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FOOTNOTES
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The house was old, and like such houses its roof was so high above our heads, the gushing wind kept it cool in the afternoon through the wide airvents. The front room was full of old rattan chairs and antique teak tables and mirrors. After a thin piece of cloth that the hostess had hung as a partition, her throne was the boldest thing there on the cold floor, under a German clock that barked the time loudly. She received visitors there and the front room was only an antechamber. The small chair was side by side with a table on which were a wooden tobacco box and small other boxes for cloves and cigarette paper, a big radio, a glass of cold tea, a big pack of matches, and a tin container of coins. She kept digging there to reward younger visitors with - younger than herself was the treshold, so even Grandma got a cent or two each time around, and the hostess' son in-law who by local standards had been a millionaire also got his coins whenever he went to see her. The guests' chairs were lined up the way she wanted them to, similar with a drill-sergeant's taste of order. Her eldest daughter made some tea in the kitchen and then receded into a chair in a corner watching the audience in silence. She was beautiful and the only one that could deal with the mother, being of the opposite sort of character. She had been living with the grandma after her husband died and her own children had gotten jobs in other places. The rule in the mother's court was strict, people spoke according to age, fortunately for my restless sister Grandma was the oldest in line since her other sister had nothing to say and a few years later she died; so our family used to get the first chance to leave the house that scared my sister. Such a visit was obligatory in Idul Fitri. Grandma visited her in other times, too, just for nostalgic reasons maybe, and humanitarian later on after the sister fell off the stairs on her way to the kitchen (it was two feet lower than the living room) and got to use walking sticks. The part I loved in the house was the kitchen. It was abnormal in every way. First of all it was huge - probably around fifteen meters square; and in the middle of it was a sealed round spot where we could listen to the flowing water below - the entire kitchen was built over a living river. A lot of horror stories suggested themselves to me in there - even those days you could just kill somebody and dump the body down the liftable concrete lid with iron chains. At the corner of the kitchen a bed was put, near it a cupboard that was said to be housing scary clanish blades that could find their way back there on their own - the grandma had given them to one of her brothers in Sumatera once, and he lost them, only to find them again inside this cupboard, while nobody saw them boarding a bus and a ship or a plane, that were the only ways a visit could be facilitated between the two islands. I had spent a good many afternoons in that kitchen, dreaming away. And the cashew business clinched the deal. Our house and all of its successors didn't have anything edible around their own territories, and I sometimes missed the old house with its row of citrus - though I had never liked them. I got to pass the old house on my way to school or anywhere else southward. The house had been torn down, and in its place was a big modern house, characterized by the conspicuous characterlessness as such houses of the eighties were, and a German Shepperd was on patrol there behind the iron fences. At the tall gate a notification of his existence was given, redundant after seeing the dog first since he was so huge. It wasn't a nice sight, alright, but the bygone never was. So after a few times of heart-wrenching the view stopped to bother me. So they were rich, so what. Sometimes we played that far away from home near the railway, because a school friend lived there in a house which innards could be seen vividly from any passing train. My uncle used to play there, too, but he didn't have to walk more than four meters, since he lived in the old house. In his days until the second half of the eighties the railway was at the foot of two hilly spots of the street, so the last vehicles halted by the passing train would be two meters above its roof. In the eighties the street was levered by a bridge so the train passed under it. My uncle had died at the end of the seventies. He was only twenty-eight, five foot eleven, wavy hair reaching his broad shoulders, slim and quiet and nice - darn this world. He was an engineer and worked at an oil ridge in the Indian Ocean and he was the one who brought Carlos Santana into my life - he told me that Black Magic Woman was released the day I was born; inaccurate but inspiring. At the time I retraced his steps along the railway I still kept his works - a pair of sharpened blades he made by putting pieces of iron on the railway at the chosen spots and let the train do the rest. We tried to imitate this, using a rusty fat piece of brass, but instead of a serviceable knife we got a flat piece of rusty brass. It clearly needed a skill. I gave up loitering around the railway and picked up English. Schools had never been anything important in my life, and they left me traceless encounters. But I was made to go to a Sunday school once - that one only time was enough to conclude my Sunday whereabout to be mud football. Since this couldn't be gotten outside monsoon, I filled the time learning other things. In the seventies every little girl wanted to be Chicha, the pioneeress and one and only really splashing kid-artist of all times in Indonesia, and her grip upon the time was the constant dream the hordes of ambitious mothers of the nineties gouged their gullible kids to emulate. Chicha got the right pedigree. Her dad and uncles, the Koeswoyos, were our national Beatles, also unparalleled. Each kid of the family sang as a matter of course, and had recorded an album, but only Chicha went nationwide. Small even for Indonesians (less than five foot as a grown-up), a bit skinny, a little Europeanish in taste, Chicha and sometimes coupled with Adi Bing Slamet, the Chicha for the boys, got everywhere. Probably she was the one responsible for the booming of ballet schools all through the decade, and piano-lessons that spoiled the lives of the upper class girls of my generation. These were to be had because Chicha had them. White boots reaching the knee were to be generated somehow from the unthinkable places all over the globe because Chicha loved wearing them. Hair was to become very long behind the back and twisted into braids because Chicha's hairdresser did that. Deeper inland and in a more or less unfavorable atmosphere to enable Chichanization, I took Javanese dancing lessons instead. My little sister went once and never to be seen again there. It was at any rate a brief activity, because the teacher - a soft-spoken, feminine man inseparable from his fez, stopped giving the lesson when his bicycle was stolen during such a good deed. The lessons were given in an old house of one of the pupils, so he had no other means of transportation and vomitted anytime he got on a bus, so it ended there. But thank God the thief's action was after the basic lessons had been given. So what I retained was a useful tool for later years. I shared most symptoms of Grandma's narcissism with some twist. Unlike her, I had never loved Javanese music. I had never liked watching dramas and dancing and almost all that I loved to do; but basically the (Central) Javanese element suited me best. Learning Balinese, Sundanese and West Sumateranese dances later I didn't find them filling me up like was the former. The so-called 'modern dancing', a cultural rampage in the eighties, was my next step, yet this was only satisfying in a lesser degree. Oddly Grandma couldn't dance at all. Mom, though, was said to be a good dancer in her teens. My sister and dancing was this planet and Jupiter until the beginning of the twenty-first century when she, or so she said, suddenly danced at the slightest provocation. In the old house we used to coreographed our own dance to make adult guests laugh - this experience that neither my sister or I want to remember actually was the seed of my lack of stage fever later. Now was the time for some chicken soup. The vendor of such food was a neighbor, and many others were also living nearby - they sold cassava cakes, rice chips, fruit salad, Javanese cocktail , etcetera, and nothing has ever beaten the goat meat curry from the area. A neighboring quarter sent in a dog meat peddler, every week or so; and another who sold roasted pork - in such a neighborhood anything was kosher. But the real sight was the man who shouldered a long bamboo stick, a gigantic alluminium container painted in the most eye-punching color was on each end. A few kids could get into one container - that was how big they were. In the containers were chips made of flour, fish- or chicken- or shrimp- or beef-flavored. A chip was as large as a soup dish and as thick as a pack of cigarettes. Grandma always suspected the coloring material as cancer-inducing, but who cared. This is an extinct profession now, selling the chips that way, while it had given such a great picture of the time - at least great in size. Everything in the olden days were big - ideas, thoughts, aspirations - which evolved along the natural history the way the dinosaurs had done, to extinction. I worked after school for some time in a factory uphill, which produced another version of shrimp-flavored chips - thin ones that crumbled down at the first bite, that's why the factory was a bit well-off and had to hire the neighborhood's kids to catch the scheduled deliveries to the shops. For ten cents a day the job wasn't hard; it only demanded my hands while the automathon inside could be relied upon to function correctly while I sent my eyes and head elsewhere. Another manual job that I had was in the candy factory a little farther from home, right in front of the rib-joint. I got the jobs because my friends worked there, too, and in the candy factory case I lied to Grandma and Mom everyday - they didn't want me to work there for some reasons, luckily I got a school friend they trusted who nervously lied for me if asked, and did live near the factory. The rib-joint was only a couple of small wooden shacks, thoughtfully facing an odd angle from the driveway so it didn't line itself up in the row of conventional households. There were three or four sex workers and one of them had kids and a husband. Most of the time they didn't conduct the business at the house; these women were packed to go. I don't know why they set up business there to begin with - the town had, at the time, in the eighties, a large pleasuretown that existed as an independent realm more or less; far away from my quarter. The spirit of debauchery and the equally spirited sway toward puritanism had never torn us apart; they only co-existed always in a dangerous tension. Denial of this instinct has never been known in a Javanese life since time immemorial - it was harnessed and labelled and stashed away with the landing of Islam, but it stayed the way it had been, in principle. Yet we were to see the day when the vast bordello was deleted from the map of the town and the little deli near my place was also closed down; the holier spirit had ridden the waves of time. In the same decade there happened the demise of the factories I had worked in. The death of the factories was because they were owned by Tionghoans. The racism of the neighborhood was not dim enough to escape notice. In the village it was so, but the scarcity of the object of unreasonability prevented it from leaking out and confined it as a social cyst. Now in the quarter there was one new house, freshly built, inhabited by a family of Tionghoans; there were approximately a dozen stores and restaurants near the market that were also owned and operated by Tionghoans. This means almost all of the stores. The Javanese vendors mostly sold their stuff on the ground at the sidewalk and in the market itself, and they didn't live there. Some of the Tionghoans were wealthier. The stereotype that Tionghoans are relentless hardworkers got them a good portrayal, but the part of the same stereotype that they are shrewd businesspersons made the opposite picture. And there's always some people who take stereotypes as facts. I woke up that morning only to be told to get back to sleep. It was six o'clock; school started at seven sharp and I wondered what on earth had happened or was I in heaven; but I did what I was told to do and never opened my eyes until noon. By then the smoke had saturated the air and turned the sky grey; my sister was scared and tailed Grandma everywhere around the house - at the time she was only able to receive and internalize one order; she had been told to get up and bathe at six, so she got up and took a bath at six no matter what, and no subsequent order could penetrate her head at all. So she had seen more than I could possibly do at such a late hour. Grandma kept everyone inside the house. But the talks and commotion outside couldn't escape us. People were standing with folded arms watching the smoke in the sky; these were the ones who didn't commit arson and other modes of destruction and only be fatalistic bystanders. At last in the afternoon I could get out and find other kids; they told me what had been happening - how the Tionghoans fled leaving their gold behind, how they (the kids) heroically got past the burning rooms to save some candies and accidentally also a dog; I got my share of the smokey candies. At dusk the grown-ups returned with their loot. The usual stuff, electronics and such; what got stuck in my mind forever was a perambulator. It was a shiny metallic contraption with a colorful matress and pillow - it wasn't used to carry the tape-recorder the looter also got with him; it wasn't of any use at his house because he was single and only lived with his mother; he took it nonetheless - like a bird to whom the glittering is just something it couldn't resist. The merchant of secondhand stuff followed Grandma there, after a pause of the village episode. She had gotten a lot of business deals with the looters, and was so busy she changed her whole appearance overnight - she cut her hair, she didn't wear the Javanese dress anymore and turned to don a blouse and a skirt; it had done away with the grace but it was of course practical. The dress changed the way she walked; previously, bound by the batik cloth that embraced the waist down tightly to her heels, she walked in fast tiny steps; now she walked slower but with long steps each time. The head, unburdened of the chignon, was movable in every direction and Grandma said she reminded her of dakocan; small black dolls made of molded gypsum with detachable head under which was planted a spiral spring. Sometimes she bought spoiled rice from yesterday, dried under the sun, from the people next door. One of the occasions of such bargains happened to be an hour or so before a baby's funeral, and with horror poured loudly from her eyes Grandma witnessed the mother of the deceased haggling about the price of the rice. While the pathways to this area were beyond fiction, some of the people might be Stephen King's beneath the coarsely shown Steinbeckian typicality. There was a small natural spring under a nameless tree at the butt of the unfriendly walkway, where people burned incense at and gave tributes of fruit, rice and rose petals to. This wasn't like other such sites, that people ask things from; this was an "or else -" site, the offerings were to prevent the unexplainable drowning of infants there. And one of the staunch believers said "Just because you have never got a kid drowned there, doesn't mean my kid won't" - there is nothing in the line of retort to this. But among the ancient deaths claimed by the spring in the past, if any, they told of a spirit very much like the village communist's that I'd heard before - an illegitimate child was inserted among the real victims there, by his or her (accounts varied) own illegitimate father. When the district was finally enlightened to take care of the driveways after I was gone, the contractor wanted to seal the spring off for good and let the water join the nearby river to flow together as naturally as they want to without interfering with the unnatural development of concrete and asphalt. The people resisted this attempt vehemently and some swore they'd cut any head off if the head bore the idea to harm the spring. The contractor mentioned the legendary evil deeds it had committed in the past, and they replied, "That's why you can't close it down!" The reasoning was, when there was nothing whatever to disturb the spring, it already took lives; imagine if it was to be killed itself. It was the same point of view to see the New Order regime at the time. So the spring is still there now, while the less sinister tree had been uprooted by the contractor just to show that he meant business, and the ground all around the small opening of the everlastingly flowing water had been hardened by cement. But without getting near the spring, in my years there, the neighbor next door always lost a baby every year. They might have had a dozen kids or so if the they all survived. The woman was twenty-eight at the time, the man twenty-nine; they lived in a small wooden shack at the left side of our house, on the ground around one and a half meters lower than ours which was hoisted on a bed of rock and the highest ground of the row, but lower than the nearest other row across the driveway, from where the neighbors' shack would be around three meters below our feet. Like many others they used a communal well that never got dry in the severest dry season, and a communal bathroom that was the constant theater of reciprocal anger. These loud things were right behind Mom's bedroom wall - just sit there and you'd hear everything about everybody; and during one bath-time, like six in the morning, the number of quarrels had already been exorbitant. My guesstimate is twenty people or so were the daily users of the facilities. They were inhabitants of the crammed wooden shacks behind our house. Others had their own bathrooms, and in my local arch-enemy's her father kept all the fishes inside the tank that they used to take splash bath from, brush their teeth with, wash their hair with, and wash their clothes by. The couple next door lived by selling small quantities of anything in the makeshift shop the man built at their dirt-floored porch. And they fought everyday - maybe the constant pregnancies were the result of the constant making-up. They fought loudly like everyone else did; sometimes a cruelly awoken neighbor jammed in and fought them both; the woman always cried like being butchered and she did say 'butcher' every time; and the routine had worn its significance off so people still came to their shop and bought something even while the fight was raging there and the man or the woman would serve the customer without ceasing to cry or shout obscenities at each other. The fights being routine didn't mean a thing to my little sister - it always frightened her anew each time around. But domestic scenes were public there; violent fathers and husbands were normalcy as statistics go; every time it nauseated me but there was no choice but to let my nerves calloused. And in the case of the next door people - they loved each other. No one agreed with me on this but Grandma's eldest sister who accasionally dropped by; but I believed they did. And it wasn't just my fiction to bear the fights of theirs; anytime they didn't fight they didn't act like a couple that had been legally married for sixteen years, but like a dark-skinned bruised Romeo and undernourished, wide-eyed Juliet. If they had never fought so barbaric maybe they'd gotten separated in two weeks after the wedding. Yet the most unbearable sight was the yearly pregnancy. It always went just fine until the baby was born; everyone couldn't help but thinking what a disgusting thing the woman was, carrying her mountainous belly everywhere for nine months and spoiling everybody's evening vista with a reminder of procreation, just to bury the burden afterwards. They had no intention to use contraceptives - for sixteen years they had waited for one live child and wouldn't stop waiting until they got it. Another love was five meters away from our house, one meter higher. This one had some bewitching bestiality. There was an unfinished house which only had a partial roofing and the bricks were left bare. It was owned by someone in Jakarta, a myth I'd never seen in person for ten years. When we moved there the house was derelict, but in the second year or so a young woman and a five year-old girl lived there. They only had one tablecloth full of worldly necessities when they arrived. The bathroom of the house of course didn't exist, so they used the communal well and latrine everyday. They came from Jakarta, on a truck - people accustomed to anything around the well were still shocked when the woman told them casually that she didn't have any money to buy train or bus tickets, but had to go to our town because her husband wanted them to, so she bartered herself with the ride to the intended destination. She was no whore, I was sure of that; she was only a bit simple-minded and this had been responsible for her indiscriminate honesty and unbearable cheerfulness regardless of the circumstances. She had never had some make-up on, probably only for financial reasons; the mysterious little sum of money to sustain their lives came monthly by couriers that spent the night there sometimes. People assumed automatically that the passkey to the mystery laid in the woman's bed; but later it was established beyond doubts that the deliveries came from her husband in Jakarta - who was behind bars. The little girl never went to anything resembling a school until I left the area when she was ten year old - the age of a fourth-grader of elementary school. Both she and her mother were better-looking than average. Grandma asked the woman about her age once and she replied "I don't know, Ma'am, but the priest in my wedding said I must be thirteen then." She was illiterate like her daughter; raised by a bunch of security guards in a Jakartanese brothel, but she said they'd never touched her, and we believed this because she had told of how she got the carnal knowledge and all and there was no reason why she got to lie about this for anything at all. The woman was the best-natured creature, by her slightly retarded mind, around. She had never quarreled against anyone, she had never retorted when insulted boldly in daylight; so they left her alone. The local drunkards and assorted social maladies stayed away from her because of the presence of the phantom of the husband - he used to be one of the boys around, and the Al Capone of them all; when a thug from the younger generation, who didn't know the absentee, was trying to get laid there, a scary scene ensued - the wiser streetfighters had beaten the clueless kid senseless before lecturing him on the ethics among comrades. About two years later the husband was released on probation. Somehow he managed to leave the city and came home. We, the kids, waited in suspense; the man who had been such a legend couldn't be anything less than The Six Million Dollar Man. The little girl became a bit too pompous and started to tell everyone about the people her daddy had whacked in the city - unlike the mother, she was medically speaking normal, so the number changed every time and we knew she made them up. The mother said he got into jail for armed robbery this last time, and injured someone fatally, but no killing was mentioned.
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