all right. When they said they were going to call an ambulance, I finally shook my head and asked them to call Risjaf instead.
What happened then was a nightmare: Tjai and Mas Nug, the two fussiest and most know-it-all people I know, came to the café. Tjai, with his low voice and calculated manner, grilled me about the quantity and frequency of my intake of alcohol. Mas Nug, meanwhile, began hectoring me about energy and similar nonsense. I wanted to disappear from their sight. There was no way they would let me refuse their demand that I go to the hospital for a physical examination. And the fact was, I was still in a bit of shock and too weak to do otherwise. I was suddenly an old codger in need of assistance from two creatures who were putting on airs of being much younger. As they led me out of the café to a taxi, I felt the ground move beneath my feet. When that happened, I knew I had to obey. There was something wrong with me.
The doctor in the emergency ward of the hospital where they took me ordered me to undergo a battery of tests. Afterwards, he prescribed some medicine. But I still haven’t gotten around to picking up the results of the tests.
That same feeling of nausea and stomach cramps were now affecting me again. Mas Nug came over and put his hand on my cheek.
“Lie down in the office. I can take your place in the kitchen.”
Hmm… I liked the taste of my cooking better, especially my nasi kuning or yellow rice with its side dishes of crispy tempeh, yellow fried chicken, and urap, spiced vegetables with grated coconut. And to make everything taste better was my fried hot pepper sauce, sambal bajak. I knew that my nasi kuning, along with my Padang-style beef rendang, gulai pakis, fiddlestick ferns simmered in coconut sauce, and a Lampung-style curried chicken dish called gulai anam, were the most popular dishes on Tanah Air’s menu, at least in terms of number of orders. Mas Nug’s cooking was much too experimental for me. He was so busy coming up with fancy names for dishes, he often forgot about their taste.
“Dimas…”
I could tell from the tone of Mas Nug’s voice that he didn’t want to offend me. He knew that the restaurant’s kitchen was my territory, a no-man’s-land for anyone unable to follow my very explicit instructions. (Don’t change the composition of spices. Don’t touch my knives. Never use the onion knife for cutting meat. The work area must be absolutely clean, with no drops of water or coffee on it. And so on and so forth.) The Tanah Air kitchen was my throne from which I could not be unseated. Reign over other parts of the restaurant, I willingly relinquished to those friends who liked to show off their fine teeth on the stage.
But now Mas Nug was suggesting that he take my position as cook. I immediately thought of Mahmud Radjab, a Malaysian writer and friend of mine, who had booked a number of tables at the restaurant that night to celebrate the publication of his latest book with friends. He had written to me far in advance to tell me that he and several colleagues from Kuala Lumpur had been invited to come to the Sorbonne and that they hoped to celebrate at the restaurant. He sent me a menu, telling me exactly what kind of dishes he wanted to serve his friends. The kinds of dishes he mentioned were common enough in Kuala Lumpur, but not so in Paris. “Your cooking is extraordinary,” he told me. “You have a gift with spices.”
And now eighteen people, Radjab and his friends, were coming to the restaurant, expecting to be served a truly Malay-tasting meal.
I had been preparing the spice mixture since morning. All that was left to do in the afternoon was to mix them with the rice, prepare the chicken, and mix the vegetables with grated coconut for the urap. But I was feeling so nauseous, I thought I was going to regurgitate.
“OK, OK, I’ll lie down for a bit, but don’t put anything strange in my nasi kuning,” I said in warning.
“Yeah, yeah …”
Mas Nug walked me to the office. Tjai, who was checking the tables that had been reserved for the event that evening, saw us and lowered his glasses and looked at me curiously. “What’s wrong, Dimas?”
“It’s nothing,” I answered flippantly. “Nothing at all.”
Mas Nug and Tjai looked at each other like parents trying to figure out how to get their unruly son to follow their orders.
Mas Nug now spoke in an authoritarian voice. “I’m not going to put up with any more of your excuses. Tomorrow, we’re going to the hospital to pick up the results of your examination. If you don’t, I swear, I’m going to mess with your spices and fiddle with your sacred recipes.”
What an absolute shithead, I thought. Mas Nug knew I treated spices and other cooking ingredients like a painter treats colors on a canvas. I treated my blend of spices for the dishes I prepared like a poet treats words in a poem.
I don’t know where I got the strength, but I whipped off the sarong I’d been using as a shawl and threw it at Mas Nug, and then grabbed him by the collar. “Don’t you dare mess with my spices. Don’t fiddle with anything. Don’t mix any other spices with the turmeric paste for the nasi kuning. And don’t even think of altering the recipes for the dishes on this restaurant’s menu!”
I blew through my nose, my head spinning and my eyes watering. Mas Nug was startled, but whether this was because of my actions or because I had specifically mentioned “turmeric” and not “ginger,” for instance, or maybe just because I looked very ill, I didn’t know. After that, my head started to spin again and my stomach felt like it was being squeezed through the wringer of a washing machine. As I plopped into a chair, my stomach suddenly erupted. I can remember Mas Nug calling out for Tjai, Bahrum, and Risjaf but after that, not much more, except swallowing the medicine the doctor had prescribed for me.
The medicine must have contained some kind of sedative, because after that I began to feel much lighter and was able to lie down on the sofa without my stomach churning. The sofa… That white sofa had been a gift from Vivienne. She had been just as enthusiastic as the Indonesian exiles who joined the cooperative that we established to raise the funds to open the Tanah Air Restaurant. How many times had we re-covered that sofa? Yet every time, Vivienne always chose another shade of white. After we divorced, I covered the sofa with a length of Cirebon-style batik that Aji had sent me. Even though we were Solonese by birth, Aji knew I much preferred the more colorful batik designs of the north coast than the traditional brown and muted tones of the batik produced in our home town.
My lids grew heavy and I soon closed my eyes. Whatever was in the medicine seemed to produce a kind of hallucinatory effect. The dreams that ensued were wild and vivid, with all sorts of people popping into them from various periods of my life. Or maybe I wasn’t sleeping at all; maybe I was awake and recalling memories of the past fifteen years, when the hands on the clock in Paris determined my future: that we might be better able to make a mark not through politics or literature but, possibly and more effectively, through culinary arts. How very strange but how very delightful it had been to enter this strange new world.
PARIS, AUGUST 1982
With the weather being so hot and stuffy—which was when all I wanted to do was to take off my clothes and go nude in the apartment—it wasn’t the best time to discuss plans for the future. Mas Nug, Risjaf, and Tjai were almost at each other’s throats trying to figure out what would be the best way to build a more permanent support structure for Indonesian political exiles and their families. No indeed, Paris in summertime is definitely not the best time for discussing matters of import. Especially avoid all thought of financial problems and go bask on a beach somewhere in the south of France or take refuge in a corner of Shakespeare & Co.
Tjai had a very serious look on his face. The rest of us probably looked
