Nostalgic Wraith

The house up the mountain was old, it used to be a Dutch's in weekends a hundred years ago. Moss had penetrated as far as the guest room's corner under the window. The Dutch knew how to build things for good, all those old European guys did - anything built in the 1980's had, on the contrary, come down to pieces within less than a decade. The Dutch was an overseer of the sugar factory downhill. The current owner had let the yellowing picture of the man and his workers, all stiffly alert in front of a wagon full of sugarcanes, stayed on the wall facing the bed. There were two Tionghoans with a long braid each down their backs among the darker faces of the Javanese laborers. None of those men smiled, whatever was his race. The caucasian looked like he had patented a certain kind of everlasting contempt towards everything, the Javanese had their ancient look of total vacuum when confronting their superior, and the Tionghoans looked insurmountably restless; one of them gave the impression of having to be somewhere else but couldn't possibly refuse the white man's order to pose for the picture.

The kitchen was large, and it had all the insignia of such a place - there was no window at all, only a row of dirty airvents high above everything and near the ceiling, the ceiling itself was chosen by a platoon of spiders as their cobwebdom, and it was partially blackened right above the kerosene stove. Pots and pans were lining up on one wall. A black plastic bag, full of other such bags, and a duster were hanging side by side near the door. A broom made of coconut hair was lying on the floor. The place where the dishes were to be washed was mossy, it was some red stone once, God knows how long ago. Dirty dishes from the supper were still there unattended. The floor was of an uncertain color now although here and there patches of green foliage printed on the tiles were visible.

Dutch houses always have high ceilings and large doors - that's the way houses should be, something for the little pigs to hide from the wolf in. The sense of order in the funky real estate of Jakarta seemed phony now being recalled under the sturdy roof two centuries old.

Who had slept in the guest room? A Javanese regent perhaps, who came there to bribe the Dutchman or to consult him upon matters like how to administer the most rewarding punishment on the sugarcane-thieves, if there was such a thing. Or a Tionghoan merchant who came to get his pay, after doing some hush-hush service for the host, like supplying tiny packets of crack or putting out a local unrest by persuasion and small change - something a good colonist should have resorted to first before applying for the use of force. Maybe there had been intriques and murderous intentions - personal grudges of the Dutchman's concubines, maybe, or his cook, or his footman; the driver of his carriage might have had some affair with his favorite mistress. People from the dusty pages of history didn't have lives more intricate than we do now; but theirs have the advantage of being memories and as such automatically magnified.

And now he was there.

Outside, there were the morning noises of a village - minus the human populace's. Chickens were already busy pecking and crooning and ranting in general, on the wet grass that retained last night's rain. Birds' added to the insects'.

The smell of wet grass and soil soaked in the ordinance of the rain brought him to the months in another village, where he spent his time digging sewers, planting trees, instructing bike repair and decoding micro economics to mislead school kids with - this was the activity he was most reluctant to do, but the campus that already sent him there and deprived him of Zippo fuel also expected him to practice what he had unlearned so far. He remembered Mr. Karto, his host, who got busy since six o'clock every morning although he was around sixty-five year old. There were five students under his roof and not enough money from the campus to help Mrs. Karto to feed them like humane. The two female students tried their best, but he was afraid Mrs. Karto could never fully recovered from their meddling in her kitchen business. A ridiculous fuss it was, when one of the women, a student of Pharmacy, declared that the water supply in the house - a well - was contaminated by difficultly-named germs. And the other woman, student of Philosophy, brought a microwave oven to upset Mrs. Karto's sense of culinary order - while there was not enough power to run the thing even when all the lights in the house was put off. The males weren't model students either - the guy named Roni who pretended to study the Law was so depressed being detached from his computer and all, and got drunk every single day. What a disgusting sight when the villagers carried him back 'home' to Mrs. Karto, in a cart that used to be functioned to carry dung - that was the only available tool at the moment when they found Roni lying literally face down in a literal gutter. Sulis, the student of Sociology, with his huge appearance and a big moustache, was afraid of everything and phobic about the rest - but at least he also dug sewers and all. The three of them were supposed to share not just a bedroom but also the one and only bed; he slept outside in the patio on most nights instead because Sulis snored like a dozen buffaloes. And he went out with a pretty Geography student named Rita on Saturdays, for whom he had a crush out of what now seemed to be a struggle to kick out boredom. They said sweet bull to each other whenever they got a chance. He remembered Rita as so sexy that carriage-pulling horses went mad whenever she was passing - no, that was a rude comment from Sulis once and now he wondered why he took it as a compliment. Rita's affection towards fried crabs aside, she was alright.

His friend's private university was more considerate, they let him take his computer and stereo set into his temporary private room. The village itself was severely considerate, it was right in the middle of a city and every weekend the students went to a cafe. His friend's host, the man's housemates, the population and the village itself almost never saw him in person for the whole course of two months; if not playing games in his room, he was in the city's mall, having capuccino.

But his public pedagogic institution ruled that no car was allowed to be brought to the villages, and no more than two bikes per five students. There was only one motorbike and one that was only by excessive generosity could be called such, for all five students in Mr. Karto's house. He drove an old Datsun truck those days and it should have been more than useful if only the university let him take it there - he could have taken Mr. Karto's cows faster to the panic-stricken would-be M.D. in another village - the only one resembling a veterinarian around - the cows were getting themselves poisoned by some paraffin, nobody knew how, and the whole family insisted upon carrying them on a cart pulled by the three male students and Mr. Karto's only son who all rode the two bikes. The cows, while recovering fast, almost took the human companions to hospital.

He got out of the front door. It was still busy, nature outside and under his sandals; green insects and red ants crawled around in a manner that to him seemed unnecessarily briskly and apparently aimless. He didn't notice the little pond near the chicken house last night, but it was there now, gold fishes floated there sleepily. The stone angel was under the morning hazy light looked dangerously wobbly; he would say something about it to Budi later. It was a dormant volcano under everything there, but who knew. A slight earthquake would dislocate the angel and mislocate it on top of somebody's head. The chicken coop now seemed very large, and the chicken too many. They didn't pay any attention to him. He walked straight following the trodden grass. After a few trees and remains of what once were brick fences, he came to the level of guilt an idler must have felt beholding another man's oceanic diligence. Budi, even if with the brothers, had done a good and hard work there in the orderly gardens. He got cabbages, cucumbers, melons, watermelons, bananas, jackfruit, mustard greens, and other cash plants. At the same time he got irritated at the remembrance that all this amazing collection of human labor in cooperation with the land only ended up as one dollar a day.

He turned around and went seeking the cemetery.

His grandmother, an old sharp-tongued person from another century, told him that when he was born a cousin of hers died, almost at the same minute (his mother denied this rumor). And when the baby was brought to the grandma she was startled to see that he looked like the departed soul's temporary earthly residence. But then again grandmother was half Buddhist and half of assorted beliefs in the supernatural, who claimed that she had predicted the Great Flood that had sunken the city of Solo to its neck. He was promised to be shown this granduncle's picture, but it had never been fulfilled and grandmother died before he remembered it again. The younger generation might have been oblivious of such things, he thought. But who knew. His friend in the dorm back then was thoroughly avant-garde when it came to the worldly matters such as computer programming, yet he attributed everything to the Unseen and once even expressed endorsement of the Javanese flocks who went to the Kawi mountain to burn gum benzoin incense under sacred banyan trees and performed such rituals like making love to any stranger there to meet the requirement of getting their wishes for riches, public officialdom, kids, to the mere prayer to eradicate pimples, granted.

This was a typical Chinese cemetery they had there. It was not very old, it wasn't there of course when the Dutchman rode by on his carriage. Epiphyte decorated the frangipani trees strewn over the marble and sandstone landscape. Cemeteries always meant frangipani. He thought someone had told him how come, but now he had forgot.

Some of the tombs were distinctly Buddhist, but others were an array of religiosity that denoted Confucianism, Roman Catholicism, branches of Protestantism, and one or two were Muslim - they were the ones with the most subdued decoration, like an understatement amidst the majority of some loud colorful yells. He noticed that the most lavishly adorned graves with shiny best marbles and golden tints were the most deserted ones - while the simpler got traces of withering flowers indicating visitors. Goats seemed to have visited the cemetery too, indifferently; and the shape of the Chinese tombs which looked exactly like beds might have invited some weary shepherds to get a nap, and they certainly did that.

He stopped quite a while near a Catholic grave which had a lot of stone-carving in the shapes of saints and angels, freshly repainted. There were only three or four lines of Chinese characters on the marbles, the rest was in Latin, and, curiously, the lines were in English. Who on earth was this? The name didn't ring a bell. He left the cemetery.

Budi was with the Cadillac at the front yard when he reached the gate. It was some bananas-dropping day. He, even by exerting his rather wide imagination to its limits, couldn't think of how this picture was to make any sense - chickens, eggs, bananas, jackfruits, everything the once a luxury car had been taken in and dropped off. Out of an excitement usually generated by the indecent and odd, he offered some muscles. Budi was to take his brother with him, but since he would have seated at the back anyway he found a place among the baskets in front. They went down the road and he chuckled when he saw Budi turning off the engine. Such a thoughtful prevention of the waste of gas he had known himself with motorbikes earlier, but it wasn't among his luggage when he moved to Jakarta because the flat coastal city wouldn't permit such an excessive frugality. They rolled quietly down until the road became a bit less snaky and a lot more roady, and Budi braked and turned the engine on again.

They reached the tourists' market - that was how Budi called it - he did help lifting up and putting down the stems of ripe, dark yellow bananas against all odds. When Budi talked with the stall proprietor he squatted by the roadside with the brother and offered him some cigarettes. The originally neat row of fruit and vegetable and souvenir stalls had become its own self after years had gone by; maybe even quicker than that. He had never seen the place after he left town; it wasn't there yet when he went to the mountain in the eighties. It was called the 'tourist market' because of the obvious reason - everything was priced at least twice its real worth and for the same sum one could get twice the merchandise in the traditional market that catered to the needs of the locals. Producers, though, didn't get the unholy dimes; it was the privilege of the ones who owned the stalls. "That swine there," Budi's brother pointed with his thumb at a small ladylike man in front of one of the stalls, "He cheated us once and now we wouldn't supply him no more."

The said swine was apparently unconcerned. A dawet vendor stopped near them. He asked for a bowl of it and Budi joined them for the refreshment shortly afterwards. After some time they discovered that the vendor was somehow 'family' - he was a distant relative of one of Budi's wife's in-laws.

Without the bananas the Cadillac was almost normal. And at any rate it was in its best of possible conditions. Old cars and wooden trucks he saw there were visibly rickety, and there was a 'Batman' Holden (its rear was like the hero's) whose breath emitted too much carbondioxyde and (just like the Cadillac) he couldn't think of how it could get so high on the mountain if not lowered down by a chopper.

They drove around, Budi seemed to take it as his next assignment to show the guest what else had been changing.

The villas were one. They were now littering the place and got so close to each other. He knew the owners couldn't be counted upon as being there even once a year. Most were in Jakarta; the almost indecently rich who bought every piece of land everywhere for future insurance. The casuarina trees that made a small forest a decade ago had gone. In their place now stood a proud architectural failure; a pastel-colored villa which distinguishing feature was that the humans associated with it had absolutely no taste at all. The small hotels had multiplied up to an alarming number. One or two looked like hotels in general, the greater number of them looked like a variety of hastily converted inconvertible households. They even dried their clothes and underwear and all, including spoiled rice from yesterday's supper to be fried as chips later, on winnowing trays put on the fences and occupying several footsteps of the road. These catered to the quickly dissipating lust of the drunken youths and the bleary-eyed middle-classed salarymen. He was glad to see all these under the reluctant sunlight - at night there would have been prostitutes pursuing the car.

"That's the villa," Budi's brother, by now having established himself as the authoritative source on local scandals, pointed at a huge building on a slope whose pillars were clearly intended to support the idea of a tropical Grecian temple. What an eyesore. His other former girlfriend Noviani would have been perplexed everyday if she were a little more down to earth. Noviani was a passionate woman, and in campus she was formidable in a good sense although it was not right. "I'm not a genius. I'm an architec." She adored her old man the way one might imagine an upstart composer adores Johann Sebastian Bach; the man explained at length to him that he only cared about functions and as far as he was concerned the aesthetic part of the job could hitchhike to hell. Noviani took this as a legacy literally and solemnly. She didn't want to listen when a friend told her that her father built things he wouldn't include in the domestic portfolio; a grand ballroom gilded and splashed with all colors, a private kindergarten, an art gallery, a gymnastic center - which were of all sorts, from simply elegant to lavishly flamboyant to beyond description. "I guess he can't say no, " she told Noviani, "Because, well, that's what architects are paid for, right? They got to build what the employers want." Ordinary architects at least might be so, not the one who designed the Holocaust Memorial.

He knew one of these disowned works of Noviani's father's. It was a bank, a beautiful bank, unfortunately it was also one of the myriad that the government had closed during the monetary crash since it was lousy in doing what a bank must while excellent in looking like what a bank must not. It looked like a small French chateau deeply receding from the main street, leaving a large garden to be the first to confront passersby, and its underground parking lot was roofed by Japanese grass. A serene air was lent also by the presence of a fountain, water still came pouring out of the stone unicorn's mouth although the building had been left much to its own fate. He's so like God, Noviani's father; he built a Paradise but never lived in it - not even anybody else did in this case.

They drove so slowly in front of the villa as was Budi's brother's wish.

"What's with the villa?" he asked. "It's the one Mayor X always goes to, with girls," he was replied. Mayors and regents and governors and other public officials had never been far from such gossip-mongering persons, no matter where.

"Do you mind if we stop in a grocery?" Budi asked him.

"Of course not," he replied, and Budi told him that as far as he knew the grocer was also his family, somehow, as far and intricate the line that made the bridge between the two was as it was with the dawet peddler. Like the Chinese, the Javanese, too, assertively in villages, considered almost everybody as a part of the same family tree - which, if trekked meticulously and faraway back, might be true or might just give away the fact that the so-called patriarch's brother was actually a paying tenant under his roof at the time, or a laborer in his fields, or the village's witch-doctor. The more cosmopolitan Javanese usually had abandoned the practice - it was, anyhow, impractical to have an unlimited stock of relatives, which meant endless party invites and evergreen possibility of somebody showing up for the purpose of borrowing some money. But in emergencies such as being stranded in a foreign city abroad this olden days' habit was tactfully resumed. Even if it wasn't, Indonesians are, like the Chinese, bound to each other by a language that called strangers 'brother' and 'sister' if they were around the speaker's age and whose 'sir' and 'ma'am' were the same words they used to denote the familial 'father' and 'mother'.

The little store was squeezed between a couple of cheap hotels, he saw that it wasn't even larger than the chicken house. It consisted of a dirty glass rack and a row of thin plywood shelves, obviously handsawed by someone unfamiliar with carpentry, and a little figure of the female who married Budi's distant relative. The woman, on his guesstimate, wasn't anywhere above twenty, and looked like so, even though at least three kids were coming in and out the cloth that was hung covering the door to the living quarters behind the store and Budi said they were hers. She wore a baby-doll sleeping attire - pinkish puffy short sleeves, puffy pants that reached her knees. He couldn't understand why people felt roaming the streets and installing themselves in public places thought(less) that such things like pajamas and lounging gowns were alright to appear in. But he wasn't being fair - his distaste only scooped up women, while like everyone else he found nothing against the menfolk who, like his father's mechanic and even his father himself, only wore nothing with the very short shorts, or in cooler afternoons they donned sleeveless undershirts. Some did for economy, some for private convenience. The mechanics saved themselves from the nerve-wrecking washing experiences since grease was destined to ruin whatever they wore; the rather rounder citizens survived hot days the same way, plus again less to wash; and he remembered a neighbor he knew who only wore trousers and shirts on weddings. There was no state policy that prevented the wandering of the people who should have been treated in mental hospitals by the way, and these people usually found no clothes to wear or perhaps they regarded them as others might think of straight-jackets and went about naked to the butts. A very distressing subject, he said to himself, when a shirt extracted half or all of one's monthly salary. The bums loitering the New York alleyways on TV had never elicited sympathies here because they were decidedly overdressed.

A small pile of dirt-stained cassava was on the floor next to a barrel filled up with kerosene. It surely was almost twice its price per liter compared to the same thing in the cities. On the plywood racks were a few packets of instant noodles, ants in transparent plastic bags which hid sugar from immediate sight, three bottles of good cooking oil and an uncovered bucket on the floor beneath them of the homemade sort, also swam in by ants. There were two pieces of soybean cakes covered with drying and shrinking banana leaves - he wasn't sure if these were for the domestic table or were they for sale. Medicine for skin diseases, remedy for flu, pills that were claimed to quell headaches and cough were strewn carelessly inside the glass menagerie of odds and ends. Two lightbulbs, packets of thumbnails, cellotapes, ballpoint pens, pencils, erasers, a few notebooks, drawing books, little envelopes for wedding gift of money, a sachet of floor cleaner, bathing soap, toothpaste, and a bottle of cheap perfume that called itself Ralph Lauren's Polo - probably distilled in an obscure factory somewhere or, noticing the state of the bottle itself, somebody's idea of a 'do-it-yourself' lesson in perfumery. There were also packs of cigarettes - they didn't have his brand. Most of the packs were opened indicating the sale of them as individual cigs. Boxes of matches were to be found lying near them with one or two plastic gas lighters bearing the logos of Italian football clubs. Above the woman's head on a plastic string that stretched from one end of the place to another, were assorted sachets of everything. Shampoo, body lotion, washing soap, strawberry and pineapple syrup powder, biscuits, monosodium glutamate, instant coffee and tea and chocolate, pepper, cinnamon and terasi .

He didn't realise that Budi's brother didn't come into the store with them. The man sat on the sidewalk outside.

"I can't get in, you know, she's my ex-girlfriend," the man said.

"Well," he said, after it became obvious that the man expected him to ask a further 'why', "She's mad at you or something? Or you are to her?"

"No, we ain't, but her husband is." He grinned. "'Cause I still see her sometimes, going to town to see a movie."

"Wow," he didn't know what to say.

"And," the man added as if in passing, "I think the second boy is mine."

He couldn't supress his laughter, although it wasn't funny or anything. The man grinned even wider. Then he said something in Javanese that indicated the same thing as a lion might convey in roaring.

What a world, he thought as the Cadillac left the place and took them off the pavement. He became acutely aware of the faces they saw on the road and on the imaginary sidewalk they used to pull angry curses from drivers' mouths. These strangers, these little noticed strangers from a mere temporary visitor's point of view, all had their own romances and woes and what a scary anthology those could yield if collected. He understood that his own life story wasn't so exciting. It was, compared to Budi's brother's (whose name he didn't even ask), tidy and intrigueproof. Naturally one loved to believe that one's own life was complicated enough to beat the Middle East negotiations for peace, but in truth everyone else's was more likely to be it.

They picked Budi's kid up from school since they passed it on the way back. The school was, like thousands of schools built by the government for the past three decades, on its way to oblivion. The roof-tiles were staying everywhere but the place assigned to them when they were put there, the cemented floor got a variety of holes, the windows got no glass and from the road the classrooms were visible enough to enable him to shake his head because the benches looked very unsafe to seat on, some were broken and just piled in a corner. Even in Jakarta, the center of everything, the heart and head of the governance, he had seen the same picturesque sight. These schools were built by some contractors who possibly didn't employ architects, who had taken the corrupt bureaucrats by the nose, and who might have spent only a quarter of what they should on the actual action of developing a place to study at. He could be sure there was no lab and the kids perhaps got to share one textbook for half the class. They saw one of the underpaid -- and probably even that was suspended indefinitely -- teachers. The educator climbed upon a bicycle and Budi nodded at him in recognition.

Looked like everybody was napping, including the chatty fowls, when he was back at the house. He felt the afternoon sun that was nowhere like such. There were several dozens of mountain resorts all over the country and each was the other's twin, but remembering Puncak and Batu he thought this one was different even if just for the fact that none of whom he knew owned a Dutch house elsewhere. A stretch of misty clouds spread away on the farthest end of his eyes' roaming range. He walked past the sensibly horticultured gardens that he didn't have the chance to see up close, and followed a patch of land full of cabbages that sloped down to some sparsely vegetated land, ended in the indifferent bushes that had almost made up their minds to be decorative. Behind this was the river.

He had heard a lot about the river and its gigantic stones that were once, a long time ago, projected out of the mountain's pyroclastic mouth. The volcano was now in a coma, but he couldn't trust slumbering beasts and he believed one day this mountain, too, would be awaken and double its dose of wrath simply because it had been lacking exercise. It would then act the part of a chronic bulimic and vomit everything out of its gargantuan stomach. He found a set of stairs cut into the solid soil, and went further down. He remembered the grandmother who kept them in the house and told them that they shouldn't, ever, venture near the river because the mist there was known to come down unexpectedly, and when it went ascending back the kids would have been gone. The evil goddess of the mist, she said, cooked young boys and girls for her tigers' supper. It was possible that he had grown taller enough today to regard the river as fairly narrow, but it was equally possible that it had stayed the way it was in the eighties and only the sedimentation had clung on it like cellulites, leaving a narrower channel for the water. He looked into the liquid calmness, seeing his own face, his nicotine haze. His father fished in the suburban man-made ponds littered by all sorts of fishes that one had some good reason to hope to catch, since the owner of the place had been paid five dollars an hour and he would have felt obliged to give the fishermen a buck's worth in their most lucklessness - he'd never known how to pursue the hobby in a real waterway like this. Perhaps his uncle, the priest, got some better experience. He guessed that he did fish in this river, because there were fishermen in Galilee.

He saw some small, dark sepia spotted frogs and with no reason recalled the old Koes Plus song - "It's not an ocean, only a milky pond. Casting nets are enough to let you live on. There's no storm, no hurricane that you'll meet. Fishes and shrimps are coming your way." Too simple for a national anthem, he soundlessly laughed; any song that he could sing couldn't have the dignity of an aria. And at any rate this was a dusty postcard picture of the now dwindling, faltering, blundering, saddened and violent people. Everybody had had their dose of civics at school, and in it was included a big pouchful of nationalist songs that told of a fearless, majestic seafaring nation, a palmy beach that hailed future greatness, a mythical bird with magical powers to unite the people, and so on. But he thought none of these really got any sincere love of Indonesia, not the way Koes Plus' did. "People said this land is Paradise," the song in his head went, "A stick, a log and a stone turn into plants -"

He was, like, six year old when listening to this song for the first time.

In his time, in his place, they didn't long for the unattainable the way they probably should have done; one didn't foresee one's future as the glittering big city's businessperson or an accoladed actor or a musician overnightly grabbing stardom - rather the picture was tuned in to some glamorous instant decay, celebrated premature burial or nothingness in general.

All the morsels of the past, he thought, they looked so uselessly committed from today's eyes. Had he merely wasted time with the girls and stuff? With his crushes and broken heart? He really tried to think this over. He couldn't escape the impression that all of those were done for nothing. But, then again, they could be the steps on the stairway that he called his life. It was possible that had he never done those unspeakables, he would have had none of what he had now to arrive at. A rather fatalistic look, he admitted to himself, but it made living bearable.

He remembered another grandmother of his, and the ghost in the tower behind her house.

He didn't really pay attention to the house except perhaps its outer door that led to the street. From the outside the house didn't give away its internal makeup. Its door opened directly to the town's main street, on its left and right were a small Chinese food restaurant and a laundress' stall. But once entering the door, a whole different world was spread inside. It opened to a yard, once a grassy yard and after years had trodden it by the yard was transformed into cement blocks, and there eight or ten houses were neatly laid on both sides, keeping grandma's children and grandchildren warm at night and even more than hot during the day. At the center, thus the farthest from the inconspicuous door, was grandma's house itself - the prelude to it was a spacious terrace with wooden fences, rattan chairs and mirrors on the wall, and from its door if it was ajar an altar was visibly red and gold with the scent of burnt joss sticks. The grandeur it had once had was no more when he was there - only fading splendor under the weak yellow lightbulbs that never exceeded ten Watts - grandma was, in his brother's words, "a miserable miser" who still gave the same sum of money in the eighties as she had had in the sixties for angpao - the gift of money put in red envelopes given especially on the Chinese New Year - disregarding entirely the inflation and deflation and everything in that direction. If she was still alive, he thought, she would have given twenty cents still to the well-wishers at her door, including her son in-law who made several million dollars a year.

The tower was a solitary building in grandma's backyard, near another obscure door that led to another busy street, from which her guests would have been denied entrance. A clumsy tamarind tree was shading it from direct view from the back porch. It was rumored as haunted for generations, although no one had testified to it - grandma really got mad if there was any such suggestion to check the rumor out for the truth. His mother said the tower was never opened at all, not as long as she knew.

Maybe grandma kept her insane illegitimate son there, he let himself wonder on the macabre, or it was grandpa's. Or even grandpa himself; when he was said to be cremated actually it was his housekeeper; he retreated into the tower for some black-magic and only his wife knew about it. His brother volunteered another theory a long time ago - he said grandma kept tons of gold there, the ones which were stolen from the Palace of the Javanese monarch in Solo, that was supposed to be given as a tribute to the Dutch Governor-General in Batavia -- that was why grandma, after being sworn to secrecy by her own father, pretended to be very poor so they wouldn't cut her head along with the sorry messengers who were genuinely robbed but never believed as so. He didn't buy the notion that his brother was capable of spinning tall tales, and it wasn't, as it turned out, his creation - the story came out of the head of none other but his car-fixing, fishing father's.

He now remembered the other tales, dispatched casually one after the other in family gatherings - but almost never to a limited audience of his own wife and offsprings. One day in somebody's wedding he told a story about how their grandfather had taken a role in the cholera plague in Solo -- he meant of course a role in eradicating this plague - and that he, the grandfather, had actually had helped dr. Tjipto Mangunkusumo organising a strike among the native physicians to get better pay from the Dutch Resident of Solo. Then there was the tale around one other ancestor of the clan, whose adventures as the jack of all trades had brought him to relative proximity to Mohammad Jafar, the last Chinese Captain of 1830 - it was this ancestor who provided the Captain with the Holy Qur'an directly sent from Mecca under his own supervision via an ugly but faithful and courageous nephew who sailed to and from the Arabian nights. And, of course, there was at least one story that installed still another ancestor as an important albeit not a key-player in the ascending of the 'Yellow Emperor' of the Javanese kingdom of Mataram. His father was very interested in this period of history, an interest which none other seemed to have had. Perhaps, to most people that he knew, the existence of a Tionghoan king on a Javanese throne amidst the struggle against the Dutch colonists didn't mean anything as it did to his father.

He smiled by himself. Those were - in his eyes of today - good stories. He had gotten the same itch - and now he could nail the genes that brought it. The stock of prototypes is very limited, he thought. A hundred and a thousand years ago there certainly had been a man like his father, too, someone like his uncle, all of his grandmothers, and so on. He could never say if he loved his parents, as a package or as individuals, but he certainly liked the fact that they were related to him. He knew his father had been living his own creed; that it was desirable to be saved from a moderate success and better to be committing a brilliant failure - but only by the man's own standard of each. This was a dreamer's worldview, and he knew his mother shared it - she and the scentless meaty petals called orchids, that were insufferably made the official National Flower - the only reason for which was probably that it was expensive. Unlike the orchids, her mother's garments and all the womanly possession she had ever had were just enough to sustain a life. But she said she was happy. His father, too, was happy. Without understanding it nevertheless he felt that he did know what they meant. The shadow on the window, the tears on the pillow, they were and they were not sorrow. It might not even be a cruel partition of one person in sunder. They blended somehow, they melted into a single thing whose name he didn't know.

The river sighed a bit louder as the afternoon crept to the west. Birds had started to make their frantic journey back home. The air had become heavier, a hint of thicker mist was again hovering above the river. And he had run out of cigarettes. Slowly he retraced his steps back. Everybody got their own notion of happiness. He wouldn't say one thing is not just because he had no idea how it could be. The evening was rain-repentant. He rode down the slippery asphalt. Too bad he had had supper; from the market and beyond food stalls and roadside tents made of old cinema canvases or flour sacks sewn together were lining up with their price-tagged offerings - oxtail soup; goat, rabbit and beef sate ; traditional fried chicken, eel, quail, milkfish, gurami fish, and the ones that were not for everybody - pork, snake, water buffalo meat, mollusk, flying white ants, pigeon and horse meat; the latter was believed to beat any other aphrodisiac in the world. The seafood stalls also served river shrimps, crabs, green mussel. Still other rows sold soto - tripe soup, beef soup, chicken soup, soup with potato croquettes, and such soup with coconut milk. He stopped though, to get fried cow entrails for Budi who hadn't had supper when he left. Of course there was no reason why what was left of the supper - the gudeg with chicken and eggs shouldn't find its way to Budi; he just wanted to buy something, the food out there was so enticing.

The farther he climbed, the quieter the road was. Only one woman he saw walking to the same direction -- wearing some sort of dress that seemed to be made not in Paris but in anger. She didn't look at him, and he didn't offer a ride. It must be over midnight, he thought, glancing at the rearview mirror - was that a fellow mammal, or was she a ghost?

The woman lifted her eyes now, only two dots in the dim road light; he thought she smiled. But she didn't float or fly or evaporate into the misty air - he didn't know why he was disappointed.

Like the main function of tumbleweeds is to be poetic; so is of ghosts in the mind of the living who once in while just catch a glimpse of himself as a wraith.

Footnotes

Under the Table & Dreamin'

The Usual Suspects

Tortilla & Coffee

Moments In Time

Mad House

Shotgun Quiz I

Shotgun Quiz II

So I Do the Write Thing

Pulp Jackets

Origins of Rainforestwind

Quotidian

Repertoire

Soul Tattoos

Panorama

Personal Animania

Thru the Window

Dog Days Eve

Picture Purrfect

Private I

Voice of Ages

Red

PICTURE GALLERIES

My Loco Valentino

Skyborne Psychopathology

An Honest Personal Ad

Rock Garden

Manowar

Wired or Weird

Between Osama & I

Phantom Deli

Red Cloud Nine

Patriots (and Scuds)

Plastic Image of Home

Cedar Grove

Sky of Dust

Noir

Love O'Clock

Song of Silence

The I of the Beholder

Of Gods & Dogs

Fifteen Stories

Planet Loco

Boomtown Brats

Blue

Aqua Marine

Caravan Of Dreams

Images Of the Sea

Avatar

Eroica

Sunset Guns

Lady Rain

Poems Of Solitary Delight

Tasty Insults

Tribute to Images

Shrine X

Fantasy Bytes

Manga Females

Arts Unlimited

Poetic Landscapes

Candy Time

Humor or So

Humor Pix II

Humor Pix III

Humor Pix IV

Humor Pix V

Humor Pix VI

Humor Pix VII

Humor Pix VIII

Funny Moby

Best Asian Movies

Real-Life Warlords

Samurai Legends

Japanese Pop

Clickaways

Ancient Yearbook

Byte Back:
Your Fingerprints On Me

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