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by Leila S. Chudori

  I wanted to approach her. The color of her eyes was the green of unripe grapes mixed with the blue of the Indian Ocean. I wished to shelter in their color. Their green was the carpet of grass under my feet; their blue, the stretch of sky over my head. I wanted to rest on that carpet and dangle my feet from that sky. What painter could possibly have created the blue-green color of her eyes? What sculptor could have carved the fluidly sensuous form of her perfect body? My eyes went to her, my body was drawn towards her, yet my legs remained fixed in place, my feet those of a criminal, shackled in steel chains, awaiting execution. The blustering wind of the Parisian spring mocked my hesitation, making me stare down at my miserable earthbound feet.

  But then, into my view, came another pair of legs, with faded jeans and a pair of dark blue tennis shoes. Slowly, I raised my eyes to see the blue-green eyes very close to my own.

  “Ça va?”

  Her blue-green eyes could smile.

  She came to me like a line of poetry perfectly complete, restoring my breath which had suddenly ceased.

  “Ça va …”

  Vivienne Deveraux and I were soon to become two dots which, when melding together, formed a line that traced the pores of the body of Paris. Only a few weeks after our first brief meeting that evening on the Sorbonne campus, nature brought us together again on the Rive Gauche, on the southern bank of the Seine. I was at a kiosk there, studying a display of posters in various artistic styles and formats. Their sight took me back to Indonesia, some of them reminding me of Indonesian painters I knew of who used a garish palette of colors in their work: bright yellow, steaming pink, and vivid purple. But there was also the work of artists reminiscent of the woodblock prints of several Eastern European artists. The posters seemed to shout out at me—though I first had to search my mind for the meaning of their words: “Toute la Presse est Toxique,” “La Lutte Continue …”

  “The struggle continues …”

  Ah, that voice! It was she, again: Vivienne, the woman with the green eyes and the pair of lips whose only imperfection was that they were not locked with mine. She was standing next to me.

  She smiled and pointed at the poster I was viewing with its image of six people in silhouette, whose ages, apparel, and accoutrements showed them to be a mix of workers and students, all with their right arms thrust in the air, in which was written, in jagged letters, the words La Lutte Continue.

  “That means ‘the struggle continues,’” she said again in English.

  “So, the artist is saying that the spirit of the students and the workers are one, is that it?”

  “It is the spirit of the entire French people,” she said emphatically.

  I nodded but knew that she could see the skeptical look on my face.

  Vivienne invited me to join her at an outdoor café nearby, where she immediately ordered coffee for us, not bothering to first ask what I might want. As in almost every other café I had visited in Paris, the coffee was served in a demitasse, whose size was, to my Indonesian mind, much more appropriate for playing house than for serving a proper cup of coffee. The first time I was served a cup of coffee in Paris, it was so strong and thick and had such an incredibly oily taste that I’d almost had a heart attack. My God, what would they have to put in their coffee to make it more palateable, I wondered, a bucket of sugar and a gallon of cream? And now again, for the umpteenth time, with my first sip, the instant the thick and oil-like liquid touched my tongue, my body recoiled in shock.

  Vivienne noticed my reaction and the difficulty I was having in swallowing the coffee. “Don’t you like it?”

  “You should try Indonesian coffee,” I said hurriedly, trying to cover my social faux pas. “We have hundreds, even thousands of kinds,” I exaggerated, hoping to impress her with my country of origin. I was sure that she, like most other French people I’d met, knew very little about l’Indonésie. I mentioned some of the kinds of coffee that Indonesia produced—Toraja, Mandailing, luwak, and so on—and explained how in Indonesia coffee was usually prepared using an infusion method, with boiling hot water poured on finely powdered coffee.

  As I rambled on, Vivienne smiled patiently, even after I went into detail how luwak is produced. Luwak coffee, I told her, is one of the few benefits of the forced cultivation system implemented by the Dutch in the nineteenth century. The Dutch colonial rulers had prohibited native farmers from picking coffee for their own use, I explained. They didn’t realize that the civet cats which inhabited the coffee groves would eat the coffee berries and later, because they couldn’t digest the actual beans, would defecate them along with their feces on the ground. The natives would then collect the droppings, soak them in water to separate the beans, then roast, grind and them turn them into coffee.

  The look on Vivienne’s face was a mixture of humor and incredulity. I could see in her green eyes the question of how a method of production as foul as the one I had described could, as if by magic, produce a cup of coffee which I proceeded to liken to an aphrodisiac. I even went so far as to say that the first sip of luwak coffee could cause a premature ejaculation, so wonderful is its taste.

  At this point, Vivienne started to laugh and couldn’t stop. Her laughter came in rolls, causing her to hold her sides and tears to stream from her eyes. Finally she regained control of herself. “Phew! Oh my God. What a story! Thank you for making me laugh so much. For a moment I was able to forget what a fucked up state this country is in!”

  I delighted in hearing her laughter. “France, fucked up?”

  Suddenly, her laughter stopped. “Yes! The police attacked my friends,” she said. “The campus has been shut down and the politicians don’t know what to do.”

  She wasn’t complaining. She was stating things matter-of-factly.

  I watched Vivienne’s lips as she spoke. To myself, I thought that when it came to the state of a nation, she had no idea what “fucked up” meant. Indonesia was rarely covered in the press, not even in leading news media such as Le Monde and Le Figaro. What the typical French person might know is that Indonesia is a country located somewhere in Southeast Asia not too far from Vietnam. (The only Asian countries the French seemed to know were China and North and South Vietnam.)

  For Vivienne and her equally agitated friends to whom she had just referred, the futility of the Vietnam conflict served as tinder for the anti-government protest movements that had begun to erupt in Europe and the United States. They wouldn’t have heard the names of Indonesia’s political activists who long predated theirs—such as Sukarno, Hatta, Sjahrir, and Tan Malaka. Given that, what could they possibly know about the bloodbath that had taken place in Indonesia in the months and years that followed the events of September 30, 1965? Most of the people I had met, Vivienne included, would probably have had to open an atlas just to find out where Indonesia was.

  Vivienne started to tell me about the roots of unrest among the students at Nanterre, which had grown and transformed into a mass movement joined by the workers. I was growing impatient. I knew for sure that if Vivienne knew about what had happened and what was still happening in Indonesia, she wouldn’t continue to prattle. But I didn’t want to tell her about the bloodbath in my homeland—or at least not yet. But how was I to get her to stop chattering?

  I moved from where I was seated to a spot on the bench beside her and touched her beautiful chin. The effect was immediate: she stopped speaking and her green eyes opened wide. Seeing in them a desire that matched my own, I pressed my lips to hers. As if wanting to drink each other, we could not stop kissing and even without a cup of luwak coffee experienced an orgasmic sensation like no other.

  Over the next few months, Vivienne and I were two flâneurs, a pair of adventurers, always together, taking in the sights and sounds of Paris. The revolution of May 1968 was out of sight and out of mind, as if it had never happened. France was again a flamboyant place, though one where civility and courtesy reigned.

  During this period, Vivienne refrained from forcing me to open
up and talk about my past. Whether because of a certain reticence on her part or because of my lock-lipped response to her initial exploratory questions about my life, she didn’t ask—or, more precisely, stopped herself from asking—about certain aspects of my life history. Fair or not, I came to know much more about her than she about me.

  Vivienne was the younger of the two children of Laurence and Marianne Deveraux, who lived in Lyon. Her brother Jean worked for the International Red Cross and had, for several years already, been stationed in countries in Africa. She had two first cousins, Marie-Claire and Mathilde, who were also students at the Sorbonne. The difference between the two cousins was that while Marie-Claire was an Earth-mother type, given to hugging everyone she met, Mathilde was much more reserved and looked on people with a suspicious eye. Regardless of any dissimilarity, this trio of stunning brunettes were closely bound by familial ties and friendship and spent much of their free time together, including those days of demonstrations in May when their voices could be heard loud and clear among the crowd.

  Vivienne was a very intelligent woman, whose natural curiosity had been nurtured by the intellectual environment of her middle-class family, who placed high stress on academic achievement. But in France, or in the rest of Europe for that matter, intelligence was not very difficult to find.

  What distinguished Vivienne from her two cousins was her keen sensitivity. She rapidly grasped that her openness about herself would not automatically elicit a similar frankness on my part about my life history. She knew that my move to Paris had not been the result of my being from a bourgeois family given to quoting Albert Camus as a sign of their academic acumen. She could infer from my reluctance to speak of the past—or maybe it was from the way I carefully counted my franc notes, or maybe from the amount of time I could spend in a used bookstore without buying anything—that it was not of my own volition that I was living in Paris. Something else had brought me here and forced me to stop and stay in Europe.

  Intuitively, it seems, Vivienne knew that she could not force me to give an encyclopedic version of my life without alienating me in the process. So it was that she allowed me to gradually feed her drops from the bottle of my memory at my own pace and in my own time.

  As a relatively new arrival in Paris, I did not know the city well and, if truth be told, was only familiar with the Metro system in the area where my rundown apartment was located, an arrondissement in which there were several Vietnamese restaurants, whose food, to my great delight, more resembled that of China and Indonesia than European food, which I found to be bland and terribly short on spices.

  Vivienne introduced me to the Bibliothèque Nationale in the Palais Mazarin. Using her membership card the first time we went there, she checked out for me several books on literature and politics. The library was so immense as to be awe-inspiring and I was almost afraid to explore the various floors. I promised myself that I would come back alone, one day, which I did soon afterwards.

  Vivienne also took me to stores and places in Paris where prices weren’t so hard on the pocketbook of a wayfarer like myself. (I still didn’t know what to call myself. What was I? A refugee? A traveler? An exile? Or maybe something with a little more cachet: a writer or an independent journalist?) Frequently, three friends of mine—Nugroho Dewantoro, Tjai Sin Soe, and Risjaf, who were fellow Indonesians also living off the good graces of the French government—would join the two of us.

  Vivienne took me and my three loud-mouthed friends to see the Grand Palais and Notre Dame Cathedral. With her, we explored Île Saint-Louis. We Indonesians were a quartet of gay and carefree ramblers ready to drop the names of locations in Paris in our (as yet unborn) poems and novels—or at least we acted that way, when in fact we were just a band of political exiles acting like thrifty tourists. But maybe it was by being able to laugh at ourselves that we were able to survive. I can’t say.

  Exploring the arteries of Paris with Vivienne was enlightening for me. Perhaps because of his talent as a writer, Ernest Hemingway was able to vividly invoke in his writing the special affection he held for Paris, as he did in A Moveable Feast; but Vivienne, as a woman, seemed to better understand the city’s corpus.

  I couldn’t say that Paris was for us the “moveable feast” that Hemingway described; but it definitely was “terre d’asile”—our place of exile. Second to that, Paris was the remarkable River Seine, which divided the city into its left and right banks but whose thirty-seven bridges sewed the two halves together. It was also Shakespeare & Co., the celebrated bookstore on Rue de la Bûcherie; and of course it was a park bench on Île Saint-Louis, the site of Vivienne’s and my first unexpected but marvelously prolonged kiss. As our land of exile, Paris was first and foremost for us the roof over our heads and the source of our next meal but it was the sights and sounds of Paris, the city’s intangible delights, which provided sustenance for our souls.

  Before meeting Vivienne, and as is true with most tourists and new visitors to Paris, I and my three friends—Mas Nugroho, Tjai, and Risjaf—spent much time strolling the Rive Droite, the right bank of the Seine, in the northern section of Paris where the Champs-Élysées and other prominent sites are located. So impressed were we by the elegance of the northern arrondissements, we promised ourselves that we would explore every one of them before our return home—whenever that might be. But Vivienne, to her great credit, was the one who pointed out the more prosaic but no less interesting sites that were to be found on the left bank of the Seine, the Rive Gauche, where used book-stalls were plentiful. At one of them she introduced me to its proprietor, Monsieur Antoine Martin, a retired policeman who loved literature so much he was content to sit at his stall all day long and read aloud favorite passages from the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras or poems by René Char. The man’s mini-performances always attracted the attention of passersby, who invariably ended up purchasing the book he was reading from, at a low price too.

  The days we passed as flâneurs in Paris helped much to enrich my French vocabulary. At first, the only words I knew were oui, non, and ça va; but because Vivienne forced me to add ten new words to my vocabulary every day, I began to study the language more seriously. Even so, it wasn’t her tutorial skills that made me attach myself to her. It was her eyes, definitely her eyes. I wanted to dive into those deep green eyes and remain buried within them forever. And her lips as well … Vivienne’s lips were the lyrics of an unfinished poem. I was convinced that only when her lips were engaged with mine could the poem be completed.

  Jakarta, August 1968

  Mas Dimas,

  Bad news … In April Mas Hananto was arrested by four intelligence agents. Adi Tjahjono, the owner of the photo studio where he was working, told me about it. He couldn’t tell me where they took him, but probably to the detention center on Jalan Guntur or to the one on Gunung Sahari. Nobody has heard anything from him directly.

  Maybe you didn’t know this but Mbak Surti, who has been interrogated by the military on a regular basis ever since ’65, was at that time in prison. And because she didn’t want to be separated from her children, when she was first called in to the detention center on Jalan Budi Kemuliaan, she took them with her and they ended up being imprisoned as well. Kenanga, who is now fourteen, has seen things that no girl her age should ever witness. And what must it be like for Bulan and Alam, who are only six and three? I simply can’t imagine. (I’m enclosing a letter for you from Kenanga. She told me she wanted to write to you, because her father had said to her that you were a second father for them. I could barely make myself read what she wrote.)

  Mother tells me to stress again the need for you to stay in Europe. Now that we’ve moved from Solo and are living in Jakarta, things feel a bit calmer—but the military’s pursuit of anyone and everyone with any link to the Communist Party has only gotten worse. Now they’re not just picking up people suspected of being party members or sympathizers. They’re bringing in families and children too.

  Mother
and I consider ourselves lucky to have been called to report to Jalan Guntur “only” a few times and to be permitted to go home after a day of answering their same old questions. Most of them have to do with your activities and what we knew about Mas Hananto, Mas Nug, Tjai, and Risjaf. They asked us if we knew what you were doing in Peking when you were there. I don’t know where they got the information, but they knew it was Mas Hananto and not you who was supposed to have gone on that tour to Santiago, Havana, and Peking in September ’65.

  When I was being questioned, I could hear the screams of people being tortured. Their shrieks of pain were so loud they penetrated the walls. I can only pray that their cries reached God’s ears and not just my own. But the things that Kenanga has witnessed are much more horrifying than anything I have seen. Read her letter and get back to me soon.

  Jakarta is hell. Pray for us.

  Your brother,

  Aji Suryo

  One night, when Vivienne and I were out for a walk on Île Saint-Louis, I suddenly found that I could take my self-inflicted silence no longer. With the moon hiding in a narrow lane on the island, a lone bright eye staring at me, I put my hand to Vivienne’s chin.

  She looked at me. “You’re upset. What is it?”

  “I got some news from Jakarta.”

  Vivienne took my hand and pulled me to a park bench—the same park bench that had such historical importance for me.

  “Can you talk to me? Do you trust me enough to tell me what it is?”

  She’d finally asked the question. She was ready to learn of my past and I was ready to share with her the blood-filled history of my homeland.

  “Peut-être…” I answered, now anxious that her body, now so close to my own, should ever leave my side.

  I kissed her softly and saw a flash in her eyes. She put her arms around me, held me tightly, and returned my kiss with a passion I had never felt before. She infused my pores, my heart, and my soul with her warmth and emotion. I was silent, still hesitating, but I knew that that Vivienne could smell the bile in my blood and phlegm. And at that moment, I knew that I wanted, that I was willing, and that if ever I could hope for Vivienne to love me as much as I loved her, then I had to open the dark curtain concealing my past.