Twilight in Jakarta

May-2

That same morning, while Saimun the garbage coolie was busy unloading baskets of refuse onto the dump in the drizzling rain, Suryono was stretching his body in his warm bed, too lazy to get up. How pleasant it was to lie in bed this way and look out at the drizzling rain blown by the wind against the windowpane. For some time Suryono lay very still, contemplating his room in the dim light and comparing it with his apartment in New York City. Three months ago he was still in New York, that giant metropolis, and now, three months later, he was back again in Jakarta. After working three years abroad, he still felt ill at ease in Jakarta. The city had too many shortcomings to count.

It had been decidedly more pleasant to live abroad. Jakarta was a frustrating place. It was annoying to work in an office that was so disorganized. He was still attached to The Ministry of Foreign Affairs but had yet to be given a clearly defined assignment. He was also dissatisfied by the way he was treated. And because he had no car of his own, even going to the office was a chore. He was sorry not to have shipped to Jakarta the car he’d owned in the United States.

He looked round his room at items he had brought from overseas: a radio and an electric record player. And over there, on the table in the corner and on the floor as well were stacks of books in French and English, on economics, international politics, and dozens of other subjects. All of them looked nice and new. On his desk and the nightstand beside his bed were more books: Westerns and foreign s*x novels with covers depicting women in a variety of poses. One cover showed the image of a woman sprawled on the floor with her thighs bared, her eyes closed, and part of one breast exposed, while behind her in the shadows loomed the figure of a masked man. The title of the book: The s*x Murders.

The bookcase was filled with stacks of records, from the works of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Chopin to tangos, sambas, rumbas, foxtrots, and American jazz.

Suryono turned over, overtaken by laziness and memories of his life in New York, so marvelously luxurious and pleasant compared with the boredom and desolation he’d felt during these past three months at home. It seemed as if there was no place for him in his own country. He was at a loss as to what he should do. Nothing really seemed to attract him.

Suddenly, the door to his room opened and Fatma, his stepmother, entered. “Are you still in bed?” she admonished.

Suryono smiled at her, unashamed to be seen in bed with only his boxers on. “What’s the use getting up in the morning? I go to the office and there’s no work for me to do.”

His stepmother moved past his bed to open the curtains, but as she passed, Suryono caught her by the hand and pulled her onto the bed.

“Is Father gone?” he said, kissing her neck intensely.

“Yes, but don’t be naughty; the servant girl is outside, sweeping the living room.”

Fatma stood and opened the curtains. Suryono studied her with his eyes. She was still young, his age-mate in fact, just twenty-nine years old. His father had married her while he, Suryono, was abroad, a year and a half ago. His father, Raden Kaslan, was fifty-six years of age; his mother had died when Suryono was fifteen. When he learned that his father had remarried, Suryono had only shaken his head in surprise. And now, lying on his bed and looking at his stepmother, Suryono was surprised again, wondering how it was possible for a relationship between himself and his stepmother to have developed as it did.

When he returned from New York his father was out of town on a business trip and so, for the first two weeks at home, Suryono was alone with her. They shared the house, went to shows, and went dancing together as well. Fatma told him not to call her “Mother”; it was enough to call her just Fatma. And then…. Suryono smiled to himself recalling what happened between him and his stepmother for the first time, and in his father’s room at that. They had just returned from a dance, and his stepmother had already gone into his father’s room. There was not a soul in the house. He remembered that he had wanted to look through an old family photograph album that his father kept in his bedroom. He went and knocked at the door.

“Come in,” he said, hearing Fatma’s voice. He opened the door, and saw that Fatma was changing her clothes behind a screen near the wardrobe.

“I’m looking for that old photograph album of Father’s,” he said. “Do you know where it is?”

“It’s over here. Come and get it.”

He hesitated at first, but then went up to the screen after all, and saw that Fatma had already taken off her clothes and wore only a very thin nightdress. Suryono could not clearly remember how it began. All he remembered was how later he was getting up from his father’s bed, with Fatma still lying on it naked, and himself rushing out, back to his room. He was surprised to find that, despite his agitation, he did not feel remorse but, instead, a great satisfaction. True, for a moment his innermost conscience scolded him, but he quickly suppressed it with the thought that it was his father’s own fault for having married such a young woman. But after that he fell asleep.

When his father returned home, the situation was further eased when, hearing how his son and his wife addressed each other familiarly, using personal names instead of formal terms of address (which was something they could not make themselves do), he remarked, “Well, I see you two have already become close friends. Wonderful!”

Raden Kaslan worked as director of the trading company Bumi Ayu and was a member of the governing board of the Indonesia Party. Formerly he had been a government official, but after the recognition of Indonesia’s national sovereignty he had grown dissatisfied with the bureaucracy and withdrawn from public service. Because of the support he found through his party connections, his enterprise grew rapidly.

After the first incident between Fatma and Suryono, the second one occurred easily, and so it continued. After that first night, he slept every night in his father’s room with Fatma for an entire week. The two of them were as if drunk. Only when the cable arrived from his father asking to be met at Kemayoran Airport did they wake up from their intoxication.

“What if your father finds out?” Fatma asked, but there was no fear in her voice or any trace of anxiety. The question had a taunting tone, as if she were convinced that she could manage to deceive her elderly husband.

They were in bed together at the time, and Suryono answered with a question of his own: “Who do you like better, my father or me?”

Fatma giggled and nibbled his cheek, then embraced him with ardor. “What, you don’t know? You’re crazy to even ask.”

Fatma told him that his father was impotent, and had married her only for the sake of appearance. Having a young woman at his side gave him self-assurance and disguised his physical shortcoming.

“It isn’t even once a month that he comes to me.”

At first Suryono felt uncomfortable discussing his father with Fatma, as if his father were some stranger, but this feeling was soon drowned by the passion her body inflamed in him.

Neither of them ever raised the question of love, whether he loved his stepmother or she loved him. It seemed that their own pleasure was sufficient reason for their affair.

A week after his father’s return, Suryono’s feelings of tension disappeared, as if nothing had happened between him and Fatma. Frequently, in fact, his father asked him to accompany his wife to a show, to a party or some other occasion, when he himself could not accompany her.

So it was this morning that Suryono found himself in his bed kissing Fatma’s neck. The drizzling rain continued to fall outside, and he felt Fatma’s body becoming tense and taut under his hands. She embraced him tightly and kissed him hard on his mouth. Then suddenly, extricating herself, she ran to the door.

“You are really naughty!” she said and then left the room.

Suryono laughed to himself, feeling excited and satisfied and rejoicing in his male superiority and the feeling of triumphing over his own father.

He put on his bathrobe and went to the bathroom. As he undressed to bathe, he stopped naked before the tall mirror on the bathroom wall and contemplated his body’s image. Too thin, he thought, gripping his thigh, and his chest wasn’t broad enough either. I must go in more for sport, he thought further. Then he examined his face. His features were handsome, and his new moustache was beginning to fill out. His eyes were too hollow, he thought, but his hair was wavy. He rubbed the cleft in his chin. He was rather pleased with that cleft; he shared it with the film star, Cary Grant. He got out his razor, soaped his lips and chin and started shaving, looking at his face in the mirror and humming away. He was very pleased this morning. There was nothing to trouble his thoughts: no work in the office to give him a headache, not a thing to worry about at all.

On this morning he almost felt at peace with himself, and his disappointment at having to stay in his own country was now at the back of his mind. A fleeting thought arose: If I can manage the patience for another year, the ministry is sure to send me abroad again. The idea made him feel elated and he whistled a tune very popular at that time, “High Noon”.

He had breakfast with Fatma, who awaited him. As the two of them sat at the table, Fatma sliced the bread for him and spread the butter on it.

“What would you like for a topping this morning: chocolate or marmalade?”

Suryono smiled at her. “What a kind mother you are! I’d like buttered bread with a slice of cheese and a coating of marmalade, and after that…” Suryono nudged Fatma’s foot under the table, making her giggle with delight.

“You are a bad boy, so misbehaved, and towards your own mother,” she said, and they both laughed.

Before he left for the office, Suryono kissed and caressed Fatma in her bedroom. Then he combed his disheveled hair and, as he was leaving the room, held Fatma’s breast for a moment. Then he left the house whistling, hailed a becak, and set off to his office.

“What’s in the newspaper this morning?” Suryono asked Harun, who sat at the desk next to his own.

Harun threw the newspaper he was reading onto Suryono’s desk. “Read it yourself. You’re late again. Only the day before yesterday the secretary general issued a circular warning all government employees to come to work on time.”

Suryono laughed. “Let him arrive on time! It’s easy to make rules. He has a car to bring him to the office. How about us?”

Resentment welled in Suryono—towards the secretary general; towards Harun, who faithfully appeared at the office every day but then sat at his desk with nothing to do; towards the entire ministry; towards his country, his people; even towards humanity and life itself.

He threw the paper back to Harun. “Read it yourself first.” He was bored witless and didn’t know what to do with himself. He sat down and picked up the telephone. He waited for a long time before the switchboard operator responded. Suryono gave the number, and soon heard ringing at the other end.