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by Leila S. Chudori

  “A cooperative. Obviously, a cooperative!” Tjai said firmly.

  “OK, a cooperative it is,” said Mas Nug obediently, leaving me to wonder who in our group held the most authority.

  “And in our proposal,” Mas Nug said immediately, as if to reaffirm his position, “we must be very clear about the raison d’être for the business model we’ve chosen. It might be, for instance, for the purpose of strengthening solidarity. As a cooperative, this will mean that we have to schedule an annual assemblée générale and choose a slate of managers every two years.”

  I looked at Mas Nug with admiration. Any time we started to discuss how to run an organization, his brain worked as fast as lightning. Since Mas Hananto was no longer with us, it seems that the spirit of leadership had moved to him—even though it was at times expropriated by Tjai, who had a much greater faculty for finance and figures.

  Risjaf stood like a soldier at attention, waiting for orders from his commander; but Mas Nug pretended not to notice. “Someone will have to undertake a survey of other restaurants—especially the Asian ones: Vietnamese, Indian, and Chinese—to see if we should focus on a place for fine dining, a casual eatery, or maybe a fast food place where people could take their meals home.”

  “It’s not going to be fast food!” I answered quickly. “Indonesian food is fine for a casual restaurant and even for fine dining, but definitely not for fast food. And we’re going to have a bar. This is Paris, after all. I’ll get to work on coming up with a menu,” I said with a growing sense of confidence.

  Everyone listened attentively. Tjai diligently took notes.

  I ran on, a dam now bursting inside me: “One thing for sure is that we should hold lots of kinds of events: book launches, for instance; discussions about developments in Indonesia; and literary readings, films, art exhibitions, and photography. We’ll need a curator so that they run smoothly and so that the people who come to them will want to stay and eat at the restaurant or drink at the bar. That way, the place can become known not just as a good place to eat, but as a place where people can hang out and socialize.”

  My three friends clapped their hands happily, even Tjai who stood and raised his thumb when I mentioned the need for a bar.

  “I can do the research. I can also curate the events!” Risjaf said, still standing in front of Mas Nug.

  Mas Nug smiled, not wanting to dampen Risjaf’s enthusiasm. “OK, but you can’t do everything, you know. You’ll wear yourself out. You plan the opening night and the nights that follow with a range of events. We can divide up the research on restaurants; there’s a lot of them that we’ll have to look at.”

  “And what are you going to do?” Tjai was heard to say flatly.

  Mas Nug twisted the tip of his mustache. “I will explore the city of Paris and study the advertising section in Le Figaro. We need to find a location, don’t we?”

  Good God! Of course, Mas Nug was right, and that was something that had to be done right away.

  Tjai nodded and made more notes. That night we each raised a glass of wine, except for Risjaf, that is, who held in his hand a ginger drink of wedang jahé instead. Clinking our glasses together, we said in unison, “To our restaurant.”

  We looked at each other.

  “What should we call it?” Risjaf said to Mas Nug.

  Mas Nug turned his head towards me. “Let’s ask our resident poet!”

  I looked at my friends, one by one. Someone was missing. There should have been five of us.

  I took a deep breath and exhaled. “We, the four of us, are the pillars of Tanah Air Restaurant.”

  We again clinked our glasses together. Tanah Air. Homeland. The name immediately stole my heart.

  PARIS, 1975

  Tjai, Risjaf, and I shared an unspoken agreement: ever since Rukmini had asked Mas Nug for a divorce in order to marry Lieutenant-Colonel Prakosa, we had surrendered to him the authority to act as our leader. Though we all believed in equality and didn’t think we actually needed a leader, Mas Nug seemed to need this kind of recognition, even if only temporarily. At least that’s what we’d surmised. And it all started that accursed evening when, after receiving his wife’s request for a divorce, he’d been shaken to the core and had tried to drown himself in alcohol. Nugroho Dewantoro, this man from Yogyakarta in the heart of Java, who always insisted on speaking egalitarian Indonesian rather than status-marked Javanese, was a very sentimental man. In fact, I even suspected that despite his frequent bouts of womanizing, he prized above all else the warmth that only a family can bring. Unlike Mas Hananto, whose relationship with Surti was complicated by perceptions of class difference—which was a psychological barrier of sorts for him—Mas Nug didn’t think about such things. If he wanted a woman, he wanted her, clear and simple. He became attracted to Rukmini and despite the fact that his green-eared friend Risjaf already had his sights set on her, he cast his net and succeeded in winning the orchid for himself. He then went on to marry her, the beautiful Rukmini with the sharp tongue. But because it became apparent to Risjaf and I that Mas Nug truly did love Rukmini, we long ago forgave him and joined in his happiness, especially so when Bimo Nugroho, the son the couple had wished for, appeared just nine months after their wedding.

  What I always found difficult to understand about Mas Hananto and Mas Nug is why, with all their political activities and responsibilities as husbands and fathers, they felt such a compulsion to sleep with other women. Mas Hananto said that he wanted to feel the “passion of the proletarian woman in bed.” As sorry and trite as that class-based justification sounds, Mas Nug couldn’t come up with a reason even as good as that. Good-looking and hirsute, with a thick mustache and a gilded tongue, Mas Nug easily attracted women to him, proverbial moths to a flame. It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that even with his stateless status and lack of permanent address either in Peking or in Zurich, he was able to easily win women’s favors and hearts. In the latter location, the crazy thing was that his mistress there was one Mrs. Agnes Baumgartner, the wife of a policeman and one of his acupuncture clients. Initially, it was the husband who had come to Mas Nug, complaining of aches from rheumatism and arthritis; but then Mas Nug had gone on to use his therapeutic skills on Mrs. Baumgartner, who, as he described it, was especially achy and in need of his special touch. According to Mas Nug, the woman’s thighs and midsection required special care and treatment.

  When I called Mas Nug from Paris and then had to listen to him tell me of his sexual conquest in Zurich, my blood went straight to my brain. I barked at him to follow Tjai’s suit and come to Paris immediately—not just so that our group could be together again or because of my concern for Rukmini and Bimo, but because of the stupid and dangerous position his sexual shenanigans were putting him in. Engaging in an affair with a married woman in a foreign country was not the same as keeping a mistress on the side in Jakarta or, for that matter, plucking an orchid in our more youthful days. The woman’s husband was a police officer, for God’s sake. And this wasn’t Indonesia; it was the West, whose written and unwritten rules we could not yet pretend to be familiar with.

  My vitriol apparently worked the trick and Mas Nug arrived in Paris a few weeks later, but with a very long face. Once again, I simply couldn’t understand how it was possible for him to fall in love with a woman he’d only just met.

  Seven years later a letter from Rukmini made its way from Jakarta to Paris and into Mas Nug’s hand: a request for a divorce. That night, I supported Mas Nug’s weight as he stumbled towards the Metro Station, all the while trying to persuade him to lower the volume of his increasingly shrill and incoherent voice. At the station, I remember clearly the severely wounded look on his face.

  Half drunk, he spoke brokenly. “You know, Dimas…actually… it was when I was in Zurich…I received a letter from Rukmini.” His voice trembled and tears welled in his eyes. “In it she turned down my request for her to join me in Europe…but she didn’t tell me why.”

  I said nothing, my m
ind for some reason still on his adventure with the policeman’s wife.

  “And Agnes, Mrs. Baumgartner, you know, was more than just a patient of mine.”

  “I know. You told me about your needles, her thighs.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t tell you the real reason why.” Mas Nug’s voice grew hoarse and he shook his head violently.

  I looked into his eyes, red and burning with pain.

  “It was her name… I called her ‘Baumgartner’ but that wasn’t her married name. It was her maiden name. But, you know, in German ‘baumgartner’ means someone who owns a garden…”

  “So?”

  “So, every time I made love with her, all I could imagine was a bed of orchids.”

  Tears streamed from his eyes.

  What made this situation—Mas Nug’s divorce from Rukmini—slightly more sensitive was that only a few months later, Risjaf announced that he had found his soul mate: a woman by the name of Amira, the sister of Mirza Syahrul, an Indonesian exile in Leiden, the Netherlands. An attractive woman with glasses, Amira was thirty-six years old and just finishing her doctorate in political science at Leiden University. She and Risjaf fell in love almost overnight and felt so comfortable with each other, they said, they decided to get married as soon as possible. They weren’t that young after all. Risjaf was forty-five, the same age as me, having also been born in 1930.

  “We’re both adults and I’m long past my due-date as a bachelor,” Risjaf joked.

  I was pleased to see him so happy.

  “So what are you going to do?” Tjai asked. “Commute between Paris and Leiden until Amira finishes her degree?” He seemed to be calculating the cost.

  “Yes, we’ll take turns,” said Risjaf, eyes shining brightly.

  “Have you already told Mas Nug?” I asked with a note of caution.

  “No, but I’m going to go to his place and take Amira with me to introduce her…”

  “Don’t!” Tjai and I yelped at once.

  Risjaf looked back and forth between us. People in the throes of happiness often forget about other people’s pain. The look on Risjaf’s handsome face was one of complete innocence.

  “Why?” he asked simply.

  Tjai and I looked at other, as if to agree on a more detailed answer. For Risjaf, with all his artlessness, we had to present a clear and detailed picture.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” I asked him. “Didn’t Mas Nug just receive a request for divorce from Rukmini?”

  Risjaf slapped himself on the forehead. “Oh my God, that’s right! What was I thinking? So, do you think that maybe we shouldn’t tell Mas Nug? It would be such a shame if…”

  “What would be such a shame?”

  Vivienne’s and my apartment was much too small, not in the least ideal for trafficking in secrets. And as if to prove the point, Mas Nug had suddenly barged into the apartment, taking us completely by surprise.

  Mas Nug looked at the three of us and then slapped Risjaf on the shoulder and laughed. “Hey, I heard you proposed to Mirza’s sister. That great! And she’s a looker, too! Congratulations!” He then threw his arms around Risjaf and gave him a big hug. Risjaf tentatively returned Mas Nug’s embrace.

  Mas Nug then plopped himself down on the floor in front of the couch and turned on the small old television, which aired only French-language shows. Regardless, he focused his attention on the screen, giving it his rapt attention. Risjaf scratched his head. Stillness, an unspoken tension, filled the air.

  “Well, I guess I’ll be going to Amira’s uncle’s place in the Marais,” Risjaf finally quipped. “She and her father are staying there.”

  Mas Nug raised his thumb but his eyes remained on the television.

  I sat down beside him. Tjai went into the kitchen to search the cupboard for coffee.

  “It’s OK. I’m doing just fine,” Mas Nug said quietly to me as he watched the TV.

  I nodded silently, still looking at Mas Nug whose eyes were pinned to the screen. Though he said nothing, I knew he appreciated my query-less presence. I could only imagine the sadness his heart must be feeling.

  PARIS, OCTOBER 1982

  All of that, of course, took place some fourteen years ago. I didn’t know at the time whether Mas Nug had been able to bury the painful memory of his divorce beneath the lowest layer of his heart or whether his gaiety, which he showed by whistling out of tune, was his way of isolating the sadness.

  One day at my apartment, our temporary meeting place, when I was working on the details of the menu that we intended to include in our funding proposal, Tjai announced he had already managed to secure a fairly substantial sum of money from the dozens of Indonesian exiles who were scattered throughout Europe. What I found touching was that not all those who had contributed to the restaurant fund were even political exiles like ourselves. Several businessmen, friends of Mas Nug, also pitched in; the same was true of friends of Tjai in Jakarta who anonymously contributed to the cause with no evident thought of return. Tjai maintained a detailed list of contributors and the amounts given, his idea being that if these donors ever came to the restaurant, they would be seated at a special “sponsors table” and given a special menu.

  Mas Nug explored the city in search of the perfect location for the restaurant for what seemed a very long time, but found no place to be satisfactory. Either its location was too distant, the water system in the building was not up to standard, or the place would require major renovation. The list went on and on. I knew he was growing tired from the hunt, but he continued to undertake his task with unfeigned happiness—just as Risjaf did when preparing a report on his survey of restaurants that offered Asian cuisines in Paris. One of his more interesting observations was that very few restaurants offered both a place for dining and a venue for events. This fact made me even more excited about the possibility opening Tanah Air, which, as we intended, would highlight both Indonesian cuisine and culture.

  Nonetheless, the problem of location still remained, and I was beginning to tire of all the meetings in my apartment. Of course, Risjaf had the perfect justification for our meetings there: they could try my dishes at the same time. But my friends were not proper culinary critics; they’d happily munch on a boiled table if they were hungry.

  But then, one day, Le Figaro came to the rescue!

  Buried inside the classified section was a small advertisement which didn’t first catch our notice but became a game-changer in our quest. It was an advertisement for the sale of a family-owned restaurant located at 90 Rue de Vaugirard. We went to look at the place and to talk to its owners—a Vietnamese couple who had resided in Paris for almost twenty years. The restaurant occupied the ground and subterranean floors of a four-story early twentieth-century building. On the ground floor was the foyer, a cashier stand, and space enough for four to six tables. At the rear was the kitchen and a small office, beside which was a stairway leading to the lower floor, a much larger open space, with transom windows at the front and room enough for ten to twelve tables or more—a perfect place for private parties and special events.

  Even as Tjai and Mas Nug were beginning their investigation of the restaurant’s public spaces I immediately felt at home; but, of course, I needed to see the kitchen. When the older couple opened the door to the kitchen, I saw inside a wide rectangular space with white tiled walls, a checkered black and white floor, and a large work table in the center that apparently served as an island for food preparation. There was a large and clean professional oven, which had been properly maintained—I didn’t see even a stray kernel of cooked rice. When I looked up to see hanging overhead a complete set of high-quality stainless steel pots, my heart was smitten. “Would you be willing to sell the cooking equipment as well?” I almost gasped.

  The older man looked at his wife who smiled, showing the dimples in her cheeks. “We’re all from Asia. We like you and if the price is right, you can have the kitchen equipment too.”

  I made a move to hug the woman, but T
jai, who had joined us by this time, immediately held me by the arm like an angry cat. I restrained myself as I allowed him to undertake his task of calculating the price, bargaining with the couple, negotiating the terms, and so on. The way he haggled with the owners reminded me of traders in Klewer, the traditional market in Solo: pretending not to be in need; feigning reluctance to buy; preparing to move to another stall because the same object there was far more attractive and much cheaper besides; but then, finally, smiling in assent when the seller agreed to his offer. The Vietnamese woman must have been smitten with us as well because she seemed uninterested in Tjai’s Klewer-market game and rushed to have the deal settled, with little bargaining at all. She nodded and shook hands with Tjai. Only then did Tjai signal that I was allowed to hug the couple, which I immediately did with an immense feeling of gratitude. I adored their kitchen and its equipment, which included almost everything commonly used in an Indonesian kitchen: large woks, small woks, strainers, steamers, numerous kinds of knives, and a large flat stone mortar (though I could see I would still need to bring my small mortar to prepare individual servings of freshly ground chili sambal).

  The cooperative was formed and the necessary capital secured from a variety of sources, including several French nonprofit organizations. Risjaf contracted the services of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and other skilled workers to repair what needed to be repaired, and while our Indonesian friends in Paris rolled up their sleeves to repaint the interior in white to give the restaurant a more spacious and airy feel Risjaf also designed and printed a flyer announcing the opening of Tanah Air Restaurant.