The Chicken Coop: A Story

by ARM IJN PANÉ

★

WE BECAME really attached to that chicken coop as soon as we moved into the house rather, I should say, the living space — where we are living now. This clarification about the house is necessary; otherwise it might be thought that I, as a Minister . . . but my wife would protest at this, and rightly, since she plays a leading role in this story — she insists on ex—Minister"— so it is ex-Minister . . .

By a lucky chance we have a little veranda, big enough and no more for two cane chairs. It is open, with a railing about two feel high, ff our little boy of four wants to sit with us, then the railing is used as an extra chair for him or for me. When we drink coffee the railing serves as a table.

Sitting there we can look out on our little part of the world, as far as the horizon formed by the high wall of the next house. Whenever we are tired of looking at the wall we can turn our eyes up to the segment of shy the Jakarta Housing Bureau has allowed us.

No doubt all the details of the few square yards we call a home are carefully listed by the Housing Bureau, for, by all reports, it is diligent in seeking out and measuring a in sort of empty building.

Yet we are not really so badly off. We have space to eat and sleep, and then, in the small back yard, there is the chicken coop. This wouldn’t be included in the Housing Bureau records, because I am sure no regulation exists to make a chicken coop a residence.

When we came here the chicken coop was in a sorry state, only that side adjoining the neighbor’s chicken run being still whole. Most of the wire had entirely disappeared from the other three sides, but the posts and the roof still remained intact.

We were pleased to have this extra, however modest, acquisition. At least I was pleased. It stirred my imagination. My wife wasn’t as impressed, perhaps bee a use she likes to get rid of anything old.

The inspiration came late one evening. We were silting on the veranda, stretched out on our chairs, gazing lazily at the night sky. I was tired and sleepx until my eyes wandered to the chicken coop. I sat upright in my excitement. “Just think!” I exclaimed. “Me can use the chicken coop! We can buy a hen and a rooster, and then we’ll have our own uggs every day. With a few eggs over we can have chickens, and we won’t need to buy moat.”

My wife kept looking at the moon as she said disdainfully, “ In the daytime the fow ls will wander off looking for food and get killed on the road.”

Lint I wasn t to be put off. “We can put up new wiring,”I explained, “so that they can’t get out.”

This proposal was just as airily dismissed. “There’s all the trouble with feeding them,” she went on, “and without proper food they’ll die.”

My idea was obviously so much out of favor that further talk would have been tactless. However, the subject cropped up again the next morning while we were drinking coffee on the veranda — where else? I nexpeeledly my wife announced, offhandedly, “Next month we will have a car.” My eyes opened. This was the first I had heard of our getting a car. Before I could get in a word she added, “We’ll have to think where we can put it. Then, pointing at the chicken coop, “That seems the best place.”

“The chicken coop!” I gasped, shocked.

“Yes,”my wife insisted. “We can patch it up and put on a door.”

“But,” I reminded her, “we haven’t got a car yet.”

This fact did not seem to concern my wife, who calmly recalled that we had a lottery ticket —as if we had already won the prize.

Then I remembered buying the ticket a few days before. “We bought that ticket on our wedding anniversary, so we can’t possibly win,”I argued. “It’s either one or the other — lucky in love or lucky in gambling. Since we arc lucky in love that ticket can’t bring us a car.”What woman could withstand a declaration of affection like that, I thought, pleased that my wife couldn’t find any reply.

Although we constantly thought of the chicken coop, neither of us spoke of it. I didn’t feel I could overcome my wife’s objections to chickens, and maybe she had begun to have doubts about our winning a car. So the chicken coop remained a symbol of our hopes, and a stimulus to the imagination.

But it wasn’t long until our dreams were wrecked . . . and we have only ourselves to blame. We found that we needed a servant, there was so much to do in the house. Now there are plenty of babus from Jakarta, but they are always likely to change jobs aft or a week or a month. Then a friend sent, along a babu from Central Java who was quite willing to work for us — hut she had a husband, so they wanted to stay together. She would come to us only on this condition and she enlarged at length on the advantages of having a babu ready to do anything day or night.

This was a problem we hadn’t reckoned on — putting up a babu and her husband, We were already rather cramped, I pointed out, and suggested they try to find a place nearby. It was hopeless, she assured me, especially when many government officials couldn’t find any room even in the kampongs.

As I was thinking what might be done my wife spoke with a finality that swept away any argument. “Buy some gĕdèk wickerwork,”she said to the babu. “Then you can make something of that chicken coop. Is that all right?”

The couple looked at the chicken coop and smiled great smiles of happiness. My wife gave the babu s husband money for the gĕdèk, and by the same evening the chicken coop was transformed.

“It is better than what we had in the country,” our new babu confided to me. I nodded, not saying anything, trying to hide my mixed feelings.

Still hoping somehow or other to retrieve my chicken coop, I approached the Minister for Economic Affairs. But the Minister put me off. “Next month . . . next month there will be enough houses,” I was told. I tried to protest, repeating that a chicken coop couldn’t be used for a dwelling. “It’s up to you,” the Minister remarked, “whether you want a babu or not.”

This point was, I had to admit, incontestably logical. So there was nothing else to do but to give in for the moment, trusting I could sooner or later think up a counter-move.

My chance came when I received two reproductions of a painting of “Bung Kamo,” as President Sukarno is popularly called, by Basuki Abdullah. One was from a newspaper editor I know, the other I got for a review. Taking both the prints to my wife I said sweetly, “One is for here, the other for the chicken coop.”

It seemed to work, this plan, to make my wife acknowledge that; a chicken coop couldn’t be lived in. Just as I had hoped, she was horrified. “How could you think of it, putting ‘Bung Karno’ in a chicken coop?” she snapped.

As she began hanging the print on the wall of our living room, I thought I might as well press the issue. “Why,” I gently reasoned, “they have as much right as anyone to show their loyalty to the President. He is not your President alone.”

To this came my wife’s sharp retort that a chicken coop was a chicken coop and no more.

It was no good trying to talk my wife over. I didn’t, as I had intended, voice my hope that the babu and her husband would soon be able to show their loyalty to the President. The second reproduction is still lying in a cupboard in the house.

Translated by A. Brotherton