Home - Leila S. Chudori

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month ago I found in one of the rooms the tail of a sting ray all matted with flesh and blood. It gave me such a shock I started to shake and cry until I couldn’t stop. I don’t know how I finally managed to calm myself down. But this is something I’ve never told even Mother about because she’s worn out from having had to suffer for so long. I find it hard to eat anymore. The sight of food makes me want to vomit.

       I’ve seen men of about my father’s age being herded down the hallways in this place with their faces covered with blood.

       Why are they doing this, Om Dimas? Why are these people being tortured? And why do they keep interrogating Mother, asking her questions she cannot answer? I hear them shouting at her, asking over and over whether she knew what Bapak was up to. They’re always shouting, always angry. They can’t seem to speak in a normal tone of voice. Why do they have to shout?

       I’m so sad and so afraid. Bulan is so young that all she can do is to follow me around wherever I go. And Alam is just a baby. Once they let Mother feed him but then, right afterwards, called her back into the room for more questions and to be shouted at again.

       I hope that you are all right. Bapak once told me that if anything ever happened, I was to contact you.

       Yours,

       Kenanga Prawiro

      Vivienne looked at me, her eyes glistening, and for a long time afterwards all we could do was to hold each other wordlessly.

      ON ONE VERY MUGGY SUMMER EVENING, VIVIENNE AND I lolled on the floor of her apartment, trying our best to do nothing. Her apartment wasn’t especially large but as my eyes scanned its contents—books, books, and more books—I felt immediately at home. Works by Simone de Beauvoir and other French authors were mixed with titles by British, Irish, Japanese, Chinese, and Indian authors. My eyes paused for a moment on two of Joyce’s works: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. I noted that titles generally viewed as mandatory reading on Marxist political thought occupied a special shelf of their own. On another shelf, I saw Ayn Rand’s semi-autobiographical work, We the Living, and her controversial novel, The Fountainhead. Judging from Vivienne’s taste in books, I could see that she was, very much like me, a literary traveler. Like me, too, she apparently liked to study the various kinds of thought that marked important periods of time, without being forced to stop at or become trapped by a particular intellectual current. Hmm… My attraction to her increased exponentially. At that moment, I wanted to take her in my arms and never let her go.

      Vivienne got up and opened the windows of her apartment as wide as possible. She was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, and the delicate film of perspiration on her elegant neck excited me. She took two bottles of cold Alsace beer from her small refrigerator and handed one to me. She drank her beer straight from the bottle, gulping the amber liquid as if it were an elixir. I watched the bluish vein on her neck pulsate as she swallowed the beer flowing down her throat. A thin stream of liquid seeped from the side of her mouth and trickled down her chin and neck. The beer mixed with her sweat made me want to lap the salty mix from her neck with my tongue.

      Vivienne stopped drinking and smiled at me, a challenge in her piercing eyes. She knew what I was thinking. “Tell me about Indonesia …”

      Not knowing how to begin to tell her about my home country, I paused. Where should I start? With my family? With the country in tumult? Or back to early 1960s when President Sukarno’s shifting political alliances led the country—and me as well—to the point we are today? My mind flashed back to Jakarta. What had Sukarno been up to? Did he actually side with his friends on the left? What had he wanted or hoped to achieve with his policy of “Nasakom,” his odd promulgation of nationalism, religion, and communism? And as the chronology of the night of September 30 emerged, why had he fled the presidential palace and gone to Halim Perdanakusuma Naval Air Base? This was a question that had nagged my friends in Jakarta and continued to nag me.

      How could I ever explain or even begin to unravel this messy bundle of thread for Vivienne? Maybe it would be best to begin somewhere else—with wayang tales, for instance, stories from the Javanese shadow theater that were my secret obsession. Better that, perhaps, than opening the doors to my country’s warehouse of history to cast light on its cluttered contents.

      Vivienne took another gulp of beer from her bottle but didn’t swallow. Instead, she lowered her body to straddle my lap and then kissed me, the cool beer emptying from her mouth into mine. The sensation quickened the flow of my blood, making it dance wildly through my veins, and inflamed my joints. Any attempt to prevent Vivienne from feeling my body’s reaction to the blood coursing through my veins to my extremities would have been futile. How could it not be? Her midsection was pressed into my crotch.

      As I became more excited, my blood raced more swiftly through me. Unable to restrain myself, I began to lick her neck and chest, which were slick with sweat and beer. With her torso positioned directly in front of my eyes, her breasts seemed ready to burst from the seams of her clinging T-shirt. And in my darting eyes, her long legs seemed to be begging for me to remove the skimpy blue jeans encasing them.

      Vivienne rarely wore a bra during the summer. At times, I protested, not because I was prudish but because of the very evident physical reaction that occurred in me at the sight of her nipples beneath her T-shirt. At times it was almost painful. How could she torture me like that? Wasn’t I supposed to be concentrating on my future life in Paris? I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t think of anything except what was under that damned T-shirt of hers.

      Once I begged her to wear a bra to prevent me from becoming so flustered. And her answer…?

      “Do you know how uncomfortable it is to wear a bra on a day as hot as this? Here!” She took a brightly colored red bra and shoved it in front of my nose. “You try wearing it.”

      My mouth turned dry. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know if Vivienne realized how excited it made me to see her nipples protruding from under her T-shirt. How can women be so cruel? But, in the end, I decided to give thanks to nature for its wisdom in making the summer in Paris so hot that Vivienne refused to wear a bra—because it made what happened next all that much easier. Not having to couch our feelings in lines of poetry from one of the books we were reading, Vivienne and I both raced to remove our clothing. Then we attacked each other, wrestling with each other on the floor. Paris was hot, but we were burning. After just a few minutes we lay exhausted and naked on the floor, staring at the ceiling of the apartment. The August evening was so stuffy and humid our bodies were drenched with sweat. But in our desire for one another, we thought nothing of the discomfort and made passionate love, again and again. What time it was I didn’t know, but I suddenly felt the urge to smoke. “Have you ever smoked kretek?” I asked Vivienne, whose head was nestled on my chest. “No, but I’ve heard about them from Mathilde, who bought some in Amsterdam. She says they’re amazing.” I scrounged in the pocket of my shirt on the floor. “Ah, I still have some.” There were still a few sticks left in a badly crumpled packet. I lit one and then took turns smoking the cigarette with Vivienne. Vivienne smacked her lips. “They have a sweet taste. What is it?” “Cloves,” I said, “desiccated cloves,” while trying to suppress the feeling of longing aroused by the scent of that spice and everything else that smelled of Indonesia. “It would be perfect if we had a cup of luwak coffee.” There, I had said it, that dangerous word. Poor and stranded as I was in the middle of Europe, giving voice to a longing for something as exotic as luwak coffee was the same as sticking a knife in my heart. If I wanted to go on living, I had to—at least for now—bury and conceal Indonesia and anything connected with it. I felt my mind return to the Jakarta where I lived four years previously.

      JAKARTA, DECEMBER 1964

      A kretek was like a symbol for us. After a long discussion and sometimes heated debate about politics and the nation’s state of affairs at the office, we would often

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