Two Nightgowns

Two Nightgowns

            There is also this.

           

The next night Ibu brought me two nightgowns wrapped in plastic.

One was red and pink and covered in hearts and frills. The other was a traditional batik print. 

She knocked gently on my door, and placed them gently on my bed, not looking me in the eye but smiling when I said thank you, these are beautiful: Terima kasih, Ibu, cantik!

She had not eaten breakfast with me, but she had brought my friends cookies and coffee that afternoon when they had come over for moral support, me wanting to runaway but needing to stay.

In her soft face and her calm fingers and humble grin, I relax into her goodness.

I’m not sure what she and Bapak think now about the Yahudi and the Protocols and who caused this earthquake and that tsunami and the poverty here.

And although I have always been devoted to the world of thoughts, although I think they are the most powerful and important possessions we have in this world, just for a moment, their thoughts no longer matter to me.

They have come back to me, with nightgowns and coffee and cookies.

And that is more than enough for me to stay and sleep the night.

           

Bapak, more distant and gruff and awkward than Ibu, texts me sometime before I leave that he has already told his Quranic group about what I had said and that they are very interested to hear it, that I should come back and come speak to them. (them, a group of Javanese devout Muslim men, me, a Jewish American woman!)

Just as extraordinary is that Bapak does not speak this level of English, so that he must have taken the effort to Google translate, a recent skill, what he wanted to say to me before texting me.

On my last night, they take me to meet the extended family. When the inevitable religion question comes up, they do not hide my Jewishness: Dari Yahudi.

They ask me to take pictures with them and their family anyway.

They ask me to sit beside sister and grandfather and brother-in-law and nephew and permutations of all of the above after being fed more tea, more cookies, more snacks.

On the morning I depart, Bapak says with his eyes to his feet, Ma’af, sorry if we make any mistake.

I smile and try to look him in the eye, Tidak apa apa.

This literary means as “No what what” but means in actuality something closer to “It is nothing.”

It is nothing.

           

But to me, it is everything.