Syam is a shadowy person. What dazzles about him are his mind and his eyes. His eyes keenly observe the faces and behavior of the people around him. Piercing and brilliant, their unsheathed power often makes people uncomfortable, and deep down they regard him as annoying or frightening. His eyes can remain unblinking for some time, staring at whoever is speaking in front of him. When he’s like that, only he and God know what he’s thinking.
A true ironic, his speech often seems at odds with many people’s logical thinking. He does it almost effortlessly. He puts on a serene face, a confused face, a bored face, a stupid face, a cold face, any face in accordance with the person in front of him. But there are always traces of a subtle cynicism, a playfulness, if not downright rudeness. These traces are always there, no matter the expression on his face. Syam usually only answers after letting people babble on in their arrogant and pretentious manner. His calm yet acrobatic speaking skills are capable of throwing the thoughts and feelings of others into chaos, bringing out the worst in them. People generally draw the one conclusion about him: he’s a son-of-a-bitch, and they regret and curse the day they met Syam. What he says is often understood only a week, a month or a year later, as if it had a certain incubation period. Then his voice resonates, torturing their late-night hours before sleep, lacerating their self-assurance and self-deception as human beings. Very probably he frequently appears in their nightmares.
Syam only occasionally sees the sun rise. Rarely is he properly dressed, shaven or with his hair combed. At a glance he looks unkempt, but if you look more closely, his fingernails are always short and clean. As clean as his shirt and his ears. He has a tall, thin build as if he doesn’t eat regularly, and indeed he doesn’t. He only ever eats three times a day when he’s with his three friends, Batara, Anya, and Alé. Syam prefers to stay cooped up reading books. He reads a great number of books at a speed way above that of the average person. He quotes phrases or writings to anyone, at any opportunity, at any time when he’s with his friends, just to annoy the three of them. He quotes Heraclitus and Confucius, Izutsu and Lao Tzu, Charles and Jean Fourier, Ibn ʻArabī and Hammurabi, Novalis and a number of novelists. Also Rilke and Roethke or poets of the Chinese Tang Dynasty and post-war Polish poets. When he’s not quoting, Syam enjoys giving definitions. Thus, love is “a sniveling lyricism in twos, in threes, in groups,” sexiness is “the capacity to project potential pleasure.”
Often the three friends have had to put up with the embarrassment from Syam’s utterances or his behavior at various social events, usually involving other people who challenge him to a fight, people who are upset or in tears.
“Look at you with your bruises, all black and blue. You wouldn’t have ended up like this if you’d pretended to faint just now, Syam! Or pretended to be disabled. Go home. I already regret inviting you to come along to the party!”
In this way the three friends would sigh and curse when they got home from an event. Syam would give no response, just lean back relaxing on the sofa with an ice pack on his forehead.
Syam wasn’t always like this. Syam 1.0 was as ambitious as other young lads his age, full of hope facing the still long future ahead of him, casting dreams along the way. Syam once shone like his Arabic name. He was an architect, a disciple and advocate for local materials in the buildings he designed. He didn’t care about the modern architectural concepts applied by his colleagues—those whose careers surely advanced faster—and he often turned down property projects, those modern wannabees that said no to the concept of “local content” that he advocated. He missed out on so many prospective jobs this way. He was more of a craftsman than an architect, doing the detailing of a building himself while imparting his knowledge, from the foreman down to the construction workers who hadn’t got further than junior high school. When he wasn’t drawing on large sheets of tracing paper, he was sketching in large drawing books. He also liked to scribble in notebooks, type on a laptop. Occasionally he wrote a number of lengthy critical essays, not just about architecture but extending to other issues. He’d sometimes date girls, go to parties, climb mountains, go to jazz clubs—all the things people do to keep busy in order to forget.
At the end of 2004, suddenly everything changed. Something had changed Syam inside and out. Something mundane, but capable of quite fatally redirecting and bending a person’s destiny. Something very familiar and ordinary, something that would never be the same again in Syam’s eyes, giving rise to his prayers and nightmares, casting a shadow over things he touched and faces he looked at, clinging to his footsteps along the way: water. It was water that had dimmed the sun in Syam; what remains is now mere dusk.
Water had broken Syam, broken his humanity, and the certainty of the mathematical calculation that 1+1=2 was no longer valid for water, a drop plus a drop still equaled a drop of water. Drops of water combine to enlarge themselves. Water flowing from Sumatra to Java and on to wherever, covering distances at a slow pace, manifesting in all its colors and forms. He would always recognize it, water that was only passing through. Transient. Like he is.
Water had passed through, engulfing his home village, in the form of floodwaters with the overwhelming force to destroy everything and everyone. And Syam was not there, but far away from the entire calamity, from his family. They who had to succumb to the power of the water, be swallowed up by its blind wrath. Syam arrived in Aceh on the second day, when the mud-smeared corpses were still fresh, scattered over the roadways. Several years have passed but it seems to him like yesterday, still reappearing in the repeated nightmares that continue to haunt his nights.
The floodwaters changed Syam into a hermit, as if he’d suddenly grown old. Gray hair suddenly covered his head, he let his face grow a beard. He handed over the mortgage on his apartment to a bachelor architect colleague who still wanted to dream. He moved to his uncle’s home, occupying a shady pavilion that had long been empty. One night his oldest uncle had told him, “Syam, stay here.” His aunt had been crying. This occurred after Syam had disappeared from Jakarta for some time. He’d gone home to his village to work on the construction of houses that had been destroyed, together with some of his architect friends. He also rebuilt the mosque and the primary school along with the survivors in his village. This was his final construction work before he stopped altogether.
At night, Syam would often talk with his aunt and uncle, his somewhat senile oldest aunty and his school-age cousins. He always avoided conversations about the past or their home village. On his return to Jakarta, he mostly secluded himself in his room, occasionally disappearing without telling anyone where he was going, maybe on a solo mountain climbing trip somewhere. Then he’d resurface in Jakarta. Often on a weekend he’d go to Alé and Anya’s house, where he mostly talked with the twins’ father, Uncle Nala. The topics of conversation between them both seemed never-ending, and they also had jokes that only the two of them understood. When it was like this, Anya and Alé felt annoyed and would go to bed. At times Syam would stay so late talking that he’d spend the night in the guestroom or in Alé’s room.
The three friends often visited Syam’s pavilion. They’d come skulking like special troops on a secret mission. This was because the oldest aunty liked to waylay them and make them sit down and recite verses from the Quran. She would listen to them, nodding in agreement if their pronunciation was correct and scolding them fiercely if they made a mistake. She truly made the three of them tremble. Batara wore a large cross around his neck when they visited because he was a Catholic, and she kept forgetting about it and always made him take the first turn.
They saw how in Syam’s pavilion, as time went on, more and more of his non-essential possessions disappeared, replaced with books. His room was full of books: lined up on shelves, piled up on the floor, scattered on his desk. He no longer had an architect’s table, having given it away with his architectural tools. Syam still often wrote essays of varying lengths, some sent for publication, others not. Twice he translated thick novels he’d liked. At one stage he frivolously wrote an even thicker novel. Its title, contents, and even the name of the author were anagrams of his full name. There was no photo, nor any biographical notes of the author, no book launch or interviews. Syam corresponded only with his publisher. Only his three friends knew who the author of this very weird novel was. Anya had read it in full, Alé had given up at chapter five, and Batara had bought a copy but didn’t even read it. “Hearing him talk is enough to make me want to faint and die, let alone read what he’s written in a book.”
At the time no one would’ve guessed that one day there would also be a book that Anya had written.
My feet drag heavily across the ground. In one sweep of the eyes I see everything scattered. I hear the repeated mutterings asking God for forgiveness, so faint, so sorrowful that I doubt whether the sentences are indeed my own, whether it’s my voice coming out of my mouth or if it’s the sound of my footsteps. I don’t know if my feet are stepping one by one, or striding out in a run. All I know is a sense of long familiarity, like recognizing the face of someone I hadn’t seen for years, but had long since died. I still know the face, but the expression is dead.
This had once been a village. Once been a road. I search for traces of my house. The road is full of ruins and skeletons of buildings; hardened mud covers everything that had once been there. A certain smell is wafting around in the air, over the torn-up asphalt damp with mud and strewn with corpses, so many of them . . . The stench I know will haunt me later among other smells in other places. So I replace this smell with the scent of the cardamom in my mother’s sarong, the fragrance of the detergent in my father’s shirt at Friday prayers, the perfume of the three rose stems in my sister’s hands, the dried jasmine in my grandmother’s sheets.
I recognize the mosque, its four white walls still standing supporting the dome, but no longer sprouting its crescent moon and star. In the courtyard of the mosque a white-faced person is picking up the fallen crescent moon and star. In the sky the sun is like a flying leaf. Shards of glass and pieces of wood are piled up, everywhere are fallen trees and slabs of concrete. Not far from the mosque is one of the stalls where my father used to sit drinking coffee on afternoons after mixing cement for the walls of the mosque years ago.
I recognize two or three faces of near neighbors. They have white faces. They are not among the dead, having escaped death. Whereas the ones scattered about, their faces are the color of mud. I don’t know what color my face is.
Our house. Its walls are still standing but damaged, with gaping wounds. Scattered pieces of wood, chunks of gray concrete, cracked tiles and glass. I recognize every detail of what was once there, materials I once handled, once handled by my father. We had rebuilt the old house inherited from my grandfather when I was home on leave. I contributed my expertise and labor in Jakarta. I am the laborer who laid the bricks, the architect who drew the blueprints of the house, an irregular visitor to this house. That was once there.
I recognize them at once—father, mother, grandmother, and my sister. Their faces are serene, smiling. They are sitting on a pandanus mat, listening to my grandmother singing songs in the old language that I don’t understand. Like in the old days when Granny sang for us at night. She pauses in her singing and turns to greet me. “You’ve come home.” They all turn to look at me. They’re not sad, because “Death came too quickly for there to be time to be sad. Remember us as being happy like this.” Their faces are clay sleek glowing. They wave, gesturing to me to leave. “Start your work here.”
I turn. I feel the water in the mud on their faces, the water on my cold cheeks, they’re no different. I don’t know what color my face is. I step outside, and on the road I see a little boy with a white face, his arms around the ruins of a concrete pole. He looks up at me laughing happily, showing his white baby teeth. He prances around joyfully, jumping, dancing, and laughing all the while. I approach him, surprised at why he’s so cheerful amidst all this gloom.
The boy looks at me, his forehead perspiring from all the dancing and jumping. Drops of sweat fall onto his dusty shirt, his body is covered in scars. He wipes his forehead and looks up at my face towering over him. He signals to me to bend down closer to him. I bend and look into his round eyes. It is as if I know him.
The boy scrutinizes my eyes and my brow then pats me on the cheek and says,
“Water has hurt us.”
“What’s your name?”
“Syam.”
“You’re all grown up now, Syam. You’re not like I remember. I never used to be so cheerful.”
“I have to enjoy myself.”
“Why?”
“Because this is how it has to be. As the night goes on, I’ll be even happier. You should see me at midnight.” “Why?”
“Because this is how it has to be. You will be grieving tomorrow, grieving too much so I—you in the past—have to pass my time being happy.” The boy spins around.
“I’m going now. My friend’s called me. She knows.” The boy points at a little girl standing nearby in a yellow and black dress with ribbons, staring at me. I feel sure that this little girl already knows.
“No need. To be sad. For too long,” the boy says as he jumps three times. “Even this mosque, God willing, will rise again.” The boy runs over to his friend. The two of them squat and play. The girl begins to sing, her voice high and clear, mellifluous as light as air, a chant in the old language.
And suddenly I understand the old language. The girl sings about the manifestations of water. Accompanying the chant are all the colors and forms of shimmering water. Water welling in the eye. Waterdrops on the forehead of the boy, the mass of condensed water drifting in the air, water ebbing back toward the horizon, water in the mud at my feet, water in the dead bodies . . . It’s the same water that once dangled on the petals of my little sister’s roses, on my father’s brow at dawn, in the soapsuds spattered over my mother’s washing, in the coffee and ginger cakes my grandmother makes . . . It’s the same water in its many manifestations. I will recognize it in all its forms and colors. While I still don’t know what color my own face is.
The children get up. They walk away and I reach out my hand, longing to run after them, don’t go, don’t go just yet.
Syam jolts into consciousness, breathing rapidly. He is always jerked awake from this dream with a tight chest and damp cheeks. He feels fingers stroking his cheek. Syam opens his eyes and looks at Anya bending over him, her eyes full of concern, calling his name “Syam, Syam.” For a few seconds Syam sees Anya with the white face of the little girl with the ribbons. Syam blinks and returns to seeing Anya’s normal face, the adult Anya. In the background he recognizes the dim shapes in the room. It’s not his room but the guestroom in Anya’s house. Syam reaches for Anya’s fingers resting on his jaw and grasps them tightly, as if her hand is the last anchor to hold onto after the sea has retreated far. Anya lies down beside him, not saying a word.
The room is in perfect dimness, and silent for such a long time. The only sound is of insects and the occasional rustling of the night wind. At one point there is Syam’s voice. Speaking softly, barely audible, drifting into Anya’s ear. She’s the only person in the world he has told about his recurring dream. Anya feels the beating of Syam’s heart in his chest, every breath in and out. Syam feels the damp on the shoulder of his shirt. Remnants of the sweat from the exhausting dream, teardrops from Anya’s silent weeping, they’re no different, both are water. Anya still does not utter a word, until Syam finishes speaking and the room returns to silence. They lie like that throughout what remains of the night.
