with Indonesia, as well as the ease of finding there most anything one wanted from Indonesia. But, in the end, we had chosen to gather in France because of the country’s long history of providing a warm embrace to political exiles like ourselves. France was the terre d’asile, the land of asylum for exiles like us—the land of human rights: le pays des droits de l’homme. France. That didn’t mean, of course, that the country offered easy citizenship. The process of becoming first a permanent resident and then a citizen required many complicated bureaucratic procedures and requirements that were time-consuming and difficult to fulfill. That said, we were able to obtain, without too much difficulty, a titre de voyage, which permitted us to travel anywhere in the world except Indonesia. A French government agency provided temporary financial assistance; but given the cost of living in Paris, the amount was hardly enough to survive.
We began to look for work almost immediately and took on odd jobs and part-time work to earn an income. After some self-promotion, Mas Nugroho, who had studied acupuncture in Peking, was soon attracting patients interested in trying his healing method—which is when I came to see why he had been reluctant to leave Switzerland: most of his “patients” were women.
Tjai, who held a degree in economics, had a much easier time finding a steady job than the rest of us, and began working as an independent accountant for several mom-and-pop stores on the city’s edge. Risjaf and I were the unlucky ones, the two people least equipped to work abroad. In Indonesia, we had studied literature because we aspired to be members of the intellectual class. But in France, birthplace of so many writers and thinkers whose books had served as our compass, intellectuals, it seemed, were ten centimes a dozen. It’s not surprising, therefore, that we were unable to find suitable work in our field and that every three or four months we’d be leaving one uninteresting job for yet another. From service work in restaurants, as bank tellers, up to assistant curators in small galleries whose only visitors were three or four pretentious people who called themselves artists, we did whatever we could.
Such was my life until an evening in May 1968 made boisterous by student demands on the French government. That was the evening I met Vivienne Deveraux on the campus of the Sorbonne. She entered my life, then my body, and, finally, as she came to know my life history, my soul as well. With Vivienne, I tried to become reborn as a new man; but no matter how hard I tried, I continued to feel that some part of me had been left behind in Indonesia. Maybe it was my heart: my love for my mother and Aji; or my concern for Surti and her children. I didn’t know. But a strained anxiety always affected me every time I received a letter from Aji, which inevitably contained more horrific stories about the slaughter going on in Java and elsewhere in the archipelago.
I remember one such letter from Aji in which he conveyed the shocking news about the hunt for communists in Solo, with the bodies of the hunted being thrown into the river.
Red. The river that had once nursed me had now turned blood red.
That is what Aji said. That is what our uncle Kiasno told Aji. And that is what finally convinced my mother to follow her brother’s advice and move to Jakarta to live with Aji’s family.
No one could comprehend what was happening. But we recognized that—for a while, at least, although who knew for how long?—we would have to remain in exile. On cold nights, I stared at the Seine and tried to imagine what it would be like if its waters were red in color. I began to chastise myself for my perpetual waffling, for my inability to maintain a fixed opinion. I liked to sail in no certain direction: upstream, downstream, from the right bank to the left, pondering opinions without diving in to completely embrace a particular “ism.” I now saw that, in the end, the effect of my wavering was that my family was thrown into a bottomless trench of trouble and travail.
Suddenly I needed that small space, that vacuum—the one Bang Amir said Allah had given to him. I didn’t know whether I was His true servant but I knew I wanted that space, that small vacuum. I longed to see Bang Amir and talk to him again. Where was he now?
I posted numerous letters to my good-hearted friend, but had no proof they ever arrived safely in his, Bang Amir’s, hands. In them, I asked about the meaning of that vacuum he once had mentioned, the one he said that could be found in every human heart. I desperately longed for something, but I didn’t know what it was. Was it some kind of spiritual essence? When I wrote to Bang Amir, I wrote as if he were standing before me with that calm look of his on his face and speaking to me in the low voice of the popular Indonesian singer, Rahmat Kartolo.
I didn’t know where to position myself in order to find that essence. If, in this tumultuous and transient world, the natural blue color of a river’s waters could be changed to red, where was my station on this map of life to be?
I found no answer to my question.
In February 1969, the following year, Aji called me to convey the news that Mother had died in her sleep.
Was that the answer to my questions? To take Mother away from me? Away from Aji?
A rapid series of snapshots flashed before my eyes from our childhood in Solo with our parents. My father was a teacher of English at the city’s State Senior High School, a school with a reputation for its rigorous curriculum and the belief that Indonesian children had to learn to appreciate both Indonesian and Western literature. It was my father who instilled in me the importance of books as one of life’s staples—just as important as food, drink, and sleep, he said (though he neglected to point out that sex was another necessary and natural part of life as well). When he told me this, my mother gave him a slight nudge. Though she was not particularly religious herself (unlike her brother, my uncle Kiasno), she did feel that some attention must be given to God and religion, that these things, too, were among life’s needs.
It was Om Kiasno who first taught me and then, later, Aji, who was ten years younger than me, to recite the Quran. My father voiced no objection to this, just as he never protested when our uncle assertively reminded us to pray. Father was more concerned with matters of daily life and was apt to make much more of a fuss when Mother forgot to put her batik implements away after using them, because Aji would end up making them his playthings and leave them scattered 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