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A rapid series of snapshots flashed before my eyes from our childhood in Solo with our parents. My father was a teacher of
English at the city's State Senior High School, a school with a reputation for its rigorous curriculum and the belief that Indonesian children had to learn to appreciate both Indonesian and Western literature. It was my father who instilled in me the importance of books as one of life's staples—just as important as food, drink, and sleep, he said (though he neglected to point out that sex was another necessary and natural part of life as well). When he told me this, my mother gave him a slight nudge. Though she was not particularly religious herself (unlike her brother, my uncle Kiasno), she did feel that some attention must be given to God and religion, that these things, too, were among life's needs.

It was Om Kiasno who first taught me and then, later, Aji, who was ten years younger than me, to recite the Quran. My father voiced no objection to this, just as he never protested when our uncle assertively reminded us to pray. Father was more concerned with matters of daily life and was apt to make much more of a fuss when Mother forgot to put her batik implements away after using them, because Aji would end up making them his playthings and leave them scattered around the house.

My mother, who was usually called Bu Giri—“Giri” being short for my father's full name, “Giri Suryo”—but who was also known by her own name, Pratiwi, had a creative hand and would, for nights on end, give herself completely to the transformation of a solid white length of cloth into a most remarkable thing of beauty.

After a day spent preparing meals—cooking was something Mother also enjoyed, a fondness for which she passed down to me—and tending to the needs of two overly active sons and a husband weary from teaching Solonese teenagers who he thought were growing up too fast, Mother would sit cross-legged
on the floor for an hour or two with her
canting
, the small copper vessel with a spouted nib she had to frequently refill with melted beeswax, to create her batik designs. Ever since I was young, I likened Mother's work with wax to a poet's work with words—both of which processes produced something of beauty.

Perhaps my discovery of the joy of poetry began not with the fantastic verses of Chairil Anwar, but as the combined result of pressure from my father to speak Indonesian well and to mind my words, just as a body must mind its soul, and of my mother's love for the
canting
and melted beeswax.

After I had graduated from senior high school, my father sent me to Jakarta to live with his older brother, Om Muryanto, in order that I might obtain a better and more focused education than was possible in Solo at that time.

After adjusting to my new life as a student in Jakarta and learning my way around the city, I moved from my uncle's home into a boarding house with Risjaf, a fellow classmate. Thereafter, my visits home to Solo became rare, except for the Idul Fitri holidays, at the end of the fasting month. Patient man that he was, my father voiced no complaint about his wayward son's avoidance of home. He continued, to the best of his limited financial ability, to send me books of literature so that I would maintain and improve my Indonesian. Meanwhile, Mother would send me reminders from my uncle Kiasno to pray regularly so as “to fill myself with thanks for God's grace.” Along with her missives of advice, Mother would also often send a newly made length of batik cloth—often one with a bird motif typical of Java's north coast. Mother knew I liked Cirebon-style batik.

After my father died in my sophomore year, Mother's letters to me would echo his reminder (to read and speak Indonesian
well) and Om Kiasno's advice (to pray), before including her own personal counsel for me to eat nutritiously the food that I myself had prepared.

Throughout my sojourn, from Peking to Paris, the advice from my elders that I did follow was to read—how could I not? It was part of my oxygen—to cook my own food, and to eat well. Somehow, it slipped my mind to pray regularly.

I wondered whether when Mother died she was thinking about her wastrel son living so far away.

I couldn't speak for several weeks. I felt as if stones were lodged in my throat. Risjaf, Mas Nug, and Tjai tried various ways to console me, from the most profane of ways—with my favorite kinds of Chinese food that Theresa would cook for me, for instance—to the most spiritual, by arranging special prayer sessions on Mother's behalf. Nothing worked. Nothing could comfort me. No one could succeed in making me talk. Even a lovely stretch of batik, brown colored in background with green-colored birds, did not make me feel better or bring me calm. The fact was my mother had died and I was not there to kiss her forehead and to say a final goodbye. No voice escaped me.

After several weeks of virtual silence, I awoke one morning suddenly feeling both energetic and panicky, as if I were on some kind of stimulant. I went from one friend to another—to Mas Nug, Risjaf, Tjai and Theresa; to Vivienne and her family; to our neighbors; and to the offices of the French agency that arranged for us to obtain our asylum status—asking the same question: was it possible, with my exile status, for me to somehow enter Indonesia?

“Enter Indonesia?
Impossible!
You cannot enter Indonesia with a
titre de voyage
. And even if you were able to, there's a very good chance you'd never be able to leave that place again.”

I didn't care. I had to pay my last respects to Mother.

I brushed off all attempts by Mas Nug and Vivienne to calm me down. I had to go home. I had to go home! I would find a ticket. Any kind of ticket. Plane, boat, whatever. The important thing was for me to go home.

In my apartment, Risjaf took me by my shoulders and tried to calm me down. I roughly pushed him aside as well. Finally, they were all silent.

That night Mas Nug handed me a telegram from my brother, which read:

              
DON'T COME HOME COMMA NOT SAFE STOP PRAY MOTHER IS AT PEACE COMMA WE PRAY FOR HER SOUL STOP

I crushed the telegram in my hand, threw it in the garbage can, and stomped out of our miserable apartment into a winter night whose chilled air seized my bones. I heard the voices of Risjaf and Mas Nug calling after me, but I picked up my pace and ran. The cold wind was a knife stabbing me in the face, but I didn't feel a thing. I ran and ran. When I finally stopped, I found myself standing on the bank of the Seine. The river was red in color. My face was hot with tears.

It was around that time, I guess, that Vivienne began to gradually turn Paris into a kind of resting place for me. Not a home, per se, but a place where I could stop for a while. Slowly, I came to see in her green eyes both assurance and a willingness to provide refuge for me, like a shade tree protecting a child from the blazing sun with its cool shadows.

Although Vivienne's curious cousins, Marie-Claire and Mathilde,
asked numerous questions about my background—the French always seem to be interested in history—all in all, I felt that the Deveraux family was very accommodative to Vivienne's
Indonésien
lover, who as yet could speak to them only in broken French.

We married a year later in Lyon, at the vineyard of Vivienne's uncle, the father of Marie-Claire. That was the Deveraux family's ancestral home. Because all of her family's members were educated people who seemed to love to cook, I refrained from trying to impress them with my own culinary skills. As Indonesia has no enological history, Vivienne's father, Laurence, and her mother, Marianne, took it on themselves to give me some basic lessons about wine—ones I very much enjoyed. They taught me the difference between a sauvignon and a merlot; which kinds of wine were a good match for certain kinds of meat; what kinds of white wine were best served with fish. Marianne, who seemed to know how affected I still was by my mother's death, showed great forbearance with me, carefully listening to each word of French I spoke. Apparently hoping to instill in me a greater sense of confidence about my ability to speak that beautiful tongue, she was patient with my halting French and displayed no exasperation with my faulty grammar. On top of that, she was constantly offering me homemade petit fours—offers I never refused—or filling my glass with wine. Jean, Vivienne's brother, who was working for the Red Cross in Africa, came home for the wedding and he and I engaged in long discussions on politics and literature. With Vivienne's family embracing me so warmly, taking me into themselves, what more did I have to complain about?

Lintang Utara: “North Star.” That's the name I chose for our daughter, born five years after we married. Everything about her showed her to be her mother's daughter, except for her wavy black hair, which came from the Suryo family. And I never tired of staring at that beautiful, living and breathing, little round creature with the wavy black hair. I never thought it would happen, but I had inexplicably found for myself a port—who knew for how long?—and put down an anchor in my life. If I ever needed a reason to stop my voyage, then this little creature by the name of Lintang Utara was the one. I couldn't stop watching her. I loved looking after her, caring for her, even changing her diapers. I sang to her the Indonesian lullabies my mother had sung to me—though more often than not I fell asleep before she did, and when I pulled myself awake would find her crawling around our small apartment.

Vivienne raised no objection to my giving our daughter such a non-French-sounding name. She agreed to my choice instantly, just as Surti had when I proposed the names Kenanga, Bulan, and Alam for the children we once dreamed of having together.

During the first few years of our marriage, I changed jobs several times. Vivienne, meanwhile, had much more steady employment: teaching in the Faculty of English Literature at the Sorbonne. Finally, however, after several years of seeing the look on Vivienne's face become one of increased annoyance as a result of the unsteady and uncertain nature of my financial contribution to our home—I was spending much of my time writing a newsletter,
Political Prisoner
, which I distributed to the Indonesian exile community in Europe—I finally committed myself to more permanent work
and took a clerical job at the Ministry of Agriculture.

Even though I earned a decent enough salary, I was not at all happy with my desk job at the ministry. Instead of my work, my mind was either on the essays and poems that I intended to publish in the next issue of
Political Prisoner
or on interesting items of news that I received from friends who worked for the news media in Jakarta. One such piece of news was about the hullabaloo in 1972 when a foundation that had been established by President Soeharto's wife, Madam Tien, commenced work on an immense theme park called “Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature” or, more commonly in Indonesian, “Taman Mini.” Not surprisingly, given the economic disparities in Indonesia at the time, some of the country's leading intellectuals objected to the project, including the well-known sociologist Arief Budiman, who damned it as a massive boondoggle; but what was surprising is that they actually voiced their objections in print and incited students to take to the streets. Another interesting but disturbing development in the political sphere was that Indonesia's political parties were coming to be dominated by businessmen and that Parliament was being transformed into an assemblage of clowns, convened only to rubberstamp anything and all that the executive branch of government proposed.

I wrote about these and other things in my newsletter as a means of keeping the exile community up to date on conditions in Indonesia. I offered the newsletter to fellow exiles, free of charge, but as it was fairly popular it sometimes did attract financial contributions from other exiles. Whenever enough money came in, I'd publish another edition, and with the help of Risjaf's design skills was able to produce something that was almost professional-looking, like a newspaper.

Gradually, after few years I grew so bored with my work at the Ministry of Agriculture, I knew I had to stop. I wanted to write a book. I wanted to publish a paper. I wanted a change.

So it was, one autumn night, I came home to our apartment bearing a bottle of wine and several cuts of choice beef. It was nine o'clock when I arrived home, and Lintang was already asleep.

“What's the celebration?” Vivienne asked, taking the bottle from me and pinching the meat. “This is expensive, Dimas. What's up?”

Vivienne's green eyes bore into me.

“Sit down,” I told her.

She sat down beside me, a look of suspicion on her face. I took her hand and kissed her fingertips. It always excited her when I sucked on her fingers. I wanted her to understand the decision I had come to.