Home (8 page)

I sat down, my lower lip still hanging.

Mas Hananto looked both irritated and sad. I had no idea what had come over him. “I can't go, Dimas. I have to stay here, in Jakarta.”

I swallowed. This was the first time I had ever seen tears in Mas Hananto's eyes.

“Surti is taking the girls to her parents' home,” he said hoarsely.

I said nothing. I knew how very much he loved Kenanga and Bulan and how much they loved him.

“Why?”

Mas Hananto didn't answer.

“Because of Marni?”

Mas Hananto took a deep breath. “I'm trying to persuade Surti not to leave me. That's why I can't leave town, much less the country, at this time. I have to take care of family business. If need be, I'll stay at home and won't go into the office until Surti has changed her mind and is ready to try again.”

Wordlessly, I picked up the manila envelope and then patted Mas Hananto on the shoulder, as if to reassure him that everything would work out.

Mas Hananto unstrapped his beloved watch. “During the conference, you have to be on time,” he said handing the watch to me.

I knew I couldn't refuse his offer, not that night, so I took the watch and put it on my wrist.

“I'm sure that by the time I get back, you two will be just fine,” I said, trying to cheer him. “Surti is never going to leave you. She's just mad at you, is all. Trust me…”

Mas Hananto nodded. I nodded in return and then looked at him for what would be the last time.

SURTI ANANDARI

FOR PARISIAN WOMEN, A CHANGE IN SEASON MEANS A CHANGE
in fashion—perhaps just a light scarf with a floral design wound around the neck to complement maroon-colored flats or to contrast with a beret of checkered motif, or maybe just a simple but elegant white long-sleeved satin blouse. For men like me who pay little attention to fashion—except insofar that clothes are needed to ward off the cold—Paris is in any season the largest open-air catwalk in the world. There's no obvious planning here. And we're not talking about the designer or model crowd. Normal Parisian women act and look like models. Parisians are a special breed whose lives are filled with style. In my mind, the term
haute couture
is little more than a ruse of the clothing industry which has conspired with designers to increase their profits. Nothing more. But, whatever the truth may be, it doesn't matter, because whatever the season, Parisians are very fashion-minded and pay utmost attention to appearances. Even so, with all the city's apparent luxury and despite being known as “The City of Light,” two things are missing here: orchids and jasmine flowers.

Tanah Air Restaurant on Rue de Vaugirard is a small and separate island in a Paris full of flair and color. It's tiny compared to Café de Flore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés which, since the nineteenth century, has been the meeting place for the world's
literary figures and intellectuals who wish to engage in high-minded discussions while sipping soup and drinking coffee. Tanah Air Restaurant—“Tanah Air” meaning “Homeland” in Indonesian—serves authentic Indonesian food, meticulously prepared with ingredients and spices from Indonesia: shallots, turmeric, cloves, ginger, lemon grass, and galingale. But maybe all of this is just the Café de Flore for us political exiles, who spend our lives cooking food for customers and reciting poetry into the night, as we think of the homeland we knew prior to 1965.

Here, in this restaurant, I am sitting with them now. There's Risjaf, the most handsome and masculine of our lot, with wavy hair and an earnest and honest heart; Nugroho Dewantoro, originally from Yogyakarta, who sports a Clark Gable mustache and has an effervescent personality but a heart of steel; and Tjai Sin Soe (who sometimes goes by the Indonesianized name Tjahjadi Sukarna), an action man and fast thinker with a calculator in his left hand, which he seems to value more than life itself.

As always, at the end of each night of service, after our customers have paid and gone home, Tjai takes out his calculator, counts the money that has come in, and divides up the tips among us all. Mas Nugroho makes sure all the perishable foodstuffs have been properly sealed and stored in the refrigerator; Risjaf cleans the tables and chairs and removes the posters from the windows for the event that took place that evening. Meanwhile, my helpers, Bahrum and Yazir, wash and dry the dishes, glasses, pots, pans, and utensils.

Risjaf has just turned the television station to CNN, which proceeds to air a few seconds of the news that today, in the 1997 presidential elections in Indonesia, President Soeharto was chosen in an uncontested election to serve a seventh five-year term. We are not surprised by the news; just bored. The news is like the sound
of mosquitoes at twilight in Solo: ever constant, never changing. Much more interesting for us is the additional bit of news that in the wake of the elections, student demonstrators have taken to the streets throughout the country, and that even the traditionally cowed news media have begun to express public disgruntlement about the fact that the president's new cabinet is filled with his cronies. Even his eldest daughter, Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, was awarded the position of Minister for Social Affairs. We look around at one another. Risjaf turns off the television.

Together and without a word—perhaps all of us feeling the need to think of happy times and be consoled by the memories of younger days when we were naïve and full of love—we go from the lower floor of the restaurant to its ground floor and there stretch out on the chairs and listen to the song “Als de Orchideeën Bloeien,” which Risjaf plays on his harmonica. The song stirs and pierces the heart.

As the chords of “The Orchids Are Now in Bloom” float through the open window of the restaurant into the spring air, all of us there are thinking of another orchid, one who went by the name of Rukmini. Rukmini, the orchid… Sipping on small glasses of rum to warm the body, our minds travel back in time to a place forty-five years ago.

JAKARTA, JANUARY-OCTOBER
1952

Three flowers, three young and beautiful women, transformed Jakarta into a garden of delight. Ningsih was a red rose of arresting beauty who made every man's heart beat faster; Rukmini, a purple orchid whose color never faded with the passing of the seasons; and Surti Anandari, a white jasmine who left her lingering
fragrance wherever she went. Men who fell in love with her could almost not function when she was not in their sight.

These three young women were members of the freshman class in the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta. Risjaf, Tjai, and I, being junior classmen, felt ourselves to be much more knowledgeable and superior, and we liked to tease them. The three women rented rooms at a boarding house on Jalan Cik di Tiro. My friends and I lived, as we had for the past three years, in a boarding house for men on Jalan Solo just a few hundred meters away. Across the street from our lodgings was the home of a Mr. Bustami who rented out his
paviliun—
a semi-detached annex of his home—to Mas Nugroho and Mas Hananto, older friends of ours who had recently begun to work at the Nusantara News office.

For Tjai, Risjaf, and me, the
paviliun
across the road became our place of recreation. Compared to our own small rooms, the
paviliun
was quite spacious, with a separate living room, where we could lounge about or play chess on the comfortable but louse-infested sofa. Mas Nugroho and Mas Hananto, who seemed much more mature than the three of us, frequently lent us their books—anything from anthologies of European poetry to titillating titles with pictures of men and women engaged in a myriad variety of sexual acts. Risjaf's eyes would open widely in surprise when he flipped through the pages of these books, as if incapable of believing that that women could wrap their bodies in such positions. Mas Nug even made it a point to lend such books to Risjaf, because he got such a kick from seeing this younger and more naïve man's reactions. Although Risjaf was the best-looking man among us, when it came to women, he was the most inexperienced.

At first I wasn't too interested in pursuing these three new
freshman girls, not as girlfriends, anyway. To my mind, they seemed excessively cheerful and sweet-natured. Further, with all their fine clothes and makeup, they looked to me like privileged daughters of aristocrats who had never known hardship. One day as I was passing by their boarding house, I saw a man I guessed to be Surti's father pull up to the curb in front of the house in a white Fiat 1100, a car that only a member of the upper economic class could aspire to own. As I came closer and was able to see the man more clearly, my suspicion was confirmed: Surti was the daughter of Dr. Sastrowidjojo, “the” Dr. Sastrowidjojo who lived on Jalan Papandayan in an elite and leafy residential area in Bogor, south of Jakarta. Not only was he famous, he was the son and grandson of equally famous doctors, members of the crème de la crème in pre-independent Indonesia. Surti's father was known to have played a leading role in the founding of Jakarta's central hospital, the Centraal Burgerlijke Ziekenhuis. The fact that Surti had not followed her father's footsteps and gone into medicine suggested that there might be something special about her; but later, when I heard Mas Nug and Mas Hananto talk about her family background, my interest in knowing her better dwindled. I could neither afford nor be bothered with all the things that having a girlfriend from her social and economic class entailed.

The problem was that Risjaf was attracted to Rukmini, she with the luscious red lips and very sharp tongue. Yet the more caustic her words, the more infatuated Risjaf became. In the end, it was for Risjaf—who swore that if he could go out with Rukmini just once he would be happy to die and go to heaven, and who often woke me when he talked about her in his sleep—that I decided to approach these three lovely women and invite them on a group date with my friends.

At first, the three girls paid no attention to my advances, pretty much ignoring me altogether. They were too busy flirting with the male students in the Faculty of Law, who were given to citing legal statutes. (And what for? What was sexy about citations from law books, which were still in Dutch no less? Wouldn't they find our skill in reciting poetry more interesting?) But I knew from the way they pretended to ignore me that they noticed me. At least Surti, for one, sometimes smiled. Once, I even caught her staring at me, her eyes like stars shining their light on me; but when she saw me staring back, she immediately turned her head. At that instant, I knew that she was the jasmine flower I wanted to pluck and store in my heart.

One day, as she was going into class, I slipped into her fingers a verse from the poem “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron—“She walks in beauty, like the night / of cloudless climes and starry skies …”—but when she opened her mouth to speak, I immediately walked away, worried that she wouldn't like the poem. The next day, however, she was the one who slipped a note to me: two lines from the poem “Elegy” by Rivai Apin: “what is it that we feel, yet have no need to express / what is it that we think, yet have no need to speak…” I almost swooned—not only from the sentiment of the poem but from the paper on which it was written, with its fragrant smell of jasmine.

For a few days thereafter, we communicated almost only through lines of verse, with very few words spoken. One time I copied in longhand a romantic section from
Romeo and Juliet
and gave that to her. She replied with a quote from the poem “Bright Star” by Keats: “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art / Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night.”

Surti Anandari was a stem of jasmine; she was a bright star in the midnight sky.

One day I waited for Surti outside her classroom. As usual when she saw me, she opened her hand to receive from me a slip of paper on which was written a romantic verse or scene. I smiled and when she raised her hand towards me, I took it and clasped it tightly. Startled, she instantly stopped walking, and looked at me in question. Lowering my lips to her ear, I whispered, “I want to be with you. Forever.”

During the first few months of my relationship with Surti, things went along pretty much the way they usually did among young men and women at that time: politely, guilelessly, and chastely. Any time our breaths began to join as one, we'd suddenly hear Risjaf or Tjai cough, causing us to draw apart from each other again. Sometimes, Surti and her friends would come to our boarding house with Rukmini and Ningsih, “just to bring us cookies they had made” or something on that order; but, usually, after the briefest of conversations, they would immediately take their leave. “It's not proper for an unmarried woman to be seen visiting a man,” Surti reminded me.