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 forlorn. None of us were happy with our jobs, and for the past several months we had been trying to find a solution to this problem: some kind of business venture where we could work together on something that was personally satisfying (as well as profitable) for everyone concerned. The work had to be enjoyable. My first thought was to publish an Indonesian literary journal much like The Paris Review with short stories, poetry, novellas, and critical essays about Indonesian literature and translations of foreign literature in Indonesian. I had hardly begun to explain this idea when Tjai said drolly, “Which will have to be distributed free of charge because the number of people who can read Indonesian and are interested in Indonesian literature in Paris is about thirty.”
His answer was cynical, but he was right, of course. The literary landscape—both Indonesian and foreign—was littered with graveyards of dead journals and literary magazines. Even so, I loved the thought of us starting a serious literary journal. What an absolute delight that would be!
“I’m just trying to think of something we all like doing,” I grumbled. “We’re all writers, after all.”
Tjai said nothing, but his small mouth became a sour pucker—which meant he was saying to me, “Try using that thing behind your forehead.”
Tjai was the glue that held us together, the only one among us with no wacky side or affectations. He came from a Chinese family in Surabaya that believed completely in the value of hard work. His exile abroad, like that of many other Chinese-Indonesians, had very little to do with ideology and much more to do with race. Tjai was not in the least political; yet he knew, in the wake of events after September 30, 1965, that his family would be among the first to be arrested, because his brother Henry had active relations with Red Party officials in Peking.
Based on the history of race relations in Indonesia and the pogroms that had affected Chinese-Indonesians in the past, the decision of Tjai and Theresa to immediately flee to Singapore and then later join up with us in Paris was very pragmatic. Among us, Tjai was perhaps the only one whose personal life was free of melodrama. He was a straight arrow, honest to the core, good-hearted, and always on the right path. And it was because of this, his unerring record of shooting straight, that we trusted his unbiased and even cold-hearted analyses—even his assessment of the various ideas we had come up with for working together. Sure, I was sometimes rankled by his frankness, but I would be the first to admit that Tjai was almost always right.
Mas Nug threw in the idea of a political daily, to which, once again, Tjai rolled his eyes. “Look at that newsletter Dimas has been doing. The content is fine, but it depends on contributions to survive.”
As a result of the butcher Tjai’s rational way of thinking, our conversation quickly died. What could I say? He was our calculator.
Mas Nug sat next to the open window staring outside as he took a cigarette from a packet. After Lintang was born and Vivienne and I moved into a larger apartment, our home had become the place my friends usually gathered. It wasn’t all that spacious, but it had a pleasant atmosphere, which was helped greatly by the numerous potted plants that Vivienne had hung around the rooms. But this was summer, and even with the plants, little could be done to lower the actual temperature of the non-air-conditioned room.
In the hours that followed, our discussion became more uncertain and even less directed. Mas Nug suggested that we buy Indonesian kretek cigarettes wholesale in the Netherlands and then sell them retail in Paris. Once again, Tjai again threw a damp rag on the idea: “You mean, set up a cigarette stand? Have you thought about taxes? And are you ready to compete with other brands? What research have you done? How many people in Paris smoke kretek besides you and Dimas?”
As we fell into silence, once again, I began to chuckle to myself.
Risjaf then began to say something but, frankly, I can’t even remember what it was. The air was so hot, all I wanted to do was take off my clothes. It was a good thing that at that point Vivienne and Lintang came home, fresh from a swim at the public pool near our apartment. She immediately offered to make us some limeade. After the number of bottles of beers that we had consumed, limeade