So it was that for a few months our small community of friends broke down and dispersed. Neither our moods nor our schedules permitted any form of reconciliation. Mas Nugroho and Mas Hananto were busy with their work; Risjaf had his books; and I was busy with women, exams, and grinding spices in the kitchen as I thought about concepts of love between men and women as depicted in the Mahabharata.
Drupadi.
Drupadi had taken all five of the Pandawa brothers as husbands. But it was the brother Bima who always tried to protect her and had thwarted Kicaka’s and Dursasana’s advances when they tried to rape her. Tragically for Bima, Drupadi loved his brother, Arjuna, much more. I don’t really know and actually never tried to find out whether Surti loved Mas Hananto more than me. What I did know is that she had made a choice.
I’m even more uncertain about why it is that, even after meeting the lovely Vivienne and marrying her, up until this very day my soul still stirs whenever I think of Surti. Perhaps I truly did give my heart to her. Forever and for always.
And forty-five years later in Paris, that same song from Risjaf’s harmonica still softly suffuses the springtime air: “Als de Orchideeën Bloeien.”
don’t come home comma wait till
calm here stop mother and I well
comma only been called in for
information stop aji suryo
PARIS, SEPTEMBER, 1965
“ONLY BEEN CALLED IN FOR INFORMATION…” Those were the words in the telegram my brother Aji sent to me two weeks after the storm that occurred in late September 1965. Mas Nugroho and I were two among the many Indonesian journalists who had been invited to attend the conference of the International Organization of Journalists in Santiago, Chile, earlier that month. Even though Jakarta was heating up and full of the smoke from rumors about a “Council of Generals” which had resulted in infighting among the ranks of the military elite, we had left the country with no apprehension or premonition about things to come. At least I had no inkling that anything out of the ordinary was going to occur, not in the days before our departure. We were going off on an ordinary assignment and, as such, said our goodbyes with little fanfare.
If I did feel any apprehension at that time, it was about the state of my friendship with Mas Hananto. A few weeks prior to my departure, we’d had an argument and I had punched him in the face because I was repulsed by the way he was treating Surti, taking her completely for granted. He accused me of still being in love with her—which was, I must admit, something I’d never been able to ascertain, even to myself. It was clear, though, that it was because of Surti I had decided to go to Santiago.
Mas Hananto was the one who should have gone with Mas Nugroho to Santiago, but he had chosen instead to remain in Jakarta in order to resolve his marital crisis—a situation for which he was entirely to blame, he being given to chasing any skirt that passed by. Initially, I had been reluctant to go because of recent political developments in several Latin American countries. Mas Hananto and Mas Nug, in fact, were in correspondence with people close to Andrés Pascal Allende, Salvador Allende’s nephew. I was aware of this, but I never really felt like I was in the same spectrum they were in. I was a free cell. What reason did I have to go to Santiago? But when Mas Hananto told me that Surti had threatened to leave him and take their three children with her, I immediately changed my mind. I felt Surti’s unexpressed anger and pain suddenly overpower me. Her silent suffering became a strong voice speaking to me. I knew that the problem was not simply a question of Mas Hananto’s womanizing; it was because she felt betrayed by her husband and shunned by her helpmate. I recalled the crude comparison Mas Hananto had drawn between Surti and his mistress, Marni: “Surti is my wife, my life’s companion. But with Marni, I can feel the passionate excitement of the proletarian class.”
Mas Hananto would never have said such a thing to his wife; but I knew Surti well, from the way she breathed down to her very pores. Being a woman who was highly sensitive to the behavior and demeanor of the man she loved, there was no way she could not have known about her husband’s shenanigans. Maybe not in specific detail but she would have known, nonetheless. As I saw it, the problem with Mas Hananto was that there was something about Surti—maybe her deep sense of honor or her innate elegance and natural beauty—which he viewed as “aristocratic” and therefore something that he, a self-styled proletarian, could never truly possess. There was something about Surti so sublime that, in Mas Hananto’s way of thinking, it could only be classified as “bourgeois,” which made him reject it out of hand and engage in sexual escapades with women in Triveli.
I truly did not want to see the couple separate, which is why I bowed to Mas Hananto’s wishes so that he could stay home and resolve his marital issues. In my departure from Jakarta, I never dreamed that I would not return.
It was during the middle of the conference in Santiago that Jose Ximenez, the chairman, made a special announcement in a plenary session about what the English-language press was calling the “September 30 Movement” which had taken place in Jakarta. (We later learned that the Indonesian phrase, “Gerakan September Tigapuluh,” had quickly been changed by the country’s new military rulers into the more ominous sounding acronym, “Gestapu.”) We were shocked. High-level military officers kidnapped and killed? We couldn’t imagine who might have perpetuated such an act. I repeatedly pressed Mas Nugroho to try to find out more from Ximenez about what had happened.
For a few tense nights, amidst all this uncertainty, we could neither eat nor sleep. Even as we marinated our minds with bottles of wine generously provided by our host as a sign of sympathy or solidarity, we constantly endeavored to contact our families and friends. Because of its leftist reputation, we were all but certain that the Nusantara News office had been raided, looted, or vandalized. Presumably, the military would have assumed that the agency was holding on to a trove of important documents. But that was the Indonesian military, for whom an ant might seem to be a raging tiger. Mas Nug assured me that there was nothing damning in our office: just books, piles of paper, and typewriters. We learned that most of the editorial staff had been called in for interrogation. No one seemed to know where the editor-in-chief had been taken.
It was only after twelve nerve-wracking days that I received the telegram from my mother and Aji. And although they sought to assuage my fears with the words that they had “only been called in for information,” at that time, in 1965, the phrase had a sinister meaning. While it may have only meant “interrogation,” it might very well have meant “torture.” Indonesia’s history during that time—even if it’s not been completely written—reveals that in the three years following the events of September 30, 1965, the country went through numerous stages of inhumanity: the hunt for people, the naming of names, raids, capture, torture, killing, and slaughter. Given that fact, I was forced to see the phrase “only called in for information” as a kind of blessing. I had no doubt that my mother and Aji had been systematically and thoroughly interrogated. I was also certain that our home in Solo had been raided. I was sure that my late father’s personal library—or, rather, the books in it that I had been unable to bring with me to Jakarta because my lodgings there on Jalan Solo were too small—had been ransacked and possibly burned. I could see soldiers’ boots stamping on photographs of my father. I could imagine all sorts of things—all the things that Aji hadn’t been willing to share with me.
Very disturbing for me was the news that Mas Hananto had disappeared and was now on the military’s most-wanted list. I shouldn’t have been too surprised, therefore,