Alam looked at me. The light in his eyes was more subdued. “Listen to me, Lintang… Nara had just called you. He wants to see you. He wants to come here. But he could tell there was something different in you from the sound of your voice.”
I sensed a tone of sadness in what he said. My tears stopped instantly. I looked into Alam’s face. Had he freshly shaved this morning?
“I wanted to give you space, Lintang. I want you to make your life decisions without pressure from anyone.”
I couldn’t say anything in the face of Alam’s explanation. Why did something so simple have to become something difficult?
“I’ve already told you, I don’t want to part from you,” Alam said, “despite my bad reputation which Bimo keeps talking about!” He smiled.
The calls for “Reformasi!” had turned into a solid scream that was deafening, even though we were seated quite distant from the free-speech platform. The cry of “reform” pounded my eardrums. Meanwhile, from a different direction came the much fainter sound of students singing a ballad whose lyrics I knew welclass="underline" “…I can hear voices / wails of the wounded / people shooting arrows at the moon…”
I was suddenly moved. My heart beat faster.
Alam knew I recognized the words. “Yes, those are the lyrics of one of Rendra’s poems set to a song by Iwan Fals.”
Alam knew instantly why I was familiar with that poem. The off-key sound of the student voices was beautiful to my ears, even more stirring than a Ravel composition. Now I felt that I knew where my home was. I hugged Alam tightly. I didn’t want to ever let go.
“Alam, don’t ever again act like you want to give me space. I don’t want a space that is empty except for me alone! I don’t want distance from you. Not one centimeter. Not one millimeter.”
Alam held my face in his hands and kissed me even though my face was smeared with snot and tears.
EPILOGUE. JAKARTA, JUNE 10, 1998
My dearest Lintang,
Listen to these lines: When I die, the cry / that bursts from my heart / will forever be in my poem / that will never die…
Subagio Sastrowardoyo’s intimate relationship with death is suggested in his poem, “The Poem That Will Never Die.” For me this poem evokes something quite normal. And for that reason, I feel that my own death, which is now very close, is something usual as well — something ordinary for which there is no reason to lament. That said, I do ask your forgiveness for my not allowing your mother to reveal the results of my medical tests to you. The name of the disease alone — cirrhosis of the liver — was enough to make me feel uninterested. The disease has no aesthetic attraction and there is nothing interesting about it to discuss.
Doctors and nurses were created to map the state of our bodily organs. Unfortunately, they often get this authoritarian streak when they do it. As a result, they are often able to influence our actions and emotions by what they say. And I for one would thoroughly object if you (or I) were to peg our lives (or deaths) on a doctor’s words.
After a long battle with your mother, who forced me to go
to the doctor to pick up the results from my final examination, I made a demand: that whatever the results of the tests, you were not to be told until your visit to Indonesia had ended. Especially after learning the news of the shootings of those students at Trisakti and then the horrendous anarchy that followed, I knew that it would be impossible to extract you from the midst of the madness the country was going through. This aside from the fact that the airport had been shut down and that many expatriates were fleeing Jakarta, at least temporarily.
The atmosphere at the restaurant was also tense at that time. All of us were on tenterhooks as we watched the television, minute by minute, hour by hour. Even with the delays in news coverage, quite a lot of information was conveyed. (Apparently, CNN and other major news outlets deemed other world news to be far more important so that news about Indonesia was aired only a few times a day.)
On May 21, when President Soeharto made his resignation speech, the whole lot of us roared aloud. The entire restaurant erupted in shouting. Our two cynics, Om Nug and Om Risjaf, yelled that they were going to find a goat to slaughter. (Don’t ask me where they were going to find a goat in the middle of Paris!) And as if they didn’t know better, they also said they were going to order plane tickets for all of us to come to Jakarta. Om Nug said that the New Order government had fallen, that we could at last go home and set foot in our native land.
Your mother kept insisting that it was time for you to come back to Paris to see me but, I’m sorry, I had to forbid her from telling you so. By this time I was just surviving on medicines, but you were in the middle of finishing your assignment.
And now I am surrounded by four white and boring walls
and a nurse with the look on her face that’s likely to hasten my death. She never seems to smile, but then becomes delighted when she’s sticking a needle in me to extract another blood sample.
Oh, my dearest Lintang…
It’s truly ironic that with the fall of Soeharto there is, indeed, a good possibility that we pillars here will be able to come home to Indonesia, but that I will be coming home in a coffin (if not in the open-sided
keranda
we Muslims are supposed to be in). But that’s all right. Didn’t I always say that I wanted my final home to be in Karet cemetery? No need for an expensive plot for me at Père Lachaise in Paris — and don’t dare purchase a plot at Tanah Kusir or Jeruk Purut cemeteries in Jakarta. Choose for me a rectangle of earth in Karet. The soil there, with which my body will fuse, has a smell and texture I know.
Don’t cry for me. Don’t cry.
Scatter cloves and jasmine flowers on my grave so that their scent reaches my body lying there below, silent and alone. I am confident of capturing their fragrance through the spaces in the soil that kindly provide a path for their scent I know so intimately to reach me.
I can picture the ceremony. I can see who will be there to attend my burial alongside you, my life’s most shining star, and your mother, the most beautiful and strongest woman I’ve ever known, who stood at my side through my life’s ordeals. I can see my brother Aji and his fine family; Tante Surti and her three children; and the remaining three pillars of Tanah Air. (Try to comfort Om Risjaf, who won’t have the strength to hold back the bitter pain of it all. Of the four pillars, he was always the most sensitive, and the one the rest of us always thought of as a youngest brother. Stay beside him, please.)
I can also see Nara and Alam and all of the friends you made at Satu Bangsa among the crowd of mourners. Maybe you will pray for me. Maybe Om Aji will lead the prayer. Maybe the lot of you will be even so wacky as to play Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” But if you want to help console Om Risjaf, let him play his harmonica — as long as he doesn’t play “When the Orchids Start to Bloom” because, for me, my orchid withered long ago. Tell him instead to play John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Road.” And if that does happen, don’t be surprised if you hear me humming along from my final place of rest.