Beauty Is a Wound (57 page)

“We will come face-to-face with the army if you continue to wreak havoc like this,” said Romeo in a tone of undeniable fear.

“We have faced those soldiers before.”

Romeo looked at him in disbelief.

“What else do you think can be done by a man who is enraged by his daughter’s murder?” asked Maman Gendeng. “I know those people are completely without sin, but I’m upset.”

He was indeed truly furious at everyone in the city, except for his cronies, but his daughter was also sort of like an excuse. He had in fact held a grudge against the people for quite a long time, knowing for sure that they all looked down on him and his friends as unemployed goons who passed their time doing nothing but drinking beer and fighting. He also held a grudge against them for thinking of Rengganis the Beautiful as an idiot, and for having stared at her with lustful and depraved looks. He had a reason to be angry.

“They believe that we are the garbage of society,” Maman Gendeng summarized. “This is true, but many of us never got enough education to make anything of ourselves, and they closed the doors on us. What can be done if we finally became robbers, became pickpockets, and only bided our time until we could get revenge on the people who made us jealous? I was jealous when I saw good people with happy families. I wanted something like that. I finally got everything I wanted, and now, after I have tasted happiness, someone has stolen that joy from me. All my old grudges have been ripped open like a half-healed wound.”

What Romeo had been afraid of truly came to pass. Riots spread throughout the city. Some dog owners fought back, and the thugs grew all the more violent, now ruining whatever they could get their hands on in addition to dogs. Cars were demolished and signposts were uprooted and hurled, as were the shade trees lining the streets. Shop windows were broken into smithereens. A number of police posts were burned, and a number of people were injured. An extraordinary terror swept over the city, until the order for military rule was sent from the central command to the city military authority, which nominated Shodancho to straighten out the goons, and if they couldn’t be straightened out, to slaughter them.

“I have already thought for quite a while that those scoundrels should be finished off just like the communists,” said Shodancho to his wife, after coming home from another fruitless search for his daughter Ai’s body.

“After banishing Comrade Kliwon now you are going to kill Maman Gendeng?” asked his wife (she had never told him about her affair with the Comrade the day before he was found having committed suicide). “Are you going to turn all my younger sisters into widows?”

Shodancho looked at his wife, surprised.

“If he is not killed, he is going to kill everyone in this city, so what do you want me to do?” asked Shodancho. “What’s more, think about this: he failed to properly protect his own daughter, so she got knocked up, and then he forced her to marry a kid that she didn’t want to marry, so she ran away on the night she gave birth to the baby. And because she ran away, our daughter, who had been her dear friend for so long, fell sick and died. And then after she died, someone snatched her from her grave. Don’t you get it? The leader of that goon squad killed our child, our Ai—Nurul Aini the third.”

“Why don’t you also blame Eve for seducing Adam into eating the apple and forcing us to live in this accursed world,” said his wife crankily.

As it turned out Shodancho didn’t pay any attention to his wife. In addition to the chaos those thugs were causing, and the order from the central military command, Shodancho was furious over Ai’s death and was still smarting from his old grudge ever since Maman Gendeng had barged into his office and threatened him after he slept with Dewi Ayu. No one had ever threatened Shodancho to his face, not a Japanese and not a Dutchman, but this one hoodlum had dared. Even though he had seen proof of Maman Gendeng’s power with his very own eyes, Shodancho believed there were still one or two ways to kill the man, and he would use whatever means necessary. He may have been Maman Gendeng’s friend, especially at the card table, but all the same he had always longed to kill him someday. Now the time had come, so he closed his ears against whatever Alamanda had to say.

“Do it and you need not return,” Alamanda said finally, “so all three of us will become widows and everything will be fair.”

“Adinda still has Krisan.”

“So kill the boy if you are jealous.”

Shodancho himself led the operation of eradicating those thugs. He gathered all his soldiers, and pulled in some extra troops from the nearest military posts. He held an emergency meeting and made a map of where the thugs had committed acts of violence and a plan for how they would be finished off. Shodancho himself was really getting too old for a field operation, in fact he was waiting for his retirement papers, but he appeared quite energetic, and even a little bit wise. “We are not going to do it like when we slaughtered the communists,” he said. “This time, everyone who is killed must be put into a sack.”

So one truck came filled with empty sacks.

The operation was carried out at night, so as not to induce a mass panic. The soldiers spread out, carrying weapons but dressed in civilian clothes, and so did the snipers, heading for the groups of thugs. They identified as thugs anyone who was tattooed, drinking alcohol, caught making trouble, or killing dogs, and all thugs were shot right where they stood, before being stuffed into a sack and thrown into the irrigation ditch or simply left lying by the side of the road. The people who found them would bury them in their sacks: that was way more practical than wrapping them in burial shrouds.

“They are too accursed for burial shrouds,” said Shodancho, “let alone cemetery plots.”

As soon as morning came on the first day, half the city’s criminals had already disappeared, swallowed by those sacks that were tied with plastic cords. They were found along the roadways, bobbing in the river, lapped by the waves on the shore, in heaps under the bushes, and lying in the irrigation ditches. Some of them were getting pawed at by dogs, and others were being visited by flies. Not one person touched them before the afternoon. The people were overjoyed that help had come, from who knows where, to finish off each and every last one of those troublemakers. Of course they still remembered the massacre of the communists, and how they had been terrorized by their ghosts for years. But no matter, those thugs were better off turning into ghosts than living and causing trouble for so many people. So they left the corpses just as they were in their sacks, hoping the maggots and buzzards would finish them off, right down to the marrow of their bones. But when the offensive rotting stench began to ambush them and they couldn’t take it anymore, the people finally dealt with the corpses closest to their settlements, burying them in their sacks.

But it wasn’t like burying a corpse—it was more like burying a turd after taking a shit in the banana orchard.

The massacre continued into a second night, and a third, and then a fourth night, a fifth, and a sixth and seventh. The operation was carried out swiftly, almost finishing off the entire supply of thugs in Halimunda. But Shodancho was not in the least bit satisfied, because Maman Gendeng was not among the corpses.

For that entire week, Maman Gendeng did not return home. Maya Dewi was very worried about him, especially after she heard that the city thugs were being killed off one by one, for seven nights straight, all shot to death, in the head or the chest. Although no one knew for sure, everyone could guess who had done it, because only certain people carried weapons. So Maya Dewi went to find Shodancho.

“Have you murdered my husband?”

“Not yet,” Shodancho replied sadly, “ask those soldiers.”

She asked them one by one, almost every single soldier, and they replied just as Shodancho had replied:

“Not yet.”

But she didn’t really believe them. Shodancho had banished Comrade Kliwon to Buru Island, so he could certainly kill her husband Maman Gendeng. She hoped that her husband truly was invincible, but seeing so many corpses in the street, she could not stop herself from keeping up her search, because maybe one of the bodies was his.

So that beautiful woman, with a red headscarf protecting her from the bright sunlight, began to go from one sack to the next, and one by one she loosened their cords—unmoved by the rotting stench that violated her nose, not caring that she was competing with the flies—and examined the corpses inside, comparing their faces to her beloved memory of her husband’s face. Not one of the corpses was Maman Gendeng, but she recognized most of them as her husband’s loyal friends, and so she felt sure that her husband had died as well. Maybe all that talk of invincibility had just been hot air. She had to find him, and if indeed he was already dead, she would have to bury him in an honorable manner.

In order to find out about those corpses that had already been buried by the people who couldn’t stand their smell, she approached a group of amateur gravediggers and asked whether they had buried her husband.

“From the smell we don’t think so.”

“What do you think my husband smells like?”

“Well, he must smell much worse than all these other thugs, because he was the biggest thug of them all.” Maya Dewi acknowledged the truth in those words, and continued her search. She chased after a couple of corpses that were floating in the river and getting swept away by the current, but after she had worn herself out catching them, it turned out that neither one was her husband. She also examined the corpses scattered along the beach, a sight that had scared all the tourists away from Halimunda. But after a whole day, her hard work was still in vain and she returned home as night fell, hoping there would be no more slaughter that evening, and that her husband would return. Her wish was not granted, and when morning came she began her search again, opening all the sacks she hadn’t tried yet.

She kept on this way until finally a couple of people told her that they had seen Romeo and her husband escape into the jungle on the cape on the seventh day of the massacre. But the soldiers had heard about this too, so she was in a race against time, hoping that they had not been able to shoot him yet. She went into the jungle alone, wearing only flip-flops on her feet, and protected by the same red headscarf she had been wearing the day before, stumbling along a footpath that was grown over with shrub brush. That jungle had been a protected forest since the colonial era, and it wasn’t inhabited just by monkeys and wild pigs, but also by wild buffalo and even jaguars, but Maya Dewi was not afraid of anything. All she wanted was to find her husband, dead or alive.

She passed by a group of four soldiers, and she stopped them.

“Have you killed my husband?”

“This time yes we have, Madam,” said their leader, “and we extend our condolences.”

“Where did you put his corpse?”

“Go straight for about a hundred meters, and there you will find his body, already surrounded by flies. We crucified him on a mango tree first.”

“Is he in a sack?”

“In a sack,” replied the soldier, “curled up like a baby.”

“See you later.”

“Later.”

Maya Dewi continued on her way, walking straight for a hundred meters, just as the soldier had told her to do, and there she did in fact see a sack, already lined with flies. The carrion-eating buzzards were already pecking at it, and two
ajak
had been tearing at its corners. Maya Dewi chased them all away, opened the cord around the sack, and made sure the person “curled up like a baby” inside was that man, her husband, and even though his face was almost unrecognizable, it was indeed him. She didn’t cry, not then in any case. With impressive composure, she tied the sack back up with its plastic cord. And because she was not strong enough to carry him on her back, she dragged the sack the whole way from where she had found him to the Budi Dharma public cemetery, where she asked that her husband be buried in an honorable manner. The flies besieged his sack for the entire journey, stretching out behind her like a comet’s tail.

The insects only dispersed once Kamino had bathed and perfumed the man. Now the corpse was lying stiffly, with bullet wounds visible in his forehead and his chest, just two shots that must have killed him instantly. The wound on his chest was right at his heart. It was only when she saw this that Maya Dewi wept, and to spare her further grief, Kamino quickly wrapped him up in a burial shroud. He recited the prayer for the dead, along with Kinkin, who paid his respects to the man who should have been his father-in-law. Maman Gendeng’s body was buried right next to the grave of his daughter, and Maya Dewi knelt for almost an hour there in between those two graves, feeling abandoned, alienated, and alone. She began her days of mourning, and on the third day Maman Gendeng returned from the afterlife.

As had already been proven, that man truly was invincible. He wasn’t afraid of the massacre. But he couldn’t stand to see his friends lying dead in the streets and said to Romeo, who was faithfully following him:

“Let’s run away into the jungle.”

They went on the seventh day of the massacre, after moving from one hiding place to the next. It was true: that city no longer pleased the
preman
. He couldn’t bear to remember all of his pride over his strength and invulnerability while his friends lay dead at his feet.

“Soon they will become ghosts, and if we survive, we will suffer to see their suffering,” he said during their escape, remembering the last days of Comrade Kliwon’s life, when that man had been beaten down by an ever-deepening grief to see the ghosts of his friends in a condition of such grave suffering. Living like that was much too painful, and Maman Gendeng wanted to avoid it.

“There’s no way we can run from ghosts,” said Romeo.

“That’s true, unless we join them, just as Comrade Kliwon finally chose to kill himself.”

“I’m not brave enough to kill myself,” said Romeo.

“I don’t want to either,” said the criminal. “I’m still trying to think of some other solution.”