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“I apologize for having disturbed you. If you can't help me, that is perfectly fine.” She stood and gathered her things. “Really, I can do this on my own. I'm quite used to it.”

Oh, shit. What did I do now to make her angry?

She again started looking for something in her knapsack, lowering her head and sticking her hand into the bag. This time she quickly found what she was looking for.

“This is for you, from my father,” she said in a crackly voice. “My father said that your father gave it to him the last night they saw each other. My father wants you to have it.”

I was stunned to receive from her a classic old watch with Roman numerals on its face. A 17-jewel Titoni. The leather watch-band was obviously new, but the watch seemed to still be running well. My heart stopped beating. Suddenly, Lintang had vanished. Flabbergasted by how fast this Frenchwoman could walk, I rushed to follow her.

“Hey, hey, slow down…”

Lintang was already on the sidewalk in front of our office. Did she know Jakarta or where she was?

“Lintang…”

She turned. Damn it! I'd made her cry.
What the hell…?

“I apologize.”

Lintang again looked for something in her knapsack, all the while saying “No need, no need,” Finally, she found a packet of tissues and blew her nose. A whole gob of snot came out. So she really was crying. Maybe I had been insensitive, but I was serious. I really didn't know what I'd said that had upset her.

“Lintang…”

I put my hand on her arm. She said nothing, but didn't yank it away either. Suddenly, out of the blue, a crazy idea came into my head.

“Listen, Lintang, let me take you somewhere interesting for you to record. I promise that from there you will be able to find the context for the topic of your final assignment. Follow me!”

She stared at me curiously with her large and tear-filled eyes. “Where?”

Images of the statues in the diorama danced around in front of me like characters on a carousel. This blood-filled diorama continued to flash before me. And at that moment I knew: Lintang Utara would make a documentary film full of significance and heretofore silenced voices.

BIMO NUGROHO

MY CHILDHOOD HOME
. A house filled with tension and disappointment. I never wanted to go back there again. But that is where my mother resides, still silently serving the man she calls her husband at a house in the Tebet area of Jakarta, where he took her along with the risk that she would bring me with her as well.

When my mother married Bapak Prakosa—whom I will never be able to call “Father”—I knew that my life would change. But even though my father, my real
bapak
, had disappeared from our lives long before, this didn't mean that I had to willingly accept this man's presence in my life. In our lives.

Bapak Prakosa was not an evil man—though his career in the military was not a profession that would immediately endear him to many. But he also wasn't a person who gladly or wholeheartedly accepted the burden that the woman he married brought with her. Bapak Prakosa viewed raising me as an unwanted but necessary duty, something he had to do for the beautiful woman he had taken for his wife. It was a risk he had to take.

I never tried to be the son he wanted. For him, a boy who liked to doodle and draw was fairly useless, not much of a male child at all. That my classmates at school often heckled me because my real father, Nugroho Dewantoro, was said to be a traitor to the state was not a subject I ever brought up at our meals together.
The bruises on my body and my puffed lips were always caused by “having fallen on the stairs at school” or “getting roughed up when playing soccer.” (Since when did I ever play soccer?) All those incidents I remember well and have transformed them into comic-strips. Maybe someday I'll publish the collection.

One very determinant day in my life occurred when I was in junior high school. Ibu had gone somewhere and was not at home. Pak Prakosa called for me.

“Do you think I don't know that you're getting beat up by kids at school?” he stated more than asked.

I didn't answer. My eyes studied the ceramic tiles on the floor of my stepfather's home.

“Do you think I can't tell the difference between a bruise that comes from a fall and one from being beaten?”

The tiles looked expensive. Maybe that's what they call “marble”?

“I am your father. Listen to me!”

You are not my father.

Pak Prakosa came close and stared at me. A cold look. But also a gleam that spoke of his will to put some gumption into this soft stepson of his.

“Fight back! Don't take it. Beat them up!”

Now I stared at my shoes.

“Are you listening, Bimo?” He clenched my hand and shaped my fingers into a fist.

“This is how you do it, with a clenched fist. Come on!”

Listlessly, I clenched my fist.

“Do it right!”

He took a cigarette and lit it. “I don't want to see you get beat up again by other boys. Fight back! Do you get it?”

I nodded.

“Where's your voice?”

“Yes, sir.”

His words of advice were useless, of course. Once, when I was in junior high, I was beaten by three classmates, big and burly guys they seemed to me. It was Alam who came to my rescue. But when Pak Prakosa saw me come home with bruises all over my body, he was so disgusted with me that he jabbed the lighted end of his cigarette into my arms and thighs. That was his usual choice of punishment, the one he meted out whenever he found something wrong in me.

It was around that time that I began to see my home as a hell hole, filled with tension and disappointment. My poor mother was too blind to see. Either that or she was too busy erasing all traces of my real father, the man whose child she had borne but who had disappeared from her life. There were no photographs of my real father on display in the house. No personal effects that he had ever owned. Not even any letters from him to me—at least not until one day when Alam came to the house to give me a letter that my father had sent to the Hananto family home. Somehow, my real father had at last figured out that if he wanted to communicate with me, it would have be through an intermediary. Thereafter, when he wanted to speak to me, he'd first call Om Aji's or Tante Surti's and tell them when and where he was going to call back. They would then call me and I would go and wait wherever it was he was going to call. I especially liked it when he called me at Om Aji's, because it gave me an excuse to see Andini, whom I was secretly fond of. I'd always borrow her books and pretend to forget to return them to her.

No one else in the world knew about what I was going through except Alam. Maybe Andini suspected. And I suppose Kenanga,
Bulan, and Tante Surti might have guessed as well, since Alam was always getting punished at school for standing up for me. That Tante Surti often invited me to stay overnight at their house was another indication that she knew something of my troubled relationship with my stepfather.

Once, when Alam and I were in senior high, this gang of boys beat me up, tied me to a pole, and took turns pissing on me. Alam came in like a superhero to save me and beat the shit out of those guys. Afterwards, when the principal called my mother to school, it was difficult for me to lie anymore about what was happening. I was just happy that on that particular day God showed mercy on me. Pak Prakosa happened to be on duty out of town, so I managed to escape punishment from him.

In 1982, after graduation from high school, I was accepted for admission to the Faculty of Social Science and Politics at the University of Indonesia. Alam got into the Faculty of Law. This was when I finally was able to say goodbye to the hell of living in my stepfather's home. Alam and I moved into a crappy boarding house near the campus in Rawamangun. Money was tight and food was whatever we could manage. Sometimes we ended up eating instant noodles for weeks on end. But that was OK. If we got too hungry or wanted some variation in our diet, we weren't at all embarrassed to go to Tante Surti's place, on Jalan Percetakan Negara. Alam's family home always felt more comfortable and pleasant than my own home ever had; and Tante Surti was always generous, ever ready to give us a simple but comforting meal. On weekend nights, when Alam was teaching karate to his students, I'd lounge about in his room drawing by myself. Sometimes I'd draw faces: my mother; my father as a young man with a thin mustache, just as he appeared in an old photograph; Andini; and others.
Sometimes I'd just scribble, producing images in shapes and forms as unclear and uncertain as my future.

On nights that he taught, Alam would usually come back around ten, always sweating but never tired of trying to persuade me to study the art of self-defense so that we could “beat the shit out of sons-of-bitches like Denny and all other species like him,”

Alam was like a brother to me, and I knew he felt the same. He wanted me to be as butch and masculine as he was, ready to face any challenge. But I wasn't born with his body of steel or sarcastic wit. He was always telling me that I had to build my own future, that I had to do something, anything at all, to make our country a better place. He sounded so heroic and full of fire, which I admired; but I knew I would never be like him. Even so, I truly did want to do something to make this country a better place, even if it was only through my drawings, because I had no idea whether the knowledge I gained in my studies at the university would ever help to make this country better.

And now here I am, back again at my childhood home, standing outside with the same feelings of tension and disappointment that plagued my childhood. Why had did I so readily agreed when Alam asked me to meet him here? I suppose it was because when he finally returned to the office at around sundown yesterday, he had in tow with him Om Dimas's daughter, Lintang. Sight for sore eyes that she was, I couldn't cuss him out in front of her. The demonstration to protest the rise in fuel prices and the corruption, collusion, and nepotism that were underming this country hadn't broken up until around the time for evening prayer, and all that ass could do when he finally appeared was to grin and smile. Gilang didn't seem at all put out, and gave Lintang an enthusiastic welcome.

So we didn't get much of a chance to speak. We just snapped at each other under our breath. The demonstration had gone off smoothly, I have to confess, without any untoward incidents and all pretty much according to plan. But Alam was gone the whole day! And the thing is, I'm sorry to admit, when Alam isn't around, I'm reluctant to act on my own. Gilang has hectored me about this, my “dependence” on Alam, saying that it's reached a “worrisome stage.” Which is why, I suppose, he'd been very happy to see me flying solo that day.

“Where have you been?” I asked Alam.

“Long story.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'll tell you later. Hey, how about if we meet at your mother's house tomorrow?”

“What for?”

“Don't argue. Let's meet there tomorrow, OK? Call it a history exercise.”

Sometimes, Alam could be brilliant. He was always bubbling over with new and interesting ideas. But just as often, they seemed crazy to me. Why were we meeting at this hell house?

Eleven o'clock on the dot, the shithead appeared with Ms. Beautiful beside him. Hmm, with Lintang around, maybe Alam was going to be careful about bathing and start shaving regularly?

“Wow! Clean as a dolphin's backside!” I said in jest, because Alam often neglected to shave, even though he was a guy with a constant five o'clock shadow. Alam just smiled at the remark. No way! This was going to be trouble! Whenever Alam started seeing a girl, he'd usually be all hot and bothered about her for about two weeks max. If he passed the one-month mark in a relationship, it was an exception. And in such cases it was usually I who had to
lend a shoulder to the woman whose heart he'd broken for her to cry on. …Which happened not too long ago when Andini and I were forced to console Rianti, who cried so much her eyes were swollen and puffy. She was just the latest in a string of girlfriends Alam had broken it off with because she had asked for assurances about their future. I felt sorry for Om Dimas's pretty daughter if Alam was going to take her for a ride.

“Hi, Bimo.” Lintang smiled and placed her hand on my shoulder. “I didn't get a chance yesterday to give you the package your father sent with me.” She took from her knapsack a small package and a white letter-sized envelope which she gave to me. My eyes were fixed on her bag. “He said he was sending some recent photographs so that you'll know he's still young and fit-looking,” Lintang said with a laugh.

I thanked Lintang but put the package aside for opening later and then invited them to take a seat on the front terrace. Even though it was a Saturday and the office is closed that day, I was sure that Gilang would soon be calling everyone for us to gather that night or the next morning, because the government was supposed to announce an increase in fuel prices. There were no days off from the struggle.

Lintang and Alam sat beside each other on the rattan settee. When Lintang asked where the bathroom was, I pointed inside the house and to the left. Only then, after Alam and I were alone, did I get the chance to swear at him.