Princess
brotodiningrAt
: Oh, sure! It was complete!114
Not so mechanical, handle-prone and knob-full, yet instrumental and furniture-like enough, another kind of music, newly fitted in, filled the space and did it still more in the modern salon way. More instruments, some with a handle, knob, pedal, others without, playing and on display, made the house shut, open, sound, and turn around—around the salon.
Mr.
Alwin
: Since I was little, still before school, I recall that my mother played the violin, and that my father also played the violin and the guitar.rM
: What kind of music?Mr.
Alwin
: All kinds, all music—I first heard the Donau Wals [“Danube Waltz”] from my mother. Classical songs.rM
: Did they also play together?Mr.
Alwin
: Yes. Sometimes we even put together a whole ensemble.For us, a repertoire was not just the Western or the traditional: both of them. We got our first gramophone in Sigli [North Sumatra], I think.
My parents bought it at a garage sale; it was called vendutjes [auctions]
at that time. There was a Dutch man selling things because he was moving. Many records came with it, I still remember. It was also the time when we got a piano in our house.
115
A salon could hardly exist, even be thought of, if a house was too far (still
too far) from the market, from a shop, toyshop, art shop, furniture shop, or
music shop. Indeed, salon, as the dictionary says, also means “a shop, busi-ness, or department of a store offering a specific product or service, esp. one catering to a fashionable clientele.” 116
Mr.
soedArMono
: My father had to know that I liked music because he saw me play the records all the time. At that time, we had an uncle who helped my father in his medical practice; his name was Saleh, and I think that he is already dead. He could play guitar, and I learned to play from him. Once we went to the town, and I saw a guitar in a Japanese shop. It was a small guitar, just for kids, but I wanted it very badly. It was too expensive, but I wanted it so much.rM
: How old were you?Mr.
soedArMono
: I think about eleven, and I wanted it so much. I had a terrible fit of temper, and I had never had this before.To tell me that he had “a terrible fit of temper” because of wanting that guitar so badly, Mr. Soedarmono used an Indonesian word, berontak, which is more commonly used to say “to struggle,” “to revolt,” or “to rebel”: a powerful verb that, otherwise, from the old people, I heard quite rarely.
Mr.
soedArMono
: In the end, after a month or so, my father came home, and he brought me a real guitar. Not just a toy! He found it at a place on the outskirts of town, near a plantation. There was someone who built guitars—so father bought one for me. After that time, I had a guitar. And then we got a piano, too.rM
: A piano?Mr.
soedArMono
: We had a piano, a broken one. It could not be repaired anymore. At least, there was nobody who would know how to repair it. It came from one of my father’s patients, a Dutch man. He owned an ice factory and also a movie house, and he was ill for years.He could not get better, yet my father managed to cure him a little. He was very grateful: “I have a piano. It is broken, but perhaps your boy might like to have it.”
rM
: He was Dutch?Mr.
soedArMono
: Yes, and a very good man. So I had a piano. But it was broken.117
The salon, with its spatiality, plasticity, and music, appears to make every-thing—all the possible reshaping of a house and of a home—very much and exquisitely pleasing. The sublime of the salon—and of the house and the home sucked into it—appears to be able to cut through history: colo-nial, revolutionary, as well as postcolonial. The postcolonial memories of the colonial salon, or a salon as one wished to have it, whatever might have happened to the people and the homes, appear invariably sweet—or scented.
rM
: You like piano?Mrs.
MinArsih
: Oh, yes! That is something that is still with me. I just must have it. My sister Nelly was four years older than I, and she took piano lessons, once she was six, with Miss Dijckerfhoff. That was a Dutch lady who came to the house and taught my sister. I will never forget the way she smelled!rM
: Soir de Paris, perhaps?Mrs.
MinArsih
: Ambra, in a tiny blue bottle. When I became six, my mother did not have enough money anymore to pay for my lessons.rM
: I know the feeling. There was a violin and an older brother in our family.Mrs.
MinArsih
: But my sister played really fantastically. That piano is still there with her. It is a piano that my father gave my mother after they married. It is a baby grand. Please take this piece [of cake]. And would you like to have another cup of tea?—rM
: So, you liked music.Mrs.
MinArsih
: Oh, yes! We used to have concerts at home. My mother told me, when she was still with my father, they were having music soirées.rM
: Yes.Mrs.
MinArsih
: My mother played the violin, and she could sing very well. Even later, she sang a lot. We sang together, “Ave Maria,” for instance. Actually, this is not a song, you know, for—rM
: Muslims?Mrs.
MinArsih
: But we loved “Ave Maria”! We had a gramophone, and I learned it as a child. My mother sang it often. And the other song, which I will never forget, it is a French song, and then, of course,“Versunken,” what is it? Schubert?
rM
: Schubert.Mrs.
MinArsih
: Schubert. And then there was yet another, a French song that I remember. My mother taught it to me also. (Mrs. Minarsih sings for me.) My mother sang in French, German, and Dutch as well. It was really fantastic, for me to grow up in this. It was so complete.118
The salon never got a fixed name in Indonesia. It might have been called by its many Dutch, English, German, or French names, but it never got a colonial (nor a postcolonial) name of its own. Maybe because the concept was so expansive and all absorbing. As a modern colonial house desired to be soulful, so it desired to be salonful—fully, not just in part.
By the same essentialism, the salon demanded that the salon stuff, every piece of it, be taken seriously and placed exactly. The comfort zones, and arrows and points of the house, all had to be salon-staked—the stuff, the statues, or the music. The positioning of the things made for fullness or emptiness in homes. It was a salon doing, and one’s home now breathed that way.119
Fork, knife, or spoon misplaced might mean that one was out, or, at least, not (yet) in. The salon dictated an ideal, which categorically demanded a new way of moving and being in space. “Ours was a modern family,” Dr. Ong told me.
Dr.
ong
: We met at each meal: in the morning, at noon, and in the evening seven sharp. Not like the people of old. And the food was warm. Most dishes, that is, were warm. Not like the food in the old style, that sits on the table at all times, and whoever wishes picks up what he or she wants. One does not care to warm it.120
Mrs.
dAMAis
: For lunch, we used to have rice with vegetables, and, for instance, chicken. But we had to be there on time, and together.rM
: So you all met, around the table?Mrs.
dAMAis
: Yes. We were quite modern.121
Mr.
hArdjonegoro
: At half past seven, we had breakfast. At one o’clock, there was lunch. In the evening, we had dinner.122
In their memories (otherwise told to me in Indonesian), people still used
Im Dokument
A CertAin Age
(Seite 67-70)