Murkiness Came to Makassar

Murkiness Came to Makassar

written by: Weronika Wójcik

 

“Humans believe that the beautiful body is separate from nature, a perfectly proportional form to be inscribed in circles and squares. The body, however, is connected to nature through the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.”
– Toyo Ito

“In recent times, he has seen only Life around him, he has felt only his powerful, passionate pulsations, not distorted, warped, or hindered by beliefs that attempt in vain to hinder this, what only reason should decide.”
– Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman

“I would show that justice and kindness are no mere abstract terms, no mere moral conceptions framed by the understanding, but true affections of the heart enlightened by reason, the natural outcome of our primitive affections; that by reason alone, unaided by conscience, we cannot establish any natural law, and that all natural right is a vain dream if it does not rest upon some instinctive need of the human heart.”
– Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Or On Education

***

When I sat comfortably on the damp sand and leaned against a nearby rock, I allowed my eyes to once again observe what was happening to a black blur of human-like shapes against the backdrop of the setting sun. At that moment I really entertained doubts as to whether it was still my mother or someone who had divested oneself of human traits in favour of getting into a love affair with nature and becoming fully united with it.

For at least an hour I had been staring full of my naive, childlike admiration at this whole spectacle, which was occasionally disturbed by long black stripes that turned out to be ordinary boats gliding on the horizon. When their fluid, dark contours escaped from my field of vision, then the black spot would re-emerge and begin its wild dance; as if it feared that it would not have time to express all emotions just before the vanishing rays of the sun, just before the last breath of the day.

Even futurists would have had a lot of trouble comprehending these uncoordinated movements of arms and legs and depicting their dynamics on canvas. I could not grasp any of it either, but I still could not take my eyes off my mother’s body. What I felt most guilty about was when I suddenly looked at my running mother, without any warning, starting to unbutton and tear her only batik, which she used to wear when she had not yet lost her virginity. I had not prepared myself for this overly intimate moment; I felt that as a little girl, perhaps I should not expose my eyes to such an inferior sight. I involuntarily raised my delicate hands; I pretended to refrain from peeping at my mother’s nudity, however, in the end my curiosity took over and I continued to take an active part in this indecent spectacle as a passive observer.

The batik arced carelessly upwards in a parabola, momentarily obscuring the setting sun-ball before falling almost silently to the sand. The contours of my mother’s body now seemed even softer, revealing many imperfections. I was genuinely convinced that my mother’s figure embodied the pursuit of the ideal she was so often in the habit of talking about. I was disappointed to see her breasts, her greatest feminine attribute dangling inertly – I began to fear that I might look exactly like this in a dozen years’ time, when I would have transformed into a physically mature woman.

Grim thoughts built up as images of that woman who, in my mother’s absence, had been secretly coming to see my father for many months, began to flash through my mind. At the time, I did not know what her intentions were and why her visits had to be shrouded in a nimbus of mystery. To ensure that I did not immediately run to my mother and faithfully recount to her what I had been witnessing for a long time, the woman would bring me a handful of ginger sweets. She knew perfectly well that I could not resist them, and so every time she crossed the threshold of my family home, she brought more and more sweets with her. And then, as was her custom, she would use her flirtatious timbre of voice to ask me if my father was staying upstairs alone. When I answered her in the affirmative, she would then begin gently stroking my hair, then use her fingertips to lift my jaw slightly, sending me a deep look in which, as I had already sensed, something heralding a passionate prelude was simmering. “Sayang, remember, you haven’t seen anything and you don’t know anything about anything,” she whispered, and I followed with interest the movements of her lips, which were puffing up with every word. Finally, she pressed a handful of ginger sweets into my hand and walked away with a full smile painted on her face covered in subtle make-up.

I also involuntarily answered her with my smile and continued to lead my eyes after her, when she quietly, gracefully walked up the stairs. Her every move seemed to be studied, there was not a single hesitation in it. She knew perfectly well how to use her bodily strengths and how to attract the attention of others. I wondered if she had had to learn how to rock her hips so neatly or if she could do it from the very beginning. I wanted to ask her this question at the closest opportunity, I wanted to know if I also had a chance to seduce in this way, using my own body.

As quickly as she appeared in our house, she left it. When she said goodbye, she would leave behind the intense scent of my father’s perfume in the corridor. She was also in the habit of going over to the Catharanthus roseus, a lush bush growing right next to the gate, and picking one of its flowers after each visit. This was one of the things, which caused me the most pain; I felt she was doing it with full deliberation. I wondered if this woman knew why this shrub was in our family garden. Once, as a very young girl, on the way home from angklung lessons with my mother, we would always pass by a certain house whose facades bore the hallmarks of the Dutch colonial style. What always caught my eye then was the Catharanthus roseus bush, climbing gracefully up the thin cast-iron pillars topped with fancily shaped es-flowers and greeting random passers-by. Its multi-colored petals breathed life into that place. One day, the owner of the house caught my mother and me admiring the Catharanthus roseus and, weaving many words of Dutch into her speech, she began to tell us about the significance of this shrub. I learned then that it symbolises happy memories, fidelity and youth, and that those born with this flower remain brave and strong. The Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau himself, of whose existence in history I was vaguely aware, picked and gave his mother a Catharanthus roseus flower when he went on a trip to the mountains with his friends. Eventually, I insisted to my mother that we plant the same shrub in our garden. She agreed. She claimed that the meaning of the flower resonated with her. For me, on the other hand, it was the good memories that mattered most – yes, as a child I wanted above all to have good memories.

As I thought back to that woman picking a flower at the end of each visit, I realised how brutally she had stripped us of our dignity, deprived me and my mother of our values, which had been the main focus of our lives. When my mother would come home, she would immediately notice the missing flowers on the bush – she would always resent me and constantly ask me what my purpose was in picking the flowers. Considering that I should pretend not to know anything and not to have heard anything, I told my mother that I was making a special necklace out of the petals for her. I do not think she believed me – she was probably well aware of what could be the reason for the visual impoverishment of the bush. And so more weeks passed, spent secretly creating a necklace that never saw the light of day. The only thing that was somehow becoming more and more prominent on the outside was the nagging sadness stabbing my mother from the inside. Every flower picked seemed to subtract from her youth and joie de vivre, and her usually full, unusually large eyes were diminishing in size – there was hardly anything left of that supple ellipses reaching opposite smooth extremes and then seamlessly transitioning on both sides into graceful constrictions.

At a certain point, I was no longer able to analyse my mother’s mental state; I did not know how I could bring even the slightest smile to her face; in any case, I rarely succeeded. I think I chickened out and escapism seemed to be the best solution for me.

That woman grew stronger as my mother and I lost ourselves more and more in a strange emptiness, in an irritating silence, in unspoken words and muffled screams.

We were wilting.

In the distance, I noticed a human silhouette walking nimbly towards the still-dancing dark blur. I paid no attention to the moment when the foreign body entered this intimate scene – I saw the mother abruptly stop her frenzied dance, her left hand frozen in mid-air, obscuring a piece of rock peering on the horizon on the other shore, while her right hand seemed to search in panic for a batik abandoned on the sand. Her body, which consisted of previously resiliently curved lines, began to shrink. I wondered if this could have been caused by a feeling of shame, a desire to quickly cover up what should have remained a secret. Or was it a defensive reaction to an impending threat.

The sun was dipping further and further into the surface of the sea, leaving horizontally spreading thick streaks of intense crimson colour. My eyes momentarily returned to what was playing out against the backdrop of the multi-hued spectacle. I could hardly catch a glimpse of my mother’s silhouette, as she had managed to fuse with the surface of the sand in a short time, creating an unusual soft bulge. Leaning just above her body was this figure; without any doubt, it was a well-built man. At the same time, the sea began to rise, more and more violent waves began to emerge, and the earlier contamination of yellow, orange and red turned into a fierce battle for dominance in the sky. My eyes tried to focus on what was happening simultaneously on the two sets, and I watched with undisguised anxiety the movements made by the man. They were becoming more and more aggressive by the second; I watched as the mother stretched her hands helplessly out in front of her, but I knew that these would level with her body in moments. In the loud noise of the foaming waves, all her moans and sobs died away.

I could foresee what would happen next, but I was reliving everything as if it were happening for the first time. I recognised the man perfectly, but I still could not understand why my mind was trying to forcefully categorise him as an unknown person.

I felt my feet sink into the sand, my body trembled. The colours seemed to melt away on the horizon as I gazed at them through my tears. My eyes could not hold their weight for too long, so I let them flow freely down my soft cheeks. I turned towards the nearest cluster of rocks; with the inside of my trembling left hand, I ran my hands over their hard, rough texture. I felt them leave deep wounds, from which a trickle of thick blood was about to flow. “Let it flow out,” I thought, and, tilting my head slightly, I let my tears mix with the streaks of puce. I could only imagine this as the darkness obscured everything, absorbed all contours. I could feel the mottle trying to claim victory in a colour duel not only in the sky, but also on my frail hands.

I froze in a hunched position for a long time. I didn’t want to close them forcibly, as that would have made what was happening just a few hundred metres away even more intense in my mind. The only thing I was most looking forward to was the end, the outcome played no role for me; I simply wanted the darkness bathed in blood red to soon turn into a new, hopeful morning, for the beach in Makassar to once again absorb what it had eyewitnessed without leaving the slightest trace.
The gloomy thoughts increasingly clouding my mind were dissipated in a second. The air was pierced by my mother’s shrill scream, the likes of which I had never heard before. Accustomed to a cruel silence, I did not expect something that would suddenly disrupt the predictable course of events. I saw life enter my mother’s body anew.

Soon another scream reached my ears, but this time it was not my mother. I tried to locate the familiar contours of the other spot, which until recently had been the only one I could barely see in the falling twilight, but this one seemed to have completely sunk into the ground. I hesitated as to whether I should come out of my safe hiding place behind the rocks at that moment, or whether I should nevertheless wait for the longed-for conclusion of this unsettling and enigmatic scene. In the end, my pure curiosity took over and, despite my inwardly growing uncertainty mixed with fear, I stood wobbly on my feet, wiped away the rest of my tears that had stopped at my jawline and ran ahead, feeling the damp sand sticking to my feet. At one point, I stopped as I snagged a batik that was still lying tumbled. I bent down to pick it up, but in the same second, I dropped it in horror. My hands felt the weight of the garment soaked through with something whose metallic smell brutally penetrated my nostrils and turned out to be nothing but blood. Trickles of it ran down my hands and then headed along my forearms. Their final journey along my body was interrupted by a scream that came from inside me and which I had the feeling must have been simmering there already since the very beginning of the sunset; it contained as much power as the dose of despair I sensed in my mother’s scream.

Effectively scaring away the fowl resembling a collection of small black dots, the bleak red engulfed the entire sky, spilling its intensely bloody streaks across the torn clouds. There was nothing left of the setting yellow full of joyful energy, it could only acknowledge the supremacy of what for centuries had heralded suffering.This was the moment when my gaze aligned with that of my mother. Her eyes resembled narrow slits through which absolutely nothing came out; they did not cast a single shadow of emotion. Her lips also froze. Unable to bear this irritating lack of any movement, I directed my gaze to her badly bruised hands, searching for any answers. My mother held the knife at the hilt, while its blade almost completely merged with the rough sea, in which the furiously blood-coloured sky reflected its terrifying beauty. She knew that she had just caught a glimpse of what could reveal the entire mystery of the night, so she quickly turned and, with a sweeping motion, threw the knife in the direction where the last rays of the sun had gone out. The knife pierced the surface of the sea, stabbing it and leaving a deep wound from which dirty red began to gush. A passionate ferocity entered the waves. They dashed like mad against the nearby rocks, flooding them with blood colour. Against the backdrop of this burst of nature, which seemed to last almost an eternity, my father’s body lay inert with his face hidden in the sand, but his legs were constantly being pounded by the aggressive waves, which were becoming more and more blood-brown in colour with each attack. That night, the sea at Makassar was both witness to and participant in the massacre; it tried to drag and devour the corpse to cover all traces. It was not without the greatest sea bloodshed to date, which then slowly gave way to the inevitable darkness in the middle of which my mother and I were embedded.

I closed my eyes and so murkiness came.

Murkiness came to Makassar.

***

Two teenage girls, whose hair was carefully concealed beneath their colourful hijabs, had just ordered a bakso mie ayam for themselves and sat on the pavement, listening to the hustle and bustle of the Square and watching the people moving about chaotically. A smile was painted on the face of one of the girls, which widened more and more at the sight of a young handsome boy who occasionally sent her sultry glances, meanwhile preparing baso tahu behind the counter of a mobile stall on wheels. These sweet, innocent musings also brought a blush to my cheeks, just like when my future husband whispered in my ear one day while coming back from a walk in Bogor with me: “Sayang, I like you very much”. I still remembered that beautiful orchids were blooming in the background behind us at the time, and I even gave a silent cry of delight at the sight of them. Since then, I have never had the opportunity to see them in person again.

My attention was now focused on the other girl, as the intense neon purple light radiating from the spotlights attached to the monotonous-looking façade of the Fatahillah Museum with its rigorous fenestration did not waver from her face, on which a clear sadness deepened as time passed. The girl slowly consumed her food, all the while deliberating over something and looking in an unknown direction with her absent-minded gaze. The blush quickly met my cheeks and my heart beat faster when I saw the tears ready to flow in her eyes. But they could not move on, they were bravely held back by an army of lashes. The tears continued in such suspension for quite some time, and unable to bear the tension, which in turn bred even more anxiety in me, I decided to approach the queue and order something for myself and my mother. Eventually, I chose siomay and baso tahu.

As I searched for my mother in the growing crowd of people, I wondered how it was possible, sitting right next to each other, to be so insensitive to what was happening to another person. How could happiness and sadness exist so close together? Even the same meal seemed to exacerbate this dissonance even more. And what did I feel? I think I might have been somewhere in the middle, between these girls. Somewhere between the crimson blush and the purple light.

I finally managed to track down my mother. She was standing almost in the middle of the Fatahillah Square where various artistic performances were taking place. It was the turn of the young women who were performing the Jaipong dance. Their swirling robes created an amazing colourful spectacle from which one could not take one’s eyes off. I wondered what could have most enchanted the mother in the movements of the dancers: the serene bright yellow, the full of spirit green or perhaps the most distinctive sensual crimson.

I approached my mother from behind, slipping her a plate of siomay so that its smell could permeate her nostrils and take her away from the dance performance for a moment.

“You’d better eat now, while it’s still hot. Besides, this may already be the last such good meal of your life,” I whispered in her ear, and the contours of my mouth at that moment formed the boundaries of my sardonic smile.Mother did not even deign to look at me. This made me even more enraged.

“You won’t see these dances anymore either.”

She again did not budge, but I managed to notice a tear slowly running down her right cheek and ending its course on her plate.

“You can eat for me, I’m not hungry” she said in a breaking voice and passed her siomay towards me.

I reluctantly took the plate from her and after consuming my baso tahu, I tried to eat at least some eggs and potatoes, but it was already too much for my stomach. A little boy happened to be passing by, holding his probably older sister’s hand, and without thinking any longer, I accosted him and asked if he would like some free food. The boy answered me with a shy smile, whispered quietly “terima kasih’’ and walked away, proudly carrying a plate of siomayu, the aromatic scent of which still has not left my nostrils. I was moved by the humility in his voice.

“But you stink of Jakarta”, my mother suddenly expelled, turning towards me for the first time and drilling me with her gaze full of strange disgust.I wanted to add some malicious comment, but she interrupted my intentions:

“Although I have lived here for many years, I haven’t fortunately managed to imbibe this trashy culture. There is no place in my heart for this city.

She turned and headed towards the tobacco stall. After a few minutes she came out of it, with a packet of kretek in her hand, and greeted me with the unbearable smell of cigarette smoke.

“Maybe it was only in Glodok where I felt some emotions,” she chuckled after a little longer reflection, tilting her head slightly and looking at the dancing colours with a thoughtful look in her eyes. “I remember seeing a young woman there, her face criss-crossed with various shades of red coming from the lanterns hanging above her. She was surrounded by a circle of her friends, but she seemed as if she was absent from among them.”

She inhaled her kretek once more and again sent puffs of smoke in my direction.

“It was amazing, but I could sense her heartbeat from afar. There must have been so many extreme emotions boiling inside her that she didn’t know how to finally give vent to them. At that moment, I showed her a lot of compassion and our hearts beat in the same rhythm.”

“I wish you had been more compassionate towards me when you decided to leave me several years ago”, I said, unable to bear my mother’s strange and incomprehensible outbursts.

With this sentence I closed her mouth for a long moment.

“Who else is closer to you than your own daughter?” I continued, trying to dig deeper and deeper into the wound on my mother’s conscience.

She extended her right hand in front of her, pointing her finger at the women still performing Jaipong.

“I feel a clear bond between us. We understand each other very well. I think we have all gone through exactly the same thing in life.”

“Have any of them take someone else’s life and run away from their children?”

The colours of the headlights went from purple to intense red seamlessly. We were both now bathed from head to toe in their sinister glare.

It was at my own request that I told my mother about the new investigation. I laughed in my mind at the thought that she was completely convinced that I wanted to talk to her about everything and nothing. By putting an end to this mystery of silence, I felt that I was finally removing the mental ballast that I had had to carry on a daily basis for so many years.

I watched her movements: she did not leave the company of the kretek, she avoided my gaze. I realised that at that moment I was rubbing her arranged life in my hands. Nevertheless, I wanted to give her time to absorb and reconsider.

Mother was visibly sad as the women finished dancing and dispersed across the Square, mingling with the crowd and the bright colours of their dresses.

“None of us held each other accountable for the past,” she replied in a dispassionate voice, taking another drag on her cigarette.

The red spotlights did not miss the smoke rising from her mouth.

“Sayang, look how out of place these women are, they’ve been uprooted from their natural habitat, just like me.”

The dancers walked past the chaotically moving people, ignoring their curious looks, laughing wildly and swaying their bodies to the rhythm of the lively music. Their sensuality was still there, but they didn’t seem to be using it to attract anyone’s attention – they just exuded it naturally.

Something else was bothering me – I grabbed my mother’s arm and tried to lead her to a less busy and crowded place.

“Are we leaving the Square?”

“Yes, we have to. It’s impossible to have a serious conversation here.”

“And is it even possible to have a serious conversation with me?” the mother’s wild laughter could also be heard at this point.

Her nervous reaction must have been a kind of protective bubble against what she was about to suffer.

We walked straight out onto the road, but the noise was still with us, in fact it seemed to be getting louder.

“Let’s head north, towards the Bay,” mother suddenly suggested. “Maybe we still have time, Sayang, to see the sunset.”

“Please don’t talk to me like that.”

“How should I address you then?”

This time it was I who ignored the question. Without wasting another moment, we set off further north. The prospect of more than an hour’s walk discouraged me, especially as I did not want to spend any more time with my mother, I wanted to separate from her forever.

The roar of speeding motorbikes accompanied us non-stop, so we hurried towards Kali Krukut, not really paying attention to the “white tombstones,” as my mother used to call the buildings with creamy white facades typical of the Dutch colonial style. She once told me that she had never seen anything more lifeless than these buildings, and when she looked at their strict arrangement of windows with white bars and floors, from which absolute darkness breathed, she had a strange feeling at the time, as if something was trying to tie her hands. I think I may have had a similar unsettling feeling, but I had grown accustomed to it.

The day was slowly coming to an end, giving way to pale greys and dark blues shrouded in jagged clouds.

“Did you tell them that you had noticed someone?” – mother broke her long silence, then quickly added, “And did they believe you?”

“I told them everything. Despite the passage of so many years, I remember everything as if it had happened yesterday,” the corners of my mouth turned up in a barely perceptible little smile, but in a moment they fell back into an almost straight, thin line, devoid of any expression.

We stopped at a bridge overlooking the calm waters of Kali Krukut. The end of the day was reflected in them. Here I wanted to ask my mother about some things that were unexplained to me:

“The knife was in your hand and then you threw it into the sea. Your colourful batik was still there. What did you do with it?”

“I burned it, but I cannot remember exactly where.”

We left the bridge and walked along the river. On the way we passed a group of girls laughing, dressed in a somewhat liberated way. My mother smiled at them and they smiled back. I lowered my head as I was reminded of how, as a mature teenager, I had tried to emphasise my physical attributes while preparing for a secret meeting with a certain boy I was madly in love with. My uncle, who, along with my aunt, had taken over my care after my father’s death, caught me sneaking out of my room in the dark, wearing a skimpy dress that slightly exposed my thighs, and threw a fit, beating me on the head for a good few minutes. This was not the only time he took his anger out on me, but I did my best to avoid humiliation. In the end I did, and my aunt told me how proud she was of me at last.

During the walk, my mother suddenly decided that we were going to Pantai Ancol. Unfortunately, we had to return to that road full of “white tombstones” and the constant growl of motorbikes.

“You still haven’t told me how this knife turned up at the scene of the crime.

It is irrelevant to you. The knife was in the sea.”

“How did it get there?” – I repeated with obvious irritation in my voice.

“Yes, I held the knife in my hand, but then the knife belonged to the sea,” my mother closed her eyes and walked stubbornly in silence for a long time, holding me under her arm.

I couldn’t figure out whether she was the one who had taken the murder weapon with her that night.

Kali Ancol was already on our right. I had the impression that my mother only chose routes that were as close to water as possible.

“I think I have always carried a well-hidden knife in my life. I just didn’t know about it and when to use it,” she finally got her answer, but it still wasn’t obvious to me.

We began to walk between pleasant streets with slightly more modern houses on either side, probably inhabited by people from the upper elite. Mother didn’t even bother to look at us – she kept her eyes on the pavement and was stubbornly silent. Again, she had nothing concrete to say – but the people of Makassar, who had heard about the events of that night, could tell a lot about her. She was quickly ostracised by the locals – a mother who dared to abandon her own child. Of course, these people could not have known that she had contributed to my father’s death. I had already known him as if through a mist, but it was my mother who had reduced him to a blurred memory.

“With those women who danced Jaipong in the Square,” suddenly my mother broke the silence, “I do not form a community with them. We understand each other perfectly, but each of us wants to act alone. Then we feel a greater wave of freedom and happiness.”

I was surprised by this confession and didn’t really know how to react.

“I belong to a community with my husband,” I finally replied.

“What do you need the community for?”

“I have a need to belong to a certain community. The people who are part of it help me to form myself. We also have rules that we put into practice.”

“So you are afraid of loneliness,” a slight smile appeared on your mother’s face.

“Why such a strange assumption?” the irritation in my voice was clearly heard…

“You’re afraid,” she repeated, lifting her head.
We were passing fewer and fewer people, the road was going to sleep and we still had the whole night ahead of us.

***

At Pantai Ancol, I waited for the swirling lines to slow and bring back my mother’s silhouette, but this time she was not a black blur from afar. What stood out most against the dirty pink that spread in pale shades across the evening sky and the tear coloured sea with the waves gently breaking on the shore was my mother’s clearly rounded belly. I think I watched her again from a distance with an equally strange awe; so much older, she still managed to find that untamed wilderness within her and let it fully express itself in the dance. Eventually, she stopped and began to slowly stroke her belly with her hands, gazing at the ball of the setting sun, around which an intense pink envelope had formed, fading at its extremities as the ray grew. I suspected that my mother had managed to absorb the vision of what was to come. Does she already know that the cards will indeed be turned and that someone else will either lose or gain something? But surely no one will be able to escape anywhere.

My mother interrupted my contemplation of the skyscrapers on the distant horizon by coming closer to me. Her feet dipped gently into the damp sand.

“This is the second time you’ve had the chance to see me in my true state,” she smiled broadly, as if she’d forgotten that tears, not happy ones at all, had been streaming down her cheeks for most of the way.

“You mean in the dance?” I asked.

“In the dance and in the sea. And in Makassar. I miss that place.”

“And that night too?” I asked with a hint of sarcasm in my voice.

My mother smoothed the folds of her floral batik and looked at me with her beautiful, unusually large eyes:

“Yes, if it had happened again, I would have come to the same conclusion.”

The sun’s rays were dying, giving way to a pale pink glow with red streaks creeping in from nowhere.

“And you would have left me then, too?”

“Sayang, I never really felt that I had left you.”

“But you did abandon me. I grew up without my father and without you. And you put your life back together. And you still have the audacity to tell me that you would put me through the same hell a second time.”

I closed my eyes for a moment to stop the sudden flood of tears.

“At least you won’t harm your new child.”

The mother turned her head towards the floating boats, which looked tiny from a distance, but were disturbing the seascape with their slow movement.

“Something inside me snapped that night. And yes, I took the knife on purpose. But it was all so sudden, so spontaneous. Suddenly a primal wildness entered me. And also into the waves of the sea. I felt a unity with them that was difficult to describe, I could actually be one of them.”
I put my right hand to my chest to check how much my mother’s short monologue had quickened my heartbeat. And my eyes wandered anxiously over my mother’s hands, perhaps searching for the shadow of a sharp silver sheen in them.

“Sayang, you couldn’t have seen it, but I smiled and tears of happiness ran down my cheeks. It was my truest reaction.”

“I regret that you took me with you at all that night. You etched an image in my mind that I will never forget. And I really don’t care what emotions you were feeling at the time, if you even thought of me for a moment!”

“I took you to the beach that day hoping that you would finally understand me.”

“I could not understand you at all. I have not been able to understand you in all these years of separation, not even at that moment.”

“You didn’t even try. You witnessed a lot of things, but you pretended you didn’t know anything. When you were told to keep quiet, you obediently kept your mouth shut.”

“You expected too much of a little immature girl. Instead, you were a mother and would soon become one again.”

It was then that I began to analyse her womb – the miracle of life that could be in my hands.

“If you want me to open my mouth and tell you something, you should know that my father used to call you primitive in front of me,” I threw out desperately.

“To him, I was a sign of weakness. Meanwhile, I saw in him the greatest depths. He tried to subjugate both you and me in order to suppress his weakness.”

“My father tried, but failed, to teach me about life.”

“I was forced into a rigid framework. Me – a flawed being.”

Mother’s eyes widened again at the sight of the sun, almost half-hidden beneath a sheet of pink sea. It was those two ellipses, those two extremely smooth extremes. They always puzzled me – there was something there, always balancing between madness and gentleness.

“Your father didn’t understand me,” she whispered towards the waves.

I watched the red streaks in the sky with growing concern. Everything seemed to indicate that they would become dominant.

The black boats had already managed to leave the horizon line. The stench increased in intensity, blotting out the last rays of sunlight. In Pantai Ancol, night was born.

“You took a great risk, thinking for so many years that there would be no consequences for your shameful act.”

“I have not acted against my nature.”

“You took a man’s life! You murdered in cold blood!”

I took a lungful of sea air to calm myself.

“You killed. You knew you were doing evil. You knew what you could get away with, so you ran. And you relied on me to take the secret to my grave.”

“These were uncontrollable impulses of the heart.”

The wind suddenly broke and set the waves of the sea in motion.

“Have you seen my wounds, my bruises?” she asked after a long moment of silence.

“I heard you were in pain,” I lowered my head and looked at my feet sunk in the sand.

“I couldn’t look at them anymore, I couldn’t see my dignity being taken away.”

Mother tried to dance with the last breath of the day, but before she could raise both her hands for a moment, one had fallen limply, dragging the other down with it.

“I have often wondered, Sayang, how we will be judged.”

“No one knows for sure. But I think very much like this.”

“I didn’t run away,” my mother stood in front of me and looked me in the eyes, “I just wanted to start a new life.”

“You start when you are accountable for the past.”

My mother’s explanations seemed to go beyond the limits of reason. But at the same time I felt that what she was saying had the hallmarks of an honest truth.

“We are torn between heroic love for others and our own fragile freedom. But in the end you have to choose between the two.”

Mother noticed that I was looking at her round belly again.

“It’s going to be a boy,” mother smiled broadly.

“You love him more than me, don’t you? Anyway – I doubt if you loved me at all, since you only remembered me now.”

“Sayang, you are a child of love. My son is a child of freedom.”

I watched the battle for supremacy between the pink glow and the spilled crimson in the sky. By nightfall, these were the only two things that mattered – we had all managed to forget the sun.

“You haven’t forgiven me, have you?” mother stood even closer to me, so that I could see my own poor reflection in her pupils.

“Yes, I have forgiven. Thanks to the community, I have learned to forgive.”

“Is that sincere?”

“I know it has to be.”

“But do you feel it?”

I pretended to ignore her question. I wondered if I felt anything at all. Maybe I was shying away from it.

“But I will never forget it. And I don’t regret keeping my secret.”

“So if you can forgive me, will you be able to understand me?”

“I don’t think we’ll understand each other anymore,” I replied with a hint of indifference in my voice, putting the emphasis on the word ‘not’.

“Sayang, you don’t have to forgive me. What is more important to me is that you have understood me.”

“You don’t deserve to be understood.”

I felt something buzzing in my bag. I pulled out my phone, a picture of my husband on the screen. I turned and walked towards the street to get further away from my mother. I had almost answered the call when I heard my mother’s question behind me:

“Sayang, are you happy now?”

I stood up. The damp sand sucked at my feet again. I let my mother see the broad smile painted on my face against the dark mottled sky. But she could not see the twitching contours of my lips, barely holding the tension.

I picked up the phone at the last minute. As the call continued, I moved further and further away from my mother; I didn’t want her to hear me.

“Have you told her everything?” my husband asked in a raised voice.

“Yes, I have.”

“Does she still smoke?”

“That hasn’t changed.”

“Fucking selfish,” I heard the sound of breaking glass in the background. It could have been one of my favourite vases.

The earlier brownish light now seemed like a prelude to dusk.

“Her child… – I stopped myself in the middle of the sentence, my voice was shaking.

“We’ll be ready for anything.”

“You know I’m the one who needs to be prepared.”

“You can do it. Don’t you remember how much suffering you’ve endured in your life?”

“A lot.”

“You will be the best mother.”

“And what will we tell the others?”

“We don’t have to. They will admire us themselves. We will be blessed in their eyes.”

“Do you think so?”

“Why are you so unconvinced?”

“You know, we have tried many times, but always in vain. I thought it was a sign to let go.”

“So who do you want to live for? Yourself?”

“No.”

At this point I covered my face with one hand as the strong wind increased, blowing straight into my eyes and carrying grains of sand with it.

Before I hung up with my husband, I managed to ask him one more question:

“Have you noticed that the cataranthus roseus flowers have disappeared since last time?”

“I don’t pay any attention to the plants in our garden. That is your job.”

“I wanted to ask you because it is the most representative shrub. It grows right next to the front gate. I thought you might have noticed some changes.”

“I don’t care.”

His last sentence caused more pain in the wounds, which were mainly on my forearms and thighs.

I felt relieved when we separated. I decided to go back to my mother’s to say goodbye and close another long chapter in my life.

As I crossed the street, to my great surprise, I passed one of the girls I had seen eating bakso mie ayam at Fatahillah Square. I turned to her for a moment. She could not hold back her tears. Her face, disfigured by blurred make-up, made my heart beat faster and I felt something catch in my throat. Salty tears trickled down my cheeks. I was crying with this girl. Although physically we were growing apart, emotionally we were one.

***

I ran onto the beach, the damp sand clinging to my feet. Suddenly I felt as if I had caught something. I bent down and with my right hand picked up something that felt like cloth. After a while I realised that it might be a floral batik that belonged to my mother. This worried me even more – why would she take off her clothes like that?

I didn’t have to wait long for the answer – it came right away.

The twilight over the Bay of Jakarta could not pass smoothly into the reign of night without one last spontaneous dance. From some unknown direction, a black blur of my mother ran with great momentum straight into the waves, intensifying the rage in them even more. I watched as she plunged deeper and deeper into the water. At one point she stood up and threw a small object in front of her. For a split second I managed to see its flash before it arced through the air and slammed into the surface of the sea, creating a new wound. Meanwhile, the thin layer of cloud that was disturbing the horizon line struggled to the end before disappearing forever, spilling its intensely mottled colour onto the churning waves. Once again I had witnessed a wild frenzy of nature that made you want to run away from it, but at the same time filled you with an inexplicable awe.

There was no trace of the black blur. It seemed as if the twilight had managed to erase all its contours, but I knew that the bloody sea had swallowed it up. Everything around it seemed to be bleeding and out of control. It was the truest spectacle I had ever seen, and I could barely contain my emotions.

I moved closer to the sea. It wrapped its cruel cold around my feet, making them numb. The Bay of Jakarta was shrouded in a cloak of murkiness that also obscured my face, on which my smile was slowly being painted. I decided to stay here until the very end, until I saw the first tentative, salutary rays heralding the arrival of the sun. I wanted to know if I would be able to stare into its heat for long.

As blissful silence ensued, large eyes appeared. One took the place of the rising sun, the other was covered by a thick veil of clouds. A nose was carved out of a rock that loomed in the distance, and a crimson mouth plunged freely into the sea, sending a few kisses towards the beach and setting the waves in a calm motion.

There far away was the mother. And I could feel her closeness.