around the house.
My mother, who was usually called Bu Giri—“Giri” being short for my father’s full name, “Giri Suryo”—but who was also known by her own name, Pratiwi, had a creative hand and would, for nights on end, give herself completely to the transformation of a solid white length of cloth into a most remarkable thing of beauty.
After a day spent preparing meals—cooking was something Mother also enjoyed, a fondness for which she passed down to me—and tending to the needs of two overly active sons and a husband weary from teaching Solonese teenagers who he thought were growing up too fast, Mother would sit cross-legged on the floor for an hour or two with her canting, the small copper vessel with a spouted nib she had to frequently refill with melted beeswax, to create her batik designs. Ever since I was young, I likened Mother’s work with wax to a poet’s work with words—both of which processes produced something of beauty.
Perhaps my discovery of the joy of poetry began not with the fantastic verses of Chairil Anwar, but as the combined result of pressure from my father to speak Indonesian well and to mind my words, just as a body must mind its soul, and of my mother’s love for the canting and melted beeswax.
After I had graduated from senior high school, my father sent me to Jakarta to live with his older brother, Om Muryanto, in order that I might obtain a better and more focused education than was possible in Solo at that time.
After adjusting to my new life as a student in Jakarta and learning my way around the city, I moved from my uncle’s home into a boarding house with Risjaf, a fellow classmate. Thereafter, my visits home to Solo became rare, except for the Idul Fitri holidays, at the end of the fasting month. Patient man that he was, my father voiced no complaint about his wayward son’s avoidance of home. He continued, to the best of his limited financial ability, to send me books of literature so that I would maintain and improve my Indonesian. Meanwhile, Mother would send me reminders from my uncle Kiasno to pray regularly so as “to fill myself with thanks for God’s grace.” Along with her missives of advice, Mother would also often send a newly made length of batik cloth—often one with a bird motif typical of Java’s north coast. Mother knew I liked Cirebon-style batik.
After my father died in my sophomore year, Mother’s letters to me would echo his reminder (to read and speak Indonesian well) and Om Kiasno’s advice (to pray), before including her own personal counsel for me to eat nutritiously the food that I myself had prepared.
Throughout my sojourn, from Peking to Paris, the advice from my elders that I did follow was to read—how could I not? It was part of my oxygen—to cook my own food, and to eat well. Somehow, it slipped my mind to pray regularly.
I wondered whether when Mother died she was thinking about her wastrel son living so far away.
I couldn’t speak for several weeks. I felt as if stones were lodged in my throat. Risjaf, Mas Nug, and Tjai tried various ways to console me, from the most profane of ways—with my favorite kinds of Chinese food that Theresa would cook for me, for instance—to the most spiritual, by arranging special prayer sessions on Mother’s behalf. Nothing worked. Nothing could comfort me. No one could succeed in making me talk. Even a lovely stretch of batik, brown colored in background with green-colored birds, did not make me feel better or bring me calm. The fact was my mother had died and I was not there to kiss her forehead and to say a final goodbye. No voice escaped me.
After several weeks of virtual silence, I awoke one morning suddenly feeling both energetic and panicky, as if I were on some kind of stimulant. I went from one friend to another—to Mas Nug, Risjaf, Tjai and Theresa; to Vivienne and her family; to our neighbors; and to the offices of the French agency that arranged for us to obtain our asylum status—asking the same question: was it possible, with my exile status, for me to somehow enter Indonesia?
“Enter Indonesia? Impossible! You cannot enter Indonesia with a titre de voyage. And even if you were able to, there’s a very good chance you’d never be able to leave that place again.”
I didn’t care. I had to pay my last respects to Mother.
I brushed off all attempts by Mas Nug and Vivienne to calm me down. I had to go home. I had to go home! I would find a ticket. Any kind of ticket. Plane, boat, whatever. The important thing was for me to go home.
In my apartment, Risjaf took me by my shoulders and tried to calm me down. I roughly pushed him aside as well. Finally, they were all silent.
That night Mas Nug handed me a telegram from my brother, which read:
DON’T COME HOME COMMA NOT SAFE STOP PRAY MOTHER IS AT PEACE COMMA WE PRAY FOR HER SOUL STOP
I crushed the telegram in my hand, threw it in the garbage can, and stomped out of our miserable apartment into a winter night whose chilled air seized my bones. I heard the voices of Risjaf and Mas Nug calling after me, but I picked up my pace and ran. The cold wind was a knife stabbing me in the face, but I didn’t feel a thing. I ran and ran. When I finally stopped, I found myself standing on the bank of the Seine. The river was red in color. My face was hot with tears.
It was around that time, I guess, that Vivienne began to gradually turn Paris into a kind of resting place for me. Not a home, per se, but a place where I could stop for a while. Slowly, I came to see in her green eyes both assurance and a willingness to provide refuge for me, like a shade tree protecting a child from the blazing sun with its cool shadows.
Although Vivienne’s curious cousins, Marie-Claire and Mathilde, asked numerous questions about my background—the French always seem to be interested in history—all in all, I felt that the Deveraux family was very accommodative to Vivienne’s Indonésien lover, who as yet could speak to them only in broken French.
We married a year later in Lyon, at the vineyard of Vivienne’s uncle, the father of Marie-Claire. That was the Deveraux family’s ancestral home. Because all of her family’s members were educated people who seemed to love to cook, I refrained from trying to impress them with my own culinary skills. As Indonesia has no enological history, Vivienne’s father, Laurence, and her mother, Marianne, took it on themselves to give me some basic lessons about wine—ones I very much enjoyed. They taught me the difference between a sauvignon and a merlot; which kinds of wine were a good match for certain kinds of meat; what kinds of white wine were best served with fish. Marianne, who seemed to know how affected I still was by my mother’s death, showed great forbearance with me, carefully listening to each word of French I spoke. Apparently hoping to instill in me a greater sense of confidence about my ability to speak that beautiful tongue, she was patient with my halting French and displayed no exasperation with my faulty grammar. On top of that, she was constantly offering me homemade petit fours—offers I never refused—or filling my glass with wine. Jean, Vivienne’s brother, who was working for the Red Cross in Africa, came home for the wedding and he and I engaged in long discussions on politics and literature. With Vivienne’s family embracing me so warmly, taking me into themselves, what more did I have to complain about?
Lintang Utara: “North Star.” That’s the name I chose for our daughter, born five years after we married. Everything about her showed her to be her mother’s daughter, except for her wavy black hair, which came from the Suryo family. And I never tired of staring at that beautiful, living and breathing, little round creature with the wavy black hair. I never thought it would happen, but I had inexplicably found for myself a port—who knew for how long?—and put down an anchor in my life. If I ever needed a reason to stop my voyage, then this little creature by the name of Lintang Utara was the one. I couldn’t stop watching her. I loved looking after her, caring for her, even changing her diapers. I sang to her the
