The Birdwoman's Palate

by Laksmi Pamuntjak

  But wait. Not so fast. Take a gander at the footnote: “This fungicide causes testicles to melt.”

  “Melt?”

  “Melt,” she says.

  From solid to liquid. From present to absent. We muse on this awhile.

  Meanwhile, outside, the night has flown by. One thing is clear—the person who came up with sample response three is (or must be?) a fruit expert who enjoys having sex. He must have been so sad when he and his partner couldn’t “do it” anymore that he claimed orange juice was behind it all.

  24

  TOBA

  Finally, the time comes for something spontaneous that doesn’t involve going to a restaurant.

  We arrive in the city of Parapat just before midday. The area is beautiful, albeit quiet—many of the places to stay in the small lakeside town are open only on certain days, and the tourists who weren’t too keen on spending the night sleeping in the car or on the beach have chosen to go to other places that offer more food and accommodation.

  We’ve come in search of Naniura, of course. From Toba, we know naniura generally has to be ordered the week before, and is usually available only on Sunday. But a relative of Toba’s who’s skilled at making naniura is willing to have us over to her house so she can demonstrate. Once in a while she sells her naniura on the main road stretching along Ajibata Beach, outside the terminal for ferries crossing Lake Toba to Tomok on Samosir Island. The road has a lot of restaurants—ones specializing in Bataknese cuisine and ones that sell roast pork, ones offering halal food for Muslims and ones that trade only in fruit and souvenirs.

  Ajibata Beach is very beautiful indeed. The sand is white and the water clear. There are rocky stretches, rolling hills, and leafy trees. I could be happy living here, I think to myself. Just me, and Farish.

  Toba’s cousin lives nearby. “She’s of Boru Sinaga descent,” says Toba, as if it should affect how we behave toward her. “Don’t ask about her husband. He ran away recently and married someone else.”

  When we arrive, we engage in pleasantries with the mistress of the house for a little while before she offers us something to eat. She’s a woman of few words. Her jaw is firm, her eyes are sharp, her voice is deep. We don’t ask about her husband, though there are photos of him everywhere. When it’s lunchtime she asks us to gather in the kitchen.

  Naniura, the middle-aged woman tells us, is fish that isn’t cooked. The best fish to use in the dish is black carp. If possible, it’s best not to use a fleshy fish or one with too much fat.

  “It’s both easy and hard to make.” As she says this, she glares at Nadezhda. Maybe beautiful women remind her of wayward ones—the kinds who steal other people’s husbands.

  We watch as this woman slices the carp into fillets before immersing them in water to which she has added salt and juice squeezed from dubious-looking kaffir limes whose skins border on black. Then she boils a stalk of red torch ginger, slices it up, and pounds it into a fine paste. After this she grates a knob of turmeric—already peeled—and dissolves it with a bit of boiling water. Then she peels and slivers young galangal, ginger, kencur root, shallots, and garlic before dry-frying them all together in a wok with candlenuts, peanuts, and lemongrass, until fragrant.

  We look on as she boils bird’s eye chilies and squeezes juices from five fresh kaffir limes. After this, she pounds the dry-fried spice mixture into a fine paste along with some andaliman peppercorns, the red torch ginger paste, and the boiled chilies. She adds the freshly squeezed lime juice before mixing it evenly until it blends with the spices. And then she pours the spice mixture into the bowl where the fish is soaking as she adds the dissolved turmeric to the fish.

  “Stir it like this,” she says. “Then put it in the fridge. Let it sit for twenty-four hours.”

  “The lime . . . ,” Bono interjects. His chef’s brain seems to be hard at work. His cheeks are flushed—a sign that he’s excited. “To ferment it and make it more fragrant?”

  “It has a more important function as well,” the woman says. “The lime cooks it naturally. It gets rid of the fish blood, also the sliminess and the smell.”

  “Does . . . does naniura play a role in local traditions?” asks Nadezhda. For the first time, I hear a tremble in her voice, as if she’s unsure about what she knows. Not only that, the woman is still glaring at her.

  “Some say naniura is the food of kings,” the woman says as she looks in Farish’s direction, as if he, a nonbeautiful male, is the one who should rightfully be asking Nadezhda’s question. “Only the palace chef was allowed to make it. Time passed, and naniura underwent a shift in status and became common fare. I still see this dish served often, at birthday parties or at parumaen—that’s the local term for the ceremony where the groom feeds the bride. It’s considered the most sacred part of the wedding ritual. At least among the Toba Bataknese. Even though I’m a small, one-woman business, I get a lot of requests to make naniura for such occasions.”

  “So it forms a sort of connection, a bond, between two families?” asks Farish, finally feeling obliged to respond.

  “Yes, exactly! But there are also beliefs about how naniura can be made. The fish used to make a batch of naniura can never amount to an odd number. Don’t ask me why.”

  It’s a shame we can’t stay the night so that we can sample the dish as it’s meant to be eaten. We don’t have twenty-four hours.

  For a moment, I wonder if any of the eateries behind the National Parliament building in the Senayan district of Jakarta serve naniura.

  But the truly miraculous thing is how easily enchanted my two friends are. As am I—enchanted by life, all because a guy I’m interested in has touched me lightly a few times on the shoulder and arm.

  25

  STONE BANANA RUJAK AND SATE MATANG

  Tuna pasta. Tuna pasta = My mother.

  This is a recurring dream.

  After she inspects the shabby room I’ve rented on Jalan Hang Lekiu, who knows how many dozens of years ago now, my mother walks to the kitchen (if it can be called that) and calmly, wordlessly, produces a few items from her shopping bag. A packet of fusilli pasta, a bottle of olive oil, a can of tuna, a can of tomato puree, a carton of cream, three scallion stalks, a few garlic cloves, two Bombay onions, and a few small packets of dried spices.

  She begins heating a saucepan of water on the stovetop and minces the garlic, Bombay onions, and scallions before sautéing them in olive oil on medium heat. A little salt is thrown in as well. Then she pours the entire contents of the can of tuna into the wok, along with two tablespoons of the canned tomato puree (not tomato sauce), followed by a quarter of the carton of cream, then another quarter, until the color of the mixture in the wok turns a brownish pink. Two pinches of sugar. A pat of butter. Oregano, sprinkled across the surface like stars. Then she turns to the water in the saucepan, which is now boiling. Oil on water. Half the packet of pasta.

  And I, so green, so orphaned, just sit there and weep. I can’t stir. I’m too weak to move. I feel small, stunted.

  Without drawing near to me, without putting her arms around me or trying to soothe me, my mother says just one thing as she points to her head. “This is where it is—the best database humankind has to offer. Our minds. Our memories.”

  My sobs grow more violent. “How am I supposed to live having to remember so much?”

  “Someday you’ll have a thousand recipes stored in your brain,” she says. “Trust me. You’ll be happy—because you’ll never be hungry.”

  A near-perfect afternoon. A gentle breeze, the scent of forest and sea. A proud, open sky, not too bright or too dark. A sort of pale silvery gray and orange-red refracted from the horizon.

  In the garden behind the little restaurant, four young Acehnese women are enjoying their plates of fruit rujak. They’re seated around a square box of a table. The garden is very spacious, and the fence enclosing it is almost completely covered by leafy trees. For a moment the sight stops us dead in our tracks—it’s been a long time si
nce we’ve seen such greenness. Never mind that there’s a garbage-filled ditch just a stone’s throw away.

  One of the young women raises her head in our direction and smiles. I smile back.

  We’ve just arrived in Banda Aceh but haven’t seen much of the city since touching down at the airport, now sleek and modern thanks to the post-tsunami renovations. But it all happened so fast, without a moment to waste. From the baggage claim area, we jumped straight into our hired car and sped directly to Warung Rujak Blang Bintang, not far from where the old entrance to the airport used to be.

  This is all a gift from Rania, an old friend of Farish’s who works at a local NGO. It was she who arranged everything.

  “Can’t think of better timing: this place only opens in the late afternoon, around three o’clock,” she says, her pallid, thin-armed, almost Schielean frame in stern contrast with her face, which is bright, expressive, a work of constant improvisation.

  When she introduces me to Mr. Maryadi Agam Muda, who’s busy assembling the ingredients for his famous dish, Rujak Aceh, she tells him I’m a food aficionado from Jakarta. As much as I love how it sounds, I can’t quite grasp what being a “food aficionado” means and am somewhat embarrassed that she hasn’t mentioned my two friends who, if anything, are the group’s true aficionados.

  “You’ve never tasted rujak as good as this,” says Rania. “Not in your whole life. I guarantee it.”

  Their secret?

  “Stone bananas,” says Mr. Agam, naming the special variety of banana with the nonchalance of someone who’s been in the rujak business almost all his life. “Without them, I wouldn’t be in business.”

  I stand there, watching him play cool without even trying, quietly mesmerized by his suavity as he slices so evenly, almost without effort, various fruits and vegetables—jicama, sweet potato, kuini, pineapple, kedondong, papaya, mango, cucumber—into a large basin. Then, with a mortar and pestle, he grinds together palm sugar, red chilies, shallots, roasted peanuts, several large-seeded slices of the stone bananas, and two other types of fruit that positively elude me: something that resembles a kawista—a wood apple—and another fruit that looks like a salak, a snakeskin fruit.

  “People often call the one that looks like a snakeskin fruit an Acehnese snakeskin fruit—a salak Aceh,” Rania explains. “But the locals call it a rumbia. The one that looks like a wood apple they call a batok fruit. Mr. Agam says that the stone bananas make his fruit rujak so distinctive. But for me, it’s the batok fruit that does it. That’s what gives it a kick.”

  I notice Mr. Agam doesn’t speak much. I look at his biceps. The muscle near the dimple of his elbow; his forearms. I look at his hands, at his long fingers—sunbrowned, strong, a worker’s ware. And what hands. How many plates of fruit salad have they produced since 1975? How many gallons of that remarkable rujak sauce? How many stone bananas and batok fruit have they sliced and mashed? And yet, from the quiet, unassuming way the man speaks, when he speaks at all, he probably doesn’t think too much about rujak in relation to himself or the passage of time.

  Then there’s the small matter of Nadezhda. I’ve never seen her take so many photos of one kind of food. She fixes her lens on the plate of rujak from every conceivable angle and distance, as if worried that the contact she’s made with her father’s heritage will slip through her fingers. Acehnese blood does flow through her veins, after all.

  “How is it?” asks Rania.

  “Well. You’ve said it yourself,” answers Nadezhda, with a wide grin. “The best rujak in the world.”

  “Nadezhda’s father is half Acehnese,” I say, as if that fact gives her appraisal more validity somehow. I want to add that her mother is part French, part Sundanese, and part who knows what. But then again, what’s the point? Her beauty is so unusual and so disabling, it speaks for itself.

  And it’s not like her to be so readily agreeable, this woman, always ready to doubt others, never plagued by it herself.

  She’s not the only one.

  “I’ve never come across rujak with sauce of this texture,” Bono says. We’ve been given several plates of roasted peanuts, and he goes through them as if each one is a separate treasure. “I can’t describe it. It’s almost creamy.”

  “I usually prefer my rujak sauce without peanuts,” I say, having decided I need to act according to my credentials. “A good sauce, I think, should be simple, something like palm sugar, tamarind, chili, and shrimp paste. That’s it. Oh, and a dash of salt. But this sauce is . . . I don’t know. It’s just . . .” I want to say “wow,” but refrain.

  No one says anything.

  “You’re absolutely right,” I go on, nodding at Rania. “This batok fruit is something else; it adds this . . . this inexplicable tang. And these roasted peanuts—they really . . .” Words fail me. So before I get too embarrassed, I follow Bono’s example and pop a peanut into my mouth.

  Across from me, Nadezhda the Beautiful is smiling away as if some happy memory has come to mind. I dare not imagine what. Or whom.

  Later, something seems to boil up and disgorge—a fragrance, a substance. The air seems to expand, as if a kind of secret pact has been made between Man and Time. We feel all the more reluctant to go. Once again, I retreat into my own thoughts.

  Before this, on the flight over, I was incredibly anxious—more anxious than I’d been on the way to the other cities, as if some greater force in the cosmos were demanding I pay my dues, that I take responsibility. For not once since the tsunami have I stepped foot in Aceh. Unlike my more proactive and compassionate friends, who immediately dropped what they were doing and headed to Aceh to help the survivors—in any way they could—I chose to bury my head in the problems of my own daily life, with all its petty dramas and obsessions. The closer our plane got to Banda Aceh, the more certain I was: I’d never be able to take it all in. I’d come too late.

  So, how very strange I feel at this moment. For at this point, I already feel I’ve taken in so much. And yet my journey hasn’t even started.

  It would be impossible not to remember our chance encounter with Leon and his team earlier that morning at Polonia Airport in Medan or the panic that overtook me once I realized we were all going to be on the same flight to Banda Aceh. After that mortifying confrontation in Medan, can anyone blame me? Of course, he was the one traveling on official business, while I had been reduced to an infiltrator, a troublemaker. It would be impossible not to remember his tall, lanky frame standing with his back to us at the Garuda Airlines check-in counter, and how my heart still races whenever I catch sight of him or even someone who reminds me of him. It would be impossible not to realize that, in many ways, I’m still that same naïve Aruna who’s never grown up—who still doesn’t understand, after all these years, how to turn her heartbreak into strength.

  For some reason, Toba’s presence among us fails to make me feel more secure, even though I can see his positive effect on our group dynamic, which until now has tended to center on the culinary. Even Rania’s presence is like a breath of fresh air, especially to Farish because now they can shoot the breeze about nonprofit sector politics and wax nostalgic about the old days when they both worked for the same NGO.

  By the time our car leaves Mr. Agam Muda’s establishment, darkness has begun to descend. When we reach the city center, we drive around the Peunayong district first. We take in the rows of food-vendor carts and their plastic chairs in the empty clearing where the Rex Cinema once stood. We take in the rows of barbershops in Pasar Kaget. We take in the hawkers selling Martabak Aceh—an Acehnese version of the ubiquitous egg-and-meat-filled pancake found all over Indonesia, but with the egg on the exterior rather than inside.

  Rania isn’t a huge fan—thinks it too starchy. Something else clearly excites her though, and she points to the part of the clearing directly opposite the Hotel Medan. “But there, you’ll find a place that does an excellent duck curry. The local name is Kare Sie Itek. The sauce is red, they use potatoes, and the meat is ver
y tender.”

  I see Bono and Nadezhda desperately exchange glances—Should we try some now or later?—despite how stuffed they look after polishing off two plates of rujak each.

  Peunayong. So much of it reminds me of Jakarta’s Chinatown. Located in the area known as the Old City, Peunayong was designated Banda Aceh’s Chinese district back in the colonial days under the Dutch government. It’s situated only about a mile away from the Baiturrahman Grand Mosque, and this was probably done intentionally, to make it easier for the Dutch to keep an eye on activity in the city center. West of Peunayong, not too far away, is the Aceh River, and about two miles to the north is the Strait of Malacca.

  “This area used to be called Peunayong Port. The Chinese have inhabited this area since the seventeenth century,” says Rania. “You all know your history, I guess. The Dutch politics of segregation. Anyway, the Dutch did this here, too, using race as the basis for maintaining district boundaries until the end of the nineteenth century. The marketplace, ostensibly, was where different groups could interact. But it only strengthened the divide.”

  We’re standing in front of Peunayong Market. After the devastation wrought by the tsunami, the buildings in this area were rebuilt by the city government and a few foreign NGOs. From outside the market area, I see three multistory buildings: the first for stalls selling fresh fish and vegetables; the second for selling chicken, duck, and various spices; and the third for beef and goat meat.

  All along the road, trucks are loading and unloading goods, jostling for space with cars and becaks. Ancient monasteries, convenience stores, fabric shops, auto parts sellers, pharmacies, and cafés are interspersed between rows of old buildings.

  At a glance, there is nothing to distinguish these rows of shophouses from those found in Chinatowns the world over: saddle-shaped roofs covered in sheets of zinc, floors laid with tile, doors and windows flanked by hinged wooden boards. Entryways with decorated arches, and an arcade in the front courtyard composed of a row of concrete pillars bearing motifs of dragons and rolling clouds pieced together from ceramic fragments. Among the pillars, vendors and visitors mingle. And in the cafés, old men and women sit at the end of the day to chat, to watch television while smoking and sipping their coffee, or to simply be. You can hear the khek dialect interspersed with snatches of Mandarin. We know all this: the nooks and crannies where the stories that make up human existence fuse and become one.