Leila Chudori - Home

“Didn’t I once suggest that you make a documentary film about Indonesia — which you angrily dismissed?”

“ Oui , I remember. But, Nara, this is about a country I have never even been to. The only way I know it is through the books my parents own, the literature I’ve read, and a few National Geographic documentary films. It’s a country I know from the stories my father and his three friends have told me, whose firsthand knowledge of the country ended in 1965.”

“That’s more than enough for your final assignment. This is for your B.A., after all, not your master’s or PhD. Your father and his friends are witnesses to history, Lintang.”

I said nothing.

“You have the discipline. I know you can finish the work on time,” said Nara with conviction in his voice.

What Nara should have understood is that this was not an academic problem. He’d already known me three years and was sensitive enough to know that this problem was far more complex for me than simply a matter of writing a scenario, filming interviews, and editing my film record.

Nara held my chin, then stroked it with his hand.

“It might be time for you to see your father.”

“I went by the restaurant this morning, but couldn’t make myself step inside.”

I stood. Goodbye, Jim. I want to say hello to my friend Oscar.

Monsieur Oscar Wilde, please tell me if it’s important for a person to look for her roots when she is already a tree, standing tall? You are an Irish poet, a tree who openly flaunted your sexual orientation in an age when such things were secret and not spoken of in polite society; the novelist who created Dorian Gray, a man of androgynous beauty immortalized in a painting that aroused its viewers. Tell me whether a tree, which stands upright and whose branches reach firmly for the sky, should bow in search of its roots for a name? For an identity?

Neither Oscar nor his bones offered a reply. The grandiosity of Wilde’s tomb, with its sumptuously curved stonework, seemed to accurately reflect the nature of the man as described in his biographies: flamboyant and flirtatious. His lovely tombstone did not condescend to answer my question. But what I could see when I looked at it were images of my father at a much younger age walking among the tombstones of famous people, while holding the small hand of a girl seven years of age. I watched as he explained to the girl how even a warrior as great as Bhisma could fall in the battle of all battles; and how Bhisma could not die, even with his body pierced by hundreds of arrows from the bows of Srikandi and Arjuna, because he alone had been granted the boon to choose the time of his death.

“Bhisma chose to die the day after the war had ended,” Ayah said to her, “and when he did die, his death was witnessed by the Pandawa brothers, their Kurawa cousins, and the gods.”

I saw the seven-year-old girl pestering her father with innumerable questions. What a nagger she was! Tales from the wayang world, the land of the shadow theater, were as fascinating as they were baffling for her. How incredible that a person whose body was shot full of arrows could still choose his time of death.

Ayah then spoke to the young girl about the wayang characters who were closest to his own heart: Bima and Ekalaya.

It took a few moments for me to realize that the seven-year-old girl who was there, playing with her father, in Père Lachaise Cemetery, was I. How very odd it was, I thought, that when I was such a young age, my father had introduced to me the concept of death through stories from the Mahabharata: about Bhisma, who chose his time of death; about Bima, who was forced to agree to Krisna’s plan to sacrifice Gatotkaca as bait to Karna in the duel against Arjuna; and about Ekalaya, the best bowman in the universe, who had even once defeated Arjuna.

But in those stories, Ayah also inserted his own hopes, whose tone was that of a person’s final wishes: “Like Bhisma, I too would like to choose the place where I take my final rest,” he said half to himself.

At first I thought Ayah wanted to be buried here, in Père Lachaise, among the writers, musicians, and philosophers he admired. I didn’t know at the time that that would have been impossible. And it wasn’t until later, when I was some years older, that I realized my father wanted to be buried in Indonesia. When Ayah introduced me to the poetry of Chairil Anwar, only then did I come to realize that, like the poet, he wanted to be buried in a Jakarta cemetery called Karet, a name that sounded so exotic to my ear.

Nara slowly approached and put his hand on my arm, a soothing feeling.

“This is an anxious spring,” he said, looking at Oscar Wilde’s tomb.

I could never be angry with Nara for long. Next to Maman, he most understood my heart. He knew there was inside me a space I didn’t know, an odd and alien space called Indonesia. Although we were the same generation and both born in Paris to French and Indonesian parents, the difference between us was that Nara and his parents could go in and out of Indonesia freely, while Ayah and his three friends would always be repulsed by a force called the “September 30 Movement”—to which the Indonesian government had later come to affix the phrase “of the Indonesian Communist Party.”

I tried to explain the meaning of this force for Nara. “The problem is, if I were to make such a documentary film, the subject could only be the testimony of Indonesian political exiles. I wouldn’t be able to go to Indonesia to interview government officials. I wouldn’t even be able to set foot in the Indonesian embassy to record their official stance on political exiles like my father, Om Nug, Om Tjai, and Om Risjaf. And…

“Why can’t you go to the embassy?” Nara interrupted. “If you really want to, I can introduce you to people there.”

“No…”

“Why not? The embassy is always hosting one event or another. Almost anyone can attend and they’re always a good excuse for getting a good Indonesian meal. In fact, I have an invitation from the embassy to celebrate Kartini Day. What a brilliant idea!” Nara announced. “You really do have to see another side of Indonesian society — on the opposite side of the spectrum from the one at Tanah Air Restaurant.”

I scratched my chin.

“Come on, what do you say?”

“But they might…”

“As you yourself implied, if you really want to be an observer or, in your case, a student with a research assignment, then you have to get to know the other side of things, the people who stand opposite your father and his friends. There’s no need to be afraid. They’re not going to chuck you out the door.”

“But they might say something bad about my father in front of me.”

“It’s a celebration. Nobody’s going to do anything to ruin the party. You can be my date. We can go there to study the enemy’s movements.”

“They’re my enemies, not yours. Your family is on good terms with all of them.”

“Whatever… But let’s go. If you find yourself growing uncomfortable, we’ll just leave and go home.”

“ T’es fou! You’re crazy,” I said.

“And you can wear a kebaya ! It’s Kartini Day, after all. All the women will be dressed up in beautiful kebaya and there will be lots of good food.”

Hmmm, a kebaya … My heart began to waver. To waver because of kebaya … I had fallen in love with kebaya not because of Kartini Day — an annual celebration where Nara said women were expected to dress like Kartini, Indonesia’s proto-feminist whose every image shows her dressed in a sarong and kebaya with her hair in a low chignon — but because of its sensuous shape which serves to accentuate a woman’s beauty. The kebaya obeyed, did not oppose, the shape of a woman’s body. And always complementing the kebaya was a selendang , a simple but elegant long scarf which became an extension of a woman hands, slicing the air when she danced.