I hate needles, especially Mas Nug’s, whose efficacy I’m not at all sure of. But even though the hospital is a place that for me is identical with needles and all sorts of ghastly-looking machines, I do recognize that there are times when I am forced to surrender myself to a doctor for medical care. Like last week, for instance…
On that morning, last week, I suddenly collapsed outside the Metro station. I didn’t feel anything, but everything turned black for a few moments, and the next thing I knew I was in a café near the kiosk at the entrance to the station where I usually bought the daily paper. Staring at me when I opened my eyes was Pierre, the newspaper vendor who never bathed, and André, the handsome blue-eyed waiter at the café who looked like he should be a Calvin Klein model instead of serving coffee. Speaking rapidly, in their nasalized Parisian French, they ordered me to drink water and kept asking me, over and over, if I was all right. When they said they were going to call an ambulance, I finally shook my head and asked them to call Risjaf instead.
What happened then was a nightmare: Tjai and Mas Nug, the two fussiest and most know-it-all people I know, came to the café. Tjai, with his low voice and calculated manner, grilled me about the quantity and frequency of my intake of alcohol. Mas Nug, meanwhile, began hectoring me about energy and similar nonsense. I wanted to disappear from their sight. There was no way they would let me refuse their demand that I go to the hospital for a physical examination. And the fact was, I was still in a bit of shock and too weak to do otherwise. I was suddenly an old codger in need of assistance from two creatures who were putting on airs of being much younger. As they led me out of the café to a taxi, I felt the ground move beneath my feet. When that happened, I knew I had to obey. There was something wrong with me.
The doctor in the emergency ward of the hospital where they took me ordered me to undergo a battery of tests. Afterwards, he prescribed some medicine. But I still haven’t gotten around to picking up the results of the tests.
That same feeling of nausea and stomach cramps were now affecting me again. Mas Nug came over and put his hand on my cheek.
“Lie down in the office. I can take your place in the kitchen.”
Hmm… I liked the taste of my cooking better, especially my nasi kuning or yellow rice with its side dishes of crispy tempeh, yellow fried chicken, and urap, spiced vegetables with grated coconut. And to make everything taste better was my fried hot pepper sauce, sambal bajak. I knew that my nasi kuning, along with my Padang-style beef rendang, gulai pakis, fiddlestick ferns simmered in coconut sauce, and a Lampung-style curried chicken dish called gulai anam, were the most popular dishes on Tanah Air’s menu, at least in terms of number of orders. Mas Nug’s cooking was much too experimental for me. He was so busy coming up with fancy names for dishes, he often forgot about their taste.
“Dimas…”
I could tell from the tone of Mas Nug’s voice that he didn’t want to offend me. He knew that the restaurant’s kitchen was my territory, a no-man’s-land for anyone unable to follow my very explicit instructions. (Don’t change the composition of spices. Don’t touch my knives. Never use the onion knife for cutting meat. The work area must be absolutely clean, with no drops of water or coffee on it. And so on and so forth.) The Tanah Air kitchen was my throne from which I could not be unseated. Reign over other parts of the restaurant, I willingly relinquished to those friends who liked to show off their fine teeth on the stage.
But now Mas Nug was suggesting that he take my position as cook. I immediately thought of Mahmud Radjab, a Malaysian writer and friend of mine, who had booked a number of tables at the restaurant that night to celebrate the publication of his latest book with friends. He had written to me far in advance to tell me that he and several colleagues from Kuala Lumpur had been invited to come to the Sorbonne and that they hoped to celebrate at the restaurant. He sent me a menu, telling me exactly what kind of dishes he wanted to serve his friends. The kinds of dishes he mentioned were common enough in Kuala Lumpur, but not so in Paris. “Your cooking is extraordinary,” he told me. “You have a gift with spices.”
And now eighteen people, Radjab and his friends, were coming to the restaurant, expecting to be served a truly Malay-tasting meal.
I had been preparing the spice mixture since morning. All that was left to do in the afternoon was to mix them with the rice, prepare the chicken, and mix the vegetables with grated coconut for the urap. But I was feeling so nauseous, I thought I was going to regurgitate.
“OK, OK, I’ll lie down for a bit, but don’t put anything strange in my nasi kuning,” I said in warning.
“Yeah, yeah …”
Mas Nug walked me to the office. Tjai, who was checking the tables that had been reserved for the event that evening, saw us and lowered his glasses and looked at me curiously. “What’s wrong, Dimas?”
“It’s nothing,” I answered flippantly. “Nothing at all.”
Mas Nug and Tjai looked at each other like parents trying to figure out how to get their unruly son to follow their orders.
Mas Nug now spoke in an authoritarian voice. “I’m not going to put up with any more of your excuses. Tomorrow, we’re going to the hospital to pick up the results of your examination. If you don’t, I swear, I’m going to mess with your spices and fiddle with your sacred recipes.”
What an absolute shithead, I thought. Mas Nug knew I treated spices and other cooking ingredients like a painter treats colors on a canvas. I treated my blend of spices for the dishes I prepared like a poet treats words in a poem.
I don’t know where I got the strength, but I whipped off the sarong I’d been using as a shawl and threw it at Mas Nug, and then grabbed him by the collar. “Don’t you dare mess with my spices. Don’t fiddle with anything. Don’t mix any other spices with the turmeric paste for the nasi kuning. And don’t even think of altering the recipes for the dishes on this restaurant’s menu!”
I blew through my nose, my head spinning and my eyes watering. Mas Nug was startled, but whether this was because of my actions or because I had specifically mentioned “turmeric” and not “ginger,” for instance, or maybe just because I looked very ill, I didn’t know. After that, my head started to spin again and my stomach felt like it was being squeezed through the wringer of a washing machine. As I plopped into a chair, my stomach suddenly erupted. I can remember Mas Nug calling out for Tjai, Bahrum, and Risjaf but after that, not much more, except swallowing the medicine the doctor had prescribed for me.
The medicine must have contained some kind of sedative, because after that I began to feel much lighter and was able to lie down on the sofa without my stomach churning. The sofa… That white sofa had been a gift from Vivienne. She had been just as enthusiastic as the Indonesian exiles who joined the cooperative that we established to raise the funds to open the Tanah Air Restaurant. How many times had we re-covered that sofa? Yet every time, Vivienne always chose another shade of white. After we divorced, I covered the sofa with a length of Cirebon-style batik that Aji had sent me. Even though we were Solonese by birth, Aji knew I much preferred the more colorful batik designs of the north coast than the traditional brown and muted tones of the batik produced in our home town.
My lids grew heavy and I soon closed my eyes. Whatever was in the medicine seemed to produce a kind of hallucinatory effect. The dreams that ensued were wild and vivid, with all sorts of people popping into them from various periods of my life. Or maybe I wasn’t sleeping at all; maybe I was awake and recalling memories of the past fifteen years, when the hands on the clock in Paris determined my future: that we might be better able to make a mark not through politics or literature but, possibly and more effectively, through culinary arts. How very strange but how very delightful it had been to enter this strange new world.
PARIS, AUGUST 1982
With the weather being so hot and stuffy—which was when all I wanted to do was to take off my clothes and go nude in the apartment—it wasn’t the best time to discuss plans for the futur
e. Mas Nug, Risjaf, and Tjai were almost at each other’s throats trying to figure out what would be the best way to build a more permanent support structure for Indonesian political exiles and their families. No indeed, Paris in summertime is definitely not the best time for discussing matters of import. Especially avoid all thought of financial problems and go bask on a beach somewhere in the south of France or take refuge in a corner of Shakespeare & Co.
Tjai had a very serious look on his face. The rest of us probably looked forlorn. None of us were happy with our jobs, and for the past several months we had been trying to find a solution to this problem: some kind of business venture where we could work together on something that was personally satisfying (as well as profitable) for everyone concerned. The work had to be enjoyable. My first thought was to publish an Indonesian literary journal much like The Paris Review with short stories, poetry, novellas, and critical essays about Indonesian literature and translations of foreign literature in Indonesian. I had hardly begun to explain this idea when Tjai said drolly, “Which will have to be distributed free of charge because the number of people who can read Indonesian and are interested in Indonesian literature in Paris is about thirty.”
His answer was cynical, but he was right, of course. The literary landscape—both Indonesian and foreign—was littered with graveyards of dead journals and literary magazines. Even so, I loved the thought of us starting a serious literary journal. What an absolute delight that would be!
“I’m just trying to think of something we all like doing,” I grumbled. “We’re all writers, after all.”
Tjai said nothing, but his small mouth became a sour pucker—which meant he was saying to me, “Try using that thing behind your forehead.”
Tjai was the glue that held us together, the only one among us with no wacky side or affectations. He came from a Chinese family in Surabaya that believed completely in the value of hard work. His exile abroad, like that of many other Chinese-Indonesians, had very little to do with ideology and much more to do with race. Tjai was not in the least political; yet he knew, in the wake of events after September 30, 1965, that his family would be among the first to be arrested, because his brother Henry had active relations with Red Party officials in Peking.
Based on the history of race relations in Indonesia and the pogroms that had affected Chinese-Indonesians in the past, the decision of Tjai and Theresa to immediately flee to Singapore and then later join up with us in Paris was very pragmatic. Among us, Tjai was perhaps the only one whose personal life was free of melodrama. He was a straight arrow, honest to the core, good-hearted, and always on the right path. And it was because of this, his unerring record of shooting straight, that we trusted his unbiased and even cold-hearted analyses—even his assessment of the various ideas we had come up with for working together. Sure, I was sometimes rankled by his frankness, but I would be the first to admit that Tjai was almost always right.
Mas Nug threw in the idea of a political daily, to which, once again, Tjai rolled his eyes. “Look at that newsletter Dimas has been doing. The content is fine, but it depends on contributions to survive.”
As a result of the butcher Tjai’s rational way of thinking, our conversation quickly died. What could I say? He was our calculator.
Mas Nug sat next to the open window staring outside as he took a cigarette from a packet. After Lintang was born and Vivienne and I moved into a larger apartment, our home had become the place my friends usually gathered. It wasn’t all that spacious, but it had a pleasant atmosphere, which was helped greatly by the numerous potted plants that Vivienne had hung around the rooms. But this was summer, and even with the plants, little could be done to lower the actual temperature of the non-air-conditioned room.
In the hours that followed, our discussion became more uncertain and even less directed. Mas Nug suggested that we buy Indonesian kretek cigarettes wholesale in the Netherlands and then sell them retail in Paris. Once again, Tjai again threw a damp rag on the idea: “You mean, set up a cigarette stand? Have you thought about taxes? And are you ready to compete with other brands? What research have you done? How many people in Paris smoke kretek besides you and Dimas?”
As we fell into silence, once again, I began to chuckle to myself.
Risjaf then began to say something but, frankly, I can’t even remember what it was. The air was so hot, all I wanted to do was take off my clothes. It was a good thing that at that point Vivienne and Lintang came home, fresh from a swim at the public pool near our apartment. She immediately offered to make us some limeade. After the number of bottles of beers that we had consumed, limeade seemed like a good idea. Maybe that would help to clear our heads.
Vivienne signaled for me to follow her to the kitchen.
“Look at the time,” she said. “Maybe you should make a snack, something to eat.”
A brilliant idea, I thought. Indonesians can never think on an empty stomach. I was proud of Vivienne for being able to read the situation so quickly.
I searched the refrigerator and kitchen cupboard to see what was there: noodles, left-over chicken, some vegetables… Aha, I knew what to prepare. I nodded and looked at Vivienne who had read my mind and begun to assemble the things I would need: a wok, oil, and spices.
I stuck my head out of the kitchen and announced to my friends: “You guys go on without me. I’m going to whip up some fried noodles. Maybe in the meantime you can come up with a brilliant idea.”
Having just said that, I already knew the discussion would falter further and that the only thing they would try to do is find a place in the room where there might be a bit of moving air.
I quickly sliced the shallots, garlic, and green vegetables, and then chopped the chicken into bite-sized pieces. I only asked Vivienne to help prepare the ingredients; she had learned long ago that I didn’t like anyone touching my kitchen tools. Straightaway, she a put a finger’s length of water in a pot and set it on the stove to boil. She raised her eyes when I took some oil from a can in which I kept used oil, but refrained from saying anything. I knew that for health reasons Vivienne didn’t like me using this reused jelantah oil in my cooking, but I used only a little bit, just enough to add the flavor of the onions that had been fried in it, and that was the secret of my spice mixture. Maybe it wasn’t the most healthy, but it was always delicious.
In just a few minutes, I had prepared the fried noodles and put the platter on the dining table for my friends to help themselves. Lintang was the first to dish up. Her eyes closed with pleasure as she began to eat. “Un très bon plat!” she announced, sticking her small right thumb in the air. Of course, given that my daughter was also my biggest fan there was an element of bias in the appraisal. Lintang, now seven years old, was the light of my life.
My three friends attacked the table like a trio of prisoners who’d been fed charred rice for a week. Tjai used chopsticks to eat the noodles, moving them so quickly and easily that his bowl of noodles was empty and slick in just a short time. Risjaf, on the other hand, picked slowly at his portion, savoring each mouthful as he ate. Lintang, meanwhile, helped herself to a second portion; the bowl she was using was a child’s-size bowl. Vivienne smiled with satisfaction as we finished our bowls and then gave us permission to smoke.
While the rest of us stretched out on our chairs in the living room, staring at our embarrassingly protruding stomachs, Risjaf continued to eat his noodles slowly, not caring that the rest of us had already finished. With greasy lips, still slick from his noodles, he said offhandedly, “Why is it that you can’t get fried noodles this good anywhere in Paris?”
Mas Nug suddenly looked at Risjaf and blinked, as if a light bulb had come on in his head.
“Yeah, just think,” Risjaf went on, “how nice it would be if, whenever we pleased, we could eat fried noodles as good as Dimas makes. Or his fried rice smelling of shrimp paste. God, my mouth is beginning to water just thinking about it. Or his nasi kuning, like the kind he made for Lintang’s birthday, with
nice crispy slices of tempeh.”
Suddenly, as if struck by what he was saying, Risjaf shrieked like a scientist who had just solved some kind of formula: “That’s it, Dimas! I know what business we can do! I’ve got it!”
Mas Nug and Risjaf beamed at each other happily, like they wanted to hug each other. Oh, no, I thought. What would they have me do? Start up a catering business?
But then I looked at Tjai, whose eyes were shining brightly with a glow that permeated mine—a completely different reaction from the one earlier, when we had been discussing business ideas he dismissed as crazy.
He looked at me straight in the face. “That’s it, Dimas. I think we’ve discovered our destiny. As a cook, you know, you are second to none.”
I had never heard Tjai speak with such enthusiasm before. His eyes flashed. Mas Nug put his hands on my shoulders and called out to the heavens: “Dimas! We are going to open an Indonesian restaurant in Paris!”
Even though the Parisian summer was still so hot I thought my skin was going to blister, my heart felt cool now that a decision had been reached. The next night we gathered at Risjaf’s apartment and, with no objections to slow down the course of conversation, we discussed our new plan. Mas Nug, twisting the ends of his Clark Gable mustache, usurped the role of manager and began to issue orders as to what each of our tasks would be.
“Obviously, Dimas will be the head cook and will choose the menu. We all know that he has a way of changing the simplest ingredients into a wonderful meal—no different from the words that slip from his pen to become a poem.”
I guessed that Mas Nug’s excessive praise was his way of consoling me because Tjai had not given his consent to the literary journal I wanted to produce.
“Tjai will look into a financial model. Once we’ve come up with a proposal, we can send it to possible funding sources: government and non-government agencies and the like as well as to our friends scattered throughout Europe, inviting them to contribute to the cause or to lend us the money we’ll need. We have to weigh the alternatives and choose the best one. Tjai can also look into what kind of business our restaurant should be, a limited license corporation, for instance, or possibly a co-op…”
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