Beauty Is a Wound (13 page)

Annoyed, the Japanese took out his samurai sword and brandished it until the flat of its blade touched Dewi Ayu’s face, and he repeated his orders. But Dewi Ayu remained immobile, even as the tip of the sword inscribed a mark upon her cheek. Her eyes still looked up to the heavens and it was still as if her ears were attuned to a faraway sound. Now, growing angry, the Japanese threw down his sword and slapped Dewi Ayu’s face twice, which left behind a red welt and caused her body to sway for a moment, but she maintained her demeanor of infuriating indifference.

Surrendering to his bad luck, the stocky soldier finally tore off the clothes of the woman in front of him, threw them to the floor, and now she was naked. He parted the woman’s two arms and two legs until she was spread-eagled. After appraising the still and silent chunk of flesh before him, he quickly got naked himself, jumped onto the bed, and lay face down on top of Dewi Ayu’s body, assaulting her. For the whole cold coupling Dewi Ayu stayed in the same position that the Japanese soldier had placed her in, not responding with any heat or warmth or putting up any unnecessary struggle. She didn’t close her eyes, she didn’t smile, she just looked up to the heavens.

Her chilly demeanor had an extraordinary effect: the man didn’t take even three minutes. Two minutes and twenty-three seconds, according to Dewi Ayu’s count as she peered at the grandfather clock in the corner of the room. The Japanese guy rolled to her side and then quickly stood up, grumbling. He hastily got dressed, and left without saying another word, slamming the door on his way out. Only then did Dewi Ayu move, and smiling quite sweetly, she stretched her body and said:

“What a boring night.”

She got dressed and went to the bathroom. There she found a number of girls washing themselves, as if they could clean off all the feelings of filth and shame and sin with some scoopfuls of water. They didn’t speak to one another. It wasn’t over yet, because the night was still young and a number of Japanese were still waiting. After bathing, they were forced to go back to their rooms and then there was more struggle and more wailing, except from Dewi Ayu who returned to her frigid bearing.

That night they were taken by four or five men each. What made Dewi Ayu suffer was not the crazy tireless screwing that froze her body in a quiet and mysterious paralysis, but the screams and sobs of her friends.
You poor women
, she thought.
Fighting against the inevitable hurts worse than anything else
. Then the next day came.

That morning there was work to do. In despair, Helena had chopped off her hair in jagged chunks and Dewi Ayu had to neaten it out. On the third night, they found Ola almost dead in the bathroom, having tried to slit her wrists. Dewi Ayu quickly carried her to her bedroom, unconscious and soaked to the bone, while Mama Kalong looked for a doctor. She didn’t die, but nevertheless Dewi Ayu realized that what Ola had experienced was even more gruesome and dire than she had first thought. When Ola had emerged from her crisis, Dewi Ayu said to her:

“‘Ola was raped and she died.’ That is not the souvenir that I want to bring back to Gerda.”

Even though life had already gone on like this for days, a number of girls still could not accept their miserable fate, and Dewi Ayu still heard screams in the middle of the night. Two of the girls still often hid in the hallways or climbed the sapodilla tree behind the house. She then advised them to do what she did every night.

“Lie down like a corpse, until they get bored,” she said. But the girls found that to be even more dreadful. To lie quiet while someone assaulted their body and fucked them, none of them could imagine it. “Or try to find one guy out of all of them who you like a little, and service him with your full attention, and make him addicted to you so that he will come back every evening and pay you for the entire night. Servicing the same person over and over is way better than sleeping with lots of different men.”

That seemed like a better idea, but it was still too awful for her friends to imagine.

“Or tell them tales like Scheherazade,” she said.

Not one of them was good at telling stories.

“Invite them to play cards.”

Not one of them could play cards.

“If that’s how it is, then flip the scales,” said Dewi Ayu, giving up. “
You
rape
them
.”

Despite everything, in time, during the day they could truly be quite happy, without any disturbances. The first week they were too ashamed to talk to one another, and they locked themselves up in their rooms, passing their time crying alone. But after a week had passed, they began to gather after breakfast, trying to comfort and entertain one another and talk about things that had no relationship whatsoever to their tragic nights.

Dewi Ayu spent some time with that middle-aged native woman, Mama Kalong, and the two developed an odd friendship, which was only possible because Dewi Ayu maintained a calm demeanor that betrayed no desire to rebel, and she didn’t give Mama Kalong any problems about her relationship with the Japanese. Mama Kalong told Dewi Ayu that in all honesty she owned a brothel at the end of the wharf. Now many women were being brought there by force, to service the low-ranking Japanese officers. All her women were natives, except the ones in this house.

“You all are lucky not to be doing it day
and
night,” said Mama Kalong. “Plus the low-ranking officers are way bigger assholes.”

“There’s no difference between low-level officers and the Emperor of Japan,” said Dewi Ayu. “They all target female genitalia.”

Mama Kalong provided a half-blind old native woman as a masseuse. Every morning the girls all got their routine massage, believing Mama Kalong when she said that was how they could avoid getting pregnant. The exception was Dewi Ayu, who usually spent the morning sleeping before breakfast and only wanted a massage every once in a while, when she was feeling especially worn out.

“You get pregnant from getting screwed, not from
not
getting a massage,” she said lightly.

She took the risk, and after one month in that whorehouse, she was the first woman to get pregnant. Mama Kalong advised her to abort her fetus. “Think of your family,” the woman said. Dewi Ayu then replied, “Just as you are telling me to do, Mama, I
am
thinking of my family, and the only family I have is this kid inside me.” So Dewi Ayu let her stomach stick out, puff up, and get bigger day by day. Her pregnancy had its benefits: Mama Kalong told her to stay in a back room and announced to all the Japanese that she was pregnant and no one was allowed to sleep with her. No Japanese even wanted to sleep with her in that condition, and so she urged the other girls to follow her lead.

“It’s true what they say, each child brings its own good fortune.”

But not one other girl dared to take the same risk as Dewi Ayu.

Three months later, not even one person had abandoned their daily routine of morning massages, and nobody else got pregnant. They continued to face the same terror every night, choosing that over being sent home to their mothers with round bellies. “What would I say to Gerda?” said Ola.

“Just say, ‘Gerda, your souvenir is inside my stomach.’ ”

As always, during the middle of the day they had a lot of free time. The girls would gather to gossip and chat. Some played cards and others helped Dewi Ayu sew small clothes for her baby. They were thrilled that one of them was going to give birth, and their hearts pounded in anticipation as they waited for the baby’s entrance into this vicious world.

Sometimes they also talked about the war. There was gossip that the Allied troops would attack certain pockets of the Japanese military and the girls hoped that Halimunda would be one of them.

“I hope all the Japanese are murdered and their guts come spewing out,” said Helena.

“Don’t be so crass, my child can hear you,” said Dewi Ayu.

“So what?”

“So, her father is Japanese.”

They all laughed at her bitter humor.

But the hope that the Allied troops might come really lifted their spirits. So when a lost carrier pigeon flew into their house and one of the girls caught it, they sent messages for the Allied soldiers.
Help us
;
We have been forced into prostitution
;
Twenty young women are awaiting their warrior saviors
. The idea was silly, and they could not imagine how the bird would ever find the Allied troops. Still, they released it one afternoon.

There was no indication that the pigeon had returned to the Allied troops. But when the bird reappeared again without their letters, the girls believed that at least someone, who knows where, had read them. So with excitement they sent new messages. They did this over and over for almost three weeks straight.

No Allied troops came; who came instead was a Japanese general none of the girls had seen before. Upon his sudden arrival the soldiers who guarded the farthest corners of the property tried to block him from entering as best they could. The two soldiers he questioned trembled, their knees knocking together.

“What kind of place is this?” asked the general.

“A place of prostitution,” Dewi Ayu called out before any of the soldiers could reply.

He was a soldier with a tall and sturdy build, maybe a descendent of the old-fashioned samurai, with a sword hanging from either hip. He cultivated two bushy sideburns on his cold and serious face.

“Are you all prostitutes?” he asked.

Dewi Ayu nodded. “We are caring for the souls of sick soldiers,” she said. “This is how we have been made into whores, by force and without pay.”

“Are you pregnant?”

“You sound like you don’t believe that a Japanese soldier could knock a girl up, General.”

He disregarded Dewi Ayu’s commentary and began to scold all of the Japanese men at the house, and when nightfall came and a number of the regular customers appeared, his anger grew all the more impassioned. He called a number of officers and held a private meeting in one of the rooms. It was clear that no one dared disobey him.

In the meantime the girls in the house looked at their savior with joyful gratitude, as if he was a wonderful victory they had won with the letters that they had tirelessly sent. “I almost don’t believe it, that an angel could have a Japanese face,” said Helena. Before he returned to his military headquarters, he approached the girls who were gathered in the dining room. He stood in front of them, removed his hat and bowed, down as low as his waist.

“
Naore
!” cried Dewi Ayu.

The general stood up straight again and for the first time they saw him smile. “Send me another letter if these demented men so much as lay a hand on any of you.”

“Why did it take you so long to come, General?”

“Well if I had come too soon,” he said in a deep and gentle voice, “I would have found nothing but an empty house.”

“May I know your name, General?” asked Dewi Ayu.

“Musashi.”

“If my child is a boy, I will name him Musashi.”

“Pray that you have a girl,” said the general. “I have never heard of a woman raping a man.” Then he left, getting into the truck waiting out front, as the girls waved. As soon as he was gone, the officers who had been standing and wiping their cold sweat off with their handkerchiefs, promptly hurried after him. That was the first night that no one came to rape them. It was so peaceful, and the girls celebrated with a small party. Mama Kalong gave them three bottles of wine and Helena poured it into small glasses like a priest at Holy Communion.

“To the safety of the general,” she said. “He is so handsome.”

“If he ravished me, I would not resist,” said Ola.

“If my daughter is a girl, I will name her Alamanda, after Ola,” said Dewi Ayu.

All of it came to an end quite suddenly—there was no more whoring and no more Japanese officers coming around at nightfall to buy their bodies. One thing that made some of the girls nervous was that they were going to have to meet their mothers, and they didn’t know how to speak about what they had experienced. Some tried standing in front of the mirror, building their courage, saying to their own images, “Mama, now I am a whore.” Of course they couldn’t say it like that, so they would try again, “Mama, I used to be a whore.” But that also sounded wrong, so they would say, “Mama, I was forced into prostitution.”

But they knew that saying that to their mothers would be much harder than saying it to a mirror. The only slightly fortunate thing was that it seemed like the Japanese did not plan to take them back to Bloedenkamp any time soon, and instead would continue to hold them there at the house. Not as prostitutes, but as prisoners of war just like they had been before. The soldiers still guarded them vigilantly, and Mama Kalong still invited the girls to take advantage of the excellent care she could provide them.

“I treat all my whores like queens,” she said with pride. “I don’t care if they are already retired.”

They filled their days, weeks, and months entertaining themselves with Dewi Ayu, who continued to sew for her baby. With the help of her friends, she already had almost one full basket of small articles of clothing, made from the fabric they had found in the household closets. At least it spared them the boredom of waiting for the war to end, until finally Mama Kalong came with a midwife.

“All of my prostitutes who have ever gotten pregnant have given birth with her help,” said Mama Kalong.

“But I sure hope that all the women she has helped give birth have not all been prostitutes,” said Dewi Ayu.

On a Tuesday of the same year that had begun with her being taken from Bloedenkamp prison and brought to the whorehouse, she gave birth to a baby girl she promptly named Alamanda, just as she had promised. The child was lovely, inheriting all of her mother’s beauty. The only indication that her father was Japanese could be found in her small eyes. “A white girl with squinty eyes,” said Ola. “Only in the Dutch East Indies.”

“It’s just too bad that she’s not the general’s daughter,” said Helena.