Home. Leila S. Chudori

to say flatly.

      Mas Nug twisted the tip of his mustache. “I will explore the city of Paris and study the advertising section in Le Figaro. We need to find a location, don’t we?”

      Good God! Of course, Mas Nug was right, and that was something that had to be done right away.

      Tjai nodded and made more notes. That night we each raised a glass of wine, except for Risjaf, that is, who held in his hand a ginger drink of wedang jahé instead. Clinking our glasses together, we said in unison, “To our restaurant.”

      We looked at each other.

      “What should we call it?” Risjaf said to Mas Nug.

      Mas Nug turned his head towards me. “Let’s ask our resident poet!”

      I looked at my friends, one by one. Someone was missing. There should have been five of us.

      I took a deep breath and exhaled. “We, the four of us, are the pillars of Tanah Air Restaurant.”

      We again clinked our glasses together. Tanah Air. Homeland. The name immediately stole my heart.

      PARIS, 1975

      Tjai, Risjaf, and I shared an unspoken agreement: ever since Rukmini had asked Mas Nug for a divorce in order to marry Lieutenant-Colonel Prakosa, we had surrendered to him the authority to act as our leader. Though we all believed in equality and didn’t think we actually needed a leader, Mas Nug seemed to need this kind of recognition, even if only temporarily. At least that’s what we’d surmised. And it all started that accursed evening when, after receiving his wife’s request for a divorce, he’d been shaken to the core and had tried to drown himself in alcohol. Nugroho Dewantoro, this man from Yogyakarta in the heart of Java, who always insisted on speaking egalitarian Indonesian rather than status-marked Javanese, was a very sentimental man. In fact, I even suspected that despite his frequent bouts of womanizing, he prized above all else the warmth that only a family can bring. Unlike Mas Hananto, whose relationship with Surti was complicated by perceptions of class difference—which was a psychological barrier of sorts for him—Mas Nug didn’t think about such things. If he wanted a woman, he wanted her, clear and simple. He became attracted to Rukmini and despite the fact that his green-eared friend Risjaf already had his sights set on her, he cast his net and succeeded in winning the orchid for himself. He then went on to marry her, the beautiful Rukmini with the sharp tongue. But because it became apparent to Risjaf and I that Mas Nug truly did love Rukmini, we long ago forgave him and joined in his happiness, especially so when Bimo Nugroho, the son the couple had wished for, appeared just nine months after their wedding.

      What I always found difficult to understand about Mas Hananto and Mas Nug is why, with all their political activities and responsibilities as husbands and fathers, they felt such a compulsion to sleep with other women. Mas Hananto said that he wanted to feel the “passion of the proletarian woman in bed.” As sorry and trite as that class-based justification sounds, Mas Nug couldn’t come up with a reason even as good as that. Good-looking and hirsute, with a thick mustache and a gilded tongue, Mas Nug easily attracted women to him, proverbial moths to a flame. It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that even with his stateless status and lack of permanent address either in Peking or in Zurich, he was able to easily win women’s favors and hearts. In the latter location, the crazy thing was that his mistress there was one Mrs. Agnes Baumgartner, the wife of a policeman and one of his acupuncture clients. Initially, it was the husband who had come to Mas Nug, complaining of aches from rheumatism and arthritis; but then Mas Nug had gone on to use his therapeutic skills on Mrs. Baumgartner, who, as he described it, was especially achy and in need of his special touch. According to Mas Nug, the woman’s thighs and midsection required special care and treatment.

      When I called Mas Nug from Paris and then had to listen to him tell me of his sexual conquest in Zurich, my blood went straight to my brain. I barked at him to follow Tjai’s suit and come to Paris immediately—not just so that our group could be together again or because of my concern for Rukmini and Bimo, but because of the stupid and dangerous position his sexual shenanigans were putting him in. Engaging in an affair with a married woman in a foreign country was not the same as keeping a mistress on the side in Jakarta or, for that matter, plucking an orchid in our more youthful days. The woman’s husband was a police officer, for God’s sake. And this wasn’t Indonesia; it was the West, whose written and unwritten rules we could not yet pretend to be familiar with.

      My vitriol apparently worked the trick and Mas Nug arrived in Paris a few weeks later, but with a very long face. Once again, I simply couldn’t understand how it was possible for him to fall in love with a woman he’d only just met.

      Seven years later a letter from Rukmini made its way from Jakarta to Paris and into Mas Nug’s hand: a request for a divorce. That night, I supported Mas Nug’s weight as he stumbled towards the Metro Station, all the while trying to persuade him to lower the volume of his increasingly shrill and incoherent voice. At the station, I remember clearly the severely wounded look on his face.

      Half drunk, he spoke brokenly. “You know, Dimas…actually… it was when I was in Zurich…I received a letter from Rukmini.” His voice trembled and tears welled in his eyes. “In it she turned down my request for her to join me in Europe…but she didn’t tell me why.”

      I said nothing, my mind for some reason still on his adventure with the policeman’s wife.

      “And Agnes, Mrs. Baumgartner, you know, was more than just a patient of mine.”

      “I know. You told me about your needles, her thighs.”