• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 913 0

be in the building at the time. She seemed to be looking for someone to explain certain objects in the collection. According to Martowikrido, they talked and Ann invited him to join her for a meal. When he arrived later at the designated restaurant, he found her talking and laughing with a friend. They were celebrating Ann’s birthday, it seemed. After that encounter, Martowikrido told me, he and Ann became friends. They would talk about Javanese culture and the meaning of certain handcrafted objects—how the design on a piece of fabric indicated that the wearer was a widow, or the significance of a certain crescent-shaped comb. After Martowikrido moved to Yogyakarta to study, and Ann moved there to begin her research, she would stop by the room he rented, where students often came by to study and talk. “She is very open-hearted,” he told me. “Nothing to hide.” She did not reveal, however, where she was living, Martowikrido said. He introduced her to lurik, the handwoven striped cotton from Yogyakarta, which he collected. He explained its history, the meaning of its design, and the varieties of stripes. Because Yogyakarta was famous for its silversmiths and goldsmiths, he took her to workshops in Kota Gede, a section of the city, so she could see how silver jewelry was made. “I told her that I am not interested in the objects but in the making of them,” he said. After a while, he said, “I think she is now looking at the object differently. At the beginning, she looks at the object as it’s written by the scholars. But she saw objects made by Javanese in society, then you see it a little bit differently.”

Their friendship created talk, according to Renske Heringa, a close friend of Ann’s in the early 1980s. “He exposed her to all kinds of things that, without him, she might not so easily have gotten access to,” said Heringa, known as Rens. “He knew all kinds of villages that would not have been easy for her to go to. And he liked to be with her in the field.” He knew where to buy fabric and objects for little money. “She went all over Yogyakarta, as far as I know, with him on this motorbike,” Heringa said. “Why not? She was free, and he was free. Most of all, it was just the fact that they went around so much. For Indonesians, that would immediately mean that there was an affair. For Westerners, not so. Ann was there by herself. Why wouldn’t she be able to do what she wanted?”

With friends at Nancy Peluso’s, Yogyakarta

Martowikrido told me, when I asked, that he did not know how Ann felt about him. Perhaps she liked him, he said, because she would come by to visit. When I asked him about his feelings for her, he turned away, as though embarrassed by the question, and said he could not answer.

Ann’s return to Indonesia had done little to shrink the distances that had opened up in her marriage to Lolo. According to Maya, the day she and Ann arrived in Jakarta, they found a young woman, who was quite beautiful, in Lolo’s house—the woman he would marry five years later, after he and Ann divorced. Maya, who was four at the time, told me she remembered little about the encounter. She did remember, however, her father’s nervousness and a lingering impression that her parents had argued about the woman’s presence.

Ann and Maya lived in Lolo’s house in Menteng Dalam that year, but it seems that much of the time he did not. “I think he had another place that he lived,” Kay Ikranagara told me, but she said Lolo was often there when she and her son would visit. On the van ride to and from the business school, Samardal Manan, who had known Ann well during her first couple of years in Jakarta, said he was struck now by how free she seemed, as though “relieved from something.” After Ann and Maya moved to Yogyakarta in early 1976, Lolo would fly in to visit, staying in the house with his mother. Ikranagara recalled Ann telling her, on a visit to Yogyakarta, that Lolo was involved with another woman. “At that point, they were separated,” Ikranagara said. “I didn’t feel that they were husband and wife anymore, whether or not they