Beauty Is a Wound (14 page)

That small baby quickly became lavish entertainment for the house’s inhabitants, and even the Japanese soldiers bought her dolls and threw a party for her good fortune. “They have to respect her,” Ola said, “because no matter what, Alamanda is the child of their superior.” Dewi Ayu was pleased that little by little Ola had been able to forget her troubled past, and seemed to be her happy self again. Her days were spent helping out with the little baby, alongside the others, who all called themselves Aunties.

Early one morning, a Japanese soldier entered Helena’s room and tried to rape her. Helena screamed so loudly she woke everyone up and the soldier ran out into the darkness. They didn’t know which soldier had attempted the rape, until morning came and the general appeared. He grabbed one soldier, dragged him out into the middle of the yard, and gave him a pistol. The soldier shot himself in the mouth, exploding his own brains. After that no one dared approach the women.

Meanwhile, the war wasn’t over yet. They heard through the grapevine, from Mama Kalong and from a number of the servants who came to help her, that the Japanese troops had finished building defense trenches along the southern coast. In secret Mama Kalong had given the girls a radio, so they heard that two bombs had fallen on Japan and a third bomb had not yet been dropped, which was enough to electrify the house. It seemed as though the Japanese soldiers had also already heard the news. In the following days they just sat underneath the trees listlessly, and one by one they began to disappear, sent who knows where. By the time the Allied planes finally began to fly across the Halimunda skies, releasing small pamphlets proclaiming that the war would soon be over, there were only two Japanese soldiers left guarding the house.

If the girls didn’t try to escape, even though they were only guarded by those two soldiers, it was because the situation was so unpredictable. What’s more, they had heard on the radio that British troops now controlled the cities, so it seemed that staying in the house was much safer than being out in the streets. Japan had lost and they were waiting for the Allied forces to save them. But it turned out those troops took their sweet time coming to Halimunda, as if they had forgotten that the city even existed on the face of the earth, but then the airplanes returned, throwing down biscuits and penicillin, and the emergency forces appeared. Who came first were the second tier Royal Netherlands East Indies Army troops, founded from the Dutch brigades. Calling themselves the
Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger
, the KNIL, they quickly replaced the Japanese flag in front of the house with their own flag. The two remaining Japanese soldiers surrendered helplessly.

But what really surprised Dewi Ayu was that Mr. Willie was embedded in one of those brigades.

“I joined the KNIL,” he said.

“Well that’s better than joining the Japanese,” said Dewi Ayu. She showed him her baby girl. “This is all that is left of them,” she said, laughing softly.

The families of the twenty girls were then brought from Bloedenkamp. Gerda looked emaciated, and when she asked them what had happened while they were gone, Ola replied evasively, “We took a trip.” But Gerda realized what had really happened as soon as she saw little Alamanda. They lived there in the house with the Dutch soldiers who took turns guarding them. Those were trying times for Dewi Ayu because Mr. Willie still professed his deep love for her, and even though he had come up against her rejection before, he seemed ready to come up against it once again.

But once again misfortune came to save Dewi Ayu.

One night, Mr. Willie and three other soldiers were taking their turn guarding the house, when a guerrilla raid of native troops attacked them, armed with weapons stolen from the Japanese troops, machetes and knives and hand grenades. Their sudden ambush was quite effective and they killed all four Dutch soldiers. Mr. Willie was beheaded from behind while chatting with Dewi Ayu in the front room, his head thrown toward the table and his blood splattering on little Alamanda. Another soldier was shot in the toilet while taking a crap, and the other two were killed in the yard.

There were more than ten guerrillas, and they gathered all the prisoners. When they discovered that all of them were women and all of them were Dutch, the men grew even more violent. They tied up some of the women in the kitchen, and the others were dragged off to the bedrooms to be raped. Their cries were even more heartbreaking than when the Japanese had turned them into whores, and even Dewi Ayu had to fight more than ever before, fending off a guerrilla who seized her baby and slashed her arm with a knife.

Help came so slowly and the guerrillas disappeared so quickly. The women buried the four dead soldiers in the backyard.

“If you had joined the guerrillas,” said Dewi Ayu while placing a flower on top of Mr. Willie’s grave, “at least you could have raped me.” And she wept for him.

But things like that happened more than once. The four soldiers assigned to guard the house were always outnumbered by the guerrillas, who appeared fully armed for ambush. The local commandant couldn’t provide any more guards because they themselves were still short on personnel. The women only felt safe once the British troops came to reinforce the security of the entire city. The troops were a part of the Twenty-Third Indian Division that came to Java, and a number of them were Gurkhas. They installed their machine guns everywhere, and some set up a post in the house’s backyard. When the native guerrillas came again, they were confronted quite fiercely, couldn’t enter the yard, and one of them was killed. After that they never targeted the house again.

For as long as they were guarded by the English troops, life was quite peaceful and pleasant. They threw small parties in order to forget all the bad times. Sometimes the young women would go to the beach in a military jeep, guarded by a few officers with full weaponry. A number of officers even fell in love with some of the girls, and some of the girls fell in love with them. It was difficult for the girls to have to talk about what had happened to them, but once all that had been taken care of, things just got better and better. A native music group was invited and they had another small celebration, with wine and cake.

The rescue of the prisoners continued: the International Red Cross arrived and all of the prisoners were to be immediately flown to Europe. This country wasn’t safe for civilians, especially after they had been held in prison camps for three years. The natives had declared their independence, and armed militias were everywhere. A number of them claimed to be the National Army, others called themselves the Soldiers of the People, and all of them were guerrillas from outside the city. Most of these militias had been trained by Japan during the occupation, and they faced off with natives who had been taught by the Dutch military and had joined with the KNIL in a chaotic war. The battle was not over, in fact it had just begun, and the natives were calling it a revolutionary war.

All of the young women and their families in that house of captives prepared to leave on a flight arranged by the Red Cross, except for one girl who always had her own ideas: Dewi Ayu. “I don’t have anyone in Europe,” she said. “I only have Alamanda and this other baby who is now growing in my stomach.”

“Well, you have me and Gerda, at least,” said Ola.

“But this is my home.”

She had already told Mama Kalong that she didn’t want to leave Halimunda. She would remain in the city, even if it meant she had to be a prostitute. Mama Kalong said to her, “Live in the house just as before. It belongs to me now and there’s no way the Dutch family will ask for it back.”

So while everybody else was leaving, Dewi Ayu stayed behind with Mama Kalong and a number of servants. She awaited the birth of her second child, who she was sure was fathered by one of the guerrillas, while reading the copy of
Max Havelaar
that Ola had left behind. She had read it before, but she read it again because there was nothing else to do, and Mama Kalong forbid her to do anything anyway. The baby was finally born when Alamanda was almost two years old, and Dewi Ayu named her Adinda, after the girl in the novel she was reading.

After living in Mama Kalong’s house for a number of months, she started to think about her treasure buried in the shit inside the sewer pipes in her old house, and she especially started to think that it was about time she got the house back. The house where she was presently living had already become a new brothel, filled with women who had been comfort women for the Japanese during the war. Mama Kalong had been able to find plenty of girls who didn’t dare go home and instead decided to stay with her, flocking to fill her rooms and live as princesses in Mama Kalong’s kingdom. The KNIL soldiers were their faithful customers. Mama Kalong let Dewi Ayu stay in one of the rooms with her two children for as long as they needed, without making her whore herself out in return. Dewi Ayu gratefully accepted Mama Kalong’s kindness, but she still believed that a house of prostitution was not a good place for her two young girls to grow up, and was determined to return to her old home.

She didn’t actually need to be a prostitute, because she still had the six rings that she had been swallowing for the duration of the war. She sold one of them, set with a jade stone, to Mama Kalong, and lived off that money for a while. She even bought a used baby carriage from the junk shop, which she used to walk her two children along the street leading back to Halimunda for the first time. Little Adinda lay under its awning, while Alamanda sat behind her little sister in a sweater and a cap. Dewi Ayu wore her hair in a topknot and a long dress tied at the waist, her two pockets stuffed with burp cloths and diapers and bottles of milk, calmly strolling and pushing the perambulator.

The road was desolate and abandoned. She had heard that most adult men had gone to the jungle to join the guerrillas. She only saw one old barber on the corner, about to die from boredom waiting for a customer. The only other people she saw were some KNIL soldiers guarding the city while reading old newspapers, looking sleepy and just as bored. Some sat behind the steering wheels of their trucks and jeeps while others perched on a tank. They greeted her warmly, after realizing that she was a white woman, and offered to escort her because it wasn’t safe for a Dutch woman to be out walking by herself. A guerrilla could appear at any time, they said.

“No thank you,” she said. “I am on a treasure hunt and I don’t want to share.”

She followed a path that was burned into her memory, heading toward the neighborhood that had belonged to the Dutch plantation owners. The houses were pressed up against the beach, with their front verandas facing a narrow road that extended the length of the shore and their back porches facing two hills that rose up in the distance behind the lush greenery of the plantations and farmland. She arrived there after a peaceful journey, following the beach path, feeling confident that no guerrillas would suddenly emerge out of the sea. Everything looked exactly as it always had. The fence still overflowed with chrysanthemum blooms, and the starfruit tree still stood next to the house with a swing hanging from its lowest branch. The flowerpots that her grandmother had lined up along the veranda were still there, even though all the aloe had died from dehydration and the elephant ears were a tangled mess. Clearly no one was tending to the wild grass or the orchids growing on the front arbor, which dangled down to the ground. She quickly realized that the servants and guards had left the house behind, and apparently not even the borzois lived here anymore.

She pushed the baby carriage into the front yard, and was confused by the clean veranda floor. Someone must have swept away all the dust, she thought. When she tried the door, she found it unlocked. She went in, still pushing the carriage even though the babies were starting to fuss. The sitting room was dark and she turned on a light. The electricity still worked, and in an instant everything was illuminated. Everything was still in its place: the tables, chairs, and cupboards, everything except the gramophone that Muin had taken with him. She found her own portrait still hanging on the wall, a young girl of fifteen years who was about to enroll at the Franciscan School.

“Look, that’s Mommy,” she said to Alamanda. “Photographed by a Japanese guy, and shortly after that raped by another Japanese guy, who might even be your Japanese daddy.”

The three of them continued their tour around the house, and went up to the second floor. Dewi Ayu shared all her memories, telling them where grandpa and grandma used to sleep, and showing them the photograph of Henri and Aneu Stammler, taken when they were still quite young and had not yet fallen in love. Of course the little ones didn’t understand any of it yet, but Dewi Ayu still enjoyed her role as a tour guide until she remembered her treasure in the sewer pipes. She invited her two children to inspect the toilet with her, relieved to see that it even still existed. All she needed to do was dismantle the plumbing and find her treasure.

“A Dutch woman wandering about in the era of the new republic.” She suddenly heard a voice coming from behind her back. “What are you doing here, Missy?”

She turned around and there was the owner of that voice: an old native woman who looked quite fierce. She was wearing a sarong and a tattered
kebaya
, with a cane supporting her leg. Her mouth was filled with clumps of betel leaf. She stood looking at Dewi Ayu resentfully, as if she would strike Dewi Ayu with her cane just as she would strike a stray dog, without hesitation.

“You can see for yourself that my photograph is still hanging on the wall,” said Dewi Ayu, pointing to the portrait of that fifteen year-old girl. “I own this house.”

“I just haven’t had the time to exchange your photo with mine.”

The old woman quickly ordered her to leave, but Dewi Ayu insisted that she held the deed. In response, the woman merely laughed, waving her hand. “Your house has been confiscated, Missy,” she said. And it was clear, just as the old woman explained while seeing the uninvited guest to the door, that the house had been taken by the Japanese and at the end of the war, a guerrilla family stole it back. This was the old lady’s family: her husband had lost half his arm to the slash of a samurai sword before going to the jungle with five of his sons, and not long after that he died, shot by a KNIL soldier, along with two of those sons. “So now I have inherited this house. But you can take your photos with you if you want, and I won’t charge you for them.”