I took from my pocket the letter I’d received from Kenanga—from Kenanga Prawiro, the oldest daughter of my friend and colleague, Mas Hananto—and I read the letter aloud, translating it into French as best as I could.
Jakarta, August 1968
Dear Om Dimas,
Not too long ago, when I was given the chance to see my grandmother, she told me that if I wanted to write to you, she would give my letter to Om Aji to send. He could include it with a letter that he was going to send to you. So that’s what I’m doing now.
All of us here are sad but trying to hold up. In April, they arrested my father and nobody has seen him since. We don’t know where they’re holding him. That’s why, when they took Mother in, she took us with her. She said she couldn’t bear to be separated from us. And we didn’t want to be separated from her either. Bulan doesn’t seem to know that we’re actually in a detention center. And Alam doesn’t know anything at all. Some of the soldiers are nice to him, acting like uncles and giving him toys to play with.
First we were taken from home to an office of sorts whose name I don’t know because it was some kind of abbreviation but it was in Jalan Budi Kemuliaan. I knew that because one time when my parents took us to see the National Monument where it was being constructed, we passed that way.
They keep asking Mother questions, day in and day out, until she doesn’t know what to say. It’s worn her out. Her eyes are swollen and she has this gloomy look on her face all the time. When they’re doing that, they put me to work cleaning the place. They’ve given me a number of rooms to clean every day.
At first I didn’t know what these rooms were for and usually it was just cigarette butts and ashes I had to sweep up.
But then, one day I found the floor in one of the rooms covered with dried blood, which I had to wipe up. That’s when I knew what the rooms were being used for. That’s when I knew that all the cries I’d been hearing—from so many different men and women—were coming from those rooms.
About a month ago I found in one of the rooms the tail of a sting ray all matted with flesh and blood. It gave me such a shock I started to shake and cry until I couldn’t stop. I don’t know how I finally managed to calm myself down. But this is something I’ve never told even Mother about because she’s worn out from having had to suffer for so long. I find it hard to eat anymore. The sight of food makes me want to vomit.
I’ve seen men of about my father’s age being herded down the hallways in this place with their faces covered with blood.
Why are they doing this, Om Dimas? Why are these people being tortured? And why do they keep interrogating Mother, asking her questions she cannot answer? I hear them shouting at her, asking over and over whether she knew what Bapak was up to. They’re always shouting, always angry. They can’t seem to speak in a normal tone of voice. Why do they have to shout?
I’m so sad and so afraid. Bulan is so young that all she can do is to follow me around wherever I go. And Alam is just a baby. Once they let Mother feed him but then, right afterwards, called her back into the room for more questions and to be shouted at again.
I hope that you are all right. Bapak once told me that if anything ever happened, I was to contact you.
Yours,
Kenanga Prawiro
Vivienne looked at me, her eyes glistening, and for a long time afterwards all we could do was to hold each other wordlessly.
HANANTO PRAWIRO
ON ONE VERY MUGGY SUMMER EVENING, VIVIENNE AND I lolled on the floor of her apartment, trying our best to do nothing. Her apartment wasn’t especially large but as my eyes scanned its contents—books, books, and more books—I felt immediately at home. Works by Simone de Beauvoir and other French authors were mixed with titles by British, Irish, Japanese, Chinese, and Indian authors. My eyes paused for a moment on two of Joyce’s works: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. I noted that titles generally viewed as mandatory reading on Marxist political thought occupied a special shelf of their own. On another shelf, I saw Ayn Rand’s semi-autobiographical work, We the Living, and her controversial novel, The Fountainhead. Judging from Vivienne’s taste in books, I could see that she was, very much like me, a literary traveler. Like me, too, she apparently liked to study the various kinds of thought that marked important periods of time, without being forced to stop at or become trapped by a particular intellectual current. Hmm… My attraction to her increased exponentially. At that moment, I wanted to take her in my arms and never let her go.
Vivienne got up and opened the windows of her apartment as wide as possible. She was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, and the delicate film of perspiration on her elegant neck excited me. She took two bottles of cold Alsace beer from her small refrigerator and handed one to me. She drank her beer straight from the bottle, gulping the amber liquid as if it were an elixir. I watched the bluish vein on her neck pulsate as she swallowed the beer flowing down her throat. A thin stream of liquid seeped from the side of her mouth and trickled down her chin and neck. The beer mixed with her sweat made me want to lap the salty mix from her neck with my tongue.
Vivienne stopped drinking and smiled at me, a challenge in her piercing eyes. She knew what I was thinking. “Tell me about Indonesia …”
Not knowing how to begin to tell her about my home country, I paused. Where should I start? With my family? With the country in tumult? Or back to early 1960s when President Sukarno’s shifting political alliances led the country—and me as well—to the point we are today? My mind flashed back to Jakarta. What had Sukarno been up to? Did he actually side with his friends on the left? What had he wanted or hoped to achieve with his policy of “Nasakom,” his odd promulgation of nationalism, religion, and communism? And as the chronology of the night of September 30 emerged, why had he fled the presidential palace and gone to Halim Perdanakusuma Naval Air Base? This was a question that had nagged my friends in Jakarta and continued to nag me.
How could I ever explain or even begin to unravel this messy bundle of thread for Vivienne? Maybe it would be best to begin somewhere else—with wayang tales, for instance, stories from the Javanese shadow theater that were my secret obsession. Better that, perhaps, than opening the doors to my country’s warehouse of history to cast light on its cluttered contents.
Vivienne took another gulp of beer from her bottle but didn’t swallow. Instead, she lowered her body to straddle my lap and then kissed me, the cool beer emptying from her mouth into mine. The sensation quickened the flow of my blood, making it dance wildly through my veins, and inflamed my joints. Any attempt to prevent Vivienne from feeling my body’s reaction to the blood coursing through my veins to my extremities would have been futile. How could it not be? Her midsection was pressed into my crotch.
As I became more excited, my blood raced more swiftly through me. Unable to restrain myself, I began to lick her neck and chest, which were slick with sweat and beer. With her torso positioned directly in front of my eyes, her breasts seemed ready to burst from the seams of her clinging T-shirt. And in my darting eyes, her long legs seemed to be begging for me to remove the skimpy blue jeans encasing them.
Vivienne rarely wore a bra during the summer. At times, I protested, not because I was prudish but because of the very evident physical reaction that occurred in me at the sight of her nipples beneath her T-shirt. At times it was almost painful. How could she torture me like that? Wasn’t I supposed to be concentrating on my future life in Paris? I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t think of anything except what was under that damned T-shirt of hers.
Once I begged her to wear a bra to prevent me from becoming so flustered. And her answer…?
“Do you know how uncomfortable it is to wear a bra on a day as hot as this? Here!” She took a brightly colored red bra and shoved it in front of my nose. “You try wearing it.”
My mouth turned dry. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know if Vivienne realized how excited it made me to see her nipples protruding from under her T-shirt. How
can women be so cruel? But, in the end, I decided to give thanks to nature for its wisdom in making the summer in Paris so hot that Vivienne refused to wear a bra—because it made what happened next all that much easier. Not having to couch our feelings in lines of poetry from one of the books we were reading, Vivienne and I both raced to remove our clothing. Then we attacked each other, wrestling with each other on the floor. Paris was hot, but we were burning. After just a few minutes we lay exhausted and naked on the floor, staring at the ceiling of the apartment. The August evening was so stuffy and humid our bodies were drenched with sweat. But in our desire for one another, we thought nothing of the discomfort and made passionate love, again and again. What time it was I didn’t know, but I suddenly felt the urge to smoke. “Have you ever smoked kretek?” I asked Vivienne, whose head was nestled on my chest. “No, but I’ve heard about them from Mathilde, who bought some in Amsterdam. She says they’re amazing.” I scrounged in the pocket of my shirt on the floor. “Ah, I still have some.” There were still a few sticks left in a badly crumpled packet. I lit one and then took turns smoking the cigarette with Vivienne. Vivienne smacked her lips. “They have a sweet taste. What is it?” “Cloves,” I said, “desiccated cloves,” while trying to suppress the feeling of longing aroused by the scent of that spice and everything else that smelled of Indonesia. “It would be perfect if we had a cup of luwak coffee.” There, I had said it, that dangerous word. Poor and stranded as I was in the middle of Europe, giving voice to a longing for something as exotic as luwak coffee was the same as sticking a knife in my heart. If I wanted to go on living, I had to—at least for now—bury and conceal Indonesia and anything connected with it. I felt my mind return to the Jakarta where I lived four years previously.
JAKARTA, DECEMBER 1964
A kretek was like a symbol for us. After a long discussion and sometimes heated debate about politics and the nation’s state of affairs at the office, we would often end the discussion with a cup of thick black coffee and a kretek cigarette at Senen Market. At that time, in late 1964, Jakarta was a city that was neither calm nor comfortable.
The office of Nusantara News on Jalan Asem Lama seemed to have running through it some kind of demarcation line separating members of political camps. On one side were members of the Communist Party; people who sympathized with Party goals; members of LEKRA, a cultural organization with close links to the Party; and even people who simply liked to spend time with the artists who belonged to this organization, the League of People’s Culture. On the other side and at the opposite end of the political spectrum were staff members who shunned anything that might be labeled leftist. Among them was my friend, Bang Amir, who was pro-Masyumi, the Islamic political party founded by Natsir, whose pan-Islamic philosophy was antithetical to leftist thought. As for me, I was a bit on the fence. I supported Marxist ideals and enjoyed reading all the books that Mas Hananto gave me on the subject; I enthusiastically listened to political discussions between Mas Hananto and other colleagues in the editorial room, and it wasn’t rare to find me tagging along with them as they continued their debate over coffee at Kadir’s stall in Senen Market. Even so, I also liked, and found much comfort in, talking to Bang Amir about things of a more religious or spiritual nature.
But that sense of wonder stopped at my body, not my soul.
Both Mas Hananto and Mas Nugroho strongly believed in the virtues of socialism, but I saw numerous weak points in their theories and, even in the face of Mas Hananto’s derision, I continued to stand by my view that while there are some things that the government should ultimately be responsible for—public health and services, to name two—there are other things that are far better left entrusted to the private sector.
Lately, I had felt the political temperature in Jakarta rise precipitously, nearing the boiling point. At the top of my mind was the ever more strident war between LEKRA artists, who clung to the notion that art only has value if it serves to promote awareness of social issues, and artists who did not belong to the League and upheld the principles of individuality and humanitarianism. I then thought of literature. A literary work was, for me at least, a matter of the heart. Just because its theme or story line involved the struggle of farmers or laborers didn’t mean it would have an enlightening effect. That power came from the ability of the work to touch the heart of its reader. In this matter, in particular, I was greatly at odds with Mas Hananto’s point of view.
Hananto Prawiro… He was not just my superior; he was also my friend. I called him “Mas,” after all, the Javanese term of address for a man older than oneself with whom one is a friend. But he was also my guru and my mentor. Mas Hananto, head of the foreign desk at Nusantara News, was constantly lending me books he thought might help to expand my world view—which he deemed to be excessively tainted by bourgeois thought and opinion. Novels like Madame Bovary, for instance; plays like Waiting for Godot; and all of Joyce’s work, for that matter, he criticized as being self-indulgent.
“They’re playing with their belly buttons!” he said of such writers one day as he was flipping through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “They’re not concerned with this world; they ignore class differences and poverty.”
“But Joyce, through his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, is trying to find himself through religion and art. I feel the process to be entirely rational,” I argued, trying to explain myself in a manner not even entirely convincing to myself. I had read the novel several times and never found myself bored by it. Dedalus is both a tragic and humorous figure. Sure, he might be a tad too serious about himself at times, but was Mas Hananto unable to see the bitter humor underlying such a work?
Mas Hananto had the most annoying habit of often repeating his views and opinions, so much so, I swear, that if my ears could have replied they would have screamed that he was merely sputtering clichés. Among Marxist followers in Indonesia, social-realist jargon was sacred. And anyone who wanted to curry favor with the editor-in-chief, a man who happened to be close to Communist Party leaders, had only to drop such terms or quote a few lines from The Mother and then act as if he had read the entire book to gain access to the editor-in-chief’s inner circle of colleagues.
For me, Gorky’s novel, which had been translated into Indonesian by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, was boring beyond belief. All its focus was on social issues with no concern for style or literary execution. My thought was that if the only thing a writer is concerned with is social issues, then he had better not write novels or poetry; he’d best stick to writing speeches or propaganda essays instead.
Mas Hananto once referred to me as a “Wibisono,” the younger brother of the ogre king Rahwana in the Ramayana, who allied himself with Rama, his brother’s foe. But in Indonesian politics, I didn’t know who was Rahwana and who was Rama. What I did know was that Mas Hananto didn’t quite know what to make of my views; they weren’t straight forward like his. And, frankly, if I were going to be called by the name of any character from the legendary Javanese pantheon, it probably would be Bima, who, among the five Pandawa brothers, was the one with the softest heart. Even though Bima fell head over heels in love with Drupadi, when his older brother Arjuna made known his desire to have her, Bima willing stepped aside. Oh, and by the way, this reference to Bima has no relation to past Indonesian politics, but everything to do with my former love life.
Mas Hananto knew that the way to deal with me was not through a battle of wills or disputation of my tastes. He knew I had little regard for the novels that he praised for their defense of the masses. I once rebuked him by asking if it wasn’t the case that we were supposed to be defending all of humanity, not just the proletariat. Why couldn’t we inculcate the concept of embracing the humanity that is found in all of us? Mas Hananto guffawed at my comment. But, unlike Mas Nugroho, whose hackles would rise because of my argumentative manner, Mas Hananto seemed to take on the role of a patient older brother trying to educate his whining younger sibling. That was why, even with the demarcation line
running through the office, dividing friends and foes of the Communist Party, I seemed to reside in a kind of Swiss neutral zone, and was able to move from one side to another and to engage with Bang Amir and his friends.
I called Amir “Bang,” a term of address that derives from abang or “older brother,” because he was indeed like an older brother for me. Also a journalist at the Nusantara News, Bang Amir was highly critical of “Bung” or “Comrade” Sukarno, judging the president guilty of too closely embracing the Communist Party leadership and also of having imprisoned Mohammad Natsir, the former prime minister and one of the country’s top religious leaders, on charges of treason.
What with the constant wrangling between the two camps in the office and especially because the editor-in-chief had allied himself with Mas Hananto and Mas Nugroho, who were committed leftists, my in-between position was sometimes an uncomfortable one. Yes, Bang Amir was vocal in his opinions, but he was also a top-notch journalist, and when he was abruptly moved to the marketing and advertising division, I thought the move not only surprising but an insult both to him and to our profession. Regardless of the fact that “marketing and advertising” is essential to the success of a company or institution, Bang Amir was our best reporter. With his easy-going manner, he was able to get along with and, in fact, had become close to the leaders of all the political parties—except for the Communist Party, that is, whose leadership Mas Hananto claimed as his key source. Furthermore, as a writer, Bang Amir was both fast and effective, the very characteristics a news agency needs in a journalist.
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