Twilight in Djakarta (11 page)

And Saimun scratched his head, unable to imagine just how much money he would get every day as an autolette driver.

They gazed into the distance, full of wonderment at the possibilities the days to come held for them, when they could get their licence and work as autolette drivers.

A whirling wind chased and scattered the flying bits of dry rubbish along the tracks of the electric train between the stop at Nusantara Street and Pintu Air II. The day was blazing hot. This whirling wind lifted the flies, too lazy to move from the tops of rubbish heaps along the road. Car horns blared, punctuated from time to time by the screeching of suddenly clamped brakes, followed by ejaculations from a swearing and scolding driver.

Suddenly the air was rent by the piercing scream of a woman, the sound of someone being beaten, the repeated scream of the
woman and then a stream of abuse.

Along the wall near the railway in the ruins of a former
half-torn-
down train-stop shelter, the city vagrants had their shanties. Old charcoal baskets had been piled up to serve as walls; worn-out, shredded pandanus mats were laid on the earth for floors. The roofs of these shanties were made of blackened and rusty pieces of old cans, patched together with bits of old cardboard. Larger cans which once held butter were set on cooking-stoves made of a few piled-up stones, and these served as kitchens.

A tiny, slender woman was trying to extricate her hair from the grip of a man’s fists. The woman screamed. The man was small and thin too, no older perhaps than sixteen or seventeen; he should have been on a school bench at this time of day, not pulling the little woman’s hair by the railway line.

The woman was beating the chest and the face of the man who was pulling her hair with both hands. His hands were clenched into small tight fists, and he too screamed. Suddenly he released his grip, and she fell hard to the ground. He stepped towards her, kicked her in the head with his emaciated, dirty, bare foot. Infuriated by the kick, the young woman leaped to her feet, picked up a stick and, like someone who had gone berserk, she swung it against the head of the man. The man, not having anticipated this sudden attack, could not escape the blow and one could hear the sound of the wood hitting his skull.

The man yelled with pain and rage.

‘The devil, you stubborn woman!’ he cursed in fury and with all his might he pushed with both hands against her chest and she was hurled to the ground once more. He advanced, to kick her again, but the woman jumped up and retreated until her back was against the wall. She was not afraid. Abuse spouted uninterruptedly from her mouth. Three or four vagrants sat and lay inside and outside their shanties, but paid no attention to the raging fight.

‘Brave with a woman, lu!’ the little woman’s ringing voice
reproached. ‘If lu dare, just kill me right now! Kill me!’ And she bared her chest half covered by her torn kebaya. Her breasts, still round and firm, were bathed by the light of the hot sun-rays.

The man stepped closer, as if wanting to hit her again.

‘What good is a man like this!’ screamed the young woman again. ‘Talks a lot. Brags! Lu promised to marry me. I’m in the third month already. Why lu didn’t marry me yet? Lu say, no money! But for gambling there’s money! Where’s the house? Lu said you had money! Said you had a house! Said you have work! Me – I’ve become a whore, lu not ashamed! You’re eating whoring money, lu!’

She wept and threw herself on the ground, sobbing and hiding her head. The man stood, perplexed. And he scratched his big toe against the dirt on the ground.

‘I’ve looked for work, there is none,’ he said vaguely.

‘If only I’d stayed in my kampung, I wouldn’t have been ruined like this. Why did I follow you?’ the little woman wailed again. ‘Now I’m a whore, without shame, selling myself every night. Because of lu I did it, aduh Gusti,
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forgiiive!’ And she wept violently.

‘Forgiiiiiive, Gusti, aduh Gustiiiii!’ the woman repeated in long-drawn wails, screaming up to the scorching hot heaven, hurling upward her despair, begging for human help, begging for human consolation, begging for human protection, begging for human mercy, begging for human love and solace.

‘Why did I get like this, aduh, Gustiii! Who turned me into this …?’ she wailed, flinging her laments to humanity.

The little woman tore her own hair with both hands, beat her breast, threw herself on the ground, wailing in a high voice, ‘Help me, God, why did I get like this, who turned me into this?’

The young fellow looked at her, made a step towards her, shoved her with his foot half-heartedly and said, ‘You whore!’

And then he walked away.

‘
J
UST LISTEN
to their talk for a while,’ Suryono was saying to Sugeng. ‘Sometimes their discussions are quite good, though frequently they get off the track, and then they’re way up in the clouds. It’s really amusing when what’s-his-name begins to discuss the Oedipus complex by – who was that writer, he’s dead, I forget his name …? But nevertheless they’re friends of mine. They’re good people – only a bit mixed up. They think they’re helping their country by discussing intensively all sorts of questions. At first they said that these discussions were needed to find out what sort of problems face us. When we know what the problems are it will be easier to solve them, they said. The pity of it, as I see it, is that these intensive discussions with
high-flown
theorising have now become an end in themselves, and are no longer a means as originally intended. But they mean well!’

Sugeng said nothing. He didn’t care too much what Suryono was telling him. When Suryono had invited him to attend a meeting of the discussion club run by Suryono’s friends, he was actually not too eager to go. Why should I go along? he had asked. But Suryono insisted that he join him, and, after all, Suryono’s father was someone to reckon with because of his great influence in the party that had done such wonders for him since he’d joined – and so he went along.

Suddenly Suryono, blowing his horn hard and clamping down the brakes, swore.

‘You pig!’ he shouted.

An old woman carrying a baby ran in fright to one side of the street.

‘Lucky the brakes are good, if not she’d be dead. Crossing the
street without using her head,’ Suryono raged and cursed. ‘How will Indonesia ever get ahead? If they can’t even cross a street?’

‘Ah, don’t be like that,’ said Sugeng. He remembered the time before he had joined the party, and how difficult it was then to live as a civil servant. ‘Such people have very hard lives. Maybe she didn’t hear the horn because she was hungry, and was full of worries about how to get food for tonight.’

‘Ah, that’s not true. When people are hungry their senses are sharpened, that’s what I read in an article by a doctor,’ answered Suryono.

Inwardly though, he recognised the justice of Sugeng’s remark, and this annoyed and angered him even more. I don’t like this man, he thought, of Sugeng sitting beside him.

As Suryono stepped on the accelerator again he was suddenly seized by a feeling of depression. A feeling which for a number of times had been creeping up on him at the most unexpected moments. While he was enjoying himself with Dahlia, in the middle of a good meal at a restaurant, when he was on the point of signing a cheque or when he climbed into his fine car. What it was that disturbed him so he found it impossible to say precisely, but it made him feel uneasy, as though something were wrong, and behind it all loomed a kind of fear. Just what kind of fear he couldn’t make out exactly either. So he ended up just feeling put out, and often was annoyed with the people who happened to be around him.

It was thus that he had had his first quarrel with Dahlia. Dahlia had sensed a change in him, and had asked him whether he was tired of her. Her question made him angry and he had inquired rudely, did she want money or didn’t she. But on that occasion he’d soon asked her to forgive him, and amity between them had been restored. He had taken Iesye out to a restaurant once, and while they were happily sitting down to their meal this odd feeling had emerged again as he saw a little beggar-girl approaching their
table. Because this strange fear was mingled with his annoyance and uneasiness at the sight of her, he’d flown into a rage and had snapped at the little beggar so harshly that the child fled in fright. Iesye had then got very angry, refused to go on with the meal and asked him to take her home right away. In the car, up to her home, he had begged her to forgive him, but Iesye had remained silent and would not speak to him. He tried hard during the following two weeks to rehabilitate himself in Iesye’s eyes, but she remained unmoved. The harder he tried, the more distant Iesye became. All this convinced Suryono, however, that he really loved Iesye, and must marry her were he to attain happiness in life. He became very jealous if he saw or heard that Iesye was going out with another man, especially if he heard that she was out with Pranoto.

He kept going to the evening discussions mainly to catch a glimpse of Iesye and to watch how Pranoto behaved towards her. He also felt that it was easier to get to talk with Iesye at these meetings. All this unpleasantness came to his mind because of Sugeng’s earlier remark, and he felt deeply upset and rather angry. But he restrained himself. He reminded himself how much they needed Sugeng. But even so he couldn’t calm down. It’s easy for him to talk, but isn’t he out for what he can get like the rest? he said to himself. No sooner had this thought crossed his mind than it seemed as if a sudden shaft of light pierced him to the heart. It became clear to him at that moment what it was that he was doing, what his father was doing, what Husin Limbara was doing for his party and what they were asking Sugeng to do. He was appalled, and a terrible feeling of shame and guilt mixed with fear gripped his heart. But a moment later this feeling was gone again. Deliberately suppressed. He recalled Husin Limbara’s words, ‘We are doing all this to further our people’s struggle for social justices to defend the Pantjasila as the foundation of our state. Ours is the only political party that firmly upholds the Pantjasila as the basis of the state. The Islamic
parties want to create a Darul Islam
1
state, the communist party wants to create a communist state and so on. That’s why our party has to win the general elections. In order to win, the party needs money, and plenty of it. Therefore, we are simply doing our bit in the struggle to save the Pantjasila. That’s the reason we are doing all this, and we’ve got the full approval of the party’s council.’

Suryono thus reassured himself with Husin Limbara’s words, and was able to enjoy driving his Dodge sedan again. Also his annoyance with Sugeng disappeared and he turned to him.

‘Have you bought a car already?’

‘Ah, not yet. I’m still hesitant. If I buy a car, the people at the office will suspect there’s something fishy.’

‘What are you afraid of? The minister will protect you. If people start asking questions, couldn’t you say that you got a present from your family? Put it down on your wife’s name. How much did you get this month, a hundred thousand?’

‘A little less,’ Sugeng replied.

‘If you apply for priority to get a car, as head of a division, you’re sure to get it. On this priority you can get something like a Zephyr – costs only sixty-two thousand. You could resell this car for one hundred and twenty-five. Then you can buy yourself a
second-hand
car for about fifty thousand, they’re decent enough, and you are left with a clear seventy-five thousand profit,’ said Suryono.

‘Maybe, I am not sure yet what to do with so much money got so easily,’ Sugeng told Suryono. ‘I never dreamed that I’d ever get so much money with so little effort. I used to feel very envious seeing other people with fine houses, cars, lots of money, going in and out of restaurants as they pleased. But now, with that much money, I’m a bit scared.

‘Scared? Why?’ asked Suryono. His resentment of Sugeng returned at once. Sugeng had reawakened his anxiety. Yet he wanted to hear Sugeng describe his apprehensions.

‘Perhaps because I think like an official,’ Sugeng responded. ‘But I do feel somehow that even though all the licences we issue are legal and are approved by the minister himself, what we’re doing is wrong. Why, for example, do we give preference to the Hati Sutji
1
corporation, a corporation chartered only a month ago, with a staff of only one director, who has no office, no staff, no experience and no business connections abroad? While other import firms, also run by our nationals, who have been in business for years, operating on a completely bona-fide basis, aren’t supposed to get anything? Ah, and there’s lots more. For instance, there’s that business run by a group of veterans claiming to represent tens of thousands of other veterans; I happen to know, they aren’t veterans at all, and they haven’t done a thing for a single veteran. When I think of all this I get scared. I’m afraid that what we’re doing is improper and that we’ve overstepped the limits somewhere.’

‘Ah,’ said Suryono. Doubts assailed him once more. But for his own peace of mind, he had to dispel Sugeng’s fears. He had to convince Sugeng that they were right.

‘You’re too much of a bureaucrat! That’s all. Don’t you remember what Husin Limbara said? It’s all for the sake of our people’s welfare. We must look at these things in wider perspective.’

‘I could feel at peace if it were really just for that one purpose,’ Sugeng replied. ‘But why should I be getting hundreds of thousands of rupiah? Why are so many people making fortunes out of it? They certainly don’t pass on everything to the party?’

Suryono was silent, he recognised the truth of Sugeng’s words. Doubt and anxiety rose in him again.

‘Well, just tell me – why?’ Sugeng was pressing.

Suryono did not answer. He tried to cover up his own anxiety by laughing.

‘Ah, because we’re just not used to having tens of thousands of rupiah in our pockets. But what does it amount to, anyway? Just think how much the Dutch and the Chinese have scraped up here over the centuries!’

Sugeng wanted to retort, but the car had reached Pranoto’s house and Suryono was greeting Murhalim, who was leaning his bicycle against the wall.

As they got out of the car Murhalim said, laughing,

‘Hallo millionaire, when did you exchange your car for an even larger one?’

Suryono, undisturbed by Murhalim’s insinuation, laughed and introduced Sugeng.

‘Here’s a new friend I brought along. He wants to participate in our discussions.’

The hell I do! Sugeng thought to himself. A lot of nice phrases!

Sugeng and Murhalim shook hands.

‘What’s tonight’s discussion about?’ Suryono asked Murhalim.

‘Pranoto will speak on the problems Western technology poses for our intellectuals.’

Aduh, more empty talk, Suryono commented inwardly.

They went inside. Sugeng was introduced to Pranoto, Iesye, Yasrin and six other people. The room, not too large, was already full.

‘What I have to say are just a few basic ideas, what I hope to get are your reactions, brothers. As I stated last month, Western technology presents a problem to our intellectuals, because its impact upon our people who are still traditionally oriented ….’

Suryono covered up a yawn with his left hand and looked stealthily at Iesye.

Iesye, feeling that she was being looked at, turned towards Suryono and smiled. Suryono smiled back, felt very happy and was now prepared to pay attention to Pranoto’s discourse.

‘The special problem of our people in confronting Western
technology,’ said Pranoto, ‘is that we’ve been given no time, there is no transitional period. We either have to accept and use it or we’ll just have to go on being a backward nation. We must accept and use this Western technology not just for the people’s physical well-being, but also to ensure their spiritual freedom. In essence the problem can be reduced to a “to be or not to be” for our people. If we want to see our nation strong and independent we must accept Western technology. To reject it is to pass a death sentence on our own people. In facing this choice, many Indonesian intellectuals are hesitant. Their attitudes vary. Some reject it completely, because they consider the values of Western life incompatible with the spirit of the East, and see Western values as shallow and materialistic (which is true in part). Others want to adopt only what seems valuable and useful to them and reject what they don’t like, but such people never specify just which Western values they prize and which they consider harmful, or how one could consciously make the distinction and put it into practice. I believe that we must accept them as a whole, the good and what we now regard as bad, and let our people make up their own minds, in the creative process of adaptation.’

Murhalim said at this point, ‘If brother Pranoto has finished presenting his basic ideas, may I intervene now?’

Pranoto did not object, but added,

‘There are still a few aspects of the problem I have not yet touched upon, but I’ll be able to bring them up in the discussion later. It’s all right by me if brother Murhalim wants to speak now.’

‘First, I’d like to observe that although the problem of Western technology certainly exists for our intellectuals we stress this problem far too much. It’s as though we’re bewitched by the West, and every aspect of thought is inevitably drawn to the West. It’s almost as if we were radios tuned in to a single wave-length, receiving broadcasts from only one station – the West. For me the question is, why the West? And, as I see it, this continued
orientation to the West won’t lead us anywhere. Don’t you realise that eighty or ninety per cent of our people are Moslems? The majority is fanatically religious even though ninety-nine per cent of them have no real conception of the spirit of Islam. Even among Islamic leaders themselves there are very few who understand it, its dynamic power to guide not only the spiritual life of the individual but also the total reorganisation of society. I remember Ies once raising the question of whether a revitalised and creative Islam could give us an answer to the problems challenging us today. Since then I have been thinking the question over, and I’ve tried to find an answer in some modern books on Islam. After reading these books (I’d be the first to admit that my studies have been far from complete), I have become convinced that keeping on with the West means approaching the problem on the wrong foot. Islam does possess standards and a spiritual dynamism to organise and run a modern state. However, the present leaders of Islam are still unable to reveal its treasures. One must admit that this fault, or deficiency, is not peculiar to the Indonesian Islamic leaders alone. On the contrary, in countries which pride themselves on being Moslem, we see how, behind the façade of Islam, the people have been exploited from century to century. The condition of the fellahin in feudal Arab countries is even more pitiful than that of the working class in capitalist countries. The Islamic leaders of Indonesia must have the courage to open their minds to modern technology. It would be well to avoid using the term
Western
here, as it could easily arouse irrational prejudices. It would perhaps be advisable to refer instead to
modern
technology, to avoid the reactions usually aroused in many of us at the mention of the word West. I don’t believe there is a single person in Indonesia who would want to reject modern technology – modern industrial techniques for producing the goods needed by our people, beginning with nails, wheels, screws, medicines, cars, railway equipment, ships, planes, radio, television, radar, rifles, bombs,
tanks, guns and even atomic energy.’