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by Leila S. Chudori

  Around the time I was twelve, after all the visa rejections, the clove-smelling ceremonies, and Ayah’s repeated reenactment of Ekalaya’s tale, I had to conclude that Ayah was Ekalaya. He might be rejected, but he would survive even if his steps were marked by wounds and blood.

  VIVIENNE DEVERAUX

  LE COUP DE FOUDRE… Who believes in le coup de foudre? Love at first sight is a romantic phrase held dear to the heart by those same people who think that Paris, City of Light, has a never-ending supply of amour.

  I was born into the family of Laurence and Marianne Deveraux. My father is a man who believes in reason and that life ends when the heart stops beating and the oxygen tube for artificial resuscitation is removed. All those stories about life after death were, for my family, a romantic notion on the part of people who believe that humans are immortal beings. Such people want to extend life, something that is, by nature, finite. They don’t want the thread of life to be broken or for it to end in uncertainty. I believed then, and I believe now, that life is transitory, that it will end one day. My family were deviants among the Deveraux clan, Roman Catholics mostly who spent their Sundays going to church and sharing a communal meal.

  Given this way of thinking among my immediate family, people who lived and worked for the day, I obviously did not believe in le coup de foudre. How could you fall in love with a person you’d only just met? Or someone whose eyes you’d only just seen? Not likely. Jamais!

  According to Indonesians I later came to meet, my attitude was kualat. This word, originally of Arabic derivation, was one with no direct equivalent in French. Dimas tried to explain its meaning to me, which was, approximately, that I was in some way doomed to a particular fate because of something I had done or spoken. Specifically as regards to me, the situation did not prove to be calamitous. I was kualat because my own words turned against me.

  May 1968 was an important time not only because of the students and workers’ revolution in Paris; it was also then that my arrogance was shattered and I was forced to believe in le coup de foudre.

  It was the moment I saw him, that Asian man on the Sorbonne campus. I guessed he was from Indochina. With his brown skin, I thought he might be from Vietnam. But he was tall for an Asian man. And with his curly hair and aquiline nose he might even have been from the Middle East. From a distance, I caught him watching me; but when I looked at him he pretended to be busy puffing on his cigarette, as if that was going to help ward off the cold wind blowing that evening. He was standing at a distance, by himself, watching my fellow students who were huddled together against the cold and the government. I thought he might be a journalist who had ventured onto campus. There was no longer any artificial division between the students and citizens of Paris. Everyone mingled and mixed together. But no, he was alone, without a camera, watching history as it unfolded.

  Some friends of mine and I had gathered beneath the statue of Victor Hugo and were waiting to hear Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a sociology student who was the student movement’s most vocal leader. There were so many people, all of them pushing their way forward, excited to see what was going on. There must have been thousands of people who had gathered there. But then my desire to hear Cohn-Bendit’s oration—and to glimpse his handsome face—suddenly withered, all because of him, that exotic-looking man, standing alone, undisturbed by both the mass of humanity and the brisk evening wind.

  And then at that moment, for a second, and then two, our eyes met. And wow! How I managed to do it, I don’t know, but slowly, going against the tide of students moving in the direction of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, I eased my way from the crowd to walk in the direction of that man. That Asian man. And then came an unexpected bolt of lightning.

  Le coup de foudre.

  His eyes bore into mine.

  I greeted him: “Ça va?”

  SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS, PARIS, APRIL 1998

  Vivienne picked up the receiver of the telephone screaming impatiently at her. “Oui,” she said while stuffing lesson materials for that day’s courses into her large multi-pocketed leather bag. With the receiver clamped between her right cheek and shoulder, she filled the bag with books, folders, pens, a pocket diary, and a roll of mints. She grabbed her mug of coffee to take a sip but then suddenly stopped when she heard the name of the hospital the person on the other end of the line had just mentioned. Slowly, she placed her mug on the table.

  “Dimas Suryo? Oui, that is my former husband. Pourquoi?”

  “Your name is listed as his emergency contact,” she heard the caller say.

  Now was not the time for her to feel annoyed.

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “Non, non, Madame. It’s just that we ran some tests on Monsieur Suryo two weeks ago and he still hasn’t picked up the results. We’ve called him several times, but he never answers the phone, so …”

  “OK, I will make sure he comes to pick them up.” She took her pen and notepad. “Where in the hospital would that be?”

  With that telephone call having ruined her morning, Vivienne lost her appetite for the mug of steeped luwak coffee she had just prepared. Steam from the cup rose and vanished in the air—like the story of her love for the man who had first introduced her to that wonderfully tasting coffee.

  Vivienne picked up the receiver again, this time to dial Lintang’s number. She took a breath to calm herself before speaking.

  “Lintang, c’est Maman.”

  Love at first sight, a love that burns deep inside, and the wish to explore something new, foreign, and completely unknown are not, it turns out, enough to save a marriage. I realized that afterwards. As much as I loved Dimas and as great as my willingness was to give to him everything I had inside of me, to this day I don’t know whether he ever loved me as much as I loved him—even though he did write me a poem, which he gave to me as a gift at our wedding. In Indonesia, he said, when a couple marries there is always a brideprice to pay. And the price he paid for me was a poem whose first lines were “Benarkah angin tak sedang mencoba / Menyentuh bibirnya yang begitu sempurna … Is it true the wind’s not trying / To touch such perfect lips…”

  He said the poem popped into his mind the first time he saw me, in May 1968, at the time of the student and workers’ movement. But did he ever really love me completely? And forever? My cousin Marie-Claire, an ever-cheerful person, always kind to everyone, told me that Dimas was an extraordinary man and would make a very suitable life partner. Mathilde, my other cousin, a much more skeptical sort, told me that Dimas was an exotic man who might be good for dating or as a lover, but not for marrying. Neither of my cousins quite understood that my attraction to and love for Dimas did not spring from some deep seated desire in me to explore a foreign territory that was exotic and unknown. Nor did it emerge from the urge to satisfy physical pleasure. Not at all. I sensed in Dimas a feeling of loss that I wanted to soothe and assuage. He had a sadness in his eyes I wanted to heal. And also, as I came to learn, he had an incredible ability to confront hardship and to survive, an ability to withstand and repulse life’s vicissitudes. At times, as I later came to see, the survival mechanisms he employed seemed to border on the obsessive; but, perhaps, such is the case of all political exiles, in every country throughout the world: their will to survive makes them obsessive about proving themselves.

  France would never be Dimas’s home. I realized that from the moment our eyes first met. There was something that prevented him from being happy, from feeling completely at home. Was it the bloodbath that had occurred in his own homeland? Was it the country’s political upheaval, which had not only eroded but also depleted all sense of humanity in Dimas and his friends, forcing them to pick up, here and there, whatever bits and pieces they could find in order to rebuild themselves into a new whole as human beings possessing a sense of dignity and pride?

  Politics is never simple, and ideological struggle is but a pretense for the lust for power. All the books I’ve read on the subject have their own theories about wha
t happened in Indonesia in September 1965. In my first few years of knowing Dimas and his friends—Nugroho, Tjai, and Risjaf—it wasn’t easy for me to piece together their life stories, which they delivered in a piecemeal fashion. There were numerous common experiences they shared as wanderers, but they all had very different personalities and different reactions towards the tragedy that had occurred in their homeland. That said, they all wanted to go home and waited for the opportunity to see a better Indonesia. But thirty years had passed and “the Smiling General”—the country’s long-reigning authoritarian leader, President Soeharto—was all the more strong and feared.

  Maybe the overtly civilian style of government in Indonesia wasn’t the same as the one adopted by military leaders in Latin American countries, but the Smiling General continued to retain a firm grip on his throne.

  It’s been a while now since I’ve seen Dimas, but I still look for the news about Indonesia that occasionally appears in the mass media, on the television and in the press. I’m sure that following the recent tumble in the value of the rupiah and the economic crisis that befell the region, President Soeharto felt the need to do something, the need to act. But what he did, according to the reports I’ve seen, was to install his own daughter in the government cabinet! Whether or not his political panic will escalate and one day cause him to fall, I don’t know, but if he does fall, I am very sure that of the four pillars—Dimas and his three friends—Dimas will be the first to return in order to live out his old age in Indonesia. I’m also sure that if at all possible he will return home with a green Republic of Indonesia passport in his hand. If at all possible, that is, but likely it’s not. Regardless, I’m very sure that he will try to return home.

  Unlike Dimas, his three friends in exile seem to have long ago given up the obsession of spending the rest of their days in their home country. Nugroho seems to be comfortable, and long ago accepted the fact that he must consider Paris to be his second home. Tjai has said that he would like to go back to visit but not to stay permanently. Risjaf, meanwhile, somehow succeeded in getting a visa for Indonesia. But as long as he has Amira and their son Ardi at his side, he could feel complete and safe anywhere.

  Dimas is in a different category altogether. He and his three friends are all Indonesian, and all of them come from Java with the exception of Risjaf, who comes from Riau, in Sumatra. Even so, after meeting friends of Dimas in Paris, Amsterdam, Leiden, The Hague, Berlin, and Cologne, I got the sense that there was something that set Dimas apart from his fellow political exiles. At first I thought of them as seagulls, flying from one continent to another as a flock and then setting down roots and establishing homes in the continent where they alighted (if only temporarily). But after meeting Dimas, marrying him, and raising a family, I came to see that Dimas was not, and had never been, in fact, an inseparable part of the flock. His camaraderie with his friends was deep and his loyalty to the group was not to be doubted, but Dimas still differed from the flock’s other members. While the others tried to adapt and to build a home in another continent, Dimas’s spirit remained in the nest where he had been born and raised. Differing from other gulls of the same generation, Dimas was a bird that always wanted to return to the land of his birth, never content to simply remain with the family he had formed in an alien land.

  I was ready to follow Dimas in his desire to return to Indonesia one day—if that day were ever to come—which is why from the time Lintang was just a baby I began to prepare her as well, making sure that she could speak not just French, but also Indonesian and English. Supposing, just supposing that miracle were to happen… But seeing the inexorable power of the Smiling General, I was never sure it would. And even in my dreams, I imagined that if one day Soeharto were to die, his replacement would be a person cut from the very same cloth, of one mind and imagination—which is, in effect, to say, there would be no change in Indonesian government policy whatsoever and the wandering flock of birds would be left stranded in their foreign lands. Their names would be expunged from Indonesian history and the history of civilization as well, whereas the regime that oversaw their erasure would continue to live on, one generation after the other. I hoped I was wrong.

  Every year Dimas did the same thing and experienced the same disappointment. My heart bled for him. Year in, year out, Dimas would submit an application to the Indonesian embassy for a visa to Indonesia, which was always rejected for reasons never given. If the embassy had summarily rejected the visa applications of all Indonesian political exiles, that might have helped to alleviate Dimas’s frustration. But there were those among his friends—probably ones the Indonesian government deemed would make no noise—who were granted tourist visas: Risjaf was one; Mirza, in Leiden, another; and several of his friends in Germany. But it was after the protests and demonstration in Dresden two years ago, at the time of Soeharto’s state visit, that I truly began to wonder how easy it would be for Indonesia to open the doors to its prodigal children abroad. Whatever the case, there were bureaucratic mountains and canyons to pass through in the Indonesian government’s alleged open-door policy for exiles. That is why—just to try to get Dimas from forever feeling rejected like Ekalaya, that favorite puppet character of his—I once spoke my mind and suggested that he accept the possibility of not being able to spend his old age, and one day shut his eyes forever, in Indonesia.

  Mon Dieu. You should have seen the hurt look in his eyes. My own words surprised me. I suddenly realized that sometimes stating the obvious, in a rational manner, can have calamitous consequences. I had extinguished the small light in a dark tunnel.

  Dimas didn’t say anything, didn’t even express his distress. But that wouldn’t have been Dimas’s style. He just picked himself up from where he was and went out to the terrace to smoke. Because he didn’t bother to close the door, cold winter air rushed into the apartment. I knew that I had said something wrong. But I was not wrong.

  I followed Dimas to the terrace and attempted to defend my point of view without further upsetting him.

  “Home is where your family lives.”

  “Home is the place where I feel I am at home,” Dimas replied, his voice cold and flat. That conversation was not the point that determined our separation. That night was just one dot in a long line of dots that finally forced us to take our separate ways.

  “Bonjour.”

  “Bonjour. Vivienne?”

  “Oui. Is that you, Nugroho? Is Dimas there?”

  “Yes, Viv, I’m here, just keeping Dimas company. My word, how long has it been? How are you!? It’s been such a while since you’ve been to Tanah Air. And how is Lintang?”

  “Lintang is busy with examinations… Is Dimas there?”

  Vivienne heard a long sigh.

  “Pourqoui? What’s wrong with Dimas?”

  “He’s not feeling well, is all.”

  “Nugroho…! This is me.”

  Vivienne waited for an answer.

  Finally, one came: “He’s sick but I don’t know why. Maybe his appendix, maybe something intestinal, or it could be his liver. Last night he was throwing up…”

  “Is he still drinking?”

  “Yes, but how else are you going to keep warm in this freezing country?”

  “And I suppose he’s refusing to see a doctor. Is that right?”

  Nugroho chuckled. “Oh, Viv, you know him better than anyone. What happened is that he collapsed at the Metro and we took him to the hospital. There they put him through a series of tests…”

  “And he has yet to pick up the results…”

  “Well, that’s our Dimas.”

  “I know, but the hospital called me.”

  “Oh,” Nugroho coughed. “Sorry about that, Viv. That was my fault. I’m the one who filled in the admissions form. I just figured that it was more likely that he’d listen to your advice than anything we said.”

  “It’s OK. I called Lintang.”

  “Oh…”

  “Where is Dimas now?”

 
“Still asleep. He had a bad stomach again last night, so I brought him home and stayed here with him.”

  “Thanks, Nug. OK, just tell Dimas that I called.”

  “Will do, Viv. Give Lintang a hug and tell her that all her uncles at Tanah Air miss seeing her.”

  “I know…” Vivienne answered, very slowly.

  Just a week before the brouhaha about Dimas’s health, Lintang had come to visit and to borrow my Encim kebaya. That night, I decided to cook one of her favorite dishes: spaghetti alle vongole. For our family, the Dimas Suryo family, food was always medicine for the sad soul. And even though I knew a number of Indonesian recipes, particularly the ones that Dimas used to make when we were still together, I still lacked the confidence to cook them on my own. Having a husband who was a good cook was, for me at least, a lucky thing. With him doing the cooking, all I had to do was choose the wine and music and then put my feet up and wait for the meal to be served. Dimas didn’t like me interfering in the kitchen anyway; the kitchen was his kingdom and he didn’t like anyone messing in it any more than I liked someone going through my office or library. As a result of this situation, with her father making all sorts of exotic dishes, Lintang grew to be a girl with a palate for a million tastes. Because she liked to tail her father in the kitchen and watch him when he was preparing his spices for whatever dish he was making, she always knew if a dish was lacking in spices and which ones were deficient.

  That night, when she told me about her professor’s comments and his suggestion for her final assignment, I immediately detected anxiety in her voice. I also heard notes of confusion and worry. To make a documentary film about her father’s homeland and a part of its history that the Indonesian government had buried wouldn’t just be difficult; it would be mentally taxing for even the soundest of minds. I didn’t know where she would find all the materials she needed to properly research the subject of September 1965. From what little I knew, so much of the available literature contained as many questions as answers. And besides all that, my hardheaded former husband and my equally stubborn daughter were not even speaking to each other.