New York: After Midnight

By Akhudiat

1983. Five Blacks on an open-air stage played New York: After Midnight as the final number. The rhythm of jazz was raging. Especially the drummer, his eyes closed as if meditating, was thundering away at all kinds of percussion instruments, reaching the peak of tones and energy, where all sounds were lost. The trumpet and saxophone duet stretched along lines of silence. Between visibility and mystery, between independence of self and the need for friends. He felt it all at the American Jazz night under a clear Surabaya night. The moon was lonely, its color whitish silver.

1960. He liked to read, a habit he'd had since elementary school. He read just about everything, and remembered almost all he'd heard. When he was in elementary school, he frequented the bookshop and magazine & newspaper agent's across the street from his school to take a peek at all kinds of reading matter. He didn't dare to borrow openly. He had no intention to buy anything because in the pockets of his shirt and shorts he only had air or shadow-puppet cards that he had won in games.

At the Jember (a major city in Eastern Java) junior high school, he began to understand that one could enjoy all kinds of reading without having to buy anything. It was sufficient to be a member of the Indonesian National Building library; the Office of Education, Instruction and Culture library; and his school library.

The neighbor who lived next door to his rooming house, a high official of the Landbouw Maatschappij Onderneming Djember (Agricultural Corporate Enterprise Djember), had a collection of foreign magazines. The one he'd borrowed included De Lach (a popular Dutch magazine), Stanvac, Look, Life and The Saturday Evening Post. In Life he meticulously read the news and atlas size photo entitled New York After Midnight. New York City is full of fascination, mystery, and one must be alert going into it, so commented the author of the text. On a full page, pitch black, right smack in the light-flooded center, a man was looking up, into the camera. The man was alone in a subway car.

The Black Jazz was roaring. The roar of the trio of the drum, guitar and bass played against the quiet lines of the duet of trumpet and saxophone. They roared like a marching drum band above ground, the whining of planes in the air, and something from underground: trains shuttling to and from along rails inside long holes.

1975. He went down to the subway hole. New York City. The cool late-autumn sun had set earlier that evening. He enjoyed the sun's disappearing behind sky-high buildings from the iron-fenced plaza of the UN building. He'd crossed First Avenue (running north-south) to the plaza, having come out of the International Institute of Education. He'd met the Institute's secretary. She suggested that he talk about the scholarship problem with the head office in Washington. He nodded. He said goodbye.

He went back to the Vanderbuilt YMCA hotel. He turned on the TV in his tenth floor room. Herbie Mann was playing the flute late into the night. It was a lively, cheerful, sassy music, like animals having fun in their nests before going to sleep.

In Manhattan, New York City, can people sleep?

The pages of the New York Times, the New York Post, the Village Voice, Cue, Rolling Stones, New York Magazine, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, Variety, Billboard or the smut paper The Screw displayed all the magic and fascination of all-night entertainment. From high, refined classical art, to medium-high, mediocre, pop, entertaining, all the way to that which was really a display of flesh without textile. It was mostly located on Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and the eccentric neighborhood of Greenwich Village.

He went down to 47th street (running west-east) to 130 West 44th street. He was going to see the play Equus by the English playwright, Peter Shaffer, at Lambs Theater. The theaters on Broadway had their lights out and their gates closed because the Federation of American Musicians was on strike. Broadway turned black.

His dark skin turned even darker. At the corner of Citi Corp Tower, which was under renovation, he passed a tall black -- who knows if he was an extortionist, a pickpocket, a repeat offender, a musician, a singer, an actor, a director, a producer, a star athlete or a homeless unemployed. Both of them were surprised. They greeted each other at the same time. "Hi!" "Hi!" And they shook hands the black way: they shook hands by holding each other's thumb. "Hi!" Hi!" The two of them parted. The Black went into 47th street, the Indonesian who became a Black for 120 seconds turned into Seventh avenue. He stopped a yellow cab, jumped into the back seat. "Village Theater, 7th Street, please."

The Village Theater in Greenwich Village was showing Hi, I Can Cope by the Black Theater ensemble. These black musicians and actors and actresses did not join in on the strike. They were not tied in by Broadway solidarity. They considered themselves Off- Off-Broadway.

The nonstop revue opened and closed with a ritual dance by a single male dancer, black, oily with sweat, his head closely shaven, his body covered with a G-string, symbolizing the birth of humanity, in an ancient times and revealing itself to the present.

The audience stood up, the musicians understood and gave a song number as encore. Invisible during the show, now it was the musicians' turn to appear and remain in their places. The front- stage lights were off, the backgrounds light were on, illuminating the four musicians behind a transparent curtain. A theme of night life.

Five Blacks sprinkled Surabaya's air with long, melancholic but sprightly howls of the trumpet.

Four Blacks behind a transparent curtain at Village Theater, Greenwich Village, Manhattan, ushered the audience into the dreams on the beds of New York.

He came out of the warm theater building to enter cold New York. He stopped by the only restaurant still open. A Greek restaurant. One kind of food drew his attention. It was a piece of bread or, more precisely, a pocket like a pastel (a kind of colonial Indonesian snack) filed with all kinds of vegetables, goat meat and spices. He bought a pocket. He held it with both hands; it contained twice or three times the contents of a Javanese pastel. He bit into the top part. It was the aroma of goat meat and spices familiar to him. Arabic soup. A pocket of Greek pastel entered his stomach while he was sitting on a sidewalk bench together with other customers. He drank chilled soda.

He walked east, after one block he turned to Sixth avenue, then entered Eighth Street.

The junior high school kid with halting English, learned through the English Progressive Courses textbooks, opened all the pages in his room in the rooming house.

And from the page with the picture of a frog in the rain under a wide leaf by a pond in the Saturday Evening Post magazine he spelled the poem A Spring Prayer and translated painstakingly: A frog spins to the pond/ seekor katak melompat ke kolam / a fly flies around / seekor lalat terbang keliling.

Along Eighth Street he whistled: Jangan ditanya ke mana aku pergi -- Jangan ditanya mengapa aku pergi -- Usah kau tanya ku berbalik lagi...(the first lines of a popular song of the 1950s. They translate as: Don't ask me where I'm going -- Don't ask me why I'm leaving -- You don't need to ask if I'll be back again...)

A subway hole was located on the sidewalk between Eighth Street and Eighth Avenue. He wanted very much to go in. He just wanted to know what the "underground animal" was like which always gave out white smoke and long hisses through the iron gratings along Eighth & Sixth avenues. He went down into the hole. He bought a 35 cent token at the ticket window. He inserted the token into a box in front of the gate, and the gate opened by itself. He entered the platform which was as quiet as a graveyard. He got on a train that had just stopped whose door opened by itself in a friendly way. The door closed, the train in the hole moved to the north, horizontally parallel to Eighth Avenue.

In his room in the rooming house he imagined how strange it was for trains to creep to and fro in holes under a gigantic city. He only knew of the Merawan and Garahan tunnels which the Banyuwangi-Jember train slipped into under mountains and forests at the eastern end of Java.

He felt the din along the rail under the metropolis. In front of the loudspeaker he was overwhelmed by the din of the jazz music whose undulations made the heart tremble.

He fell into his seat in the subway right across from the only entrance and exit. The benches were elongated, stuck to both walls of the car. The middle part was empty; it was for people to stand while holding on to straps on a long pipe above just like in a city bus. He gazed at the door that automatically opened when the train stopped and closed when it moved.

In Life magazine the lone man in the subway was situated right smack across from the door. His picture was taken from a camera above. The page was blocked black and the man's picture was enveloped by bright light the size of a shooting target.

Shooting?!

The banging of the drums by the meditating drummer was very loud. It was deafening.

He didn't want to be shot by accident or shot just because he was having a bad luck. He was going to the left wall. Someone there was asleep, his face covered with a hat, or he was pretending to be asleep. He was going to move to the corner to the left of the door; someone there was nodding his head while playing with a rolled magazine as if aiming a pistol. He was going to move to the right wall; someone was pacing back and forth, forward and backward, forward -- turning to the right -- forward again -- turning again from corner to corner, as if he was keeping watch on both corners, or perhaps he was keeping watch on them. He was stuck right in the middle, right smack in front of the closed door covered with railings similar to bars in a prison cell.

Hey hey hey - hey! Five musicians under the sky, a white moon and wind sent by the leaves of a guava tree, sighing voice improvisations. Their voices and sounds pumped up breaths and lusts that were still roaming in the jungles of a half-asleep metropolis.

He imagined a train tunnel under the city of Jember. The central terminal would be under the town square. Yes, the square surrounded by the District Office, the Grand Mosque, the Red Cross building, the empty plot which had been the burnt down Cathay movie house (they said it burned down because it had been an affront to the Mosque), the Normal School, the Regency Office, the Bank of Indonesia building, the Army headquarters, Hotel Jember, the Jail, the ... Office (he forgot), the Post Office and the Military Police headquarters. All lines would start down here. And the rails would be in holes horizontally parallel to Sultan Agung Street, Semeru Street, Sudirman Street, RRI (the acronym for Radio Republik Indonesia) Street, Tembakan Street, Kartini Street. Fascinating.

How long would he have to be cooped up frightfully in this underground jail which was running rapidly? Should he just follow wherever this electronic ground rat was moving persistently, shuttling to and fro, moving like an express train, until the center of its energy wore out and broke down by itself? But when would that be?

What time was it? It was around dawn.

The three men who limited his freedom still hadn't done anything yet; they just watched him, or they were edgy themselves and kept on guard against one another. Would they pounce on him at once or would one defeat the two rivals first?

Without meticulous calculation it would be risky to jump out suddenly when the automatic train stopped. Of course they'd run after him when the station was deserted and the sidewalks above were a map of Manhattan which he hadn't known yet. It could be foolish.

The pictures of victims of the brutality of the Mafia, the quasi-Mafia, groups a la Mafia, Mafia impostors, were displayed or appeared one by one in front of his eyes. Then it became a montage overlapping and flashing.

What kind were these three men? Cheap crooks, street criminals, shady characters, conmen, or double-spies for ten western & eastern countries that found the wrong target?

He had to calculate how many minutes the train would stop, how many minutes it would take the railings to open, how many minutes before it closed again when the wheels moved again. And how many minutes it would take him to jump out when the railings were almost closed and the train had not entered the tunnel yet.

Times like this called for the arrival of a Superman. Ah, legends.

What was called for was an accurate second-by-second calculation and concentration and then action.

The jerky movements of the train's wheels filled his ears with a repetitive rhythm: off-on off-on no-yes no-yes tidak-ya tidak-ya (Indonesian for no-yes no-yes) alive-dead alive-dead alive-dead alive-dead ali-screech!

The train stopped. The railings opened, a new passenger came in, he was big, muscular, blocking the doorway. He immediately jumped out and flew above to the sidewalk!

He looked to the north. He saw car lights. He raised his hand. Taxi! The car stopped. It was not a taxi. It was a white 1974 Volkswagen "the white buggy". The white fingernail. Inside was a white woman, smiling: come in. He sat next to her. The smell of perfume was all over the place, wiping out the stale air outside, above and underground. The quick fingernail, the fragrant butterfly and the pale, sweaty Indonesian, his sweat reeking of a Greek recipe, flit on deserted lanes heading south: the center of town (downtown).

The Black Jazz resonated guitars with the strumming of Chinese strings.

The Fragrant One asked, "Where are you from?" The Indonesian answered in a typical Indonesia way, "From a friend's house."

"A friend? In Harlem?"

Harlem. A concentration of Blacks. Its street were numbered upward of one hundred. "That's right. Yes, lady, hey, why. Yes."

"Yes. That's right." He became a shriveled rat in the arena of three cats while going from 8th Street all the way to 135th Street, along 8th Avenue to Lenox Avenue.

Going by Central Park, a green oasis in the heart of a steel and concrete jungle and Manhattan, the whitish silver moon was very cheerful and victorious. The moon slipped in front and behind lush maples and red woods. In the center of town, the moon was pale because one's eyes were obstructed by thousands of kilowatts of neon light.

The pretty Fragrant One stopped her tiny bug on the sidewalk at Times Square, across the street from the TKTS booth; purveyors of tickets to all theater and film shows.

"Thank you very much, Miss..."

"Buggy." They both laughed. "You're welcome. Your fur jacket's terrific. Watch out, there are lots of bad people. Bye."

"Bye."

The blue and black textured fur jacket he'd bought at the Canadian border because he'd felt cold while on the Greyhound bus tour apparently stimulated the claws of those cats inside the hole to grab him. He turned the jacket, which still smelled of men's stores, inside out, and the color changed into parachute- nylon black. He walked to the east, cruising along 47th Street, heading towards an eighth-dollar room. The night music that accompanied him was not crickets or moths, but the hiss of smoke from underground trains and trucks that had started to go down and remove trash.

In his room in the rooming house he fell asleep clutching at Life with New York: After Midnight on the cover. And he forgot to read the history book and the Arabic-script-for-Malay primer for tomorrow's lessons.

Five Blacks ended the jazz concert brilliantly. They were breathtaking. The audience applauded. "Encore!" they shouted in the Surabaya dialect. The five blacks reappeared on the stage, presenting the composition whose basic bars they had written just the previous afternoon at the five-star hotel cock fight. And they called the tune Cock Fighting...

Translated by Dede Oetomo

Akhudiat was born in 1946 in Eastern Java. In 1975-1976 he went to Iowa City for the International Writing Program. This story was first printed in Horison XIX, October 1984. The translation appeared in New York After Midnight, 11 Indonesian Short Stories, which was printed here in 1991.