Beauty Is a Wound (41 page)

At half past ten he woke to the aroma of spices. Not yet fully alert, he stumbled out of bed and walked to the back of the house. His vision was still a little blurry, but he saw a girl carrying a steaming bowl, which she placed on the dining table.

“I cooked for you.”

He immediately recognized Farida. He was amazed.

“Bathe first,” said Farida, “or wash your face. We’ll eat together.”

Like a hypnotized man, he walked only half-conscious to the bathroom, almost forgetting to take his towel, and bathed as quickly as he could. He found the girl sitting at the dining table waiting for him. The rice was still warm. The bowl was filled with cabbage and carrot and macaroni soup. On one plate he saw fried tempeh, and on another plate he saw flying fish that had been chopped up into small pieces and fried nice and crispy.

“I found it all in the kitchen.”

Kamino nodded. It felt miraculous—he hadn’t eaten with another person for years, not since his mother and father were still alive. Now here he was with a young woman, the one he had secretly fallen in love with the previous afternoon. His heart raced uncontrollably, and he still didn’t dare to look at the girl’s face as he ate. They only peeked at each other every once in a while, and if their eyes met they would smile shyly, like two sinners caught in the act. They sat across the dining table from one another, looking exactly like a pair of happy newlyweds.

This love story was slightly disrupted by a busy afternoon. Five people had been killed in a clash between communists and anti-communists. There were four communists and one anti-communist and Kamino had to bury them all. He soon realized that more and more corpses were going to arrive at that cemetery, and that these days would mark the inevitable downfall of the Communist Party. He knew this from the numbers of dead. He dug five new graves, four in one corner for the communists, and one in another corner where the regular folks were buried. Five dead people, each with their kinsmen crying over their graves, and short speeches from the Party leaders, consumed all his time until the afternoon. But while he was busy, Farida didn’t go anywhere. She sat all day beside her father’s grave, just as she had done the day before.

“I am willing to bet,” said Kamino to Farida after his work was done and he was walking back to the house to wash up, “that tomorrow ten more communists will die.”

“If it gets to be too much,” said Farida, “bury them in one mass grave. On the seventh day there might be as many as nine hundred dead communists—there’s no way you can dig that many graves.”

“I just hope their children aren’t as foolish as you,” said Kamino. “Because to feed them I’d have to throw a banquet.”

“Tonight, may I be your guest?”

That question took Kamino off guard, so he could only respond with a nod. Farida prepared their dinner, and after eating they once again called a spirit: none other than Mualimin, of course, and Farida could once again have a nice chat with her dad. This continued until nine o’clock at night, when it was time to go to bed. Farida got the room that used to belong to Kamino’s mother and father, while he slept in the same room he had slept in since he was a child.

The next day, Kamino and Farida’s predictions came true—early in the morning twelve communists died. This time there were no eulogies by Party leaders, because the situation was dire. There was talk that DN Aidit and the leaders of the Communist Party had in fact been executed. The twelve communist corpses were thrown into the cemetery without ceremony. He didn’t know their names. And even though he only dug one big grave for twelve corpses, it was a busy day for Kamino because at noon the military truck reappeared and tossed out eight more corpses. Then in the afternoon he got seven more.

Farida sat at her father’s grave, and when night fell she was Kamino’s guest, while he was still busy with the onslaught of corpses. And that’s how it went until the seventh day.

While most Communist Party sympathizers had gone running, more than one thousand communists still held out against the mob of soldiers and anti-communists at the end of Jalan Meredeka. Some of them shouldered old weapons, with severely limited ammunition. Besieged for one day and one night, they were very hungry but not willing to surrender. The stores in the area had already been destroyed and all the inhabitants had fled. Heavily armed soldiers surrounded them from all directions, and their commander had ordered the communists to disperse, telling them with a shrill voice that the Party had been finished from the moment their coup failed. But one thousand or more communists still held out.

As dusk approached, a few of them took shots at the soldiers. But their bullets wounded no one. The commander finally lost his patience and ordered his men to shoot. Hit from all sides, communists collapsed in the street. Those who had not yet been killed ran about in a blind panic, knocking one another down, before the bullets killed them off one by one. That afternoon, in one quick massacre, one thousand two hundred and thirty-two communists died, bringing an end to the history of the Communist Party in that city, and the entire country.

The corpses were heaved onto trucks, more and more, packed like stacks in a slaughterhouse transport, and a convoy of those corpse-filled trucks headed for Kamino’s house. That day was the man’s busiest day of all. He had to dig an extremely large pit—by the middle of the night he still wasn’t done, only finishing up with the help of some soldiers as dawn broke. He kept hoping that the communists would surrender, so that no more corpses would appear and he could finally rest. Through all this, Farida stayed with him, waiting for him, preparing his food, and sitting beside her father’s grave.

That morning, after the troops and their trucks had gone and one thousand two hundred and thirty-two communist corpses had been buried in one mass grave, Kamino, who hadn’t slept but still looked full of energy, approached Farida, who’d been there for almost an entire week, and asked:

“My lady, would you like to come live with me and be my wife?”

Farida knew that it was her destiny to accept that man. So that morning, after they’d bathed and put on their finest clothes, they went to the village headman and asked to be married. They became husband and wife and went on their honeymoon to Farida’s old house.

This meant there was no gravedigger on duty that day, but that was no problem, because the army troops had grown tired of bringing all the communist corpses to the graveyard and having to help the gravedigger dig mass graves. After all, some of those communists had been killed by regular army troops but most of them had been killed by anti-communists—carrying machetes and swords and sickles and whatever else could be used to kill—who had left their corpses at the side of the road to rot. The city of Halimunda was now filled with corpses sprawled out in the irrigation channels and on the outskirts of the city, in the foothills and on the riverbanks, in the middle of bridges and under bushes. Most of them had been killed as they tried to escape.

Not everyone had been killed, however. Some had surrendered and had been thrown into local jails and the military prisons before being brought to Bloedenkamp, the delta’s most terrifying prison. Interrogations lasted for hours, ending with the promise that they’d be continued the following day. Some would die there, starved or beaten to death. Communists still on the loose were savagely hunted down, even deep into the jungle.

And Comrade Kliwon remained the most wanted man of all.

Shodancho formed a special unit to capture him, dead or alive.

Comrade Kliwon had in fact been sitting on the veranda with Adinda, patiently waiting for his newspapers, at the Communist Party headquarters when the special forces arrived. But swear to God, they didn’t see those two. They charged in and tore the place apart, ripping down the painting of Karl Marx and burning it on the side of the road along with the Party flag, the hammer and sickle, and all the books from the library, except for the books about
silat
, Indonesian martial arts, which Shodancho rescued for his own enjoyment. He’d led the attack himself, and he got two whole boxes of those
silat
books, which he immediately stashed in his jeep. All this happened right in front of Comrade Kliwon and Adinda’s eyes, who were in shock that nobody noticed them.

The troops went off to look in the public cemetery, because someone had reported he was hiding there, but it was abandoned—not even the gravedigger was there. Next they went swiftly to Mina’s house, following another tip, but she insisted throughout the long interrogation that she hadn’t seen Comrade Kliwon since the week before.

When the forces had gone, Mina said to herself, “That stupid kid should have known—all communists end up in front of a firing squad.”

A man hurried up to Shodancho, saying he’d seen Comrade Kliwon escaping out to sea with a young woman. In his growing annoyance and with his abiding and unsated desire for revenge, Shodancho ordered a search of the open sea. His soldiers chased Kliwon on motorboats, but all they found was an empty floating skiff tossing in the waves, without a trace of him. Hoping that they could find his corpse, Shodancho ordered three soldiers to go diving, but they came home deeply disappointed.

To vent his anger, Shodancho reinterrogated the few important Party men they’d been able to capture. Each man said that the last time he’d seen Comrade Kliwon he’d been sitting on the veranda waiting for his newspapers. Shodancho took their tale as a mocking joke and he brought those men out behind the military prison and executed each one with his very own pistol.

Rumors flew that Comrade Kliwon had mystical powers, that he could disguise himself as someone else, or split and multiply himself so that he could appear in many different places at once. But in the end, he was finally captured. Shodancho retraced his footsteps, led his troops back to the Party headquarters at the end of Jalan Belanda, and then suddenly he saw him, still sitting on the veranda with Shodancho’s own sister-in-law, exactly as the people he’d just executed had said. It was afternoon and a drizzly mist filled the city. Shodancho felt too embarrassed to ask where he’d been all day, because it seemed apparent, from the way Comrade Kliwon was sitting, that he had in fact been right there all along.

“You are captured, Comrade,” said Shodancho, “and my dear Adinda, you’d better go home.”

“What am I being arrested for?” asked Comrade Kliwon.

“Waiting for newspapers that will never come,” said Shodancho, with bitter humor.

Kliwon held out his hands and Shodancho handcuffed him.

“Shodancho,” said Adinda, standing there with tears streaming down her cheeks. “Allow me to say goodbye, because I’m afraid you’ll execute him as soon as he gets to prison.”

Shodancho nodded, and her farewell was simply a long kiss on Comrade Kliwon’s lips.

The news of his capture was quickly known and almost everyone in the city, some with their hands still caked with blood, quickly gathered and lined the street from the Communist Party headquarters to the military prison. Each person had special fond memories of Comrade Kliwon, and waited patiently for that man to pass by.

Comrade Kliwon had refused to climb up onto the military jeep, and walked with what remained of his dignity, escorted by soldiers. Adinda was in the jeep with Shodancho, moving very slowly behind that small procession, while the people crowded on the left and right sides of the street in a solemn silence. They looked with mixed emotions at the man who, even then, was still wearing his beloved cap. Many of the spectators had been his friends ever since their school days, and they wondered how it could be that the cleverest and handsomest man in the city had chosen to live as a misguided communist. Some were women who’d gone out with him, or had dreamed of going out with him, and they watched with teary eyes as if their one true love was leaving them.

The people’s anger vaporized as soon as they saw him. He walked straight and tall, still full of resolve, not at all like a conquered man. He walked like a commander certain he’d soon win the wars still yet to come. And the people who saw him remembered all the good he had done in the past, and forgot all the bad. He was a clever, smart, diligent, and polite young man, and suddenly no one remembered that he used to be a rabble-rouser who’d stiffed prostitutes, or that he had burned down ships.

On his cap there was now embroidered a small red star. He was wearing a shirt his mother had sewn for him, and slacks from his brief time studying in the capital, and borrowed leather shoes.

He turned his head hoping to catch a glimpse of Adinda, but he couldn’t see her inside the jeep. He also looked for Alamanda in the crowd, but she wasn’t there. Thinking that there wasn’t anyone of importance in the crowd, he walked calmly to the prison behind the military headquarters, where without a trial Shodancho pronounced that he was to be executed the next morning at five o’clock.

Adinda reappeared not long afterward and since visitors were forbidden, she just left one change of clothes that she asked Shodancho to pass on with a tray full of food.

“Promise me, Shodancho,” said Adinda, “that you make sure he eats it. Ever since he didn’t get his newspapers he hasn’t eaten anything.”

Shodancho delivered all these things himself and found Comrade Kliwon lying down on a cot, his two hands folded beneath his head and looking up at the ceiling.

“I guess you still have a good reputation with the ladies, Comrade,” said Shodancho. “One of them sent you a set of clothes and a tray of food.”

“And I know which lady—your very own sister-in-law.”

After that Comrade Kliwon fell silent, his body language unchanged. But in the dim light of the room, Shodancho smiled, enjoying his little revenge. This is the man who robbed me of my beautiful wife, he told himself, and cursed my two children.

“Tomorrow I will see you executed.”

He didn’t plan for the execution to be as simple or fast as a bullet. He wanted to see Kliwon die slowly—his fingernails yanked off one by one, his scalp peeled off, his eyes gouged out, his tongue hacked off. Shodancho smiled a cruel acrid smile in anticipation.