Leila Chudori - Home

Lintang leaned her head against the arm of the sofa and lifted her legs to the cushion. Sometimes she didn’t know where she was supposed to put her long legs and arms. By Indonesian standards, she was fairly tall, almost 170 centimeters. Her physique had clearly come from the Deveraux family. Anyone looking at her would immediately see her to be the spitting image of her mother — except for her black hair, that is, which came from her father, and the dark brown color of her eyes, which came from him as well. Otherwise, almost everyone said of Vivienne and Lintang that they looked like two very beautiful sisters, even when neither was wearing makeup. Lintang once told Nara that what made her different from her mother was that her mother was raised in a happy, normal, well-balanced family. Her mother had had a harmonious family life. Nara pointed out that another similarity between them was their amazing aptitude for languages. Aside from French, Vivienne was fluent in English and Indonesian. And Lintang, even at an early age, was able to speak unaccented English and Indonesian with fluency and ease — a rare gift in France.

Nara pushed the play button, and the images Lintang had recorded in the past began to flash by again. He was now able to see that the images were a kind of record, not just of the times and places in Lintang’s life, but of her progression in the mastery of film. He noted that over time the recorded images gained greater focus and cohesion: Canal St. Martin, Notre Dame, Musée Picasso, up to the Cimetière du Père Lachaise.

“And that’s why finding you is so easy when you’re down,” Nara said with a fond smile. “You always end up at Père Lachaise Cemetery!”

“ Irréparable ,” Lintang muttered.

Nara pressed the pause button and looked into Lintang’s eyes. “What can’t be fixed?”

On the screen was the image of Oscar Wilde’s tomb: elegant and flamboyant, but nonetheless an attempt to eternalize something that was already gone.

“After months of me having to listen to Maman and Ayah’s endless fights, Ayah finally left.”

Though Lintang’s eyes were fixed on the screen, her thoughts were in the past.

“What did you mean by your father’s past personal life?” Nara asked cautiously.

“There’s something I still haven’t told you,” said Lintang to him.

Nara stared at Lintang with no force in his eyes.

Lintang then told him about a time in the past when she had inadvertently discovered a letter her father had written but which he had never sent. She had read the letter, which was addressed to a woman by the name of Surti Anandari. Years on, she could still vividly recall the letter’s intimate tone and how bewildered this had made her feel. She had given a stack of her father’s letters to her mother and that was the start of an unending argument between her parents.

“That night, Ayah came into my room and gave me a big long hug. After that, he left taking with him just a small bag with just a knapsack on his back. For the longest time after that, I blamed myself for their divorce. If I hadn’t found that letter, Ayah and Maman would still be together.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Lintang,” Nara said, stroking hers cheek. “I’m sure they already had issues you knew nothing about. The letter was just a trigger.”

Lintang remembered looking out the window to see her father’s back as he walked away from the apartment building. Every evening thereafter, she still set three plates on the table at dinner time. She missed her father’s fried rice with its scent of cooking oil laced with onions. But she always ended the night by returning his unused plate back to the cupboard.

Finally, after a few months, unable to bear her daughter setting three plates on the table for dinner, her mother could do nothing else but tell her daughter the truth.

“Your father’s and my relationship is irréparable ,” she said. “Forgive me, Lintang.”

Lintang continued to hold her father’s blue plate. Staring wordlessly at her mother, she pressed the blue plate tightly against her chest. But once she was sure that her mother was not going to add anything more to her pronouncement, she put her father’s plate on the table, as if nothing had happened.

She wiped away a tear drop that had fallen onto her father’s plate. Vivienne said nothing.

Lintang looked at Nara. Only now, after all these years, did she finally realize what it was that was missing in her life: it was her father’s past life, the part of his life she had never known.

The telephone rang and then rang again. Lintang was reluctant to pick up the receiver but finally did. Her mother.

“ Oui , Maman …”

Nara noted the look of seriousness that suddenly appeared on Lintang’s face. She talked to her mother for quite some time. Finally, after she had replaced the receiver, he asked, “What happened?”

“Ayah collapsed at the Metro station a few days ago. He was taken to the hospital and put through a series of tests.”

“And what were the results?”

Lintang shook her head. “Ayah has yet to pick them up. That’s why the hospital called Maman.”

Lintang knew the time had come for her to put differences aside and go to see her father

THERE WAS SOMETHING ABOUT MY FATHER and his relationship with Indonesia I had always wanted to know. It wasn’t about the country’s blood-filled history or the problems affecting the lives of Indonesian political exiles as they roamed the world in search of a country willing to receive them. There was something that made my father extra sensitive to rejection, which I became aware of, little by little, because of his obsession with the story of Ekalaya he often told to me.

Up until when I was ten years old, my parents and I had a ritual we always went through as summer approached. The sun in late May is a friendly creature, not the angry monster it can become in June or the months that follow. And every year, at that time, we would fall in love once more with the Parisian sky, which seemed close enough for us to touch.

Ayah and Maman would take me to Domaine National de Saint-Cloud, the large park on the outskirts of Paris. For our personal comfort, as we waited to watch the films shown there —un cinéma en plein air— we’d bring with us knapsacks filled with blankets and books and a hamper of food and canned refreshments. As Ayah and Maman had begun this tradition when I was just a baby, these outings became something I looked forward to each year. It wasn’t until years later I came to realize that this custom hadn’t evolved simply from the pleasure we found in watching film retrospectives in the open air, but also because this form of entertainment cost my parents almost nothing.

On the blanket that Maman spread out on the park lawn, we’d lie on our backs, staring at the sky above. Another hour to go before the film began. Would the film tonight be one by Federico Fellini or Akira Kurosawa? Or maybe Woody Allen? Even when I was in primary school, my parents had me watching the classics of cinema — which until today remain clearly in my head. But the most pleasurable time of those evenings was when we, the three of us, would let our imaginations fly. I can see our hands raised upward, our grasping fingers trying to clutch the sky as we imagined a throne room and other such things up there. And I can hear Ayah relating stories that he plucked from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana , the two sources of almost all stories in the shadow puppet theater. Looking back, I guess that had been his way of trying to familiarize me with all things Indonesian — though he did explain that most of the stories had originally come to Indonesia from India. Through his repeated tellings, a number of wayang characters came to hold a special place in my heart. Two of them were Srikandi from the Mahabharata and Candra Kirana from the story of Panji Semirang. My choice of favorite characters seemed to surprise my father.