Beauty Is a Wound (22 page)

Tracking his gaze, Major Sadrah answered, “Her name is Alamanda. She’s the daughter of the whore Dewi Ayu.”

After the pig-hunting business was over, Shodancho divvied up his ninety-six
ajak
among the citizens of Halimunda. Most of them were given to the farmers to help them guard their paddies and fields, and the rest were given out randomly. Shodancho ordered those who did not yet receive one yet to wait patiently, because soon enough they would have puppies. Halimunda would become filled with dogs, who were all the descendants of those
ajak
.

Shodancho should have just returned to the jungle, as he had initially intended. When he had first arrived, he’d told Major Sadrah that he would stay in the city only until the pig business was settled. But since seeing Alamanda in the pig arena, he hadn’t slept. “This must be love,” he said to himself. And it was love that made him tremble and try to think of excuses to stay in the city longer, and maybe never leave it ever again.

A solution came when Major Sadrah said, “Don’t go right away, we have more festivities to celebrate our victory.
Orkes melayu
.”

“Out of my love for this city, I will stay a little longer,” Shodancho quickly agreed.

He saw her again, that girl, the night of the
orkes melayu
performance. It was held in the same soccer field, but this time there was no ticket required, so the place was way more crowded. A band of musicians came from the capital, bringing singers that no one had ever heard of, but nobody cared, it was still good music for dancing, and Halimunda’s young men and women could rock and sway, thanks to the rhythm or maybe the booze.

The songs always had whiny lyrics about broken hearts, about unrequited love that was like one hand clapping, about cheating husbands, but no matter how tragically sad the song, the singers didn’t cry—instead, smiling and laughing in their sexy makeup, they would turn their backs to the audience and shake their asses. After being applauded for their butts, they would then turn around and face forward, squatting a little bit, and the people would clap even more, because the girls were wearing miniskirts so that everyone could see what they were intended to see. That particular mingling of music, sentimentality, and lasciviousness was what made so many people feel so overjoyed that evening.

Shodancho saw Alamanda again, walking all by herself. This time she was wearing jeans and a leather jacket, and once again a cigarette was perched between her sweet lips. Shodancho gave wholehearted thanks that he had come out of the jungle and could meet a real live angel in his beloved city. The girl wasn’t swaying in front of the stage. Instead she just stood next to one of the food stalls scattered around the soccer field, watching. Unable to resist the provocation of her beauty, Shodancho approached her. His popularity made the journey to the girl quite bothersome, because he had to field so many friendly greetings, but finally the girl was right in front of him, or he was standing right in front of the girl, and he could experience her stunning natural beauty from up close. He tried to smile, but Alamanda just gave him an indifferent glance.

“It’s not good,” Shodancho said, to start some small talk, “for a young woman to be roaming around at night all by herself.”

Alamanda looked straight into his eyes. “Don’t be stupid, Shodancho, I’m roaming around with all the hundreds of other people here tonight.”

And with that, Alamanda departed without another word. Shodancho was frozen in disbelief. That crazy exchange had been far more terrifying than any battle he had ever fought. He turned around and started walking, with a body and soul truly drained of all power.

Is there a guerrilla strategy to defeat love?
he asked himself in a brief lament.

He tried to forget the girl’s image, but the more he tried to forget it, the more that half-Japanese half-Dutch and a-little-bit-Indonesian face haunted him. He tried to come up with reasons for why he couldn’t love that girl. Just think about it, he said in the moments before he fell asleep (even though he clearly would never be able to sleep well again), that girl had probably just been born the same year I became a
shodancho
and was plotting the rebellion. There was an age difference of twenty years—and now, a man who had been named a great commander and had received the rank of general from the first president of the Republic of Indonesia had to surrender to a sixteen-year-old girl. Thinking further about that made everything all the more painful, and he found himself even more mired in a bottomless love.

One morning he awoke, and swore that he would stay in Halimunda forever and Alamanda would be his wife.

But he didn’t tell his thirty-two faithful soldiers, who awaited his orders, until finally Tino Sidiq asked, “When are we going to return, Shodancho?”

“Return where?”

“To the jungle,” replied Tino Sidiq, “where we’ve been living for the past ten years.”

“Going back to the jungle would not be a return,” said Shodancho. “Me, and you, and everybody else was born here, in this city, Halimunda. Here we have returned.”

“So you don’t want to go back to the jungle?”

“No.”

He proved this by putting up a nameplate in front of his old
shodan
headquarters: Military District of Halimunda. To Major Sadrah, who suddenly appeared after hearing about Shodancho’s decision to stay in the city and about his impulsive establishment of a military district, he said shortly, “Here I am, the commander of the military district, faithful to my sworn soldiers and awaiting further orders.”

“Don’t be silly. You are a general and your place is next to the president.”

“As long as I can stay in this city, next to the girl whose name you told me,” he said in a heartbreaking tone of voice, “I’ll become anyone or anything—even if it means I have to turn into a dog.”

Sadrah looked at his friend with a gaze full of pity. After hesitating for a moment, Major Sadrah said, “That girl already has a sweetheart.” He couldn’t bear to look at Shodancho’s face, so looking away he continued, “He is a young man named Kliwon.”

He knew that he was saying something that pierced right to the heart.

NO ONE KNEW
how Comrade Kliwon ended up becoming a communist youth, because even though he had never been rich, he’d always been a hedonist. His father of course had been quite the communist, and a master speechmaker. He had managed to avoid being sent to Boven-Digoel by the colonial government and so for a time survived, but he was finally executed by the Japanese after his endless meddling and pamphlet writing made the Kempeitai realize he was a communist rebel. Still, there had been no sign that Kliwon would follow in his father’s footsteps. He was good at school and had even skipped two grades, and it seemed as if he could be anything he wanted when he grew up.

Really, Kliwon seemed more like a prodigal son than a disciplined young communist. He led a gang of marauding neighborhood kids, stealing whatever they could get their hands on for their own enjoyment: coconuts, logs, or a handful of cacao beans that could be eaten on the spot. On the night before Eid, they would steal a chicken and roast it, and then the next day they would find the chicken’s owner to ask for forgiveness. They didn’t bother anyone too much, so they were usually just left to do their thing, although one or two people complained. Once they reached their early teens, everyone knew that they’d been to the whorehouse. To earn some spending money they’d go to the sea or help out hauling nets, and after getting the cash those kids would look for a whore—but sometimes they were really broke and thanks to the brothel they were no longer accustomed to controlling their lust.

Kliwon was clever and sometimes his way of thinking could be surprising, if not borderline insane. He once brought three of his friends to the whorehouse, and they took turns sleeping with a prostitute. At first the whore encouraged them to climb up on the bed in pairs because, as she said, she had a hole in the front and in the back. But none of them wanted to share a hole with a piece of shit, so they just slept with her one by one. Kliwon showed himself to be a selfless leader, inviting his friends to sleep with the prostitute first, and taking the last turn. When the sex was over, the prostitute was met with the depressing sight of those three kids crashing through the door and vanishing without paying.

“I asked her whether she liked having sex with us,” Kliwon said, recounting the story in the beer garden not long after, “and she said that she liked it. If she liked it and we also liked it, then why should we have to pay?” People often enjoyed hearing such stories from him.

His mother, Mina—not wanting the same thing to happen to him as had happened to his father—tried to distance him from crazy Marxist ideas and anything associated with them, and didn’t care what he did as long as he didn’t end up a communist. She sent him to the movies and music concerts, and let him get drunk at the beer garden and buy records, and was perfectly happy with him hanging out with a lot of young girls. She knew that her son had slept with many of them, and that many others had begged him to sleep with them, but she didn’t care. From her point of view, that was better than someday having to see him stand in front of a firing squad, about to be executed. “Even if he does become a communist, I want him to be a happy communist,” said his mother. Her marriage to a communist, which had lasted for some years, and her interactions with her husband’s comrades had led her to the conclusion that communists were always gloomy and pensive and never had a good time. So throughout that difficult era, the entire Japanese occupation and the revolutionary war, she let Kliwon live in an endless hoorah.

In his seventeenth year, life was truly sparkling and bright for this young toast of the town. He wore slacks with wide-piped edges and a dark jacket and loafers shiny with polish. The girls came out of their houses to follow him wherever he went, trailing behind him like the train of a wedding gown, and all the young men would fall in step, tailing the girls. The girls fell in love with him, and they showered him with gifts that piled up until the house began to resemble a junkyard. Thinking of nothing else, they held parties almost every night. His male friends also adored him, because he never kept the girls to himself. And that was how they lived. In those years, Kliwon and his friends probably had the happiest lives of anyone in the city.

Kliwon had heard about the renowned prostitute Dewi Ayu, and if there was one thing that marred his happiness, it was the fact that up until the age of seventeen he had never slept with this whore everyone was always talking about. He had tried a couple of times, but Dewi Ayu only wanted to sleep with one man a night, and he always came too late, when men were already queued up ahead of him. Or, if he did succeed in getting there on time, someone would push him aside because they had more money: Mama Kalong always gave the opportunity to the man who could pay the most. All that time, he was obsessed with being able to enter her room and her bed, and that image so infernally haunted him that sometimes he would sleep with some other girl while imagining she was Dewi Ayu, whom he had caught sight of only a few times out and about in the city.

At the very least, Dewi Ayu made him realize that not every single woman on the face of the earth was crazy about him. Even married women and widows, although not quite as obsessed as the young girls who followed him wherever he went, were always stealing glances at him, and he knew that deep in their hearts they longed to bring him into their bedrooms. He had slept with some of them, and it seemed that he could sleep with whomever he wanted—anyone except Dewi Ayu. He was certain that only that woman was not infatuated with him, and in fact quite the opposite, he would have to pay if he wanted her. He began to think of how he could get an opportunity to sleep with her—it didn’t have to be for long, even less than five minutes would be enough, even just touching her body would satisfy him. He decided to go visit the woman at her house, something he was sure no other man had ever done before.

Kliwon liked music and was a good guitar player, or at least he had a solid repertoire of
keroncong
and whiny love songs that he could sing for his friends. He went to Dewi Ayu’s house all alone one Sunday dressed up like a busker, carrying a guitar, with the intention of conquering the woman with his songs and his bullshit seduction. He had already done this a number of times, making young girls crazy for him by singing songs for them outside their bedroom windows. Now that he was standing in front of the door to Dewi Ayu’s house, he began to pluck the guitar strings and sing in his distinctive falsetto.

Apparently the whore wasn’t at all intrigued and so he had to stand there, singing five whole songs without anyone opening the door. He had heard people say that the woman lived with her three teenage daughters and two servants, and that they were all quite gracious. With this notion of their kindness, he kept standing there until he had sung ten whole songs and his throat felt dry. Then, after one full hour had passed, he took out a handkerchief and wiped away the drops of sweat that were beginning to speckle his forehead and neck. His legs were practically no longer able to support his body, but there was no indication that the lady of the house would emerge. He finally set his guitar down on top of a table and sat himself down in a chair to rest for a moment, practically seeing stars but determined not to give up.