RainForestWind -- Nin -- Blue Rose Monday

Blue Rose Monday
[part 2]

Her eye caught the Shakespeare letter again and she began to think of why the obsolete scrutiny. No wonder they could barely speak English, these English Literature students, Dora thought; spending their semesters browsing Shakespeare and then graduating upon a tired footnote on Bunyan -- her friend Vera committed exactly this crime -- and even the most progessive thesises never got anything beyond the World War I. Shakespeare wouldn't find it difficult to fill up a lifetime, but with laundry and Bangkok roosters and vegetable vendors and the sundries of daily life Dora thought it was most impertinent to gulp so much of a deceased Englishperson's words and even more imperious to throw up something considerably less readable than the grocer's bills. With a sufficiently deaf self-appraisal, Dora didn't feel guilty for her own thesis that severed her tie with the university herself - taking the French George Sand was something closer to a tribute to the university, she thought; or else no one cared a fig about olden days' sobsisters who wrote of tempestuous affairs for bread only. And she remembered Herman's thesis on the Southern countries' deals with the International Monetary Fund - his mandatory quotation page was populated by Mark Twain. The quotes were looking out of place, yet the fact that Balzac was so immersed in his debts might have shown the crucial link between French Literature and Economics.

The phone rang. Her little sister Safira's voice was insulting the morning.

"It behaved nonsensically," the younger sister said, "It rained 'til just now so I couldn't go to the street to get a bus and in effect I couldn't catch the train."

"Going somewhere?" Dora asked, thinking, how dare she to disturb me just for this private mobility disaster -

"I forgot to tell you that I'm going to your place today!" Safira sounded surprised at herself, and Dora thought, now even if the state had the Law to lock up nuts, it wouldn't do it anyway because her whole kinsfolk alone would have crammed the place of detention. "I have told you over and over not to misplace your mind," Dora used her lecturing tone, "although if you lose your wallet that would be more disastrous. Still, minds are hard to come by."

"Don't talk to me like that," Safira, she imagined, sulked, "I know I'm not Einstein but neither are you anyway."

"It's perfectly forbidden to be Einstein in my job," Dora retorted. Her sister said she would see if she could catch the afternoon train and if so she would call her again, then they hung up.

Dora thought about her little sister for a minute while boiling the spinach. Safira was different from Amelia - she was jovial and seemed to lose age year after year instead of gaining some, and she took care that it remained so, by the help of pots of cream and frequent visits to beauty parlors. A beautiful nuclear physicist, Dora thought, is enough to scare back to their senses the segment of imbeciles among the males who always complained of not being able to grab a brained body in bed - they'd never known what brain is, being in no immediate contact with any; their idea of a brain was a naked nymph citing the opening lines of Stephen Hawking's The History of Time -- no longer citation would be needed, for the primal urges would have seized the occasion when she arrived at the second sentence. Well, Dora thought, this could be a story, but certainly not for some erotic web sites that cater to the stale libido of the geeky cubicle-dwellers who are still sore about the cancellation of their one and only date ten years ago, and the unhappily married idiots with birthmarks all over their backs.

The water went flowing out of the pot, sending the stove into fitful snorts. Dora quickly turned it off and she focused her mind on the moderate breakfast-lunch-whatever. She had decided to proceed from either Timon of Athens or Othello - the Athenian appealed to her because he sounded pretty much like Amelia in bad days, although as a misanthrope her sister loved the shopping mall too much. The play she disliked most was Hamlet - if she were to meet this airheaded Dane she was sure to do some simpler job of Laertes'. Of course, Dora tried to weigh her sentiment a bit fairly, even a superstitious, nervous-disordered royal bumpkin like Hamlet didn't deserve a father like he had had - a selfish ghost that specifically told his live son to kill the treacherous-murderous uncle at all cost surely had beaten every bad father she had known, though on second thought she conceded that Mrs. Susi might be capable of being equally thus ghostly. Since she had no kid of her own maybe she could have one adopted for the purpose.

Dora flipped the pages of her secondhand The Complete Shakespeare and skipped the sonnets altogether, glanced at titles to refresh her memory and when she faced the screen again she had discarded the previous plans and taken The Two Gentlemen of Verona as the starting point. She had written a few lines around the bandits who told Valentine, the victim, if he really was so moneyless then he should be their captain instead. Gosh, all these people and their incurable romanticism! She didn't want to imagine the real Europe when all the Shakespearean things happened. She couldn't think of how anything romantic could have crept in when one didn't even take a bath for two weeks and had to put on probably seven layers of starched underwear in every occasion of living. She deleted her previous prelude to restart from the scene where Julia tore Proteus' love letter to pieces, had them strewn around the floor, forbade her maid from fetching the broom, took the pieces back into her hands to be thrown around again when this persistent maid (rather like Sari) offered assistance the second time around, and so on - of course, because this was no ordinary fiction but the magical Shakespeare's, the letter torn in a thousand pieces was still able to band itself together again to the leading lady's perusal and regret.

There was someone knocking at the door. Dora got up and saw the neighborhood busybody for its male half, Mr. Ifan, stood there with a tragic facial expression. Perhaps the cats had eaten his quails, Dora thought and sped up.

Mr. Ifan worked only until noon in a radio station. He was forty-three, and no disk-jockey there; he did what he called accounting, consisted of two bottles of Coke and a lot of jokes and when he got some time to spare then he took up the company's prospectus and edited it. He was tall, like five foot nine, and slim enough to share a becak* seat with someone other than his wife (she would need the whole seat for half of her Self). When Dora had just moved in, she got his visit and was interrogated for everything that a census-taker might have had in mind, and only after it had been over someone - Mr. Giman, probably - told her that her visitor was not the neighborhood headman, and madly Dora got to submit the second copy of her official ID card to the real, quiet, fatherly headman - who ironically didn't even ask her name.

"I saw your door opened, so I came by," Mr. Ifan said, explaining his visit this time; "There's a thief breaking into Mr. Karjo's house half an hour ago - he lost his TV, video CD player and his son's computer."

"Half an hour ago?" Dora shook her head and Mr. Ifan did the same. "It's been nastier and nastier these days," he observed vaguely, "The government is so ineffective to be expected to take care of crimes," Mr. Ifan, who had the tendency to drag the government by its feet into casual conversation, re-shook his massively haired head. "The President will never see the next term."

"Miracles might happen," Dora tried to get herself interested. Mr. Ifan laughed defiantly at the idea. "Only the government is able to make miracles. And this one can't even do the usual tricks. Except one: it's collapsing too slowly. That is a miracle." He seemed to enjoy the prospect of political doomsday.

The headman walked by with another man - Dora rarely saw this one, and she said so. Mr. Ifan reminded her that it was a retired Major of the army or something like that, who owned the spacious cave of luxurious real marble a few meters outside the alleyway. The man didn't live there, though. He stayed in another town and according to Mr. Ifan the house was built for his mistress. She's a singer in a bar.

"In the afternoon and after nine p.m. this neighborhood is too quiet and nobody is around," they heard the ex-Major spoke loudly to the headman who mumbled something in return.

Mr. Ifan walked to the gatelessness and stopped to mutter, "Get some door in here," he kicked at the hinges with his foot.

For a while Dora couldn't do anything but laughing at the absurdity of her life - there she was, thinking of Shakespeare, while Mr. Karjo got some real robbery. Bye, Billy, she said, turning the computer off but sitting there still, staring at the mismatched pair of the monitor and the CPU; that was what happened when one bought only what one could afford at a time, and the age of each of these items of assorted brandlessness differed from one another by quite a wide margin. At least, she told herself while getting up, no smart thief would fail to notice those facts and maybe then he would commit catnapping instead.

At the next, louder, knocking Dora walked to the door ready to give Mr. Ifan a few drops of sarcasm - but it opened to Anton's face, a narrow, long grinning face, and behind him at the terrace a Mohawk-haired Arman stood languidly smoking and the creature who went about bearing the name of Wotan fidgeted with his own long, curly hair that had never seen shampoo up close since, Dora estimated, nineteen ninety-seven.

Wotan was a bipedal tragedy. He painted like a poet and wrote like a painter. Dora blamed his parents for that - people, she thought, should be in jail for failing to give their kids proper and saner names.

Wotan's sculptures were the first of his creations that Dora encountered, some three years ago; she was looking for Anton and since he was at this other artist's exhibition she then came to know him, too. Eventually the two men shared a dirty room after they had sufficiently scared the landlord to rent to them, at five dollars a month. It was large enough for two dispossessive men and a small dog named Jin; even when the wide canvases were brought in they all still got plenty of space to stand on. Anton sold his paintings once in a blue moon and that was claimed to be enough for a living, and he left his aggrieved mother to the care of his siblings, got on an interprovince bus, and arrived at fine art with nothing but a pair of jeans, a white scarf on his neck, and a lot of wild ideas whose energy was, mysteriously, transformed into landscapes with sheep and lakes with jasmine of subdued colors.

Dora took the lonely beer can from the fridge, giving it to Wotan. "Oh, yeah," she said to the protesting eyes of Anton's. The three shared the one can, and Dora, although accustomed to watch them collecting coins to procure one meal for all, couldn't help feeling sorry. Bullshit if they say they're adults and must know what they're doing, she said to herself. Arman would have been happier being a clerk, and Anton could have been a moderately successful small town grocer; only Wotan she couldn't imagine as anything else but his current self. He's the happiest among them because it didn't involve making an option of the possibles - being what he was was not a choice at all. She got up and go into her bedroom.

"Here, get some more beer," she handed one dollar and eighty-five cents, exactly, to Arman. It was supposed to get Sari some washing soap and other such things; but three cans of beer for these epiphytes were more gratifying at the moment. Arman smiled again and said, "I have, like, forty cents -" he put his obviously only cigarette down neatly and looked into his wallet - "I'll get you a rootbeer." Dora laughed at the display of misplaced pride between them, and she said, "Get yourself some cigs. I'm having my second coffee." We're all Timons of Athens, this crossed her mind. What a tragedy that people who have less tend to give more.

"I'll go," Anton got up; "Kiki will hang me if you ride her bike." Arman thrusted his leathered arms and gave Anton the money. The three had been borrowing Kiki's motorbike for years and had driven against all the effects of the cheapest liquor in town and the everpresence of the traffic cops, all three on one bike, and they always said something like that, as if Kiki had said farewell to her bike only yesterday and not four years ago when she saw it the last.

"Your bike's troubling you again?" Arman asked when he went to the bathroom and passed the vehicle. "Always," Dora replied in her distinct fatalism. Arman didn't come back to his chair but sat on Dora's working chair in front of the computer.

Then suddenly he said, "Linda left me, you know. Two or three days ago. She took my son. She'd never come back." He stroked his Mohawk hair.

"I think he's her son, too," Dora said after a second of silence.

"My son," Arman objected.

Amazing, Dora thought while shrugging to the adamant possessiveness. Arman and Linda and Hari, their five year-old, had been living in the housekeeper's house - Linda's parents' housekeeper - since they got together. They didn't get married in the sense of having obtained the piece of paper issued by the state bearing the words that explained to whom it may concern that the two were entitled to have sex without anyone in the neighborhood interfering. Arman was a bad sculptor and an even worse painter; he got zero talent in art, and Dora believed that he had faked literacy when applying to the art college which tried all its tricks to educate him before at last Arman gave up when they hadn't yet, and he met Linda and they worked together to build the castle in the air and hell on earth. Dora thought about this for a moment. She couldn't approve of such a life being lived - less so by her friends. Arman's parents, while saying that they never wanted to see his face again on the family property, didn't really mean what they said. Dora was almost certain of that. Some, maybe most, parents that she knew, excluding hers of whom she couldn't say so in certainty, still saw their most troublesome offsprings as offsprings nonetheless. Extreme cases (by an ironically lesser kind of crime) like Yanto's were conspicuously rare. They tend to get attached to the kids a whole world more than the kids to them, Dora thought.

She happened to know that Linda's parents still sent her some money through the housekeeper, although Arman knew nothing of that. Arman's father in turn gave him some regular backup of which he expressively said "that little bitch should get none". Both sides of parents were, secretly, caring for their grandson Hari. That was how the couple and their unfortunate kid could stand another day in the absolute nothingness to gain from the rest of the world. Problem was, both Linda's and Arman's parents were not billionaires. In Linda's case there were still three dependent younger daughters, who had taxed a lot of the parents' nights with insomnia by the worries of their being trekking the eldest's footsteps to the edge of the social cliff. Arman was a second kid in a line up of five; his father got to smuggle his help lest his elder brother noticed - now this brother was the one with the healthy head there, Dora mused. For practically a few hundredth time Dora thought why did she bother to let Arman into her house at all, she who really worked for the little money she got to have. I don't know, Dora answered herself; I just like Arman, perhaps.

Now she remembered that she needed to go to the grocery, she was out of sugar. The disappointed ants had been in a rampage all around the kitchen all morning, after their futile raid on the sugar bowl that Sari had so showily cleaned up.

She walked slowly on the sun-blistered concrete alleyway, looking at every house with closed door on both of its sides. It was not the first time that Dora got the feeling like she was living among tombs or at least some very senior citizens; even Mr. Ifan's small boys had never been caught shouting meaninglessly at each other like live kids do. It only came to life in the morning under Endang's sun.

A loosely knit, respectable social web, she thought. The lower part of the middle class were them all; a few steps upstairs was to them 'rich' and a few descending steps was 'poor'; and the acceptable conduct was the only one they could comprehend and imagine to be done by themselves. Other than that, none. It was this particular strand which moved in hordes to the streets, she thought. The upper class didn't have anything to say and the downtrodden had no means to say the lot that they have. That's why it's always the students to try to initiate some overhaul or at least to provoke the act of applying some mascara to the country.

She saw that Mrs. Lia had put a new collection of ceramic vases in her front room, visible from the clear windows. Mrs. Lia the homemaker with fifty bucks a month of her hubby's salary at her disposal; that was 'rich' enough because less wouldn't have fetched her those vases; at any rate the husband had been able to build the house on his own land - how? This question always lingered in Dora's mind, thinking about all people - Arman would get a piece of his papa's land if he's still pretty much alive when the old man dies, but it wouldn't make any sense if everyone - excepting a few, including herself - had gotten inheritance or else they wouldn't be able to live like they had done.

Mrs. Karti's house got a newly painted windowpane; just why she had let it be blue while the rest of such panes were brick red, even the front door jamb was hot neon red, she had no idea. Might be one of the enigmatic marks of the personality of the local sphinx.

The grocer happened to be the fatherly headman; so the service was also fatherly, meaning he would have taken fifteen minutes just to find that he's out of toothpaste and fifteen more minutes before he told you of the fact. At the moment he was filling up an elderly woman's jerrycan with kerosene. "Shopping, Miss?" she greeted her. No, hunting foxes, Dora thought, and said, "Yes. Out of kerosene at home, Mrs. Minah?" of which she should have replied "Not at all. I'm burning the city hall tonight."

But these were a parcel of rituals that Dora knew too well to get disposed entirely of; unlike Vera, who refused flatly to be engaged in such, she always believed that the easiest way to get it her way was by paying her due.

It took a while to get the grocer all for herself, so Dora sat on the concrete seat in front of the store and she saw Anton getting back. She looked around the lazy afternoon larger road out of the alleyway. It was empty. The blue phone booth stood in utter technological loneliness on the patch of grass the town had asked the owner of the rice field there to donate for public convenience. The public at the time being was a sparrow; it perched on the booth's tin roof. Sometimes when the phone in the house melted down she and all others got to use this booth, and for long distance and international calls they went to Mr. Adi's booth - a single line of an ordinary house phone that he, after retiring from the phone company, had taken as a good job since he also loved fishing.

This place was the end of the town and the start of the village, with all the characteristics of such a place. So illiterate workers of the rice field were exchanging gossips with Professor Indro; water buffaloes walked the road with an impatient Mercedes honking at their butts; Mr. Ifan's wife had been breaking the record of staggering bills of overseas calls to her sister in Manhattan while Mrs. Minah here had never used a phone all of her seventy years of existence.

A weird halfway to anywhere one might like to go to - or nowhere at all.

And she was abnormal enough to feel at ease in such a world - Amelia didn't like the house Eri bought in the same kind of place; the house was alright, she explained, but the place was not - she felt misplaced, so they had transplanted themselves in her idea of the right whereabouts; five minutes from the center of the town. Perhaps Safira loved big cities - she would, despite the stupid choice of specialization, re-install herself after graduation in Jakarta, like almost everybody else, year after year; the reason why the capital was still bearably overpopulated was because the flocks of defeated seekers of the monetary holy grail had also been witnessed retreating into the inland where they came from. This happened everywhere around the globe; wanderlusty youth who went to Los Angeles, such the same dreamers who sought their way to Paris, the inlanders that moved to Berlin; the same people who would, in a regretfully long years, get back with nothing but had lost a lot. Money and fame and easy life - these were the privilege of the lucky unequally distributed beings on earth; but she couldn't blame anyone who tried to catch their shadows when they were proven to be passing by without even glancing at the expectant worldly dreamers.

A partially-dressed man appeared in a distance now, he was carrying a bed on his bare, sweaty shoulders. Under his caping* the toil of the day seemed to Dora as being at its worst. She almost expected the bed, being entirely on its own and unattached to the body by anything, to slide down any moment. It was surely not made of teak, that would be too expensive; but whatever wood it was, no bed could be light especially under the scorching ultra red rays. Dora hated sights like this, which unfortunately had never been rare. It made no sense to her that a man could make sense out of the idea to sell a bed that way - or the whole set of living room chairs on one thin normal bicycle - or the heavy terracotta tables, and jugs five foot in height - but these happened and no telling of them could alter a single stroke of the real sweat falling on the asphalt.

With sombre thoughts mounting her head Dora got her sugar at last, but she lingered a while chatting about the robbery with the headman and Mr. Robby. He was the director of a poultry food company and whose house was too modest for his sort of position, but that might have been his way to blend in with the landscape, and had probably been a good precaution against bipedal housebreakers. He told them about his friend's experience, in which the neighborhood employed several professional watchmen at night - who stole their belongings after a few months of crime draught. The headman purred the proper sentiment, and Dora was warned to get extra careful because she lived alone.

More participants to the discussion came, one was personified by Mr. Jalu, the shoe-repairman, who stopped by to ask for some water. This man lived deeper into the village, but he was Mr. Karman's driver once and knew everyone around. The second was Mrs. Sugeng, the vendor of traditional snacks like cassava porridge, fried bananas, corn fritters, and the like. She was also the renown chef around; everybody had needed her culinary service once, and some even had been so for all the significant phases in life: the ceremony when they were seven months old inside their mothers' bellies, another when they were born, one more as they started to walk, then upon circumcision if they were males, afterwards a wedding, and all was repeated again with the new generation. Dora thought Mrs. Sugeng was not as old as was her reputation. When she said so, Mrs. Sugeng laughed and said she only ate vegetables and never touched meat, she didn't drink anything but water, and she stood and walked a lot in her job, so Age was duly deceived to leave her alone and bestow itself to, for instance, Mrs. Rahmat. Dora didn't believe in such things as 'healthy living', but she was glad anyway if those were really keeping Mrs. Sugeng around for a long time. She made great fritters.

Mr. Jalu had been having his afterhours, while Mrs. Sugeng was hardly starting her work when stopping there. Dora noticed that the man was a bit constrained after she came by - probably because she was quite well-off. Dora wondered how many clients had had their old shoes repaired today; even in a nationwide scope she couldn't think of a great number. Looked like she had been doing nothing but wondering about people's jobs all day.

With the arrival of the two, though, they talked about criminals in a livelier conference, drawing examples and illustrations from so wide a map - one of Mr. Robby's tales of real robbery happened to his acquaintances took place in Canada.

She told the three unreliable males in her living room about the robbery, and Anton said once thieves got away with it they would do it again in the same area. He told them about what the mob had done to the thieves once in town; they had beaten the criminals as mightily as they could, and then burned them alive. No arrest of the people; it had, Dora knew, been seen as natural for good people to get mad at criminals and to inflict their own sense of justice for all. Such a class action of taking the law into their own hands had been everywhere in practice these days.

"Yeah," Wotan agreed, "When I was young," he said, "Mobs only took adulterers and couples who weren't legally married to the street, stripped them off, and paraded them naked. It got me seventy bucks."

He painted the scene he witnessed of such a social punishment, and some foreign collector bought it - not for its artistic worth, Dora recalled her guess at the time, but maybe more for its realistic, documentary sort of depiction of the nation's moralizing sect. Tourists could be relied on to get enthusiastic about foreign shores at their worst.

Dora thought she was depressed enough by the time the guests left her with the empty beer cans. Every thought about crimes and criminals and mobs always got her sad. "Come on," Herman said to her once, "Don't get sad over such things. The stuff we can't possibly erase have to be lived with." Dora remembered she got mad at him for that; but she knew there was no other way but to do what he said. Like the thousands of Tionghoans* - including Herman's clan -- whose lifetime of hard work vanished in an overnight arson out of sheer hatred towards the wealthy in general, an everpresent racism, and every other cause that actually got nothing to do with them - but in time these same people got up on their feet again, started all over again, bearing the knowledge that it just might be repeated again - Dora let out a frustration that got a grip on her by a short sudden yell. This woke the black cat up and brought the ginger in from the window. Dora looked at the clock and discerned a quarter past four; she gave the cats their biscuits and thought that tomorrow she'd buy some cheap river fish to delay the depletion of the favored cat food.

After taking a bath Dora waited for any food peddler that might come - she didn't feel like eating, let alone cooking, but she couldn't digest Shakespeare, robberies, professional wrestling, or anything else of that calibre, on empty stomach.

Mrs. Susi's drillmaster voice was infiltrating the air and dissuading it from entering households; a hot late afternoon that still deceived people to think it was to be a hot night, while it did suggest some rain. Dora tried to unheard the discussion of the robbery outside between Mrs. Susi and the ever-ready Mr. Giman; soon after Mr. Giman's wife, Mrs. Rina, entered the arena and what she had (been thought to have) missed of the previous quarter of an hour made it necessary for Mrs. Susi to retell.

Dora concentrated on other sounds; during the day the Wall's, Miami, and Campina ice cream vendors with loud colors on their bodies and loudspeakers to send the company's message around had made their excursions. At some relatively short interval (when one was full of lunch and in no immediate need of supper) or ages away from each other (if one was starving) the siomay* vendors cruised the alleway, making the dull noise produced by hitting a piece of wood against its twin. Chicken sate* vendor, a sole fighter unrivalled so far, came almost punctually at eight-thirty p.m. Then at a reliable irregularity some noodle-with-chicken vendors came, too, and the mode of operation was similar with that of the empek-empek* sellers, but the latter were given to yelling and hitting their pans at the same time. Dora jumped from her seat when, amidst Mrs. Rina's shrill tone, she heard the sound of someone hitting a china bowl with spoon - it was the meatball vendor. For twenty cents she got a bowl of beef broth, in it swam meatballs, noodles and fried soybean cakes, tomato sauce and celery. She finished eating with the feeling of freedom of some unpleasant duty - it had always been how she felt when she wanted to work on something - she gave the bowl and spoon back to the vendor and was glad to close the door to Mrs. Susi's ".....so I have told Mr. Bowo, and he agreed with me, that the ex-cons -"

Dora didn't get back to The Two Gentlemen of Verona. She started instead to write a story about a courtroom incident, which had suggested itself while she was eating, and had suspended the plot about a murderous teenager that she got while bathing. She had reached the beginning of the last few paragraphs when the phone rang. She hated such an interruption and hoped it would shut itself up if she pretended that she didn't notice, but it rang persistently. Almost yelling, Dora answered it.

"What have I done?" the voice at the other end asked. That was rhetorical, Dora was sure, for she recognised it as Hamzah Farhan's. "One day," he once told her, "I might commit a heinous crime just because people keep ringing me up when I am in the middle of a mystery." He was a good short-story writer who also got the rare sense of taking up a tenure as an Indonesian Literature professor. Only twenty-nine, sharp, nice goatee and obstrusively silent, they were more or less friends since working together on an anthology a year ago. Dora liked him because he knew that he wasn't made for being brilliant, so he aimed at being pleasant.

"Sorry," Dora almost sincerely apologised. "I'm writing," she added. "Just give me two minutes," he said. "I'm organising a fund for Amir Maulana. You know him, right? He is in hospital now, needs a lot of blood, and he wouldn't get the operation if we can't raise enough to help his parents to pay for that. So - blood or money?"

Dora, although personally much annoyed, laughed. Hamzah chuckled. Amir was a poet that Dora didn't know well but enough to observe that he was not very likeable, with a superior air over everything that didn't respond to his challenge and disdain towards those that did. He sold his poems to local newspapers for fifty cents apiece, and he took his poverty with the pride that was unbearably unreasonable even to some artists. To Amir anything outside fiction was trash and everything outside poetry was crap. Now that he was hit by a mad trucker along with half a dozen of other pedestrians, Dora didn't have any social choice to resort to her personal thought of the man; and she promised to donate some filthy banknotes and refused to yield her blood. Hamzah thanked her on the behalf of the still unconscious Amir (who, Dora suspected, wouldn't even think of doing that) and she could then put down the receiver.

That Shakespeare thing simply must pay, Dora thought, getting a flash of the prior spending of the day. She stood at the window, feeling the oppressive heat, and then the air was jammed by some other thing - it was six-fifteen, and all mosques announced the time to pray the Maghrib prayer. Dora listened to it, a sound that she had heard every single day of her life, which at times she did notice. She imagined an isobar of mosques all around the timezone, all sent the same message at exactly the same time via big loudspeakers - an awesome picture. However discounted, God still was the greatest audience-getter, she thought; the Nazis could only did a thing similar to that in a pathetically small area of death camps and sport stadiums; the threat represented by guns and all couldn't cater to the need of a forever - Hell, on the other hand, had it.

The quiet neighborhood, praying-time aside, had only had its languor cut when the local band was in charge of the air. They got a pretty good band, consisted of a large drummer and five lesser figures, and they were able to give almost anything - jazzy sounds, dangdut*, Latin American lamentation, Backstreet Boys, keroncong*, lazy Hawaii'an tunes, kasidah*, Javanese pop, North Sumateranese melodies, and occasionally glam rock. Many villages had such a band, summoned to play in weddings, birthdays and such, the Independence Day, and the Islamic New Year's day - Dora considered herself lucky that the band in her area was a little bit above the level of listenability; in her mother's neighborhood they had a barely tolerable sound-producers of this kind. They could play all night. She'd prefer that anytime over the most dreaded substitute -- Mrs. Novi's karaoke sessions, relayed from her living room usually on an otherwise good, slumbering Sunday afternoon. The woman had the inimitable talent of being able to reduce any composer of any song to tears without even trying her worst.

After the last sound of adzan subsided, Dora sat down again and resumed the writing - but again the phone shrieked for attention. Now who was hit by what this time, she thought, saying her "hello" civilly remembering how she did it before. But no one was hit by anything as far as her sister Safira was concerned, except herself. She called to postpone her visit. Dora said "Okay. Now I'm hanging up, I'm working," and she thought, if the phone rings again I'd pull the cord off. The phone seemed to take the threat as real and it stayed mute until Dora had finished the story.

She made a cup of tea, and fed the fishes in the backyard. A large brown gecko, the size of two newborn kittens, scrambled away above the well; Dora almost shrieked - darn, she thought; thank goodness that thing didn't know that she was a whole lot more scared of it than it was of her. Wotan told her once that in facing a reptile "We must keep up appearance". That guy should know such an invaluable crack, Dora said to herself; he kept a snake and two horny lizards once, and in addition he also had been keeping on with Anton - he knew what he was saying. She eyed the well a little more nervously with a flash of thought that Amelia's cats might have contemplated something like an ambush for the gecko and the open well was then a very disconcerting spot for the hostess. She had been thinking of sealing or at least covering it up since a long time ago, since she didn't use it anyway, but the landlord objected flatly - for some rural Javanese, it seemed that sealing off a well was a voodoo-like action with one's (the owner of the property's; this was a superstition that recognised mortal Law) own source of worldly goods as the pricked body and the well itself be the doll. This put her out.

A drizzle was coming down there, little by little it was converted into rain. Dora got back to her computer and read what she had written. She edited the story though it was to her not so good, and dutifully counted the words, copied the file, and re-edited it to fit into certain editors' idea of the feasible length, and copied the shorter speciment to a floppy disk. Then she turned the computer off. She would have to take the floppy to a computer rental one of these days to have it printed; she didn't own a printer. All these only took her several hours of one night, unless she got the block. She had never told the truth whenever people asked her how long did it take to finish a short-story; she got evasive at the question. It was considered nuts to think up a plot until the last dot on an actual writing activity in one day - this could even damn the story itself regardless of its inherent merits; an editor she knew wouldn't read such an instant verbal dish. Everything on Planet Art got to be done as slowly as possible or else it would earn the title of hackwork. She hated the whole attitude, but at the moment there was nothing she could do about it.

Dora shut the windows when the rain was getting fiercer. It was almost midnight already; she locked the doors. The ginger cat had curled up on her bed, the black one snuggled up on the computer desk. For a second or two Dora was at peace with the world, then came the noise of water coming down the cracks on the roof onto the ceiling and finally the trip was concluded on the floor and on the kitchen table and elsewhere. Dora ran to the bathroom and put buckets on the victims of the leakage. She stood on at the kitchen door, shaking her head. She got to let the smaller leaks do whatever they had to; she was out of buckets and didn't want to use her cheap kitchen utensils. She still stood there when the phone, now satisfied with the knowledge that she had finished using the computer for the night, rang.

The first thing Amelia said was, "Where are my cats?" and that she would owe Dora if she would not feed the cats with real fish and stick to the heavily processed - "The salt will make their fur fall off," she emphatically said. Dora told her that Mr. Ifan ate the same kind of fish like twice a week and yet his hair kept to its post undisturbed; more than that, his moustache had been even thicker than ever; but Amelia wouldn't yield to this argument.

Dora felt tired for the first time after she hung up. The rain was still exerting its full force, and the dripping of its excess into the buckets was quite loud. She was glad that she had had the part of the roof and the ceiling above her bedroom mended; that was the only sensible place to be at the moment. She put on the plastic covers of the computer, picked up the black cat, put the light there off and went to bed with the two felines who seemed to want her out of it - probably because they couldn't go out in the rain. Dora wasn't able to determine the pair's way out of the house, and she wasn't sure if they couldn't break out the bedroom. For a few hours at least, she thought, they wouldn't go anywhere.

In bed, repetitions were relentless. Dora thought of the girl that Yanto's friend had broken up with, and she wondered if anyone could still make a readable story about it. Tragedies' tragedy is that they're so commonplace, she thought. Whatever glory was once attached to the suicide of the broken-hearted, after the first couple of examples it had waned and now it was perfectly dead. No one who had rejected another's possessive affection would be moved to tears or anything to hear that the dejected one tried out a suicide; at most only a slight guilt when there occured real deaths, yet that wasn't a personal guilt either, but a social one as expected by the environment. She thought some plots up, but they all looked unconvincing and severely dated. Then she moved on to the Suprapti girl and her double carelessness - she hoped the very young mother wouldn't have the guilt imprinted on her for the rest of her days - yes, it was horrible, Dora thought carefully, but it was different from drowning the kids, and she shouldn't be made to think of it as such. She felt immensely sorry for the Suprapti that she didn't know, because all the Endangs and Mrs. Lias in her world would drag this on to Armageddon. She thought about Mr. Bowo and the pitiful domestic submission; Mrs. Karti's mysterious colorfest; Linda's desertion of Arman; what Anton would have been if he were keeping a grocery. Scenarios and plots around these actual things came in quick flashes on her mind. Dora got up suddenly, risking the black cat's anger, put on the small light above her head and wrote down a few lines - she was able to nail one plot that she wanted to follow up; its main character was to be a baby goat. In the dark afterwards she still scribbled other few lines without looking; and only when her fictional characters made an exit and she was almost asleep she let her most private thought out - the last thing before she actually slept involved a guitar.

Footnotes
Click here for pictures of Javanese & Indonesian cats.
John Bunyan: Author of The Pilgrim's Progress, 1628-1688.
Becak: Pedicab; a tricycle with a seat at the front for passengers.
Caping: A hat made of woven bamboo, shaped like a broad cone.
Tionghoans: Chinese-Indonesian. Click here for complete history of the Tionghoans.
Siomay: West Javanese food converted from a Chinese dish, or so some say; of steamed rolls of cabbages, potatoes, fish or meat-filled soybean cakes, and fish or meat balls, served within hot peanut sauce, with soybean sauce or/and tomato sauce sprinkled on it.
Sate: Madurese food of pieces of chicken (or goat, or beef) meat roasted on skewer, served with sliced raw red onion, pickled cucumber and soybean sauce. Click here for pictures of Javanese & Indonesian food.
Empek-empek: Southern Sumateranese food of fried fishcakes, served in vinegar sauce with fresh cucumber pieces.
Dangdut: Popular music with strong beat reminiscent of Hindi and Arabic music, its main driving force is the bongo drums, flute, and tambourine. Lately it has taken in a wider audience, but in its history the dangdut has been mostly associated with the lower class or the blue-collar workers.
Keroncong: Originating from the Portuguese songs, characterized by the ukulele and flute, usually perceived as 'old men's music', since its biggest segment of audience comes from the bulk of more senior citizens.
Kasidah: Started as religious chant in Arabic sung to the rhythm of a sitar-like instrument, then it represents the genre of the Indonesian Islamic music sustained mainly by tambourines and drums.