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by Leila S. Chudori

  With free assistance and advice provided by two government-provided lawyers, Jean-Paul Bernard and Marie Thomas, Mas Nug and Tjai undertook all the steps that were necessary to establish our cooperative as a French legal entity. While they were doing this, I was busy training my two new assistants: Bahrum and Yazir, the sons of political exiles who liked to cook and shared the dream of going on to school at a culinary institute.

  The four pillars of Tanah Air Restaurant decided to imitate the formula of the Dutch-Indonesian rijsttafel, with dishes on the menu from not just one but a variety of regions, each with its own culinary specialty—Padang, Palembang, Lampung, Solo, Yogya, Sunda, East Java, Makassar, Bali—combining the selections in packets based on the customer’s desire and taste. In the Western manner—knowing very well that our European customers would demand it—we also arranged the menu so that the dishes could be served in three to five courses, from starters to desserts. We translated the Dutch rijsttafel, or “rice table” in English, into French, offering customers a “table du riz,” Risjaf and Tjai studied making aperitifs and digestifs from a friend of Jean-Paul, an expert mixologist, who volunteered to give them lessons for no cost at all.

  We planned to open the restaurant in December, and the closer we came to the date, the busier I was in the kitchen, with Bahrum and Yazir, trying out recipes, playing with the selection of dishes, making various modifications for lunch and dinner service, as well as planning a number of special menus for private parties and celebrations. Two weeks before the opening, our days and nights were spent trying the foods we’d cooked, looking for dishes that would make a lasting impression on visitors. We had yet to decide what dishes to feature on opening night, but we had purchased all the foodstuffs and spices we might possibly need, all the while keeping in mind Tjai’s strict reminder to be conservative in the amount of supplies we had on hand during the trial period: “Asian spices are expensive, you know, because most have to be imported!” Tjai, with calculator in hand, like a soldier with his rifle, was completely obsessive. I made a secret promise to myself that one day I would throw that calculator of his into the Seine.

  One afternoon, Mas Nug came into the kitchen and started rifling through my recipe cards while whistling off tune. Exactly like an Indonesian spook, I thought, who doesn’t know the meaning of quality as he preens about his profession.

  “Why are these names so boring?” He looked at the slate board on the kitchen wall. “‘Palembang dishes,’ ‘Padang dishes,’ ‘Solo dishes’… God, put some creativity into those names!”

  I lowered my eyeglasses and looked at him without commenting. What kind of louse was this, suddenly showing up in my kitchen?

  “What would you suggest?” Bahrum asked politely.

  Mas Nug smiled and looked at me. Like me, Mas Nug was a decent cook. Risjaf could eat just about anything, but in the kitchen could do little more than boil water and fry an egg. As for Tjai, he could help cut up onions but only after donning a face mask and eyeglasses.

  Also like me, Mas Nug had a discerning tongue and was always curious to try different things. Tongues weren’t just for discovering the inside of a woman’s mouth; tongues were also able to recognize that certain kinds of meats could be matched with certain spices, with certain kinds of wine, and that vegetables tasted better if they hardly felt a fire’s heat at all.

  The difference between Mas Nug and me was pragmatism. Just as Mas Nug could imagine Agnes Baumgartner to be Rukmini, he could also see peanut butter as an adequate substitute for freshly ground peanuts, the basic ingredient for gado-gado and satay sauces. I, on the other hand, insisted on culinary authenticity: the peanut sauce for gado-gado or satay could only be made from peanuts that first had been fried with grilled cashew nuts and then hand ground together with red and green chili peppers and a dash of kaffir lime juice.

  Neophytes that they were, Bahrum and Yazir were receptive to Mas Nug’s suggestions: Bahrum stood ready with his pen and notepad in hand, Yazir with a stick of chalk beside the slate board.

  Mas Nug coughed before speaking. “This is the thing… Instead of calling Kalasan-style fried chicken ‘Fried Chicken from Central Java,’ why not give it a more poetic name, ‘Widuri Chicken,’ for instance. People don’t know what the word means and it doesn’t matter, but it sounds more exotic and unique. You can still cut up and fry the chicken just as you would for Kalasan-style chicken, but you change the recipe a little—maybe with a sambal sauce made of shallots and—Voila!—you now have ‘Widuri Chicken’ instead. That’s what will make Tanah Air Restaurant special. Or take our common everyday tofu dish that’s been stuffed with white fish and use red sea perch instead and then change the name from ‘Stuffed Tofu’ to ‘Rainbow Tofu,’” he suggested with a grin.

  “Out, damned spot!” I screamed, banishing him from the kitchen.

  Mas Nug burst into laughter and then turned to walk away, whistling off tune as he retreated from my domain.

  Bahrum and Yazir looked at each other. Their fingers stopped writing.

  “Good suggestions…” Bahrum started to say to me.

  I stared hard at him. “I don’t believe in pretentious packaging like that. I don’t believe in formats. I don’t believe that presentation will make a diner forget the meal’s content. It’s the tongue, not the eye, that decides. Ingredients and taste are everything.”

  Bahrum swallowed. “What do you mean by format?”

  I sat down on the kitchen stool and ordered the two of them to sit down across from me. I leaned my head toward them. They leaned towards me.

  “Do you two understand literature? Poetry, novels, short stories?”

  “Well, I read,” Yazir said, “but I can’t create the kinds of work that all of you do here.”

  Yazir looked for all the world like I was about to present him with a treasure map.

  “For my good friend Mas Nugroho, presentation and format are very important, which is why we left the ‘look’ of this restaurant to him. But for me, cooking is as serious as writing a poem. Letters jump from my pen to create a word; the words then twist and turn, maybe even running into one another, as they search for a harmonious match so as to create a sentence that is both meaningful and poetic. Every letter has a soul and a spirit; every letter chooses a life of its own.”

  Bahrum scribbled notes like a freshman college student. His ballpoint pen moved quickly, writing down what I said as if it were canon law. Yazir looked at me with a mixture of awe and surprise, no doubt wondering why I was talking about poetry in a kitchen that smelled of onions.

  “And so it is with cooking!” I exclaimed, while lifting a shallot with the tips of my fingers. “This goes well with garlic, red chili, and shrimp paste. But this…?” I took a salmon fillet.

  “Would this go well with shrimp paste?” I paused. “Frankly, I don’t know. I haven’t tried it yet. But what is certain is that they don’t know each other and haven’t yet learned how to be close to each other or to excite each other.”

  Yazir jumped straight into the world of metaphor. Now he looked at the pieces of chicken, salmon, and beef on the kitchen table as if they were living creatures looking for the spice of their life. Yazir picked the pieces up, one by one, as if having found a diamond amidst the booty. Meanwhile, Bahrum, a calculating young man but one with limited imagination—I had begun to suspect he was Tjai’s offspring—looked at me the way he might look at an orangutan who needed to be put back in his cage.

  “But there are traditional recipes for all these dishes, complete with measurements for spices, right?” he asked. “How are we supposed to know that, uh, this onion here might be attracted to this.” He picked up a slice of fresh turmeric.

  My heart skipped a beat. I took the turmeric and put it down in front of me, exactly in front of me.

  “Turmeric is the spice that everyone competes for,” I said, as if reciting a legal writ. “This is the flavor for all kinds of cuisines and a curative for all kinds of ills. Turmeric is the jewel in t
he crown of spices. Don’t ever question its status or use.”

  “Use your feeling, your sense of taste, Bahrum,” said Yazir, lifting his two hands as if suddenly imbued with the feeling that he could write a thousand poems of the same caliber as those of Chairil Anwar.

  Bahrum rolled his eyes and took a knife. “I’m just more practical,” he said to me. “Give me a recipe and I’ll follow it.” He threw up his hands and refused to join in the party of metaphors in the kitchen. “So,” he said, trying to usher Yazir and me to reality, “are we going to put ikan pindang serani on the menu?” Bahrum pointed to the pile of turmeric in front of me.

  I nodded. My Javanese spicy and sour milkfish soup was going to be the star of our menu, the restaurant’s signature dish.

  90 RUE DE VAUGIRARD, PARIS; DECEMBER 12, 1982

  The poet Robert Frost once said that home is our destination, the place that will embrace us. Tanah Air Restaurant was our destination, the place that would embrace us, but she had to be able to demonstrate cheer upon our arrival.

  Mas Nug looked at himself frequently in the mirror, studying his mustache—which he had kept from Jakarta to Peking, then on to Zurich and finally to Paris—practicing how to demonstrate that cheer. He practiced smiling in front of the mirror, repeating the question “Ça va?” and nodding his head in interest as he listened to the patter of his imaginary guests.

  No one criticized or made fun of Mas Nug; each of the four pillars had his own way of standing strong in the face of mounting apprehension. Sometime before the opening day, Mas Nug and Risjaf asked me to hand-write an announcement, which they enlarged to create a large poster for display in the front window. I wrote: “L’ouverture du Restaurant Tanah Air. Cuisine Indonésienne. Prix spécial pour la première semaine. Grand opening of Tanah Air Restaurant. Indonesian cuisine. Special prices during the first week.”

  Risjaf paced the floor of the restaurant, righting the position of tables and chairs and checking on the attendants—students, most of whom would be working for us part-time—and teaching them how to pronounce “welcome” in Indonesian. “Se … la … mat ma … lam,” he intoned. “Sa … la … ma’ ma … laaaam,” they replied; yet he was satisfied. They were better at the pronunciation of Indonesian than Indonesians were at trying to get their tongues around French.

  Mas Nug hooked up loudspeakers outside the restaurant so that passing flâneurs could hear the alternating sounds of Javanese and Balinese gamelans. A few of our French friends, including Jean-Paul and Marie who had helped to set up the cooperative, arrived early to listen to the gamelan music, even though it was only coming from a cassette. Vivienne arrived shortly afterwards and engaged the two in conversation. She also tried to calm the four pillars, who at that tense moment in time did not in the least resemble strong or solid uprights.

  To calm his nerves, Mas Nug stopped twisting his mustache and began sipping on a glass of wine in a corner of the room. Tjai and Risjaf took up posts outside the front door, waiting for our first customers to arrive. I remained at my place in the kitchen, while frequently glancing through the window of the door towards the ground floor dining area.

  The hands of the clock pointed to six. The heavy beating of hearts, those of the four pillars, was almost audible to my ears. Even with the gamelan music playing, filling the room with its sound, I couldn’t bear to view the emptiness of the dining room. I came out of the kitchen to join Jean-Paul, Marie, Vivienne, and Mas Nug, who was futilely attempting to the whistle to the tune of the gamelan’s pentatonic scale. A sorry sound, indeed, but I didn’t have the energy to tell him to stop. My eyes were glued on the front door.

  “Stop staring at the door,” Vivienne said in hopes of calming my nerves. “It’s not going to look back.”

  I smiled, and I had just taken out a cigarette to smoke when the bell hanging from the top of the front door began to ring. I looked over to see a French couple enter. They stopped just inside to look around the room and study the shadow puppets and masks that decorated the wall.

  Mas Nug and Risjaf immediately greeted them with a mixture of overwhelming good cheer and utter nervousness. I was just about to return to my domain of authority, when Risjaf called my name.

  “Madame and Monsieur would like you to explain the menu and, perhaps, advise them what to eat,” he said to me in front of the middle-aged pair.

  Before advising anything, I first asked the two of them whether they preferred beef, fish, or chicken, or if they were vegetarian. I also asked whether they liked spicy food. Their answers would tell me what to recommend. Apparently, the couple were culinary adventurers and liked to try all sorts of food—which is why they had come to the restaurant. They had vacationed in India and Thailand and liked the foods they tried there. Now they wanted to sample Indonesian cuisine.

  Based on their answers, I recommended that they try a complete Padang meal with an assortment of dishes from West Sumatra. So as not to put his practice in front of the mirror to waste, Mas Nug spoke with the couple in French and offered to bring them wine.

  I had just turned to go to the kitchen when the bell on the door rang again. A group of six people came in, all of them French as well. Mas Nug called me over to speak with them. The first lesson learned on opening night was that customers liked this personal touch—the chef of the restaurant discussing with them what they would like to eat.

  Then an Indonesian family came in, and then another group of French people. And then, and then, and then… All of a sudden, as if the flood gates had been opened, more and more people came in. Apparently, Risjaf had done a very good job of spreading the news about the opening of the restaurant. But I really did have to return to the kitchen in order to prove that Tanah Air could serve as a home away from home.

  Vivienne and Risjaf took over my task of explaining to our curious but mostly unknowing French customers the various dishes on the menu. Watching and listening to Vivienne and Risjaf, our waiters and waitresses also learned about the food they were going to serve.

  My hands, and those of Bahrum and Yazir as well, did not stop moving at the work counter. Through the kitchen window, we could observe the expression of customers’ faces. The hits of the evening were grilled chicken; goat satay; gulai anam or Lampung-style chicken curry; soto ayam, spicy yellow chicken soup; and nasi Padang, with a medley of dishes special to Padang, West Sumatra. The waiters delivered hand-written notes from customers full of praise for their meals. I tacked them to the wall of the kitchen so that they would one day serve as a reminder of my first day as a poet in the world of Indonesian cuisine.

  “The place is full. All tables are filled!” Bahrum announced when he returned from a survey of the two floors. They even had to get extra chairs out of the storeroom. “You should see how Pak Tjai is sweating!” he added with a wide grin.

  “And the pourboire!” Yazir screamed. “Pak Tjai said there are several thousand francs in it.” We had decided that any and all tips would go into a common tip box to be divided equally among the crew at the end of each evening.

  I smiled to hear the good news—a delightful and unexpected surprise—but then went back to my cooking and preparing desserts. The most popular was es cendol, made from coconut milk, jelly noodles, shaved ice, and palm sugar, to which I added jack fruit (though, unfortunately, jackfruit from the can). Almost half of all the visitors that evening ordered an extra serving.

  There had to be something right about all the work we had put into establishing the cooperative. There had to be something good in what we were doing as human beings. I didn’t know whether the opening night’s success was a matter of hard work or good luck; Paris, after all, has thousands of bistros, cafés, restaurants, and bars. But as I was slowly pouring the next order of es cendol into a glass, suddenly something, I don’t know what, began to tug at my chest and made my eyes begin to water.

  “Zir, could you help me here?” I said to Yazir as I put down the glass.

  Yazir took the glass from me with a look of sur
prise. I quickly retreated to the corner of the kitchen, my back to my two assistant as I faced the wall. I lifted my apron to wipe my face, which was suddenly moist with perspiration. I didn’t want my helpers to know that I was suddenly crying, for no explicable reason. But the more I rubbed my eyes, the faster my tears began to fall.

  The door to the kitchen opened. Shit.

  “Dimas …”

  It was Mas Nug’s voice. Please leave me alone.

  But I heard his footsteps as he walked towards me. Then suddenly felt his hands on the back of my shoulders. This time he was not whistling or singing off key. From the trembling of his hands, I could tell that he, too, was silently crying.

  Life as a political exile would not have been complete without a steady stream of trials: having our passports revoked; being forced to move from one country and from one city to another; having to change professions; even having to change families—all with no obvious design or definite plan. All these things were happening while we were in the midst of a search for our identity, shapeless souls searching for a body to inhabit. The annoyances we faced—or the “challenges” as Mas Nug preferred to call them—were never-ending. For that reason, and despite the successful opening of the restaurant and the popularity of Tanah Air in the days and nights to come, we knew that our celebration would propel an opposing force.

  This afternoon, for instance… I had just finished preparing spices and was enjoying a cool beer in the ground floor dining area next to the cash register where Tjai was working. The telephone rang and he answered it. I looked at him to see who was calling, but his face was flat and cold-looking. He frowned.

  “Who was that, Tjai?”

  “I don’t know. Some crazy guy,” he answered with a tone of unconcern as he went back to his calculator and notes. “Do you really have to use Bango soy sauce? Can’t you use another brand?”

  “No,” I insisted. “Bango has a different sweetness.”

  “Well, OK,” he said, but then turned to Mas Nug who was seated beside me. “If you’re going to Amsterdam, pick up a bulk order there. It’s much cheaper there.”