he had managed to affix his signature to the right spot, because when he signed the papers he did so in anger and with a theatrical flourish.
When he had finished signing the papers, Mas Nug refolded them and gave them to me.
“Mail them for me, will you?” he asked, while putting his jacket back on, “I’ll end up throwing them in the fireplace if I take them with me.”
I nodded and said “sure” while signaling with my eyes to Vivienne. I would have to take Mas Nug home; he was already wobbling. Vivienne fetched my jacket for me and then walked us to the door.
“Bonne nuit, Vivienne, you’re lucky to have Dimas. He’s a loyal man. Bonne nuit, Dimas. And you’re lucky to have married the very beautiful Vivienne. Bonne nuit. Au revoir, Rukmini. And fuck you, Lieutenant-Colonel Prakosa!”
I patted Mas Nug on the shoulder and motioned for him to follow me. As we walked towards the Metro station, crunching the red fallen leaves under our feet, Mas Nug looked up at the sky and screamed. The Parisian autumn heightened the sense of gloom.
A cook a pure artist
Who moves everyman
At a deeper level than Mozart …
W.H. AUDEN
90 RUE DE VAUGIRARD, PARIS; APRIL 1998
IN PARIS IN THE SPRING, THE DAYS GROW LONGER AND THE nights begin only when one is ready to pound the mattress. I am listening to a soft whistling sound, a tune of no certain pattern, the song of someone who can neither read music nor keep a beat. It is the song of my friend, Nugroho Dewantoro, who has come to within hearing radius. I can detect the effort he puts into trying to sing like the remarkable Louis Armstrong or any one of a number of the Indonesian keroncong crooners he so admires. At any one time, he might be whistling Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World;” at another, the traditional Indonesian song “Stambul Baju Biru.” It’s always a guess. Only Mas Nug has the verve and gaiety to not be affected by changes in weather. He’s the same, whether it’s an incredibly hot summer day that burns the flesh and causes skin to peal; the autumn, when the pollen count is so high everyone is coughing and sneezing; the winter, when freezing temperatures corrode our tropically pampered Malay bones; or the spring, that fickle time of year when it’s sometimes cold and windy, sometimes warm and humid.
The only time I remember Mas Nug unable to beat back the gloom was the time he received the letter-of-request for a divorce from Rukmini. At all other times, he’s always been the most optimistic person in the world, ever capable of finding the silver lining in any disaster.
Even back in Jakarta, when there were the five of us, Mas Nug was a guy who could never say, “give up.” That gang of ours on Jalan Solo was made up of five men, each of whom felt pretty sure about himself in one way or another. Look at Mas Nug, for instance, who, with his Clark Gable mustache, thought himself to be the best-looking chap in the world, but who nonetheless had to deal with as many failures as victories. Mas Hananto, Mas Nug, Tjai, Risjaf, and I once went through a period when we were competing for girlfriends, a time that ended with victory on the part of the senior members of our group: Mas Hananto won Surti’s hand; Mas Nug tied the knot with Rukmini; and Tjai married Theresa Li. Risjaf and I, meanwhile, ended up as frustrated bachelors and didn’t find our helpmates until after coming to Paris. But whatever the situation and regardless that we five often found ourselves at odds with one another, either because of women or ideology, we were always able to overcome any conflict that might arise between us. And one reason for this was Mas Nug’s unflagging optimism.
Among the five of us, it was only Mas Nug who liked to whistle and sing, even though his was the worst of voices and he was unable to carry a tune. Whether he was aware of this himself is uncertain, because in gatherings at the Nusantara News office, he was always the most eager to join in the singing. Mas Hananto and Risjaf had some musical skills: Mas Han could pluck a guitar and Risjaf was pretty good on the harmonica and flute. Meanwhile, my bass voice wasn’t too bad; but neither Tjai nor Mas Nug could carry a tune. The difference between those two was that Tjai recognized his shortcoming, whereas Mas Nug was blind to this imperfection and whenever there was a microphone present, he’d soon be clinging to it so fast you’d think it was a curvaceous woman.
So it was, blessed with this deep-seated sense of optimism, skilled at both massage and acupuncture (which he had studied and mastered during our time in Peking), and, with his Clark Gable mustache, very confident of his appearance, Mas Nugroho felt that he had all the capital in life he needed to get along. And it’s true: among us, he was the one most capable of confronting the challenges that conspired against us. He was precisely the kind of person our band of stateless people needed to bear life’s harsh realities.
And now I’m hearing Mas Nug’s off-tune voice, happily yodeling as he makes his way towards the kitchen on the ground floor of Tanah Air Restaurant, which for the past fifteen years has been at once our home, our source of income, and a point of major pride.
Mas Nug comes into the kitchen carrying a few bags of cooking ingredients and other supplies I had ordered. I guessed that he had just come from shopping in Belleville, where it was possible to buy Asian spices, because the day before I had been grumbling about how low we were on many of the basic Indonesian spices: turmeric, ginger, red chilies, shallots, garlic, Javanese bay leaf, and citrus leaf. In Paris, some of the spices we needed were available in dried form; but, in Indonesian cuisine, there is no replacing fresh red chilies, shallots, and garlic, whose prices at the market were always much higher than we thought they should be. Bahrum was usually the one who purchased my kitchen supplies, but he was in the midst of cleaning the restaurant’s wooden floor.
Still whistling, Mas Nug removes the purchases from their bags and plops them on the kitchen table I use for preparing spices. I don’t know whether it’s because of his insufferable whistling or my irritation with him for throwing the purchases on the table where I am trying to work, but all of a sudden I feel nauseous, as if I am about to throw up. The fact is, for the past several weeks my stomach has been troubling me on and off, but, up until then, I have always been able to ignore it.
Mas Nug looks at me. “What’s wrong with you?”
I don’t answer him. Both he and Tjai are constantly ragging me about my health, like two parents angry with their teenage son for not wanting to study. Mas Nug thinks he can treat any illness with that bag of needles he takes wherever he goes. He is always going on and on about concepts of energy and acupuncture needles. Any time he starts to speak of such things, I immediately want to fall asleep. Who gives a hoot about “energy,” “chi,” and “New Age” treatments? Only Mas Nug!
I hate needles, especially Mas Nug’s, whose efficacy I’m not at all sure of. But even though the hospital is a place that for me is identical with needles and all sorts of ghastly-looking machines, I do recognize that there are times when I am forced to surrender myself to a doctor for medical care. Like last week, for instance…
On that morning, last week, I suddenly collapsed outside the Metro station. I didn’t feel anything, but everything turned black for a few moments, and the next thing I knew I was in a café near the kiosk at the entrance to the station where I usually bought the daily paper. Staring at me when I opened my eyes was Pierre, the newspaper vendor who never bathed, and André, the handsome blue-eyed waiter at the café who looked like he should be a Calvin Klein model instead of serving coffee. Speaking
