The Call (Muezzin)

Under ten meters from the losmen to the mosque across the lane. Small lanes in Java are called gangs, usually measuring less than 1.5 meters. Beside Pinang Merah Losem—Red Palm—there is a small yard of trees behind a rough picket fence, with a rooster that does not belong to the house and which disdains apple cores often perched and chortling on the top rail. An open space between mosque and house.

         After almost two weeks in residence the early pre-dawn call to prayer rarely now wakes entirely, the blast detonating somewhere just beyond the trench of sleep and soon forgotten. Out at the main mosque on Malioboro the muezzin seems to be auditioning for radio or TV, the strain and put-on enough to make one wince. Last year Faris revealed that it was the Muslim prayer—in Faris's particular case the crucial example heard in the Shah's Iran—that brought him the last part of the way to conversion. Since this discovery hearing the muezzin often brought Faris to mind. Just now for the noon-call the voice was the stirring one of an older man, perhaps mid-sixties, natural and deep-welling timbre reaching out in the way that Singing teachers encourage their pupils. Plangent, modest and yearning, the example gave a hint of what had struck the young Arizonan—a classically trained pianist in fact—so particularly.

         Faris had recommended the family at Red Palm. The head of house attended the mosque across the way where Faris went when in Jogja, Nurul Huda. In these two weeks however the old man has not been seen. In the last six months he must have passed away. The old bent Ibu still made herself useful minding her grandchild, doing the laundry and cooking. One could not help wondering whether the son, Adhi, missed his father's voice coming from the mosque. That is presuming the old man took his turn at the microphone calling the prayer; through the course of the day certainly a range of voices can be heard from Nurul Huda. As one might expect from a small, local neighborhood mosque, no grandstanding nor egotism detectable here.

         Listening from the room, thinking of the ghost of Adhi’s father, whose photographs hung on the wall of the losmen, Baba's remarks are recalled on her own father, granddad Rade's beautiful voice answering the priest during services at St. George, a short distance from his house in the village. Granddad Rade had a year or two of learning with a priest, before his father's death put an end to the prospect of the priesthood. Even sixty years ago before mother's immigration, while her father was still in fine voice, one of the neighbors had anticipated a time when there would be no one to answer the priest at St. George. Not anyone of Rade Todorov’s gift.
         A non-Muslim non-speaker hangs uncertainly on the end of these verses. Sometimes the calls are very brief; sometimes the extensions coming unexpectedly when one had assumed the man was done. In the mature, ripened voice of a man in his sixties the straining is clearly not for effect; the striving of this local muezzin in the urban kampung of Sosrowijayan all in another direction. Quite remarkable. Totally gripping. Generations past in the courts of Sultans, Tzars and Emperors listening to prisoners pleading for their lives must have fascinated onlookers in a similar fashion.