Vivienne continued to stare at me, a small smile tugging on her lips.
“That was then, Vivienne. We all have a past,” I said sincerely, hoping that the light in her beautiful green eyes would not fade. “I’m serious. And now I care for and respect Surti as I would a sister. She is — or was, rather — my best friend’s wife.”
Vivienne still looked unsure. I myself was unsure. I knew that whenever I mentioned Surti’s name, my heart felt a jolt of pain. And hearing the names of Kenanga, Bulan, and even Alam, the youngest whom I had never known, still made my heart leap. I was the one who dreamt up their names. I don’t know if Mas Hananto ever knew that.
In a firm voice, Vivienne now asked me to continue my story.
THE TRIVELI AREA OF JAKARTA;
SEPTEMBER 5, 1965
Mas Hananto rubbed his rub his jaw in pain. Inside the cigarette kiosk, the vendor snored, unaware of the disturbance outside.
“Mas Han …”
Hananto turned away, avoiding the look in my eye. “You still haven’t gotten over her, have you?”
I didn’t answer. It would have been a waste of time, what with the anger boiling in each of us.
“What time is it anyway?” I mumbled, suddenly feeling my body begin to wilt. My knees seemed to have lost their caps.
“Three,” Mas Hananto said brusquely, looking at his watch, a 17-jewel Titoni which was like a second heart for him and never free from his wrist. “That’s why I keep telling you to go to Senen Market and buy yourself a watch. You’re always having to ask other people the time.”
His tone was rough, but I could tell he was no longer angry. His jaw must have been hurting him, though.
I sat down beside him on the bumper of his jeep. “This will be the last time I interfere in your personal affairs,” I told him, “but I need to tell you that the way you live your life, with your family here and you going off to see Marni or some other woman there, shows that you are not consistent.”
Mas Hananto helped himself to a pack of cigarettes from the kiosk, placed a bill to cover the cost beside the still-sleeping vendor, opened the packet, and then offered a stick to me. He signaled for me to get into the jeep.
The streets in Jakarta were silent. Silence and smoke suffused the jeep’s interior.
In what seemed just a moment, we found ourselves already driving by the construction site of the unfinished National Monument in the park facing the presidential palace. From the disarray of the site, it was hard to guess when construction would be completed.
“So, you don’t think I’m consistent?” Mas Hananto suddenly muttered.
A strange question, I thought, coming from a man like Mas Hananto, who was so sure of the political ideology he had chosen to follow and the woman he had selected to be a helpmate in his life.
“I say that,” I told him, “because you have a family. A family requires stability and consistency. If you can’t control yourself and are always giving in to impulse, then you shouldn’t have gotten married. All you’re going to do is to make other people suffer.”
Mas Hananto glanced at me. “You’re not saying this because of Surti?”
“You know this has nothing to do with her,” I said unequivocally.
He gave me a serious look. “So I’m the one who’s inconsistent and you are sure your position is the right one? Tell me, are you consistent? Do you know what you want? Either in politics or your personal life?”
I said nothing, certain that he was being rhetorical.
“You don’t belong to a political party. You’re not a member of any of the mass organizations. You always refuse to take sides. You malign LEKRA but then turn around and criticize signatories of the Cultural Manifesto.”
“Yes, and so?” I stared at Mas Hananto, waiting for him to continue his critique.
“Well what is you want, Dimas? Take a look at your personal life. You don’t seem to know what you want. Is it because you haven’t been able to move on from the past or is it that you just like being single?”
Now I didn’t understand. Was he irritated with me because I didn’t want to take sides or because he thought I still had feelings for Surti? Why must a person take sides and join one group or another, I asked myself. Was it merely to prove one’s convictions? And were convictions entirely unitary in nature? Socialism, communism, capitalism, and all the other isms… Must we choose one and then swallow it whole without any sense of doubt? Without any possibility for criticism?
I looked at Mas Hananto but kept my questions to myself. He had one hand on the steering wheel and was rubbing his jaw with the other. That night we said nothing more, at least not until Mas Hananto’s jeep stopped in front of my boarding house, but how the conversation ended, I frankly no longer recall.
What I do remember is that the next day and for the entire week thereafter, we didn’t speak to each other. At the office, Mas Hananto said only what was essential, hardly bothering to look at me when he spoke. His jaw and cheek were swollen and blue.
One day at the office, after about a week of us of not speaking, I watched from a distance as Mas Hananto laughed and spoke in whispers with Mas Nugroho and the editor-in-chief. I gave no thought to their little intrigue. I had no idea that their conversation that day would determine the course of my life, my fate, and my future as an exile, stranded in Paris. But then Mas Nug looked over in my direction and waved his hand, signaling for me to come to his desk.
“So, they had decided to send you to Europe?”
“No, they had decided to send me to one conference in Santiago and then on to another in Peking.”
“So you went to Santiago, Chile, and then after that flew on to China?”
“My journey in life has been a long one, Vivienne. Before going to China, I went to Cuba first, and it was only after some time in China that I came to Europe.”
I looked outside the window. To compare Paris and Jakarta would be like comparing coconut milk with gutter water.
A COFFEE STALL ON JALAN TJIDURIAN, JAKARTA;
SEPTEMBER 12, 1965
“I don’t know anything about the I.O.J. or its conference in Santiago,” I said to Mas Hananto after tracking him to an itinerant coffee stall near the corner of Jalan Tjidurian. I tossed the large manila envelope on the stall’s rickety table. This was the first long sentence I had spoken to Mas Hananto since we’d stopped talking to each other. Inside the envelope was an invitation to attend a conference of journalists in Chile.
Mas Hananto, who was sitting slovenly with one arm on the table and one leg propped up on the bench, stared at his glass of hot coffee as if pretending to be deaf. He lowered his lips to the edge of the glass and started slurping — a sound that disgusted me. I knew he was doing this to annoy me.
Feeling both surprise and the desire to smack him in the jaw again, I finally decided to sit down beside him. “This invitation is for you,” I said. “Why do you want me to go?”
Saying nothing, Mas Hananto lowered his head, looking into his glass of coffee again.
“I can’t speak Spanish. I’ve never engaged in any kind of journalistic activity at the international level. I wouldn’t know what to say at such a conference,” I sputtered, angry with him that he could so flippantly assign me a task without even consulting me beforehand.
“It’s the Chief’s decision,” Mas Hananto mumbled. “You have to go with Nug.”
A glass of coffee suddenly appeared before me.
Mas Hananto said, “The name of the organization is the ‘International Organization of Journalists,’ which is English, right, so the language of the conference is going to be English, which you speak perfectly well. It’s an annual conference for heads of media institutions from around the world. The delegates of each of the countries represented have been given a topic to discuss. You and Nug have one too.”