The Empty Frame

 

There’s something about empty picture frames that gets under your skin like a splinter you can’t quite dig out. They hang there on the wall like missing teeth in a smile, promising something that never comes. In the Salatiga Mayor’s Office, right there on the wall beside the entrance to the pendopo area, all the mayors stare down at you with their official grins and pressed suits—all except one. That frame stays empty, has stayed empty for going on sixty years now, and the locals will tell you (if you get them drunk enough, if you catch them on the right day when the shadows are long and their memories get loose) that it ought to stay that way.

The empty frame belongs to Bakrie Wahab, who was mayor from 1961 to 1966, though he didn’t finish out that last year. No sir, not by a long shot.

You see, Bakrie made the mistake of being a communist in a place and time where that particular affliction could get you dead faster than cancer. Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey, those scholarly types who pick through history’s bones like coroners at a crime scene, they pegged Bakrie as PKI—Indonesian Communist Party—in their book about that bloody October back in ‘65. Being the chief executive of a city when the political winds started howling made him about as safe as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

The September 30 Movement hit Indonesia like a fever dream, all chaos and conspiracy and neighbor turning against neighbor. When the smoke cleared and the screaming stopped, folks like Bakrie Wahab had a way of just… disappearing. Singgih Nugroho wrote about it in his book Menyintas dan Menyeberang—surviving and crossing over, how’s that for a title that’ll give you the shivers?—and he noted that PKI leaders in Salatiga, Bakrie included, started vanishing come October 4th, 1965.

Now, some say Bakrie got himself thrown in jail when the movement erupted. John Roosa, another one of those folks who makes a living digging up the past, says Bakrie never actually declared support for the movement. Hell, the PKI folks in Salatiga mostly kept their heads down, stayed quiet as church mice on Sunday morning. But you know how it is when the blood gets up and the fear starts spreading like wildfire—being innocent doesn’t count for much when the mob’s got torches and rope.

What happened next was the kind of thing that stains a place forever, seeps into the ground and stays there, poisoning everything that grows. They came for every PKI affiliate, every sympathizer, every poor son-of-a-bitch who’d ever so much as nodded at the wrong political rally. Those they caught faced a choice between slaughter and torture, and most didn’t get to choose at all.

Bakrie’s house on Jalan Senjoyo No. 6 stands empty to this day, or damn near empty. Only one man ever had the stones—or maybe the desperation—to live there: Sutoyo, a retired forestry worker. The house was given to him by Lieutenant Colonel Sugiman, the same military man who stepped into Bakrie’s shoes as mayor after the dust settled. Funny how that worked out, isn’t it? One man’s disappearance becomes another man’s promotion.

Central Java was PKI country back then, red as fresh blood. The party had sunk its roots deep into the soil, and in towns like Salatiga, it grew up alongside Nahdlatul Ulama and the Indonesian National Party like weeds in a garden. Come 1963, 1964, the competition got ugly. You could feel it in the air, thick as humidity before a thunderstorm. The smart money should have seen what was coming.

But smart money’s always in short supply when hatred starts talking louder than sense.

The September 30 Movement was the match that lit the fuse, and when it blew, it turned Salatiga into a slaughter yard. The stories of what happened next live on in whispers and half-remembered nightmares, the kind of collective memory that burrows deep and stays there like a tumor.

Lentera magazine, published by those brave college kids at Satya Wacana Christian University, they had the balls to dig into it all in 2015. Called their investigation “Salatiga, the Red City,” and let me tell you, that title alone was enough to make the old-timers break out in cold sweats. But somebody had to tell the story, had to pull back the curtain on what really happened in those dark months when neighbor murdered neighbor and the rivers ran red.

Harjo Sarwi, he lived through it. His house sat maybe three feet from a rubber plantation where they did the killing, and he could hear it all—the shots, the screams, the wet sounds bodies make when they hit the ground. The victims got dumped in pits dug by the villagers themselves, because that’s how these things work: they make you complicit, make you part of the machine.

“Quick, prepare the pits. There’ll be a shipment this afternoon!” That’s what Sarwi remembered the plantation owner shouting, like they were talking about livestock instead of human beings.

Bodies scattered like banana stalks, he said. Cold and sticky and slimy.

Kasrowi, eighty years old when he told his story, remembered being ordered to dig execution pits at Skeep Tengaran Field. You didn’t say no to orders like that, not if you wanted to keep breathing. Anyone who refused could find themselves labeled PKI faster than you could blink, and then they’d end up in the very pit they’d refused to dig.

“They didn’t threaten me,” Kasrowi said, “but I was afraid because I’m just a commoner, so I complied.”

He never knew if the folks they shot were actually communists. Hell, he never wanted to know. When the executions happened, he stayed far from the shooting, only came close afterward to cover up the pits. The soldiers would finish their grim work and walk away, leaving the cleanup to folks like Kasrowi.

Those execution pits got leveled in 1990, turned into a shooting range for the local military command. But before they flattened the ground, it was all mounded up like fresh graves. When they finally leveled it, bones scattered everywhere like broken crockery.

Stanley Karnow from the Washington Post was the first foreign journalist brave enough to come poking around, and what he found would’ve made Dante himself reach for the bottle. Half a million dead across Java and Bali, he estimated. Half a million souls snuffed out in the name of politics and fear.

The killing went on in the dark, always in the dark. Midnight, early morning—devil’s hours, when decent folks are asleep and the monsters come out to play.

In Sombron hamlet, beneath an electricity tower, they found three unmarked graves. Twenty-five people in total, according to Ignatius Sugiman, a local who’d lived with the secret all those years. Two pits held twelve bodies each, the third held one man they called Mbah Jenggot—real name Hardjo Hardi, village head of Kopeng. His boy was only six when they took his daddy away in broad daylight.

“I don’t know much about what happened at that time,” the son said years later, and you could hear the old pain in his voice, the kind that never quite heals. “Only that my father was taken in the daytime.”

In 2010, workers renovating a water channel found bones buried in the soil near Mount Buthak. Leg bones, arm bones, scattered remains of people who’d died screaming decades before. The worker who found them, a man named Doleng, set the bones aside with the kind of reverence the dead deserve, even when they’ve been forgotten by the living.

The perpetrators? Some of them were still around to tell their stories, if you knew how to ask. Yoso Dumeri had been a guard, tasked with watching PKI prisoners when they went outside to clean themselves. Fifty prisoners per guard, armed with rifles loaded for trouble. The prisoners were kept in military buildings, schools, anywhere they could cram bodies together and keep them locked up.

But it wasn’t just the killing that left scars. It was the silence that came after, the way the truth got buried deeper than any grave.

When those college kids at Lentera tried to tell the real story in 2015, tried to challenge the official narrative that had been carved in stone by the Suharto regime, they found out real quick that some truths are too dangerous to speak. Their magazine got banned, confiscated by police, treated like contraband. The rector of their own university turned against them, demanding they recall every copy.

The cover image came from The Years of Living Dangerously, the only film about 1965 that wasn’t made by Suharto’s propaganda machine, and even that was enough to send the authorities into a panic. Communist symbols on a magazine cover in 2015—fifty years later!—and still they were scared of what people might think, might remember, might finally understand.

Three students got hauled in for questioning: Arista Ayu Nanda, Bima Satria Putra, and Septi Dwi Astuti. Their crime? Telling the truth about what happened to their city half a century ago.

The magazine included testimony from a PKI survivor named Sutarmo who’d spent seventeen years in prison—Salemba, Cipinang, Nusakambangan, finally Buru Island. He’d been there at Lubang Buaya, had practiced the Harum Bunga dance and sung Genjer-Genjer with the women’s organization. But he swore up and down that none of it had anything to do with killing generals. It was just singing and dancing, the kind of thing soldiers do in barracks everywhere.

“If we really had rebelled,” Sutarmo said, and you could hear the bitter truth in his words, “logically, it should have been Sukarno who arrested us, not Suharto.”

But logic’s got nothing to do with mass murder. Logic doesn’t explain how a city can turn red with blood overnight, how neighbors can become executioners, how the truth can stay buried for fifty years while empty picture frames hang on government walls like accusations nobody wants to hear.

The empty frame in the Salatiga Mayor’s Office is still there, still waiting. Maybe it always will be. Some ghosts don’t want their pictures taken, and maybe that’s for the best. Some stories are too dark for official portraits, too bloody for government walls.

But the story itself? That’s different. That story demands to be told, demands to be remembered, even if—especially if—it makes the living uncomfortable. Because the dead don’t rest easy when the truth stays buried, and in Salatiga, there are a lot of dead who’ve been waiting a long time to be heard.

The empty frame hangs there like a question mark, like a wound that won’t heal, like a reminder that some silences are louder than screams. And maybe, just maybe, that’s exactly what Bakrie Wahab would have wanted—not to be forgotten, not to be erased, but to be remembered as the space where truth used to live before fear drove it underground.

In the end, empty frames tell stories too. They tell stories about what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget, about the pictures we hang and the ones we hide, about the truths we frame and the ones we leave to gather dust in dark corners.

Salatiga keeps its secrets, but secrets have a way of seeping through the cracks, of staining everything they touch. The city may not be red anymore, but if you know where to look, if you know what to listen for, you can still hear the echoes of that terrible autumn when the killing started and the truth got its first taste of the grave.

Some stories never really end. They just wait, patient as bone, quiet as blood, until someone brave enough comes along to drag them back into the light.