Leila Chudori - Home

“Lintang!” Maman called. She didn’t like me sticking my nose into adult conversations.

I pretended to be deaf and watched the mini drama unfold as Ayah, Om Nug, and Om Tjai faced the unblinking policemen. I didn’t want to miss a single thing. One of the policemen — I could see he had blue eyes — removed an identification card from his pocket.

I am Michel Durant,” he said, showing the card to Ayah, who gave it a cursory glance, “and this is my partner, Luc Blanchard.” He didn’t introduce the other two men.

“May I help you?”

“We received a report from the Indonesian embassy that a subversive meeting is being held here; that you’re planning a political demonstration.”

Ayah’s features hardened, a look that was somewhere between ghoulish humor and outright contempt. Om Nug, meanwhile, broke out in laughter. Maman’s cheeks turned bright pink, a sign that she was angry. She immediately went up to the policemen and started chattering at them in French.

“Meeting? A subversive meeting? This is too much. Can’t you see that we’re busy preparing food for our customers?”

Maman’s anger was evident from both the look on her face and the tone of her voice. The two officers, Michel Durant and Luc Blanchard, immediately stepped back as if being attacked by a rabid dog. The other two officers behind them backed away towards the door.

“The only thing we’re doing here is cooking in the kitchen and serving meals to our customers. There’s nothing political going on here,” said Ayah in a much calmer voice than Maman’s.

“Take a seat if you wish and you can see what we are doing,” Maman said, putting her hands on her hips and turning away. When Maman got this way, I’d bet that even Mitterrand wouldn’t want to take her on. Maman’s bark caused Blue Eyes to fall back a few steps.

I always cringed whenever Maman stared so hard that her eyeballs bulged from their sockets. Even Ayah would retreat when her green eyes ballooned like that. Usually, he’d back down immediately or scamper off to another room. The four policemen — if they really were policemen — looked nervous.

One of them, the thinnest and the youngest, plucked the courage to speak, “I’m sorry, Madame, but we’re only carrying out orders.”

Blue Eyes quickly added, “If all you’re doing here is cooking and serving meals, then that is what we’ll report.”

At that moment Om Risjaf came out of the kitchen with a platter of nasi kuning and fried shrimp with chilies, the sambal goreng udang whose magic scent immediately suffused the air of the dining room. I watched as the policemen’s nostrils flared and twitched.

“You’ll pardon us,” Luc Blanchard said as he held his hand out to Maman, though his eyes were fixed on the platter of nasi kuning in Om Risjaf’s hand. Calmer now, Maman extended her own hand to the man.

“Oh, that smells good,” said Blue Eyes pointing to the platter that Om Risjaf was carrying. “One day, I’ll come back to try it.”

“That’s our homemade nasi kuning and sambal goreng udang— which are shrimp cooked in a chili sauce,” Ayah said with a smile. “Please do come back.”

“ Nasi kuning… ” The man suddenly seemed to have forgotten the reason for his visit as his eyes followed the platter to the table of the customer who’d ordered it. “With shrimp? Ça sent bon! ” He swallowed. When his assistant coughed, he hurriedly took his leave, but added that he was definitely coming back to try the nasi kuning.

And Mr. Michel Durant was not joking. After that time, every month after receiving his pay check, he and his subordinates treated themselves to a meal at Tanah Air.

Although that incident took place when I was ten years old, I still remember it clearly — even the smells. I also remember feeling that there was something wrong with my family, or, to be more precise, that there was something that always made us feel like we were living in a state of uncertainty.

It was around that time I began to feel that there was another kind of life that was different from the one I had known as “normal” since childhood. My family was different from most French families. And I was different too. Not just because I was mixed-race, the product of an Indonesian and French marriage — in my class at school there were a number of mixed-race kids: French-Moroccan, French-Chinese, Anglo-French and so on — but because my classmates could talk about their parents’ other home, whether it be Rabat, Beijing, or London. But not I.

My father came from Indonesia, a distant land I didn’t know and could never get to know (for at least as long as the same government remained in power). Starting then, it slowly began to dawn on me that I would never be able to visit Indonesia, at least not with my father.

For the longest time I had realized, whether consciously or not, that the difference between my family and others did not end with my parents’ mixed-race marriage. My father’s background, full of political drama as it was, exceeded the absurdity of political events in Russian novels. In 1965 a blood-filled tragedy had taken place in Indonesia, yet Ayah spoke of the events that had occurred only in snippets and ever so sporadically. The older I became, the more stories I learned about that distant homeland of mine, invariably shown in documentary films as blue seas and waving palm trees.

Never, not even once, was I able to pry from my father the complete, comprehensive, and detailed story. I never really knew, for instance, how Ayah and his friends had been able to leave Indonesia to attend a conference in Santiago (followed by conferences in Havana and Peking) with only a metaphorical knapsack on their backs nor why they had never been able to return to their homeland. Wasn’t that completely absurd? And why was it that Ayah left Indonesia to begin with? Nobody ever told me why.

At some point, I remember Maman telling me that in Indonesia anyone thought to be a member of the Communist Party, or a member of the family of a communist, had been hunted down, jailed, or made to disappear, just like that. Hearing these stories from Maman and Ayah, I didn’t know which regime was more frightening: Indonesia, with its civilian-dressed dictator, or Latin America, with its generals.

So who was my father and who were his friends, my “uncles” Nugroho, Tjai, and Risjaf? Why couldn’t they go home? Why were they on a wanted list? The story I got from Ayah and his three friends was piecemeal at best and often not even consistent. According to Professor Dupont, Ayah and his friends were a part of Indonesia’s unwritten history. Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire?

What did he mean? And did I really have to make a record of this absurdity as my final assignment?

April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / memory and desire.

“LIKE AN ANGEL, DESCENDED FROM HEAVEN…” That is what Gabriel Lafebvre said of his wife, Jayanti Ratmi. I was struck by the phrase. At the age of fifty-six, Gabriel was still a striking-looking man whose eyes were a seine for the sky. I’ve always believed that a man with stars in his eyes is likely to be a friendly man. And the amity I found in him, I came to see had been inherited by son, Narayana Lafebvre.

Narayana, whom everyone calls Nara, was given his name by his mother, Jayanti Ratmi, a Javanese dancer who loved the stories of the Mahabharata. She also gave him his adorable cleft chin.

That I spent most of my weekends with the Lafebvre family wasn’t because of the similarity between Nara’s family mine — his also being a mixed French-Indonesian family domiciled in Paris. That was pure coincidence. There was something else, something more significant, more magnetic about his family — something that I found calming when I was with them. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was their comfortable apartment, with a batik tablecloth here and a wayang puppet there — enough touches to show the Indonesian influence, but not like a craft store or a tourism bureau. It might also have been because of their dinners, whose light conversation invited intimacy, something I had rarely ever or possibly never felt again after my father left us.