The Birdwoman's Palate

by Laksmi Pamuntjak

“Wouldn’t a Siria branch closer to them be doubly to their advantage, then?”

  “Not necessarily,” counters Nadezhda. “My point is their response to Siria II depends a lot on the type of people who come and hang out there. If it’s only fellow members of Pondok Indah’s elite, then what’s the point? They want to see the beautiful people from the other parts of town—the celebs, the actors, the models, the super-rich.”

  Bono scratches his head as he studies the menu. It looks like he wants to order some tekwan for himself.

  “If that’s the case, I’ll give them something they can’t get at Siria I,” he says. “Crazy, innovative dishes that I’ll only serve in the new restaurant. Can you see it? Something like the ABC Kitchen menu, but you won’t have to travel to New York!”

  My dear heart, my Bono: he really is a true chef. In the face of a sociological problem, he proposes a purely culinary solution.

  After ordering his own bowl of tekwan, he returns to staring at his iPad, following with his eyes every one of Nigella Lawson’s curves, pondering every weighty phrase that falls from the lips of the great and gorgeous creature as she pours batter into the cake pan she presses to her breast like a baby.

  In the meantime, I nibble on my small, sweet, pancake-like Apem Banyu. The texture resembles the more ubiquitous Kue Cucur, but this quiet beauty is soaked in a sauce heavy with coconut cream, palm sugar, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon. It’s only served at Islamic funerals in rural areas, explains the owner of the eatery, during the nightlong recitation of prayers. Ah, but all of us have to return to our eternal home at some point, I think lightly. The important thing is that all of it be delicious—or, in the lingo of these parts, lemak nian.

  16

  HE’S NO LONGER WITH US

  In another dream, I see myself in a hospital, approaching the nurse’s station in the middle of the night. I’m an enormous baby, swaddled in a special isolation room gown, whimpering for milk.

  When a nurse replies “We’re out of milk,” I scream like a baby possessed. “Me want miwk! Me want miwk!”

  My team of three and I haven’t even emerged from the car when a middle-aged woman runs toward us.

  “Oh God. He’s dead, ma’am. Dead.” As she speaks, she shakes her head. From her uniform and figure, she appears to be an employee at the Ministry’s local office who doesn’t care much for food.

  My heart is pounding. Who’s dead? My mother? Irma? The two other people I love, Bono and Nadezhda, are with me now. It can’t be . . . it can’t be Leon. My pulse quickens, like in that wretched dream with Leon and Katrin in it. I hastily brush the thought aside. What I experienced with Leon wasn’t love; it was stupidity.

  “The patient, ma’am,” the woman stammers when I grab her hand. “The avian flu patient you just visited.”

  Now my heart seizes.

  “Mr. Zachri?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Mr. Zachri. Just now. Less than ten minutes ago.”

  “Wha . . . wha . . .” My knees go weak. I have to sit down, and Farish gets me a stool—strangely attentive of him. There I am, sitting down on the veranda of the Ministry’s local branch office as if my own world is falling apart.

  “How could this happen? I only just . . . I mean, he was fine when I left him.”

  “According to the hospital, there was some unexpected hemorrhaging in Mr. Zachri’s lungs.”

  “There was . . . there was no direct connection with the avian flu, was there?” I ask a bit stupidly, my head spinning.

  A hand lands on my knee. I’m trembling all over.

  “Run,” says Farish, the hand’s master, “you know it’s not your fault, right?”

  For some reason, I let his hand remain.

  This seaside restaurant, though much vaunted, doesn’t seem that impressive tonight. In Jakarta, this restaurant wouldn’t last long; people wouldn’t think it was the real thing. What kind of successful restaurant operates in complete darkness? With some sadness, I consider this difference in standards. Even though the people of Palembang get all starry-eyed when they talk about this place, the facts of life outside the capital still apply: electric lighting belongs only to governors, mayors, the police—those who have the power to do dark deals for their own gain.

  After we pass the enormous fish tanks at the front of the restaurant, we decide to sit in the open-air area, which resembles a wharf and where we can freely admire the lights of the Ampera Bridge, their curvature like the broad grin of Zwarte Piet.

  In the light of the moon, Nadezhda looks like a mythical creature from a faraway land, as if she is still unwilling to refuse outright the awe of mortals like Farish and Ewan, who in turn know they might as well be the owl in that old saying, pining hopelessly after the moon.

  Once again I feel that jealousy—a jealousy that is, really, more a kind of disappointment with myself. A disappointment that I’m so straight, so monotone, not in the least plural like this enchanting sylph who happens to be my very close friend.

  It’s a matter of some astonishment—Nadezhda’s confidence that she’ll always be the center of attention. She was raised in a high-profile family, both wealthy and educated. As such, she’s used to meeting, befriending, and conversing with people from diverse circles, and she knows how to bring them under her spell. It’s like the rules don’t apply to her; she’s above them, and yet because of this she’s open to all kinds of eccentricity and madness. She’s not someone who’s fated to embrace the full import of her origins or to find what other people call “home.” And she doesn’t feel the need to explain why she is the way she is.

  Bono isn’t much different. When he looks at something, he takes in the world. He works hard, learns to play many parts. He absorbs, infiltrates, embodies his surroundings. When he laughs the sun is brighter, the moon fuller.

  Look at them now, discussing recipes for Pindang Patin and the hemorrhaging of internal organs as if the problems of this world and the afterlife must be confronted, debated, and settled to keep the human race going. Meanwhile, I still can’t find the words to express this strange grief of mine. Where are they? How do I call them to me? Or do they come only to those who put themselves in their hands?

  “He was already more than sixty-five years old, wasn’t he?” asks Nadezhda.

  I don’t respond.

  “How could an aneurysm go undetected by the doctors?”

  In truth, I’ve begun to suspect that the doctors handling Mr. Zachri’s case were preconditioned to regard his pneumonic symptoms in the larger context of avian flu, to the point of dismissing the other chronic ailments he suffered that could have caused similar symptoms. It’s very likely that he had suffered for a long time from a rare form of bronchiolitis, or a lung condition even more difficult to detect, that quickly spread to the blood vessels and gave rise to pneumonic symptoms. But I say nothing.

  “Tamarind!” It’s Bono, his voice floating up. “I’m positive there’s tamarind in this.”

  Suddenly, just like that, hemorrhaging as a topic of discussion is forgotten. Nadezhda and Bono begin comparing the pindang patin they’re currently savoring like there’s no tomorrow. It’s tasty as hell, as are the other versions of pindang soup around the archipelago: the Pangeh Masi of the Minang, the Javanese-style Pindang Serani, the Gangan or Lempah from Bangka Belitung.

  “Definitely tamarind. Just a hint, dissolved in water. No wonder it’s so subtle. I even detect notes of something roasted, but it’s not smoked fish. Turmeric, maybe? Shrimp paste?”

  Ewan, who’s been listening to us this whole time, holding his breath, suddenly chimes in. You can find many kinds of pindang in Palembang, he tells us. There’s Pindang Meranjat, Pindang Pegangan, Pindang Musi Rawas, Pindang Palembang. The most common version in South Sumatra, in the regency of Ogan Komering Ilir, uses coarsely ground red chili pepper. When you stir the pindang, bits of chili pepper spread through the broth. “Like someone’s brains spraying out after they’ve been shot,” he says earnestly.

  Nadezhda gaz
es for a moment at the innocent face of the Palembang boy. She seems impressed—beneath the water’s placid surface, there are ripples after all.

  Pindang meranjat and pindang pegangan, Ewan continues—probably more confident now that he has Nadezhda’s attention—use a lot of shrimp paste, and sometimes smoked fish.

  “But this pindang has shrimp paste, too!” Nadezhda exclaims with energy. “I’m sure of it. Not a lot, but enough to enrich the flavor. The combination of the sour, sweet, and spicy is just right as well. Cherry tomatoes, green tomatoes, bilimbi, bay leaves, pineapple slivers . . . my God. So stylish. Not to mention the lemon basil!”

  “And they all make complete sense—they balance out the oiliness of the patin fish, which might make this dish too rich,” says Bono.

  “Even the broth is spot on,” says Nadezhda. “Thick, but not too thick. Full-bodied,” she adds in English before looking my way. “Aruna, what’s the right word in Indonesian?”

  But I pay her no notice. I still can’t erase Mr. Zachri’s face from my memory, especially the look on his face when he said he wanted to stay in Palembang for the pempek. I also can’t shake off the image of the Grand Mosque and the stillness I felt down to the tips of my toes. Why did that moment feel so arresting, so stirring?

  Then I remember someone once told me that silence is God’s friend. From the monks and nuns of certain orders who carry out their days mutely, to the Hindu concept, in Sanskrit, of sunyata, it is clear that stillness can become a kind of acknowledgment on the part of humankind that God is truly that which is inexpressible.

  Before I realize it, I’m crying. And there’s that hand again, this time on my shoulder.

  “Do you want me to take you to Mr. Zachri’s house?” asks Farish. His gaze is gentle, almost like a lover’s. “I’m not sure if we’ll have time tomorrow.”

  I nod.

  Again, I let the hand remain.

  During the ride to Mr. Zachri’s house, it feels like something is going to burst out of my chest. I go into hysterics.

  “Impossible, Run.” Farish tries to calm me down. “It’s impossible to push for a histopathological investigation if a patient’s already dead. Even when a patient is still alive, who has the right to ask for such a procedure if they’re not the doctor? And even if the doctor had the same idea, what hospital would be able to do it? And who would pay for it?”

  “What about an open lung biopsy?” I ask stubbornly.

  “You can’t be serious. That’s a mighty expensive procedure. It would involve video-assisted thoracoscopy and everything! Look around you! We don’t have the technology, much less the technicians. And as we all know, Mr. Zachri probably never had a real doctor and probably was never given proper medicine. If he really did suffer from bronchiolitis, it’s very likely he was never diagnosed as such and consequently was never given corticosteroids or prednisolone.”

  My tears start flowing again.

  Thanks to the hard work of the local Ministry staff, Mr. Zachri’s family has been convinced not to bury the old man’s body until the next morning, with the excuse that an additional examination has to be performed before the final report is sent to Ministry headquarters in Jakarta. But what they don’t know is how many additional examinations have already been performed on his corpse.

  However, the local Ministry staff had clearly failed to convince Mr. Zachri’s family to let his body stay in the hospital overnight. At half past seven, earlier that evening, while my friends and I were analyzing the composition of flavors in a bowl of sour, sweet, and spicy pindang patin, the body of Mr. Zachri was returned to his house to be prayed over by people who probably never so much as glanced at him when he was still alive.

  “Maybe the hospital just wants to wash their hands of the matter,” I say, tears still streaming. “Now they can close the books on it. All they have to do is tell Ministry headquarters, ‘Suspected avian flu patient died of complications related to pneumonia.’ No one will ask why or what triggered the death. And now Mr. Zachri’s body has been returned to his family. There won’t be an autopsy. He’ll be buried tomorrow. Case closed.”

  “Just let it go, please.”

  “Look,” I say as I swallow, “sorry . . . but do you mind if we go to the hospital for a little while? I want to examine the pathology records again. I probably wasn’t concentrating earlier today when I read them the first time.”

  When we get to the hospital, the nurse who greets us says curtly, “The pathology records have already been sent to Ministry headquarters. We forgot to make a copy. Sorry. You can check them when you get to Jakarta.”

  It’s only when we’re back in the car on the way to Mr. Zachri’s house that I remember—she was the nurse who kept reminding Mr. Zachri not to talk to me for too long when I was visiting him.

  My knowledge is limited where death is concerned. Only two people I know well have died: my favorite elementary school teacher and my father. And even those didn’t seem real.

  When my teacher died, I hadn’t seen her for years, and all I remember of the funeral was the canopy tent that suddenly collapsed, the people baked under the sun’s fierce heat, and the ustad who hacked continuously as he prayed for my teacher’s soul: “May her good deeds always be remembered (cough, cough) and may the family she leaves behind be strong and pure of heart (cough, cough). Amen.”

  Whenever I recall that afternoon in the cemetery at Tanah Kusir, something stirs within me, near the nape of my neck. It was a day when my teacher sat me down in the classroom and, gazing deep into my eyes, said, “You’re the kind of student who’ll never be satisfied with what you know.” To this day, I don’t know what she meant. I don’t feel like I know much of anything. But “who’ll never be satisfied” implied some kind of strong desire, a struggle even, to fix or change my fate in life. And for some reason those words always gave me strength. So I found it sad that someone who had made my life richer with what she’d said had to leave this world accompanied by words so hoarse, so broken, so banal.

  With my father it was a different matter entirely. Maybe it was because I reached the hospital too late or because my mother was trying hard to avoid seeing him. I wasn’t even allowed to look at his body in the mortuary, before he was taken to our home to have his face scoured and his body and hair freshly washed and wrapped in Muslim linen.

  My memory of that day is groaningly unreliable because death, like birth, circumcision, marriage, and all other important events in a person’s life, is a public affair, and as a result is packed with the problems of other people: Is there enough rice for everyone? Have we paid the ustad his fee? Have you called the funeral transportation company? Has the tent been set up? Have the flower arrangements from Company X arrived yet?

  After my father was bathed and made up and laid out on a mat in the middle of the house, all I saw was a face, rotund and yellowish. A sad piece of flesh. I found myself thinking, Isn’t now the time to cry? But wait. Isn’t now also the time to “be strong”—to dress neatly, to receive guests with a brave smile, to invite people to sit down, to fetch them drinks?

  How many stories were milling around that day among the guests being served sweet tidbits and fruit and small packets of nasi rames—rice with assorted side dishes? Stories about my father’s swollen face, about the mixture of mucus and blood that rose from his broken lungs and poured from his nose in such a horrible gush that the mask that had been put there to protect his nose couldn’t contain it all. But of course life was no longer the same. After my mother had stolen away to her room to cry and my father was no longer able to protect us, those who had come to pay their respects didn’t even try to lower their voices as I passed. As if death, from now on, was a part of life best learned through other people.

  Later in the day, after afternoon prayers, I watched six men, some whom I didn’t know, shoulder the coffin and carry it to the open grave. A hollowness took hold of me, and I felt nothing. What I felt—if it was a feeling at all—was a profound dullness. And I
felt the same when, in a flattened corner of my consciousness, I heard the voices of children chasing each other among the graves of strangers, their happy shrieks rising like balloons above the public grief of their parents.

  For days I lived in that dullness as a constant stream of people came to visit the house and uttered the same words again and again: “My condolences.” “Be brave, child.” “Take care of your mother.” “Let your father go.” “Only God knows what is best for us.” It was only after a month or so, when I saw a pair of songbirds—sooty-headed bulbuls—on the veranda of a friend’s house that I felt moisture warming my cheeks.

  But tonight, as I’m sitting cross-legged on a mat in a dank house that smells of death, about a hair’s breadth away from the body of an old man who wasn’t my father, wasn’t an acquaintance, wasn’t anybody, just someone who less than twelve hours ago was squeezing my hand and entrusting his most intimate memories to me, I feel a tightness in my chest. And lo, tears falling.

  I’ll never know if my sadness has shown itself to such an extent because I feel more involved in his death or if it’s because I only knew Mr. Zachri in part—the side of him that moved me—unlike my father, whose entire life had been a long stretch of despair.

  I’m also not sure if the tears that now flow so easily from me are because I’m older than when my father was ripped away from me. Because in being older, I see now that the struggle of those who stand face-to-face with death is really a struggle against malaise—the pain of loss.

  Whenever a person says he or she wants to win their fight against cancer or some other terminal illness, it is that pain they are fighting against; the pain tells them they will lose. It’s the same with the person who stands at death’s door, talking about the beautiful things in their life, whether they be the birds that make them smile in the morning or the pempek that keeps them rooted to the city of their birth.

  That night, when I return to my room, Nadezhda hugs me. There’s a book, she says, about a woman mourning her husband and child who passed away within a short time of each other. In one chapter toward the end, the author writes: Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.