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“What …?”

“How about if we burn down that paviliun across the road?”

I turned my head towards him and smiled weakly, somewhat consoled by Risjaf’s display of solidarity and brotherhood.

“No need for that,” I said as Risjaf lifted his harmonica to play again. “Better to murder those two fuckers instead.”

Suddenly, we both burst into laughter, delighted by this black fantasy.

It wasn’t easy for me to expunge the name of Surti from my life. Not only because I liked to cook and the kitchen was a constant and painful reminder of my feelings towards her. For the first few weeks after that incident I was forever seeing Surti standing next to the cooker and her reflection on plates and in pots. But where I saw her most often was on the handle of my knife, perched there, looking at me, as I prepared spices for grinding: shallots, onions, and turmeric.

Just as other men with broken hearts would do, I tried to forget my feelings for Surti in the most clichéd of ways: by sleeping around with other women. After each of these sessions, however, I always felt foolish and sick to my stomach. By coincidence, with political and social tensions on the rise in Jakarta at that time, we rarely saw Mas Nugroho or Mas Hananto. They were busy with their work at Nusantara News and both had been assigned to cover the incident of October 17, 1952, when a group of army officers staged a failed coup attempt to force the dissolution of Parliament and install President Sukarno as the country’s supreme leader. If I had been on speaking terms with them at the time, no doubt I would have been dogging their tracks, hoping to learn more about the political situation. To become a journalist, I had begun to discover, was a career path I could not resist. Journalism uses the power of words in the same way that a chef uses the strength of spices in the dishes he creates.

So it was that for a few months our small community of friends broke down and dispersed. Neither our moods nor our schedules permitted any form of reconciliation. Mas Nugroho and Mas Hananto were busy with their work; Risjaf had his books; and I was busy with women, exams, and grinding spices in the kitchen as I thought about concepts of love between men and women as depicted in the Mahabharata.

Drupadi.

Drupadi had taken all five of the Pandawa brothers as husbands. But it was the brother Bima who always tried to protect her and had thwarted Kicaka’s and Dursasana’s advances when they tried to rape her. Tragically for Bima, Drupadi loved his brother, Arjuna, much more. I don’t really know and actually never tried to find out whether Surti loved Mas Hananto more than me. What I did know is that she had made a choice.

I’m even more uncertain about why it is that, even after meeting the lovely Vivienne and marrying her, up until this very day my soul still stirs whenever I think of Surti. Perhaps I truly did give my heart to her. Forever and for always.

And forty-five years later in Paris, that same song from Risjaf’s harmonica still softly suffuses the springtime air: “Als de Orchideeën Bloeien.”

don’t come home comma wait till

calm here stop mother and I well

comma only been called in for

information stop aji suryo

PARIS, SEPTEMBER, 1965

“ONLY BEEN CALLED IN FOR INFORMATION…” Those were the words in the telegram my brother Aji sent to me two weeks after the storm that occurred in late September 1965. Mas Nugroho and I were two among the many Indonesian journalists who had been invited to attend the conference of the International Organization of Journalists in Santiago, Chile, earlier that month. Even though Jakarta was heating up and full of the smoke from rumors about a “Council of Generals” which had resulted in infighting among the ranks of the military elite, we had left the country with no apprehension or premonition about things to come. At least I had no inkling that anything out of the ordinary was going to occur, not in the days before our departure. We were going off on an ordinary assignment and, as such, said our goodbyes with little fanfare.

If I did feel any apprehension at that time, it was about the state of my friendship with Mas Hananto. A few weeks prior to my departure, we’d had an argument and I had punched him in the face because I was repulsed by the way he was treating Surti, taking her completely for granted. He accused me of still being in love with her — which was, I must admit, something I’d never been able to ascertain, even to myself. It was clear, though, that it was because of Surti I had decided to go to Santiago.

Mas Hananto was the one who should have gone with Mas Nugroho to Santiago, but he had chosen instead to remain in Jakarta in order to resolve his marital crisis — a situation for which he was entirely to blame, he being given to chasing any skirt that passed by. Initially, I had been reluctant to go because of recent political developments in several Latin American countries. Mas Hananto and Mas Nug, in fact, were in correspondence with people close to Andrés Pascal Allende, Salvador Allende’s nephew. I was aware of this, but I never really felt like I was in the same spectrum they were in. I was a free cell. What reason did I have to go to Santiago? But when Mas Hananto told me that Surti had threatened to leave him and take their three children with her, I immediately changed my mind. I felt Surti’s unexpressed anger and pain suddenly overpower me. Her silent suffering became a strong voice speaking to me. I knew that the problem was not simply a question of Mas Hananto’s womanizing; it was because she felt betrayed by her husband and shunned by her helpmate. I recalled the crude comparison Mas Hananto had drawn between Surti and his mistress, Marni: “Surti is my wife, my life’s companion. But with Marni, I can feel the passionate excitement of the proletarian class.”

Mas Hananto would never have said such a thing to his wife; but I knew Surti well, from the way she breathed down to her very pores. Being a woman who was highly sensitive to the behavior and demeanor of the man she loved, there was no way she could not have known about her husband’s shenanigans. Maybe not in specific detail but she would have known, nonetheless. As I saw it, the problem with Mas Hananto was that there was something about Surti — maybe her deep sense of honor or her innate elegance and natural beauty — which he viewed as “aristocratic” and therefore something that he, a self-styled proletarian, could never truly possess. There was something about Surti so sublime that, in Mas Hananto’s way of thinking, it could only be classified as “bourgeois,” which made him reject it out of hand and engage in sexual escapades with women in Triveli.

I truly did not want to see the couple separate, which is why I bowed to Mas Hananto’s wishes so that he could stay home and resolve his marital issues. In my departure from Jakarta, I never dreamed that I would not return.

It was during the middle of the conference in Santiago that Jose Ximenez, the chairman, made a special announcement in a plenary session about what the English-language press was calling the “September 30 Movement” which had taken place in Jakarta. (We later learned that the Indonesian phrase, “Gerakan September Tigapuluh,” had quickly been changed by the country’s new military rulers into the more ominous sounding acronym, “Gestapu.”) We were shocked. High-level military officers kidnapped and killed? We couldn’t imagine who might have perpetuated such an act. I repeatedly pressed Mas Nugroho to try to find out more from Ximenez about what had happened.