Beauty Is a Wound (37 page)

Now Kliwon had a schoolgirl holding him tight, the first time since Alamanda’s wild kisses in front of the train station. Even though a number of girls and young mothers still made eyes at him, he’d thrown off his reputation as a lady-killer and devoted most of his time to the Party and work, and didn’t have any time for flirtation or seduction. But now this girl was clutching him close and without realizing it—just to protect her from the rabid dog—he found himself returning her embrace.

They were pressed together so tightly that Comrade Kliwon could feel the girl’s breasts, so soft and warm, and strands of her hair, fluttering in the breeze, brushed across his face. When her friends arrived, relieved, Comrade Kliwon gently pushed the girl away, and that was when he saw her unique beauty, with that old-fashioned, gentle, and natural grace, her hair in two braids, her closed eyes with the tapering eyelashes of a nymph, her slim nose, her finely-carved ears, her lips curled in a small frown, her full cheeks, and then he realized the girl had fainted, and had perhaps been unconscious from the very first moment she’d leapt into his arms.

With the help of her friends, he set the unconscious girl down in a chair. After attempting to revive her, he stopped a horse-drawn cart making slow progress across the weeds and along the bathing springs near his hut and Comrade Kliwon told them to take the unconscious girl home and the girls then crowded together on top of the cart.

But even after they’d disappeared around the bend and the clopping hooves could no longer be heard, Comrade Kliwon could still smell the scent of the girl’s hair, feel the soft touch of her breasts, and the effect of her mystical beauty. He tried to chase away those feelings, telling himself he had to work hard for the future of the Party, but that warmth simply would not go, even when he busied himself with burying the rabid dog in the thicket, and even after waking his friends because the rice was ready.

Bedtime made him suffer all the more. The morning’s events haunted him, and he realized that the schoolgirl’s face was somehow vaguely familiar—maybe he even knew her name. Still feeling the warmth of her body, he tried to remember how he knew her. The girl was about fifteen years old, so he definitely had never dated her. And then, once he remembered who the girl was, he suffered all the more—he indeed
had
seen her face, and he even knew her name, and
had
known it ever since she was six years old. In fact, in the year before he went to Jakarta, he’d seen her almost every day. He immediately tried to banish all memories of the girl’s warmth from his body, to erase the soft touch of her breasts, but it was hopeless.

“Oh,” he said quite pitifully, “her name is Adinda and she’s Alamanda’s younger sister.”

He finally decided to get up. The fishermen had emerged from their houses and some were checking their nets, fixing any parts that had been torn by thrashing fish, and others were walking toward the city in search of entertainment. After ensuring the nets stretched out to dry next to their hut were in good condition, Comrade Kliwon went to bathe in the spring. The bathing spot had an open-air spigot protected only by pandan shrubs. There was just a big barrel with a small hole corked with an old rubber sandal. But indeed Comrade Kliwon didn’t like bathing under a showerhead where the water dribbled down like piss, and he preferred to scoop and pour the water directly onto his body like this.

It turned out that he couldn’t escape that girl, as if her family had been destined to hound him as long as he lived. Before he had finished bathing, Karmin shouted that two young girls were looking for him. After he had gotten dressed, with his hair still wet, he found two girls in the front room, looking at the portraits of Marx and Lenin and the hammer and sickle on the wall.

“Thank you for helping me,” said Adinda with a small embarrassed bow. She wasn’t at all like Alamanda—her face was calm and innocent and shy.

“You ran faster than the dog,” said Comrade Kliwon. “You could have run him to death with such speed.”

“He would have bitten me,” said Adinda, “because I would have fainted.”

For the time being, the disturbance that girl caused could be overcome by his Party duties. He had to attend to the complaints of the Fishermen’s Union regarding the operation of Shodancho’s fishing vessels. Comrade Kliwon tried to lead a group of fishermen in an action one morning. As the large boats were lining up in the port market to lower their catch, Comrade Kliwon and his group stood facing them. He told one of the captains that they would stand there until there was a guarantee the huge vessels would cease their operations in the traditional fishing grounds.

“I don’t care if all your fish rot,” he began, and of course ended with, “Workers of the world, unite!”

The workers on the large ships stood relaxed on the rails, with no intention of clashing with their fellow villagers, and without caring that the fish might rot, because after all they weren’t paid in fish. Meanwhile the market buyers, who should have felt cheated, stayed quiet seeing how many fishermen were there, with their bodies as strong as baby whales. The truly bothered and infuriated ones were of course the captains and officials on Shodancho’s ships, but even they didn’t move to confront the Fishermen’s Union men. One tense hour passed, with agitations and a choir singing the
Internationale
, and fishermen linking arms in a line to face whatever came down from the ship, man or fish.

Comrade Kliwon was fairly certain of victory. The fish would quickly begin to rot and, if the vessels did not comply, then in the following days they would continue to catch rotting fish. But before the blocks of ice on the vessels melted and the fish truly began to stink, some policemen and an army battalion arrived. After an anxious moment, the fishermen decided to fight, but then the soldiers began shooting their rifles into the sky and they ran away frantic. Comrade Kliwon was forced to order a retreat.

All this should have been enough to make him forget Adinda, but it was not. That girl appeared in the crowd of fishermen, and he saw her.

The hut where he lived with Karmin and Samiran served as the Fishermen’s Union headquarters, so it was open to everyone. They held their frequent meetings, and talked on and on about anything and everything there, and he couldn’t hardly just ask the girl to leave if, on her way home from school, Adinda showed up with a number of her friends.

Adinda was good at speaking English, which wasn’t too unusual in Halimunda since so many foreigners came there to visit. Comrade Kliwon had a library that delighted book lovers; most of the volumes were philosophy and politics, but there were also English storybooks that Adinda enjoyed. When Comrade Kliwon awoke from his afternoon nap, he would quite often find the girl sitting at the large table, right under the photo of Lenin, solemnly reading. She would look up at him for a moment and smile as if to say,
Sorry I came in without asking
, and Kliwon would give her a cup of tea nervously, though the girl would say,
Thank you, I can get it myself
, but by then Comrade Kliwon would have quickly gone out back to the well to tremble.

Adinda read many books there. She read all the Gorky, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy novels he had. All of them were published by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow, and sent through the Party. She read local novels too, and translated ones put out by Yayasan Pembaruan, the publisher of the Party, and the books of Balai Pustaka, which belonged to the government.

Comrade Kliwon never asked her to leave, but he did avoid her as best he could. Two things made him suffer when she was near: first, Adinda elicited a painful nostalgia for Alamanda, and second, seeing Adinda transported him back to their warm embrace that had so intoxicated him. He busied himself even further with the Fishermen’s Union business, discussing the failure of their first action against Shodancho’s ships. He organized Union cadres to infiltrate the ships and work there to win over the laborers. It would take some time, but he believed that communists were the most patient creatures on the face of the earth.

It wasn’t easy, but he finally succeeded in placing two of his men on each vessel—nowhere near enough, but better than nothing. Most of the fishermen grew impatient waiting to provoke the ship laborers, and urged Comrade Kliwon to burn the ships. Comrade Kliwon tried to calm them down.

“Give me some time to talk to Shodancho,” he said.

Comrade Kliwon’s first negotiations with Shodancho had failed to produce results; instead, Shodancho had added one more fishing vessel. The fishermen then once again urged him to take the shortcut of burning the ships down. A second time, Kliwon asked to speak with Shodancho. That was when he went to the house and saw Alamanda’s stomach, swollen but empty. And it wasn’t just Shodancho who had taken his words that day as the curse of a jealous man—Adinda had felt the same.

She came one afternoon, begging him, practically in tears, “Don’t hurt my older sister, she has already suffered enough, having to marry that Shodancho.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You cursed her so that she would lose her child.”

“That’s not true,” said Comrade Kliwon, defending himself, “I just saw your sister’s stomach and told what I saw.”

The girl didn’t believe him one bit. She sat in the same spot where she usually read books, her feelings a mix of anger and confusion. Usually Comrade Kliwon would leave her be, but this time he weakly pulled up a chair and sat down. There was no one else around that afternoon except the lizards on the wall and the spiders hanging from the ceiling spinning their webs.

“I’m begging you, Comrade, forget Alamanda.”

“I already forgot that was even her name.”

Adinda ignored that lame joke. “If you’re angry at her,” she said, “take out all your anger on me.”

“Alright then, I will squash you like a tomato,” said Comrade Kliwon.

“You can kill me or rape me whenever you want, I won’t put up even the tiniest bit of a fight,” said Adinda, not drawn in by his jokes. “You can make me your slave, or whatever.” She took a handkerchief from her skirt pocket, and wiped away the tears streaming down her cheeks. “You could even marry me if you wanted.”

A gecko called out seven times in the distance, a sign that she was looking for a mate.

If that baby was truly going to disappear from his wife’s stomach, Shodancho was sure it would be due to Comrade Kliwon’s curse—the curse of a jealous lover. A problem like this couldn’t be solved with weapons, nor with a seven-generation war; to save his first child he had to find a peaceful solution. He finally told Comrade Kliwon that he would order his captains to move their operations far away from the beach and the traditional fishing waters.

“But,” Shodancho then said, “please remove your curse far from my wife’s stomach.” He desperately wanted a child to prove to the world that he and his wife loved each other, that their’s was a happy marriage. Hearing that request, Comrade Kliwon smiled, not because he knew that Alamanda only loved him and didn’t love Shodancho at all, but because, “There’s no connection between an empty pot and those ships, Shodancho.”

As if he hadn’t heard what Comrade Kliwon said, Shodancho still moved his ships far back into the deep ocean.

The fishermen reveled in their victory—those ships no longer caught fish in their waters and no longer sold their fish in the local market, docking now in bigger cities that needed larger quantities of fish.

Comrade Kliwon tried to tell them as tangibly as possible, as his Marxist gurus instructed, what had happened and to discuss their new efforts, now that the big ships had been pushed into the distance and the fish had returned. But it turned out that as soon as the fishermen had some money, they bought a cow’s head and after celebrating on the beach with some bottles of
tuak
, they threw it into the sea as an offering to the queen of the South Seas, still so superstitious. Comrade Kliwon couldn’t do much about that, feeling sure that it would be difficult to teach them even the most basic logic, let alone instill the Marxist dialectic that he himself had only received in bits and pieces during his short stay in the capital. He was happy enough that they’d had the courage to fight back against the threat to their unity and their livelihood, but time and time again he told his friends that life wasn’t as easy as all that, that they shouldn’t let themselves get carried away by a small victory, and that the ties of their friendship must be knit even tighter, because even larger threats were sure to come.

The fishermen weren’t the only ones to hold a cheerful
syukuran
ritual of thanks. Shodancho was so happy that he was constantly throwing these blessing celebrations. Perhaps because he had been so worried by Comrade Kliwon’s curse, he also asked that a traditional ceremony be held for Alamanda’s safety and the safety of the baby growing in her stomach. For that ceremony, Alamanda bathed in water filled with all kinds of flowers in the middle of the night as a traditional midwife recited mantras. This midwife reassured Shodancho that his wife’s stomach was beautifully full, and the child was doing just fine in there, a baby girl who would be as beautiful as her mother.

Shodancho didn’t care about the sex of the baby, just knowing that he was going to have a child was good enough for him. But when he heard the midwife’s prediction that the baby was a girl, he jumped for joy, reassured that the curse was nothing but hot air from a man consumed with jealousy. He straightaway began to think of a name for the child and decided on Nurul Aini, not because it had any special meaning, but because it suddenly appeared in his mind, and yet it was for that reason precisely that he thought the child’s name was a divine inspiration he had to follow. Meanwhile the midwife was dousing his wife with scoopful upon scoopful of flower water, and Alamanda was shivering in the chilly night air, sure that she’d wake up the next morning with the flu. And elsewhere, out at sea, Comrade Kliwon was hoping that he had been mistaken, wishing for the couple to have a real baby.