That night Lintang had one question. Or maybe she had a thousand questions — but one question, always starkly present, unendingly posing itself, was there in her heart. Would she have the clarity of mind to see and to decipher the complex problems that awaited her in Jakarta?
Lintang wasn’t able to answer that question, at least not yet. But that night, and during the days and nights that followed, she typed almost nonstop, as if there were no tomorrow. Every so often she’d look at a book, a manuscript, a journal, a clipping, a paper, or an old photograph and then would begin to write again, to type again. Reading something more, using a yellow highlighter to underscore a phrase, she’d then write again. Countless cups of coffee filled her stomach, which was about to scream from high acid content, and Ravel’s music filled her ears. Eyes open wide, she blinked as she studied the tens of pages in her proposal, checking its language for fluency and whether or not the sources that she quoted effectively bolstered her argument. In her proposal, Lintang explained the importance of revealing information that had too long been buried by official Indonesian history; how necessary it was to provide a space and a place for those historical actors whose voices had been silenced. Lintang had to produce a convincing argument for her need to conduct her work in Indonesia, and not, for instance, in Paris or Amsterdam. The names of the sources she quoted ranged from well-known players to persons whose voices time had almost forgotten.
Three days had passed and now on the morning of the fourth, she was sprawled on the sofa in her apartment, trying to get a little sleep before bathing and getting ready to see Professor Dupont to turn in her proposal. She slept so soundly that she definitely would have been late had not a kiss as gentle as cotton awakened her.
“Nara …”
Lintang rubbed her eyes. Her throat suddenly felt parched. What time was it? Where was she?
“I started to get worried when you didn’t answer the telephone. I know your proposal is due today and that you should be leaving soon for campus.”
Lintang jumped up from the sofa. As she did, the loose pages of her proposal flew into the air. Not bothering to first pick them up, she raced into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Nara smiled and shook his head as he picked up the sheets of paper and arranged them in their proper order. Then he poured orange juice into a glass and rolled up his sleeves to make breakfast. He assumed that Lintang had not been eating well and had probably consumed gallons of caffeine during the past several days.
“Yum, an omelet and sausages? And where did you find the croissants? I’ve haven’t had a chance to shop this week. Did you hold up the boulangerie on the ground floor?”
Dressed in a kimono bathrobe, Lintang pounced on the breakfast Nara had arranged neatly on the table.
“Their first croissants of the day were just coming out of the oven when I arrived, so I scooped them up,” Nara said.
“You are an angel,” Lintang said as she kissed his lips. “That place is the only reason I can stand to live in this shit hole of an apartment. I love waking up to the smell of their freshly baked croissants.”
“But this morning you woke up because of my kiss,” Nara said as he repeatedly kissed her face. “Is there enough time for me to help relieve some of your tension?”
Lintang laughed, pulled the lobe of Nara’s ear, and then went into her bedroom to change her clothes.
“I straightened up your proposal and put it in the green folder,” Nara called after her.
“Did you read it?”
“Just skimmed it — I was fixing your breakfast, you know — but it looks to me to be pretty good, in content and in tone. I’m sure Monsieur Dupont will be impressed.”
As Lintang dressed, Nara put her messy kitchen back in order.
She came out from the room wearing black jeans and a white blouse. Hanging from her shoulders, and complementing her simple apparel, was an almost diaphanous batik scarf her mother owned.
Sitting down at the kitchen table, Lintang began to talk: “You know, all the stuff I’ve read these past few weeks, in my father’s unpublished manuscripts and the letters that’s he’s received over the years, and all the documentary films I’ve seen — both the unprofessional and professional ones produced by Australian filmmakers and the BBC — reveal a blood-filled side of Indonesian history that has thus far been largely ignored.”
Nara could only nod as he listened to Lintang speak.
Pausing to take a breath, Lintang then attacked the omelet and sausages before continuing: “The massacres that took place around Indonesia and the hunt for members of the Communist Party and their families served to bolster a strong and enduring power structure. And those concepts of ‘political hygience’ and being ‘environmentally clean’…Merde! What the hell are they anyway?!”
Still eating her omelet, Lintang spoke quickly, no pausing for commas, no stopping for periods, sometimes jabbing her fork in the air.
Afraid that Lintang was going to stick him in the eye with her fork, Nara took her hand and lowered it to the table. “Very good, darling, but it’s time to get ready to go. I’ll go with you as far as Monsieur Dupont’s office; but after that, I must go see Professor Dubois.”
“Oh, hmm…” Lintang suddenly felt guilty for not having paid sufficient attention to Nara or his own academic concerns. “Is he going to give you his recommendation?”
“It looks like it…but come on,” Nara told her. “When all this is over, I am going to kidnap you and lock you in the bedroom for three days!” he added with a leer.
Nara grabbed Lintang’s jacket and the two of them ran to the Metro station. At that moment, Lintang could not help but think how easy her life was. She would finish her final assignment. Nara would continue his schooling in London. Soon, it would be summer in Paris again. Life was neat and orderly, just as it should be.
Dimas put the oversized envelope containing the X-rays of his chest and abdomen into a large bag the hospital had provided. He was sorely tempted to throw the results of the examination into the trash container — Bam! — but he realized that would be overly dramatic and childish. He sat at the Metro station, staring at its subterranean walls and the array of announcements on them. They suddenly seemed to transform into a series of advertisements and health advisories about vaccines, skin diseases, breast cancer, and AIDS. He felt chafed. What a cliché it was: he would not die like Hananto, before a firing squad, or be thrown off a cliff or drowned in the Solo River. He would be slowly worn away by a fucking disease he could not even see.
It was such a cliché, so damned banal and mediocre that Dimas was relucant to talk or think about the topic, even to himself.
Dimas held his stomach, which had begun to feel queasy. He took the bottle of pills he had just paid for at the hospital. Opening the cap, he popped two tablets into his hand and then swallowed them straightaway.
Paris was preparing to welcome the beginning of summer. Dimas counted the number of summer days that he still might see.
Ever since the first time Lintang set foot on the campus of the Sorbonne as a freshman student, the wide corridors of the main hall held a special place in her memory. The Sorbonne was where she first met Narayana; where she first recorded autumn’s falling leaves and winter’s chilling winds; where she learned to wait patiently for the right moment, for those few seconds, when a flower opened in bloom; and where she had honed her editing skills by sifting through hours of film footage to find the most arresting images and most interesting quotes of the people she’d interviewed. But the most important thing, and what made the experience different from her primary years of education, was that the Sorbonne had made Lintang feel accepted, a natural part of academic life, where questions of a student’s skin color or appearance were of no concern. She felt at the Sorbonne a life of freedom, one which she and her fellow classmates had been invited to explore, to plunge into the world of intellectual life. Nothing was more exciting and stimulating.