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The hotel room felt too small, too dark and too constricting for me. I walked outside, up to the river Brantas. What scenery! Mountains, hills, a huge wide river! I walked along its banks and, in front of the house where my sister-in-law had lived during the events of 1965, I stopped. I tried to imagine what she must have witnessed that year and the next. While afraid for the lives of her husband and her children (and, of course, for herself also), she must have seen this river coloured with blood, the blood of innocent people. Sacrificed for what? Dead bodies tied together with bamboo, like rafts, floating down there in the river. The water of the Brantas river carried the tragedy down to Surabaya where it meets the Java Sea. I can imagine how she could not stand the view and the fear. It left her with an illness she will carry for the rest of her life. Fear reigns her, fear for her husband, for her children, even fear for her unborn grandchildren. She will never acknowledge that she is my sister-in-law to anyone outside the family. She cannot, for danger is everywhere. The river Brantas polluted her, as it did to countless others. For a while I close my eyes. Then I look over the river again and it calms me. There are no dead bodies at the moment. There’s just a river in the midst of beautiful scenery. One day this river will produce flowers, red and white flowers, and there will be as many of them as there were dead bodies dragged away by the stream of the Java Sea. Children will bathe in it and decorate themselves with the red and white flowers and whisper to each other “it’s gone, the tragedy. Truth has blossomed. Just look at the flowers! Sang Merah Putih, the Indonesian flag, is ours!” Goodbye Indonesia, I send you my hope, my tears and my love. Ruth Havelaar #1965setiaphari #living1965 An excerpt from a story published in Quartering. A story of a marriage in Indonesia during the Eighties. Clayton: Monash Papers on Southeast Asia no. 24, 1991.
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