The reasons your sister doesn’t want her daughter to visit Lubang Buaya are those of your average, middle-class mother. She wants a healthy, beautiful world for her child, not one poisoned by trauma and images of horror. Her objections have nothing to do with ideology. The last time you saw her, she remained anti-communist.
You close your sister’s email without replying and rise from the computer desk in the hotel lobby. Your sister, and your memories of her, always make you feel like you’re on the run but that one of your shoes keeps catching on something behind you. You don’t want to look back. You want to flee as far as you can, and not be caught.
At three o’clock you’ll meet Yvette. Like Nazwa, you’ll also go to a museum. Yvette has invited you to the Holocaust Memorial.
The sharp lines of the Holocaust Memorial make you uneasy. Perhaps everywhere is the same; sites that recall dark pasts never let people feel comfortable. But now you’re rattled by order. You’re surrounded by thousands of rectangular stones, arrayed horizontally like coffins, in neat rows behind and before you. The stones are grey, clean and uniform. You walk among them, on a narrow pathway, seeking a foothold on uneven terrain.
You glance at Yvette. It’s truly unnerving when people place their memories in boxes, without curves.
‘The design is deliberately disturbing,’ says Yvette. ‘Cold and clinical.’
The museum was built two years previously, in the vicinity of government buildings and embassies. Maybe we should be forced to remember straight lines and right angles, because memories are tangled strands vying to be drawn out. Humans hear so many stories. Maybe the strands in your head have become so enmeshed that you can’t determine which stories to remember. You have to admit that your encounter with Yvette is making thoughts of Muhammad recede. Your grief begins to fade. But forgetting is an involuntary crime. You don’t wish to forget Muhammad, so you have to hold in your memory what he has passed on: the story of Snow Red.
What would Helga say if she saw this concrete monument? Helga, child of world war, who felt that everything she did was inappropriate. Her memories were full of soft and delicate crannies, like Oma’s cakes. But she could never reach what lay within. You feel you can see Oma’s face here, among the grey concrete corners on either side. Oma boarded a train, but it wasn’t Snow Red who led her away.
‘Hey.’ Yvette touches your shoulder. ‘Let’s go,’ she whispers.
You nod.
Yeah, let’s go. We all want to go. Muhammad wanted to leave with Snow Red because he was tired of seeking refuge, because he hoped that ghosts could help him return home. Home, though his house would never be as it was. You also wanted to leave, though you now realise how shallow your desires were. And Yvette – why did she long to be abducted?
You walk in silence, without speaking. Once you reach the road, you let out a sigh. Again you find yourself in a crowd, accosted by the hubbub of the street. Relief? An inappropriate emotion. But you don’t want to feel alone. You don’t want to be captured.
‘Over there is the Brandenburg Gate,’ says Yvette. You’ve been there, on one of your early aimless days, but you accept Yvette’s invitation to visit again.
‘This city is crazy about museums,’ you mumble as you gaze at the bright blue sky sheltering the chariot atop the gate.
‘Does Indonesia have museums like that?’ Yvette asked.
‘Like what?’
‘Museums of dark history.’
Your sister’s email comes to mind, and your memories of the trip to Lubang Buaya. Yes, a museum of dark history. Who could forget? They didn’t let us. Maybe all these dark sites are connected. A close high school friend said the military called the PKI’s attempted coup Gestapu, a jumbled acronym for Gerakan September Tigapuluh, the September 30 Movement, in order to recall the terror of the Nazi police. Gestapu and Gestapo, bloodthirsty older and younger siblings. In your head the voice of your friend rings:
But who are the real fascists?
Early in high school your best friend was Dian. Her full name was Dian Carolina Halim. You haven’t seen her in years, but this visit to the past brings her back. Very strange. You wanted to run far, far away, but this new world catapults you to memories and names long buried, like Dian Carolina Halim.
‘When I was a kid, my friends and I went to Lubang Buaya. They call it the Sacred Pancasila Monument. I don’t know why they call it that – the name actually means Crocodile Pit. Maybe it takes a holy miracle to wipe out communists, like killing witches.’
You tell Yvette your story.
Unlike the Holocaust Memorial with its lines and angles, Lubang Buaya is filled with curves and details. You still remember a relief depicting the torture of the generals. Your teacher said it was proof of the savagery of the Partai Komunis Indonesia.
‘Did I already tell you that bit?’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘I’m sorry, but I heard that line over and over.’
Teacher sounded like a broken cassette tape and probably didn’t endorse his own statement, but you swallowed it whole. In the relief, side by side with the horror made manifest in violent bodies wielding hammers, a bare-shouldered woman was dancing, surrounded by men. Who is that? you asked Teacher. He answered quickly, as if wanting to stave off further questioning: Oh, that’s a Gerwani, a member of the Indonesian Women’s Movement, a communist supporter. Your teacher must have felt that the story of the Gerwani dancing naked before mangling the generals was too much for a fourth-grader. But the image on the relief was immortalised in Treason of the September 30 Movement, and repeated every year when it screened on television. ‘Blood is red, General,’ says a Gerwani, before slicing his face with a razor blade. Kids playing at school would repeat the phrase dramatically: Blood is red, General! When games got out of hand, cry-babies would run home tearfully to their mothers. Their mothers, in your imaginings, would be cooking in the kitchen. No razor blades for moms.
A woman dressed in red with blade in hand, however, is capable of anything.
The violent scenes always made you clamp your eyes shut. Fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade. After that you had no desire to watch Treason of the September 30 Movement again, but the agonised faces of the generals remained, cursed to be frozen in stone forever. Monuments and memories are grooved. Gothic.
For some reason you always connect memories of the PKI and Gerwani with an event that happened at school, before Suharto fell, back when you and Dian Carolina Halim were still best friends.
Students eagerly anticipated Year Two of high school because one year later they would enjoy the glory days of Year Three, when they became the most senior pupils in school, and girls could wear skirts as short as they liked without fear of being ‘squashed’ by the older girls. You don’t know if kids even use the term ‘squash’ any more, since the English word ‘bully’ has become popular.
You and Dian Carolina Halim had just finished eating fried rice in the cafeteria when the most popular Year Three girls began creating a commotion. Hearing the shouts, you hurried to pay for your lunch and rushed to see what all the fuss was about. Dian was a quiet girl who didn’t like parties, but she was always happy to peer, or rather peep, at pandemonium. You followed Dian, curious but shy. You hated the seniors from the popular clique, who could be so full of themselves. But they never squashed you – you weren’t even a blip on their radar. You were nobody and your best friend was nerdy Dian, an innocent-looking bookworm who could never be a threat.
As her surname suggested, Dian Carolina Halim was of Chinese descent (her grandfather had changed his name from Liem to Halim in the sixties). Being Chinese in a good state school in the nineties meant being a minority, invisible, considered unattractive. You were occasionally mistaken for being Chinese as well – your skin was fair and you always walked at Dian’s side. Sometimes you regretted that your best friend wasn’t cool, but you’d immediately dismiss such thoughts because Dian was so nice to you.
‘Those Year One girls are
being squashed again,’ Dian explained, unasked. ‘The dynamic duo.’
A crowd of onlookers had already gathered. Here we are now. Entertain us.
‘Linda and Ayu?’
Dian nodded. You’d never spoken to Linda and Ayu, but they were notorious around school for obvious reasons: they were beautiful, rich, and boys went crazy over them. That was enough to make them the most hated girls in Year One. The popular Year Three girls were always looking for reasons to squash them: for wearing shoes that were too flashy or skirts that were too short. At school, only seniors could show off brand-name shoes and wear miniskirts. This time, the reason was their underwear. Below their thin white uniforms, Linda and Ayu wore black bras.
‘Oh, think you’re hot, do you?’ a Year Three girl shouted. ‘Wear a black bra to school again, and you’re fucking dead.’
‘Don’t go looking for attention!’
‘PKI wannabes, huh?’ added another.
You nudged Dian. PKI? What did that mean? Partai Komunis Indonesia? Dian shook her head. PKI: perempuan kutang item, she explained, a girl with a black bra. She was always trying to stay on top of the latest slang at school.
‘Planning to be sluts, are you? You’re already acting like Gerwani!’
‘Yeah, Gerwani. They’re lesbos.’
The word Gerwani was immediately met with howling laughter by the clique of popular girls. You remembered a bare-shouldered woman dancing on a relief at Lubang Buaya. Linda and Ayu looked down, their faces red. Ayu started to cry. You felt sorry for them, but your feet remained fixed in place. You kept watching, much as you watched Treason of the September 30 Movement when the generals were being cursed, tortured and then executed. Blood is red, General! No need to pity Linda and Ayu. Chances were that two years later they’d be doing exactly the same thing to pretty girls in the classes below them.
What happened was wrong. Very wrong. You shouldn’t have been a bystander, just as you shouldn’t have believed Treason of the September 30 Movement. But you only realised that a few years later, when you were a university student and met Dian Carolina Halim once more.
In Year Three you and Dian were in different classes, so you rarely saw her. When the May 1998 riots hit, Dian disappeared from school. Her father, afraid that she’d be beaten up or raped just for being Chinese, wouldn’t let her out of the house. Dian was fine, but after that May’s events she became more of a loner. She’d claim to be busy studying at home. She wanted to move to Jogja and attend Gadjah Mada University because she didn’t want to stay in Jakarta. I hope you get in, Dian, you said. You heard rumours that state universities discriminated against ethnic Chinese. But Dian was accepted to study sociology at Gadjah Mada, while you were stuck at a private university in Jakarta.
Dian visited your house in early 2002. Her pale yellowish skin had grown sallow. She was interning with an independent organisation that documented the stories of former Gerwani, who mostly lived alone in sheltered housing. The organisation sought to present an alternative narrative of the past. Several times she used the phrase ‘rectification of history’. Dian Carolina Halim, the bookworm, had become a left-wing activist.
‘You remember that incident, don’t you?’
The bullying at the school was part of New Order military culture, Dian said. We became used to violence because as kids we grew up watching torture in Treason of the September 30 Movement.
Our culture is a culture of torture.
In the living room, you mostly listened as Dian, who’d been quiet for so long, gave voice to her rage. She seemed to hate many things. She hated all forms of militaristic hierarchy in schools, including the hazing that happened during university orientation week. She hated how she had long stood by, watching students being bullied. She hated that she only came to understand years later how the myth of Gerwani as savage women was perpetuated. There were no nude dances, no razors in hand. The state feared smart women who were politically active.
In the middle of the conversation, your sister, who was back from Bandung for the school holidays, came over from her room.
‘Hey,’ she scolded. ‘Don’t talk about Gerwani so loudly.’
‘Why not?’
‘Informers could be all around us.’
‘Informers?’ Dian gave her a quizzical look. ‘Suharto has stepped down, Mbak.’
Unlike you, Dian admired your sister. In Dian’s eyes, not only did your sister get into Mechanical Engineering at Bandung, she was one of the first women to wear a headscarf when Suharto banned them in schools. Your sister spoke up for the right to wear the hijab with Muslim friends, and she was upset that your father forbade her to join the demonstrations against the New Order in 1998. Dian looked up to her for all this. To her, women who fought for the right to wear a headscarf were just as brave as Gerwani who rejected polygamy. But, in your living room, Dian was struck by something else: your sister feared a communist threat.
‘Don’t let communism rise again. Books are circulating now, written by children of PKI members,’ your sister told Dian.
‘What, don’t let communism rise from the grave, you mean, Mbak?’ Dian frowned. ‘The thing is all the PKI members were wiped out – murdered.’
Your sister and Dian engaged in a fierce debate, while you, with allegiance to neither the right nor the left, remained silent. After that argument you realised that Dian’s admiration for your sister had evaporated in an instant. And that was the last time you ever saw Dian Carolina Halim.
A museum exists in your head, a museum of ignorance. Entry is free, but you don’t want to enter, because it displays all the stupidity of your past. Years later, after reading a book called The Museum of Innocence, you looked back and wondered about the right term to use. High school bullying: was that innocence or ignorance? There is nostalgia in the word ‘innocent’, whereas you really don’t care to remember all the events that you consider ignorant.
How strange are journeys that prise open memories, events so distant you never think about them, items stored in a museum of ignorance. The journey makes you nervous. Perhaps the line between past and present is never clear. You’re as unenlightened as ever.
Yvette continues walking beside you in her red boots, listening attentively to your story. You should have worn your demon shoes today, but you knew you’d be walking a lot, and your shoes aren’t made for walking.
‘Funny. I remember more about my home elsewhere,’ you say.
‘Like looking in the mirror?’
You turn to her. You feel like you’re hearing someone else’s voice, but it’s just Yvette next to you, wearing a soft smile. Then you remember Devil’s words: every mirror is a door.
‘Yes, but each time I look, I see something slightly different.’
‘I know. Your home will never be the same again.’
You sit on a park bench and buy Yvette a coffee. You didn’t expect to reveal so much to a new acquaintance. You also didn’t expect your journey to take you backwards rather than forwards. You feel you’ve run as far away as possible but have still been caught.
‘Sometimes travel can revive traumas,’ Yvette says.
Trauma? Watching the New Order’s propaganda films, the girls who squashed each other at school, your communist-fearing sister and Dian Carolina Halim – you’re not sure such memories can be called traumatic. Or more honestly, you don’t know what to call them.
‘Strange, but I don’t feel traumatised.’
‘Wounded?’
‘Yes, maybe,’ you say, and then sip your already cooling coffee. ‘What about you? What do you keep in the museum in your head?’
‘Not in my head,’ she corrects, and taps the asphalt with her shoes. ‘These are my museum. I walk with my wounds everywhere I go.’
On the road, it seems, people share the stories of their scars. That day you hear another tale, another bend in the journey. You feel like a tourist moving ever further off the map, like an adventurer without an obvious storyline. But you have no fixed des
tination beyond a set of routes defined by tourist guidebooks. At an unexpected turn, Yvette reveals to you the origin of her red boots.
Continue to page 120.
You don’t want to look in the mirror again. With the doorman’s help, you lower it, wrap it neatly, and lean it against the wall. The mirror remains in your apartment, but at least you don’t have to confront the carvings, that Medusa-like hair ready to strangle you. Instead, you order a plain black-wood mirror from Target. All it takes is a $15 purchase to check your clothes, shoes and scarf before leaving the apartment. No more irrational horror, no more anxiety from a sense of being constantly watched.
You can now return to the existential question that has been increasingly plaguing you: how does life go on? More precisely, how can you start living with a purpose?
Time to find a job and meet others. Besides, half the money in your account is gone. You’ve realised that $20,000 is not enough to live off for a year. How naive to have been thinking in Indonesian terms. You regret squandering so much. Perhaps Devil will send more money, but you doubt it. You believe he loves you, but he’s also one cunning boyfriend.
Propped up in bed with your laptop, you start looking for jobs on Craigslist. You send out several applications to vacancies for English tutors for foreign speakers. The poor huddled masses of New York might be tired and desperate to learn English, but no one answers you. You’re disappointed, but you get it. White people are trusted more in all sorts of areas, including teaching English. Who in America wants to learn English from a fresh-off-the-boat Indonesian? You start lowering your standards. Nanny? Nannying needs references, though, and you’ve never looked after a kid. You aim for waitressing jobs and contact a few cafes and restaurants. Unfortunately, waiting tables also demands experience.
The Wandering Page 10
