Leila Chudori - Home

For a few moments I said nothing; but then I was shocked when I realized that for a bowman a steady thumb is indispensible. And Ekalaya, obedient student that he was, willingly fulfilled Dorna’s request and immediately cut off his thumb. Even though, thereafter, he could still use his bow with four fingers, he was never again the expert bowman that he had been. And Arjuna returned to the perch from which he had been removed, as the best bowman in the entire universe.

We liked to frequent a used book kiosk owned by Antoine Martin, a retired policeman, who was one of my parents’ favorite book suppliers. Whenever we went there, we would scrounge around until we found one or two books of interest. They were extremely cheap, almost free. If we had a little extra money to spend, we might stop at Shakespeare & Co., which was one of my favorite haunts and that of many famous writers and artists as well. Every time we wandered into the store, my father — just like a tourist guide — would point out the chair in which Ernest Hemingway had always sat, where he would leaf through books, one after another, and then borrow some to take home from Sylvia Beach, the store’s founder and owner.

“That’s because Hemingway was poor, too. Just like me!” Ayah would say with a touch of pride. Then he’d show me that corner of the store where James Joyce and Ezra Pound often held discussions. When I was older, in my early teens, I came to realize that Ayah knew about these things from the photographs of writers that were scattered throughout the store in open spaces on the walls. By the time I was in high school, I had memorized which famous writers had left their mark in that small and cluttered but historic bookstore. Maybe because of all the history associated with the store, whenever Ayah had friends come to Paris — usually Indonesian exiles from Amsterdam, The Hague, Leiden, Berlin, and Bonn — he would invite them to visit the store. They were happy to do so, because Shakespeare & Co. was one of the few bookstores in Paris that sold English-language books, and also because there they could sit around in the store discussing how the city’s intellectuals, journalists, and creative writers in the 1920s debated among themselves about the “Great War” that had just passed.

Maybe that was also why I grew up with a great feeling of respect for history.

So, when I was younger, the days I spent with my parents watching films and looking for books at Shakespeare & Co. were among the most pleasurable ones for me. Though I always wanted to fill an entire shopping bag with books when we went out exploring, my parents usually let me buy only one new book from Shakespeare & Co. and two used books from Antoine Martin’s kiosk. In time, however, I found that even these conservative purchases could be a source of trouble.

I remember one bright Saturday morning very clearly when I heard Maman whisper to Ayah that we needn’t go to any bookstore that day. And then Ayah whispering back that it was possible for us to visit a bookstore without buying anything at all. What’s going on, I wondered. Didn’t they have any money?

I passed that Saturday morning with feigned cheer. I put on a happy face but was anxious, nonetheless. Around midday, after Ayah had prepared fried noodles for us to take along to eat on the day’s exploration tour — Ayah’s fried noodles was another one of my favorite foods and more appealing to me than any normal French food — we headed off to Shakespeare & Co.

At the store, when Ayah was delving into books of poetry, I discovered a copy of Le Petit Prince , the book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry I had long wanted to own. The book’s colored illustrations — an elephant inside a snake, baobab trees, the Little Prince on a distant planet — were wonderful. And now having the book in my hand, I didn’t want to let it go.

My cousin Marie-Claire, who was in my class, already owned the book and had told me all about it. But because the book was new and in hard cover with color illustrations — which meant that it was expensive and likely beyond my parents’ means — Maman told me to put the book back in its place on the shelf. I refused.

“Please, Maman. I’ve wanted it now for so long. I want to fly like Le Petit Prince ,” I said, trying to keep from crying.

The next words she spoke were said in a loud and staccato voice: “Lin-tang. Remet-le. Right now!”

Trying to hold back my tears as best I could, I returned the book to its place on the shelf. But just as I was doing that, I caught sight of another book, The Mahabharata, a condensed version of the story by R.K. Narayan. O, mon Dieu ! Excited by the find, I hesitated, not knowing what to do. With a trembling hand, and stealing a glance at my mother, who was standing near the front door with an annoyed look on her face, I removed the book from the shelf. As I quickly leafed through the book, the names “Shrikand” and “Ekalavya” jumped out at me. Taking the book, I then went to find Ayah in the poetry section. On the edge of tears, I whispered to him how much I wanted to own the book. Afraid that my tears might damage the book’s cover, I hastily wiped my cheeks with the sleeve of my blouse. No more than five seconds passed before Ayah had taken the book from me and paid for it at the cash register. Maman said nothing; she only blinked, but I could guess what would happen later.

Throughout the walk home, the two of them trained their eyes in opposite directions. I knew that no amount of fried rice the next morning, no matter how good it tasted, would be able to make them smile or to laugh at the silliness of their behavior.

There was something much deeper going on than just the issue of Ayah’s purchase of The Mahabharata , which I read from cover to cover that very same night. Starting then, I realized that Ayah and Maman were faced with a much larger problem, one that I would never know because, as Maman often said to me about friends of theirs: “It’s useless to even try to pretend to know or understand what goes on between a husband and wife. Only they know what problems are affecting them.”

When I read Ekalaya’s story, at the moment he cut off his thumb to obey Dorna’s wishes, I started to cry and couldn’t stop. At my age of just ten years, I didn’t know that I was crying because I sensed somehow that I was facing a loss as great as that of Ekalaya; or possibly that I suddenly had a premonition that my days of watching films with Ayah and Maman in the open air were coming to an end. A winter’s wind was coming which, blowing between them, was turning everything cold as ice.

Only a few months after my parents separated, I began to sense that there was “something” between my father and Indonesia that could never be replaced by anything or anyone. It was around then that I also came to know that he had for years, on a routine annual basis, submitted an application to the Indonesian embassy for a visa to enter Indonesia. A tourist visa, of course. By this time, as a permanent political exile, Ayah — like his three friends — had obtained a French passport. But unlike Om Risjaf, who in some magic way managed to obtain a visa to enter Indonesia, my father’s requests, and those of Om Nug and Om Tjai as well, were always rejected.

The officials at the Indonesian embassy never gave a reason for their rejection. Nor did they explain why Om Risjaf was being treated differently even though he, too, had been among those whose passports had been revoked when they were in Havana.

Every time he learned that his visa applications had been rejected, Ayah would take Ekalaya from his place on the wall and play with the puppet. He’d go off by himself, to sit alone in his room and read old letters, from whom I didn’t know — a personal territory I did not want to know. When that happened, if it happened when I was spending the night at Ayah’s, I would try, as best as I could, to open for him a space in myself in which to store his sadness.