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Оглавлениеdon’t come home comma wait till
calm here stop mother and I well
comma only been called in for
information stop aji suryo
PARIS, SEPTEMBER, 1965
“ONLY BEEN CALLED IN FOR INFORMATION…” Those were the words in the telegram my brother Aji sent to me two weeks after the storm that occurred in late September 1965. Mas Nugroho and I were two among the many Indonesian journalists who had been invited to attend the conference of the International Organization of Journalists in Santiago, Chile, earlier that month. Even though Jakarta was heating up and full of the smoke from rumors about a “Council of Generals” which had resulted in infighting among the ranks of the military elite, we had left the country with no apprehension or premonition about things to come. At least I had no inkling that anything out of the ordinary was going to occur, not in the days before our departure. We were going off on an ordinary assignment and, as such, said our goodbyes with little fanfare.
If I did feel any apprehension at that time, it was about the state of my friendship with Mas Hananto. A few weeks prior to my departure, we’d had an argument and I had punched him in the face because I was repulsed by the way he was treating Surti, taking her completely for granted. He accused me of still being in love with her—which was, I must admit, something I’d never been able to ascertain, even to myself. It was clear, though, that it was because of Surti I had decided to go to Santiago.
Mas Hananto was the one who should have gone with Mas Nugroho to Santiago, but he had chosen instead to remain in Jakarta in order to resolve his marital crisis—a situation for which he was entirely to blame, he being given to chasing any skirt that passed by. Initially, I had been reluctant to go because of recent political developments in several Latin American countries. Mas Hananto and Mas Nug, in fact, were in correspondence with people close to Andrés Pascal Allende, Salvador Allende’s nephew. I was aware of this, but I never really felt like I was in the same spectrum they were in. I was a free cell. What reason did I have to go to Santiago? But when Mas Hananto told me that Surti had threatened to leave him and take their three children with her, I immediately changed my mind. I felt Surti’s unexpressed anger and pain suddenly overpower me. Her silent suffering became a strong voice speaking to me. I knew that the problem was not simply a question of Mas Hananto’s womanizing; it was because she felt betrayed by her husband and shunned by her helpmate. I recalled the crude comparison Mas Hananto had drawn between Surti and his mistress, Marni: “Surti is my wife, my life’s companion. But with Marni, I can feel the passionate excitement of the proletarian class.”
Mas Hananto would never have said such a thing to his wife; but I knew Surti well, from the way she breathed down to her very pores. Being a woman who was highly sensitive to the behavior and demeanor of the man she loved, there was no way she could not have known about her husband’s shenanigans. Maybe not in specific detail but she would have known, nonetheless. As I saw it, the problem with Mas Hananto was that there was something about Surti—maybe her deep sense of honor or her innate elegance and natural beauty—which he viewed as “aristocratic” and therefore something that he, a self-styled proletarian, could never truly possess. There was something about Surti so sublime that, in Mas Hananto’s way of thinking, it could only be classified as “bourgeois,” which made him reject it out of hand and engage in sexual escapades with women in Triveli.
I truly did not want to see the couple separate, which is why I bowed to Mas Hananto’s wishes so that he could stay home and resolve his marital issues. In my departure from Jakarta, I never dreamed that I would not return.
It was during the middle of the conference in Santiago that Jose Ximenez, the chairman, made a special announcement in a plenary session about what the English-language press was calling the “September 30 Movement” which had taken place in Jakarta. (We later learned that the Indonesian phrase, “Gerakan September Tigapuluh,” had quickly been changed by the country’s new military rulers into the more ominous sounding acronym, “Gestapu.”) We were shocked. High-level military officers kidnapped and killed? We couldn’t imagine who might have perpetuated such an act. I repeatedly pressed Mas Nugroho to try to find out more from Ximenez about what had happened.
For a few tense nights, amidst all this uncertainty, we could neither eat nor sleep. Even as we marinated our minds with bottles of wine generously provided by our host as a sign of sympathy or solidarity, we constantly endeavored to contact our families and friends. Because of its leftist reputation, we were all but certain that the Nusantara News office had been raided, looted, or vandalized. Presumably, the military would have assumed that the agency was holding on to a trove of important documents. But that was the Indonesian military, for whom an ant might seem to be a raging tiger. Mas Nug assured me that there was nothing damning in our office: just books, piles of paper, and typewriters. We learned that most of the editorial staff had been called in for interrogation. No one seemed to know where the editor-in-chief had been taken.
It was only after twelve nerve-wracking days that I received the telegram from my mother and Aji. And although they sought to assuage my fears with the words that they had “only been called in for information,” at that time, in 1965, the phrase had a sinister meaning. While it may have only meant “interrogation,” it might very well have meant “torture.” Indonesia’s history during that time—even if it’s not been completely written—reveals that in the three years following the events of September 30, 1965, the country went through numerous stages of inhumanity: the hunt for people, the naming of names, raids, capture, torture, killing, and slaughter. Given that fact, I was forced to see the phrase “only called in for information” as a kind of blessing. I had no doubt that my mother and Aji had been systematically and thoroughly interrogated. I was also certain that our home in Solo had been raided. I was sure that my late father’s personal library—or, rather, the books in it that I had been unable to bring with me to Jakarta because my lodgings there on Jalan Solo were too small—had been ransacked and possibly burned. I could see soldiers’ boots stamping on photographs of my father. I could imagine all sorts of things—all the things that Aji hadn’t been willing to share with me.
Very disturbing for me was the news that Mas Hananto had disappeared and was now on the military’s most-wanted list. I shouldn’t have been too surprised, therefore, to learn that Surti and their children had been taken to the military detention center on Jalan Guntur. According to Aji, Surti had been permitted to go home following her initial interrogation, but then had been ordered to return the following day. When she returned, she took the children with her and that’s where she and they were held for several months.
Three years went by; and because the military had yet to find Mas Hananto, horror returned to the Hananto family household. Surti and her children were taken to another detention center, this one on Jalan Budi Kemuliaan. And because her interrogators were convinced that she knew where her husband was hiding, that is where she and the children remained until he was captured.
Aji was a good and loyal brother. Unlike me in school, Aji had been a mild-mannered student, obedient to the rules of the system and averse to causing any difficulty for our parents. He was so good-hearted that he always tried to make it appear that his assignments, which were in fact very challenging, were actually very simple, just so that our mother didn’t fret. He was a peacemaker, good at resolving strife. I was grateful that he and his equally kindhearted wife, Retno, were there to stand by and support our mother. Aji knew that I was in exile abroad not because I had fled misfortune, but because of a strange and unaccountable twist of circumstances. (I intentionally do not use the word “fate.”) He knew that I would think nothing of the peril that I might bring on myself were I to return to Indonesia. He knew that I would want to come back to Jakarta or to Solo, regardless if it meant that I might be taken in. That is the reason he sent me the telegram, a simple but courageous act in the days after September 30. Ignoring the suspicion that he would have drawn to himself by this action, he sent me that telegram precisely at a time when suspicion was enough to have a person jailed or worse. Like many large towns in Java at the time, Solo was divided into two strongly opposing camps: those who supported the leftist-oriented “Revolutionary Council,” which had the city mayor’s backing, and those who supported a militarized order as expounded by the “Council of Generals.” That had been the case for quite some time, or so Aji had reported even prior to my departure for Santiago. According to a colleague at the Nusantara News branch office in Solo, the war of ideologies going on at that time was reflected in a multitude of jargon-filled posters plastered on walls throughout the city.
I may have been worried about my family in Indonesia but, at the very least, I’d been in contact with them. Such was not the case with Mas Nugroho, who had lost all contact with Rukmini and their one-year-old son. Optimist that he was, he constantly tried to convince himself that no harm had come to them. He guessed that they had moved to the home of Rukmini’s parents or her older brother and had not attempted to contact him for safety reasons.
In the second week of October, just after the arrival of Aji’s telegram, Mas Nug and I decided to stick with our original plan and go on to Havana to meet Risjaf who was now stranded there. Our onward flight was one of increased foreboding; and in Havana, where life is supposedly meant to be lived like a festival, we drowned our depression in glasses of rum.
Although our hosts in Havana were busy organizing a conference for the solidarity of Asian and African peoples, to be held in early 1966, they gave us a warm and hearty welcome. Risjaf was Indonesia’s representative on the organization’s steering committee for the conference, which is why he had come to Havana.
It was in Havana that we heard of the death—or killings, rather—of a number of senior officials in the Indonesian Communist Party, including the party’s chief, D.N. Aidit. Mas Hananto had apparently succeeded in finding a hiding place somewhere, because his name was not among the list of the people whose deaths were mentioned.
From day to day, even almost every few hours it seemed, we would learn additional bits of bad news. A wide-scale hunt was on for Communist Party members, their families, and even Party sympathizers. These people weren’t just being captured or detained; mass executions had begun to take place throughout much of Indonesia. Such items of news were like sketches drawn in blood. It was a time of unending insomnia; none of us were able to get a decent night’s sleep. Even Risjaf, who could fall asleep on a sinking ship, remained wide awake all night long.
I tried to think of ways to contact my loved ones—my mother, Aji, Surti, and others—without putting them in additional danger, but our friends in Havana insisted that any form of contact would do just that, stirring up even greater attention from the military authorities.
Then the next bomb dropped: our passports were revoked and we became, in an instant, a band of stateless people with no fixed identity. So sudden and startling was this development, I didn’t have even a moment to mentally prepare myself and think ahead of how I might live a life far from Jakarta or from Mother and Aji in Solo, distant from everything else in my life, both the good and bad. The sword of Damocles now hung over our heads, ready to fall. Every day our lives were filled with the pounding of our hearts, because we had no idea what our future held. To go home was impossible. To wander the world, unlikely—not without money or a passport.
We decided to go to Peking, where numerous other Indonesian exiles had congressed. We still had our air tickets and, with some help from our Cuban contacts, we were able to obtain temporary travel documents. We let ourselves be convinced that once we were in the People’s Republic of China, things would somehow work out. Our friends there would help us solve the problems we faced.
Our friends in Peking were very accommodating and showed us extraordinary solidarity. They found us a place to stay. They fed us, and even entertained us, arranging all sorts of meetings for us, as well as visits to sites that often left us feeling exhausted. For the first few weeks in Peking, they put us up at the Friendship Hotel. Thereafter, they found a small house for us to live in. In just a month’s time, Mas Nug, who had been a student of Chinese studies at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, was able to find a job as a translator for the journal Peking Review. Risjaf and I, who couldn’t speak a word of Chinese, were given work as assistants to the clerks in the same office. Frankly, we didn’t care what kind of work we had to do; the important thing was to make a living. Between the time we arrived in October 1965 and the following year, we Indonesians in Peking were in constant contact with one another, everyone sharing and comparing the bits of information he had received.
By this point, I had been able to learn more details about what had happened to my mother and Aji and his family. Military personnel had visited them several times. They had been intimidated. Their homes had been searched and they had been called in for interrogation—several times, in fact—but they hadn’t been detained or incarcerated. By good fortune, my uncle, my mother’s brother, was a kiai, a respected religious leader in Solo, and his status in the community helped to shield my mother from harm. Because of him as well, Mother’s neighbors and other people in the area where she lived offered her sympathy and comfort. In their eyes, she was just “a poor blameless woman who didn’t know what her good-for-nothing son had been up to.”
So be it. I didn’t care what was said of me as long as my mother was safe.
By late 1966, we had received so much training in the concepts behind the Chinese Cultural Revolution that our throats were raw from screaming “Mao Zhu Xi Wan Sui”—Long Live Chairman Mao!—but we were also deemed sufficiently ready, it seems, to be “invited” to move into the Red Village, a commune on the outskirts of Peking where members of several Indonesian social organizations who had also been stranded in Peking were practicing dong bei fang, which can be literally translated as “Facing the Eastern Sea.” Among the Indonesian exiles were other journalists, writers, teachers, and a number of Communist Party cadres. Through instruction in how to work together in a collective manner, we came to understand the kind of communal system the Chinese government sought to promote: a highly structured agricultural system where the members of the commune were obliged to turn over to the state a certain portion of what they produced. In observing this way of life, I became increasingly certain that Marxist theory, which I had once admired, had little more than theory to its credit. I longed to engage in a discussion about this with Mas Hananto—but he was now being hunted precisely because of this ideology and his belief in it.
The name of the village in which we lived was one that stood out for me. As this was the time of the Cultural Revolution, the word “red” in Chinese stood for “happiness” or “revolution.” But as it was there, in the Red Village, that we Indonesians learned of what was happening at home, the word “red” for us symbolized the color of rivers in Java and elsewhere which were clogged with corpses.
So many deaths, whose number grew from hundreds to thousands and on up to a million or more. While some people were “only” interrogated, intimidated, or tortured, many more were killed straightaway—on roadways, in the forest, on river banks, and at the edge of ravines. We heard that in Solo, around the time of the September 30 Movement, some Communist Party members or sympathizers had killed a number of non-Communist youth activists and thrown their bodies into the Solo River. In East Java, the same thing had also happened, with the victims’ bodies thrown into the Brantas River. So what happened was that after September 30, the region’s strongly anti-communist military, paramilitary, and religious groups reclaimed the Solo River and turned it into their dumping grounds. According to the information that made its way among the Indonesian residents of the Red Village—news conveyed in whispers and hushed voices—so many corpses had been dumped into it that at bends in the river, where the corpses accumulated, one could walk atop the bodies from one bank to another. After hearing this news, and for weeks on end, the distance between the Red Village and Solo suddenly evaporated, and I could smell in the air the putrid scent of decomposing bodies.
When this mood came upon me, I grew furious, no longer caring about any threat to myself. Almost hysterical, I sent off a cable begging Aji to move Mother to Jakarta. I don’t know why, but I felt Mother would be safer in Jakarta.
During our fourth week in the Red Village, friends in Peking brought word to Risjaf that most of our colleagues at Nusantara News had been detained. Miraculously, Mas Hananto was not among them. Somehow, he had managed to vanish without a trace.
“Probably disguised himself,” Risjaf quipped in a low and mysterious-sounding voice.
“What as? A beggar?” I scoffed.
Mas Nugroho spoke firmly, optimistically: “Hananto can be slippery. I can see him being able to go most anywhere, without people catching his trail.”
“I’m sure he’s in disguise,” Risjaf repeated.
I didn’t have the will to rebut Risjaf’s foolish notion. In the dark and depressing atmosphere of the Red Village, the only thing we had to bolster strength in one another was a sliver of hope and a gram of energy.
Mas Nug received news from his mother that Rukmini and Bimo had gone into hiding in Yogya a few weeks previously. He sent back the suggestion that they move back to Jakarta to live with his brother.
We received the welcome news that Tjai and his family had made it safely to Singapore. Although Tjai was the most apolitical person among us, he had two strikes against him: he was of Chinese descent and he worked at the Nusantara News office. Because of this, in the current conditions—even though he was not a senior staff member—the odds were not in his favor. Fortunately for Tjai, he had an uncle in Singapore where he and his family were able to find refuge.
There was always a two- or three-week lag in the news we received—sometimes even a month or more. In early April 1966, for instance, we received news dating from early March that was difficult to believe. On March 11, we were told, three army generals had gone to see President Sukarno at the presidential palace in Bogor, where he had taken refuge from demonstrations in Jakarta. There they asked him to sign a statement known as “Super Semar,” an acronym for “The March 11 Letter of Command.” The effect of this command was to transfer the power of the executive office to army commander Lieutenant-General Soeharto. That same letter authorized Soeharto to take whatever measures “he deemed necessary” to restore order to the nation. It was hard to get my head around what was happening in Indonesia. How was it possible for a cabinet meeting that Bung Karno was leading to be interrupted by a demonstration and why had our “Great Leader of the Revolution” felt forced to flee to safety in Bogor? What kind of pressure had those three army generals exerted to make the president sign such an important document, one with repercussions of such great magnitude for the fate of the nation? That day, that event, determined the course of all things to come. I was beginning to grow extremely tired of the political circus taking place at home.
After three years of life in Peking and having to constantly raise our fists in praise of Mao Tse Tung and calling out “Long Live Chairman Mao!” all the while studying agricultural production in a number of villages, I was fed up with the absolutism of the Cultural Revolution being crammed down the throats of the Chinese people. I was sure that Mas Nugroho, despite his unflagging optimism, and Risjaf, with his deep found sense of loyalty, felt the same kind of unease.
One night, after many nights of sleeplessness in the guest house where I was living in the Red Village, I finally came to a decision. I lit a match and began to rouse Risjaf, who was asleep on the upper bunk of the bunk bed we occupied. I patted him softly on the cheek so as not to startle him.
“Sjaf … Sjaf … Wake up, Sjaf…”
Risjaf moaned and rubbed his eyes, then sat up. “What time is it?”
“It’s still dark outside. I want to go to Paris, Sjaf.”
“Where?” he asked, his eyes still shut, in a voice as hoarse as a crow’s.
“Paris, I want to go to Paris. Tjai has already said that he’d be willing to move to Paris or Amsterdam. We could meet him there.”
Risjaf looked unsure as to whether he was dreaming or awake. He probably thought I was just the bedpost talking to him in his dreams. He mumbled “OK,” then shut his eyes and lay down again, ready to go to sleep again.
I said nothing and started to count from one to ten as I waited for Risjaf to reach a normal level of consciousness. It worked. On the count of five, he swiftly rose and sat up again. His curly hair was a mess, his eyes red and open wide.
“Paris? As in Europe?” he shouted, still with a hoarse voice.
I put my hand over Risjaf’s mouth, afraid that he would wake up other members of the commune.
His eyes shone brightly, a mixture of glee and fear. “But how?” he asked in a whisper.
“I don’t know yet, but we’ll figure something out. Tomorrow we can talk to Mas Nug about this. Tjai is ready to join us—but coming from Singapore that won’t be hard. Getting out of here, however, I’m sure will mean lots of hoops to jump through and bureaucratic rigmarole.”
Once I’d expressed this crazy idea of mine, neither I nor Risjaf was able to fall asleep. I kept staring at the metal cross braces on the bottom of Risjaf’s bunk. Risjaf, meanwhile, kept turning on his side, to the left and to the right, trying to find a comfortable position, but causing the braces to creak.
“Calm down, Sjaf,” I finally whispered.
“How am I going to calm down?” he whispered back. “You said ‘Paris’ and now the only thing in my mind is the beauty and the lights of that city.”
I smiled.
I arrived in Paris in early January 1968, when winter’s cold racked the bones. At first the four of us were separated. I was in France; Mas Nug in Switzerland; Risjaf in the Netherlands; and Tjai in Singapore. But after I arrived in Paris, I immediately hooked up with Tjai and his wife, Theresa, who had come to the city just before Christmas, a few weeks previously.
It was not long before Risjaf made his way to Paris and moved in with me in my small and shabby apartment. Mas Nug, who had fallen for a Swiss woman, delayed his arrival in Paris until April, when I finally got him on the phone and barked at him to come join us in Paris as we had planned. I reminded him that while he was in Switzerland thinking only of himself, Rukmini and Bimo were no doubt still living in fear as a result of the continued madness in Indonesia. Only then did he consent to break off his affair and join us.
Initially, the thought of moving to the Netherlands had seemed more attractive than France, what with the country’s historical relations with Indonesia, as well as the ease of finding there most anything one wanted from Indonesia. But, in the end, we had chosen to gather in France because of the country’s long history of providing a warm embrace to political exiles like ourselves. France was the terre d’asile, the land of asylum for exiles like us—the land of human rights: le pays des droits de l’homme. France. That didn’t mean, of course, that the country offered easy citizenship. The process of becoming first a permanent resident and then a citizen required many complicated bureaucratic procedures and requirements that were time-consuming and difficult to fulfill. That said, we were able to obtain, without too much difficulty, a titre de voyage, which permitted us to travel anywhere in the world except Indonesia. A French government agency provided temporary financial assistance; but given the cost of living in Paris, the amount was hardly enough to survive.
We began to look for work almost immediately and took on odd jobs and part-time work to earn an income. After some self-promotion, Mas Nugroho, who had studied acupuncture in Peking, was soon attracting patients interested in trying his healing method—which is when I came to see why he had been reluctant to leave Switzerland: most of his “patients” were women.
Tjai, who held a degree in economics, had a much easier time finding a steady job than the rest of us, and began working as an independent accountant for several mom-and-pop stores on the city’s edge. Risjaf and I were the unlucky ones, the two people least equipped to work abroad. In Indonesia, we had studied literature because we aspired to be members of the intellectual class. But in France, birthplace of so many writers and thinkers whose books had served as our compass, intellectuals, it seemed, were ten centimes a dozen. It’s not surprising, therefore, that we were unable to find suitable work in our field and that every three or four months we’d be leaving one uninteresting job for yet another. From service work in restaurants, as bank tellers, up to assistant curators in small galleries whose only visitors were three or four pretentious people who called themselves artists, we did whatever we could.
Such was my life until an evening in May 1968 made boisterous by student demands on the French government. That was the evening I met Vivienne Deveraux on the campus of the Sorbonne. She entered my life, then my body, and, finally, as she came to know my life history, my soul as well. With Vivienne, I tried to become reborn as a new man; but no matter how hard I tried, I continued to feel that some part of me had been left behind in Indonesia. Maybe it was my heart: my love for my mother and Aji; or my concern for Surti and her children. I didn’t know. But a strained anxiety always affected me every time I received a letter from Aji, which inevitably contained more horrific stories about the slaughter going on in Java and elsewhere in the archipelago.
I remember one such letter from Aji in which he conveyed the shocking news about the hunt for communists in Solo, with the bodies of the hunted being thrown into the river.
Red. The river that had once nursed me had now turned blood red.
That is what Aji said. That is what our uncle Kiasno told Aji. And that is what finally convinced my mother to follow her brother’s advice and move to Jakarta to live with Aji’s family.
No one could comprehend what was happening. But we recognized that—for a while, at least, although who knew for how long?—we would have to remain in exile. On cold nights, I stared at the Seine and tried to imagine what it would be like if its waters were red in color. I began to chastise myself for my perpetual waffling, for my inability to maintain a fixed opinion. I liked to sail in no certain direction: upstream, downstream, from the right bank to the left, pondering opinions without diving in to completely embrace a particular “ism.” I now saw that, in the end, the effect of my wavering was that my family was thrown into a bottomless trench of trouble and travail.
Suddenly I needed that small space, that vacuum—the one Bang Amir said Allah had given to him. I didn’t know whether I was His true servant but I knew I wanted that space, that small vacuum. I longed to see Bang Amir and talk to him again. Where was he now?
I posted numerous letters to my good-hearted friend, but had no proof they ever arrived safely in his, Bang Amir’s, hands. In them, I asked about the meaning of that vacuum he once had mentioned, the one he said that could be found in every human heart. I desperately longed for something, but I didn’t know what it was. Was it some kind of spiritual essence? When I wrote to Bang Amir, I wrote as if he were standing before me with that calm look of his on his face and speaking to me in the low voice of the popular Indonesian singer, Rahmat Kartolo.
I didn’t know where to position myself in order to find that essence. If, in this tumultuous and transient world, the natural blue color of a river’s waters could be changed to red, where was my station on this map of life to be?
I found no answer to my question.
In February 1969, the following year, Aji called me to convey the news that Mother had died in her sleep.
Was that the answer to my questions? To take Mother away from me? Away from Aji?
A rapid series of snapshots flashed before my eyes from our childhood in Solo with our parents. My father was a teacher of English at the city’s State Senior High School, a school with a reputation for its rigorous curriculum and the belief that Indonesian children had to learn to appreciate both Indonesian and Western literature. It was my father who instilled in me the importance of books as one of life’s staples—just as important as food, drink, and sleep, he said (though he neglected to point out that sex was another necessary and natural part of life as well). When he told me this, my mother gave him a slight nudge. Though she was not particularly religious herself (unlike her brother, my uncle Kiasno), she did feel that some attention must be given to God and religion, that these things, too, were among life’s needs.
It was Om Kiasno who first taught me and then, later, Aji, who was ten years younger than me, to recite the Quran. My father voiced no objection to this, just as he never protested when our uncle assertively reminded us to pray. Father was more concerned with matters of daily life and was apt to make much more of a fuss when Mother forgot to put her batik implements away after using them, because Aji would end up making them his playthings and leave them scattered around the house.
My mother, who was usually called Bu Giri—“Giri” being short for my father’s full name, “Giri Suryo”—but who was also known by her own name, Pratiwi, had a creative hand and would, for nights on end, give herself completely to the transformation of a solid white length of cloth into a most remarkable thing of beauty.
After a day spent preparing meals—cooking was something Mother also enjoyed, a fondness for which she passed down to me—and tending to the needs of two overly active sons and a husband weary from teaching Solonese teenagers who he thought were growing up too fast, Mother would sit cross-legged on the floor for an hour or two with her canting, the small copper vessel with a spouted nib she had to frequently refill with melted beeswax, to create her batik designs. Ever since I was young, I likened Mother’s work with wax to a poet’s work with words—both of which processes produced something of beauty.
Perhaps my discovery of the joy of poetry began not with the fantastic verses of Chairil Anwar, but as the combined result of pressure from my father to speak Indonesian well and to mind my words, just as a body must mind its soul, and of my mother’s love for the canting and melted beeswax.
After I had graduated from senior high school, my father sent me to Jakarta to live with his older brother, Om Muryanto, in order that I might obtain a better and more focused education than was possible in Solo at that time.
After adjusting to my new life as a student in Jakarta and learning my way around the city, I moved from my uncle’s home into a boarding house with Risjaf, a fellow classmate. Thereafter, my visits home to Solo became rare, except for the Idul Fitri holidays, at the end of the fasting month. Patient man that he was, my father voiced no complaint about his wayward son’s avoidance of home. He continued, to the best of his limited financial ability, to send me books of literature so that I would maintain and improve my Indonesian. Meanwhile, Mother would send me reminders from my uncle Kiasno to pray regularly so as “to fill myself with thanks for God’s grace.” Along with her missives of advice, Mother would also often send a newly made length of batik cloth—often one with a bird motif typical of Java’s north coast. Mother knew I liked Cirebon-style batik.
After my father died in my sophomore year, Mother’s letters to me would echo his reminder (to read and speak Indonesian well) and Om Kiasno’s advice (to pray), before including her own personal counsel for me to eat nutritiously the food that I myself had prepared.
Throughout my sojourn, from Peking to Paris, the advice from my elders that I did follow was to read—how could I not? It was part of my oxygen—to cook my own food, and to eat well. Somehow, it slipped my mind to pray regularly.
I wondered whether when Mother died she was thinking about her wastrel son living so far away.
I couldn’t speak for several weeks. I felt as if stones were lodged in my throat. Risjaf, Mas Nug, and Tjai tried various ways to console me, from the most profane of ways—with my favorite kinds of Chinese food that Theresa would cook for me, for instance—to the most spiritual, by arranging special prayer sessions on Mother’s behalf. Nothing worked. Nothing could comfort me. No one could succeed in making me talk. Even a lovely stretch of batik, brown colored in background with green-colored birds, did not make me feel better or bring me calm. The fact was my mother had died and I was not there to kiss her forehead and to say a final goodbye. No voice escaped me.
After several weeks of virtual silence, I awoke one morning suddenly feeling both energetic and panicky, as if I were on some kind of stimulant. I went from one friend to another—to Mas Nug, Risjaf, Tjai and Theresa; to Vivienne and her family; to our neighbors; and to the offices of the French agency that arranged for us to obtain our asylum status—asking the same question: was it possible, with my exile status, for me to somehow enter Indonesia?
“Enter Indonesia? Impossible! You cannot enter Indonesia with a titre de voyage. And even if you were able to, there’s a very good chance you’d never be able to leave that place again.”
I didn’t care. I had to pay my last respects to Mother.
I brushed off all attempts by Mas Nug and Vivienne to calm me down. I had to go home. I had to go home! I would find a ticket. Any kind of ticket. Plane, boat, whatever. The important thing was for me to go home.
In my apartment, Risjaf took me by my shoulders and tried to calm me down. I roughly pushed him aside as well. Finally, they were all silent.
That night Mas Nug handed me a telegram from my brother, which read:
DON’T COME HOME COMMA NOT SAFE STOP PRAY MOTHER IS AT PEACE COMMA WE PRAY FOR HER SOUL STOP
I crushed the telegram in my hand, threw it in the garbage can, and stomped out of our miserable apartment into a winter night whose chilled air seized my bones. I heard the voices of Risjaf and Mas Nug calling after me, but I picked up my pace and ran. The cold wind was a knife stabbing me in the face, but I didn’t feel a thing. I ran and ran. When I finally stopped, I found myself standing on the bank of the Seine. The river was red in color. My face was hot with tears.
It was around that time, I guess, that Vivienne began to gradually turn Paris into a kind of resting place for me. Not a home, per se, but a place where I could stop for a while. Slowly, I came to see in her green eyes both assurance and a willingness to provide refuge for me, like a shade tree protecting a child from the blazing sun with its cool shadows.
Although Vivienne’s curious cousins, Marie-Claire and Mathilde, asked numerous questions about my background—the French always seem to be interested in history—all in all, I felt that the Deveraux family was very accommodative to Vivienne’s Indonésien lover, who as yet could speak to them only in broken French.
We married a year later in Lyon, at the vineyard of Vivienne’s uncle, the father of Marie-Claire. That was the Deveraux family’s ancestral home. Because all of her family’s members were educated people who seemed to love to cook, I refrained from trying to impress them with my own culinary skills. As Indonesia has no enological history, Vivienne’s father, Laurence, and her mother, Marianne, took it on themselves to give me some basic lessons about wine—ones I very much enjoyed. They taught me the difference between a sauvignon and a merlot; which kinds of wine were a good match for certain kinds of meat; what kinds of white wine were best served with fish. Marianne, who seemed to know how affected I still was by my mother’s death, showed great forbearance with me, carefully listening to each word of French I spoke. Apparently hoping to instill in me a greater sense of confidence about my ability to speak that beautiful tongue, she was patient with my halting French and displayed no exasperation with my faulty grammar. On top of that, she was constantly offering me homemade petit fours—offers I never refused—or filling my glass with wine. Jean, Vivienne’s brother, who was working for the Red Cross in Africa, came home for the wedding and he and I engaged in long discussions on politics and literature. With Vivienne’s family embracing me so warmly, taking me into themselves, what more did I have to complain about?
Lintang Utara: “North Star.” That’s the name I chose for our daughter, born five years after we married. Everything about her showed her to be her mother’s daughter, except for her wavy black hair, which came from the Suryo family. And I never tired of staring at that beautiful, living and breathing, little round creature with the wavy black hair. I never thought it would happen, but I had inexplicably found for myself a port—who knew for how long?—and put down an anchor in my life. If I ever needed a reason to stop my voyage, then this little creature by the name of Lintang Utara was the one. I couldn’t stop watching her. I loved looking after her, caring for her, even changing her diapers. I sang to her the Indonesian lullabies my mother had sung to me—though more often than not I fell asleep before she did, and when I pulled myself awake would find her crawling around our small apartment.
Vivienne raised no objection to my giving our daughter such a non-French-sounding name. She agreed to my choice instantly, just as Surti had when I proposed the names Kenanga, Bulan, and Alam for the children we once dreamed of having together.
During the first few years of our marriage, I changed jobs several times. Vivienne, meanwhile, had much more steady employment: teaching in the Faculty of English Literature at the Sorbonne. Finally, however, after several years of seeing the look on Vivienne’s face become one of increased annoyance as a result of the unsteady and uncertain nature of my financial contribution to our home—I was spending much of my time writing a newsletter, Political Prisoner, which I distributed to the Indonesian exile community in Europe—I finally committed myself to more permanent work and took a clerical job at the Ministry of Agriculture.
Even though I earned a decent enough salary, I was not at all happy with my desk job at the ministry. Instead of my work, my mind was either on the essays and poems that I intended to publish in the next issue of Political Prisoner or on interesting items of news that I received from friends who worked for the news media in Jakarta. One such piece of news was about the hullabaloo in 1972 when a foundation that had been established by President Soeharto’s wife, Madam Tien, commenced work on an immense theme park called “Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature” or, more commonly in Indonesian, “Taman Mini.” Not surprisingly, given the economic disparities in Indonesia at the time, some of the country’s leading intellectuals objected to the project, including the well-known sociologist Arief Budiman, who damned it as a massive boondoggle; but what was surprising is that they actually voiced their objections in print and incited students to take to the streets. Another interesting but disturbing development in the political sphere was that Indonesia’s political parties were coming to be dominated by businessmen and that Parliament was being transformed into an assemblage of clowns, convened only to rubberstamp anything and all that the executive branch of government proposed.
I wrote about these and other things in my newsletter as a means of keeping the exile community up to date on conditions in Indonesia. I offered the newsletter to fellow exiles, free of charge, but as it was fairly popular it sometimes did attract financial contributions from other exiles. Whenever enough money came in, I’d publish another edition, and with the help of Risjaf’s design skills was able to produce something that was almost professional-looking, like a newspaper.
Gradually, after few years I grew so bored with my work at the Ministry of Agriculture, I knew I had to stop. I wanted to write a book. I wanted to publish a paper. I wanted a change.
So it was, one autumn night, I came home to our apartment bearing a bottle of wine and several cuts of choice beef. It was nine o’clock when I arrived home, and Lintang was already asleep.
“What’s the celebration?” Vivienne asked, taking the bottle from me and pinching the meat. “This is expensive, Dimas. What’s up?”
Vivienne’s green eyes bore into me.
“Sit down,” I told her.
She sat down beside me, a look of suspicion on her face. I took her hand and kissed her fingertips. It always excited her when I sucked on her fingers. I wanted her to understand the decision I had come to.
“You know I love you and Lintang,” I began.
She nodded and frowned, a nervous look. “This isn’t about another woman, is it?” she asked.
“What! Are you crazy?”
Vivienne laughed with relief. “You always forget how good-looking you are, Dimas. The grayer your hair, the more attractive you are for younger women. But never mind… What is it?”
I paused, wondering which younger women found me attractive. How unfortunate I did not even notice. “It’s torture for me, Vivienne. I am so unhappy with…”
“You want to quit your job at the ministry, is that it?”
“Oui.”
She stared at me, a tree offering its shade. As long as the subject at hand was not another woman, Vivienne seemed to me to be the most understanding wife in the universe. Unlike some other French women I knew, who allowed their husbands to flit from the bed of one mistress to another, for Vivienne there were very clear rules in our marriage. She would tolerate everything except one: another woman. And I agreed.
“I knew.”
I embraced her and held her tightly to me.
Once again, I asked myself, what did I have to complain about if I had around me a family that loved me? Why did I feel like a piece of me was still left behind in Indonesia?
That night, we poured ourselves a glass of wine and discussed what our future might bring once I resigned from my steady job at the ministry. In the course of our conversation, we were suddenly interrupted by a rapping sound. I opened the door to find Mas Nug, whose face was forlorn and whose appearance resembled a pile of dirty clothes. He was sweating, his shirt drenched. He held in his hand a brown manila envelope. He stared at me with tears in his eyes.
Vivienne quickly pull Mas Nug inside the apartment. “Come in, Nugroho, come in.”
My heart beat faster. What had happened now?
Mas Nug’s hands were shaking as he held the envelope.
Vivienne slowly took the envelope and gave it to me. I opened and read the document inside: a divorce request. Rukmini, his orchid in bloom, was asking Mas Nugroho with the Clark Gable mustache for a divorce.
I put my arms around Mas Nug and pulled him to me, hugging him tight. I knew how much he loved Rukmini, even if, like Mas Hananto, he too played around.
“I supposed I should have known why she refused to move here,” Mas Nug said slowly, taking the glass of wine that Vivienne proffered.
“Why?” Vivienne asked.
“Because of her relationship with a military officer, the one who protected her during the hunt for communists in 1966 and 1967. This man, Lieutenant-Colonel Prakosa, I thought at first was just a friend of her father’s who had in him a kind enough heart to help Rukmini.”
I swallowed, imagining the faces of Lieutenant-Colonel Prakosa and Rukmini before me.
“So, you’re saying that Rukmini is asking for a divorce in order to marry Lieutenant-Colonel Prakosa?”
Mas Nug lifted the wine glass to his lips and downed its contents in one gulp. He asked for his empty glass to be filled. Vivienne obediently granted his request.
Between tears and with the smell of wine on his breath, he ranted. “Tell Risjaf he was lucky never to have married her. Inside that orchid was a worm,” Mas Nug spat with anger and hurt.
After emptying the rest of the bottle of cabernet sauvignon, Mas Nug picked up the letter of request for a divorce and flattened it on the dining table.
“Pen!” he shouted at me. Never before had I heard such a dictatorial tone in Mas Nug’s voice.
I frantically searched for a pen but couldn’t find one. Finally, Vivienne rummaged inside her purse and managed to come up with one.
Mas Nug scrawled his signature on each of the multiple copies of the letter of request. Silently, I hoped that he had managed to affix his signature to the right spot, because when he signed the papers he did so in anger and with a theatrical flourish.
When he had finished signing the papers, Mas Nug refolded them and gave them to me.
“Mail them for me, will you?” he asked, while putting his jacket back on, “I’ll end up throwing them in the fireplace if I take them with me.”
I nodded and said “sure” while signaling with my eyes to Vivienne. I would have to take Mas Nug home; he was already wobbling. Vivienne fetched my jacket for me and then walked us to the door.
“Bonne nuit, Vivienne, you’re lucky to have Dimas. He’s a loyal man. Bonne nuit, Dimas. And you’re lucky to have married the very beautiful Vivienne. Bonne nuit. Au revoir, Rukmini. And fuck you, Lieutenant-Colonel Prakosa!”
I patted Mas Nug on the shoulder and motioned for him to follow me. As we walked towards the Metro station, crunching the red fallen leaves under our feet, Mas Nug looked up at the sky and screamed. The Parisian autumn heightened the sense of gloom.
