My Serene Friend

By Ron Dihamma

He was thin and pale. This man did not look like anything special. He was nothing more than a very quiet man. At first I didn't quite notice it; I was acquainted with this type of character.

However, I never thought I would meet such an extremely shy man. He must have been raised in an old-fashioned manner. Surprisingly, he wasn't! He had a very modern upbringing. He was a diplomat's son and was born in Moscow.

This gentleman walked half as fast as normal people do. You can just imagine how slow he walked. In the David J. Schwartz book I frequently read, Schwartz suggests you walk 30 percent faster than average people do. When I asked this man why he walked so slow, he said his doctor recommended it. He said he was subject to lung infections that made it hard for him to breathe.

I figured it out while speaking with him on his way home from the office. His voice was huskier and his words fibrillated. I also noticed the way he washed his hands after meals. At a glance he always seemed to be pondering some weighty issue, but watching him closely made it clear that he enjoyed washing his hands. Sometimes he smiled as he stared at the water flowing through his fingers.

It was Sunday morning. Unlike other Sunday mornings, he woke early. I received a further surprise when I saw him running down the corridor in front of our rooms. He glanced at my window as he went by, as though he knew I was watching him. I turned away and pretended to be asleep. After a few moments, I pretended I was just waking up. I opened my door, hoping he would stop running and smile shyly at me as unusual. But something had changed; he didn't show any signs of awkwardness when I stepped into the hall and greeted him.

"Huh, huh, huh. I've almost worked up a sweat," he said. He continued to run.

"Next week we should do this at Hira square, okay?" I yelled to him.

He didn't hear, or pretended not to listen, as usual. Listening to other people did not seem to interest him. I witnessed this for myself several times. One time, his inattentiveness caused everyone in the whole house to think I had gone missing.

It was approximately 8 p.m. "Hey, would you mind accompanying me to the telephone booth? I need to call my family in Idi to ask about the Letter of Replacement," he said to me.

A Letter of Replacement is crucial for people who want to move between cities within our province.

"We cannot be held responsible if you're taken," the chief of my village once said. Being "taken" was a reference to kidnappings and detentions by the so-called "unidentified elements". These kinds of things often occurred in our region.

"Okay," I responded. We walked for about five minutes. The telephone booth was located on the corner, in front of a four- story one-star hotel. The grounds in front of the hotel were not very big, just enough for a few cars to park. I saw some cars there that I thought belonged to some friends I hadn't seen for a month or so.

"Hey, I think those are my friends' cars, I'll go check for them inside," I said to him. I went in and asked the receptionist if he knew whose cars were parked outside.

"Go knock on the door of room 14. They just checked in," said the receptionist, pointing to a room to his left.

My friends were there. I went back out to the phone booth but he was not there. He might have gone home, I thought, so I went back into the hotel.

"Is Al home, Sir?" he asked the owner of our house.

"Didn't he go out with you?" the old man replied.

"Oh my dear, maybe he's in trouble," the old man's wife said.

"Okay Al, I've got to get back to my sister's, she insisted that I stay with her," one of my friends said, putting an end to our conversation.

"Yeah, I need to get back too, it's already 9:30. Say hi to all the guys." I walked out of the hotel. There were still a number of guests and local youths hanging around in front of the hotel and some of the nearby coffee shops. It made me feel safe. Usually people don't' go out at night around here. I turned left to go home and ran into the village secretary, the wife of my landlord with her granddaughter, and one of my friends.

"Oh, you were about to make my heart explode, Al!" the landlord's wife screamed as she grabbed my arms.

"You scared us, you know that! I know this place. What was I supposed to do if you were missing," my friend yelled at me.

I guessed, by this point, that my friend had not told the people at the house that I had gone by the hotel.

I had known him for about three weeks, meeting him when I moved into the house. The house was about a five-minute walk from our company's car pick-up point. So was almost everything else, this being a small town.

I had been staying at the employee housing complex, which was a five-minute drive from the office. The accommodation was quite comfortable, just like a three-star hotel. It was located among other buildings and village houses.

Every morning, when I went to the office, I enjoyed watching all the activities around me. There were schoolchildren walking, riding bikes and sometimes teasing each other. Mothers doing their laundry in the public well donated by our company. And young soldiers holding guns. The soldiers looked so young, like they were fresh out of high school. Most of them looked tense and tired; tense and tired of always being on the alert for attacks from their enemies hiding in the forest.

I didn't understand why the villagers lived here. Why would they want to be poor and live away from everything? Isn't it better to be poor and live in a town or city? At least they'd have the opportunity to change their luck. Not to mention the risks they faced living amid the conflicting parties.

It was public knowledge that villagers were targets when the soldiers and their enemies were fighting each other.

So I decided to stay in town, which was relatively safe, and moved into this house about three weeks ago. It belonged to a retired paramedic. It was a white two-story house with a nice- sized front yard. The owner of the house lived with his wife, a son who was about my age and three grandchildren whose mother was working in Malaysia and whose father had taken refuge in the eastern part of the province.

My room was on the second floor. The quiet guy rented the room next to mine. He worked in a cement packaging factory near the port. He was on the administrative staff. Sometimes he asked me to help him translating letters or other documents from Indonesian to English, or vise versa.

At first, I didn't have a problem with him coming into my room without bothering to knock first. I eventually mentioned it to him, in a way that made me regret being so rude to a person like him. The idea of privacy was absolutely baseless at that particular time and place. So, it wasn't really a problem. "Although he's weird, he's not dangerous," I thought. For this, I thought I was being too kind to him.

No one is actually too kind to anybody. Not even to someone who is below average in everything; stumbling when talking, having few ideas on anything and walking extremely slow. But there was indeed excitement being with this guy, particularly when he talked about his desire to marry soon and the qualities his prospective bride should have. He thought his wife should be beautiful and smart with a bubbly personality. Where in the world would he get her? I sometimes felt guilty about discouraging him from his dream, but I didn't want him to be disappointed.

We were discussing his dream girl for the umpteenth time. I didn't know why I persisted in saying he should just find someone on "his level". Was I really speaking to myself? Sometimes I felt I was being selfish by making someone else take responsibility for my wrong ideas, thoughts and beliefs.

He then commented on how and why he could fulfill his dream. "Most women today are so easy to predict. Just dress up in fashionable and expensive clothes and drive a fancy car and they are all yours. Or, though you don't dress so fashionably, once they find out you have a great job and earn pretty good money, you'll be surprised at how they will start to show interest in you. It's all because women are lazier now and don't want to think much on their own. They willingly let us, men, do the thinking and working for them. As compensation, they'll 'serve' us until they finally and truly fall in love with us. Not to mention when they've given birth to our children. At this point, they've got nowhere else to go but into our arms."

He must have spent some time thinking about this. Still I was not convinced he would be able to attract such women or, it crossed my mind, get over the pain of being dumped by those women. Especially now that our region is in social confusion because of all the unrest. All the nice, attractive men and women have flown away, seeking temporary refuge or leaving the area for good.

Frustrating? Yes it is! The town used to be lovely. Small, but nice. Just a perfect town to get married and raise children. Now it is dead at night. People prefer, or they have no other choice, but to stay home at night. Night is a fearful time, when shootings, bombings and raids occur. Surprisingly, during the day people go about life as usual: going to the market, working in offices or even just repairing a chicken coop.

It was a blessing we still had one place to go to in town. It was a restaurant downtown. We both liked it. The place was only open in the afternoons. It was more crowded during the weekend. The restaurant was actually something like a food court, with about eight small coffee shops and food stalls inside. The chairs and tables were in front of the different stalls. It was located across from the regency office. The specialties at the restaurant were sate and boiled oyster.

Once he told me that he was pretty concerned about his family. He is the eldest sibling in his family. He said he paid the school fees for his brother and sister, and that he regularly sent money to his mother. He sounded like a very responsible man when talking about his family. He was almost a father!

I found out later that his father had passed away a year ago and that he was now responsible for the family. Wow! I don't think I could do that, even though I earn much more money than he does. Financially supporting and being the man in charge of a family are two different things. From the way he talked to his family I could tell that he was listened to and respected! He said he was concerned about his family's safety in the town where they lived.

There, he told me, few men are seen because they are hiding from the security forces that frequently raid the area. Men are often taken away to be interrogated and those men don't usually come back. There are only little boys and old men in the town. Any men between the ages of 18 and 50 have moved away. He told me that his 21-year-old brother had to wear a veil and makeup to avoid being caught on buses. Somehow, it still gave two of us a big laugh.

He was a friend to laugh with indeed. He might not listen much to what you say, but I could still have fun listening to his stories.

It crossed my mind that the uniqueness of this guy must be the result of a weird and hidden story that he would never tell anyone. However, each day I spent with him made me realize the hidden story was no longer important to me. Anyway, whatever happens to anyone in this world was meant to be. No one can make fun of it or use it against you. No one should bother or be bothered.