It was the moment I saw him, that Asian man on the Sorbonne campus. I guessed he was from Indochina. With his brown skin, I thought he might be from Vietnam. But he was tall for an Asian man. And with his curly hair and aquiline nose he might even have been from the Middle East. From a distance, I caught him watching me; but when I looked at him he pretended to be busy puffing on his cigarette, as if that was going to help ward off the cold wind blowing that evening. He was standing at a distance, by himself, watching my fellow students who were huddled together against the cold and the government. I thought he might be a journalist who had ventured onto campus. There was no longer any artificial division between the students and citizens of Paris. Everyone mingled and mixed together. But no, he was alone, without a camera, watching history as it unfolded.
Some friends of mine and I had gathered beneath the statue of Victor Hugo and were waiting to hear Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a sociology student who was the student movement’s most vocal leader. There were so many people, all of them pushing their way forward, excited to see what was going on. There must have been thousands of people who had gathered there. But then my desire to hear Cohn-Bendit’s oration — and to glimpse his handsome face — suddenly withered, all because of him, that exotic-looking man, standing alone, undisturbed by both the mass of humanity and the brisk evening wind.
And then at that moment, for a second, and then two, our eyes met. And wow! How I managed to do it, I don’t know, but slowly, going against the tide of students moving in the direction of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, I eased my way from the crowd to walk in the direction of that man. That Asian man. And then came an unexpected bolt of lightning.
Le coup de foudre.
His eyes bore into mine.
I greeted him: “Ça va?”
SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS, PARIS, APRIL 1998
Vivienne picked up the receiver of the telephone screaming impatiently at her. “Oui,” she said while stuffing lesson materials for that day’s courses into her large multi-pocketed leather bag. With the receiver clamped between her right cheek and shoulder, she filled the bag with books, folders, pens, a pocket diary, and a roll of mints. She grabbed her mug of coffee to take a sip but then suddenly stopped when she heard the name of the hospital the person on the other end of the line had just mentioned. Slowly, she placed her mug on the table.
“Dimas Suryo? Oui, that is my former husband. Pourquoi?”
“Your name is listed as his emergency contact,” she heard the caller say.
Now was not the time for her to feel annoyed.
“Is there something wrong?”
“Non, non, Madame. It’s just that we ran some tests on Monsieur Suryo two weeks ago and he still hasn’t picked up the results. We’ve called him several times, but he never answers the phone, so …”
“OK, I will make sure he comes to pick them up.” She took her pen and notepad. “Where in the hospital would that be?”
With that telephone call having ruined her morning, Vivienne lost her appetite for the mug of steeped luwak coffee she had just prepared. Steam from the cup rose and vanished in the air — like the story of her love for the man who had first introduced her to that wonderfully tasting coffee.
Vivienne picked up the receiver again, this time to dial Lintang’s number. She took a breath to calm herself before speaking.
“Lintang, c’est Maman.”
Love at first sight, a love that burns deep inside, and the wish to explore something new, foreign, and completely unknown are not, it turns out, enough to save a marriage. I realized that afterwards. As much as I loved Dimas and as great as my willingness was to give to him everything I had inside of me, to this day I don’t know whether he ever loved me as much as I loved him — even though he did write me a poem, which he gave to me as a gift at our wedding. In Indonesia, he said, when a couple marries there is always a brideprice to pay. And the price he paid for me was a poem whose first lines were “Benarkah angin tak sedang mencoba / Menyentuh bibirnya yang begitu sempurna … Is it true the wind’s not trying / To touch such perfect lips…”
He said the poem popped into his mind the first time he saw me, in May 1968, at the time of the student and workers’ movement. But did he ever really love me completely? And forever? My cousin Marie-Claire, an ever-cheerful person, always kind to everyone, told me that Dimas was an extraordinary man and would make a very suitable life partner. Mathilde, my other cousin, a much more skeptical sort, told me that Dimas was an exotic man who might be good for dating or as a lover, but not for marrying. Neither of my cousins quite understood that my attraction to and love for Dimas did not spring from some deep seated desire in me to explore a foreign territory that was exotic and unknown. Nor did it emerge from the urge to satisfy physical pleasure. Not at all. I sensed in Dimas a feeling of loss that I wanted to soothe and assuage. He had a sadness in his eyes I wanted to heal. And also, as I came to learn, he had an incredible ability to confront hardship and to survive, an ability to withstand and repulse life’s vicissitudes. At times, as I later came to see, the survival mechanisms he employed seemed to border on the obsessive; but, perhaps, such is the case of all political exiles, in every country throughout the world: their will to survive makes them obsessive about proving themselves.
France would never be Dimas’s home. I realized that from the moment our eyes first met. There was something that prevented him from being happy, from feeling completely at home. Was it the bloodbath that had occurred in his own homeland? Was it the country’s political upheaval, which had not only eroded but also depleted all sense of humanity in Dimas and his friends, forcing them to pick up, here and there, whatever bits and pieces they could find in order to rebuild themselves into a new whole as human beings possessing a sense of dignity and pride?
Politics is never simple, and ideological struggle is but a pretense for the lust for power. All the books I’ve read on the subject have their own theories about what happened in Indonesia in September 1965. In my first few years of knowing Dimas and his friends — Nugroho, Tjai, and Risjaf — it wasn’t easy for me to piece together their life stories, which they delivered in a piecemeal fashion. There were numerous common experiences they shared as wanderers, but they all had very different personalities and different reactions towards the tragedy that had occurred in their homeland. That said, they all wanted to go home and waited for the opportunity to see a better Indonesia. But thirty years had passed and “the Smiling General”—the country’s long-reigning authoritarian leader, President Soeharto — was all the more strong and feared.
Maybe the overtly civilian style of government in Indonesia wasn’t the same as the one adopted by military leaders in Latin American countries, but the Smiling General continued to retain a firm grip on his throne.
It’s been a while now since I’ve seen Dimas, but I still look for the news about Indonesia that occasionally appears in the mass media, on the television and in the press. I’m sure that following the recent tumble in the value of the rupiah and the economic crisis that befell the region, President Soeharto felt the need to do something, the need to act. But what he did, according to the reports I’ve seen, was to install his own daughter in the government cabinet! Whether or not his political panic will escalate and one day cause him to fall, I don’t know, but if he does fall, I am very sure that of the four pillars — Dimas and his three friends — Dimas will be the first to return in order to live out his old age in Indonesia. I’m also sure that if at all possible he will return home with a green Republic of Indonesia passport in his hand. If at all possible, that is, but likely it’s not. Regardless, I’m very sure that he will try to return home.