Leila Chudori - Home

It was around that time, I guess, that Vivienne began to gradually turn Paris into a kind of resting place for me. Not a home, per se, but a place where I could stop for a while. Slowly, I came to see in her green eyes both assurance and a willingness to provide refuge for me, like a shade tree protecting a child from the blazing sun with its cool shadows.

Although Vivienne’s curious cousins, Marie-Claire and Mathilde, asked numerous questions about my background — the French always seem to be interested in history — all in all, I felt that the Deveraux family was very accommodative to Vivienne’s Indonésien lover, who as yet could speak to them only in broken French.

We married a year later in Lyon, at the vineyard of Vivienne’s uncle, the father of Marie-Claire. That was the Deveraux family’s ancestral home. Because all of her family’s members were educated people who seemed to love to cook, I refrained from trying to impress them with my own culinary skills. As Indonesia has no enological history, Vivienne’s father, Laurence, and her mother, Marianne, took it on themselves to give me some basic lessons about wine — ones I very much enjoyed. They taught me the difference between a sauvignon and a merlot; which kinds of wine were a good match for certain kinds of meat; what kinds of white wine were best served with fish. Marianne, who seemed to know how affected I still was by my mother’s death, showed great forbearance with me, carefully listening to each word of French I spoke. Apparently hoping to instill in me a greater sense of confidence about my ability to speak that beautiful tongue, she was patient with my halting French and displayed no exasperation with my faulty grammar. On top of that, she was constantly offering me homemade petit fours — offers I never refused — or filling my glass with wine. Jean, Vivienne’s brother, who was working for the Red Cross in Africa, came home for the wedding and he and I engaged in long discussions on politics and literature. With Vivienne’s family embracing me so warmly, taking me into themselves, what more did I have to complain about?

Lintang Utara: “North Star.” That’s the name I chose for our daughter, born five years after we married. Everything about her showed her to be her mother’s daughter, except for her wavy black hair, which came from the Suryo family. And I never tired of staring at that beautiful, living and breathing, little round creature with the wavy black hair. I never thought it would happen, but I had inexplicably found for myself a port — who knew for how long? — and put down an anchor in my life. If I ever needed a reason to stop my voyage, then this little creature by the name of Lintang Utara was the one. I couldn’t stop watching her. I loved looking after her, caring for her, even changing her diapers. I sang to her the Indonesian lullabies my mother had sung to me — though more often than not I fell asleep before she did, and when I pulled myself awake would find her crawling around our small apartment.

Vivienne raised no objection to my giving our daughter such a non-French-sounding name. She agreed to my choice instantly, just as Surti had when I proposed the names Kenanga, Bulan, and Alam for the children we once dreamed of having together.

During the first few years of our marriage, I changed jobs several times. Vivienne, meanwhile, had much more steady employment: teaching in the Faculty of English Literature at the Sorbonne. Finally, however, after several years of seeing the look on Vivienne’s face become one of increased annoyance as a result of the unsteady and uncertain nature of my financial contribution to our home — I was spending much of my time writing a newsletter, Political Prisoner , which I distributed to the Indonesian exile community in Europe — I finally committed myself to more permanent work and took a clerical job at the Ministry of Agriculture.

Even though I earned a decent enough salary, I was not at all happy with my desk job at the ministry. Instead of my work, my mind was either on the essays and poems that I intended to publish in the next issue of Political Prisoner or on interesting items of news that I received from friends who worked for the news media in Jakarta. One such piece of news was about the hullabaloo in 1972 when a foundation that had been established by President Soeharto’s wife, Madam Tien, commenced work on an immense theme park called “Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature” or, more commonly in Indonesian, “Taman Mini.” Not surprisingly, given the economic disparities in Indonesia at the time, some of the country’s leading intellectuals objected to the project, including the well-known sociologist Arief Budiman, who damned it as a massive boondoggle; but what was surprising is that they actually voiced their objections in print and incited students to take to the streets. Another interesting but disturbing development in the political sphere was that Indonesia’s political parties were coming to be dominated by businessmen and that Parliament was being transformed into an assemblage of clowns, convened only to rubberstamp anything and all that the executive branch of government proposed.

I wrote about these and other things in my newsletter as a means of keeping the exile community up to date on conditions in Indonesia. I offered the newsletter to fellow exiles, free of charge, but as it was fairly popular it sometimes did attract financial contributions from other exiles. Whenever enough money came in, I’d publish another edition, and with the help of Risjaf’s design skills was able to produce something that was almost professional-looking, like a newspaper.

Gradually, after few years I grew so bored with my work at the Ministry of Agriculture, I knew I had to stop. I wanted to write a book. I wanted to publish a paper. I wanted a change.

So it was, one autumn night, I came home to our apartment bearing a bottle of wine and several cuts of choice beef. It was nine o’clock when I arrived home, and Lintang was already asleep.

“What’s the celebration?” Vivienne asked, taking the bottle from me and pinching the meat. “This is expensive, Dimas. What’s up?”

Vivienne’s green eyes bore into me.

“Sit down,” I told her.

She sat down beside me, a look of suspicion on her face. I took her hand and kissed her fingertips. It always excited her when I sucked on her fingers. I wanted her to understand the decision I had come to.

“You know I love you and Lintang,” I began.

She nodded and frowned, a nervous look. “This isn’t about another woman, is it?” she asked.

“What! Are you crazy?”

Vivienne laughed with relief. “You always forget how good-looking you are, Dimas. The grayer your hair, the more attractive you are for younger women. But never mind… What is it?”

I paused, wondering which younger women found me attractive. How unfortunate I did not even notice. “It’s torture for me, Vivienne. I am so unhappy with…”

“You want to quit your job at the ministry, is that it?”

“ Oui .”

She stared at me, a tree offering its shade. As long as the subject at hand was not another woman, Vivienne seemed to me to be the most understanding wife in the universe. Unlike some other French women I knew, who allowed their husbands to flit from the bed of one mistress to another, for Vivienne there were very clear rules in our marriage. She would tolerate everything except one: another woman. And I agreed.

“I knew.”

I embraced her and held her tightly to me.

Once again, I asked myself, what did I have to complain about if I had around me a family that loved me? Why did I feel like a piece of me was still left behind in Indonesia?