Listen. Every plane has a ghost in it before it ever leaves
the ground—a shape the metal is going to become, waiting in the rivets
like a name waiting to be spoken. On the morning of January 24, 1957, at
exactly 8:00 AM Western Indonesian Time (and Indonesian time, in those years,
still had the good manners to be exact, still hadn’t learned the tricks that
time plays on nations in the middle of coming apart), the hangar at Halim Air
Base—Cililitan, if you want the old name, the name the grass and the tarmac
still remembered even if the newspapers had already started forgetting it—opened
its mouth and welcomed something new inside.
An Ilyushin. An IL-14 Avia, built by Soviet hands in a
Soviet factory under a Soviet sky, and if you’d been standing close enough when
the engines finally quit ticking and cooling in the tropical heat, you might
have sworn you could still smell the cold of that other country on its skin,
the way a letter from far away sometimes smells faintly of somebody else’s
kitchen. Aboard it: Dmitry Alexandrovich Zhukov, the Soviet ambassador, a
careful man doing a careful thing, because this was not merely an airplane.
This was a gift. President Kliment Voroshilov had sent it across an ocean and
half a hemisphere as a token—friendship wrapped in aluminum and rivets and the
smell of jet fuel—for Indonesia, for the man who ran it.
The ceremony was festive. (Aren’t they always, right before
the trouble starts? That’s the joke history likes to play on us—throw the party
first, save the storm for later, so that everybody in the photographs is
smiling.) Officials came. The invited guests were permitted to climb up into
the belly of the aircraft, to walk its aisle, to touch the seats with their
hands the way you’d touch something in a museum you weren’t quite sure was
real. There was an orchestra. There was music. And at roughly 9:45 that
morning, Sukarno and Zhukov walked out of the hangar together and left the air
base, and something had already changed, though nobody watching could have told
you exactly what.
Het nieuwsblad voor Sumatra, in its edition of
January 25, 1957, put a name to the shape of the thing: a gesture of
appreciation from the Soviet government, meant to deepen the friendship—and,
more quietly, the leverage—between two nations still young enough to be testing
each other’s weight. Sukarno was moved. He had reason to be. The IL-14 Avia had
just become, officially, the first presidential aircraft Indonesia had ever
owned, and there is something about first that gets into a man’s blood
the way nothing else does. First love. First house. First airplane with your
name inside it, waiting.
After the luncheon at Merdeka Palace—where Zhukov was
received properly, the way you receive a man who has just handed you a piece of
the sky—Sukarno sat with the question that was going to matter more than
anybody in that room understood yet: what do you call a thing like this?
And here is where the story gets its spine.
Because the moment he looked at the aircraft—really looked
at it, at the long imperious line of the fuselage, the way it sat on the tarmac
like something that knew it was important—a name arrived in him. Not chosen. Arrived,
the way names sometimes do, the way a word you’ve been chasing for an hour
suddenly just sits down at the table across from you.
“There is a mountain in Indonesia called Dolok Martimbang,”
he said, standing up at the handover ceremony, and if you close your eyes you
can hear the particular cadence he must have used, the orator’s rhythm that
made rooms go quiet, “located in Tapanuli, and it forms a unity with the
surrounding mountains and hills. I hope the Indonesian people will form the
same kind of unity, and that is why I am naming this IL-14 aircraft ‘Martimbang.’”
Java Bode caught it and printed it the same day, January 24, 1957, the
ink still nearly wet with the moment.
Now here’s the part where you lean in, because this is where
the plain history stops being plain.
A.I.D.: de Preangerbode, reporting the next day,
called Sukarno shrewd—and they meant it as the compliment it was, and also as
the small warning it was. Because this wasn’t a poet picking a pretty word off
a mountain. This was a president reading a map that was catching fire at the
edges. Since late 1956, Sumatra had been rumbling under the floorboards of the
republic—the whole island humming with a resentment that hadn’t found its full
voice yet but was getting closer every week. The first crack opened in North
Sumatra, where Infantry Colonel Maludin Simbolon, commander of Territory
II/Bukit Barisan—a man with real soldiers and real guns behind him, not just
grievances—stood up on December 22, 1956, and declared the formation of the
Dewan Gajah. The Elephant Council. Even the name of it sounds like something
too big to be moved once it decides to plant its feet.
So you understand now, don’t you, what Sukarno was actually
doing when he stood at that podium and gave a Soviet airplane a Batak name? He
was reaching across a widening crack with the only hand he had—language, myth,
geography—and hoping it would hold. Dolok Martimbang wasn’t just a mountain. It
was meant to be a bridge, a word laid down like a plank over a gorge
that was getting wider every day the newspapers came out.
“I know that disputes like this are just growing pains for
young people,” he said—and maybe he even believed it, or needed to, the way a
father needs to believe a fever will break by morning.
He hadn’t reached for the name by accident. This wasn’t
improvisation dressed up as inspiration. Sukarno had known Tapanuli a long time
before he ever stood in that hangar—had known it the hard way, the way you come
to know a place when you’re not free to leave it. According to Akhir Martua
Harahap, a history enthusiast and lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and
Business at the University of Indonesia, Sukarno had become acquainted with the
region while detained near Parapat, after the Dutch assault on Yogyakarta in
December 1948. Think about that for a moment. A man learns the shape of
a mountain’s legend while he is a prisoner beneath it, and years later, free
and powerful, he reaches back into that captivity and pulls out a name to heal
a nation with. There’s a kind of poetry in that so strange it almost hurts to
look at directly.
And the mountain had history of its own, older than Sukarno,
older than the republic. Nommensen—yes, that Nommensen, the missionary
whose name still echoes through Tapanuli church pews—wrote a letter, published
in the Sumatra-courant: nieuws-en advertentieblad on February 21, 1878,
describing a ceasefire struck near that very slope: eighty soldiers under
Captain Scheltens facing down the remaining forces of Sisingamangaradja, and
somehow, on that particular mountain, the guns went quiet instead of louder.
“It seems that Mount Dolok Martimbang had already become a
special place always chosen for peace agreements,” Harahap wrote later on his
personal blog, Poestaha Depok, “not only between local leaders and the
Dutch government, but also among hostile regional chiefs.”
A special place always chosen for peace. Say that out
loud once. There’s something in those words that wants to be believed, the way
an old scar wants to be believed as proof the wound is closed.
There was a legend too—the kind of legend that gets passed
mouth to mouth long after anyone can say where it started—that the mountains of
that region had once quarreled endlessly with one another, the way mountains do
in stories, stubborn and silent and furious in equal measure, until it was
Dolok Martimbang, alone among them, that finally talked the others down. Sukarno
knew that legend. He quoted it. He was betting a nation’s fragile unity on a
story about mountains that had learned, eventually, to stop fighting.
---
Three months. That’s all it took before Sukarno was already
itching to fly on his new namesake. Java Bode reported that he meant to
use the aircraft for trips to Surakarta and to Bali—meetings, lectures, and
(you can almost hear the relief in the word) recreation.
It didn’t happen. Not then. Het nieuwsblad voor Sumatra
reported that those plans quietly died, and Sukarno flew on a GLA aircraft
instead—no clean explanation given, just the low murmur of speculation that
follows powerful men everywhere: maybe he was holding back, waiting out the
worst of the political weather; maybe the plane itself wasn’t ready, still not
fully broken in, still carrying some invisible fault the mechanics hadn’t
caught yet. Either way, Dolok Martimbang sat grounded a while longer, a promise
not yet kept.
He finally flew it months later. Thursday, October 31, 1957—Kupang.
Sukarno stood before the people there and spoke about patriotism, about the
necessity of building skilled labor into the bones of a just and prosperous
society, the kind of speech that sounds like architecture when a man like
Sukarno gives it. The next day, November 1, he flew straight on to Ambon, and
did there what he did everywhere: climbed the podium and let the grand,
sweeping national rhetoric pour out of him like weather.
Days later, still aboard Dolok Martimbang, he went on to
Maluku—and this visit cut deeper than speeches. The Republic of South Maluku,
the RMS, was still resisting, still hiding, still a wound that hadn’t closed,
and Sukarno went there to lay the literal foundation stone of Masohi, the new
capital of Central Maluku, as if bricklaying itself could be a form of
diplomacy—which, in its way, it was.
A.I.D.: de Preangerbode reported on November 6, 1957,
that in Maluku Sukarno issued a direct call—a summons, really—to the RMS rebels
“led by Dr. Mr. Soumokil, who are still hiding in the forests of Ceram.”
Picture that phrase for a second: men in a forest, listening, maybe, to a radio
somewhere, hearing their own names spoken by the president of the nation they
were fighting against. Sukarno went further still. He claimed Maluku ancestry
for himself that day—Nusaina, Upuina, Upuama, Upulatu—and stood among the
traditional leaders to help lay the ceremonial foundation of Masohi, seeking,
in his own way, a blessing for a peace that hadn’t arrived yet.
On November 20, the aircraft carried him to Medan, to
inaugurate the University of North Sumatra. Sixteen people came with him that
day, including the Minister of Education and Culture, Prijono, and the Sultan
of Yogyakarta himself, Hamengku Buwono IX. Even Guntur came—Sukarno’s eldest
son, the boy he’d had with Fatmawati—small enough still to be brought along on
history the way children are, without quite understanding what history is.
---
But here’s a truth the airplane itself had to learn the hard
way: it had never actually been built to carry a president. It had been built
to be an airplane, full stop—not a symbol, not a stage, not a name
people wrote down in newspapers. So in early August 1957, Dolok Martimbang went
back to Moscow. Back into the cold it had first come from, to be repaired, to
be redesigned, to be made into what everyone had already decided it was.
The work took its time—the way important work always seems
to, as if the universe extracts a toll of patience from anyone waiting on
something they’ve already fallen in love with. Het nieuwsblad voor Sumatra,
on September 27, 1957, reported the aircraft finally rolling into the Polonia
hangar workshop at eleven in the morning, more than a month after it had first
been sent away. Captain Sri Mulyono Herlambang oversaw the work directly, and
it was he who told the paper what had changed: the cabin, once fitted for
sixteen seats, now held twenty-one. Nobody could yet say when the plane would
come home to Jakarta. A month and a half, all told, spent in the Soviet Union—being
remade, quietly, into the thing it was always going to become.
The numbers, if you want them, are these, drawn from Sejarah
Angkatan Udara: 1950–1959 (2004): a fuselage twenty-one point three-one
meters long, a wingspan of thirty-one point seven meters, a service ceiling of
twenty-four hundred meters, a maximum speed of three hundred ninety-eight
kilometers an hour. Numbers are cold things, I know. But sit with them a moment
and you can almost feel the size of the thing settling over the tarmac like a
shadow with wings.
Once it belonged fully to the Indonesian government, the Air
Force—AURI—took over its care. Captain Sri Mulyono Herlambang became its first
pilot, and around him gathered a crew: First Lieutenant The Tjing Hoo, Second
Lieutenant A. Carqua, Captain Soesanto, First Lieutenant Basjir. Names that don’t
show up often in the textbooks, but were there, in the cockpit, every time the
plane climbed into that hot bright Indonesian sky.
And from that single aircraft grew something larger: the
Special Transport Squadron, Air Squadron 17, born out of Dolok Martimbang the
way a family sometimes traces itself back to one particular house. Its job was
to carry the important people—VIPs, VVIPs, and, of course, the president,
riding as a special passenger inside the very legend he’d named.
---
One passenger, though, deserves her own paragraph, because
every history like this one carries a smaller, quieter story folded inside it—the
kind that doesn’t make the official record but somehow survives anyway, passed
down the way rumors survive, warm and a little dangerous.
Her name was Kartini Manoppo. According to Reni Nuryanti, in
her book Perempuan dalam Hidup Sukarno: Biografi Inggit Garnasih (2007),
Sukarno first laid eyes on Kartini’s face not in a room but in a painting—a
portrait by Basuki Abdullah, exhibited in 1959, her features caught forever in
oil and canvas before he’d even met the woman herself. Think about that.
He fell, or began to fall, for a face on a wall before he ever heard her voice.
When they did meet, when the acquaintance became real, Sukarno invited her to
fly with him to Surabaya—aboard Dolok Martimbang, of course, because by then
the plane had become something like an extension of the man, a second skin he
wore into every important moment of his life.
On that flight, he asked her, personally, to serve as a
flight attendant. And Irma Ottenhoff Mamahit—the aircraft’s very first flight
attendant, and a close friend of Kartini’s—remembered that from that Surabaya
flight onward, the two of them, Sukarno and Kartini, simply began flying
together. Often. Regularly. The way two people do when something has quietly,
irreversibly, shifted between them.
Irma knew. Of course she knew—she was standing right there
in the aisle, wasn’t she, watching it happen in real time, the way anyone close
enough to a fire can feel the heat before they ever see the flame. She could
see it in the way they held themselves around each other, the thing neither of
them was saying out loud. And there was a pattern to it, one that everyone
aboard the plane must have noticed sooner or later, the kind of pattern that
reveals itself the way water finds the cracks in a foundation: whenever one of
Sukarno’s wives flew on Dolok Martimbang, Kartini was never there. Never in the
same cabin. Never in the same sky. And in the empty spaces left behind—on the
flights where the wives weren’t watching—Sukarno was, more than once, caught doing
the small, human, unpresidential thing of stealing a glance, a moment, across
the aisle, toward the woman whose face he’d fallen for before he’d ever heard
her speak.
The plane kept flying. It always does, in the end—carrying
its cargo of nations and mountains and marriages and the quiet, dangerous
things people don’t say out loud until the history books, decades later,
finally say it for them.
Comments
Post a Comment