Home

by Leila S. Chudori

  I took a sip of coffee to calm myself. I wanted to see Dimas, quickly. I had an uneasy feeling about the man. Who was he?

  “I was juuuust at Tanah Air. I saw Dimas, Nugroho, Risjaf, and Tjai too. Amazing, amaaazing! Having been stranded in a foreign country like they were and then being able to make a go of it. Just ammaazzzing! And to be able to make a living from a restaurant that serves Indonesian food? That is quite something, really quite something!”

  He then giggled for the longest while. I didn’t know if what he’d just said was honest praise or pure cynicism. I began to gather my students’ papers. He gulped his coffee as if he were in a hurry to go.

  “I see you have to get back to your busy life as a teacher. Sorry if I’ve bothered you. But it’s a good thing you have tenure at such a large and prestigious university. Imagine if you didn’t—what with your husband changing jobs so many times and you having a daughter to raise. Hmm, what’s her name… Lintang Utara. Such a beautiful girl.”

  I shivered as a chill ran down my spine, not because of the cold winter air but because I was sure this man had been someone evil and cruel in Dimas’s past. Someone Dimas once knew, perhaps, but definitely not a friend. If he were a friend or even just a former acquaintance or colleague, he wouldn’t have secretly sought me out and put on these airs of friendship and familiarity. God! What was he? An intelligence agent? Is that what Indonesian intelligence personnel were like? With gold teeth and a bucket of pomade on their hair, searching out the wives of their targets? I tried signaling for one of the waiters to bring me the bill, but they were all busy with other customers. Impatiently, I began to rummage through my bag, looking for my wallet.

  “No, no, no, Vivienne! Please allow me,” Sumarno said. “Chalk it up as returning the favor that Dimas once showed me. Yes, back in those days in Jakarta, when he was still thick with Surti, he’d often treat me to food or drink at places on Cikini or in Senen Market. I had so little at the time, there’s no way I could ever have gone to Paris like he did.”

  My heart was pounding—and not because he had mentioned Surti’s name, but because it was apparent that he was intentionally trying to terrorize me. I no longer had time for good manners. I stood, picked up my belongings, and walked away from the man to the cashier’s counter. I paid for my coffee and the brioche I’d eaten, then walked back and past the table without saying anything. But then I stopped. I didn’t like this. He had to know that I was not afraid of him. I turned, went back to the table and looked down on this man with the hair pomade and gold teeth, then looked him sharply in the eye.

  “Listen to me, Sumarno, or whatever your real name is. I don’t know who you are or what you want by coming to see me here. And, frankly, I don’t care. But I know that you are no friend of my husband. And if you ever again dare to show your face here or to bother me or my family, I will call the police. And in this country, at least, the police do their jobs. Get it?!”

  Sumarno looked at me in surprise, but then nodded slowly. I left him and walked back towards campus with the wind pushing me in the back.

  That night, when I went to Rue de Vaugirard, I told Dimas, Nug, Risjaf, and Tjai what had happened. Hearing my story, these aging men suddenly turned into a gang of angry youth: clenching their fists, slamming a knife into the table, and doing all sorts of primeval “manly” things.

  But my instincts were right. Though Sumarno had been an acquaintance of Dimas, he was now called “Snitch” for having pointed out to the military who should be picked up.

  People like Snitch are everywhere in the world, of course. They might even be behind the door or the walls of our homes. They have ears everywhere and a thousand poisoned tongues. I knew Dimas and his friends did not want to expend energy uselessly on getting angry at a louse like Snitch. My experience in meeting him was just one part of the country of Indonesia. I was convinced that another part of Indonesia would yield for me an experience that was much more honorable and intimate.

  “Are you OK?” Dimas asked, stroking the back of my hair worriedly as we walked towards the Metro station.

  “Oui, I’m fine. People like Sumarno are everywhere. Don’t worry. Matters like these I can handle on my own,” I said embracing Dimas for a feeling of safety and closeness.

  Dimas laughed. “I called him a rat. You called him a louse. I don’t know which description is more apt.”

  We continued walking, embracing tightly as we did. He whispered how much he loved my strength. And then I asked myself, did he love me because I was strong and independent so that he did not have to protect me as Bima protected Drupadi? Or did he love me because he would not be able to breathe if ever I were to leave him? Why could I not find the answer?

  BLOOD-FILLED LETTERS

  AS TWILIGHT SLOWLY SETTLED ON THE MARAIS, sadness also fell. Lintang could never understand why the area always evinced such a feeling of loneliness; the Marais was, after all, an area filled with cafés, galleries, and the homes of prominent French artists. Nara believed the Marais to be the hippest, most multicultural area of Paris. But Lintang could never decide whether the sadness of the place was caused by the colors of the twilight sky—thin strips of red, yellow, and orange—or because it always reminded her of her parents’ divorce.

  She once said to her father: “Your decision to live in the Marais must have had something to do with Victor Hugo, what with all his heart-wrenching works.” Lintang preferred the morning because morning time brought with it the possibility of hope: maybe the possibility of doing something good that day or correcting a misdeed. Or maybe a reunion with her father after five months of evading him—which was something that made her feel guilty, of course, but angry as well. Even so, to feel riled by her father when she felt him to be judging her life choices was one thing but to be so put out as to shut down all avenues of communication was quite another, something she’d never before done, regardless of how irritated she was with this man whose attitude towards life she deemed to be warped and cynical.

  Outside the door to her father’s gloomy apartment, untouched by the warmth of spring, Lintang knocked on the door. No answer. She took the door key from her knapsack and opened the door. Entering the apartment, she took off her jacket and unwound the light woolen scarf from around her neck.

  She scanned the length of the apartment where her father had lived all these years alone. Her heart began to crumble. Everything that had been upsetting her these past five months suddenly evaporated. The state of the apartment seemed to indicate that its owner was either very tired or ill. The living room and work space, separated one from the other by a wooden partition, looked like an untidy storeroom full of books. Usually the bookshelves in the room were neatly lined with their volumes arranged in alphabetical order by the author’s name; but now the place was in such disarray it looked as if it were inhabited by a slovenly teenager.

  On sections of the wall not covered with books hung glass paintings from Cirebon and photographs of Lintang and her father, many of the same ones that were displayed in the apartment she shared with her mother. The brown and green batik cloth with an avian motif that covered the coffee table—a gift from her grandmother, her father said—was wrinkled and faded, looking more like a rag for cleaning the kitchen counter. An array of LPs lay scattered about: Louis Armstrong, Branford Marsalis, Jack Lemmers, Bing Slamet, Koes Bersaudara, Édith Piaf, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. In former days, whenever her father had played a Led Zeppelin record, he and her mother would compete in telling her about their meeting at the time of the May Revolution in Paris. “That was the year Led Zeppelin was born,” her father declared proudly.

  Lintang always felt that her parents forced the coincidence. In 1968, at the time of her parents’ first meeting, didn’t many other things happen in the world? But just as it was forbidden for her to criticize the works of Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and James Joyce, it was also forbidden to mock Led Zeppelin. Her father was in awe of their musi
c.

  Lintang now turned her gaze to the walls. Oh… The large shadow puppet of Bima, the strongest of the Pandawa brothers in the shadow theater pantheon, which usually stood erect as would befit such a mighty character, now hung aslant, as if forlorn and sad. At least the Ekalaya puppet remained upright.

  On the coffee table, covered with a layer of ash, was an ashtray heaped with cigarette butts, a coffee cup in which only dreg were visible, and a hunk of half-eaten bread. She noticed the two apothecary jars with cloves and turmeric root standing neatly upright among the many books that were piled in disorderly stacks on the book shelf.

  Suddenly, Lintang heard raised voices coming from her father’s bedroom. A look of surprise washed over her face as she heard Nugroho trying to persuade her father to do something he obviously did not want to do. Her father was clearly rankled.

  “It won’t hurt; it’s just a small needle. You don’t even have to watch!” That was Nugroho speaking.

  “No, Mas Nug, I don’t want to,” said her father.

  “Come on, trust me. Just last night you had an acupuncture treatment, and you felt all right after that, didn’t you?”

  Lintang tiptoed towards her father’s room, not wanting to interrupt the developing drama. She could guess what was happening: Om Nug was trying to treat her father with acupuncture and her father was loudly and staunchly refusing. She smiled; her big strong daddy was strangely afraid of needles.

  Lintang peeked inside to see Nugroho opening a small bag of acupuncture needles. Her father blinked madly at their sight, as if he’d seen a witch. With what strength he had, he pulled himself up and then stumbled hurriedly towards the bathroom. Once inside, he slammed and locked the door behind him.

  “Come on, Dimas…” Nugroho entreated.

  “No! No!” her father shouted from behind the bathroom door.

  Nugroho rose from the chair beside Dimas’s desk and softly knocked on the bathroom door. “Please, Dimas. If we don’t do it now, it will be too late.”

  “No! I’ll sleep in here if I have to. I’m not coming out as long as you have that needle in your hand!”

  Nugroho looked exasperated and ready to give up. Sitting down, he suddenly noticed that Lintang was now present in the room, watching him with a covert smile. Seeing her, he immediately gave a sigh of relief and jumped up to give her a warm hug.

  “Lintang, Lintang, my girl… Why has it been so long since you’ve come to the restaurant? How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, “just busy.”

  Nugroho looked at Lintang who so very much resembled her mother Vivienne, except for her hair and eyes which obviously came to her from Dimas.

  Nugroho shot a glance at the bathroom door. “That father of yours… Yo wis, wong ditambani kok wegah. I’m just trying to help, but he won’t let me.”

  Lintang smiled again and patted Nugroho on the shoulder. He had already begun to repack his set of needles.

  “I’ll try to talk to him,” she said.

  “Please do. Maybe if you talk to him, he’ll listen.” Now ready to go, Nugroho picked up his bag. “I have to get back to the restaurant. I hope we can catch up soon.”

  Lintang gave her kind uncle a peck on the cheek and then walked with him to the door. After Nugroho had gone, Lintang returned to the bedroom and rapped softly on the bathroom door. “Ayah…”

  She heard her father angrily clear his throat and was surprised by the vehemence of its sound. He must have known the voice was hers.

  “Ayah, it’s me, Lintang…”

  She heard the inside latch on the door release. The door cracked open and she saw her father’s head appear. The stress in his features immediately vanished and his eyes glowed with happiness at the sight of his daughter. But wary that Nugroho and his needles might still be there, he hesitated before opening the door wider, first sticking his head further out and looking around.

  “Is Om Nug still here?”

  Lintang giggled, “He’s gone, Ayah. Come out of there!”

  Dimas emerged cautiously from the bathroom, his eyes still bright with suspicion, not trusting that Nugroho wasn’t there, ready to attack again with his needles. Lintang shook her head in silent agreement with the view that over time the role of parent and child reverses itself, with the child acting as the parent when the parent is older.

  Finally sure that Nugroho was no longer on the premises, Dimas breathed a sigh of relief. “Did you see the size of those needles?” he said, spreading his arms to the length of a broomstick.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Lintang muttered dismissively. Then noticing her father’s unkempt bed, she immediately began to strip the sheets and take off the pillowcases.

  Dimas observed the focused look on his daughter’s face.

  Throwing the used linen into a pile on the floor, Lintang looked up to see her father staring at her. She went to him and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Ça va?”

  “Ça va bien.” Dimas smiled and straightened his posture, then began to help Lintang, who had taken a clean set of sheets and pillowcases from the chest of drawers and was now putting the sheets on his bed.

  “Your mother and Om Nug are making the problem bigger than it is,” he said, then immediately changed the subject: “How are you and your studies?”

  “My coursework is fine; all I have left is my final,” she said. Then she brought the subject back to the matter at hand: “I was told you collapsed at the Metro station.”

  With her arms on her chest, Lintang looked like a mother speaking to her five-year-old son.

  Dimas scratched his head and turned his attention to the pillowcases that Lintang had just changed. “Yes, yes… Je suis fatigué.” Dimas glanced at Lintang and again tried to change the topic of conversation: “You’re looking thin. How long has it been since you’ve been here? Four months, five…?”

  Lintang didn’t answer the question. She was not going to feel guilty or take offense at her father’s comments. Besides, he looked thinner too. And all those pills on the bookshelf? There were far too many of them.

  “Did you pick up the results of the tests?” she asked.

  “Om Nug said he’d pick them up for me tomorrow. But, you know, he’s extra busy now at the restaurant now, covering for me.”

  Lintang began to straighten her father’s bedside table, which was littered with ash. On it was an ashtray piled high with cigarette butts and matchsticks. At that moment, her father removed a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and put it to his lips, but when he opened a matchbox and put a light to the cigarette, Lintang immediately yanked it from his mouth and stubbed it in the ash tray.

  Dimas shrugged in surrender, not willing to risk an argument with his daughter, who had been boycotting his presence in her life for so long. He watched her as she slammed the contents of the ashtray into the wastebasket beside the bathroom door.

  Lintang then began to check her father’s medicine bottles, one by one, reading their instructions. “These pills, the ones that you’re supposed to take in the morning and the afternoon, have you taken them?” she asked.

  “This morning, I did. Haven’t taken the ones for the afternoon.”

  Lintang went to the kitchen, filled a glass of water from the faucet in the sink and returned to her father’s side with two kinds of pills in her other hand. “It says on the bottle: ‘Take regularly until finished.’”

  Her father downed the tablets obediently. As he looked on, Lintang went back to straightening his room After the bedroom was in reasonable order, Lintang shifted her attention to the living room. The sofa cover was rumpled and its upright cushions on the floor because Nugroho had slept there the night before; the books in their cases needed to be sorted and re-shelved; the dining table was a mess, and the wooden floor looked as if it hadn’t been touched by a vacuum cleaner in at least a week.

  “Come over here, Lintang. Sit with me. We can straighten up later.”

  “No, I’m not comfortable like this. It
’s like a pigsty in here!”

  Just like your mother, Dimas muttered to himself, eyes closed. He stretched out on the sofa as he watched his daughter straighten the living room.

  “Stop, Lintang. We can do that later. I want to know what’s happening with you. What’s your final assignment?”

  Lintang turned off the vacuum cleaner and set it aside. She knew it was time for her to stop this pretense. She had to drop the bomb and then convince her father that what she was doing was right, without getting into an argument. She sat down beside her father on the couch, then turned and looked at him directly in the face.

  “I might have to go to Indonesia…” she began.

  Her father immediately opened his eyes and blinked. “Why? What for? Your final assignment?”

  Lintang took a deep breath and then told her father about her discussion with Didier Dupont and how he had nixed her proposal for a documentary on Le Quartier Algérien à Paris. She spoke of her visit to the Indonesian embassy for the Kartini Day banquet and the preliminary research she had conducted at the library to try to find the historical context of Indonesia during the crisis of 1965. She also told her father about the late nights she had spent discussing her project with several senior class members at the Sorbonne and even about her conversation with Narayana’s father, who frequently traveled to Indonesia.

  Dimas listened to Lintang carefully. Each question she raised seemed considered and well thought out. What had really happened in Indonesia on September 30, 1965? What was the impact of the events of 1965 on survivors and their families? What was the effect of New Order government policy on the years that followed? These were the questions of a future academician who was undertaking bibliographic research in a rational manner about the conflict in Indonesia’s military elite at that time.

  “While these are questions I very much feel need to be answered, I also want to find a more human side,” Lintang said. “This is to be a documentary film, after all. I’d like to focus on the fates of people whose lives were affected by this political conflict—not just the bloodbath itself and the incredible number of deaths that occurred, but the ongoing political trauma and the extraordinary amount of indoctrination the Indonesian people have gone through in the period since 1965.”