Given that fact, I was forced to see the phrase “only called in for information” as a kind of blessing. I had no doubt that my mother and Aji had been systematically and thoroughly interrogated. I was also certain that our home in Solo had been raided. I was sure that my late father’s personal library—or, rather, the books in it that I had been unable to bring with me to Jakarta because my lodgings there on Jalan Solo were too small—had been ransacked and possibly burned. I could see soldiers’ boots stamping on photographs of my father. I could imagine all sorts of things—all the things that Aji hadn’t been willing to share with me.
Very disturbing for me was the news that Mas Hananto had disappeared and was now on the military’s most-wanted list. I shouldn’t have been too surprised, therefore, to learn that Surti and their children had been taken to the military detention center on Jalan Guntur. According to Aji, Surti had been permitted to go home following her initial interrogation, but then had been ordered to return the following day. When she returned, she took the children with her and that’s where she and they were held for several months.
Three years went by; and because the military had yet to find Mas Hananto, horror returned to the Hananto family household. Surti and her children were taken to another detention center, this one on Jalan Budi Kemuliaan. And because her interrogators were convinced that she knew where her husband was hiding, that is where she and the children remained until he was captured.
Aji was a good and loyal brother. Unlike me in school, Aji had been a mild-mannered student, obedient to the rules of the system and averse to causing any difficulty for our parents. He was so good-hearted that he always tried to make it appear that his assignments, which were in fact very challenging, were actually very simple, just so that our mother didn’t fret. He was a peacemaker, good at resolving strife. I was grateful that he and his equally kindhearted wife, Retno, were there to stand by and support our mother. Aji knew that I was in exile abroad not because I had fled misfortune, but because of a strange and unaccountable twist of circumstances. (I intentionally do not use the word “fate.”) He knew that I would think nothing of the peril that I might bring on myself were I to return to Indonesia. He knew that I would want to come back to Jakarta or to Solo, regardless if it meant that I might be taken in. That is the reason he sent me the telegram, a simple but courageous act in the days after September 30. Ignoring the suspicion that he would have drawn to himself by this action, he sent me that telegram precisely at a time when suspicion was enough to have a person jailed or worse. Like many large towns in Java at the time, Solo was divided into two strongly opposing camps: those who supported the leftist-oriented “Revolutionary Council,” which had the city mayor’s backing, and those who supported a militarized order as expounded by the “Council of Generals.” That had been the case for quite some time, or so Aji had reported even prior to my departure for Santiago. According to a colleague at the Nusantara News branch office in Solo, the war of ideologies going on at that time was reflected in a multitude of jargon-filled posters plastered on walls throughout the city.
I may have been worried about my family in Indonesia but, at the very least, I’d been in contact with them. Such was not the case with Mas Nugroho, who had lost all contact with Rukmini and their one-year-old son. Optimist that he was, he constantly tried to convince himself that no harm had come to them. He guessed that they had moved to the home of Rukmini’s parents or her older brother and had not attempted to contact him for safety reasons.
In the second week of October, just after the arrival of Aji’s telegram, Mas Nug and I decided to stick with our original plan and go on to Havana to meet Risjaf who was now stranded there. Our onward flight was one of increased foreboding; and in Havana, where life is supposedly meant to be lived like a festival, we drowned our depression in glasses of rum.
Although our hosts in Havana were busy organizing a conference for the solidarity of Asian and African peoples, to be held in early 1966, they gave us a warm and hearty welcome. Risjaf was Indonesia’s representative on the organization’s steering committee for the conference, which is why he had come to Havana.
It was in Havana that we heard of the death—or killings, rather—of a number of senior officials in the Indonesian Communist Party, including the party’s chief, D.N. Aidit. Mas Hananto had apparently succeeded in finding a hiding place somewhere, because his name was not among the list of the people whose deaths were mentioned.
From day to day, even almost every few hours it seemed, we would learn additional bits of bad news. A wide-scale hunt was on for Communist Party members, their families, and even Party sympathizers. These people weren’t just being captured or detained; mass executions had begun to take place throughout much of Indonesia. Such items of news were like sketches drawn in blood. It was a time of unending insomnia; none of us were able to get a decent night’s sleep. Even Risjaf, who could fall asleep on a sinking ship, remained wide awake all night long.
I tried to think of ways to contact my loved ones—my mother, Aji, Surti, and others—without putting them in additional danger, but our friends in Havana insisted that any form of contact would do just that, stirring up even greater attention from the military authorities.
Then the next bomb dropped: our passports were revoked and we became, in an instant, a band of stateless people with no fixed identity. So sudden and startling was this development, I didn’t have even a moment to mentally prepare myself and think ahead of how I might live a life far from Jakarta or from Mother and Aji in Solo, distant from everything else in my life, both the good and bad. The sword of Damocles now hung over our heads, ready to fall. Every day our lives were filled with the pounding of our hearts, because we had no idea what our future held. To go home was impossible. To wander the world, unlikely—not without money or a passport.
We decided to go to Peking, where numerous other Indonesian exiles had congressed. We still had our air tickets and, with some help from our Cuban contacts, we were able to obtain temporary travel documents. We let ourselves be convinced that once we were in the People’s Republic of China, things would somehow work out. Our friends there would help us solve the problems we faced.
Our friends in Peking were very accommodating and showed us extraordinary solidarity. They found us a place to stay. They fed us, and even entertained us, arranging all sorts of meetings for us, as well as visits to sites that often left us feeling exhausted. For the first few weeks in Peking, they put us up at the Friendship Hotel. Thereafter, they found a small house for us to live in. In just a month’s time, Mas Nug, who had been a student of Chinese studies at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, was able to find a job as a translator for the journal Peking Review. Risjaf and I, who couldn’t speak a word of Chinese, were given work as assistants to the clerks in the same office. Frankly, we didn’t care what kind of work we had to do; the important thing was to make a living. Between the time we arrived in October 1965 and the following year, we Indonesians in Peking were in constant contact with one another, everyone sharing and comparing the bits of information he had received.
By this point, I had been able to learn more details about what had happened to my mother and Aji and his family. Military personnel had visited them several times. They had been intimidated. Their homes had been searched and they had been called in for interrogation—several times, in fact—but they hadn’t been detained or incarcerated. By good fortune, my uncle, my mother’s brother, was a kiai, a respected religious leader in Solo, and his status in the community helped to shield my mother from harm. Because of him as well, Mother’s neighbors and other people in the area where she lived offered her sympathy and comfort. In their eyes, she was just “a poor blameless woman who didn’t know what her good-for-nothing son had been up to.”
So be it. I didn’t care what was said of me as long as my mother was safe.
By late 1966, we had received so much training in the concepts behind the Chinese Cultural Revolution
