Nugroho’s voice grew hoarser as he spoke. Dimas’s eyes glistened. Tjai and Risjaf pretended to be busy getting plates and glasses, trying not to be seen wiping away the damn tears that had come to their eyes.
Vivienne squeezed Nugroho’s hand. “Lintang is sure to meet Bimo. He and Alam are good friends. I’ve heard that they are going to try to come to Europe next December for the International Conference on Human Rights in The Hague.”
Always so rational-sounding, Vivienne was ever able to soothe a person’s heart.
Wiping his tears, Nugroho nodded and laughed. “That’s right. He told me that he’d be coming to The Hague with Alam and representatives from other non-governmental organizations on December 10. After the conference, he’ll swing down here with Alam. I mark the calendar every day, counting how many months and days it will be before I meet my little boy again.”
“He’s not your little boy anymore,” Risjaf said, patting Nugroho on the shoulder. “He’s a young man now and better looking than his father.”
Dimas squeezed Nugroho’s shoulders, not saying anything.
“I will give you full report on Jakarta,” Lintang promised Nugroho. “Thank you all for this,” she said with the envelope in her hand.
Lintang hugged each of her uncles, those strong and steadfast pillars. If, when she arrived in Jakarta, she possessed even a shred of their strength, she knew that she would be ready to explore this foreign world that she called her homeland.
Dimas and Lintang walked among the rows of grand and beautiful tombstones. They looked at Édith Piaf’s grave marker—black with a crucifix—contrasting in its simplicity with the others. Before the grave of Marcel Proust, it was as if they were flâneurs in the midst of enjoying the beauty of death eternalized in beautiful form. Death celebrated in poetry, flowers, and verdant trees that lent passersby their cooling shadows. Dimas hadn’t thought to wonder why, on the day before his daughter’s departure, they had ended up coming to this cemetery. What they had decided was to visit a number of places in Paris they both liked—with no clear plan, time schedule, or map. Earlier in the day, they had enjoyed a simple meal together at a small café on Île St-Louis. They spoke of the Tour d’Argent, one of the city’s oldest and costliest restaurants, and laughed at the craziness of anyone willing to spend so much money there just on lunch or dinner.
“Why Balzac, Dumas, and other poets, even modern-day ones, have cited that place as a source of inspiration, I will never understand.”
Dimas shook his head. They walked along the bank of the Seine until they came to Antoine Martin’s bookstall. There, they engaged the owner in small talk and Lintang said her goodbyes, even as they rummaged through the place for used books and records.
“You’re going so far away,” Monsieur Martin said to Lintang through clenched teeth in which he held a cigarette as he scanned the shelves and piles of books. “I’m going to find something nice for you to read along the way.”
Finally, he found what he was looking for and handed the slim volume to Lintang: The Waste Land. “This is free for you.”
Lintang laughed. She already owned Eliot’s collection of poems but she thanked Monsieur Martin enthusiastically. Maybe she would take it with her. The one she owned was a wreck, full of scribbling and loose pages.
After buying a few used books, they slowly traced the River Seine, their purchases in hand, marveling at how this river, which was constantly being groped and explored by tourists, photographers, and filmmakers, was able to hold so many stories in its rippling waters, including the arrival of Dimas and his friends in Paris, this large city, home to some of the best and most important writers, philosophers, filmmakers, designers, models, and architects in the world. But at the very least, the River Seine had not been violated in the same way the Solo River had. How mankind had betrayed nature by using the river as a place to dispose of corpses and, worse still, by doing so, had betrayed all sense of humankind.
“Ayah…?”
“Yes…?”
“Are you really OK—your health, that is?”
“Yes.”
“What did the results of the tests show?”
“A problem with my liver, is all. Medicine will cure it. I’ll go in for another check,” Dimas answered, his eyes on the tourist boat coming up the Seine.
Typical. Lintang knew that when her father didn’t want to talk about something, he would segue the conversation to a topic lighter in tone.
“Ayah…” Lintang stopped and took her father’s hand. “I want you to be here to see me graduate, build a career and home, and have children.”
Dimas placed his hand lovingly on his daughter’s cheek. But there was something, some kind of clot that seemed to be stuck in his throat.
“I don’t intend to miss any of those events, Lintang. I will be there, right at the front. And on your wedding day, when you marry Nara, your mother and I will be there to be a give you to him and his parents.”
Lintang laughed and exclaimed. “Ayah! Who says I’m getting married to Nara? I don’t know who I am going to marry. I don’t know if I even want to get married. I know I want to have children but I can’t picture myself in a marriage.”
Lintang’s statement caught Dimas by surprise. This information was new and foreign to him. What?
“But aren’t you serious about Nara?” he asked. “Didn’t you get mad at me and all defensive about him when you thought I was mocking him? And now…?”
“Stop!” Lintang suddenly demanded, seeing that her father had indeed succeeded in steering the conversation to another topic. “Don’t try turning the conversation around. I was asking you about your health.”
“Dear Lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know Your stairway lies on the whispering wind …”
Dear God… Lintang knew that she had to hold her tongue when her father went into his Led Zeppelin mode. If she were to dare to mock his taste in classic rock—a musical period she felt should be stored in a museum along with memories her parents shared, such as the time they went to London to see a Led Zeppelin concert—the result would be a three-hour course in its merits. Her father would lecture her about this legendary British band, which he deemed to be the most influential band in the world. He and her mother were just two of the band’s billions of fans.
Her father was so good at changing the conversation and she was so irritated with him for his skill that she didn’t even remember having immediately agreed with him when he suggested they go to the Père Lachaise cemetery. And so it was, without a plan, without a destination in mind, and without a fixed desire of something to do, they had found themselves in the cemetery grounds.
“Today, we really are flâneurs.”
Dimas smiled. “Which doesn’t necessarily mean this to be a meaningless journey.”
Dimas felt calm and at peace in this place. Perhaps it was strange, but that is what he felt. So, too, Lintang—which is what, in the end, reunited them again: their shared memory of exploring the graveyard, studying the gravestones, and talking about the famous figures who were now nothing but bones beneath the cemetery ground. Lintang’s first experience in using a camera as a girl had been here in this cemetery.
In Indonesia, cemeteries were generally not places for strolling, sitting, watching twilight, or creating poetry. Even in front of Chairil Anwar’s grave, whose stele-like gravestone set it apart from all other graves around it, Dimas had never found the cemetery in which it sat to be an intriguing or comfortable place—not like the Cimetière du Père Lachaise. But, that said, there was something—a scent, a sense of ownership, or a sense of unity, perhaps—that united it with Karet cemetery where the great Indonesian poet was buried.
As they were passing Jim Morrison’s grand tombstone, Dimas bent down and picked up a small clump of soil from the site. Smelling the soil, he shook his head. “It smells different.”
Lintang followed her father’s example and picked up another small clump of soil near the grave and smelle
d it too. A look of confusion appeared on her face. “What’s the difference? Different from what soil.”
“In Karet, my future home,” her father said, not bothering to cite the source of the quote, because he knew Lintang was familiar with Chairil Anwar’s poetry.
As a child Lintang had never been comfortable when she heard her parents speak about death or plans for their final place of rest. Frankly, she still wasn’t.
“Look at the gravestones here,” Dimas said to Lintang. “Aren’t they extraordinary? You get the feeling that they were erected not only as a result of the desire on the part of the living to continue their relationship with loved ones who have already crossed over to a world we do not know, but also with the intent of nurturing in the living a feeling of melancholy. But, whatever the case, I think I would be more comfortable and happy to be buried in Karet, Chairil Anwar’s home.”
Lintang immediately paraphrased one of the poet’s more famous lines. “I want you to live for a thousand years more, Ayah. So stop talking about where you’re going to be buried.”
“OK,” Dimas agreed. “There’s one thing I want you to do for me,” he said while removing the Titoni 17-jewel watch which, for decades, had gripped his wrist. “I want you to give this to Alam, Om Hananto’s son. It’s very old but it still runs well.”
Lintang’s heart trembled as she took the watch from her father. “This was Om Hananto’s?”
Dimas nodded. “Yes. He gave it to me the last time I saw him, before I left Jakarta.”
As if it were a precious gem and not an old timepiece, Lintang carefully wrapped the watch in the scarf she had been wearing.
“Ayah, one thing I’ve always wanted to know is what it is with this ménage of you, Om Hananto, and Tante Surti.” Lintang felt relieved to have finally released the question that had haunted her for years.
A slight look of tension appeared on Dimas’s face. Finally, he lowered his body and sat down beside Jim Morrison’s gravestone. The sun was edging towards the horizon, but with summertime approaching, daylight would remain for some time to come.
“What can I tell you, Lintang? It’s just the story of a student romance. I was friends with Om Hananto first, ever since I started college.”
Lintang waited for the rest of the story, but her father appeared to be trying to figure out how to disentangle a snaggled skein and turn it into a smooth, straight, and simple thread that did not give rise to perturbing questions. But Dimas didn’t know how to untangle this knotted ball of thread. Could he not just bury it with the bones in the ground of the Cimetière du Père Lachaise?
“And then…?” Lintang gently tried to stress the tone of demand in her question.
“I once…I once dated Surti when we were students, but, in the end, she married Hananto. That was it; nothing special about it. Just an old romance, now forgotten.” The greater the undertone in his voice, the more unconvincing his words seemed to be.
Lintang studied her father’s face and the soft flickering light in his eyes, which sapped her of the strong urge to know more and to ask him further questions.
“It was just like Om Risjaf and Tante Rukmini. He was interested in her but, in the end, she chose to marry Om Nug. They’re just funny stories from our student days that are not important now and don’t have…”
“The two stories differ,” said Lintang, her curiosity renewed. “There were plenty of times I heard Om Risjaf and Om Nug talking and joking about the past, plus Om Risjaf never actually dated Tante Rukmini. That’s different from your situation with Om Hananto and Tante Surti.”
“Why is it important for you to know about this?” Dimas had begun to feel his daughter trespassing on personal territory—a domain he had never truly spoken of or freely explained, not even when Vivienne had demanded that he be honest with her about his feelings. “And what does this have to do with your final assignment?”
For a while, Lintang said nothing as she tried to understand her father’s feelings. Yes, this was his personal space. But she had to know the entire context and background of her respondents, especially the Hananto Prawiro family.
“I will be meeting the Hananto family,” she finally said, “and if there is some kind of special relationship between you and them, I think I need to be prepared. I am coming to them as a research student to document their life history, which is a dark spot on the history of your homeland, Ayah, and on my homeland too…”
Dimas looked at Lintang, his heart was touched when hearing her say “my homeland.”
“You know, don’t you, that the word ‘flâneur’ has multiple meanings?”
Lintang nodded her head slowly.
“In the sixteenth century the word flânerie meant the custom of strolling the pathways, enjoying the twilight air or flowers blooming in the spring. The implication here is that it was an activity undertaken by aristocrats who had time to spare. More recently the word flâneur came to have a much more ambivalent meaning. In it was now an aspiration on the part of a person who is undertaking a journey to fulfill his curiosity and study the local culture. This is different from the previous ‘flâneur,’ which meant a stroller or a wanderer who went from one place to another, without any certain destination. Witnessing a flâneur is like watching a motion picture of an urban life.”
Lintang felt certain that her father had a reason for this lecture on the semantics of ‘flâneur.’ She would try to be patient. At the very least, listening to a lecture on etymology would be much more beneficial than hearing him expound on the awesomeness of Led Zeppelin.
“But I am most in agreement with the explanation provided by Charles Baudelaire, who said that activity on a journey is the same as a home for the flâneur, like water for fish. Passion and work become one in the activity. A flâneur will forever be looking, and building his home in the flow and motion of movement. He might feel he has left his home, but in fact he built a home in his journey.”
“Like a seagull,” Lintang commented.
“Yes,” Dimas said, turning his head, as if being drawn back to the real world after being submerged in a sea of thought and semiotics. “That’s what your mother used to say: like a seagull.”
In late spring, the Paris sun doesn’t retire early from its duties. Père Lachaise Cemetery was still bright even though the hour showed it to be eventide. “I am still wandering, with or without a destination. I was still a flâneur when Surti asked me to throw down my anchor and seek port. I guess it was a logical risk. I shouldn’t have been surprised when Surti chose for herself a man who was ready to stand beside her and was able to promise to protect her and their future children from anything the sky might cast down on them. That’s all…”
Lintang nodded slowly, though her face was full of questions.
“And when you met Maman? Did you feel ready then? Or did you still feel yourself to be a flâneur?”
Dimas paused. He knew that his marriage to Vivienne had been based more on need and comfort than anything else, but he was also aware of how unfair that sounded. Certainly what he felt for Vivienne would always be pure and sincere. To this day, however, he did not know whether it was love or a comfortable sense of security. He so very much wanted to tell his daughter that settling in Paris, starting a family with her mother, and building a home in exile was not something he had ever wished or aspired to. But “exile” was not a word he ever would have said in front of Lintang’s mother, because, for Vivienne, Paris was home. What he and his three friends had done—jumping from Santiago to Havana and then to Peking before finally landing in Paris—had not been a journey they had made out of choice. They were not epigones; nor were they members of the Beat generation who wandered about the United States because of choice—to breathe in the air of freedom and to experiment with sex and drugs. He and his friends were forever haunted by a feeling of being watched and hunted as a result of their political choices—or, in his case and that of Tjai, as a result of their not choosing.
“I love your mother and
everything about her. I love her because she gave me the most beautiful gift in the world, which is you.”
Finally, after having found the right formula for closing the topic of conversation, Dimas had provided an answer. But Lintang was a curious student, trained by both her parents and teachers not to accept at face value the answer given or what is written in a book.
“Kenanga, Bulan, and Alam… Are those names ones that you chose?”
Dimas almost fell over backward. He suddenly turned pale. Damn! Having such a bright daughter was as irritating as it was pleasing.
“Yes,” Dimas answered with a long sigh. “Those were names that I came up with long before the children were born. They represent the dreams of a young couple in love. But it was Surti who chose to give the names to her children. What you might…”
“Ayah! Don’t underestimate me,” Lintang chastised with a smile. “Look at my name and look at theirs. They all have your fingerprints on them. Supposing I had a younger brother or sister, I’m sure you would have given them names like ‘Button Flower’ or ‘Blue Sea.’”
Dimas broke out laughing. Just like Vivienne, Lintang had no space in herself for secrets or darkness. Everything had to be bright and glowing.
“Tell me, Ayah, once and for all, are you still a flâneur? Are you the inveterate wanderer who is always seeking, always traveling, never able to anchor?”
This time Dimas gave a sincere and honest answer: “I want to go home, Lintang. To a place that understands my odor, my physique, and my soul. I want to go home to Karet.”
After saying goodbye to her father at the door to his apartment, Lintang went to meet Narayana at Au Petit Fer à Cheval, the classic bistro in the Marais. She was late by ten minutes, but Nara greeted her warmly, impatient to possess her for the three days and nights he had so often mentioned to her. As soon as Lintang arrived at the table, one they had to reserve far in advance because of the café’s popularity, Nara gave in to the desire he had postponed for so long and immediately embraced her and gave her a passionate kiss. Lintang neither resisted Nara’s embrace nor encouraged him to continue. Her head was still full of Indonesian names unsuited for a French vocabulary: Karet, Surti, Hananto, Kenanga, Bulan, Alam, Karet, Bimo Nugroho, Karet, Chairil Anwar, Karet …
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