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The sound I made caused him to stir.

“Hey,” he said, as he wiped his eyes and sat up. “Feeling better?”

“Much better. Who brought me home? And where is Sumarno?”

“Sumarno? What? You must have been dreaming.”

Hmm… I said nothing. This was serious. What year was it anyway?

“Don't you remember getting sick last night? You took some medicine and fell asleep at the restaurant. I ended up cooking for those Malaysian friends of yours. And then Risjaf and I brought you home in a taxi.”

I took two cups from the cupboard and began to prepare coffee.

“You shouldn't be drinking coffee or tea,” Nug told me.

I ignored his ridiculous suggestion. How could I live without coffee?

“Listen, Dimas. While you were asleep, I put my magic needles in several of your pressure points. That's why you're feeling better now. And from the points I stuck, I could tell that something is wrong with your liver.”

Mas Nug sounded more like a charlatan than a healer to me. After the coffee had brewed, I gave a cup to Nug and then poured one for myself. As I took a sip, I noticed that there were some used acupuncture needles in the waste basket. Good God, he wasn't kidding.

“Where did you stick those things in me?” I asked, darting my eyes at my arms and stomach.

“You don't need to know. The important thing is that you're feeling better now. You are, aren't you?”

I nodded. “That doesn't mean I'm going to let you stick those things in me again.”

Mas Nug grinned and took a sip of coffee. “Before you go back to sleep, there are a couple of things that you should know.”

Now what was he going on about? I waited for him to speak.

“The first is that in our conversation with those Malaysian friends of yours last night, the subject of political activism in Indonesia came up. They especially had a lot to say about one particular activist, a young man by the name of Pius Lustrilanang who had been kidnapped and tortured. Not that I found this information particularly surprising, but what did surprise me is not only that this Pius kid survived the torture but, as the Malaysians told it, he convened an international press conference and described in detail how he had been kidnapped and tortured and that he fully intended to find his captors and make them face justice.”

I almost dropped my cup of coffee.

Wasn't that crazy to think of? Justice? In Indonesia? It was one of the most startling things I had heard in my thirty-two years in exile.

“What's happening there?”

Mas Nug shook his head. “I don't know; but now that one person has spoken up, it will only be a matter of time before other victims begin to speak out as well.”

After mulling over this incident, I suddenly remembered something. “And what's the other piece of news?”

“Vivienne called this morning to say that the hospital had
contacted her because the results of your tests are still at the hospital, waiting to be picked up.”

“The hospital called Vivienne?”

Mas Nug shrugged. “When we filled out the registration form at the hospital the time you fell, we put down Vivienne's name and number in case of emergency.”

“What the hell? Damn you!”

Mas Nug shrieked like a monkey with a banana. He knew very well that Vivienne would now be on my tail about getting medical treatment. We may have divorced years ago, but she and I continued to maintain an amicable relationship.

“When I talked to Vivienne, she mentioned that she had told Lintang about you collapsing at the Metro station.”

Merde!
Now that Lintang knew, there would be no end to the matter.

Mas Nug finished his coffee and then packed his kit of needles. He needed to go home and take a bath and change his clothes, he said. Then he'd go to the restaurant to help in the kitchen and would come back to see me in this evening after the restaurant closed.

“We've all agreed that you need to rest. Go get the results of your test, and whatever they may be, follow the doctor's orders! If you don't, I'm going to come back here and stick you with a thousand needles,” he said with a threatening tone.

“But the kitchen…”

“Let me and your two assistants take care of the kitchen. There's no bargaining this time,” said my dictatorial friend, not permitting a reply.

As Mas Nug left my apartment, I listened as he began to sing “What a Wonderful World” in his terribly off-tune voice.

II

LINTANG UTARA

PARIS, APRIL 1998

FROM THE WINDOW OF THE METRO
, I looked out on a gloomy Parisian spring. Dark and gray, thick with haze Where were the colors of cheerful times: bluish purple, golden yellow, and pastel pink? It was April. The air should be suffused with the scent of flowers and the aroma of a freshly baked croissant just dunked into a cup of sweet-smelling hot chocolate. And the people of Paris should be dressing up the city's body in preparation for a glorious summer ahead. But as the great poet T.S. Eliot said so effectively,
April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / memory and desire …

Thus, it's not the fault of Paris, for this city is not a land of the dead that gives birth to putrid-smelling flowers. Nor is it the fault of spring, which should be festooned with flowers. April is an accursed month for the students at the Sorbonne, a time with no pause button for their lives. At this time, professors become gods, doling out assignments for tens of papers and examinations, even as they retire to cafés and bistros to drink glasses of wine and cackle with laughter.

Outside the Metro window, I could still see flashing, from one support beam to the next, the clouded look on Professor Didier Dupont's face—that same sour look that appeared on his face this morning when he watched the video footage I had produced over
a period of several months on the subject of my final assignment:
Le Quartier Algérien à Paris
, the Algerian quarter in Paris.

The light from the small screen flickered on his face. I watched the images of the Algerian immigrants I had interviewed these past few months and whose stories I had methodically recorded. Occasionally, Professor Dupont would squint his eyes and sometimes purse his lips at footage of the adorable and wide-eyed Algerian children but, after ten tense minutes, the professor asked me to sit down in front of him.

For several minutes, my advisor allowed me to fidget nervously as he busily scribbled notes on a pad. Finally he took a breath and looked at me. “
Quelle est votre opinion? C'est un bon plan …
”

His voice was deep as he asked my own opinion of the footage and my future plans.

Professor Dupont was economic with his words and didn't continue his sentence. He took off his glasses, wiped the lenses with an old handkerchief, and then put them back on in a slow, almost stylized, movement.

I knew that he had more to add, but impatiently I raised my hands, palms up, as if to ask, “Well?” The man was getting old.

Professor Dupont tapped the keyboard of his computer, and on the monitor there suddenly appeared a list of final assignments previously undertaken by students of the Sorbonne on the subject of Algerians in Paris. As he scrolled, the list grew longer, with hundreds of titles. My heart suddenly skipped a beat. I knew, of course, that numerous Sorbonne alumni had made documentary films about the Algerians in Paris when they were students. But I was convinced the documentary film I planned to make would be different.

Before I had the chance to express my argument, Professor
Dupont turned the computer screen in my direction. “This is a subject that's been hashed and rehashed by students here. Your proposal isn't a bad one, Lintang.
Non
, not at all,” he said, his blue eyes burrowing into mine. “But it's a good thing this is only a proposal… I strongly suggest you drop it at this stage.”

I found myself forced to nod. I thought of all the footage I had already shot with Algerian immigrants. I had been sure that the professor would agree to my proposal for my final assignment.

“You have great potential, talent, and spirit, Mademoiselle. So, eh, why don't we try coming up with something a little more original?”

T.S. Eliot's poem immediately reverberated in my ears. No wonder the poet hated the month of April.

“I find the Algerian immigrant experience in Paris to be extremely interesting, Professor,” I tried to say in a non-defensive tone. “They are French people who feel themselves to have two homelands.”

Professor Dupont stared me in the eye. His blue eyes reminded me of the turquoise in a ring my mother owned. The stone seemed to be boring into my dulled brain.

“But aren't you forgetting, Lintang, that there is also something very interesting about you and your own background?”

My heart, which I thought had stopped functioning for the past few minutes, suddenly seemed to expand with a surge of new oxygen-giving blood.

“You, too, have two homelands: France and Indonesia. You were born in Paris, grew up in Paris. You know the place. But aren't you curious about that other side of your identity, the land of your father's birth?”

Professor Dupont took a copy of
Le Monde
from off his desk,
which, given its crumpled state, he had apparently read. He opened the paper, folded it, and handed it to me. On page three, a headline read, “
Enlèvement: un Militant Indonésien Prend la Parole
,” a short article about an Indonesian student activist who had been kidnapped but now was speaking out. On the Economics page opposite was a bigger headline and longer article about the monetary crisis now affecting the Asian region, Indonesia included.

I said nothing. I knew the direction Monsieur Dupont's conversation was taking. Indeed, I knew it very well. His question was one that had often disturbed my sleep. It was one that I had long ago stored away and buried deeply in my heart. I didn't want to arouse something that was now at peace, there in the deepest recesses of my heart.

“Your father is a part of an important period in Indonesian history,” he said, refolding the paper and giving it to me. “Take it.”

I took the paper but couldn't find a reply for Monsieur Dupont's suggestion. Staring down at my smudged sneakers now seemed to be much more interesting than looking into the man's blue eyes.

“The country where your father was born is in a state of unrest. Economics is the trigger, but the political situation is becoming increasingly unstable because of the country's one-man rule for so many decades.”

So what if it was!? Wasn't this the case in almost all developing countries, which were constantly going through periods of unrest because of uncertain social and political situations? Many countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia were led by corrupt authoritarian leaders.

“Don't you want to visit the place of your origins? Don't you want to understand what brought your father and his fellow exiles to a country that has almost no historical links to Indonesia?”

Obviously, I knew that my father had come to Paris not to admire the Eiffel Tower or to trace the steps of history at Notre Dame Cathedral. In fact, my father once told me that in all his life he had only twice set foot in the Eiffel Tower and those times had only been because a visiting Indonesian poet had forced him to go there. My father hated tourist sites.

I also knew that my father and his friends had not come to Paris with a briefcase of dreams or a suitcase of plans; there had been something darker, dangerous, and more covert. Even when I was too young to understand much about politics, I already knew that Indonesia—or rather, Soeharto's everlasting and seemingly invincible New Order government—would not make it easy for my father to return to his homeland. This was what Maman always told me. And this was a topic I always avoided, because whenever Ayah began to think of Indonesia, he would inevitably begin to cry, painful and bitter tears.

I pretended to clear my throat. “I've never been to Indonesia.”

Monsieur Dupont pretended to be deaf. “What?”

“I know very little about Indonesia.”

My first statement was true: in all of my twenty-three years I had never once set foot in Indonesia, because my father, regardless of how much he missed his homeland, could not take me there. But the second statement, I had to admit, was a lie. Of course I “knew” Indonesia, even if only in second-hand fashion—from Ayah, and his three friends, my three adoptive uncles, Om Nugroho, Om Tjahjadi, and Om Risjaf; from books and documentary films; and even from arguments my parents had. But also from certain incidents, both good and bad, which formed a source of tension between my father and myself to this very day.

“If you know so little, don't you want to know more?
Tu veux
s'évader de l'histoire?
Do you wish to run from your history?”

Monsieur Dupont spoke with a flat tone, but I could hear him clearly. His questions were daggers and I could feel drops of fresh blood dripping from my heart. I'm sure he knew just what he was doing and what was happening inside me.