Online Flip Book / Download   Back to our Information Page

I believe that every person has an interpretation for his own life. Even crazy people. Each direction we take depends more or less upon these interpretations. And now I would like to recount the tale of a man’s life, a man who, because of a misinterpretation, fell into my hands to become the hero of my story.

I first met him under the eaves of a house I wanted to rent. He was wearing black shorts. His back was hunched and his ribs stuck out like rows of crabs’ legs. His red eyes longed for a good night’s rest, but the plaintive tone in his voice begged for attention.

“Even though I am just one of the little people,” he said with pride, “God has granted me the good grace to meet a number of our great leaders: the president, ministers, high-ranking officials.”

And again his ribs undulated, really and truly like a crawling crab, and his reddish eyes blazed: he solicited my absolute attention, and that attention I gave him.

“So what is it that you do?” I asked.

It turned out he was a debt-collector for a doctor in private practice.

Later, we became neighbors.

Over time I came to realize that his life was a long chain of fears: of demons, of the police, of sorcerers, of rich people, of his own bitterness at not hitting it big on the black market, of his wife’s nagging, and a whole lot more that could be linked to the chain. It was as though each step forward was two steps back—paralyzing! And what he sought were fragments to hold on to: the turtledove he sprayed with his own spit each Friday, and the spontaneous expression of his sexual fantasies: so beautiful, so fair (when a woman happened by)! And his red eyes would flash demonically.

And when Saturday night arrived, he’d take his ketjapi from its place and, alone, begin to play sesindiran. Occasionally another neighbor would bring a violin and their playing would grow quite lively. The sesindiran would quickly be replaced by tembang sekar. Then the aura of his homeland—the Land of Valleys and Mountains—would descend from the heavens. The faint sound of the singing would suddenly change into something lively and passionate. Ah dreams! Ah reality! The two coexist within each person. The two are constantly at war. That’s why no one can escape them.

This battle was evidently too violent for his body; his eyes always red, his ribs looking like crab’s legs. Then there were his little projects: like polishing his French bike with a wet rag until it shone—he’d shoulder this two-wheeler over every mud puddle that he encountered. Or smoothing down the dirt floor of the house he rented from Raden Marbaut—the house that he’d patched up with discarded materials he’d collected on his daily rounds: paint, two-by-fours, screens, shards of broken windshield to make skylights. Or selecting nice spots to place twigs where his turtledove might perch. Or making a coop for his prized chickens that laid eggs every day.

Over time I learned fragments of his life story. He was born and raised and married in his homeland: the Land of Valleys and Mountains, where at any moment you can hear the sound of a ketjapi blowing in the humid wind, where at any moment you can doze off peacefully because the soil always bestows its grace upon the crops. He was an industrious farmer. That was before, fourteen or fifteen years ago. But his plot of land was too small and the sawah couldn’t bring prosperity all year round. He had no other means, except to get a meal while working on community projects like building a neighbor’s house, or angling for catfish in the river. He was miserably poor, and he felt bitter that this poverty isolated him from other people. Everyone feels that they have the right to govern themselves. And he did not like to stay at home. And when he was at home, even his wife did not want him near her.

That cursed wife! he would grumble to each fish he caught, to each gust of wind, to the top of the bamboo clumps under which he was fishing, to the murky water churned up by the startled fish, to anyone he knew who was willing to listen to his complaints. To everyone—to everything. With but one exception: his wife herself. He believed that Si Tjitjih was the mastermind behind all of the unhappiness of his life. He wanted to rebel against her. But the justification for it was not there!

He too needed a justification, just like the diplomats, just like the politicians, and the critics.

But with time, his accusations took shape: it was Tjitjih’s fault that he was so poor. That good-for-nothing wife! And in time that shape was realized as he surrendered to his sexual fantasies: one man and all the long-legged, light-skinned women! How delicious: djankungkoneng! Then one day she caught his attention: a young virgin! And this virgin was willing to accommodate his dreams and transform them into reality. A true virgin! Truly djankungkoneng!

And then his whole manner began to change. This was his first victory. His first victory as a man! And it was a victory he could really and truly feel. His marriage to Tjitjih broke up. His eldest daughter who attended SGB and had a civil service scholarship, stayed with her mother. His son went with him. With his clothing, his son, and si djankungkoneng, he set off for the land of runaways. Djakarta! Djakarta! Djakarta, a place for all runaways.

Such was one fragment of his history that I came to know.

And in Djakarta he embarked upon a new history, and a new life, the saga of his escape. An escapee, too, from his old livelihood: no land, no fishing-rod. He became a transplanted citizen in this new region. He immediately rented a shanty from Raden Marbout. And this raden also lent him what he needed for sleeping and for the kitchen. Luck was with him, for that same day he found a job: in a government printing-house. His wages? A week’s work was enough to pay the rent on his shanty.

A livelihood that brought no satisfaction! When the rains came, water that overflowed from higher ground spilled down into the house. And because the back wall of the house was actually part of a small hill that had been cut open, and because the side of this small hill formed a big drain, the back wall of the house automatically became a nesting-place for fieldmice. And when it rained heavily, mud flowed through the holes made by these mice. The main room, which he’d designated as the bedroom, the kitchen and the living-room, had once been the neighborhood outhouse, but was later buried under piles of garbage. But as the fumes from the waste evaporated, and the trash began to decompose into dirt, the floor of this room sank down, creating a large hole. Every day he brought a load of dirt to fill the hole, but a month later it had still not disappeared. In fact, when the rain fell in that area, the hole became something that was no less significant than si djankungkoneng. The result of all this was quite predictable: of course si djankungkoneng complained day in, day out. And his son wandered the city looking for scraps of this and that.

After a time he began to daydream about his former life. And at one critical moment he poured out the contents of his heart to me: “When I think about it, my life before was not so bad. It is my life now that is hell.”

And I knew for a fact that this runaway family only ate once a day.

It’s quite possible that, before she married, si djankungkoneng had received extravagant promises. Quite possible. For now, as threatening clouds announced themselves on darkening skies, she could be heard praying long and loud. And when thunder began to rumble in the evening, I could hear her interspersing her high-pitched chanting of Koranic verses with curses on her husband. Because: his promises to keep her company had never been kept. When her man went to work, she grew lonely and began to grumble angrily to herself. To fill up her loneliness, she adopted a child. But that only resulted in the division of their food into even smaller portions. The days of loneliness and want did not end. Eventually si djankungkoneng grew furious. She did not hesitate to castigate her husband in front of everyone. And her man had only one strategy in such a situation: he would quickly put on his pants and run away, run away to wherever, until si djankungkoneng‘s anger subsided and she was willing to take him back. He would come in at some late hour and sleep in the chair. The more she chastised him, the more often he would run away. In the end it became so habitual that it even gave him a little satisfaction.

By now he was at home only an hour or two in twenty-four. For a while he forced himself to work the black market here and there. Sometimes he was also swindled. But in one stroke of luck, he was able to buy the French bike.

Another day, it was a bed with a mattress. A mattress! A real mattress! Not a bamboo mat. Over time he was able to build up something of a normal household. But the salary he received from the government printing-house did not likewise build up. He was a typesetter—a typesetter who could not understand the letters that he set. This was the agent causing the paltriness of his salary.

This paltriness led him to change jobs. Now he was a debt-collector. With a five percent commission. He would only work one week a month. His new family began to prosper.

But his eyes only sank further inward. He suffered a feeling of great longing. It was this matter that he discussed with me one particularly hot afternoon:

“Although life was more difficult, actually, I was happier before. A family that was whole. A heart, a mind that were whole. The rest was actually just inconvenience. And now? So what if good fortune pours down from the sky, my family is broken apart. My mind, broken. My body is here, my heart goes there … wherever.”

In the several years of their marriage, si djankungkoneng was unable to get pregnant. With each passing day her stomach grew rounder—but with fat. And because she did not feel that her position as a wife was secure, and because her husband was only home for two hours each day, and because she did not feel like a genuine mother since she had never given birth, there was little else for her to do except lie despondently on the bed with the real mattress. Eventually her body became downright plump. That alone was enough to poison her husband’s dreams.

“What can you expect from a body as fat as that!” he said this to me as he watched someone draining the cesspool and glanced simultaneously at the door to the communal toilet where his wife was doing her business. “No children, no happiness, no pleasure. The only thing I get from her is the stink of monkeys! To the devil with her!”

Eventually his pleasure in avoiding his own household faded as well. Most likely because, as time went on, his body grew weak from it. Often he appeared moping about in the covered passageway by his house. Now he often slept at home. Or played with his chickens early in the morning. But most of the time he plucked his home-made ketjapi. The vibration of the strings became the vehicle by which he was transported back to the Land of Valleys and Mountains. This was evident from the rhythm of his plucking, from the style of his singing, and from the particular quality of sound made by the ketjapi strings themselves. And if a woman happened by, and he saw her, and especially if she was a young virgin, he would immediately break into his song with a catcall:

Aih,aih,kapèlèt engké…
[Watch out! Watch out! Eventually you’ll fall to my love-magic!]

And he paid no attention to his wife.

He answered only to his own passions, to his attempts to release himself from the burden in his heart. Of course his wife understood none of this, because it was her first marriage. Because she had never had children, because she had never been left by a man. The marriage of a virgin girl and boy is what binds the heart through each divorce, it is this bond that each man and woman always remembers.

At first the catcalling annoyed his wife—she considered it extremely crude. But her husband paid no attention.

The tension within his soul grew greater with time, for, as each day passed, his wife became less and less si djankungkoneng. And increasingly she showed the signs of a heart burdened by loneliness.

“It’s not her fault,” he told me once, unexpectedly, “that she doesn’t have a child. At least she really tried to get pregnant. If it doesn’t happen, it’s out of our human hands, no?”

Our hero withered away with each passing day. In fact, he even said one day that he would like just once to get sick, really sick, and then, he imagined, there would be a hand that would caress him with true love and kindness, and a voice that would whisper in his ear, wishing him quickly well again. But he did not get sick. What’s more, his son, whom he had brought with him to Djakarta, grew increasingly distant from this heart so in need of sympathy. He longed for the Land of Valleys and Mountains, for his little sawah, for his daughter, for the happier times which he himself had destroyed. Whereas the son he had brought with him…

“He’s not like me!” he said. “Who knows who he takes after? He doesn’t understand his responsibilities to the household, although I know he doesn’t like staying home with his stepmother.”

The orphan his wife had taken in grew bigger every day and had clearly become a source of competition for her stepson.

“She loves a child whose parents are unknown,” grumbled our hero, when feeling jealous of the adopted baby, “whereas my own son, who knows his mother and father, is neglected.”

And from that time on, both our hero and his son found it increasingly unpleasant to stay in the house.

And the child was much too fond of crying. His wife was fond of spoiling it. And the child grew bigger every day, more spoiled every day, especially when it came to understand the utility of crying.

And because the child was a boy, our hero’s grumbling was, this time:

A two-bit kid!

And the neighbors exacerbated the grumbling of his heart, because they could not bear to listen to the crying all night.

A two-bit kid!

* * * * *

It seemed like a long time—more than a year and a half—that our hero’s ketjajri had remained mute, while he himself passed the age of forty. A question often arose in my heart: there are millions of men like him, energetic, and not without skills, who have passed the age of forty, but what have they got from their lives? Anything to give them something to hold onto for their remaining years as they set forth into impending old age? And naturally, this problem grew to be both a problem and a mirror in which I could see myself. Ten more years, and forty would become fifty. How unsettling it is to see that, in all this time, and as one’s energy dwindles, there is yet to appear something to serve as a support. This was his situation. And my situation as well. We lived under the same unsettling and anxious conditions, facing the future in a weakening body.

It was precisely for this reason that our hero captivated my attention. Behind all of his actions, even behind the ready laughter, there was something unstable, something that indicated a suppressed angst in the face of his surroundings, his life, and himself, and yet there was a strong possibility that he was completely unaware of it.

Once, when his parents passed away, the whole family traveled back to the village, to the Land of Valleys and Mountains. Not for long though! Several days later the family returned home to our neighborhood. Much talk and news flowed copiously from his mouth. There was only one thing that was not forthcoming—exactly that which I had expected to hear: the turmoil of his own heart.

Perhaps he had constructed, in his innermost being, a pseudo-resolution, or, proper resolution, or the cheap way out, i.e.: to pray for the death of the wife he no longer desired. Or: for liberation through his own death. Or: for God so to conjure the world that everything in it would be as he wanted it. But this is clearly not possible, because the world develops in its own way, and the human heart is too ravenous in its desires. The world is not only poor, but also stingy, cruel, while the human heart is extremely greedy and wants to control everything.

So?

So our hero remained stooped and red-eyed.

A few months after his return from his homeland he could be heard playing the ketjapi again, when the guest he had been waiting for did not show up, that is, the guest who was to perform the recitation for the souls of his late parents. He still did not realize that in Djakarta the souls that leave this fleeting world do not receive the same attention or respect as those who leave from the Land of Valleys and Mountains. He was extremely disappointed. This could be heard in the plucking of the ketjapi strings. And in his slow, undulating voice.

I heard his wife call out to him. But he did not hear the call. He continued plucking and singing in the dark of night, on his verandah, on a pandanus mat that he had just bought especially for the recitation.

Didieu gunung diditu gunung;
Lamun djurang mah mana djalanana.
[Here a mountain, there a mountain
But where is the valley path between them …?]

I no longer remember the rest because I did not understand the regional language that he used. But from the rhythm of the singing I could tell it was a passionate lament. He sang the feelings of his heart: an awareness of his misguided interpretation of his own life. Once, he had thought that his wife was the mastermind behind the destruction of his household; but now he knew that it was actually he himself who had failed to create a happy atmosphere in which to live. Here too! His longing now reached its peak: a longing for a happy atmosphere in which to live.

Late into the night, this rhythm of regret at the choice, which was the result of a misinterpretation, continued in a plaintive whisper. So sentimental!

Kalau mail apakah mail
Tjibeber punja tjerita.
[If one dies, does one truly die?
Tjibeber has a story….]

At three in the morning, I could still hear his melancholy pleading. But his voice, full of sleepiness, reverberated deeply: tears made into song.

And I have now resolved it for myself: his heart, his soul, his life, his future have all become tattered and full of holes.