Notes on a letter that emptied a chair without giving a reason, a guessing game that outran its own invitation, and grounds that would like to become a lesson
On Thursday evening, my regular warung was full of people claiming to have seen it all coming since Tuesday, and the fritters vanished faster than usual. The long bench now rested on a block of wood nailed up the night before, replacing cardboard that had surrendered to the damp. Phones reported that shortly before noon the Vice-President had gone to the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR), handed in a letter of resignation, talked with the Assembly’s leaders for about twenty minutes, and left without a word to reporters. About three hours ahead of schedule, the House of Representatives cancelled the two o’clock plenary that was to have announced the motion on its right to state an opinion. The hundred and twenty signatures, so briskly stirred together the day before, stayed in their folder, never read out. Ironically, one sheet of paper emptied the chair faster than all that ink.
The retired schoolteacher at the window table read the letter through as if marking an exam script. The Assembly’s Speaker read it out to reporters: resignation from office at the Vice-President’s own request, with one line about guarding the nation and its people above oneself, and no cause given. Some reports say the Assembly’s leaders had at first not read it, but the sequence is reported inconsistently, so that goes on the plate marked unverified. In format it earns full marks; the box marked ‘show your working’ is blank. To me it is a letter without sugar: valid, brief, bitter, and leaving the whole warung to invent its own sweetness. An official who leaves without explanation leaves a hole, and holes fill quickly with gossip.
The business of the chair itself ran like a train afraid of being late. The Speaker declared the vice-presidency vacant from the moment of the resignation, and the Assembly has at most sixty days to fill it. The President summoned ministers and the Assembly’s leaders to the Palace, and the coordinating minister for law explained that one letter from the Assembly’s leadership to the President is enough to start the process. Dispatch is scheduled for Friday; from receipt, the President has fourteen days to put forward two names, while the Assembly prepares a team to verify candidates’ files and an ad hoc team to draft its decree. The President proposes, the Assembly chooses, and the people watch from the back bench. Beside a hundred and twenty signatures gathered in a day, sixty days sounds like a luxury; let us hope it is spent on checking, not merely on bargaining.
Before that invitation had even gone out, the guessing game was open. One outlet offered five names, another six, another seven; the lists swapped members like substitutes, and all spoke with confidence. A former coordinating minister named five on his personal channel, while a former deputy chair of the anti-corruption commission claimed to have heard that the choice would most likely come from within Gerindra. One customer even offered a packet of prawn crackers as a wager. All of it is conjecture or one-sided claim that I cannot check. In some lists the official now running the process has been tucked in too, which is again only media guesswork. We are quick to forecast who will sit, yet fumble when asked what qualifies anyone to sit.
The parties that were busy signing the motion yesterday are busy counting today. One researcher judges that the vacancy opens fresh room for bargaining between the President and the parties backing the government. Analysts can be wrong, but warung common sense grasps that an empty chair doubles as a negotiating table. Yesterday’s keyword was qualifications for office; today’s is composition. The right to state an opinion has drifted into the right to submit hopes. That is not forbidden, provided the haggling takes place in front of the customers rather than in the back kitchen.
What did not leave with the resignation are its questions. The Supreme Court’s ruling annulling the equivalency certificate still stands; who ought to have checked it upstream remains unanswered; and what it means for the past, nobody I have heard has explained. With the plenary cancelled, the Constitutional Court tested nothing. The schoolteacher shrugged: a pupil who transfers does not erase the school register, and the record of the move must still be tidied. Resignation closes the political chapter, not the governance one; the person has moved on, but the case is still on the table.
The way out is not complicated. The Palace and the Assembly need only post a single open calendar giving the date of the letter, the date the names are submitted and the date of the electing session, so that there are not three versions as there were this week. The President could announce criteria before naming anyone, then make sure both candidates’ educational records are examined by the verification team and a summary of the findings published before the session. The Assembly can turn the candidates’ duty under the MD3 Law to declare their readiness at its plenary into a forum for testing ideas, not a formality. The competent authorities should publish a chronology of how the equivalency certificate came to be issued, so the error is not repeated. The Vice-President who resigned is entitled to silence, but a short explanation in his own words would close the door on gossip without diminishing anyone’s rights. The media and we readers need only tell guesses from reports, and ask for criteria before names.
Near closing time, the owner poured a fresh glass for the last customer without asking who would win. The soil in the chilli pot by the door looked darker for last night’s grounds. The customer had ordered coffee without sugar. She served it without comment, merely setting a small spoon beside it in case he changed his mind. An empty chair, she said afterwards, is no excuse to let the table gather dust; what matters is that whoever sits down eventually brings their own papers. At the bottom of my glass the fresh sediment was settling slowly, and this time I did not rush to stir it.
While waiting for further developments, the customers and coffee-sippers no longer stared at their phones. The owner turned the dial of her old FM radio until the needle settled on a mournful frequency, and from it flowed Cavatina, composed by Stanley Myers and now better known as the theme from The Deer Hunter. The piece was originally written for another film in 1970, then reused by this one eight years later, and its journey is recorded as tidily as the owner’s receipt book: who composed it, what it was made for, when it was used again, all clear without a single equivalency certificate. The pedigree of a melody turns out to be better documented than the history of the frying oil in our tray; may other origins take lessons from it. The owner’s choice felt apt: the film is about ordinary people from a small town, pressed by great events beyond their control, and it ends in a bar, when words run out and old friends choose to sit together, then sing softly. The letter without a reason, too, leaves feelings unspoken. Of course our commotion is not a war; I am only borrowing the mood. The broadcast faded for a moment, swallowed by hiss, rather like those claims I cannot check: there is a signal, but not necessarily any content. The song ended, and the announcer merely read the weather forecast, sunny intervals, no official announcements. Nobody complained; at least that was news one could check by glancing at the sky. At the bottom of the glasses, the grounds settled without a sound, waiting and listening too.
