Member-only story
Further to the West
The translation of Budiarto Danujaya’s Indonesian short story “Semakin dan Semakin ke Barat” by Tjahaja.
That man was my childhood. A sun-drenched childhood in the dry rice paddies of the passing bird season, when a mosaic of earthen cracks boiled bodily fluids through the soles of our bare feet-me, my little brother, and his children. A childhood drenched in sweat because of connecting, tying, and sticking bamboo poles a dozen meters high to anchor bird-catching nets. I spent my childhood running back and forth to ward off gulls, terns, chickens, grouse, and the occasional heron or white heron in the late afternoon, so that they would turn and fly into the tens of meters of net we had stretched along the rice paddies. (Well, the heads of those unlucky birds were stuck in the net up to the neck, floundering around in vain trying to escape, until finally, with a faint gasp, they hung like a shuttlecock stuck deep in the net after being smashed by the famous King Smash.)
Forty years ago, the Kapuk area was still a stretch of fields, rain-fed rice paddies, ponds, swamps and scrub on the outskirts of Jakarta, the very edge of the city. Interspersed between the wide, open expanses were small villages of mixed or entirely Betawi communities. In the bamboo hut directly opposite my house, a burly man as tall as a door frame lived with his children, two playmates of mine with whom we wandered around, stealing gourami in the pond, hooking corks in the rice paddy ditch, baiting catfish in the swamp, or tapping turtles in the graveyard.
He was Mr. Buari I knew, tall and sturdy as a tamarind tree trunk, with arms full of muscles that could carry a dozen net poles by himself. I vividly remembered his hurried, full stride almost three times the width of mine, his guttural voice as he chased away birds, and his face full of smallpox scars but far from frightening. It’s hard to forget his lively figure throughout the bird-catching season. Very different from the listless figure who stood before me when the cruelty of life reunited us north of the Ciujung toll road—a figure who told a much longer story through the dull crust of his skin than through his lips.
“The trajectory of the birds kept going further and further west… and we kept moving further and further…
