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was I? A refugee? A traveler? An exile? Or maybe something with a little more cachet: a writer or an independent journalist?) Frequently, threefriends of mine—Nugroho Dewantoro, Tjai Sin Soe, and Risjaf, who were fellow Indonesians also living off the good graces of the French government—would join the two of us.
    Vivienne took me and my three loud-mouthed friends to see the Grand Palais and Notre Dame Cathedral. With her, we explored Île Saint-Louis. We Indonesians were a quartet of gay and carefree ramblers ready to drop the names of locations in Paris in our (as yet unborn) poems and novels—or at least we acted that way, when in fact we were just a band of political exiles acting like thrifty tourists. But maybe it was by being able to laugh at ourselves that we were able to survive. I can’t say.
    Exploring the arteries of Paris with Vivienne was enlightening for me. Perhaps because of his talent as a writer, Ernest Hemingway was able to vividly invoke in his writing the special affection he held for Paris, as he did in A Moveable Feast ; but Vivienne, as a woman, seemed to better understand the city’s corpus.
    I couldn’t say that Paris was for us the “moveable feast” that Hemingway described; but it definitely was “ terre d’asile ”—our place of exile. Second to that, Paris was the remarkable River Seine, which divided the city into its left and right banks but whose thirty-seven bridges sewed the two halves together. It was also Shakespeare & Co., the celebrated bookstore on Rue de la Bûcherie; and of course it was a park bench on Île Saint-Louis, the site of Vivienne’s and my first unexpected but marvelously prolonged kiss. As our land of exile, Paris was first and foremost for us the roof over our heads and the source of our next meal but it was the sights and sounds of Paris, the city’s intangible delights, which provided sustenance for our souls.
    Before meeting Vivienne, and as is true with most tourists and new visitors to Paris, I and my three friends—Mas Nugroho,Tjai, and Risjaf—spent much time strolling the Rive Droite, the right bank of the Seine, in the northern section of Paris where the Champs-Élysées and other prominent sites are located. So impressed were we by the elegance of the northern arrondissements, we promised ourselves that we would explore every one of them before our return home—whenever that might be. But Vivienne, to her great credit, was the one who pointed out the more prosaic but no less interesting sites that were to be found on the left bank of the Seine, the Rive Gauche, where used book-stalls were plentiful. At one of them she introduced me to its proprietor, Monsieur Antoine Martin, a retired policeman who loved literature so much he was content to sit at his stall all day long and read aloud favorite passages from the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras or poems by René Char. The man’s mini-performances always attracted the attention of passersby, who invariably ended up purchasing the book he was reading from, at a low price too.
    The days we passed as flâneurs in Paris helped much to enrich my French vocabulary. At first, the only words I knew were oui , non , and ça va ; but because Vivienne forced me to add ten new words to my vocabulary every day, I began to study the language more seriously. Even so, it wasn’t her tutorial skills that made me attach myself to her. It was her eyes, definitely her eyes. I wanted to dive into those deep green eyes and remain buried within them forever. And her lips as well … Vivienne’s lips were the lyrics of an unfinished poem. I was convinced that only when her lips were engaged with mine could the poem be completed.
    Jakarta, August 1968
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Mas Dimas,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Bad news … In April Mas Hananto was arrested by