Leila Chudori - Home

Om Aji and Tante Retno were fine, it turned out. Bimo had brought Andini home safely. (I intended to interrogate her when the situation was calmer.) Maman had called during the night, but Om Aji had managed to calm her worries. That meant I could put off calling France at least for a little while, until things were more settled.

Alam came into the house, plopped down in a chair, and immediately pulled me down onto his lap. He kissed me long, as if he never wanted to let me go.

“I haven’t bathed or brushed my teeth.”

“I haven’t either. Let’s take a bath together!”

I laughed. “No wonder Bimo is always telling me to be careful around you. No matter the situation, your hormones are always talking.”

Alam smiled but continued to stare at me intensely. “It’s exactly in times like these that hormones act up.”

“Was that Bimo or Gilang on the phone? What do they have to say?”

Alam took a breath and then exhaled. “It was Bimo. He said that on SCTV they reported that at a meeting with Indonesian people living in Cairo, Soeharto said that he would be willing to step down if that’s what the people wanted.” He seemed to be thinking of something. “I suspect that he’ll still try to hang on.”

My head was still pounding.

“What about on the streets? What’s happening there?” I asked.

“There’s still disorder, everywhere, even near our office… But we can talk about that later,” he said. “Right now, you have to eat. Have a headache?”

I nodded. “A little.”

“Too little sleep, too much stress,” Doctor Alam suggested. “Did you call Om Aji?”

“Yes, everything’s OK there. But I do have to go home so that they can stop worrying. Plus, I need to rest.” I felt Alam’s chin with my fingers, which tingled from the touch of his prickly beard.

“Maybe we should stay put for a while. Might be best not to go out until it’s safe, don’t you think?”

Alam slipped his hand beneath the loose T-shirt I was wearing. He knew my body too well and what would happen to me as soon as his fingertip touched my nipples. This was wrong. This should be a time of mourning. We needed to grieve for the chaos this country was in. I got up and off his lap, but Alam pulled me back down again — firmly, without hesitation. And the awful thing was, his action made me all the more excited. His hand succeeded in finding my breast. With only the soft touch of his index finger, I had almost surrendered.

“Alam… We should be in mourning.”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled me to my feet, then removed his shorts, and then mine as well.

“And making love is only permitted in happy and prosperous times?” He smiled. “If that were the case, the population of Indonesia would shrink to a mere percentage of what it is!” He sat down again and pulled me down, facing him, on the center of his lap. “Don’t move,” he whispered. “Just enjoy. Don’t move…”

“But I want to move…”

“Don’t, baby… Wait…”

That morning, all the evil in the world was slowly chased away by tender loving I never wanted to end. That morning, all misfortune and catastrophe was cast aside by endless love.

JAKARTA, MAY 16, 1998

Yesterday, when they heard the news that President Soeharto had returned to Jakarta from Cairo, Alam and his friends seemed to become possessed — not because the President wasn’t going to be able solve the crisis at hand but because “the time had come for Indonesia to figure out what to do with him.”

Gilang and Alam were acting like two generals ready to raise arms even if their weapons were only the toothbrushes they always carried with them. Regardless, there was now hope in the air. According to Gilang, since the previous day numerous important public figures had been calling meetings to discuss the crisis and what to do about it. Several of his sources mentioned that Nurcholish Madjid, the respected Muslim intellectual Gilang referred to as “Cak” Nur — don’t ask me what the term of address “Cak” means — had met with several other influential figures at the invitation of one of the senior military leaders at the Indonesian Armed Forces Headquarters. He said that Cak Nur had put together on the spot a concept for the transition of power that was to be delivered to President Soeharto. The plan included several key points, but the most important one, and the one that made Gilang and Alam feel as if they’d won the war, was that Soeharto would not stand as a candidate at the next general election, which was to be held at the soonest possible time.

“But the students, all of them, want him to resign right now,” Bimo stated firmly. “No election! No nothing! Just his resignation!”

Hmmm… Ever since he and Andini had gotten closer, Bimo seemed to glow.

“The students are right,” Alam agreed. “Soeharto is just trying to buy more time.”

While Alam, Gilang, and Bimo were debating and making predictions in overly loud voices, I was reviewing all the footage that Mita and I had collected from May 12 up to this morning. I don’t know how to describe my feelings when I saw the series of images we’d shot. Even scenes on streets leading to Jalan Diponegoro — which we shot between yesterday and this morning — showed us to be in the middle of a war zone, on a tour of a slain city that would be difficult to resurrect. A preview of Doomsday. Along the streets, I saw through my eyes and lens storefronts and even large malls now reduced to their basic structures; sidewalks whose brickwork was now piles of rubble; twisted and misshapen fences; traffic signs hanging limply from their poles, some of them even melted; lofty and formerly awe-inspiring buildings now nothing but blackened skeletons. ATM machines that had been broken into and plundered. Supermarkets, banks, and stores devastated. The country’s economic and business pulse had been mortally maimed and severed. Even today, several days after the firestorm, there were no other words for it: Jakarta in the morning light was a hell, completely distressed from torture. Television news programs constantly aired horrific images of burned victims — stacked in piles and put into black bags like so much rubbish. And I can’t even make myself talk about the attacks on and the rapes of women of ethnic Chinese descent. The stories of perversion were so utterly grotesque they made my head want to explode.

Alam was anxiously waiting for news from his friends in ILUNI, the University of Indonesia Alumni Association. He said that the university’s professorial senate, headed by the university rector, had met with President Soeharto earlier that morning at the president’s private residence on Jalan Cendana to convey the results of the emergency symposium the university had called on the question of governmental reform. They included a request for the president to resign.

“I want to know Soeharto’s answer to that one,” Alam said, pacing the floor, phone in hand, grumbling because no one could tell him the president’s response.

“Be patient. We’ll find out soon enough,” Bimo said. “How about getting us some lunch,” he then said to Ujang.

As Ujang was writing down our orders, a loud ring was heard. Alam almost jumped from his seat to grab his cell phone on his desk but then suddenly frowned.

“Not mine. Same ring tone.”

“Oh, that must be mine…” I said, picking up my phone. I had finally gotten around to changing the irritating ringtone on the cell phone that Andini had lent to me; but the stupid thing was that I had set it with the same ring tone as Alam’s. I looked at the screen but saw no number. Was it Maman? Or Ayah?

“ Salut ,” came the sound of a familiar voice.

“Oh, Nara… Salut !” I glanced at Alam whose hands were now on his hips. I didn’t know if he was irritated because the call wasn’t the one he’d been waiting for, because our ring tones were the same, or because he heard me say Nara’s name.