Confessions Of An Invisible Girl Sub Indo

[Amit Bolds]

Wedropped down another slight slope into a shallow bowl of farmland. To the left lay a stretch of low, boggy country, perfectly flat. Beyond it, a few cars span around a roundabout, and further off the roofs of the retail complex between the little Clarin River and the GAA pitch were catching the sunlight. Another uphill stretch, a scramble across a couple of big walls, and suddenly we were in a little wooded patch, fenced off from the surrounding fields. There was a disused badger sett in the roots, and a ruined cottage, half thatched with ivy. The lintel over the wide hearth had snapped, but a tight plait of ivy roots still spanned the gap. Who had lived here? When had they left? Neither the place itself, nor any of the answers, was indicated on the modern OS map.

On Indonesia in the 21st century a colourful, sprightly introduction is Indonesia, Etc. by Elizabeth Pisani. This highly engaging book is written as a travelogue, but Pisani knows the country very well indeed, and she has many meaningful encounters on her journeys.

Walk south of Athenry on the Craughwell road, the R347, past the graveyard with its tight ranks of crosses and the turning to Kiltullagh. Just before the motorway there is a crossroads. The turning on the left runs out to join the Kiltullagh road. The lane on the right, tight against the motorway embankment, is not marked on the map. It seems to lead nowhere, but walk along it anyway. The lane has the strange, ancient stillness of places close to fast-moving traffic. After three hundred metres you reach a gate, with a triangular field beyond. To the right, through the next gateway, is a ringfort.

The ringfort is large, seventy-five metres across. It has been accommodated by the grid of the surrounding fields, its circular form hemmed by dead-straight walls. The embankments are broad, chest-high in places. Where trampling cattle have worn away the grass you can see that the perimeter is built of earth and stones, pushed up like an esker or a motorway embankment. There is a trace of an outer ditch. To the west, the big blue exit sign for Junction 17 hangs in the thick evening air.

Walking through the thistles in the ringfort by the motorway, you can detect traces of internal structures; an enclosure to the southeast; an apparent outer gateway opposite; some other cryptic lumps and bumps. The secure perimeter probably had more to do with keeping the cattle in and the wolves out than with any endemic culture of violence.

Anyway, the big ringfort by the motorway is still there, grazed by bullocks, the ground within a metre higher than the land without. There are three huge upright slabs of limestone built into the field wall to the east. Beyond the wall, a line of flowering blackthorns, their branches crusted with greenish lichen. The leathery leaves of the stinging nettles below are dusted with fallen blossom.

My desk was on the upper floor of the library, a space full of the furtive rustle of quiet study and the occasional industrial rattle of roller stacks on the move. The view to my right was cut into thin strips by a bank of window-mounted solar panels. Between them I could make out a city sinking into autumn and a quartet of wind turbines on the skyline in a milky distance.

I had three artefacts before me: his manuscript, a daunting slab, just shy of ninety thousand words in twelve-point type, bound into two separate bundles; that hardback A4 notebook, filled cover to cover with scribblings in black ink, the pages crackling stiffly like some far older manuscript; and the blue journal, somehow softer to the touch, with a hand-drawn calendar of the journey inside the cover. There was a fourth artefact too, hovering invisible around the desk, though it turned out to be a disturbingly fickle thing, far more so than I might ever have imagined: memory.

I see him, tripping along the narrow paths between the fields, talking to the people at the roadside and in villages in garbled but earnest Indonesian. There he is in a mosque beneath the mountain, chatting to men in black hats, and there he is, passing a funeral procession on a blue road in the highlands and then riding the motorbike down into south-facing forests and stopping for the night in a bamboo bungalow in the rice fields in a village called Tetebatu. There are cobwebs in the corners of the bungalow, and the fields are full of furious insect noise after dark. There is a mosquito net over the bed like a grubby bridal train, and as he fades into a sleep stirred by antimalarial medication they begin to pass on either side: a cavalcade of wraiths, those who have come this way before him.

Now the flimsy window shutter of the bungalow bursts open, and Englishmen in frock coats with factory chimneys at their shoulders and the Enlightenment in their eyes come clambering through, brushing the mosquito net, and striding out of the doorway in the opposite wall. Knowledge is power, they say as they pass, and in the intercourse between enlightened and ignorant nations, the former must and will be the rulers, and the grandeur of their ancestors sounds like a fable in the mouths of these degenerates, and in most of their Mahomedan institutions, we discover the marks of Hinduism. They write and they write and they write, these Englishmen, and they measure and catalogue and categorise, and they pour out their words into a river of their own making. The bungalow itself is islanded in the flood.

Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, they say. But the truth of the matter is that during the 19th-century heyday of the British Empire, the sun was an object of horror for most travelling Englishmen. In latitudes south of the Tropic of Cancer, it was widely believed, midday sunshine had the capacity to do terrible injury to the brain of a European.

Every town shows a different face at night, and Surabaya, a vast collection of villages by day, seems like a real city after dark. Tonight I plan to stay awake until dawn, criss-crossing the city by motorbike, exploring its nocturnal side.

I make a sharp turn into a side street to avoid a police checkpoint and head north again. The streets of the Old City are eerily empty. I catch the smell of garlic and onion skins, and see one ghostly becak creaking through the night. This part of the city, with its narrow alleys and derelict shop-houses, is a creepy place at night and I am glad when I see bright lights on a street between Chinatown and the Arab Quarter. Men in rubber boots are lugging barrels of fish from trucks and tough Madura women are haggling over prices. The fish market has been open since late afternoon and the ground is slimy underfoot. The air is pungent with fish and kretek cigarette smoke.

As I leave Dolly I sense a change in the rhythm of the night. The darkness is as heavy as ever, but there is a little more traffic on the roads: the people who have been awake all night are beginning to meet the early risers of the coming day.

Beside the river the Keputran vegetable market is a blaze of light. All night trucks have been rolling in from the East Java hinterland and porters squelch through the mud under enormous loads of carrots, onions and beans. The workers and stallholders seem to get through the night on a brew of ready humor, and I am met with cheerful greetings and bursts of riotous laughter. Then I hear something above the voices: the loudspeaker of a mosque across the river has been switched on and a taped prayer is playing into the darkness. The end of the night is within reach.

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