The Birdwoman's Palate

by Laksmi Pamuntjak

  (Score awarded: 6/7)

  Sample Response 3: sweet potato, apple, asparagus, cherry, tomato, nutmeg, Tropicana orange juice.

  (Score awarded: 7/7)

  Sample Response 4: anthrax, cyanide, arsenic, tetrodotoxin, formaldehyde, puffer fish, poisonous snake.

  (Score awarded: 6/7)

  My heart nearly stops beating when I realize two things: (1) I don’t understand the logic behind the scoring system, and (2) there is a good chance that I can’t use any of the answers printed in the examples.

  “Honesty?” I squeak.

  “Correct,” my examiner replies, her face devoid of expression. “And of course we expect you not to give any of the answers provided in the examples. Understood?”

  “Yes,” I say with some difficulty. “But I have one condition. You have to tell me my score right away.”

  To my surprise, the woman nods. “All right.”

  I’m given ten minutes to write my answer.

  Here are the results:

  Jealousy, slander, low self-esteem, obesity, betrayal, paranoia, cowardly men.

  After examining my answer for two minutes, the woman looks up from my paper with a big smile on her face. “Congratulations!” she says, shaking my hand. “A perfect score!”

  For the first time on this trip, Bono is ticked off with me, even though the day has just begun. The drops of morning dew have yet to fall from the leaves. Even the roosters are too tired to crow.

  And this is why I’m not too enthused about the “Crack of Dawn” Medan-style kwetiau goreng and bihun bebek he’s been raving about for days, as if these two dishes comprise a vital, hitherto omitted part of our education.

  Actually, there are a few other reasons for my attitude: (1) My heart and mind are still wrapped up in thinking about that cursed DOCIR project, (2) I’m not a breakfast person, and (3) see my dream from last night.

  The Medan-style kwetiau goreng and bihun bebek—flat rice noodles and duck vermicelli—are particularly famous because of how clean and unadorned they taste. If the long, thin sheets of the kwetiau in question are best enjoyed with nothing more than sliced green chili and a dash of soy sauce, then the bihun bebek, which is also the most expensive duck vermicelli in the entire archipelago, requires nothing in addition to what comes in the bowl. That is, a mound of plain boiled noodles, plump slivers of poached duck, and a sprinkling of fried garlic chips that lend the dish an extra radiance. Usually, I don’t have any problems with such simplicity.

  But this morning both dishes taste bland to me. Even the relaxed atmosphere of the café—the Chinese “auntie” busy at the wok; the Chinese “uncle” going back and forth, greeting his neighbors, mostly middle-aged men there to sip coffee and enjoy breakfast after a morning run—fails to rouse my inner sociologist, who under normal circumstances would readily come to life.

  “Guess your sense of taste has been ruined, Run,” Nadezhda says with some sadness. “We’re all at fault. We ate too much yesterday. Too much heavily seasoned food.”

  We? Who is this “we”? I may have eaten a lot, but I’d never lose my palate, thank you very much.

  “I bet it’s poultry. Maybe your body’s rejecting anything to do with it,” says Farish, trying to lighten the mood.

  “Your taste buds are getting too pampered,” Nadezhda adds.

  I say nothing. If Bono is allowed to be critical, why can’t I? Sometimes I feel the wisdom we hear repeated constantly about food or wine should never be taken to heart. For example, that the most consistent quality is found in traditional dishes or food served by vendors. (Not always true!) Or that the more subtle the seasoning, the more the meat/fish/main ingredient will stand out. (But what about rendang, or Thai curry, or fish pepes?) Here’s another one: heavy wine must be preceded by lighter wine, and fish goes better with white wine while red meat goes better with red. (This isn’t always the case, as demonstrated by German Riesling, which almost always goes well with lamb or Cantonese cuisine. And a German Gewürztraminer is almost always a success when paired with Thai food.)

  To me, standard wisdom ought not dictate our feelings or opinions. Our enchantment with things ultra-expensive, such as caviar and well-known wines, or things ultra-unique, such as a Serbian pule cheese or a fleck of bhut jolokia, the spiciest chili in the world, can be just as irritating as being overly smitten with things ultra-simple, such as popsicles, or toast, or popcorn, or with rare local ingredients such as the kenikir herb, or the popohan leaf, or the pegagan plant.

  Which is why I can’t understand my sense of taste being seen as faulty when I don’t sing the praises of a kwetiau so straightforward in its paleness—a paleness so honest it’s almost touching. Or a bihun bebek that doesn’t send us reeling because it’s not as rich as other versions of the same dish.

  Still. I’m human. I’m not that strong. I can’t always bear all that is unfair or makes no sense. No sooner do I think this than I feel queasy. I want to leave Medan. Yet I don’t want to go back to Jakarta. I’m turning into a drama queen.

  But wait. I see something. I see Farish, with that glance that I’ve come to rely on these past days, seeing me.

  The café is bizarre. It’s not clear what they specialize in. Various coffee drinks and unhealthy snacks (doughnuts, cronuts, bananas, fermented cassava, and fried ice cream), Chinese food (various noodle dishes, Cap Cay stir-fry, and butter-fried chicken), or “Portuguese” food (“Portuguese soup,” “Portuguese salad,” “Portuguese rica chicken” [Isn’t rica chicken from Manado?], “Portuguese pudding,” etc.) But maybe that’s what happens to your identity when you’re located smack-dab in the middle of the bustle of Sun Plaza. It is clear that when it comes to buildings, this mall is this city’s crowning achievement. The locals’ love for it is beyond me.

  “People here are really proud of this mall,” Farish says with a chuckle. “It’s Sun Plaza this, Sun Plaza that.”

  “Why bring me here at all?” I ask bitterly. “To remind me of Jakarta?”

  But Farish has made his choice, and he hasn’t had one so far.

  What he does have, though, is an agenda. He wants me to meet his friend. And his friend wanted to meet us here.

  “A friend?”

  “Yes, a friend,” says Farish. “We go way back.”

  There’s a big grin on Farish’s face when he stands up to greet his friend. They shake hands, then hug. They’re close; anyone can see it.

  Toba comes from Lake Toba. Where else? He’s an environmental activist, but he works mainly in wildlife conservation. He has an interesting face. His jaw and cheekbones are like firm Cubist brushstrokes on a canvas, but his ebony-colored eyes are soft, round, trusting, like the eyes of a coddled puppy. He seems eager to talk about his experiences with his friend, but is a bit hesitant because I’m there. He’s unlike the activists I know, all too impatient to share their stories from the field with anyone who’ll listen.

  Farish realizes what’s going on.

  “Aruna’s an animal-lover, too,” he says. He puts his arm around my shoulders. Don’t worry, bro. This gal’s one of us. How quickly my identity has been pulled out from under my feet.

  Then Toba begins to talk. He’s an animal-lover, but of all the animals whose rights to life and well-being he has fought for, it’s the elephant he loves most. He laments that since 2004 more and more elephants have been slaughtered by poachers, especially in the provinces of Riau and Aceh—even though the total number of elephants has gone down by half within a mere twenty years. Just last year, he tells us, dozens of elephants were poisoned or shot.

  “After losing their habitat to deforestation, they end up losing their lives as well,” he adds. “No one thinks of these elephants as big-eared Dumbos anymore—all sweet and cute—or the great and sacred animals who deliver kings to their palaces. People see them as pests, as bearers of misfortune, as enemies, even.

  “I saw with my own eyes, last May, the body of an elephant whose tusks had been lopped off,” he says. “My frie
nd—the vet who happened to be tasked with doing the autopsy—found a plastic bag of poison in the elephant’s stomach.”

  He shows Farish and me several photos on his iPhone. Among them are a dozen pygmy elephants who’d been massacred in Sabah less than a week ago. I can’t bear looking at them. Animals may be fierce. They may be hungry. They may kill. But they never do so with unnecessary cruelty, beyond the urges that arise in them as a matter of instinct. What is it that causes human beings to be so cruel?

  “Toba,” says Farish hoarsely, “how far has your organization gotten in your talks with the government?” He explains quickly to me that Toba’s organization engages in conserving four keystone species in Sumatra—the elephant, the tiger, the rhinoceros, and the orangutan.

  “It’s been tough. You just can’t talk to those guys—the provincial authorities in Riau and Aceh. The second we approach them, they feel like we’re blaming them. They get all defensive and even hostile. ‘Only real cases, Toba. You know we’ve already submitted eight cases to the relevant people, right? But have they done anything about them? Did they even read our recommendations?’ That’s what one of the provincial representatives tried to tell me the other day—till he was blue in the face. ‘What can we do if people are afraid to report anything?’ he asked. ‘Or if they themselves were the ones who poisoned the elephants by coating fruit in cyanide?’ Or maybe they’ve just had it with us. Or they’re not scared of me anymore.

  “I’ve been told that the big palm-oil companies have put my name down on a list of activists they’re going to kill. Naturally, these companies have their own network of thugs. And let’s not even talk about the ivory-trade mafia at large in Aceh. They tell me, ‘Your days are numbered, Toba. Just you wait.’”

  “And you’re not scared?”

  Toba’s gaze becomes unfocused. But then his deep voice—deep as his namesake—fills the space around us. The background noise fades. I can no longer hear the hum of electronic music from the toy stalls or the banal chitchat around us.

  “My father worked the land,” he says, “and it was he who introduced me to mangroves and reefs, coves and capes. It was he who taught me to appreciate the dawn, to name the colors of the rainbow, and distinguish this moth from that. It was he who taught me to love the sea and fog and how to tell the difference between the duku fruit and the kokosan, between the different kinds of rice and different kinds of bananas. It was he who taught me to respect what springs from the earth and what sinks to the ocean floor. In the end we all must return to the earth, so is there any greater act of devotion than surrendering your entire life to it? And is there anyone more shameless than someone who kills innocent creatures?”

  22

  IVORY AND STRIPES

  Bono and Nadezhda are instantly mesmerized by Toba. It isn’t entirely unexpected. When the three of us enter the restaurant, which happens to be located smack-dab in Pancasila Youth territory (in name, defenders of our national ideology; in reality, government-sanctioned thugs), the Lake Man brings his own aura—and amazing stories as long as a giraffe’s neck. Including ones about food.

  My two friends, who before our arrival were racing with each other to analyze every inch of the barbecued pork that has become the pride of this restaurant, seem to stop in their tracks, at a loss for words. For half an hour they say practically nothing, just listen. The slices of crimson succulence that started out as their main objective are still sitting on their plates—as if they’ve found something more valuable.

  I notice Farish doesn’t touch the meat. He even sits at a little distance from the table. But, like the others, he is under Toba’s spell.

  In keeping with what it says on the banner above the door, the lard-lover’s paradise begins closing up at 2:45 p.m., fifteen minutes before closing time. Six hours is a civilized amount of time to spend feeding so many people.

  For a moment, we stand transfixed outside the restaurant. As far as the eye can see, the road looks desolate and gray, as if filtered by a camera lens into wintery shades—a cloudiness almost intentional and unintentional all at once. We’re surrounded by old and new buildings covered in wounds and burns, with broken-down corrugated zinc roofs. Rows of electrical poles lean as if they’ve just been hit by a cyclone. The roads are dotted with potholes and flank crumbling sidewalks. We stand amidst it all, a handful of people positioned mise-en-scène to complete this dark portrait of a post-apocalyptic world.

  The darkness takes on an ominous form when the eye comes to rest on the black and orange stripes screaming for attention at several points along the road: the Pancasila Youth minibus parked in front of the dilapidated colonial structure; a stretch of iron railing painted black and orange; and the security guardhouse in the middle of the road, the front of its exterior plastered with the face of their leader, Yapto S.—a face the whole world has now seen, most likely without his knowledge, thanks to The Act of Killing. The signboard reads: “Pancasila Youth Headquarters, Branch: Sei Rengas, Medan District, Jalan Sun Yat Sen.”

  I shudder. And yet here they are. Chinese-hating goons milling about on a road named after a Chinese national hero across from a Chinese culinary mainstay . . .

  Never before have I been confronted with such starkness—a fount of both amusement and terror.

  What do you call the restlessness that never disappears, that lurks and roams through the body like a virus? Whatever it’s called, this disquiet compels me to call Priya that afternoon to find out the name and address of Leon’s hotel in Medan.

  “You want to see him?”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t. I swear. I just want to know whether his hotel is way better than mine.”

  And from the tone of her voice, I know Priya suspects that I’m going to do something stupid.

  She’s right. I am going to do something stupid. I show up at the hotel, without makeup, without changing my clothes, under the pretext that I’m Mr. Leon Basri’s colleague—“I have to speak with him. His phone’s died. I’m his boss, Irma Shihab.” I succeed in getting the receptionist to put me through to Leon’s room.

  When his voice comes through the receiver, I immediately whisper, “Leon, it’s Aruna. I’m downstairs. I need to talk to you.”

  Unexpectedly, he’s down from his mountaintop in a flash. He looks like he just woke up. His collared shirt is a little wrinkled.

  He’s not smiling.

  Damn it. He is good-looking. What was I thinking the other day?

  “Aruna,” he says, sounding uneasy. “I know—”

  “Traitor,” I hiss, drawing my courage from who knows where.

  “Let’s sit down. I’ll explain everything.”

  “I just want you to admit it,” I say in a trembling voice. “You’ve known for a long time that they were going to kick me out.”

  “That’s not true,” says Leon.

  In his panic he tries to invite me to sit on a polka-dot sofa in the hotel lobby as he remains standing, watchful, as if measuring the distance between us. What’s he thinking? That I’m going to hit him? With my backpack? Or my fist, which prolonged contact with tapioca flour has made meaty and tough?

  “Irma just gave me the assignment late yesterday evening. I swear. She said I shouldn’t ask any questions, just show up at the airport early the next morning. My ticket had already been e-mailed to me. I was to go to Medan and Aceh, back through Jakarta to Pontianak, then last of all, Mataram. That’s all she told me.”

  “What files did you bring with you?”

  He looks at me as if I’ve asked him something inappropriate.

  “Hey, don’t blame me,” he says. “I’m not here by choice.”

  What a jerk. Look at him: standing there, keeping his distance, absurd in his conviction that he’s the one being persecuted, being judged before he’s proven guilty. I want to punch him in his cowardly face.

  A voice is calling to me from a corner of the lobby. “Aruna, enough already. Let’s go. Enough.�
�� For a split second I seem to see my father standing there, but no. The one who is standing there, who is now half walking, half running toward me and my sworn enemy is . . . Farish.

  And thus we each play our parts, falling into each other’s lives. And not a single person knows why or for how long—not that feeble excuse for a foe, or the staff of that luxurious hotel, or the receptionist who murmurs, “Have a good night, Ms. Irma” when I leave with Farish. Not the darkness that begins to enshroud the city like some great, maternal mosquito net, and not me—especially not me—who always thinks I know not everything but something, when in reality I know nothing at all.

  Farish doesn’t seem particularly interested in discussing all of Leon’s faults. Unlike me, still consumed by bile, he wants to talk about other matters—lighter ones, simpler ones. Our childhood foods, our favorite fruits, the names of the trees he had to memorize as a boy. His fierce, unstable uncle who showed up at their house one day after drifting around for some time and then stayed with them for years. Alma, the good-hearted German shepherd—his faithful companion for fourteen years until she dropped dead one day, frothing at the mouth, poison in her belly.

  “I’m positive my uncle poisoned Alma,” says Farish. “Rumor had it he was a hardened criminal on the run from the police. My mother was the one who forced him to stay with us so he’d be safe and learn how to abide by the norms of decent society. ‘Who knows?’ Mom would say. ‘Environment has an influence, too.’”

  Nature versus nurture.

  “I didn’t say anything at the time, though I already knew—there are people who can change and people who can’t. In that respect, humans are like animals. Not all lions are like Elsa in Born Free. Imperceptibly, life with my uncle left an imprint on me. Frankly, I spent years feeling oppressed. His cruelty to animals, which I think was his way of compensating for suddenly having to be nice to people, made me want to protect all of them. And I mean all of them. Every animal on the face of this earth. Even the big, strong ones who sometimes did harm or killed. I wanted to protect them, too. Because they never did it for fun or on purpose. They didn’t know how.