One day in August 1999, when I had nothing urgent to do on my own project, I went to visit the Collection of H. B. Jassin, the national literary archives in Jakarta. A friend had recently mentioned Chairil Anwar, the poet, in an interesting way, so I went to see what is there, in the archives, of the man. The archives building is in Ismail Marzuki a complex of several cultural institutions, located not far from the city center. The taxi took me to the Gardens, passed the guard at the main gate, turned right, and stopped there. Arrows pointed to the archives, toward an area where there was no more asphalt, just a trace of a grassy path surrounding the big building in front of which the taxi stopped. Through the open doors and windows, in this building's otherwise empty halls, I saw pairs of, evidently cultural, officials playing Ping-Pong. The arrows led me further around the building, among and over heaps of trash-insect-buzzing and rat-lively, soft, and occasionally ankle-deep. At the end of the path, at the back of the Ping-Pong building, at a stinking pond, a man in a stark-white shirt and dark starch-ironed trousers was fishing. Crossing over an unsteady plank, across a pool of even more stinking sewage, I entered the archives.