The living room might better be described as a library, because all four walls were covered with bookshelves, and in its center was a sofa and two chairs, as if it were a reading room. Only a small bit of wall remained visible and that is where there hung two shadow puppets, Bima and Ekalaya, the two characters that had always served Ayah as his role models. On one of the shelves, in the middle of a row of books, were two sacred apothecary jars. The one jar was filled almost to the top with cloves. The other jar held turmeric powder. These two jars had been one of the reasons behind the argument that took place between Maman and Ayah on the night they separated.
“Hello. What’s up?” Ayah said, looking at me over the top of his glasses as he came out of the bedroom.
I had already decided that I wasn’t going to stay long, so I remained standing, my heart suddenly quivering with anger. “Ayah, Nara invited you to dinner to get to know you, not to be insulted,” I told him straightaway.
Ayah took off his glasses and frowned with surprise. I couldn’t believe it. He was surprised that I was angry? He told me to sit down, but I remained on my feet. I didn’t want to get caught there.
“Insult Nara? Who insulted whom?”
“You had to find something wrong in everything he said and did: his choice of restaurant, his choice of films, even his choice of poems!”
“He’s pretentious!” Ayah barked impatiently, as if he had forcibly refrained from expressing his true opinion about Nara the night before. “He’s a rich bourgeois kid used to getting anything he wants without working for it, whether it’s a car or eating in the most expensive bistro in Europe. If he wanted to meet me, why did we have to go all the way to Brussels? Wouldn’t you call that pretentious?”
This was the first time I began to suspect the real reason why Maman had been unable to remain married to Ayah. How could she have endured living with a man who always had to criticize everything that was wrong in his eyes?
“I’m not faulting Nara for having the good fortune to be the son of a man who got his wealth from hard work. I’m just not interested in pretense. His choice to recite lines from ‘Sonnet 29’ was such a cliché.” He paused before adding, “Sure he’s good-looking and a smooth talker, too — but what is it you like about him?” Now he was being saracastic.
“I like being with him and his family. Une famille harmonieuse! They are kind and welcoming to everyone they meet. I feel comfortable when I am with them.”
“What I asked you,” Ayah stressed, “is what you like about him, not about his family.”
Now Ayah had gone too far. “I don’t want to be like you,” I spat. “You’re never happy. You’re never thankful for the things you own. I don’t want to be like you, always cynical about other people’s happiness.”
As these spiteful words spilled from my lips, tears fell from my eyes in a torrent. Ayah looked at me, speechless, as if not comprehending the meaning of my accusations.
“I don’t want to be trapped by the past! And not just by your political past, Ayah, but by your personal life either.”
Ayah seemed shocked by what I’d just said. But I left him standing there in silence. I saw the hurt that was in his eyes, but I didn’t care. That night Paris was no longer the City of Light. Paris had turned into a dark and gloomy place, because that was the night I decided to break off communications with my father.
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.