Intuitively, it seems, Vivienne knew that she could not force me to give an encyclopedic version of my life without alienating me in the process. So it was that she allowed me to gradually feed her drops from the bottle of my memory at my own pace and in my own time.
As a relatively new arrival in Paris, I did not know the city well and, if truth be told, was only familiar with the Metro system in the area where my rundown apartment was located, an arrondissement in which there were several Vietnamese restaurants, whose food, to my great delight, more resembled that of China and Indonesia than European food, which I found to be bland and terribly short on spices.
Vivienne introduced me to the Bibliothèque Nationale in the Palais Mazarin. Using her membership card the first time we went there, she checked out for me several books on literature and politics. The library was so immense as to be awe-inspiring and I was almost afraid to explore the various floors. I promised myself that I would come back alone, one day, which I did soon afterwards.
Vivienne also took me to stores and places in Paris where prices weren’t so hard on the pocketbook of a wayfarer like myself. (I still didn’t know what to call myself. What was I? A refugee? A traveler? An exile? Or maybe something with a little more cachet: a writer or an independent journalist?) Frequently, three friends of mine—Nugroho Dewantoro, Tjai Sin Soe, and Risjaf, who were fellow Indonesians also living off the good graces of the French government—would join the two of us.
Vivienne took me and my three loud-mouthed friends to see the Grand Palais and Notre Dame Cathedral. With her, we explored Île Saint-Louis. We Indonesians were a quartet of gay and carefree ramblers ready to drop the names of locations in Paris in our (as yet unborn) poems and novels—or at least we acted that way, when in fact we were just a band of political exiles acting like thrifty tourists. But maybe it was by being able to laugh at ourselves that we were able to survive. I can’t say.
Exploring the arteries of Paris with Vivienne was enlightening for me. Perhaps because of his talent as a writer, Ernest Hemingway was able to vividly invoke in his writing the special affection he held for Paris, as he did in A Moveable Feast; but Vivienne, as a woman, seemed to better understand the city’s corpus.
I couldn’t say that Paris was for us the “moveable feast” that Hemingway described; but it definitely was “terre d’asile”—our place of exile. Second to that, Paris was the remarkable River Seine, which divided the city into its left and right banks but whose thirty-seven bridges sewed the two halves together. It was also Shakespeare & Co., the celebrated bookstore on Rue de la Bûcherie; and of course it was a park bench on Île Saint-Louis, the site of Vivienne’s and my first unexpected but marvelously prolonged kiss. As our land of exile, Paris was first and foremost for us the roof over our heads and the source of our next meal but it was the sights and sounds of Paris, the city’s intangible delights, which provided sustenance for our souls.
Before meeting Vivienne, and as is true with most tourists and new visitors to Paris, I and my three friends—Mas Nugroho, Tjai, and Risjaf—spent much time strolling the Rive Droite, the right bank of the Seine, in the northern section of Paris where the Champs-Élysées and other prominent sites are located. So impressed were we by the elegance of the northern arrondissements, we promised ourselves that we would explore every one of them before our return home—whenever that might be. But Vivienne, to her great credit, was the one who pointed out the more prosaic but no less interesting sites that were to be found on the left bank of the Seine, the Rive Gauche, where used book-stalls were plentiful. At one of them she introduced me to its proprietor, Monsieur Antoine Martin, a retired policeman who loved literature so much he was content to sit at his stall all day long and read aloud favorite passages from the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras or poems by René Char. The man’s mini-performances always attracted the attention of passersby, who invariably ended up purchasing the book he was reading from, at a low price too.
The days we passed as flâneurs in Paris helped much to enrich my French vocabulary. At first, the only words I knew were oui, non, and ça va; but because Vivienne forced me to add ten new words to my vocabulary every day, I began to study the language more seriously. Even so, it wasn’t her tutorial skills that made me attach myself to her. It was her eyes, definitely her eyes. I wanted to dive into those deep green eyes and remain buried within them forever. And her lips as well … Vivienne’s lips were the lyrics of an unfinished poem. I was convinced that only when her lips were engaged with mine could the poem be completed.
Jakarta, August 1968
Mas Dimas,
Bad news … In April Mas Hananto was arrested by four intelligence agents. Adi Tjahjono, the owner of the photo studio where he was working, told me about it. He couldn’t tell me where they took him, but probably to the detention center on Jalan Guntur or to the one on Gunung Sahari. Nobody has heard anything from him directly.
Maybe you didn’t know this but Mbak Surti, who has been interrogated by the military on a regular basis ever since ’65, was at that time in prison. And because she didn’t want to be separated from her children, when she was first called in to the detention center on Jalan Budi Kemuliaan, she took them with her and they ended up being imprisoned as well. Kenanga, who is now fourteen, has seen things that no girl her age should ever witness. And what must it be like for Bulan and Alam, who are only six and three? I simply can’t imagine. (I’m enclosing a letter for you from Kenanga. She told me she wanted to write to you, because her father had said to her that you were a second father for them. I could barely make myself read what she wrote.)
Mother tells me to stress again the need for you to stay in Europe. Now that we’ve moved from Solo and are living in Jakarta, things feel a bit calmer—but the military’s pursuit of anyone and everyone with any link to the Communist Party has only gotten worse. Now they’re not just picking up people suspected of being party members or sympathizers. They’re bringing in families and children too.
Mother and I consider ourselves lucky to have been called to report to Jalan Guntur “only” a few times and to be permitted to go home after a day of answering their same old questions. Most of them have to do with your activities and what we knew about Mas Hananto, Mas Nug, Tjai, and Risjaf. They asked us if we knew what you were doing in Peking when you were there. I don’t know where they got the information, but they knew it was Mas Hananto and not you who was supposed to have gone on that tour to Santiago, Havana, and Peking in September ’65.
When I was being questioned, I could hear the screams of people being tortured. Their shrieks of pain were so loud they penetrated the walls. I can only pray that their cries reached God’s ears and not just my own. But the things that Kenanga has witnessed are much more horrifying than anything I have seen. Read her letter and get back to me soon.
Jakarta is hell. Pray for us.
Your brother,
Aji Suryo
One night, when Vivienne and I were out for a walk on Île Saint-Louis, I suddenly found that I could take my self-inflicted silence no longer. With the moon hiding in a narrow lane on the island, a lone bright eye staring at me, I put my hand to Vivienne’s chin.
She looked at me. “You’re upset. What is it?”
“I got some news from Jakarta.”
Vivienne took my hand and pulled me to a park bench—the same park bench that had such historical importance for me.
“Can you talk to me? Do you trust me enough to tell me what it is?”
She’d
