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My three friends attacked the table like a trio of prisoners who'd been fed charred rice for a week. Tjai used chopsticks to eat the noodles, moving them so quickly and easily that his bowl of noodles was empty and slick in just a short time. Risjaf, on the other hand, picked slowly at his portion, savoring each mouthful as he ate. Lintang, meanwhile, helped herself to a second portion; the bowl she was using was a child's-size bowl. Vivienne smiled with satisfaction as we finished our bowls and then gave us permission to smoke.

While the rest of us stretched out on our chairs in the living room, staring at our embarrassingly protruding stomachs, Risjaf continued to eat his noodles slowly, not caring that the rest of us had already finished. With greasy lips, still slick from his noodles, he said offhandedly, “Why is it that you can't get fried noodles this good anywhere in Paris?”

Mas Nug suddenly looked at Risjaf and blinked, as if a light bulb had come on in his head.

“Yeah, just think,” Risjaf went on, “how nice it would be if, whenever we pleased, we could eat fried noodles as good as Dimas makes. Or his fried rice smelling of shrimp paste. God, my mouth is beginning to water just thinking about it. Or his
nasi kuning
,
like the kind he made for Lintang's birthday, with nice crispy slices of tempeh.”

Suddenly, as if struck by what he was saying, Risjaf shrieked like a scientist who had just solved some kind of formula: “That's it, Dimas! I know what business we can do! I've got it!”

Mas Nug and Risjaf beamed at each other happily, like they wanted to hug each other. Oh, no, I thought. What would they have me do? Start up a catering business?

But then I looked at Tjai, whose eyes were shining brightly with a glow that permeated mine—a completely different reaction from the one earlier, when we had been discussing business ideas he dismissed as crazy.

He looked at me straight in the face. “That's it, Dimas. I think we've discovered our destiny. As a cook, you know, you are second to none.”

I had never heard Tjai speak with such enthusiasm before. His eyes flashed. Mas Nug put his hands on my shoulders and called out to the heavens: “Dimas! We are going to open an Indonesian restaurant in Paris!”

Even though the Parisian summer was still so hot I thought my skin was going to blister, my heart felt cool now that a decision had been reached. The next night we gathered at Risjaf's apartment and, with no objections to slow down the course of conversation, we discussed our new plan. Mas Nug, twisting the ends of his Clark Gable mustache, usurped the role of manager and began to issue orders as to what each of our tasks would be.

“Obviously, Dimas will be the head cook and will choose the menu. We all know that he has a way of changing the simplest
ingredients into a wonderful meal—no different from the words that slip from his pen to become a poem.”

I guessed that Mas Nug's excessive praise was his way of consoling me because Tjai had not given his consent to the literary journal I wanted to produce.

“Tjai will look into a financial model. Once we've come up with a proposal, we can send it to possible funding sources: government and non-government agencies and the like as well as to our friends scattered throughout Europe, inviting them to contribute to the cause or to lend us the money we'll need. We have to weigh the alternatives and choose the best one. Tjai can also look into what kind of business our restaurant should be, a limited license corporation, for instance, or possibly a co-op…”

“A cooperative. Obviously, a cooperative!” Tjai said firmly.

“OK, a cooperative it is,” said Mas Nug obediently, leaving me to wonder who in our group held the most authority.

“And in our proposal,” Mas Nug said immediately, as if to reaffirm his position, “we must be very clear about the
raison d'être
for the business model we've chosen. It might be, for instance, for the purpose of strengthening solidarity. As a cooperative, this will mean that we have to schedule an annual
assemblée générale
and choose a slate of managers every two years.”

I looked at Mas Nug with admiration. Any time we started to discuss how to run an organization, his brain worked as fast as lightning. Since Mas Hananto was no longer with us, it seems that the spirit of leadership had moved to him—even though it was at times expropriated by Tjai, who had a much greater faculty for finance and figures.

Risjaf stood like a soldier at attention, waiting for orders from his commander; but Mas Nug pretended not to notice. “Someone
will have to undertake a survey of other restaurants—especially the Asian ones: Vietnamese, Indian, and Chinese—to see if we should focus on a place for fine dining, a casual eatery, or maybe a fast food place where people could take their meals home.”

“It's not going to be fast food!” I answered quickly. “Indonesian food is fine for a casual restaurant and even for fine dining, but definitely not for fast food. And we're going to have a bar. This is Paris, after all. I'll get to work on coming up with a menu,” I said with a growing sense of confidence.

Everyone listened attentively. Tjai diligently took notes.

I ran on, a dam now bursting inside me: “One thing for sure is that we should hold lots of kinds of events: book launches, for instance; discussions about developments in Indonesia; and literary readings, films, art exhibitions, and photography. We'll need a curator so that they run smoothly and so that the people who come to them will want to stay and eat at the restaurant or drink at the bar. That way, the place can become known not just as a good place to eat, but as a place where people can hang out and socialize.”

My three friends clapped their hands happily, even Tjai who stood and raised his thumb when I mentioned the need for a bar.

“I can do the research. I can also curate the events!” Risjaf said, still standing in front of Mas Nug.

Mas Nug smiled, not wanting to dampen Risjaf's enthusiasm. “OK, but you can't do everything, you know. You'll wear yourself out. You plan the opening night and the nights that follow with a range of events. We can divide up the research on restaurants; there's a lot of them that we'll have to look at.”

“And what are you going to do?” Tjai was heard to say flatly.

Mas Nug twisted the tip of his mustache. “I will explore the city of Paris and study the advertising section in
Le Figaro
. We need to
find a location, don't we?”

Good God! Of course, Mas Nug was right, and that was something that had to be done right away.

Tjai nodded and made more notes. That night we each raised a glass of wine, except for Risjaf, that is, who held in his hand a ginger drink of
wedang jahé
instead. Clinking our glasses together, we said in unison, “To our restaurant.”

We looked at each other.

“What should we call it?” Risjaf said to Mas Nug.

Mas Nug turned his head towards me. “Let's ask our resident poet!”

I looked at my friends, one by one. Someone was missing. There should have been five of us.

I took a deep breath and exhaled. “We, the four of us, are the pillars of Tanah Air Restaurant.”

We again clinked our glasses together. Tanah Air. Homeland. The name immediately stole my heart.

PARIS
, 1975

Tjai, Risjaf, and I shared an unspoken agreement: ever since Rukmini had asked Mas Nug for a divorce in order to marry Lieutenant-Colonel Prakosa, we had surrendered to him the authority to act as our leader. Though we all believed in equality and didn't think we actually needed a leader, Mas Nug seemed to need this kind of recognition, even if only temporarily. At least that's what we'd surmised. And it all started that accursed evening when, after receiving his wife's request for a divorce, he'd been shaken to the core and had tried to drown himself in alcohol. Nugroho Dewantoro, this man from Yogyakarta in the heart of Java, who always insisted on
speaking egalitarian Indonesian rather than status-marked Javanese, was a very sentimental man. In fact, I even suspected that despite his frequent bouts of womanizing, he prized above all else the warmth that only a family can bring. Unlike Mas Hananto, whose relationship with Surti was complicated by perceptions of class difference—which was a psychological barrier of sorts for him—Mas Nug didn't think about such things. If he wanted a woman, he wanted her, clear and simple. He became attracted to Rukmini and despite the fact that his green-eared friend Risjaf already had his sights set on her, he cast his net and succeeded in winning the orchid for himself. He then went on to marry her, the beautiful Rukmini with the sharp tongue. But because it became apparent to Risjaf and I that Mas Nug truly did love Rukmini, we long ago forgave him and joined in his happiness, especially so when Bimo Nugroho, the son the couple had wished for, appeared just nine months after their wedding.

What I always found difficult to understand about Mas Hananto and Mas Nug is why, with all their political activities and responsibilities as husbands and fathers, they felt such a compulsion to sleep with other women. Mas Hananto said that he wanted to feel the “passion of the proletarian woman in bed.” As sorry and trite as that class-based justification sounds, Mas Nug couldn't come up with a reason even as good as that. Good-looking and hirsute, with a thick mustache and a gilded tongue, Mas Nug easily attracted women to him, proverbial moths to a flame. It wasn't surprising, therefore, that even with his stateless status and lack of permanent address either in Peking or in Zurich, he was able to easily win women's favors and hearts. In the latter location, the crazy thing was that his mistress there was one Mrs. Agnes Baumgartner, the wife of a policeman and one of his acupuncture clients. Initially,
it was the husband who had come to Mas Nug, complaining of aches from rheumatism and arthritis; but then Mas Nug had gone on to use his therapeutic skills on Mrs. Baumgartner, who, as he described it, was especially achy and in need of his special touch. According to Mas Nug, the woman's thighs and midsection required special care and treatment.

When I called Mas Nug from Paris and then had to listen to him tell me of his sexual conquest in Zurich, my blood went straight to my brain. I barked at him to follow Tjai's suit and come to Paris immediately—not just so that our group could be together again or because of my concern for Rukmini and Bimo, but because of the stupid and dangerous position his sexual shenanigans were putting him in. Engaging in an affair with a married woman in a foreign country was not the same as keeping a mistress on the side in Jakarta or, for that matter, plucking an orchid in our more youthful days. The woman's husband was a police officer, for God's sake. And this wasn't Indonesia; it was the West, whose written and unwritten rules we could not yet pretend to be familiar with.

My vitriol apparently worked the trick and Mas Nug arrived in Paris a few weeks later, but with a very long face. Once again, I simply couldn't understand how it was possible for him to fall in love with a woman he'd only just met.

Seven years later a letter from Rukmini made its way from Jakarta to Paris and into Mas Nug's hand: a request for a divorce. That night, I supported Mas Nug's weight as he stumbled towards the Metro Station, all the while trying to persuade him to lower the volume of his increasingly shrill and incoherent voice. At the station, I remember clearly the severely wounded look on his face.

Half drunk, he spoke brokenly. “You know, Dimas…actually…
it was when I was in Zurich…I received a letter from Rukmini.” His voice trembled and tears welled in his eyes. “In it she turned down my request for her to join me in Europe…but she didn't tell me why.”

I said nothing, my mind for some reason still on his adventure with the policeman's wife.

“And Agnes, Mrs. Baumgartner, you know, was more than just a patient of mine.”

“I know. You told me about your needles, her thighs.”

“Yes, but I didn't tell you the real reason why.” Mas Nug's voice grew hoarse and he shook his head violently.

I looked into his eyes, red and burning with pain.

“It was her name… I called her ‘Baumgartner' but that wasn't her married name. It was her maiden name. But, you know, in German ‘
baumgartner
' means someone who owns a garden…”

“So?”

“So, every time I made love with her, all I could imagine was a bed of orchids.”