Halfway

By Ismet Fanany

The road marker signaling the halfway point on the highway between Launceston and Hobart stood alongside one of the overtaking lanes.

The approach to the lane brought a sigh of relief to those who found themselves trapped behind a fully loaded truck or who were in a hurry, like Rusli that morning.

It was barely four months since he arrived to take up a teaching position at the University of Tasmania, and he had already made at least twenty trips back and forth on the route.

For some reason, he had not spotted the sign before. It was no more than a triangular stump, green in color and knee height.

Rusli was a visiting lecturer for one course, lasting approximately eight months, to teach Indonesian on the island which prides itself as a tourist center. As Indonesian was the only foreign language taught at the university's two campuses, Rusli had to drive at least once a week from his base in Launceston to the Tasmanian capital.

"What about your work at the department?" Ermiati had asked when Rusli told her about the offer from Hamid. Hamid was Rusli's friend and the chief of the Indonesian language program in Tasmania.

"It'll be discussed with the dean," he had told his wife. "It is obvious the department head will support the plan. The department will be proud, too, because a professor has been invited to teach abroad."

"But you have never been abroad!" There was a worried undertone in her voice.

"Nothing is going to happen, Er. Remember how I took care of myself when I was in university."

"But that was fifteen years ago. When you bought food from a rice stall, and when you washed your clothes with well water scooped up with a pail attached to a long cord!" Ermiati was not joking.

He tried to reassure her. "Hamid said there will be no problems. Not only is rice available over there, there is turmeric, lemon grass, bay leaves, pepper, everything. There are washing machines. There is no need to hang the washing out to dry because there are dryers."

He gazed at his wife as she stared dejectedly at the floor and twisted the ends of her short kebaya with pale, cold fingers, wrinkled at the tips from washing. He did not know what she was thinking.

He realized the parting would be stressful. Ermiati was accustomed to working together with him but she would soon have to do everything alone. Take the children to school, shop, clean the house. Straighten out squabbles among the children, pay the monthly telephone and electricity bills. More difficult would be the spiritual burden from insecurity and uncertainty.

In the eyes of the Minangkabau people and their matrilineal kinship system, theirs was an ideal marriage as Ermiati was the child of Rusli's maternal uncle. They were childhood playmates. Little Ermiati had spent most of her days in the home of Rusli's family.

They played traditional games, or picked the leaves of the putri malu plant which grew abundantly among the bushes.

As they grew older, they fished together in the many ponds owned by Rusli's family. Rusli would search for worms with a spade and Ermiati would collect them in a coconut shell filled with a mound of earth. At high school, they were big enough to work in the ricefields to shoo away the ducks and their chicks. Their friendship grew into puppy love, full of innocence and beauty.

Rusli knew intimacy did not allow a person into the innermost and private part of a person. He realized Ermiati's fear must be more complex than was reflected on her face.

He could not get the small, green triangle out of his mind. From the corner of his eye he saw the speedometer as it climbed to 120 kilometers per hour. He lifted his foot slightly from the gas pedal; the Tasmanian police force had no qualms about stopping speeding drivers.

Halfway from my home in Launceston, Rusli told himself. Only halfway. Four months more and I will be back in Indonesia, with my family in Padang, back to my routine job at the Indonesian department of IKIP Padang, back to the lifestyle and social values with which I was raised.

What about the first part of his life in Tasmania? Time is relative, not in the sense of physics, but in human feelings. Four months may feel short, or as long as a lifetime. He had experienced and done a lot in the last four months.

There were many confusing and complicated thoughts going through his mind. He had caressed the kangaroos in Mole Creek and watched them bound on their sturdy hind legs. He had seen echidna and koala, kookabura birds and cockatoos of various colors. He had also drunk in the view of sheep grazing on vast green pastures.

Halfway, the sign reminded him. Why was it praying on his mind? Rusli was restless behind the wheel. His room in Mowbray, near the campus in Launceston, came to mind. The two other rooms in the house were occupied by students, a Thai girl taking a computer course, and a Singaporean girl of Chinese descent who studied business.

At first, Rusli called his children in Padang once every two weeks. But now he called only once a month. Was it really because of the expense? When he first arrived he prayed five times a day, always on time. Even though he only had one hour for lunch on certain days, he would return home to pray as he only lived ten minutes from campus.

Now, he prayed three times or twice daily. He could no longer pray at dawn because of the morning lectures. The time was too short, what with students asking about the difference between tidak and bukan, or when they should use the passive form. Come to think of it, he only prayed two and a half times a day now.

These swirling thoughts made Rusli even more restless. His hands gripped the steering wheel nervously. He was thinking harder about his first months away from his familiar environment.

"Where will you be staying in Australia, Dad?" asked Rohana, his eldest child, a second grader at junior high school.

"Your friend said that you can stay in a dorm or rent a room." "If you are in a dorm, you'd be just like Erni's brother, eh Dad?" interrupted his youngest daughter, still in kindergarten, who was nestled in his arms.

"Erni said that a dormitory is just no good, Dad." Aminah never stopped talking, "There are too many people. It is too noisy. You won't be able to do any work."

"Australian dormitories are different, Ina," Rusli said softly. It's not noisy and there aren't many occupants."

"If you are in Australia, what presents will you be bringing home, Dad?" asked Burhan, Rusli's only son.

"What would you like to have?" asked Rusli.

"A kangaroo!" yelled Aminah before Burhan could say anything.

"Ina saw one on TV. It is very beautiful. We can have one, can't we Dad? When you are back you have to make a cage near the chicken coop in the backyard."

"How is that possible," Burhan said. "He couldn't take a cat from the village, let alone a kangaroo!"

"Daddy can bring a toy kangaroo home!" Rusli said consolingly. "There are plenty of them in the shops."

"Ina would like a large one, Dad."

Rusli was moving further away from lane H100. This meant that he was entering the Southern Midlands and nearer to Hobart. Rusli thought of the family he seldom called, and his negligence in not praying regularly.

Something else was bothering him. It seemed, he thought, that he had also turned halfway from the values he once upheld and never thought to violate.

Another thought on his mind was related to this Hobart visit. Three weeks before Rusli met a woman at lunch in the university cafetaria.

"Good afternoon!" a voice had called out. He looked aside to find a woman with shoulder-length blonde curly hair.

"Good afternoon," Rusli replied simply. Even though it was April and the weather had cooled considerably, many students were still wearing sleeveless dresses cut low in the front.

Rusli had acted differently before coming to Tasmania when he looked at women dressed this way. A sense of guilt would envelop him and he would fear that others would view him as having dirty thoughts.

Admittedly, these women were different from the students he used to teach. And nowadays, the sight pleased him.

"I hear that you teach Indonesian in Hobart," said the woman.

"I teach twice a week on Thursdays and Fridays," Rusli said. "Please, sit down."

She took the seat opposite him.

"And from Monday to Wednesday in Launceston," she said.

"How do you know?"

"I have a friend in your class. You are a very good teacher, I hear," the woman said as she reached toward him to shake his hand. "Diana."

"Rusli. Your Indonesian is very good!" He was sincere as her pronunciation and sentence structure was excellent.

Rusli was awed by Diana's clear, green eyes, her blond hair and the paleness of her skin. He knew for a long time that people like her existed, yet to be at such close proximity had been but a dream. Diana was a beautiful woman, agile and funny, clever, and she liked to talk with Rusli.

Would dark skin, dark eyes and black shining hair attract Diana, Rusli wondered. To make a long story short, the two continued to meet when Rusli was in Hobart. Two weeks before, when Rusli spent the night in Hobart, they had dined together. Rusli could not deny that he was extremely attracted to the girl.

Diana enjoyed the intimate relationship with Rusli. She now had an Indonesian friend who was a teacher. Since completion of the third year of her Indonesian class the year before, she had feared her Indonesian would become rusty if she did not continue to practice.

For Rusli, Diana was the first Australian he knew intimately. He was glad that this had not happened in Launceston where his actions would have been noticed by his compatriots who lived there.

On the evening of their dinner, Rusli had promised to stay over in Diana's boarding house on his next visit.

Half of the Launceston-Hobart route was hilly terrain. There were few open spaces and steep hills at first, but near the border of the Southern Midlands and the Hobart region it became a hilly panorama. The winding road became steeper and curved, with rising hairpin bends and staggering downhill roads. If the view reached far beyond the horizon at first, the sight was now hampered by mountainous ranges obscuring all behind them.

"Be careful in a foreign country," Ermiati had warned the day before Rusli's departure.

"Of course, I will," Rusli said as he embraced his wife.

"Don't forget to pray!" She was quiet for a moment then looked intently at Rusli. "Watch out for temptation."

"Er!"

"I have to say it. Even if we have been together for a long time. We know each other. Of course, you know that I totally trust you. If that would not have been the case, I would not have let you go in the first place. But, temptation is an outside factor. You cannot control it, no one can. We can only control ourselves. And you have to go through en extremely heavy challenge. It never happened to you before. I hope my message will help you overcome trials and temptations."

"You are right, Er. As usual." He kissed Ermiati lovingly.

That evening, the time seemed too short but it was a more enjoyable experience than ever before.

Rusli's Toyota Camry climbed and descended down the hill as he neared Hobart. Rusli's breathing was so labored it could be heard over the car's engine.

Here he was, a man who was considered devout in his hometown. In Padang, he often acted as the leader during collective prayers. He was known as a person who moved well in social circles.

But, just as his wife had predicted, the situation in the new land was extremely testing. All values and the society which used to control his behavior were not present. The values were different.

Nobody was looking over his shoulder if he worked on something different. That was the most important test of human behavior. Would he still adhere and contribute to values when they were no longer dominant in the surrounding environment?

From the slope of the river, Derwent spread widely as it neared the mouth of the waterway. The view on the opposite side showed hilly segments of Hobart, which seemed to rise in the surroundings.

It would not be long before he passed Granton bridge from where black swans could be spotted in the river. Rusli knew that Diana was waiting for him. And he also knew what would happen if he stayed the night at her place. A wave of passion engulfed him when he thought of Diana.

Rusli started to shiver when he suddenly remembered Ermiati in Padang, the woman he had known most of his life, who became his wife and the mother of his children. His heart cried out when he thought of his children far away. His thoughts were more confused now than when he passed the halfway marker.

The car slowed down as it approached its destination. It took the slope almost recklessly as if driven by an outside power, as if the earth gravitated and hurtled it on its course of destiny.

"Good afternoon, Diana!" Rusli said. She smiled in reply and then gave him a deep kiss.

"May I leave this small bag here while I teach?" he asked.

Diana nodded. "See you soon!"

Translated by Claudine Frederik.

The author was born in Kotopanjang, West Sumatra, in 1952. His first short story was published in Haluan in Padang when he was an student of the Teacher Training Institute (IKIP) in that city. He received his doctorate from Cornell University in 1990. He is now director of the Indonesian Language program at the University of Tasmania, Australia.

Separo Jalan (Halfway) appears in Pistol Perdamaian: Cerpen Pilihan Kompas 1996 (Pistol of Peace: An Anthology of Kompas Short Stories 1996). It is printed here courtesy ofKompas.