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by Leila S. Chudori

  “What is it, ma chérie…”

  “My father kept talking about Karet.”

  “Karet?”

  “A cemetery in Jakarta.”

  “Oh …”

  “He said it’s not as grand or beautiful as the cemeteries here, that it’s just a normal cemetery. But still, he said, Karet is the place where he wants to go home!”

  Why she had suddenly snapped at Nara and thrown this information in his face, Lintang didn’t know; but sometimes, and for no apparent reason, Nara suddenly seemed to transform into a young aristocrat who had no idea that there were still places in the world where beggars existed and piles of shit littered the streets.

  “I know of Karet, Lintang. I know it’s a cemetery in Jakarta,” Nara answered patiently, trying to understand what she was really saying. He had been to Jakarta often. Lintang knew that.

  Hearing Nara’s calm voice, Lintang suddenly felt guilty and started to cry. She hugged him, then took a sip of whatever it was he had been drinking.

  “I’m so sorry, mon chéri. My father was in such a strange mood today.”

  “Maybe he’s just sad because you’re leaving.”

  “Leaving? I’m only going to be gone for a few weeks. At most a month and a half, if I have to extend. I have a deadline to meet.”

  “But you’ve just been reunited and now you’re going away.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Lintang said in agreement with Nara’s theory. “Maybe that’s it.”

  “I’m sure that’s it. Your parents love you. And your relationship with them is not only that of parent and child; you are like a friend for them. But enough of this for now. It’s getting late, my lovely. Let’s get something to eat and then go home for dessert! I want to kidnap you now.”

  Nara stroked Lintang’s neck.

  Lintang smiled and her eyes were aglow. She lifted Nara’s glass and drank the rest of its contents in one swallow. “How about if we forget about having dinner tonight? We can pick up a bottle of wine and go to my apartment now.”

  Nara grinned widely when he heard this brilliant idea.

  “But you’re going to be hungry,” Nara noted soberly. “I know you’re going to get hungry.” He protested because he knew that if there was one thing that might get in the way of their lovemaking, it would be Lintang’s empty stomach.

  “After our kidnapping session, we can order Chinese,” Lintang suggested. “Come on, let’s go!”

  Lintang straightened her bag and Nara quickly paid the bill. On the sidewalk, they held each other closely as they walked.

  “One and a half months is too long, ma chérie. Please make it just three weeks. More than that and I’m going to come and get you!” Nara nibbled Lintang’s ear. He was restless and the Metro seemed so far away and would take so long that he immediately hailed a taxi and they soon set off in the direction of Belleville.

  “D’accord!”

  For three smoldering hours—three days was not realistic—Nara succeeded in making Lintang forget the word “Karet.” For three hours Lintang whispered a different vocabulary, an intimate one that further flamed Nara’s passion. Weeks and weeks of delayed desire had to be allayed in that one night only. They turned up the music as loud as possible so that their neighbors, separated from them by only a thin wall, would not be bothered by the constant creaking of the bed and the high-pitched moans of its inhabitants. But after three boisterous and sweat-filled hours, when Nara was lying asleep and naked on the bed, Lintang opened her eyes to look at the ceiling. She got out of bed, wrapped herself in a sheet, and went into the kitchen. There, her father’s words began to stir up her thoughts. She tried calming herself with a glass of water.

  Through the large window in her apartment, Lintang could see the streetlights of Belleville washing the old buildings with their glow: spice stores, a boulangerie, and the old apartment building across the street from her own. Suddenly, the streetlights began to die, one after another, and in just a few seconds the buildings outside had turned into tombstones, standing in a neat and even line. Lintang squinted her eyes to see. Directly in the middle of the row of tombstones, she could see a mound of fresh red clay earth, not yet covered by stone or cement, where a plain wooden plank was planted. On it was printed the simple words: DIMAS SURYO, 1930–1998.

  III

  SEGARA ALAM

  A DIORAMA

  JAKARTA 1993

  THEY’RE ALL STANDING, bodies bloodied, limbs injured—miniature statues that have been placed there, arranged just so, forever frozen in one position. Maybe a few facts can be gleaned from their assemblage; maybe the rest is just a series of poses.

  The small figures behind the glass seem to be actors in some kind of play. One of them has been shot in a living room. Another one, tied to a chair, is being tortured. All kinds of cruelties have been carved into this extensive diorama which has served as the official history of this country for twenty-eight years.

  I watch as a group of grade school students form a neat line behind their teacher and the museum guide, who proceeds to explain to the children how the communists abducted the generals and then hacked and slashed their bodies with swords and knives. Two of the boys press their foreheads to the glass, their eyes bulging as they take in the cruel sights they’re seeing. Behind them is a group of junior high school girls, waiting to take their turn to look through the glass.

  Ooh, yuck! Creepy! Those are bad guys.

  Is that blood or ketchup, ma’am?

  In the film, they were singing.

  Be orderly now, and write down what you see for a report…

  The first and second comments are from the grade school students and the third is from a junior high school student who is comparing the scene in the diorama to The September 30 Movement: the Treachery of the Indonesian Communist Party, a feature film that all students are obliged to watch annually around the time of the anniversary of the events depicted in the diorama.

  This is history. Here, in this place, the powers that be have conflated a story capable of disrupting childhood memories, inserting in them scenes of defilement, corruption, and horror. Compared with the filmed enactment of the same events, which come across as highly theatrical if not outright melodramatic, the diorama is able to elicit a more powerful emotional reaction precisely because of its silence, which permits the mind greater room for a gory imagination. Who created this diorama? What was its original intent—a tool for information, education, propaganda, or entertainment? Or all of them together? Could the diorama’s creator have known how effectively it would be used as an educational tale for the schoolchildren of this country, how this country’s mentality would come to be shaped by wounds and paranoia?

  If you open the encyclopedia and look up the name Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, you’ll find that it was he who partnered with Charles Marie Bouton in 1822 to construct the first diorama in Paris. You will read that their creation was intended as a tool for entertainment and education—and not, as it were, a device to project a version of history that was supposed to be accepted as true.

  I watch those two grade school students, their foreheads still pressed against the glass, entranced by the scenes of torture. And then I recall a time twenty years earlier, when Bimo and I were in fifth grade.

  I remember the date very clearly: September 30, 1975, the tenth anniversary of the events in 1965. I can see my class being herded onto a bright yellow bus, each one of us carrying a knapsack containing a notepad, pencils, a stuffed bun, and drinking water. We’re taken to far eastern Jakarta for a tour of the Sacred Pancasila Monument. Arriving there, the lot of us are ordered out of the bus and told to line up in straight and orderly fashion.

  Just that one visit was enough for me to have the whole scene memorized. The first thing I remember about the site is a kind of suspended stage on which life-size bronze statues of the seven military officers who were killed that night are standing. Posed in heroic positions, they project an air of supreme authority.
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br />   We are told to gather around the woman guide and listen to her as she repeats all the names and incidents we’d often been told of before.

  As is well known and recorded in history, the generals who are depicted here were abducted and tortured, and their bodies thrown into a well called Lubang Buaya, the infamous Crocodile Pit. The blame for this rests solely on the shoulders of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party…

  Unfortunately, that statement was not true. The blame didn’t rest solely on the shoulders of Communist Party members. It was transferred to their friends and families as well, and even to their children who hadn’t yet been born in 1965. All were sinners; all carried a permanent stain.

  I became frightened and started to shake. Bimo, too, and we didn’t know why. Was it from hearing that scary story? Or from the fear that the guide might know who our fathers were? Bimo and I focused our attention on the white streaks in the guide’s hair. In trying to count the number of streaks, this little game made us less nervous and the tour pass by more quickly.

  Over the years, the voice of the woman guide grew more tremulous as she aged. I sometimes wondered if she was doing that job because she needed extra money for her family, or out of some kind of zealot-like dedication to the New Order government and its monument to history. In the end, I concluded that she was there just doing what she had been told to do, without any real understanding of what she was saying. I bet that if she were asked, she couldn’t answer the question of who the real owner of history is.

  What else did Bimo and I do when we were there? For one thing, we’d stand next to each other beside a support pillar and compare each other’s height. Although Bimo is older than me, born the year before I was, for as long as we can remember, I’ve always been taller than him. For all the world, we looked just like those two grade school boys who have their foreheads pressed to the glass in front of the diorama at the museum that opened to the public this past year. In addition to the diorama, which extends the length of the main hall, the museum also contains, as illustrations of historic scenes, a number of reconstructed rooms, sites where various nefarious meetings were held and acts of torture were perpetrated. I stand there, staring and asking myself a question. Twenty-eight years ago, the question was a simple one: how much truth is reflected in the diorama?

  To give my question a more academic or philosophical sound, I might ask instead who are history’s owners? Indeed, who is it that determines who is a hero and who is a traitor? Who is it that determines the accuracy of events? Is it the historians who were hired and paid by the government to write the official history of September 1965? Or is it that far smaller number of historians and intellectuals who have dared to ask about issues not recorded in official history? I know several Indonesian historians who have long been itching to dig up, uncover, and refute the New Order’s official version of history. I know of their grumbling—in academic terms, that is—about the twisting of history and the amplification of certain events so that particular individuals emerge as heroes.

  One historian wrote in an academic journal I read that the political situation in 1965 was not nearly as black and white as might be inferred by the diorama at Lubang Buaya or as depicted in the state-produced film that we were obliged to view every year. I also know the views of friends of mine in the mass media who have long seen as problematic the government’s version of history that has been shoved down the throats of school children for now going on thirty years.

  My sister Kenanga has often said that history is owned by the holders of power, not just in Indonesia, but in all authoritarian regimes. Even countries in the West that are thought to be democratic tend to shape history as they perceive it to be. But at least their historians are able to be fairly independent-minded. Any overt distortion of historical facts would cause outrage in the academic quarter.

  The way I see it, history is owned not just by the power holders but also by the materialistic middle class who cuddle up with them. I more often use the term “power grabbers” to describe the former because the people who have been in power in this country for these past few decades no longer have the right to govern. Meanwhile, the middle class, which emerged during this same period of time—and which does have the choice to be critical—remains incapable of questioning the legitimacy of the corrupt New Order government.

  And now here I am, at the age of twenty-eight, and the government is unfurling its flag further with the expansion of this “sacred” monument to include a Museum of the Treachery of the Indonesian Communist Party.

  Maybe it’s just easier for the middle class to act as a fan of or to play a role in the New Order government than to exercise their critical faculties. But the only possible way to do so is to pretend to be deaf and blind as the government continues to bury rotting corpses and to perch like vultures on victims’ graves. The middle class has the education. Imagine if they actually had the nerve and integrity to speak up? I suppose that they, too, would end up like the signatories of the Petition of 50 after they protested against Soeharto’s continued rule. If the president can silence Nasution, Ali Sadikin, Mohammad Natsir, and other influential people, what would he do to people less powerful?

  Imagine!

  Standing in this museum, I find myself being forced to expunge all traces of my father’s memory.

  Most of what I know about my father I know from stories told to me by my sisters, Kenanga and Bulan, and Om Aji. My own memory of my father is much more vague. I have just snippets of an image of him holding me, his youngest child and only son, in his arms and of me sitting in his lap.

  I was three when the military arrested my father. He was imprisoned but never put on trial. He was executed when I was five. Even the memory of that time is a vague one, but somewhere inside of me I can see him and my mother with me on her lap, and Kenanga and Bulan crying.

  I have a faded photograph which I carry with me in my wallet. It’s always been a source of strength for me, for both my body and soul. It’s a picture of my parents and Om Dimas that Ibu said was taken some twenty-some years ago at the wedding of Om Aji and Tante Retno. The picture has yellowed, as if wasted by jaundice and revenge; but in the light that is visible in my father’s eyes, I find assurance that even if we have nothing else in this life except goodness, we will survive.

  In the picture, my father looks like a handsome and intelligent man, simple in his taste in clothing and appearance. Both my mother and Kenanga say that I look just like him. But I’m not all that sure about the comparison. To me, he looks much more self-assured, with a steady gaze capable of piercing the heart of anyone—even the person now holding this square of yellowed and cracked photographic paper. Whatever the case, that’s also what other women I’ve once been close to have always said about me. I say “once” here because I’ve never had a long-lasting relationship with a woman. Kenanga says the fault is mine and that if I ever hope to have a long-term relationship I’m first going to have to learn to control my anger. Maybe she’s right, but at least that hasn’t put a dent on intimate relations. Matters of the body and the heart are two different things. The body is on earth, the heart is in heaven. My problem is that while I prefer to spend my time on earth, most women seem always to want to talk about a future heaven. When that happens it is, for me, the time to say goodbye.

  Starting from around the time my father was executed, Om Aji and Tante Retno became frequent visitors to our home. For years I thought that they were somehow related to my family. It wasn’t until I was in junior high school that I learned that “Uncle” Aji was no relative at all. He was my father’s friend or, to be more exact, his older brother, Dimas Suryo, had been a close friend of my father.

  It was Om Aji who told me about the relationship between my father and Om Dimas, Om Risjaf, Om Tjai, and Om Nugroho, all of whom had worked together at Nusantara News. They were at once colleagues and friends, he said, who liked to discuss the important issues of the day. But while the rest had gone abroad and never been all
owed to return home, my father had stayed behind and was hunted down by the military. It all seemed so hard to believe, like the plot of a film.

  Whenever Om Aji spoke to me about these things, he’d always get this bright look in his eyes. But then, afterwards, he’d hug my shoulders and tell me over and again that if my father were still alive, he would be proud to see my dedication to my work and my lack of concern for material standing or wealth. For me to have started an NGO during the New Order regime, especially with the stigma I carry as the son of an executed communist prisoner, was not a choice that many people in my position would have made.

  I suppose Om Aji says such things to console me, but I always nod in agreement anyway. Supposing my father were still alive, I think the question I would most like to ask him is whether or not what has happened in this country is a case of historical malpractice. That’s the term I devised for it: “historical malpractice.” I didn’t want to ask Om Aji, because I’m sure he’d just tell me not to get all worked up thinking about the so-called “foundations” of the New Order government. I understand. Om Aji just wants me to be more cautious and not to be so overt in exercising my critical and challenging approach.

  For my family, Om Aji and Tante Retno are a large umbrella under which we sheltered in times of rain and storms and from the heat of the sun. Almost as far back as I can remember, Om Aji and Tante Retno were always coming to our house to check on our well-being, bringing with them a dish of baked macaroni; the fried chicken in soy sauce that Bulan likes so much; children’s books by Soekanto S.A., Djokolelono, and Mark Twain; and magazines like Si Kuntjung and Kawanku that their kids had already read. At the end of each visit, I’d often catch sight of Om Aji slipping an envelope into my mother’s hands. Ibu, who worked as a seamstress with the help of two assistants, rarely had extra funds to spare. She, the daughter of a renowned and wealthy doctor, had to make ends meet by working as a seamstress. Whether she ever received any assistance from her parents, my grandparents, I didn’t know and din’t care to find out. They live in Bogor, which isn’t far from Jakarta, but it might as well be another world away from us. Om Aji, who was no blood relation at all, was more like family for us.