Here the nation's children are put to the test...

      - Eke Budianta

 

1. Arrival

 

He was waiting for me: an Indonesian man in a waistcoat holding a small whiteboard bearing my name. He wore a pitji and glasses.  We shook hands.

His name was Hendie.  He was from Jakarta.  His English was quick and fluent, and he punctuated his statements with a joking shrug.  He'd been to Australia several times - to Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne.  "In Melbourne," he told me, "I was stuck in a lift.  I was stuck with three other people.  It was late in the afternoon.  I thought, Oh no, we are in serious trouble.  I thought, What is the problem: this is not Indonesia!"  He laughed.

I'd initially thought he was the driver, but he wasn't. The driver was waiting in the car at the exit.

  The freeway from the airport to the city is new and efficient. We were gliding along, flanked on both sides by open, green country.

I told Hendie that in Medan I had been warned about Jakarta, about the crime and chaos and the crowding.  I told him that I was glad I hadn't flown straight to Jakarta from Australia, that it might have been too much of a shock, especially in light of the warning that Foreign Affairs was issuing about "personal safety".

He laughed, indicating the world outside, and said, "What do you expect? Riots?"

At one point we passed the burnt-out shell of a large building. All that was left of the three storey block were its black-streaked walls.  Hedie noticed that it had caught my eye and said, "That was from the May riots."

I asked him what he thought of the riots.

He shrugged: "I don't know... But many good things happened after the student demonstrasi: the newspapers can now say what they like.  Some of it is unbelievable.  The other day I read an article that said Suharto was behind the demonstrasi: Suharto and the army!  Before May no one would have been able to say that. They would have been taken out like this -"  He pressed an imaginary pistol against the side of his head.

"So do you think Suharto was behind it?"

He laughed. Then he asked me, "Do you think demonstrators off the street, poor people and students, could burn a big building to nothing like that?  It isn't easy to burn a whole building...Ó

Soon we were off the toll-way and were in the midst of the city.  The roads were five lanes in both directions and jammed with vehicles.  Yet there was a calm to the traffic.  There seemed to be road rules.  Being on the road here, like being in a crowd anywhere in Indonesia, was a case of relinquishing your personal space and keeping focused.  Our driver changed lanes, made u-turns and doubled-back in complex but effective ways.  It was impossible for me to get a sense of the layout of the city as we turned every time I was on the verge of orientating myself.  I asked Hendie if the traffic was particularly bad at the moment.  "No. It is fine. To drive in Jakarta you need to know the tricks..."

I asked him if he was a Muslim.  Having noted he was wearing a pitji probably bought for Labaran, I already knew the answer.  I asked him if he prayed at the mosque I had seen on TV, in the breaks in the broadcast during which the Azan, the call to prayer, is transmitted and the voice of the meuzzin rings out on all radio stations and tv channels.  On the screen the huge, unpeopled Istiqlal Mosque appeared resonant with the presence of Allah.  At the mention of that mosque, Hendie frowned, replying that he didn't like it.  "That's  where Suharto prays.  It's too big.  Not nice.  And its not in good repair."  So I asked him where he prays.  "At my local mosque: it is small and cared for."

As we moved through the city Hendie indicated sights: the freeways and bridges that marked the time of "our first president Sukarno", the kitsch Welcome Monument of a heroic man and woman on a three storey-high plinth, and the skyscraping MONAS, a bare column topped by a sculpted golden flame, an anomaly impressive in this city of the poor and desperate. He was pointing them out to me with a strange affection.  It was as if he felt that, even though they were evidence of poor decision-making and egoism, they were sufficient testament to the uniqueness of place and nation to be a source of pride and amusement.  I told Hendie that I had read somewhere that MONAS was known as "Sukarno's last erection".  He smiled distractedly at the joke.

He also pointed out some of the skyscrapers. To me they all looked like gigantic, misplaced objects, reminding me of lines from a poem by the Afrikaner Wilma Stockenstrom: "... how clever we are with/ our inner clockwork genius, how strong/ the wide swaying crane-like gestures/ with which we drop rectangular skyscrapers/ in residential areas and business centres..."  Except that here those buildings were proclamations of a future. They were statements of Sukarno's dream for an empire in this Asian archipelago and of Quarto's implementation of the so-called Asian economic miracle in the new nation. Those skyscrapers and freeways, so much like those of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union's imagined futures, had actually been dropped into kampung.  Although Hendie repeatedly drew my attention to the grand office blocks and department stores and hotels, it was obvious that just out of sight, just around the corner, there were becaks and warungs and jungles of slums.

"That," Hendie said, pointing to yet another huge building, "Is the Plaza Indonesia, a hotel and shopping-complex.  It belongs to Tommy Suharto and the First Family."  He had already pointed out much that belonged to them.  Most of the nation's economy did.

"Hendie," I said. "You shouldn't show me what belongs to them. You should show me what doesn't..."

He laughed uproariously.

 

Before taking me to the hotel, Hendie asked if I would like to go past Suharto's house. It was in Menteng, the suburb of ambassadors' and generals' residences.

Entering the suburb, we passed a park in which there were several army tents.  Soldiers were lounging on empty petrol barrels or playing boardgames in the shade.  Their rifles, propped against one another in a cone, reminded me of a photo from the American Civil War. We rounded the park and passed through a checkpoint. Two armed soldiers were merely standing beside it.  They paid no attention to us.  Perhaps we were let through without a second glance because we were in a car with diplomatic numberplates?  Off to one side on the curb there was a wooden framework coiled with barbedwire.  It would be used to block the entrance to the housing estate.

"What do you think?" Hendie asked me.  "Do you think Suharto is not in control?  They are afraid, afraid of the students."

The road we turned into was nondescript.  It had high walls, like all the others in Menteng.  And like all the others, the houses were large with noone, except a guard or two, loitering out the front.  There was no traffic.  It was like a wealthy suburb in Buenos Aires or Sydney or, perhaps, any other of the New World's major cities.  Hendie wound down the window.  I could hear birdcalls.

I asked him which house was Suharto's.

"All of them," he answered, gauging my reaction.

"All of them in this street?"

"All of them. And also the next street."

"Like a whole suburb?"

Hendie nodded.  "Yes. All Suharto's. And his family."

On our way out of the complex, we again passed the park.  Hendie leaned forward on the seat, his body tense, and he peered fiercely through the closed window.  He was watching a group of jogging soldiers.

Without turning from staring at them, he said, "I hate them. I hope the students catch them and kill them."

 

2. The Embassy

 

The Australian Embassy in Jakarta is probably the largest in the city and the second-largest Australian embassy after the one in Washington DC.  It's surrounded by a four metre high fence of steel palings which tilt outwards at the top.  They are as sharp as stakes.  We drove through the double security gates, then up the sloping driveway to the drop-off point.  It was oddly like a hotel, rectangular in a style that was trendy in the seventies and covered with a shell of white tiles, tiles that were once were white, though now were a grimy, creamy grey from the constant pollution of the heavy traffic on Jalan Rasuna Said.  Hendie indicated an expensive car parked conspicuously at the main entrance.  "That's Mister McCarthy's car."  He saw that I didn't comprehend the significance, so added, "Mister John McCarthy is our Ambassador."

Hendie led me through another entrance. He showed me into a theatrette. Switching the lights on, revealing a grand piano on the small stage, he smiled broadly, stating, "This is my theatre."

     

While waiting to meet the Cultural Councillor, I made a few phonecalls and sent a fax. I was given an envelope, an invitation to the Australia Day Celebration at the Ambassador's Residence.

"It's not on Australia Day," I remarked to Hendie.

He explained that, usually, because the national day of Australia and India fall on the same date, the two embassies have agreed to alternate them: one year they celebrate Australia Day, the next year they celebrate India's Day of Independence.  "It works well," he said.  "That way everyone can attend.  But this year its on a different day, neither of those days, because it would have fallen during Idul Fitri and all the Muslims, like me, would have been fasting."

 

The Culture Man, Gregson Edwards, had an urgency about him. He shook my hand and asked me to following him back out through the security doors.  He wanted to have a cigarette.  He was slightly hunched.  His greying beard was really more an outgrowth of stubble.  He spoke quickly, with a seriousness of expression that indicated he was intending to take everything in.  He began my part of the conversation by saying, "Tell me your background...Ó  We went back into his office.  He had a few things to arrange by phone.  He let me make a call to my girlfriend in Australia.  She wasn't there.  Then he took me through to the cafeteria for lunch.

 

At lunch I felt alienated. For two months I had been living with Indonesians, having dealings with only a few Caucasians; now I was sitting under an awning on a patio that was next to a brilliant blue pool.  Around me were white Australians tucking into their curries and salads.  They all seemed ungainly, lumpen, monstrously pale. The woman doing laps in the pool looked like someone in a cosmetics advert.  Behind the bars of the spiked fence against the hot, gritty sky there was a row of skyscrapers glistening like knives.

 

Besides taking me to the bank, Gregson felt he should show me Plaza Indonesia, "Tommy Suharto's little gem".

It was. We entered through the foyer of the hotel-part of the complex.  "It's the most expensive hotel in Jakarta. You can only pay in US Dollars. The rooms start at two hundred and seventy dollars a night."

"In US?" I asked, astounded.

"Yeah."

The staircase we were climbing was marble. From the floor to the ceiling above us must have been three or four storeys. There was the hush and tinkle of opulence.

"Look at it," Gregson urged.  "Look at it. It's a fucking gin palace."

I didn't know exactly what he meant, yet it seemed the right phrase. The Plaza was an egoist's idea of good taste, glitz: all marble, gold finishes and mirrors.

(Previously I'd been told that our Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, loved the luxury of its hotel. He liked to stay there on his trips to Jakarta. When he visited for the IMF's meeting to plan the financial bail-out for Indonesia after the "Asian economic meltdown", he was told that he shouldn't stay there, that it sent the wrong message - It belongs to that Family.)

We went down a passage which was lined with shop windows full of clothes and accessories by designer labels I'd only heard of.

Gregson was talking: "Where's the "economic crisis"? There's no economic crisis in here.  The shops are still open.  People are still buying.  I tell you, John, there's some people with a lot of money here, some people so rich that the crisis hasn't even touched them yet.  They're the people who send their kids to study in the States.  They're the people who've stripped this country.  They'd already moved their money out before the crisis hit...Ó

I waited for Gregson to have his beard trimmed at a hairdresser upstairs.  I wandered around, window-shopping.  There were only a few shoppers, and they were mostly young, glamorous women.  Wives, daughters or mistresses, I assumed.  The bored shop assistants either whiled away their time by chatting or busied themselves with folding and packing.  The plaza was massive and for quite some time I was disorientated.

By the time I'd found out where the hotel was in relation to the hairdresser, I had to return to meet Gregson.

 

3. One Night at the Hotel Sofyan Cikini

 

I thought I was just being friendly, practicing my Indonesian with the thin waiter.  The restaurant was almost empty and I hadn't wanted to venture out into Jakarta's streets at night.  My plan was to stay in the hotel and enjoy the luxury: a TV, air-conditioning, room service and a view out towards MONAS.

But then, while I was watching MTV Asia, there was a knock on the door. I peered through the spyhole.  Strange to have a spyhole in a hotel room door, I thought.  It was the guy from the restaurant, the waiter. He had a glass of water on a tray.

I let him in, but told him that I hadn't ordered anything.

He shrugged. He didn't seem to speak English.

I said the same thing in Bahasa.

He didn't respond.  Then he said, "Mau massage?"

Did I want a massage?  I had asked about getting a massage at the front desk when I'd checked in.  There was a board advertising it.  In Medan my housekeeper Ibu Enim had regularly given me a Javanese massage.  She was the masseuse to Medan's expat community - if you wanted to hear the latest news you'd just ask her: Australians, Germans and the French, all were her clients, and she'd had even more before the riots.

"Are you a masseur?" I asked him, again in Indonesian.

He didn't answer.  Instead he placed the tray on the table in front of the mirror.

"Can you massage?" I asked, realising too late what the answer would be.

He'd raised his hands, as if to massage my neck.  I stepped back.

"Berapa itu?"  How much?

He replied in English: "No charge."  Once again he raised his arms to touch me.

I stepped back and told him, "Saya tidak mau." No thanks.

He gestured again.

"If I wanted a massage," I told him in a fast, though stilted, Bahasa, "I would want a woman." 

He looked disappointed. "No charge," he murmured.

It struck me that to be gay in Indonesia would necessitate secrecy.  In response I smiled and shrugged.

His disposition changed.  He seemed frightened.  It must have occurred to him that I could lodge a complaint.  He quickly lifted the tray and slipped it under his arm.  He was bowing slightly now, a pose of deference. I shook my head.  He raised his finger to his lips, indicating that I should say nothing about it.

Then he turned and exited, carefully clicking the door shut.

 

Twenty minutes later there was again a knock at the door.

Through the spyhole I could see a dimly lit Indonesian woman in a floral long-sleeve dress with shoulderpads. Her hair was hanging loose and her face heavily made-up and expressionless.

I opened the door.

"Massage, sir?" she asked under her breath.

Oh no. "No. Bukan. Aku tidak mau..."

"Massage, yes?" She placed her hand on the partly open door. Her nails were painted a milky pink. And she stepped forward.

"No. No. Kenapa anda disini?"  Why are you here?

"Massage. Massage.  I good massage you.  Ok?"

"Bukan."

She changed her tack: "You American?"

"No."

"Ingris?" English?

I shook my head.

"Arab?"

Again I shook my head.  I was getting some idea of her clientele.

"Apa?"  What? she asked, breaking into a deceptive smile.

I replied, "Australi."

She laughed, shaking her head, then said, "Cheap."  She lifted her hand from the door and indicated giving a "handjob" and mentioned a price. Then, with her thumb inserted between her fore- and index-finger, she mentioned another figure.

I laughed weakly, refusing.

Her smile froze. Suddenly she was pleading, saying that she was from Sunda, West Java.  "Tau itu?"  Do you know it? she asked me.  Very poor. She told me she had three children, no husband, that they need to go to school, that schooling, that food, is expensive.  "Aku cheap," she repeated.  "Cheap sekali."  Very cheap.

When I started to close the door, she cocked her head in disbelief. I saw in her eyes a flash of contempt. Then, with a practised stealth, she swiftly turned and stalked down the narrow passage.

 

4. MONAS

 

Rising from the centre of the wide Merdeka Square in central Jakarta, MONAS, the National Monument, is an obelisk. It doesn't seem as tall as many of the buildings on the skyline, yet once you're up there its obvious that it is, if not taller. Above the viewing platform there's a sculptured ball of flames gilded with real goldleaf.  Nightly, illuminated from the ground by spotlights, the fireball flickers nostalgically.

It's said that Sukarno didn't build it to symbolize Indonesia's freedom from centuries of colonisation; he built it as a monument to his own virility. While this may be a joke, at least one historian has suggested that instead of conceiving of MONAS as a work of totalitarian kitsch, a la Stalin, we could think of it as being in keeping with the traditions of the Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms of Java, in much the same way that the autocracy of Sukarno and Suharto could be seen as in keeping with an indigenous, courtly decadence. At least in part, we should appreciate the monument as an Oriental phallic symbol, a lingam-yoni, that icon of the union of male and female, of microcosm and macrocosm, the column being the phallus and its wide, upwardly-tilted base the vulva. And why not?  Isn't there a cannon in the old Dutch quarter of the city, Kota Batavia, that used to be - and may still be - venerated for its power to grant fertility to those young women who sit astride it?

But the National Monument is also a panopticon, that ideal gaol in which all prisoners can be viewed simultaneously, as though by the eye of God. From the viewing platform you have an unimpeded 360 degree view.

Up there I saw the trees of the Square which hid the army tents and soldiers dozing in their hammocks; the roads which led up to the monument, one of which was lined with army trucks and tanks.  In the direction of my hotel I noted the Istiqlal Mosque with its enormous, white mushroom dome.  To the north, hardly visible in the smog, I knew there lay Kota, once the administrative centre of the Dutch East Indies, where I'd had to pay the museum director for showing me around the National Gallery.  It was there that I crossed the cobbled square to eat lunch at the swanky Cafe Batavia.  In the stairwell I was pleased to find a signed photo of the Czech writer and president Vaclav Havel.  Beyond Kota, invisible, there was Sunda Kelapa, the port where even today there are schooners with neatly trimmed sails bearing hardwoods from Kalimantan.

(Earlier in the day, on the way to Kota with two Indonesian friends, I had passed the Chinese quarter, Glodok: many burnt-out buildings, smashed shop windows.  To me it felt vacant, eerie, like an ancient battlefield.)

From this tower the city, its illogical clumps of towers, mid-sized office complexes, houses and kampungs strung along canals, freeways and trainlines, is painfully visible, extending out in every direction.

Close to MONAS is Gambir Station. It's on the eastern edge of Merdeka Square and it marks the second centre of Jakarta, second after Kota Batavia. Gambir was the "Indonesian" centre of the city as distinct from the Dutch centre of Kota. In the redevelopment of Jakarta that was sponsored by Sukarno the centre was also moved from Gambir. The peoples' centre, the marketplace, was to become an open, symbolic space, a symbol of the Revolution: Freedom Square. Due to Sukarno's desire to make the growing city The Capital of a new empire, those peasants who had migrated to the metropolis to seek a better life and who were hawking, operating warungs or working as becak drivers had to be thrown out. They were villagers and therefore unwelcome in the symbolic heart of the metropolis. Becaks are still banned from the city centre. Yet despite Bung Karno's desire to keep the poor invisible, they kept returning. And they are still returning. From my vantage point I saw that there were even a few traders at the entrance to MONAS itself.

As I peered out into the buzzing city, it seemed to me that nations and their symbols are notions too large and too general to be meaningful. Nations always have to be defended, whether against attack from the outside world or against criticism by their own people or from the corruption of their own leaders.

Beside me as I was thinking these things, a young woman was chatting lovingly to a soldier who cradled a machinegun in his arms.

As usual, the Square below was conspicuously empty, a ghostly public place. I couldn't help wondering how many crowds of stone-throwing, pole-wielding students and buskers and hawkers and unemployed would be needed to return this place, this Freedom Square, to the Indonesian people.

 

John Mateer