A poet

"Finally, thanks a lot for everything. Thank you very much. For me, London is not marked by Big Ben, but by your spacious home, in term of space and generosity."

That was the last paragraph of a letter sent by Tantrawan 23 years ago. I held it out to my wife. She read the letter. Her eyes were fixed on me and there was an expression in them that I could not read.

"It was Christmas Eve when he came", she said, looking back on Tantrawan's visit. "He knocked at the door, I opened it and he stood there smiling."

I nodded.

"It's fun to recall how he became our first guest, how tired and sleepy he was when we took him around the city in our car," I said.

"Exhaustion made him fall asleep. He snored and only the Christmas carol The Song of Joy from one of the stores in Oxford Circle could wake him up," my wife said, laughing.

After accomplishing his coverage of an international seminar in New York, Tantrawan came to visit us on his way home to Jakarta. He stayed with us for three days. In the second evening, while we were watching a BBC program, there was a knock at the door.

Mrs. Marks, our landlady, dropped in unexpectedly to wish us a merry Christmas, and then left after handing us a Christmas gift.

"Mrs. Marks is a Jew. She knows that Yusni and I are Moslem. However, she's never missed a year to wish us a merry Christmas during our stay here," I said to Tantrawan.

"She is so kind and humane," my wife said.

Tantrawan seemed interested in hearing more about Mrs. Marks and he asked many things about her.

He enjoyed his stay with us. He left two days after Christmas, after which we only received two letters. The paragraph I wrote above was from his second letter.

We moved back to Jakarta three years after my contract was up. A week after our arrival, I received a telephone call from Tantrawan.

"Hi, long time no see, long time no news. How are you and Yusni?".

"Fine. And you?" I asked.

"Never better in my life."

"Good."

"Would you mind if I came by to see you and Yusni this afternoon?'

"No, not at all. Please come and see us."

I waited for him all day. He never showed up.

He must have been busy as a journalist," my wife said.

A month later, Tantrawan call again and promised to come over. "This is for real," he said.

My waiting was again in vain.

I tore open the envelope and read Mrs. Marks' letter. She wished us good health and happiness. Then she told us about her son, David, who had moved to a new house four blocks from hers. London? It was still somber, cloudy and foggy. Nothing new to tell. Suddenly, I could not believe what I was reading. It was about Tantrawan.

"He is a great poet. The poems he has sent to me really sympathized with what we experienced in Germany during World War II. What did you tell him about me? The poems should have been dedicated to the victims of the holocaust. I was no survivor of the genocide because I lived in London all my life. However, I kept the poems in memory of my dead brothers and sisters."

Tantrawan is a poet. What a surprise! I showed the letter to my wife.

"I am sure now that I was not mistaken," she said. I didn't catch her.

"When I read the poem titled 34 Manor Park Gardens in a Jakarta Sunday paper a few months ago, I felt strongly that it must have been written by someone who had been with us in our home in London. But who? There had been so many friends with us there. I kept thinking and thinking. And then I came to the conclusion that it must have been the work of Tantrawan. He was a journalist. Being a journalist, a writer and a poet at the same time was common in our country. We could not identify him because he used a pen-name".

The days passed quickly and we were busy with our daily ritual. One day, the rain was descending in torrents, December rain which flooded the streets and backed up traffic. I inched my way along the congested road. The radio played an important role in traffic. Rap songs were playing over and over again. Then after a short commercial interval, the announcer recited the story of Gregory Corso, a Beat Generation poet in America. He concluded the short story by quoting Corso:

"Somehow I felt, in the beginning, that it was too easy to write poetry, that even though most critics of art hail poetry as being one of the most difficult forms, I couldn't believe so. As I say, I found it too easy to write this great big difficult thing. But the time came to me when I could only write one or two poems a month, a time when it became real hard to put down on paper what I wanted to express from the heart. It is those poems, the ones that took sweat and laborious joy to create, which remain."

Then the announcer read eight lines of Corso's poem, whereupon commercial ads filled the air. How happy Tantrawan is, I said to myself. A journalist turned poet or journalist, and at the same time a poet.

I had never read his poem. 34 Manor Park Gardens, our address in London, was read by my wife. She did not tell me what the message was in the poem. When I got home, my wife told me that Tantrawan had called and promised to come on Christmas Eve.

"Good," I said. "I want to listen to how he would read his poem."

He turned up in the evening, gave me a warm hug and shook my wife's hand joyfully.

"After 23 years, this is the first time I see you both," he said, bursting into laughter. We had an enjoyable night with Tantrawan.

Before leaving after midnight, he said: "As did Mrs. Marks, I know you are both Moslems. You don't celebrate Christmas Day. However, I would like to give you this poem as a Christmas gift. It is not mine. It is the work of a great poet I admire. Please, keep it."

After he left, I read the poem. It was a long verse called Christmas Trees -- A Christmas Circular Letter by Robert Frost. Tantrawan underlined the last three lines of the poem.

Too bad I couldn't lay one in a letter/ I can't help wishing I could send you one/ In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas/

I smiled to my wife. "It is real hard for him to put down on paper what he wanted to express from his heart," I said.

"Nevertheless, I still believe that he is a great poet".

Sori Siregar was born in Medan, North Sumatra, in November 1939. Since 1960, he has been a frequent contributor to Indonesia's leading journals, including Sastra, Horison, Budaya Jaya and Zaman.