Beauty Is a Wound (43 page)

Every girl in Halimunda, including Alamanda, would picture that man every time they thought of the city, but at dawn he would die, and prayers began to float up in the air above the city, rising from the mouths of people powerless to prevent his punishment. It was only Alamanda who might be able to stay the man’s execution: she held the key.

At quarter to five in the early morning, Shodancho finally appeared at home, wanting to rest for a moment before witnessing the execution of his most infuriating enemy, tossed the revolver he would use to shoot that crazy communist onto the bed and then, exhausted, laid himself down next to the gun before he realized that Alamanda was sitting on a corner of the mattress, shivering.

“Tell me, Shodancho, he is scheduled to die at five o’clock this morning, right?” Alamanda asked from the darkness.

“Yes.”

“I will recite the mantra and I will give you my love, if you will guarantee that the man will live.” Alamanda’s voice rang out with conviction.

Shodancho got up and sat facing his wife in the dim room for a moment, entering into the strangest transaction ever to take place between a husband and wife.

“I’m serious, Shodancho.”

“It’s a fair deal,” said Shodancho, “even though it fills me with jealousy.”

He didn’t say another word. He just stood, picked up his revolver and walked out of the room with hearty steps. He went to the military headquarters and found the firing squad polishing their rifles with pride, because in a half hour they would kill the biggest catch of their careers.

Shodancho found the squad leader and gave his orders. No one was allowed to kill Comrade Kliwon and no one was allowed to ask the reason why. He said that all things which fell under the jurisdiction of the generals in the central command were his responsibility, and if anyone dared to kill that man, he would not hesitate to kill that killer with his very own revolver (he said brandishing the weapon), along with his children, wife, parents and in-laws, older siblings, nieces and nephews, cousins, uncles, and aunts.

His order was so emphatic that no one dared argue, even though they were all wracking their brains trying to figure out what had happened. But then as Shodancho was heading home, he turned at the gate and gazed back at the soldiers, who hadn’t slept all night long, anticipating this execution, saying:

“You can rough him up a bit, but I repeat, do not kill him. At seven o’clock this morning he must be set free.”

And then he quickly went home.

Upon his arrival he found his wife lying naked atop their bed, exactly how Maman Gendeng had discovered Maya Dewi. The air in the room felt warm and refreshing even though the rainy season had frozen everything outside. In the glow of the night-light he saw the shape of the body he knew so well, every arc and dimple and curve. The woman was now twenty-one years old, ripe and tempting.

And then Shodancho realized that the room had been decorated like a bridal chamber. Everything was a golden color, as was Alamanda’s liking, from the sheets, to the blanket, to the mosquito netting. There were orchids and tuberose in a vase on the corner table to delight his nose. This was like the wondrous offering of a wedding night, that was five years late.

Shodancho assumed the shy attitude of a new groom, not rushing like he usually did, but taking off his clothes slowly. Then that delayed wedding night began, followed by an extraordinarily romantic and warm honeymoon. The love they made that night was formidable and wild, moving to the floor when they rolled off the golden bed without noticing, then continuing in the bathroom, before they did it on the sofa as sunbeams began to pierce through the window.

They closed all the doors of the house, locked the servants in the kitchen, and did it again in the front parlor while reading aloud to each other from pornographic novels. Then they returned to the bathroom, and it was all a surprise for the servants in the kitchen and the neighbors listening to Alamanda’s short yelps and Shodancho’s low grunts. He came three times that evening, but satisfaction only arrived after they did it eleven more times the next day: truly, a pair of opponents who’d been starving for five years.

Just like Maman Gendeng and Maya Dewi, they didn’t emerge from their house for weeks after that. They no longer cared about anything happening outside their own home.

Then, months later, Shodancho heard the news that Maman Gendeng’s wife was pregnant. A small party was held and the
preman
all got drunk in the backyard, paying no heed to Maman Gendeng’s shouts forbidding anyone from getting wasted under his roof—they even began to pass out and Maman Gendeng was forced to drag them out to the street one by one.

Maman Gendeng sat on a veranda chair looking out at those friends of his, some lying on the side of the road and others staggering back to their benches at the bus station, from the giddy perspective of a man who is ready to live the normal life of all the other family men that he’d ever seen, and yet a man who’d for years lived in solidarity with his friends in the open air.

He was still a man filled with that ambiguity—a bad guy in the outside world, but such a good man at home—when their child finally was born. Just as he had sworn to do, he named the baby Rengganis. But most people ended up calling her Rengganis the Beautiful because of her extraordinary beauty.

That was when Shodancho appeared, saying with sincerity that he was truly overjoyed to see his friend have a little girl who was just as beautiful as her mother and her grandmother. Of course he also teased him, congratulating him that his equipment still functioned after its forced rest for five long years, not counting a few ridiculous bathroom episodes. At this, Maman Gendeng, usually so crude and ruthless, blushed shyly and cautiously asked how Shodancho himself was doing.

Shodancho revealed a wide grin: “Take a look at me my dear friend. We’ve both been graced with good fortune and all of our patience has finally born fruit. My wife is also pregnant and her belly is round and full. Oh my friend, don’t look at me like that, I didn’t do it the way I did for her first two pregnancies. It’s true that those two sweet little baby girls were lost, but I hope that now my grief will finally disappear. I believe my wife will give birth to an honest-to-goodness real child, and I swear that our baby will be no less beautiful than your little daughter here. Because this time I did it right, not by raping my own wife. We had sex like other newlyweds, a little bit shy at first but warm and passionate and sincere and full of love.”

He continued, “You must be surprised to hear this. I was just as surprised when one night, as dawn was about to break, I found my wife naked and offering herself to me, saying that she was ready and willing to be ravished and would not put up a fight, and for weeks after that we enjoyed the exquisitely beautiful nights of our honeymoon. My story is not so different from yours, my friend, because maybe the universe destined us to the same fate.”

Both men chuckled.

Shodancho did not mention—feeling there was no need for Maman Gendeng to know—that he had earned his wife’s love by sparing the life of Comrade Kliwon.

Overflowing with joy, they toasted each other in the backyard near Maman Gendeng’s fish ponds. They chatted about many things, including trump strategy, and promised that they would soon meet again at the card table after the long absences caused by their never-ending honeymoons.

Six months after Rengganis was born, when he heard that Alamanda was going into labor, Maman Gendeng brought his wife and daughter to Shodancho’s house. They arrived just as the infant let out its first cries, and right at that moment Maman Gendeng clasped Shodancho’s hand. The new father was ecstatic to see his baby, actual flesh and blood, bone and skin, just perfect, like almost every other baby in the world. The baby was a girl, and it turned out that she was in fact no less beautiful than the daughter of his dear friend and his enemy.

Maman Gendeng said, “Congratulations, Shodancho, I hope that these cousins will become best friends. Have you already thought of a name?”

“Just like her two older sisters who disappeared,” said Shodancho, “I will name her Nurul Aini.” But later people preferred to use her nickname, Ai.

And so that is the tale of two fathers who each had to wait for years to get their bundles of joy, both men who loved their daughters dearly, so that when they reunited at the trump table with the sardine seller and the butcher they sometimes brought those little girls along. And so it was that the kids grew up together. The men would let the children shuffle the cards in the middle of a game and toss them their betting coins, and their friendship grew closer with the presence of those two girls.

Meanwhile, twelve days after the birth of Nurul Aini, a third cousin was also born—a baby boy, Adinda’s child, and his father named him Krisan. But that’s another story, another family, another destiny which began the day Comrade Kliwon was scheduled to be executed at dawn but was spared because Alamanda bought his life with her surrender to Shodancho. At the time, no one knew that the birth of those three cousins, Dewi Ayu’s grandchildren, would lead to the most harrowing tragedy in the years to come.

Meanwhile, in the cemetery, Kamino and Farida passed their quiet life together full of joy. Kamino, happy that he had finally found a girl willing to be a gravedigger’s wife, didn’t even mind when she told him repeatedly that the only reason she’d married him was because he lived close to her father’s grave.

“It’s pointless to be jealous of a dead man,” said Kamino.

They still often played that
jailangkung
game, calling up Mualimin’s spirit. The dead man seemed happy that Farida had landed a gravedigger husband.

“There’s no one kinder than gravediggers,” said the dead man. “They graciously serve people who no longer need to be served.”

Their marriage grew even happier when Farida got pregnant. “If it’s a boy, then the next generation of gravediggers will have arrived,” said Farida to her husband, “but if it turns out to be a girl, then this city might not have anyone to bury their dead.”

That was their life together. They passed the time talking mostly to each other, and to the spirits of the dead, and occasionally talking with mourners accompanying the corpses, and they also enjoyed rare opportunities to visit their neighbors across the cocoa and coconut plantations.

Their life could be considered prosperous. They had the house the city had given them, and their family was never short on money because almost every day there were mourners who each slipped one or two bills into Kamino’s hand. People made a pilgrimage to the grave on the seventh day after someone’s death, and another pilgrimage on the fortieth day, and again on the one hundredth day, and then another on the thousandth day. Early in the fasting month of Ramadan they made a pilgrimage, and after Eid sometimes people made another pilgrimage too. Because so many people were buried in the cemetery, it wasn’t surprising if every day someone came there on a pilgrimage, and Farida and Kamino enjoyed the entertainment of all those visitors.

The only slightly bothersome thing were all the disturbances from the ghosts. They weren’t evil, but they were mischievous. They often teased people forced to walk past the cemetery, making spooky noises or appearing as headless sweet potato sellers. Everyone avoided the place at night but Kamino and Farida were quite used to the ghosts, and simply chased them away like other people shoo out a chicken that has wandered into the kitchen. Every once in a while the couple even teased the ghosts right back.

At midday, if there wasn’t much to be done, Farida still often sat alone beside her father’s grave. She had put a chair there, but once her pregnancy was farther along sitting became tiring, so she rolled out a woven mat and lay down under the shade of the frangipani leaves, but the sea breeze would set the sand flying along the ground. Kamino made her a rope hammock that he tied from one frangipani tree to the other so his wife could lie there lulled by the wind, closing her eyes with her body swaying gently.

But one day this led to disaster. When her pregnancy had reached six months, Farina fell asleep in that hammock and had a terrifying nightmare. In shock, she startled awake and bounced up out of the hammock and fell to the ground. She hemorrhaged, and before Kamino, who had heard her body thud onto the dirt, could reach her, she was dead.

How sad that man was: he had lost both his wife and his unborn child. He would now return to the same loneliness that he’d endured for so many years, except this new loneliness would be much more depressing, because now he had tasted happiness.

He took care of his wife’s burial himself, only telling one or two neighbors what had happened, too overwhelmed to tell anybody else. He lovingly bathed his wife’s body, lacerated by grief, and blaming himself for that hammock. He prayed over her body himself, and since his house was well stocked with burial shrouds, he even wrapped his wife’s body in her shroud himself. In the afternoon he began to dig his wife’s grave, right beside Mualimin’s grave, because he knew that was exactly what Farina would have wanted. When night fell, the digging was finished. With tears streaming down his face, he carried his wife’s corpse and placed it in the small recess at the bottom of the pit. He covered it with small planks of wood. As he began to fill in the hole with dirt, his sobs broke out into wrenching convulsions.

He didn’t sleep that night. Like Farida had done when she was grieving the death of her father, Kamino just sat next to the grave of his wife without moving a muscle. His body was still stained with earth from her grave and the shovel still stood at his side. Suddenly he heard small whimpers. They were the cries of a child—no, a baby. He looked this way and that, but he saw no one. He began to think that maybe it was some cemetery ghosts making mischief, but as those cries became louder and more distinct, he knew that they were coming from his wife’s grave.

Like a man possessed, he dug up his wife’s burial plot. He pulled out the protective wooden planks. The corpse was still lying stiffly covered in the burial shroud, but near its crotch he saw something moving. Kamino quickly unwrapped the shroud, and saw a half-emerged baby, pinched by the corpse’s two thighs. He pulled on the baby, who was clearly very much alive and crying loudly, and cut the umbilical cord with a bite.