Nara took a deep breath and shook his head. “I have no idea. What I do know is that it’s the most discriminative regulation on earth.”
Obviously, Nara was overstating the case. There were other regulations that were much more discriminatory—apartheid, for one—but Nara was angry, and his anger was natural, because someone had insulted his girlfriend.
As it had been some time since I had broken off communication with my father, I was not up to date either on developments in his life or in Indonesian political life. “I want to know for sure. I think I’ll go to Beaubourg to find out.”
“I doubt if you’ll find much there,” Nara said. “I’d be surprised if the Beaubourg had much stuff on regulations affecting former political prisoners or their families.”
“Oh…” I didn’t know what to say. I could feel my heart pounding.
Nara took my arm and walked me to the door.
“Coming in?” I asked.
“I’m sure your mother wants you to herself tonight. I’ll just go home.”
From the clutch bag I had also borrowed from mother, I removed two name cards and showed them to Nara.
“Hans and Raditya,” I said with a laugh.
This time, Nara laughed along.
“They told me that if I wanted to go to Jakarta on a tourist visa that they’d be willing to help.”
Nara smiled, now with a look of optimism on his face. “Not all the people at the embassy are cut from the same cloth. The younger ones, like those friends of mine, are very different in their thinking than the old-school diplomats.”
I still hesitated to express my opinion on the subject of a “clean environment,” the look on Tante Sur’s face, and the opinions of the various diplomats and guests who were at the party. I was thinking of Professor Dupont’s words about my father, and about history. That night I had been introduced to a part of Indonesia which was very different from the one I knew through Tanah Air Restaurant.
Suddenly, having entered a long and dark tunnel into Indonesian history, I felt the need for a lighted candle. Just as suddenly, blood quickened in my veins. My chest pounded. The word “Indonesia”—I-N-D-O-N-E-S-I-A—suddenly became something of interest for me. I thought of Shakespeare and of Rumi.
How was I to pluck the meaning of Indonesia from the word “Indonesia”? The reaction of Tante Sur, she of the red kebaya, was one I had just come to know at a glance. What is the real Indonesia, I asked myself. Where is it? And where within it are my father, Om Tjai, Om Risjaf, and Om Nug?
I stroked Nara’s chin and then kissed him on the lips. Delightfully surprised, he nestled his body closer to mine.
“What was that kiss for?” he asked.
“Because you are the angel who descended from heaven to save me.”
And then I kissed him again.
L’IRRÉPARABLE
There once was what remained of a park the place where we embraced.
(“AFTERWORD,” GOENAWAN MOHAMAD, 1973)
PARIS, MAY 1997
THE SOUND OF RAVEL’S “MIROIRS” was a constant in Lintang’s apartment. Narayana knew very well that Ravel was always able to soothe Lintang’s soul and heal her wounds. Nara took a video cassette and inserted it in the player As the video began to play, he saw the somewhat blurred image of a younger Dimas from ten or more years previously. Facing the lens, Dimas was giving instructions to the person holding the video camera.
“Don’t come too close or you’ll blur my face.”
Dimas now stuck his head towards the lens to give instructions. The lens turned away from him. Only then Nara realized that the person who had been holding the camera was Lintang. Look at her, how young she is: only nine or ten years of age. But she was a beauty even then, this Eurasian girl with starry eyes.
“Bonjour. This camera is a gift from my ayah. Today is my birthday and I am, I am…”
“Ten years old!” came the sound of Dimas’s voice, announcing his daughter’s age.
Lintang giggled.
“Starting today, I am going to record…”
Lintang’s small hands reached out to take the camera. Garbled images and sounds ensued as the camera moved hands. The next clear image was that of Vivienne sitting on a lawn chair beneath a tree. Her face had a weary look as she leaned against the back of the chair. Noticing the camera, she smiled and waved, but then she looked down, her lips stiff once more. Gloomy.
Narayana’s forehead furrowed as he watched this fledgling documentary.
“It was around that time my parents began to argue a lot.”
Lintang had suddenly appeared behind Narayana with two open bottles of beer in her hands. Nara grabbed one of the bottles and took a swig.
“Ayah bought a used video camera for me. A friend of his had several, and he bought one from him—but not all at once; he had to pay installments for months on end.” Lintang sat down beside Nara on her threadbare sofa. As Nara pushed the pause button on the player, she stared at the image of her mother’s face, frozen on the television screen. “Maman was not pleased with Ayah because their finances were so tight around that time.”
“I’m sure she thought that you were too young,” Nara quickly surmised.
For a moment, Lintang said nothing, then: “Later, of course, after she realized how much I loved film, she stopped complaining. But arguments between my parents always erupted whenever Ayah spent money on things Maman thought to be unnecessary.”
Nara said nothing. And Lintang felt reluctant to talk about how a love as great as the one her parents shared could be riven by seemingly minor domestic issues. She thought of her father. How long had it now been since she had seen him?
As if reading her mind, Nara suggested, “You really should visit your father.”
Perturbed by the thought, Lintang squeezed her eyes shut. “Nara, Nara… Have you forgotten that dinner of ours together—that fucked up meal, the very worst dinner in my entire life?”
Nara laughed. “That was months ago! Besides, Lintang, it’s in a father’s nature to be protective of his daughter when he’s introduced to the man she’s now with.”
Nara had already forgiven Lintang’s father for his behavior the first time they’d met five months previously. It was Lintang who refused to compromise. The night of their first dinner together had been the breaker for her; she had decided then she would never again visit her father unless forced to.
BRUSSELS, OCTOBER 1994
When I first suggested to Nara that he meet my father, he immediately agreed and made arrangements for the three of us to meet over dinner at L’Amour, a favorite place of ours in Brussels where both food and art ruled. The first time we dined there was around the time we first began to date. If I had to list the five most unique restaurants I have ever visited, L’Amour would definitely be on the list. The restaurant resembled a cave, a real cavern, with walls constructed of what appeared to be mammoth stones and whose multi-colored tables and chairs—which had been imported from India and Egypt, we learned—also appeared to be made of stone. The menu was personal, planned and served according to a customer’s wishes. The restaurant’s lighting was minimal with almost no electric lights at all, except for a few small ones in the cave’s recesses. Illumination was provided by candles, hundreds of them affixed to the walls of the cave throughout. Our first time there, I almost grew scared wondering if there was enough oxygen for us to breathe in that windowless place. But once that fear abated, we dissolved in the romantic atmosphere.
That said, and as much as I liked L’Amour, I didn’t think it was the most appropriate place to invite Ayah to dinner or for the two of them to get to know each other—not because the restaurant was incredibly expensive, with a clientele made up primarily of well-heeled people from Brussels and Paris—but because I was sure that Ayah would find the place to be pretentious and a testimony to the class differences that had so marked his life. But Nara had chosen the place because that is where the Lafebvre family liked to celebrate special occasi
ons—wedding anniversaries and birthdays, for instance—and that is where he had first kissed me.
I knew that for a man like my father, Dimas Suryo, who had come to France from a country in upheaval—a place called Indonesia which, for me, existed only in the imagination—L’Amour would come off as being no more than a primping room for members of the nouvelle bourgeoisie with an urgent need to show off their wealth, and pseudo-intellectuals with brains no bigger than peanuts.
I tried to explain all of this to my dearest Narayana as subtly as I could, but being both stubborn and naïve (at least in regard to my father), he resisted my suggestion and went ahead planning that first dinner with my father, full of love and attention. Meanwhile, I nervously wondered what my father’s reaction would be.
The dress code at L’Amour required that male customers wear suit and tie—something my father never did unless absolutely forced to. That, I guessed would be a big problem. Then, too, I couldn’t imagine him feeling comfortable beneath the fawning attention of the restaurant’s beautiful waitresses or the haughty gaze of its handsome maître d’.
Remarkably, Ayah protested very little when I told him that he had to wear a suit. I knew that he was doing it for me.
That night, the two main men in my life looked handsome, a well-matched pair. My fingers were crossed that everything would work out all right. And I watched them intently as they adopted a polite attitude and began to engage each other in civilized conversation. It would be more accurate to say that Nara began the conversation. He began by telling Ayah of his visit to Jakarta the previous year. He spoke of the city’s horrendous traffic conditions and how hot and humid the city felt. He talked about “Abimanyu Fallen,” a dance-drama performance he had seen with his parents at the Jakarta Arts Building, and about developments in Indonesia’s art world in general. More particularly, he talked about painting, whose popularity, he said, far surpassed that of other art forms.
Perhaps it was this talk about Jakarta, but Ayah suddenly seemed disinterested in Nara’s explanation. He listened quietly, but offered almost no comment at all, as if unimpressed.
When the sommelier came to our table with the bottle of Saint-Émilion Bordeaux that Nara had ordered for our meal, Ayah accepted a glass and slowly took a sip.
“Expensive wine for a college student,” he remarked.
Aha! The first of Ekalaya’s arrows, shot straight at the target.
Nara smiled. “That’s all right. This is a special occasion.”
“What makes it special?”
Nara continued to smile and looked at me.
“Lintang is a very special woman.”
Ayah stared at Nara like a tiger ready to pounce on a creature that had entered his domain.
“So, you’re a student,” Ayah said, “but do you also work part-time, like Lintang does at the library to earn enough money to cover her other expenses?”
The second arrow. But Narayana patiently continued to smile.
“No, sir. But during the summer two years ago I worked at my father’s office.”
“Must have been nice.”
The third arrow, this one straight into the heart.
I stared at Ayah. What was he doing? Was it his goal to make the rest of my life miserable? Didn’t he understand that Nara was the man I loved? The person who always put my happiness first?
Ayah grumbled about his tie and how it was strangling him. His eyes, a camera lens, panned the interior of the cave-like restaurant, scanning the reproductions of paintings around the room and the thick hanging plants suspended from the ceiling. What a mistake this was! Why had Nara invited him to Brussels, to this strange and expensive place?
“Why do we have to wear a suit in this cave? Why not costumes like on The Flintstones?”
Apparently thinking this was funny, Ayah chuckled to himself. I wanted to take the tub of butter the waiter had just set on the table and stuff it in my father’s mouth.
Maybe because Nara did not react to his taunts, Ayah finally began to act more polite.
“So, Jakarta is chaotic, you say? I’ve heard all there is now are shopping malls. Is that true?” he asked as he cut his steak and broccoli.
“Yes, sir. But the thing is, there’s no clear style of architecture. And not just the malls, but the toll roads that crisscross the city, which the children of the president own,” Nara answered critically.
His answer appeared to appease Ayah somewhat. He looked at Nara and then at me with a friendlier light was in his eyes.
Nara might be from a wealthy family, but he wasn’t stupid or ridiculous like many of the rich Indonesian kids I come to meet in Paris who drove Ferrari or Porsche cars to show off the fruits of their fathers’ corruption.
“What with their fingers in businesses everywhere, I’d say Soeharto’s children are the source of the problem,” Ayah suggested.
“I was there in June last year, just at the time the government revoked the publishing licenses of those two news magazines and a newspaper. You heard about it, I’m sure. It really was quite the scene. People took their protests to Parliament and were demonstrating in the streets.”
“I know, I follow the news,” Ayah remarked. “It was an idiotic thing for the government to do. All it did was prove to everyone that the Soeharto regime continues to want absolute power.”
I sensed Nara breathe a sigh of relief to see Ayah now acting in a more courteous manner. At the very least, he had smiled.
But, apparently, Ayah wasn’t quite ready to give in so easily. His face grew serious again. Looking downward, as if to bury his face in the plate, he cut at his steak intensely. I knew the look on his face; it was the same one that appeared whenever Maman started to get on his back about their precarious financial situation.
I broached a different subject. “Nara likes to watch films.”
“Of course he likes to watch films,” Ayah snapped. “If you’re a student of literature, you’re going to be interested in theater, film, dance, and music as well. That’s normal. It would be strange if he didn’t,” he added coldly.
I was getting the impression that the only reason my father had accepted Nara’s invitation to come all the way to Brussels for this meal was to insult and hurt this rich kid’s feelings. What he didn’t seem to realize was that by hurting Nara, he was also hurting me, his own daughter.
The restaurant was getting busier and the music emanating from the piano and violins on the small stage in the corner of the cave made me want to cry.
“You’re right, sir. A person has to choose the field he likes, but this is not a freedom all of our friends enjoy. Life makes its own choices.” Nara continued to maintain a pleasant demeanor and friendly tone of voice. He must have wrapped his body in some kind of anti-bullet or anti-arrow armor. He seemed immune to all the negative energy being directed towards him, his body a shield that deflected the jousts aimed at him.
Ayah said nothing for a moment. Maybe it had begun to dawn on him that Nara was, in fact, an intelligent person.
“What films do you like?” he asked in a warmer tone of voice.
“Well, one of my all-time favorites is Throne of Blood. It’s amazing how Kurosawa was able to reinterpret Macbeth the way he did. I had no idea that Shakespeare could be adapted to fit in with Japanese artistic traditions.”
Ayah cut another piece of meat from his steak before answering, but then nodded. “Throne of Blood is a great film,” he finally consented with a grunt.
“It’s Kurosawa’s interpretation of Lady Macbeth that really floored me,” I said, joining the conversation. “The soliloquy she delivers while seated, with her eyes fixed straight ahead as she speaks her poisonous words… Just incredible!”
“But you like Rashomon and Seven Samurai better,” Ayah stated as a truth before turning to Nara. “When Lintang was small, we used to go to film retrospectives in the park at the Domaine de Saint-Cloud,” he added in an aside.
“I know that, sir. Lintang has told me about al
l the films she’s seen,” Nara said with a smile as he squeezed my hand in his.
Wrong move. I could see it in my father’s eyes. His smile vanished.
The plates had been cleared away. Dessert arrived, but Ayah declined the offer and ordered coffee instead. I asked for mint tea. The waiter brought to the table several stems of mint arranged like a miniature tree in a pot. I had only to pick the leaves, rinse them in a small receptacle of water, and then submerge them in a cup of hot water. As he followed this process and the movement of my hands with his eyes, Ayah kept shaking his head. It was obvious that bringing such a cynical man as my father to this place had been a very bad idea.
I tried to bridge the looming silence. “Nara is one of the few men I know—aside from you, Ayah—who actually likes to read poetry,” I said.
“Really?” Ayah asked with a tone of disbelief. Again his eyes scanned the interior of the restaurant with its hundreds of candles. “Whose works do you like?”
Nara wiped his lips with his napkin and slowly recited the lines of a poem: “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes / I all alone beweep my outcast state / and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries …”
“Shakespeare, huh?” Ayah took a breath. “But why did you choose ‘Sonnet 29’?”
Nara said nothing. My heart beat faster.
Ayah set down his coffee cup on its saucer, then looked into Nara’s eyes as if he were seeking some kind of truth. Ayah contended that a person’s honesty could be seen in his eyes. Even the smallest of falsehoods could be detected in a person’s downward glance or a timorous shade in his eyes. Ayah was confident of his ability to judge a person’s character merely by the light in that person’s eyes. He always frightened me by his ability to do so.
“When I think of that sonnet,” Ayah said, “the picture that comes to my mind is of a young aristocrat who was born into wealth but is now depressed because he has fallen into poverty. He covets the things that other people own: ‘Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope…’ The sonnet is well written, with a good choice of words, but its message is conveyed though the figure of a spoiled young man.”
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