephone stopped ringing just as Margaret opened her eyes. It had been ringing for a very long time. Her head hurt terribly. She squinted at the clock: nine-forty. She could not remember the last time she had woken up so late. She was turning into a grand old white housewife, she thought to herself as she padded her way slowly to the bathroom; she wished there was a bell she could ring so that some dusky, half-dressed youth would appear bearing two aspirins on a silver tray. She had fallen asleep in the rattan armchair in the sitting room and had remained there for some time before being woken by a stiff neck. She had summoned just enough energy to stumble into her bedroom and had fallen into bed without showering, and now she felt suffocated by her own cold sweat, as if someone had coated her skin with a thin layer of wet paint.

      The phone rang again as she dressed. Now that she was awake and fully conscious, the phone seemed curiously dangerous. She picked it up slowly and put it to her ear but did not say anything; she barely even breathed. There was silence, as if the person on the other end was holding their breath too, and the air in her bedroom began to feel stifling. The line clicked and went dead. ‘Probably just the exchange playing up again,’ she said aloud. The sound of her own voice reassured her, and she began humming to herself, a vacuous tune that she soon realised was the song she’d heard at the Hotel Java the night before. Somehow, she knew the phone would ring again, and this time she would not be so cowardly. Dressed now, the pain in her head dull rather than stabbing, she reached for the phone as soon as its harsh drilling started up.

      ‘Hell-o,’ she said loudly, challenging the mystery caller.

      There was a half-second’s pause. ‘Margaret?’ Din’s voice sounded timid, almost scared.

      ‘Yes, hi, Din, it’s Margaret here. Did you try calling me earlier? Just a second ago?’

      ‘Um, no,’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’

      ‘Sure,’ she said, sliding her feet into her shoes. She was sure it was he who had rung, it must have been. ‘You recovered from the horror of last night?’

      ‘It was interesting, actually, I was thinking about it on the way home. I’m glad you took me along. Maybe we’ll do it again some time.’

      ‘Sure. Maybe.’

      ‘Are you sure everything’s all right?’

      ‘Why shouldn’t it be all right?’

      ‘Well, it’s just, you’re always on time, that’s all. You’re usually here before me, so I thought I’d ring you to see if you were OK.’

      ‘What do you think might have happened? That I might have fallen prey to a wanton taxi driver? I just overslept, that’s all.’

      Din did not answer for a while. Margaret imagined his inscrutable smile. ‘OK then,’ he said calmly, ‘maybe I’ll see you later.’

      ‘Yeah, maybe.’ She let the phone fall into its cradle with a crash and walked into the sitting room. The swirling green faux-marble Formica tabletop was half-covered in bits of paper and photographs. Margaret had not bothered to put them back into the box that lay at the foot of the low cane armchair. Last night, her head heavy with drink, she had wanted to look at all those dead images. She had not seen them for a very long time, and it had taken her a while even to remember where the box was. She had recovered it in the small storeroom into which she threw everything that she did not use on a daily basis, things that collected in layers as the years went by. And so, working her way through the archaeological dig of her life, she had found it preserved like a rare fossil in the pre-adult period, buried under old college textbooks but lying (more or less) on top of a box labelled Childhood in New Guinea. Once consigned to this storeroom, things rarely resurfaced; geckos laid their eggs on the spines of books and mice crawled into boxes to die. Margaret had no idea why she had spent a good hour and a half on her hands and knees, struggling with the flashlight wedged between her chin and shoulder, to free this box from its tomb of memories. She had looked at the pictures until it was very late, until she was alone in the night, when even the scooters and dogs and radios had fallen silent. She had been surprised to see how little she had changed, and had felt an unexpected surge of happiness when she recognised herself in the pictures. She had grown older, of course, but the similarities between the fifteen-year-old Margaret and the forty-something Margaret were obvious: the slight, adolescent build, the firm unfleshy arms, the hair pulled back neatly from the face, the chin raised in a perpetual challenge, the pouting smile. It was definitely Margaret.

      She wondered if she would recognise the other people in the photos if she met them today. She certainly had not recognised her father when he lay on his deathbed. She had flown back to New York and driven upstate through an incipient snowstorm to be with him, kept warm only by the vestiges of the Jakarta heat. She had found him in a room that stank of disinfectant in a nursing home on the outskirts of Ithaca, his face pale and mottled, bleached of colour. The few wisps of hair on his head had grown too long and fell like threads of fine white silk across the scabs on his scalp. He looked like just another old man, like the ones playing cards in the hall. He was barely sixty but the cancer had taken hold.

      When he smiled she felt a terrible pain in her chest; she had never believed that sadness could be a physical sensation. During that brief weak smile, she had recognised her father, the one whose image she had always kept in her mind’s eye. And she was glad when he closed his eyes again, for he became an old man once more, someone foreign whose pain, too, was foreign to her.

      Here, in the photos, he was just as Margaret remembered him: lean and deeply tanned, barefoot and wearing a sarong, often staying in the background, ceding the spotlight to his wife. Margaret had not seen her mother for ten years and wondered if she would recognise her now.

      Margaret put all the photos except one back in the box, and tidied the table. She picked up the newspaper article that Bill Schneider had given her, looking at it once more under the magnifying glass. It didn’t help. The picture only became fuzzier, its indistinct dots revealing no further clues. There was one white man in the crowd of twenty Indonesian ones, that was for sure. They were in a cell, or the back of a dark room. The flash of the camera had surprised a few of them; their faces were raised open-mouthed and dazed, looking straight at the viewer. The others just sat cross-legged, their heads bowed to their chests. Right at the back, the solitary white figure sat calmly with his back propped up against the wall, his head turned at an angle as if examining something on his leg. A small part of his neck was revealed, like a fragment of a precious mosaic, and Margaret studied it at length; the slight curve of it was unmistakeable – or was she just imagining the similarity? She had spent most of the night comparing the photo in the newspapers to her old photos but could not reach a conclusion.

      The streets were already teeming by the time she stepped out into the dusty sunlight. Along the shady lanes near her house the drains were no longer overflowing but filled with shallow puddles of oily water, blocked by dams of rubbish rotting slowly in the heat. Two mangy dogs picked listlessly through the tangle of tin cans and empty sacks and vegetation as Margaret walked past a row of shop-houses, their bamboo blinds lowered against the sun. A hundred and fifty years ago, when Dutch Batavia was at its zenith, these shops contained sacks of spices and tea and fragrant wood bound for Europe where there was no limit to their prices; this was the port from which European fantasies were stoked to frenzied extremes, but you could sense none of the past glory in the streets of Old Jakarta. The voices of prosperous merchants did not echo in the narrow lanes, the clink of gold coins had disappeared a century ago. Even in the south of the city, in the place that some people called ‘New’ Jakarta, Margaret could see only decay. She had witnessed its growth, the simple, functional houses built seemingly overnight, stretching in rows like crops, punctuated by enclaves of big houses, where the roads suddenly widened and high cement walls hid immense Western-style mansions, the bright terracotta tiles on their faux-Tuscan roofs just visible above the walls. But everything aged so quickly here, Margaret thought; Jakarta had a way of dragging everything into its slimy mess, of

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