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by Leila S. Chudori

  The name of the village in which we lived was one that stood out for me. As this was the time of the Cultural Revolution, the word “red” in Chinese stood for “happiness” or “revolution.” But as it was there, in the Red Village, that we Indonesians learned of what was happening at home, the word “red” for us symbolized the color of rivers in Java and elsewhere which were clogged with corpses.

  So many deaths, whose number grew from hundreds to thousands and on up to a million or more. While some people were “only” interrogated, intimidated, or tortured, many more were killed straightaway—on roadways, in the forest, on river banks, and at the edge of ravines. We heard that in Solo, around the time of the September 30 Movement, some Communist Party members or sympathizers had killed a number of non-Communist youth activists and thrown their bodies into the Solo River. In East Java, the same thing had also happened, with the victims’ bodies thrown into the Brantas River. So what happened was that after September 30, the region’s strongly anti-communist military, paramilitary, and religious groups reclaimed the Solo River and turned it into their dumping grounds. According to the information that made its way among the Indonesian residents of the Red Village—news conveyed in whispers and hushed voices—so many corpses had been dumped into it that at bends in the river, where the corpses accumulated, one could walk atop the bodies from one bank to another. After hearing this news, and for weeks on end, the distance between the Red Village and Solo suddenly evaporated, and I could smell in the air the putrid scent of decomposing bodies.

  When this mood came upon me, I grew furious, no longer caring about any threat to myself. Almost hysterical, I sent off a cable begging Aji to move Mother to Jakarta. I don’t know why, but I felt Mother would be safer in Jakarta.

  During our fourth week in the Red Village, friends in Peking brought word to Risjaf that most of our colleagues at Nusantara News had been detained. Miraculously, Mas Hananto was not among them. Somehow, he had managed to vanish without a trace.

  “Probably disguised himself,” Risjaf quipped in a low and mysterious-sounding voice.

  “What as? A beggar?” I scoffed.

  Mas Nugroho spoke firmly, optimistically: “Hananto can be slippery. I can see him being able to go most anywhere, without people catching his trail.”

  “I’m sure he’s in disguise,” Risjaf repeated.

  I didn’t have the will to rebut Risjaf’s foolish notion. In the dark and depressing atmosphere of the Red Village, the only thing we had to bolster strength in one another was a sliver of hope and a gram of energy.

  Mas Nug received news from his mother that Rukmini and Bimo had gone into hiding in Yogya a few weeks previously. He sent back the suggestion that they move back to Jakarta to live with his brother.

  We received the welcome news that Tjai and his family had made it safely to Singapore. Although Tjai was the most apolitical person among us, he had two strikes against him: he was of Chinese descent and he worked at the Nusantara News office. Because of this, in the current conditions—even though he was not a senior staff member—the odds were not in his favor. Fortunately for Tjai, he had an uncle in Singapore where he and his family were able to find refuge.

  There was always a two- or three-week lag in the news we received—sometimes even a month or more. In early April 1966, for instance, we received news dating from early March that was difficult to believe. On March 11, we were told, three army generals had gone to see President Sukarno at the presidential palace in Bogor, where he had taken refuge from demonstrations in Jakarta. There they asked him to sign a statement known as “Super Semar,” an acronym for “The March 11 Letter of Command.” The effect of this command was to transfer the power of the executive office to army commander Lieutenant-General Soeharto. That same letter authorized Soeharto to take whatever measures “he deemed necessary” to restore order to the nation. It was hard to get my head around what was happening in Indonesia. How was it possible for a cabinet meeting that Bung Karno was leading to be interrupted by a demonstration and why had our “Great Leader of the Revolution” felt forced to flee to safety in Bogor? What kind of pressure had those three army generals exerted to make the president sign such an important document, one with repercussions of such great magnitude for the fate of the nation? That day, that event, determined the course of all things to come. I was beginning to grow extremely tired of the political circus taking place at home.

  After three years of life in Peking and having to constantly raise our fists in praise of Mao Tse Tung and calling out “Long Live Chairman Mao!” all the while studying agricultural production in a number of villages, I was fed up with the absolutism of the Cultural Revolution being crammed down the throats of the Chinese people. I was sure that Mas Nugroho, despite his unflagging optimism, and Risjaf, with his deep found sense of loyalty, felt the same kind of unease.

  One night, after many nights of sleeplessness in the guest house where I was living in the Red Village, I finally came to a decision. I lit a match and began to rouse Risjaf, who was asleep on the upper bunk of the bunk bed we occupied. I patted him softly on the cheek so as not to startle him.

  “Sjaf … Sjaf … Wake up, Sjaf…”

  Risjaf moaned and rubbed his eyes, then sat up. “What time is it?”

  “It’s still dark outside. I want to go to Paris, Sjaf.”

  “Where?” he asked, his eyes still shut, in a voice as hoarse as a crow’s.

  “Paris, I want to go to Paris. Tjai has already said that he’d be willing to move to Paris or Amsterdam. We could meet him there.”

  Risjaf looked unsure as to whether he was dreaming or awake. He probably thought I was just the bedpost talking to him in his dreams. He mumbled “OK,” then shut his eyes and lay down again, ready to go to sleep again.

  I said nothing and started to count from one to ten as I waited for Risjaf to reach a normal level of consciousness. It worked. On the count of five, he swiftly rose and sat up again. His curly hair was a mess, his eyes red and open wide.

  “Paris? As in Europe?” he shouted, still with a hoarse voice.

  I put my hand over Risjaf’s mouth, afraid that he would wake up other members of the commune.

  His eyes shone brightly, a mixture of glee and fear. “But how?” he asked in a whisper.

  “I don’t know yet, but we’ll figure something out. Tomorrow we can talk to Mas Nug about this. Tjai is ready to join us—but coming from Singapore that won’t be hard. Getting out of here, however, I’m sure will mean lots of hoops to jump through and bureaucratic rigmarole.”

  Once I’d expressed this crazy idea of mine, neither I nor Risjaf was able to fall asleep. I kept staring at the metal cross braces on the bottom of Risjaf’s bunk. Risjaf, meanwhile, kept turning on his side, to the left and to the right, trying to find a comfortable position, but causing the braces to creak.

  “Calm down, Sjaf,” I finally whispered.

  “How am I going to calm down?” he whispered back. “You said ‘Paris’ and now the only thing in my mind is the beauty and the lights of that city.”

  I smiled.

  I arrived in Paris in early January 1968, when winter’s cold racked the bones. At first the four of us were separated. I was in France; Mas Nug in Switzerland; Risjaf in the Netherlands; and Tjai in Singapore. But after I arrived in Paris, I immediately hooked up with Tjai and his wife, Theresa, who had come to the city just before Christmas, a few weeks previously.

  It was not long before Risjaf made his way to Paris and moved in with me in my small and shabby apartment. Mas Nug, who had fallen for a Swiss woman, delayed his arrival in Paris until April, when I finally got him on the phone and barked at him to come join us in Paris as we had planned. I reminded him that while he was in Switzerland thinking only of himself, Rukmini and Bimo were no doubt still living in fear as a result of the continued madness in Indonesia. Only then did he consent to break off his affair and join us.

  Initially, the thought of moving to the Netherlands had
seemed more attractive than France, what with the country’s historical relations with Indonesia, as well as the ease of finding there most anything one wanted from Indonesia. But, in the end, we had chosen to gather in France because of the country’s long history of providing a warm embrace to political exiles like ourselves. France was the terre d’asile, the land of asylum for exiles like us—the land of human rights: le pays des droits de l’homme. France. That didn’t mean, of course, that the country offered easy citizenship. The process of becoming first a permanent resident and then a citizen required many complicated bureaucratic procedures and requirements that were time-consuming and difficult to fulfill. That said, we were able to obtain, without too much difficulty, a titre de voyage, which permitted us to travel anywhere in the world except Indonesia. A French government agency provided temporary financial assistance; but given the cost of living in Paris, the amount was hardly enough to survive.

  We began to look for work almost immediately and took on odd jobs and part-time work to earn an income. After some self-promotion, Mas Nugroho, who had studied acupuncture in Peking, was soon attracting patients interested in trying his healing method—which is when I came to see why he had been reluctant to leave Switzerland: most of his “patients” were women.

  Tjai, who held a degree in economics, had a much easier time finding a steady job than the rest of us, and began working as an independent accountant for several mom-and-pop stores on the city’s edge. Risjaf and I were the unlucky ones, the two people least equipped to work abroad. In Indonesia, we had studied literature because we aspired to be members of the intellectual class. But in France, birthplace of so many writers and thinkers whose books had served as our compass, intellectuals, it seemed, were ten centimes a dozen. It’s not surprising, therefore, that we were unable to find suitable work in our field and that every three or four months we’d be leaving one uninteresting job for yet another. From service work in restaurants, as bank tellers, up to assistant curators in small galleries whose only visitors were three or four pretentious people who called themselves artists, we did whatever we could.

  Such was my life until an evening in May 1968 made boisterous by student demands on the French government. That was the evening I met Vivienne Deveraux on the campus of the Sorbonne. She entered my life, then my body, and, finally, as she came to know my life history, my soul as well. With Vivienne, I tried to become reborn as a new man; but no matter how hard I tried, I continued to feel that some part of me had been left behind in Indonesia. Maybe it was my heart: my love for my mother and Aji; or my concern for Surti and her children. I didn’t know. But a strained anxiety always affected me every time I received a letter from Aji, which inevitably contained more horrific stories about the slaughter going on in Java and elsewhere in the archipelago.

  I remember one such letter from Aji in which he conveyed the shocking news about the hunt for communists in Solo, with the bodies of the hunted being thrown into the river.

  Red. The river that had once nursed me had now turned blood red.

  That is what Aji said. That is what our uncle Kiasno told Aji. And that is what finally convinced my mother to follow her brother’s advice and move to Jakarta to live with Aji’s family.

  No one could comprehend what was happening. But we recognized that—for a while, at least, although who knew for how long?—we would have to remain in exile. On cold nights, I stared at the Seine and tried to imagine what it would be like if its waters were red in color. I began to chastise myself for my perpetual waffling, for my inability to maintain a fixed opinion. I liked to sail in no certain direction: upstream, downstream, from the right bank to the left, pondering opinions without diving in to completely embrace a particular “ism.” I now saw that, in the end, the effect of my wavering was that my family was thrown into a bottomless trench of trouble and travail.

  Suddenly I needed that small space, that vacuum—the one Bang Amir said Allah had given to him. I didn’t know whether I was His true servant but I knew I wanted that space, that small vacuum. I longed to see Bang Amir and talk to him again. Where was he now?

  I posted numerous letters to my good-hearted friend, but had no proof they ever arrived safely in his, Bang Amir’s, hands. In them, I asked about the meaning of that vacuum he once had mentioned, the one he said that could be found in every human heart. I desperately longed for something, but I didn’t know what it was. Was it some kind of spiritual essence? When I wrote to Bang Amir, I wrote as if he were standing before me with that calm look of his on his face and speaking to me in the low voice of the popular Indonesian singer, Rahmat Kartolo.

  I didn’t know where to position myself in order to find that essence. If, in this tumultuous and transient world, the natural blue color of a river’s waters could be changed to red, where was my station on this map of life to be?

  I found no answer to my question.

  In February 1969, the following year, Aji called me to convey the news that Mother had died in her sleep.

  Was that the answer to my questions? To take Mother away from me? Away from Aji?

  A rapid series of snapshots flashed before my eyes from our childhood in Solo with our parents. My father was a teacher of English at the city’s State Senior High School, a school with a reputation for its rigorous curriculum and the belief that Indonesian children had to learn to appreciate both Indonesian and Western literature. It was my father who instilled in me the importance of books as one of life’s staples—just as important as food, drink, and sleep, he said (though he neglected to point out that sex was another necessary and natural part of life as well). When he told me this, my mother gave him a slight nudge. Though she was not particularly religious herself (unlike her brother, my uncle Kiasno), she did feel that some attention must be given to God and religion, that these things, too, were among life’s needs.

  It was Om Kiasno who first taught me and then, later, Aji, who was ten years younger than me, to recite the Quran. My father voiced no objection to this, just as he never protested when our uncle assertively reminded us to pray. Father was more concerned with matters of daily life and was apt to make much more of a fuss when Mother forgot to put her batik implements away after using them, because Aji would end up making them his playthings and leave them scattered around the house.

  My mother, who was usually called Bu Giri—“Giri” being short for my father’s full name, “Giri Suryo”—but who was also known by her own name, Pratiwi, had a creative hand and would, for nights on end, give herself completely to the transformation of a solid white length of cloth into a most remarkable thing of beauty.

  After a day spent preparing meals—cooking was something Mother also enjoyed, a fondness for which she passed down to me—and tending to the needs of two overly active sons and a husband weary from teaching Solonese teenagers who he thought were growing up too fast, Mother would sit cross-legged on the floor for an hour or two with her canting, the small copper vessel with a spouted nib she had to frequently refill with melted beeswax, to create her batik designs. Ever since I was young, I likened Mother’s work with wax to a poet’s work with words—both of which processes produced something of beauty.

  Perhaps my discovery of the joy of poetry began not with the fantastic verses of Chairil Anwar, but as the combined result of pressure from my father to speak Indonesian well and to mind my words, just as a body must mind its soul, and of my mother’s love for the canting and melted beeswax.

  After I had graduated from senior high school, my father sent me to Jakarta to live with his older brother, Om Muryanto, in order that I might obtain a better and more focused education than was possible in Solo at that time.

  After adjusting to my new life as a student in Jakarta and learning my way around the city, I moved from my uncle’s home into a boarding house with Risjaf, a fellow classmate. Thereafter, my visits home to Solo became rare, except for the Idul Fitri holidays, at the end of the fasting month. Patient man that he was, my father voiced no
complaint about his wayward son’s avoidance of home. He continued, to the best of his limited financial ability, to send me books of literature so that I would maintain and improve my Indonesian. Meanwhile, Mother would send me reminders from my uncle Kiasno to pray regularly so as “to fill myself with thanks for God’s grace.” Along with her missives of advice, Mother would also often send a newly made length of batik cloth—often one with a bird motif typical of Java’s north coast. Mother knew I liked Cirebon-style batik.

  After my father died in my sophomore year, Mother’s letters to me would echo his reminder (to read and speak Indonesian well) and Om Kiasno’s advice (to pray), before including her own personal counsel for me to eat nutritiously the food that I myself had prepared.

  Throughout my sojourn, from Peking to Paris, the advice from my elders that I did follow was to read—how could I not? It was part of my oxygen—to cook my own food, and to eat well. Somehow, it slipped my mind to pray regularly.

  I wondered whether when Mother died she was thinking about her wastrel son living so far away.

  I couldn’t speak for several weeks. I felt as if stones were lodged in my throat. Risjaf, Mas Nug, and Tjai tried various ways to console me, from the most profane of ways—with my favorite kinds of Chinese food that Theresa would cook for me, for instance—to the most spiritual, by arranging special prayer sessions on Mother’s behalf. Nothing worked. Nothing could comfort me. No one could succeed in making me talk. Even a lovely stretch of batik, brown colored in background with green-colored birds, did not make me feel better or bring me calm. The fact was my mother had died and I was not there to kiss her forehead and to say a final goodbye. No voice escaped me.

  After several weeks of virtual silence, I awoke one morning suddenly feeling both energetic and panicky, as if I were on some kind of stimulant. I went from one friend to another—to Mas Nug, Risjaf, Tjai and Theresa; to Vivienne and her family; to our neighbors; and to the offices of the French agency that arranged for us to obtain our asylum status—asking the same question: was it possible, with my exile status, for me to somehow enter Indonesia?