For Tjai, Risjaf, and me, the paviliun across the road became our place of recreation. Compared to our own small rooms, the paviliun was quite spacious, with a separate living room, where we could lounge about or play chess on the comfortable but louse-infested sofa. Mas Nugroho and Mas Hananto, who seemed much more mature than the three of us, frequently lent us their books—anything from anthologies of European poetry to titillating titles with pictures of men and women engaged in a myriad variety of sexual acts. Risjaf’s eyes would open widely in surprise when he flipped through the pages of these books, as if incapable of believing that that women could wrap their bodies in such positions. Mas Nug even made it a point to lend such books to Risjaf, because he got such a kick from seeing this younger and more naïve man’s reactions. Although Risjaf was the best-looking man among us, when it came to women, he was the most inexperienced.
At first I wasn’t too interested in pursuing these three new freshman girls, not as girlfriends, anyway. To my mind, they seemed excessively cheerful and sweet-natured. Further, with all their fine clothes and makeup, they looked to me like privileged daughters of aristocrats who had never known hardship. One day as I was passing by their boarding house, I saw a man I guessed to be Surti’s father pull up to the curb in front of the house in a white Fiat 1100, a car that only a member of the upper economic class could aspire to own. As I came closer and was able to see the man more clearly, my suspicion was confirmed: Surti was the daughter of Dr. Sastrowidjojo, “the” Dr. Sastrowidjojo who lived on Jalan Papandayan in an elite and leafy residential area in Bogor, south of Jakarta. Not only was he famous, he was the son and grandson of equally famous doctors, members of the crème de la crème in pre-independent Indonesia. Surti’s father was known to have played a leading role in the founding of Jakarta’s central hospital, the Centraal Burgerlijke Ziekenhuis. The fact that Surti had not followed her father’s footsteps and gone into medicine suggested that there might be something special about her; but later, when I heard Mas Nug and Mas Hananto talk about her family background, my interest in knowing her better dwindled. I could neither afford nor be bothered with all the things that having a girlfriend from her social and economic class entailed.
The problem was that Risjaf was attracted to Rukmini, she with the luscious red lips and very sharp tongue. Yet the more caustic her words, the more infatuated Risjaf became. In the end, it was for Risjaf—who swore that if he could go out with Rukmini just once he would be happy to die and go to heaven, and who often woke me when he talked about her in his sleep—that I decided to approach these three lovely women and invite them on a group date with my friends.
At first, the three girls paid no attention to my advances, pretty much ignoring me altogether. They were too busy flirting with the male students in the Faculty of Law, who were given to citing legal statutes. (And what for? What was sexy about citations from law books, which were still in Dutch no less? Wouldn’t they find our skill in reciting poetry more interesting?) But I knew from the way they pretended to ignore me that they noticed me. At least Surti, for one, sometimes smiled. Once, I even caught her staring at me, her eyes like stars shining their light on me; but when she saw me staring back, she immediately turned her head. At that instant, I knew that she was the jasmine flower I wanted to pluck and store in my heart.
One day, as she was going into class, I slipped into her fingers a verse from the poem “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron—“She walks in beauty, like the night / of cloudless climes and starry skies …”—but when she opened her mouth to speak, I immediately walked away, worried that she wouldn’t like the poem. The next day, however, she was the one who slipped a note to me: two lines from the poem “Elegy” by Rivai Apin: “what is it that we feel, yet have no need to express / what is it that we think, yet have no need to speak…” I almost swooned—not only from the sentiment of the poem but from the paper on which it was written, with its fragrant smell of jasmine.
For a few days thereafter, we communicated almost only through lines of verse, with very few words spoken. One time I copied in longhand a romantic section from Romeo and Juliet and gave that to her. She replied with a quote from the poem “Bright Star” by Keats: “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art / Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night.”
Surti Anandari was a stem of jasmine; she was a bright star in the midnight sky.
One day I waited for Surti outside her classroom. As usual when she saw me, she opened her hand to receive from me a slip of paper on which was written a romantic verse or scene. I smiled and when she raised her hand towards me, I took it and clasped it tightly. Startled, she instantly stopped walking, and looked at me in question. Lowering my lips to her ear, I whispered, “I want to be with you. Forever.”
During the first few months of my relationship with Surti, things went along pretty much the way they usually did among young men and women at that time: politely, guilelessly, and chastely. Any time our breaths began to join as one, we’d suddenly hear Risjaf or Tjai cough, causing us to draw apart from each other again. Sometimes, Surti and her friends would come to our boarding house with Rukmini and Ningsih, “just to bring us cookies they had made” or something on that order; but, usually, after the briefest of conversations, they would immediately take their leave. “It’s not proper for an unmarried woman to be seen visiting a man,” Surti reminded me.
And whenever this trio of young ladies did stop by, all of a sudden our older and more dashing neighbors, Mas Nugroho and Mas Hananto, would also appear, “just to borrow some glasses or a platter” (which I knew they’d never use) or to help me cook up some fried rice. Even though my fried rice was famous among the students who boarded on Jalan Solo, it was obvious that our neighbors were coming not to dine but to feast on the sight of the three young women. Crafty devils that they were, they’d pretend to help by grinding chilies or preparing the seasoning by mixing shrimp paste with oil, but all the while they would be shuttling back and forth between the kitchen and the living room where the three girls were seated, a farce that would end with the batch of them giggling together. Meanwhile, Risjaf and Tjai would find themselves staring, hopelessly frustrated by the sight. The three of us were just college students, whereas Mas Nugroho and Mas Hananto were grown men with mustaches they could shape like that of Clark Gable.
Through their gambit of borrowing things and “giving Dimas a hand” at our boarding house, Mas Nug and Mas Hananto succeeded in persuading the three women to visit their den of iniquity. Mas Nug, who had a much larger expendable income than we as students had, owned a hi-fidelity player and would play records for the three womem. For that reason, the trio willingly spent what I thought was an inordinate amount of time at the paviliun listening to the songs of Sam Saimun and others. Mas Nug, who couldn’t carry a tune to save his life, would always start singing along, disrupting the glorious sound of Saimun’s voice. Mas Hananto owned a radio and sometimes we’d hear the girls laughing at the comic repartee of Bing Slamet and Adi Karso on their show at Radio Republic Indonesia.
Initially, I thought that Mas Hananto was attracted to Rukmini with the ruby red lips. I knew that Risjaf was almost epileptic about this but was trying not to show his jealousy. Only later I realized that Mas Hananto was in fact helping to win over Rukmini for Mas Nugroho. As the competition between Risjaf and Mas Nug to capture Rukmini’s affections heated up, I of course stood by Risjaf. As his friend, I was bound to support him.
One day I found Risjaf rummaging through books on my work table.
“I want to borrow some of your poetry books,” he said. His eyes emitted a deep light of sincerity.
What? Here was this tall and very handsome man from Riau with thick wavy hair— a living and breathing testimony to masculinity—looking for books of poetry. A man with his build and temperament didn’t need poetry to conquer a woman’s heart.
I took Risjaf firmly by the shoulders and turned him around until he was facing me. “Listen to me, Sjaf!