I didn’t reply.
“So, do you want to meet at my mother’s house later?” Alam asked in a softer voice. “How long do you think you’ll be there? Maybe, when my business is done, I can come to Percetakan Negara to pick you up.”
I restrained my glee in hearing that he wanted to see me again the next day. So juvenile, so pubescent I’d suddenly become, like a teenager on the cusp of change. I should have been focusing my thoughts on the questions I would ask in upcoming interviews and the answers my respondents might give, but here I was trying to set my schedule so that it fit in with Alam’s. This was ridiculous. What had happened to Nara? I really had to call Nara. It would be expensive, but I knew I had to call him.
“What time do you think you’ll be done? I imagine my interview will be two, maybe three hours.”
Alam laughed. “You don’t know my mother. First, she’ll want to get to know you and then she’ll invite you to join her for lunch or maybe even to cook a meal with her. Only after that will she let you interview her. I can see it taking most if not all of the day.”
“Well then, do you want to meet me at your mother’s?”
Alam paused before answering. “Let’s play it by ear and call each other in the afternoon. If you finish before I do, maybe we can meet somewhere halfway. You have Andini’s extra cell, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do, and I have mine, too, but it has my French number.” Now, I was feeling disappointed.
“OK then, gotta go. Good luck and take care.”
I put down the receiver of the phone in Om Aji’s living room and sat down on the couch to reread the notes I had gathered thus far. So, my meeting with Alam tomorrow was still up in the air—or, at best, still uncertain as to when and where. I suddenly felt miserable and upset. But why was a meeting with this tall man, with the almost blue facial skin from having just shaved, so important to me? I had to forget about him—at least for now. I had other business to do, the first of which was to find out where to buy some flowers. My father had specifically requested that when I meet “Tante Surti”—which is how he always referred to her when speaking to me—I was supposed to bring her jasmine flowers.
When Andini came to join me, I asked her, “Din, where can I find jasmine flowers?”
“Jasmine? What? Who’s koit?”
“‘Koit’?” I asked, not knowing the word.
Andini laughed. “Yeah, ‘koit.’ That’s Jakarta slang for dead, as in ‘kicked the bucket’ or ‘bit the dust.’ Never heard that one in Paris, huh?”
I took my notebook and wrote down the new word. Though I considered myself fluent in Indonesian, ever since setting foot in Jakarta, I’d been constantly writing down words that were foreign to my ears and not to be found in any dictionary. Andini was constantly chiding me about my obsessive notetaking.
“Are you going to a wake or something?” she then asked. “Or getting married?! Jasmine flowers are for the newly married or nearly buried.”
Hmm… Then why had Ayah asked me to take jasmine to Tante Surti?
“Whatever… I just need to know where can I buy some jasmine flowers for tomorrow.”
“Well, at the cemetery, for one. Come on, I’ll take you. You’re the one always touting the charms of graveyards—like a flâneur,” she said, imitating my expression. Andini smiled and blinked her eyes.
I grabbed one of the extra cushions on the couch and threw it at her, truly pleased at that moment to have a cousin my age.
Om Aji, seated in his lazy chair, looked up and interrupted. “Dini, ask Irah to buy some when she goes to the market tomorrow morning. Are they for Tante Surti?” he then asked me. “I’m sure your father asked you to bring some for her.”
I nodded in surprise. How did he know such a thing?
The Prawiro family home on Jalan Percetakan Negara in the Salemba area of Jakarta was an older building that looked in need of renovation. Its original white color was now closer to light brown. Even so, the small lawn and garden out front were well maintained, and the house was framed by lantana shrubs with showy heads of purple and yellow flowers. My video camera was in the bag hanging from my shoulder, and in my hand was a clear plastic container with strings of jasmine flowers. (Tante Retno insisted that putting them in the container would help to keep the flowers fresh.) The gate to Tante Surti’s home was unlocked and it creaked when I opened it. I looked around at the yard and imagined Kenanga, Bulan, and Alam, who must have spent whole days playing there as children.
I knocked on the door. An older woman, a housemaid, I assumed, opened the door and invited me to come inside, then led me to the living room where she invited me to take a chair. The clackety-clack sound of a foot-driven pedal sewing machine came to me from a side room. Alam had told me that after her husband’s death, Tante Surti had supported herself and her family as a seamstress, and that she had two assistants to help with the sewing orders she received.
In the room were a long rattan recliner and a lazy chair that looked to be in need of retirement. Dozens of old and faded photographs in frames filled the bookshelf. A tall vase of white carnations perched on an Indies-style upright stand helped to freshen the room. A large photograph of the Hananto family hung on the living room wall. Om Hananto, still young and good-looking, held a baby in his arms—Alam, for sure. Beside him were two girls: Kenanga and Bulan, of course. And standing next to them was—mon Dieu!—Tante Surti? It was no wonder that my father and Om Hananto had once vied for her attention. She looked like a film star the great filmmaker Usmar Ismail might have discovered. She wasn’t just pretty, with her thick wavy hair framing her oval face with almond-shaped eyes and finely shaped nose. She was stunning, with a magnetic appeal. Her full lips were a wonderfully natural shape—unlike those of many women today who manipulate their shape with lipstick around the edges to make them appear thinner or transforming thin lips to resemble hunks of steak, like Brigitte Bardot’s lips when she was young. No, Tante Surti’s lips were natural, perfectly formed, and required no disguise or manipulation. Like Maman, Tante Surti appeared to be a woman who did not depend on cosmetics to enhance her natural beauty. Maybe a light brush of the powder puff or a dab of lipstick on occasion, but that was enough. And certainly no rouge or mascara, either.
Hanging beside this formal photograph was another one that arrested my gaze: Alam dressed in some kind of martial art fighting gear—maybe karate, maybe tae kwon do, I didn’t know the difference. He appeared to be of primary school age but even then, next to his teammates, he looked tall and fit for his age. A montage of photographs showed him in action and wearing a black belt. It must have been from those beginnings that he acquired the set of muscles visible beneath his shirt. Alam had his father’s face: handsome, stern, and masculine. Both Kenanga and Bulan were blessed with their mother’s beauty; but Kenanga, despite her obvious charms, did not smile in any of the photographs on display. She looked serious, almost forlorn. Her sister Bulan, on the other hand, was always posing and staring straight into the camera with a friendly smile.
“Hello. You must be Lintang.”
A woman of about sixty years of age stood in front of me: Surti Anandari, who was no less attractive in her later years than she had been as a young woman. What differentiated the present Surti from the one in the faded photograph was that her hair was now silver in color and her skin of a different texture. Nonetheless, for a woman who had suffered so much in life, she remained poised and erect. Alam must have gotten his eagle-like eyes, which had a piercing gleam, from his mother.
I extended my hand and bowed slightly. She took my hand, embraced me warmly, and kissed my cheeks. Her eyes glistened as she stroked my hair.
“Such a beautiful daughter Dimas has,” she said, “Please have a seat. Would you like a refreshment?”
I sat down slowly on the sofa, still mesmerized by Tante Surti’s aura. She had a presence that filled the room. “Anything’s fine. Water would be OK.”
“I just split open a young coconut. Would
you like some of that, with ice?”
Young coconut with ice on a hot day? A person would have to be crazy to object. Dingue! I nodded readily.
Tante Surti went into the kitchen and soon emerged with two bowls of young coconut with shaved ice and flavored syrup. The coconut tasted especially fresh, as if just cut from the tree. As we ate, we began our conversation, first seeking common ground: talking about my father’s friendship with Om Nug, Om Hananto, and Om Tjai when they were young; about going to school at the University of Indonesia at the time when Sukarno was president; and about the books they had difficulty in finding but which they usually managed to obtain from Dutch friends of Tante Surti’s father. After that, all the classic names emerged: Lord Byron, T.S. Eliot, on up to Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg and of course those Indonesian poets whose names were so common on the tongue, such as Chairil Anwar and Rivai Apin. Tante Surti was able to quote these poets’ words, and did so with great warmth as she spoke. Her face became overcast, however, when she said that 1965 marked the end of poetry in her life, that at that time poetry had changed it into an alien thing.
“Ever since that time, the only thing I was ever able to think about was how to survive and to protect the children,” she said, looking at me as her mind returned to Jakarta today.
I felt it was time to begin to record what Tante Surti was telling me, but then her mood suddenly changed, becoming lighter. Smiling broadly, she announced that it was about time for lunch. Would I like to join? This was an offer I was not about to refuse. Alam was right.
“Kenanga called earlier to tell me that she’d cooked ikan pindang serani, and that she would send some over to me. It should be here soon,” Tante Surti said as she fetched silverware for the meal.
I helped her set the table as she told me that Kenanga lived with her husband and children nearby. Because Tante Surti now lived alone—her two assistants and the servant went home in the evening—Kenanga often cooked for her mother, even though, Tante Surti insisted, she liked to cook as well. Bulan, Tante Surti said, worked in an advertising agency on Jalan Rasuna Said and lived in a boarding house in the Setiabudi area, which was close to that street, in order to be close to her office. Tante Surti told me that regardless of how busy Alam was, he always visited her on weekends.
Strangely though, after all these years, she remarked with a glance in my direction, he had yet to bring a girlfriend home. Of her three children, Tante Surti said with a smile as she placed water glasses on the table, he was the only one who seemed to have no obvious intention of establishing a permanent relationship with anyone.
I didn’t know how I was supposed to react to this information. Wasn’t it normal not to be married at the age of thirty-three? Or was it that in Indonesia the age of thirty or thereabouts was a demarcation line of sorts, past which one should not wait to get married? I was twenty-three and I didn’t know whether I wanted to get married or not.
I was answering one of Tante Surti’s questions when a lithe young woman who greatly resembled Tante Surti rushed breathlessly into the house holding a pot in her left arm, a tiffin in her right, and a plastic container beneath her chin. I quickly moved to assist and took the large and hot pot from her.
“You must be Kenanga,” I said. “Here, let me help.” I extracted the plastic container of fried shallots that was wedged between her chin and neck and then took the tiffin from her hand.
“Thank you,” she said, breathing a sigh of relief. “And you must be Lintang. My God, you’re beautiful!” she remarked point blank, causing me to blush straightaway. Tante Surti began to remove the food from the tiffin containers and put the various dishes in serving dishes. She shook her head and tisked. “My word, Kenanga, you cooked an entire meal!”
“No extra work, Ibu,” Kenanga replied. “It’s what we’re having at home for dinner tonight.” Saying that, she again looked at me, up and down, assessing my features. “I’m not surprised that Alam invited you here,” she said to me, then turned to look at her mother: “but I’m guessing that it wasn’t just for an interview!”
“I was thinking the same thing,” her mother replied. “Earlier, I told Lintang that Alam had never introduced any of his women friends to me. This is the first time.”
“You’re forgetting Rianti,” Kenanga said.
“Oh, Rianti…” Tante Surti said with a flap of her hands. “She only came here because Alam had suddenly vanished like a ghost and she knew that he usually visits me on weekends.”
I was strongly tempted to imitate the way Andini said “Ohmygod, ohmygod” whenever she found something to be funny or absurd, but secretly I didn’t object to this dialogue between mother and daughter since they had, at that instant, crowned me in my position as “the only girl Alam had ever invited to his mother’s home.” I didn’t know whether to scratch my head or to laugh, the situation was so absurd.
“I came to interview you,” I said to Tante Surti, “not because Alam suggested it.”
Tante Surti looked me in the eye, gently touched my cheek with her smooth fingers, and turned to Kenanga. “Look how she blushes!”
“It’s called the ‘Alam effect,’” Kenanga said with a laugh, as she came to the table with a pitcher of water.
Alam was right: when two women were talking, it was always best to listen and to not interrupt—especially when the two were as harmoniously paired as Tante Surti and Kenanga. He was also right that in his home, just as in mine, the family meal occupied an important position in daily life.
The three of us conversed while enjoying our plates of steamed white rice surrounded by tempeh cubes grilled in chili sauce, and stir-fried green beans with shrimp, and portions of milkfish from the soup that Kenanga prepared.
Kenanga seemed surprised to witness my dexterity in using the fingers of my right hand to eat the food she had prepared. When she pushed the bowl of rice towards me, a signal to help myself to a second serving, she asked, “Who taught you to eat with your fingers?”
“My father, of course,” I answered. “This pindang serani is extraordinary, Kenanga. The milkfish melts in your mouth. My father is the best cook at the Tanah Air Restaurant, and this is one of his favorite dishes.”
Kenanga glanced at her mother who was now enjoying the meal in silence.
“The recipe is from your father,” Kenanga said.
“Really?”
“Did you know that your father and my mother were once a hot couple?” Kenanga said.
I was glad she’d said that, as it indicated that she and her siblings could look on our parents’ former relationship with good humor.
“It’s a good thing they never married. If they had, you never would have met Alam!” Kenanga declared as she picked up some of the dishes and began carrying them to the kitchen.
Tante Surti smiled to see her daughter continue to tease me. I brushed off Kenanga’s remark.
“Is Alam going to be busy all day?” Tante Surti asked me.
“I think so.”
Kenanga quickly cleared the rest of the table and then prepared to leave. She apologized, saying that she had to attend a parent-teachers meeting at the school of her youngest daughter. Kenanga gave her mother a kiss, and then I walked her to the door. Noticing the plastic container of jasmine flowers on the table in the living room, she paused and said, “For most people jasmine is a flower of death, but for my mother…” She pointed at Tante Surti who was preparing coffee for the two of us in the kitchen, “…jasmine is a flower of life.”
Her remark implied that she and her mother were so close that she was confidant to her mother’s past life. Kenanga leaned towards me, speaking in a lower voice: “I suppose that it’s because I came to know of death at a very early age, I am now very short-tempered with people who do not appreciate life. That’s also the reason I get angry at Alam when he puts himself close to danger. It was enough that we had to grow up without our father and without a normal social life.”
I put my hand on Kenanga’s arm. “I h
ope that you will let me interview you one day.”
“Take care of Ibu first. She’s the linchpin in our lives. We’ll find a chance to speak again,” she said, “but now I have to go.” She kissed my cheek, then left the house.
We drank our coffee on the back terrace of the house. Tante Surti now seemed to be ready to give her testimony. She positioned herself on a chair facing the camera, a sign that we could begin.
Before starting, I told Tante Surti that if at any point she began to feel uncomfortable, she was to tell me so, and I would stop the camera. But with only one question from me to start, she began speaking to the camera as if it were a long lost friend, someone she had waited for years to meet again…
“I decided to marry Hananto Prawiro in Jakarta in 1953 for reasons of love and conviction. Hananto was a responsible man and I knew that he would love and take care of his family. I knew little about his political aspirations or activities. He worked as a journalist at the Nusantara News Agency where he ran the foreign desk. I knew that, of course, but I knew little of his activities outside office hours. In the numerous times that I was interrogated during the three years that Hananto was on the run, it was always that information my interrogators wanted: what it is that Mas Hananto did, whether he was a member of LEKRA, what meetings he had ever attended, who was present at the meetings, and so on and so forth. These questions were asked repeatedly by different interrogators, and with different tones of voice…”
Tante Surti paused for a moment to take a breath and a sip of coffee.
“Perhaps you could tell me why they detained the entire family…” I said to her.
“It’s not true that they detained our entire family—or at least that hadn’t been their original intent. It was my fault that happened. It was just that, with Mas Hananto gone, the kids and I were all so afraid of being separated from each other. But let me go back a bit…
“It all began on the morning of October 2 when Mas Hananto left to go to the office. He said the situation there was very uncertain. He told me not to leave the house unless it was absolutely necessary. Or, if I didn’t feel safe, then I was to go to my parents’ home in Bogor. But because I had just been at my parents’ house for an extended period of time for an entirely different reason—ehem, let’s just say that we were having marital problems—I declined his suggestion. I had no inkling of how bad things were to come.
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