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by Leila S. Chudori

  I cursed and swore to myself that I would never again set foot in the home of that traitor.

  Prone on my bed, I stared at the ceiling as Risjaf repeatedly played “Als de Orchideeën Bloeien” on his harmonica.

  After some time, he stopped and then I heard him say. “Hey, Dimas …”

  “What …?”

  “How about if we burn down that paviliun across the road?”

  I turned my head towards him and smiled weakly, somewhat consoled by Risjaf’s display of solidarity and brotherhood.

  “No need for that,” I said as Risjaf lifted his harmonica to play again. “Better to murder those two fuckers instead.”

  Suddenly, we both burst into laughter, delighted by this black fantasy.

  It wasn’t easy for me to expunge the name of Surti from my life. Not only because I liked to cook and the kitchen was a constant and painful reminder of my feelings towards her. For the first few weeks after that incident I was forever seeing Surti standing next to the cooker and her reflection on plates and in pots. But where I saw her most often was on the handle of my knife, perched there, looking at me, as I prepared spices for grinding: shallots, onions, and turmeric.

  Just as other men with broken hearts would do, I tried to forget my feelings for Surti in the most clichéd of ways: by sleeping around with other women. After each of these sessions, however, I always felt foolish and sick to my stomach. By coincidence, with political and social tensions on the rise in Jakarta at that time, we rarely saw Mas Nugroho or Mas Hananto. They were busy with their work at Nusantara News and both had been assigned to cover the incident of October 17, 1952, when a group of army officers staged a failed coup attempt to force the dissolution of Parliament and install President Sukarno as the country’s supreme leader. If I had been on speaking terms with them at the time, no doubt I would have been dogging their tracks, hoping to learn more about the political situation. To become a journalist, I had begun to discover, was a career path I could not resist. Journalism uses the power of words in the same way that a chef uses the strength of spices in the dishes he creates.

  So it was that for a few months our small community of friends broke down and dispersed. Neither our moods nor our schedules permitted any form of reconciliation. Mas Nugroho and Mas Hananto were busy with their work; Risjaf had his books; and I was busy with women, exams, and grinding spices in the kitchen as I thought about concepts of love between men and women as depicted in the Mahabharata.

  Drupadi.

  Drupadi had taken all five of the Pandawa brothers as husbands. But it was the brother Bima who always tried to protect her and had thwarted Kicaka’s and Dursasana’s advances when they tried to rape her. Tragically for Bima, Drupadi loved his brother, Arjuna, much more. I don’t really know and actually never tried to find out whether Surti loved Mas Hananto more than me. What I did know is that she had made a choice.

  I’m even more uncertain about why it is that, even after meeting the lovely Vivienne and marrying her, up until this very day my soul still stirs whenever I think of Surti. Perhaps I truly did give my heart to her. Forever and for always.

  And forty-five years later in Paris, that same song from Risjaf’s harmonica still softly suffuses the springtime air: “Als de Orchideeën Bloeien.”

  TERRE D’ASILE

  don’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 ho
lding 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 shar
ing 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.