Separating herself from her fellow students, she looked back to observe them from a distance. Her eyes held a smile, yet her lips remained even. Occasionally, she’d bite her lower lip, then check the watch on her wrist. A few minutes later, she placed her hands on her hips and turned around, her back to me.
A man approached with two bottles of 1644 beer in hand, one of which he gave to her. He wore eyeglasses and had curly hair. If he weren’t so scraggly-looking, the French might have considered him handsome; but, from the look of him, I suspected he hadn’t seen the inside of a bathtub in at least a week—much like the thousands of other students who were there on the Sorbonne campus demonstrating against the arrest of students from the University of Paris in Nanterre and who had opposed the government’s shut-down of their campus.
The May air was suffused with the rank odor of rarely-washed bodies and the bad breath of mouths unfamiliar with toothpaste but partial to cheap booze which, in their coalescence, elicited an incomparable scent of resistance.
I felt envious.
I was jealous.
The battle lines in the struggle that was taking place in Paris at that moment were clear. Both the plaintiff and the accused were known to all. The struggle was one between students and workers against the De Gaulle government. In Indonesia, we were well acquainted with confusion and chaos, but were never quite sure which people were our friends and which ones were our opponents. We weren’t even truly sure about the goals of the various combative parties—with the exception of “power,” that is. Everyone wanted power. How messy things were there, so very dark!
I had two letters tucked in my jacket pocket. Since the beginning of the year anyone who was thought to have been a member of the PKI—or had family and friends, or colleagues and neighbors, in the Indonesian Communist Party—had been hunted down, detained, and interrogated. My brother Aji had frightening stories to tell about how many people had disappeared and how many more had died.
One of the two letters was from him, my brother Aji, who forbade me to come home. In previous posts he had told me of neighbors and acquaintances who had been swept up by the military. But this most recent letter contained news I never wanted to receive. My constant hope was that Mas Hananto would remain out of the military’s reach. But now, the bad news had come: Mas Hananto, my friend, colleague, and boss; Surti’s husband and father of Kenanga, Bulan, and Alam; and my inveterate sounding board, had been captured one month previously at the place where he’d been surreptitiously working on Jalan Sabang.
In an instant, a cloud fell over Paris. My heart darkened. I didn’t want to open the second letter, which was from Kenanga, Mas Hananto’s oldest child, because I knew that it would further paralyze my emotions.
It was ironic. It should have been me the military arrested in Jakarta that night, yet I was here, in Paris, amidst thousands of French students on the march. In their yells and cries, I somehow caught a whiff of stench from Jakarta’s gutters mixed with the sweet smell of clove-laden kretek cigarettes and steaming black coffee. The bright gleam in the eyes of the French students reminded me of former friends in Jakarta whose fates I didn’t know. With sparkling eyes and effervescent spirits, they demanded in loud voices a more just society (though, to be sure, some of those same idealistic students would one day become part of the same power structure they vowed to tear down).
That same spirit emanated from the eyes of the brunette woman whose attention remained fixed on the unwashed man with curly hair and eyeglasses. Staring at him, her emerald eyes seemed to protrude from their sockets. As if agitated by the woman’s penetrating gaze, the slovenly man left the woman’s side. Gulping what was left of the beer in the bottle in his hand, he tossed the bottle into a trash can in such a flippantly dismissive manner that he seemed to be speaking of his feelings for the beautiful woman next to him.
I wanted to approach her. The color of her eyes was the green of unripe grapes mixed with the blue of the Indian Ocean. I wished to shelter in their color. Their green was the carpet of grass under my feet; their blue, the stretch of sky over my head. I wanted to rest on that carpet and dangle my feet from that sky. What painter could possibly have created the blue-green color of her eyes? What sculptor could have carved the fluidly sensuous form of her perfect body? My eyes went to her, my body was drawn towards her, yet my legs remained fixed in place, my feet those of a criminal, shackled in steel chains, awaiting execution. The blustering wind of the Parisian spring mocked my hesitation, making me stare down at my miserable earthbound feet.
But then, into my view, came another pair of legs, with faded jeans and a pair of dark blue tennis shoes. Slowly, I raised my eyes to see the blue-green eyes very close to my own.
“Ça va?”
Her blue-green eyes could smile.
She came to me like a line of poetry perfectly complete, restoring my breath which had suddenly ceased.
“Ça va …”
Vivienne Deveraux and I were soon to become two dots which, when melding together, formed a line that traced the pores of the body of Paris. Only a few weeks after our first brief meeting that evening on the Sorbonne campus, nature brought us together again on the Rive Gauche, on the southern bank of the Seine. I was at a kiosk there, studying a display of posters in various artistic styles and formats. Their sight took me back to Indonesia, some of them reminding me of Indonesian painters I knew of who used a garish palette of colors in their work: bright yellow, steaming pink, and vivid purple. But there was also the work of artists reminiscent of the woodblock prints of several Eastern European artists. The posters seemed to shout out at me—though I first had to search my mind for the meaning of their words: “Toute la Presse est Toxique,” “La Lutte Continue …”
“The struggle continues …”
Ah, that voice! It was she, again: Vivienne, the woman with the green eyes and the pair of lips whose only imperfection was that they were not locked with mine. She was standing next to me.
She smiled and pointed at the poster I was viewing with its image of six people in silhouette, whose ages, apparel, and accoutrements showed them to be a mix of workers and students, all with their right arms thrust in the air, in which was written, in jagged letters, the words La Lutte Continue.
“That means ‘the struggle continues,’” she said again in English.
“So, the artist is saying that the spirit of the students and the workers are one, is that it?”
“It is the spirit of the entire French people,” she said emphatically.
I nodded but knew that she could see the skeptical look on my face.
Vivienne invited me to join her at an outdoor café nearby, where she immediately ordered coffee for us, not bothering to first ask what I might want. As in almost every other café I had visited in Paris, the coffee was served in a demitasse, whose size was, to my Indonesian mind, much more appropriate for playing house than for serving a proper cup of coffee. The first time I was served a cup of coffee in Paris, it was so strong and thick and had such an incredibly oily taste that I’d almost had a heart attack. My God, what would they have to put in their coffee to make it more palateable, I wondered, a bucket of sugar and a gallon of cream? And now again, for the umpteenth time, with my first sip, the instant the thick and oil-like liquid touched my tongue, my body recoiled in shock.
Vivienne noticed my reaction and the difficulty I was having in swallowing the coffee. “Don’t you like it?”
“You should try Indonesian coffee,” I said hurriedly, trying to cover my social faux pas. “We have hundreds, even thousands of kinds,” I exaggerated, hoping to impress her with my country of origin. I was sure that she, like most other French people I’d met, knew very little about l’Indonésie. I mentioned some of the kinds of coffee that