‘What did you say?’ Din asked, folding his newspaper at last.
‘Nothing,’ Margaret said, turning round. She looked at Din’s clear, slightly watery eyes and felt guilty at having snapped at him earlier. She wished that she was able to think things through before saying them. ‘Let’s get an early dinner. Then we can go to the Hotel Java or somewhere fancy, you know, have some drinks – something strong and colourful with a little umbrella in it. We can watch all those ridiculous rich people with their prostitutes.’
Din pulled his chair closer to his desk and flipped open a notebook. ‘It’s too early for dinner,’ he said, picking up a pen and removing its cap. He held the pen poised over the notepad but he did not write anything. ‘Besides, they won’t let me into the Hotel Java. Not like this, anyway.’ He held the collar of his shirt between his thumb and forefinger for a second before letting it fall.
‘I’m not taking no for an answer,’ Margaret said. She grabbed his hand and pulled him towards the door. ‘You’re with me, no one will say anything. It’s one of those disgusting privileges of being white in a place like this. Everyone says they hate Westerners, but as soon as an orang putih walks into the room they give them whatever they want. Every other blanquito I know breaks the rules and behaves badly, and tonight I intend to partake of this disgusting orgy.’
They crossed the highway on the overhead walkway. Beneath them the never-ending traffic beeped and hooted and revved as usual, a river of bashed-up, rusting steel whose current flowed everywhere and nowhere. The sun had begun to calm slightly, hazy now behind the perpetual layer of cloud; the sky was a dirty yellow, a yellow overlaid with grey, and soon, when the sun was setting, it would turn mouse-coloured and finally – swiftly – black. There was never any blue, nothing true or clear.
They walked along the road for a while trying to hail a taxi, but there seemed to be none today so they settled for a becak, ridden by an ancient Javanese whose face was so fleshless that they could see the outlines of his skull under the old-leather skin. He rode with surprising speed and agility, passing men and women pushing their cartloads of peanuts and scrap newspaper and fruit. Stallholders along the road cried out to them as the rickshaw went past; they offered watches, toys, magazines, bottles of Benzine. Often Margaret thought they would collide with something – a horse-drawn cart or a bare-framed jeep or a bicycle – but at the last moment their driver would casually veer past the obstacle. Every few minutes they went past an accident or a broken-down vehicle. There were few cars, few recognisable ones, anyway. Everything had been cannibalised, picked to pieces and reassembled to look like something else so that it was impossible to identify a car as a Datsun or a Fiat or a Skoda. Something could begin as a Mercedes, morph mid-chassis into a Cadillac and end up an open-sided lorry.
She looked across at Din, whose serious expression never seemed to alter very much. A more or less permanent frown drew his close-set, almond-shaped eyes even closer together and lent his slim features an air of mild anxiety. She liked him. He was certainly a great improvement over the last few who had filled his position; they had been, by and large, American post-graduate students earnestly pursuing dull projects on the Economics of Oil or International Aid in Newly-Independent Asia. Without exception, they had been spectacularly unsuited to life in South-East Asia. The longest-serving of them had stayed for two years, the shortest a mere three months. There were rumours that they might not have been bona fide students, that they were in fact working for the US Government, but Margaret could not substantiate these rumours. She did find it slightly odd that there was such a steady stream of American students wanting to be teaching assistants in Jakarta, but there was nothing to suggest that they were funded by anything more sinister than indulgent Ivy League scholarships. Once or twice, she had casually slipped into conversation the presence of the CIA in Indonesia, which was an open secret in town, but she was met by blinking incomprehension, so she let the matter rest. In this city you could never be sure if anyone was who they said they were and, frankly, Margaret couldn’t care less.
Din, however, seemed far removed from the sordid details of Jakarta life. He did not have a comfortable scholarship to fall back on, and Margaret felt guilty because there was no money to pay him properly. In fact neither of them had drawn any salary for this month and although he never complained she knew that even his small rented room would soon begin to weigh heavily on his finances. He said he had taken a room in Kebayoran, but she did not believe him; it would be far too expensive for him. She knew that he did not want her to think him destitute, just another semi slum-dweller. He wanted her to believe that he was an ordinary middle-class professional, and she was happy to go along with it. But she did not know how long he could continue like this. She did not want him to leave.
‘Do you ever miss Leiden?’ she asked. They were travelling alongside a canal filled with stagnant black water covered in a film of grease.
He shrugged. ‘Not really.’
‘But you said you liked it. You did really well there – academically, I mean.’
‘I didn’t like the cold.’ He could be like this, uncommunicative to the point of sullenness. Margaret wondered if he suffered from that respect of hierarchy that (she had noticed) seems to plague all Asians, so that she, being his elder and superior, could never be a companion with whom he could converse freely. It troubled her somewhat to think of herself as a Mother Superior figure, wizened and stern.
‘I can understand that,’ she said, deciding not to push too far. She wished he would relax in her company, and she began to imagine how the evening might proceed if she had her way. They would have something simple to eat at a street stall and then they would have drinks, lots of them, and at some point in the evening he would begin to confide in her, telling her all about his village sweetheart and the girls he had had in Holland; he would begin to trust her, think of her as his equal, his confidante, and the next morning, at work, they would be friends and colleagues and she would no longer feel awkward in his company.
She was not sexually attracted to him, she wanted to make that clear. She had worked out that he was twenty-four going on twenty-five; not quite twenty years her junior but certainly young enough to be her son in this country where girls of eighteen often had three children. Besides, she had long since shut out the possibility of romance. Once, in an age of endless possibilities, love had presented itself to her and it had seemed so simple, so attainable that all she had to do was reach out and claim it. Falling in love then had felt as easy as swimming in a warm salty sea: all she had to do was wade into it and the water would bear her away. But she had not done so, and now the tide had retreated, leaving broken bottles and driftwood and tangled nets. It was a landscape she had learnt to live with.
The lights had just come on in Pasar Baru. The air was filled with the steady hum of portable generators and strings of naked bulbs burst sharply into life, casting their harsh glare on to the faces of passers-by. There were not many people there yet, and Margaret and Din were able to stroll around for a few minutes before settling on a place to eat.
‘What do you feel like eating?’ Margaret asked.
‘Anything. It’s up to you.’
She’d known he would say that and had therefore already decided. ‘Why don’t we just grab some Nasi Padang? Since you’re Sumatran. It’ll make you think of home.’
They chose a place at random, sitting down at a fold-up table that wobbled when Margaret put her elbows on it. Din sat facing her, though he did not look at her face but stared into the space beyond her left shoulder. He looked clean and neat, as he always did, his plain white short-sleeved shirt uncreased even at the end of the day. He never seemed to perspire. This evening he was not wearing the thick black-rimmed glasses that he wore at work, and Margaret was glad because she had a clearer view of his eyes. ‘Isn’t this nice?’ she said. ‘The first time we have been out together.’ Even as she said so she was aware of the inappropriateness of it: she, a white woman, he a young