share with her the blood-filled history of my homeland.
“Peut-être…” I answered, now anxious that her body, now so close to my own, should ever leave my side.
I kissed her softly and saw a flash in her eyes. She put her arms around me, held me tightly, and returned my kiss with a passion I had never felt before. She infused my pores, my heart, and my soul with her warmth and emotion. I was silent, still hesitating, but I knew that that Vivienne could smell the bile in my blood and phlegm. And at that moment, I knew that I wanted, that I was willing, and that if ever I could hope for Vivienne to love me as much as I loved her, then I had to open the dark curtain concealing my past.
I took from my pocket the letter I’d received from Kenanga—from Kenanga Prawiro, the oldest daughter of my friend and colleague, Mas Hananto—and I read the letter aloud, translating it into French as best as I could.
Jakarta, August 1968
Dear Om Dimas,
Not too long ago, when I was given the chance to see my grandmother, she told me that if I wanted to write to you, she would give my letter to Om Aji to send. He could include it with a letter that he was going to send to you. So that’s what I’m doing now.
All of us here are sad but trying to hold up. In April, they arrested my father and nobody has seen him since. We don’t know where they’re holding him. That’s why, when they took Mother in, she took us with her. She said she couldn’t bear to be separated from us. And we didn’t want to be separated from her either. Bulan doesn’t seem to know that we’re actually in a detention center. And Alam doesn’t know anything at all. Some of the soldiers are nice to him, acting like uncles and giving him toys to play with.
First we were taken from home to an office of sorts whose name I don’t know because it was some kind of abbreviation but it was in Jalan Budi Kemuliaan. I knew that because one time when my parents took us to see the National Monument where it was being constructed, we passed that way.
They keep asking Mother questions, day in and day out, until she doesn’t know what to say. It’s worn her out. Her eyes are swollen and she has this gloomy look on her face all the time. When they’re doing that, they put me to work cleaning the place. They’ve given me a number of rooms to clean every day.
At first I didn’t know what these rooms were for and usually it was just cigarette butts and ashes I had to sweep up.
But then, one day I found the floor in one of the rooms covered with dried blood, which I had to wipe up. That’s when I knew what the rooms were being used for. That’s when I knew that all the cries I’d been hearing—from so many different men and women—were coming from those rooms.
About a month ago I found in one of the rooms the tail of a sting ray all matted with flesh and blood. It gave me such a shock I started to shake and cry until I couldn’t stop. I don’t know how I finally managed to calm myself down. But this is something I’ve never told even Mother about because she’s worn out from having had to suffer for so long. I find it hard to eat anymore. The sight of food makes me want to vomit.
I’ve seen men of about my father’s age being herded down the hallways in this place with their faces covered with blood.
Why are they doing this, Om Dimas? Why are these people being tortured? And why do they keep interrogating Mother, asking her questions she cannot answer? I hear them shouting at her, asking over and over whether she knew what Bapak was up to. They’re always shouting, always angry. They can’t seem to speak in a normal tone of voice. Why do they have to shout?
I’m so sad and so afraid. Bulan is so young that all she can do is to follow me around wherever I go. And Alam is just a baby. Once they let Mother feed him but then, right afterwards, called her back into the room for more questions and to be shouted at again.
I hope that you are all right. Bapak once told me that if anything ever happened, I was to contact you.
Yours,
Kenanga Prawiro
Vivienne looked at me, her eyes glistening, and for a long time afterwards all we could do was to hold each other wordlessly.
ON ONE VERY MUGGY SUMMER EVENING, VIVIENNE AND I lolled on the floor of her apartment, trying our best to do nothing. Her apartment wasn’t especially large but as my eyes scanned its contents—books, books, and more books—I felt immediately at home. Works by Simone de Beauvoir and other French authors were mixed with titles by British, Irish, Japanese, Chinese, and Indian authors. My eyes paused for a moment on two of Joyce’s works: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. I noted that titles generally viewed as mandatory reading on Marxist political thought occupied a special shelf of their own. On another shelf, I saw Ayn Rand’s semi-autobiographical work, We the Living, and her controversial novel, The Fountainhead. Judging from Vivienne’s taste in books, I could see that she was, very much like me, a literary traveler. Like me, too, she apparently liked to study the various kinds of thought that marked important periods of time, without being forced to stop at or become trapped by a particular intellectual current. Hmm… My attraction to her increased exponentially. At that moment, I wanted to take her in my arms and never let her go.
Vivienne got up and opened the windows of her apartment as wide as possible. She was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, and the delicate film of perspiration on her elegant neck excited me. She took two bottles of cold Alsace beer from her small refrigerator and handed one to me. She drank her beer straight from the bottle, gulping the amber liquid as if it were an elixir. I watched the bluish vein on her neck pulsate as she swallowed the beer flowing down her throat. A thin stream of liquid seeped from the side of her mouth and trickled down her chin and neck. The beer mixed with her sweat made me want to lap the salty mix from her neck with my tongue.
Vivienne stopped drinking and smiled at me, a challenge in her piercing eyes. She knew what I was thinking. “Tell me about Indonesia …”
Not knowing how to begin to tell her about my home country, I paused. Where should I start? With my family? With the country in tumult? Or back to early 1960s when President Sukarno’s shifting political alliances led the country—and me as well—to the point we are today? My mind flashed back to Jakarta. What had Sukarno been up to? Did he actually side with his friends on the left? What had he wanted or hoped to achieve with his policy of “Nasakom,” his odd promulgation of nationalism, religion, and communism? And as the chronology of the night of September 30 emerged, why had he fled the presidential palace and gone to Halim Perdanakusuma Naval Air Base? This was a question that had nagged my friends in Jakarta and continued to nag me.
How could I ever explain or even begin to unravel this messy bundle of thread for Vivienne? Maybe it would be best to begin somewhere else—with wayang tales, for instance, stories from the Javanese shadow theater that were my secret obsession. Better that, perhaps, than opening the doors to my country’s warehouse of history to cast light on its cluttered contents.
Vivienne took another gulp of beer from her bottle but didn’t swallow. Instead, she lowered her body to straddle my lap and then kissed me, the cool beer emptying from her mouth into mine. The sensation quickened the flow of my blood, making it dance wildly through my veins, and inflamed my joints. Any attempt to prevent Vivienne from feeling my body’s reaction to the blood coursing through my veins to my extremities
