Gecko talk

Sri Mulyanti Goenawan

I am awake early in the morning, and the first conversation that I have is with the cockerel as he greets the new day. By the time my day is finally done my body is tired and my mind is weary, but still I manage to talk with the gecko.

He is a good listener, you see, and his replies are consistent and dependable.

It has been some years now that I have shared my evenings with the gecko. I suppose I was quite surprised to find him in the big city of Jakarta when I first moved here from my village 20 years ago.

Back then, I thought that so much was going to be so different from my village. Little did I know that Jakarta had so many villages within its city limits. But still it was amazing and a comfort to find that so much of my village life was still to be found here in the big city.

I did not expect, though, to find the gecko here in the city. I thought that the concrete jungle, all the asphalt roads and the city's walls and windows would have robbed the gecko of any place to live but still he was living among us, among all the city chaos. Still he talks with me and I find this reassuring.

Even being surrounded by so many people, the city can still be a lonely place, and since the death of my husband I suppose it has become even more so -- desolate even -- for me.

My husband was a construction worker; that is what brought us to Jakarta in the first place. The growth of the city offered so many opportunities to him with his skills in steel work that, of course, it was an ideal place for him to earn a living for his family.

He managed to keep in work for almost all of the time. But the economic crisis at the end of the 1990s left him unemployed for a short time but we survived and he soon found new work.

One of the buildings that he was working on in 1998 still remains unfinished; it is a painful reminder to me of him. He always would say to me that one day he would finish that building and make it look as grand as it should.

But now he has gone and he will not be able to do what he planned.

The steel beams of that unfinished building are still there for all to see. The building stands like an unfinished skeleton, the beam what finished my husband off.

Each time I pass that unfinished building I weep silently inside for my husband. He worked on those buildings for so long, it was so much a part of his life that I never thought that he would lose his life to it.

Of course, we always knew that it was dangerous work. Working and walking at such great heights, with only a slender steel beam between you and a certain fall to your death, was something that had to raise a certain amount of fear.

But the skill and ease with which my husband was able to walk those beams meant that my worries for him were abated. I would not say that I, or indeed he, became complacent but because it was so much a part of his everyday working life, we somehow just came to think of it less and accepted it as part of what he did.

But it was always there in the back of my mind. That fear and the worry that something might just happen was something that I lived with. In fact I lived with it to such an extent that when something did finally, fatally happen, in some strange way I was prepared for it. My mind was somehow ready for it.

But that may not be entirely true. With retrospect, I may well be trying to make myself more comfortable with it now than I was then when it actually happened. It was an accident, they assured me. It was almost as if they were trying to make me feel better about it by saying that it was not his fault and that there was nothing that anyone could have done.

He did not fall; it was not a slip or a misjudgment on his part. An unusually high wind had somehow swirled around the building site. What to people all around the world would have been little more than a gentle breeze had been increased by the presence of the tall buildings around.

This gale force had swung a section of a steel beam too quickly towards my husband as it was being lifted by a crane into place. This meant that it struck him and sent him plummeting to his death.

His broken body was laid before me on the evening of the accident. The injuries must have been massive but I saw none of them. I only looked upon his face which looked serene, almost happy. And I suppose he was happy; he was at his place of work when he died and that was the place that he loved.

His place of work was a place of great danger but perhaps that is what made him love it all the more. He died doing what he loved to do; it was what kept him alive, perhaps even gave him a reason for living.

So, what is my reason for living now? My children, of course, are an important part of my life but they have grown up, moved on and have their own lives to live now. I do not have a life of high adrenaline rushes like my husband's. Mine is a much quieter life but I continue to work.

I got money after the accident but that was not important to me. What is important is that I continue to live. So I still rise early before the cockerel and listen to his early morning speeches and in the evening I talk with the gecko.

They say that property developers plan to build on the land where my "village in the city" is. They say that they will build another multistory office building that my husband could have worked on and climbed to those great heights as the building was raised. Well, maybe they will but my husband will not be here to work on it, but I suspect he is looking down on me as I think of him.

The gecko and I may have to move on, but I am sure we can move on. We can continue our conversation in another part of the city, in another village in this ever growing and ever rising city.