Leila Chudori - Home

Vivienne got up and opened the windows of her apartment as wide as possible. She was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, and the delicate film of perspiration on her elegant neck excited me. She took two bottles of cold Alsace beer from her small refrigerator and handed one to me. She drank her beer straight from the bottle, gulping the amber liquid as if it were an elixir. I watched the bluish vein on her neck pulsate as she swallowed the beer flowing down her throat. A thin stream of liquid seeped from the side of her mouth and trickled down her chin and neck. The beer mixed with her sweat made me want to lap the salty mix from her neck with my tongue.

Vivienne stopped drinking and smiled at me, a challenge in her piercing eyes. She knew what I was thinking. “Tell me about Indonesia …”

Not knowing how to begin to tell her about my home country, I paused. Where should I start? With my family? With the country in tumult? Or back to early 1960s when President Sukarno’s shifting political alliances led the country — and me as well — to the point we are today? My mind flashed back to Jakarta. What had Sukarno been up to? Did he actually side with his friends on the left? What had he wanted or hoped to achieve with his policy of “Nasakom,” his odd promulgation of nationalism, religion, and communism? And as the chronology of the night of September 30 emerged, why had he fled the presidential palace and gone to Halim Perdanakusuma Naval Air Base? This was a question that had nagged my friends in Jakarta and continued to nag me.

How could I ever explain or even begin to unravel this messy bundle of thread for Vivienne? Maybe it would be best to begin somewhere else — with wayang tales, for instance, stories from the Javanese shadow theater that were my secret obsession. Better that, perhaps, than opening the doors to my country’s warehouse of history to cast light on its cluttered contents.

Vivienne took another gulp of beer from her bottle but didn’t swallow. Instead, she lowered her body to straddle my lap and then kissed me, the cool beer emptying from her mouth into mine. The sensation quickened the flow of my blood, making it dance wildly through my veins, and inflamed my joints. Any attempt to prevent Vivienne from feeling my body’s reaction to the blood coursing through my veins to my extremities would have been futile. How could it not be? Her midsection was pressed into my crotch.

As I became more excited, my blood raced more swiftly through me. Unable to restrain myself, I began to lick her neck and chest, which were slick with sweat and beer. With her torso positioned directly in front of my eyes, her breasts seemed ready to burst from the seams of her clinging T-shirt. And in my darting eyes, her long legs seemed to be begging for me to remove the skimpy blue jeans encasing them.

Vivienne rarely wore a bra during the summer. At times, I protested, not because I was prudish but because of the very evident physical reaction that occurred in me at the sight of her nipples beneath her T-shirt. At times it was almost painful. How could she torture me like that? Wasn’t I supposed to be concentrating on my future life in Paris? I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t think of anything except what was under that damned T-shirt of hers.

Once I begged her to wear a bra to prevent me from becoming so flustered. And her answer…?

“Do you know how uncomfortable it is to wear a bra on a day as hot as this? Here!” She took a brightly colored red bra and shoved it in front of my nose. “You try wearing it.”

My mouth turned dry. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know if Vivienne realized how excited it made me to see her nipples protruding from under her T-shirt. How can women be so cruel? But, in the end, I decided to give thanks to nature for its wisdom in making the summer in Paris so hot that Vivienne refused to wear a bra — because it made what happened next all that much easier. Not having to couch our feelings in lines of poetry from one of the books we were reading, Vivienne and I both raced to remove our clothing. Then we attacked each other, wrestling with each other on the floor. Paris was hot, but we were burning. After just a few minutes we lay exhausted and naked on the floor, staring at the ceiling of the apartment. The August evening was so stuffy and humid our bodies were drenched with sweat. But in our desire for one another, we thought nothing of the discomfort and made passionate love, again and again. What time it was I didn’t know, but I suddenly felt the urge to smoke. “Have you ever smoked kretek ?” I asked Vivienne, whose head was nestled on my chest. “No, but I’ve heard about them from Mathilde, who bought some in Amsterdam. She says they’re amazing.” I scrounged in the pocket of my shirt on the floor. “Ah, I still have some.” There were still a few sticks left in a badly crumpled packet. I lit one and then took turns smoking the cigarette with Vivienne. Vivienne smacked her lips. “They have a sweet taste. What is it?” “Cloves,” I said, “desiccated cloves,” while trying to suppress the feeling of longing aroused by the scent of that spice and everything else that smelled of Indonesia. “It would be perfect if we had a cup of luwak coffee.” There, I had said it, that dangerous word. Poor and stranded as I was in the middle of Europe, giving voice to a longing for something as exotic as luwak coffee was the same as sticking a knife in my heart. If I wanted to go on living, I had to — at least for now — bury and conceal Indonesia and anything connected with it. I felt my mind return to the Jakarta where I lived four years previously.

JAKARTA, DECEMBER 1964

A kretek was like a symbol for us. After a long discussion and sometimes heated debate about politics and the nation’s state of affairs at the office, we would often end the discussion with a cup of thick black coffee and a kretek cigarette at Senen Market. At that time, in late 1964, Jakarta was a city that was neither calm nor comfortable.

The office of Nusantara News on Jalan Asem Lama seemed to have running through it some kind of demarcation line separating members of political camps. On one side were members of the Communist Party; people who sympathized with Party goals; members of LEKRA, a cultural organization with close links to the Party; and even people who simply liked to spend time with the artists who belonged to this organization, the League of People’s Culture. On the other side and at the opposite end of the political spectrum were staff members who shunned anything that might be labeled leftist. Among them was my friend, Bang Amir, who was pro-Masyumi, the Islamic political party founded by Natsir, whose pan-Islamic philosophy was antithetical to leftist thought. As for me, I was a bit on the fence. I supported Marxist ideals and enjoyed reading all the books that Mas Hananto gave me on the subject; I enthusiastically listened to political discussions between Mas Hananto and other colleagues in the editorial room, and it wasn’t rare to find me tagging along with them as they continued their debate over coffee at Kadir’s stall in Senen Market. Even so, I also liked, and found much comfort in, talking to Bang Amir about things of a more religious or spiritual nature.

But that sense of wonder stopped at my body, not my soul.

Both Mas Hananto and Mas Nugroho strongly believed in the virtues of socialism, but I saw numerous weak points in their theories and, even in the face of Mas Hananto’s derision, I continued to stand by my view that while there are some things that the government should ultimately be responsible for — public health and services, to name two — there are other things that are far better left entrusted to the private sector.