“You’d be welcome,” Mita said, “but you’ll have to be patient. The equipment is mighty ancient.”
“I’m used to it,” Lintang commiserated. “The cameras and editing tools at my school are pretty old, too.”
I was getting the impression that Lintang would quickly fit in with the other people in the office.
“And what do you and Alam do?”
Lintang asked at the end of our brief tour.
When I smiled at her she immediately guessed my answer: “Victims of 1965?”
“Yes, but we can’t be too out in the open,” I explained to her. “The other people handle advocacy issues; they are our public face. Meanwhile, we work in the background, collecting and documenting the treatment of families of the victims of 1965. We’ve collected a lot of material, but we’re not yet at the point where we can take anything to court.”
“But one day you will, Bimo. I’m sure of it,” Lintang told me, with conviction in her voice. Not entertaining me, not trying to soothe me. Her sentence had the same kind of effect that Bulan’s words had had on me when she treated my injuries after being beaten by Denny and his gang: “One day, don’t you worry, they’ll get their just desserts.”
I don’t know if what Bulan said is true but, at the very least, her words helped to assure me that my life still had meaning. I became increasingly sure that Lintang being here in Indonesia—even with all her French beauty and Sorbonne smarts—was like a fish just released in its own sea. I watched as she looked at the walls near my desk, which were covered with my sketches. There were a few of my father. There was one with a clenched fist and the words “Historical Malpractice.”
Lintang gave me a smile as she pointed to that particular sketch. “Is that your work?”
“That’s not ‘work.’ That’s just doodling.”
“No, it’s better than that.”
She shook her head and looked more closely at the images.
“Om Nug, your father, looks so young and handsome,” she commented. “His mustache is still the same.”
“That’s a sketch of an old photograph. I’ve only met my father twice, you know. It’s too expensive to go see him,” I answered off the top of my head.
Lintang looked at me and then took my hand. “But now you can make some new sketches with the recent photographs I brought for you. You looked at them, didn’t you? He’s still handsome, isn’t he?”
Lintang smiled as if wanting to draw me out from my sadness. I nodded. Sad and happy, the two feelings mixed together.
Lintang looked again at the sketch of the fist. “Historical Malpractice?”
“That’s a term Alam made up,” I answered.
“He does seem to like making up new terms.”
I smiled. “That he does, Lintang. But I’d be careful; he’s a ladies’ man.”
Lintang laughed. I led her back to Alam’s desk.
“If you want to use Alam’s desk or phone, go ahead. I’ll be right over here.”
Lintang quickly removed from her knapsack her notebook with its list of potential respondents and began to make telephone calls. Meanwhile, I busied myself answering e-mails. As I typed, I kept an eye on Lintang, and could see on her face growing frustration as she learned that this person was out of town, that one was down for an afternoon nap, this one would have to first check out Lintang’s background, and that one hung up before she could speak.
At one point, Lintang leaned back against her chair and said out loud: “Now I can see why Alam said that three weeks would not be enough time.” She turned to me. “I guess it’s not easy for some families of former political prisoners to open up old wounds. Especially for people they don’t know, like me.”
“Be patient,” I told her, having no real answer. “This is just your first day.”
“I’m going to need your and Alam’s help to open their doors for me,” Lintang said.
“Later, we can look at that list of respondents and talk about them one by one. But to be honest with you, Alam would be the better person to help you.”
After Alam and Gilang had finished whatever it was they were discussing, Alam came to our corner of the room with a stern and serious look on his face. Just as I started to ask what was happening, Ujang returned with our meals.
“What is it, Alam?”
“Food’s on, Lintang.”
“What is it? What’s going on?”
Alam took his packet of rice and left Lintang’s question hanging. Lintang seemed to understand that she couldn’t force him to give her an answer.
The three of us ate our packets of rice with their Padang-style mix of side dishes while we talked about things that had nothing whatsoever to do with Alam’s furrowed look or the irksome time with my stepfather. Lintang, who I noticed was good at eating with her fingers, talked about my father and his Clark Gable mustache and how he had chased down her father with his acupuncture needles. The way she described the scene had us laughing so much we were holding our sides and trying to keep from choking on our rice.
That evening, after our work for the day was over, Gilang came to Alam and spoke again in a whispered voice about plans for the coming Monday.
Only when the three of us were on the sidewalk, walking to find a taxi, did Alam tell us what Gilang had said: “Gilang said I had to be careful. He found out that those four activists who were abducted last March…”
Lintang and I furrowed our brows.
“What?”
“He found out they heard that I was to be the next O.T.”
“O.T.?”
“Operation Target.”
“Oh…”
“What? Does that mean you can’t go anywhere?” Lintang asked.
“Are you supposed to keep your head down?” I asked.
Alam lit a cigarette, apparently to calm himself.
“Whatever…Gilang just wants me to keep a lower profile. Not to be so vocal. He said that there have been some flies around this place.”
“Flies?”
Ms. Sorbonne needed a translator. “Intelligence agents,” I told her.
Alam smiled, which surprised me. Normally, he would have been angry. With beautiful Ms. Sorbonne around, he had become extraordinarily docile.
Lintang looked around at us, left and right. “Do you mean, like spies?”
“Don’t worry, Lintang, our local brand of spy is easy to pick out, because they want to be seen,” said Alam with a laugh.
That night, the three of us walked the length of Diponegoro down to Salemba even though the sidewalks, which smelled of urine, were definitely different from those of Paris, which had been built with the pedestrian in mind. But Lintang seemed to enjoy the contrast. She listened to us attentively, every once in a while needing a translation for a term she didn’t know. Whenever that happened, she would try to find a synonym in French. “Intelligence,” she said, but the way she pronounced it was “entelijongs,” with a somewhat nasal sound. “When you say that word in French,” I told her, “it sounds much too poetic for the dirty flies the term describes.” We laughed at that and for the first time that day I was able to forget my childhood home of hell.
THE AJI SURYO FAMILY
AS THE SCENT OF TORAJA COFFEE infused the morning air, Aji Suryo wished to do nothing more than spend the weekend in pleasing solitude. After a full week at the office listening to noisy and oft-repeated conversations about the demonstrations that were disrupting traffic and causing everyone to be late to work, that is what his intention had been. These conversations had grown even more clamorous when, as the demonstrations spread, it became increasingly difficult for the staff even to leave the office building. There was little choice for Aji or the members of his staff but to wait inside and talk about the political situation until dusk, when the call to evening prayer signaled that it was time for the protestors to go home.
As Aji listened to his colleagues rant about the country’s chaotic situation—from decisions President Soeharto had made, seemi
ngly without forethought at a time when the value of the rupiah was in free-fall, to the announcement that the president had appointed his cronies and even one of his children to the cabinet—he felt very little except apathy. As bad as the country got, the government wasn’t going to change. Despite the perils that the current economic situation foreboded, the government’s leaders and their supporters still felt themselves to have the upper hand. One indication of this was that the president was still planning to leave for Cairo the following week—as if the problems at home were going to just vanish.
The strong scent of coffee stimulated his senses. There were times when Aji wanted to step out from the clichéd family portrait of a husband sitting and reading the newspaper as he waited for that morning miracle called coffee to appear, brought to him by his charming wife. Sometimes he wanted to turn the picture around or upside down, with him in the kitchen grinding the beans for coffee, like his brother with his cooking ingredients and spices, and Retno leaving the house to earn their daily bread. But Aji realized that even now as Retno was making cups of Toraja coffee for the two of them, their family was in fact very dissimilar from the one in the clichéd portrait.
While he waited for his wife and their morning coffee, Aji switched on the television and then began to turn the pages of the morning paper. The news in both media was the same: the ongoing demonstrations by students from nine universities in Medan. Finally Retno did appear with the cup of coffee he’d been waiting for, but also with a piece of news that and caused the clichéd structure of their Indonesian family to immediately implode.
“Rama called…”
The morning miracle began to dissipate. Aji tried to enjoy what remained, one small sip at a time.
“Aji…”
Aji was either not listening to his wife or pretending not to hear. His eyes were fixed on the television newscaster, who was reporting details of the demonstration that had ended in mayhem.
“Mas Aji…”
“Yes…?”
“Rama. Your son…”
“What is it? Did you see this? There’s rioting in Medan.”
“Rama is coming by; he’s on the way here now.”
This sentence caused Aji to turn and look at his wife. “What for?”
Retno sat down beside her husband and appeared to be searching for the right words, so that her husband’s Saturday, the day on which he saved his energy, would not be disturbed.
“Why? What for?” Aji asked again, this time with more stress in his voice in order to force his wife to quickly express whatever disturbing piece of news it was she had to convey. Was there ever any news about Rama that failed to dislodge the clichéd view of their home and family?
“All he said is that he wanted to speak to us.”
Aji took a breath and went back to watching television. “Almost four years now he’s had little to do with us. Last year he didn’t call or come over, just at Lebaran when he showed his face and then vanished like a ghost.”
Aji turned off the television with a look of hurt and insult on his face. “Does he even think of us as his parents anymore?”
“Whatever the case, he is our son. We can’t just let go of him.”
“Didn’t he let go of us?”
“No, he didn’t. He’s just confused is all.”
“A teenager having an identity crisis is normal. That’s the time when people change. But Rama is an adult, almost thirty years old. Your thinking is too complicated. There’s no need to defend him. It’s simple: he’s ashamed of us and himself!”
The light in Retno’s eyes dimmed as she listened to her husband. Although his criticism was justified and he made no false accusations, almost any mother is going to feel a sting when fault is found with her child. A child’s umbilical cord with his mother can be severed only by the angel of death. Between Retno and her son there was an everlasting bond, which not even her husband and Rama’s father would ever understand.
“Not every child can be as happy-go-lucky as Andini,” she said softly to her husband. “Children have their own nature, even when they have the same parents.”
Retno tried to be philosophical, even though she, too, felt hurt by the absence of their son in their lives and their home.
Aji took another sip of coffee and then stroked the arms of his wife whose heart and soul were far more noble than his own, this husband who became easily riled when unable to accept things as they were.
“What does he want? He’s not coming here just to say hello, for sure.”
“Hush…”
With her husband’s anger now in abatement, Retno stood to return to the kitchen; but Aji was certain his wife knew the reason for Rama coming to the house.
“Where’s Lintang?”
“She’s been out with Alam since morning. They went to Bimo’s house. Said it had to do with her documentary.”
“And Dini?”
“Still sleeping. She was up all night working on her thesis,” his wife replied from the kitchen. “I’m making nasi uduk, is that all right?”
Aji nodded. While he knew that Retno could not have heard his non-vocal response, it didn’t really matter; he wasn’t very particular about what he ate for breakfast. Aji guessed that his wife had, if only subconsciously, reverted to being a mother of two children at home in the house. Nasi uduk with all the fixings—fried chicken, chicken livers, and shredded omelet on top of rice that had been cooked in coconut milk—had always been Rama’s favorite dish. Andini had never been a picky eater and devoured anything on her plate. She could eat a boiled fence post. But Rama had always been much choosier in his tastes: in his diet and the moods of his heart. This his mother recognized, which is why she tried so hard to make the house a happier place whenever Rama came to visit.
The television was now off and the screen mute and dark gray, yet Aji seemed to see in it an electric flashpoint that expanded into a television series about his family—one episode after another telling the story of how his children had been born and raised in a family always haunted by fear. Despite the fact that his family lived in Jakarta and that the hunt for members of the Communist Party and affiliated organizations had waned in the years after 1965, as had the tracking of families and sympathizers of Party members, this did not mean that the Aji Suryo family had ever been able to live in a state of loh jinawi, the kind of complete happiness and harmony that marks the end of every wayang tale.
Aji was well aware of the paranoia of the New Order government, which issued decrees whose only purpose was to strengthen the regime’s hold on power. Given his own experience, with his family’s home in Solo having been frequently raided by the military and the interrogations he had been submitted to during their search for his brother, it was natural that Aji chose to keep his head down in later years, both in his career and in his social life.
Unfortunately, his chosen way of life seemed to have had a negative effect on his son Rama, who grew up with an inferiority complex from thinking there was nothing about his family that he could be proud of. His parents rarely held parties or convened large gatherings with relatives or neighbors. Unlike in “normal” families, birthdays, graduations, and even Rama’s and Andini’s achievements in school competitions were never celebrated in any big way. Unlike many of Rama’s classmates, his family didn’t live in a palatial home or own an expensive car. Never anything flashy, and not because his family was poor. In fact, they were far from it. With Aji holding a degree in the field of industrial technology from the Bandung Institute of Technology and as head of the materials processing laboratory for research and development at a leading tire manufacturing company, he earned a very reasonable income, even if it was not astronomical.
Ever since Rama was a child, Aji observed, his son had always been good with figures. He paid close attention to everything said to him and was diligent in doing his homework. He was serious in undertaking each task assigned to him—and expected the same degree of fastidiousness on the part of the person giving
the assignment. With his family choosing to live outside the radar, as it were, Rama often felt stymied; but he forced himself to hide his frustration—at least until he was a teenager, when it began to burst out of him. At that point he began to complain of how his uncle’s political “adventures” had caused such discomfort for his own family’s life. In Aji’s eyes, however, what his family had had to go through was far from, for instance, what the Hananto Prawiro family had experienced, with their entire life spent beneath the microscopic scrutiny of intelligence agents.
When the government launched its so-called “Personal Hygiene” and “Environmental Cleanliness” programs in 1981, it meant that anyone hoping to become a civil servant or to occupy a public service position—like a teacher or journalist—had to first go through a special background check. Rama, who was in junior high school at the time and beginning to think of his own future, became an ever more tense adolescent. These policies served as a filter and were intended to keep the families of political prisoners from ever playing a significant role in public life. At once, Rama’s and Andini’s future prospects narrowed.
Rama felt that all his classmates, friends, and neighbors looked down on his family, that they carried a stigma which had best be kept at a safe distance. Rama’s paranoia was such that every day he asked his father whether he had been harassed at his office. Rama began to drop his use of the name “Suryo” and, in its place, use his second name instead: “Rama Dahana.”
Andini, unlike her older and anxious brother, was born with an easy-going and carefree nature. Whenever she succeeded at something, she never sought to bask in the attention garnered by her achievement. What she liked best was not the end goal—high marks, a trophy, or whatever—but the process leading to that achievement, whether in her education at school or in the stacks of books her father gave her. Without ever having met her cousin Lintang, she had initiated a correspondence, and the two cousins began to send each other books of literature whenever someone their families knew was going to or coming from Paris. The two cousins were equally avid readers who found untold joy in words and their meanings.
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