Beauty Is a Wound (9 page)

Muin’s only other job had been as a letter courier: there were no household telephones yet, and a “letter” was actually a double-sided chalkboard slate. She’d often exchange gossip with her school friends by writing on one side of the chalkboard. Muin would then run to her friend’s house with the slate and wait for the reply to be written on the other side. Waiting, he would be treated to a cold drink and some small cakes, which he ate with gusto, and he would come home bringing the board, plus all the gossip from the other household servants. He enjoyed the work, and Dewi Ayu sent him out almost every day.

The only chalkboard she did not send with Muin was the last chalkboard she ever sent, her message to Ma Gedik, which Mr. Willie and a tough guy delivered to his shack.

“That chalkboard is also for you,” she said.

Then she turned to Supi the washerwoman, the queen of the water pump and soap. When she was little the old woman had always kept her company as she slept, singing the lullaby
Nina Bobo
, and telling her the fairy tale of
Lutung Kasarung
. Her husband worked as the gardener. He always had a machete at his hip and a sickle in his hand, and often came home with surprise packages—a black kitten, snake eggs, a monitor lizard—or with delightful gifts like a bunch of king bananas, a half-ripe soursop, or a sack full of mangos.

There were a number of tough guys—the house guards, the garden security, and the goat-pen guards—and she hugged them all. For the first time in many years, Dewi Ayu wept. Leaving them behind felt like losing a piece of her own body. At last she stood looking at Mr. Willie. “I am crazy, and only a crazy person would marry a crazy person,” she told him. “And I don’t want to marry a crazy person.” She kissed him before leaving with the two Japanese soldiers who would wait no longer.

“Take care of my house,” she said to them for the last time, “unless these people seize it.”

She climbed up into the back of the truck idling in front of the house. She almost didn’t fit because it was already crowded with women and their crying and screaming children. She waved to the servants still standing on the house veranda. For sixteen years she had lived there, never going beyond the city limits except for a few short vacations to Bandung or Batavia. She saw the borzois running from behind the house and barking in the yard that was filled with the Japanese grass they loved to roll around in, with jasmine flowers creeping next to the house and sunflowers growing near the fence. That was their dominion, and Dewi Ayu hoped Mr. Willie would take good care of them. The truck began to move and Dewi Ayu struggled to breathe pressed up against the bodies of all the other women. She still waved in the direction of the barking borzoi dogs.

“It can’t be believed, that we are leaving our own houses behind!” said the woman next to her. “I hope it won’t be for long.”

“
I
hope that our army can beat back the Japanese,” said Dewi Ayu. “Otherwise we are going to be traded like sugar and rice.”

Natives squatted along the sides of the road, watching the people jostling around in the back of the truck with impassive gazes. But then a number of them were brought to tears when they caught sight of the few Dutch women they knew, and handkerchiefs began to wave in between sobs. Dewi Ayu wiped away her own tears, smiling at the strange sight. The natives were kind and innocent, obedient, and a little bit lazy. Dewi Ayu recognized some of them; they had worked on her grandfather’s cocoa plantation and she often had snuck away to their huts. She liked them because they told her many fantastic tales about
wayang
and
buta
, and they loved to laugh, and they would dress her up in their tight sarongs and
kebaya
lace blouses and pull her hair back in a bun. They were very poor, they were only allowed to watch movies from behind the screen so that the picture was backward, and they were never at the club or the dance hall unless it was to sweep up. “Look,” she said to another woman next to her, “they must be confused by two foreign nations making war on their land.”

The journey seemed to take forever as they headed toward the prison on the western shore on a small delta of the Rengganis River. Up until this point the prison had been filled only with serious criminals: killers and rapists, and political prisoners of the colonial government, most of them communists held there temporarily before being tossed into Boven-Digoel. The women baked beneath the blazing tropical sun, without a parasol or anything to drink. In the middle of the journey the truck came to a halt; its radiator got some water but the people got nothing.

Dewi Ayu, exhausted from crouching and looking out at the road, turned around and leaned back against the wall of the truck and realized that she actually knew some of the women quite well—they were her neighbors and her friends from school. The Dutch had a fairly close-knit social life. If you were a child, you would meet up almost every afternoon at the bay to swim. If you were a teenager, you would meet at the dance hall or the movie theater or the comedy shows. If you were an adult, you’d meet at the club. Dewi Ayu recognized some of her friends. They flashed each other bitter smiles, and one of them jokingly asked her, “So, how are you?”

With sincere conviction, Dewi Ayu answered, “I’m terrible. We’re heading for a prison camp.”

That was enough to make them laugh a little bit.

The girl who had started the joke was named Jenny. They used to go swimming together, floating on an old inner tube Dewi Ayu kept in the car. Those had been happy times, before the thunder of war. Young men would stand near the water, and old men would sit in the sand under umbrellas with tobacco pipes in their mouths, all there just to ogle the young women in their bathing suits. She also knew what they were up to in the changing room. What they called the changing room was really a natural spring at the edge of the beach, enclosed by woven bamboo. Even though the men’s and women’s sections were divided, she often caught eyes peeping through the cracks in the weaving. She would peep right back and shout, “Oh my God, yours is so small!” The men would usually flee, mortified.

From time to time the appearance of a shark fin would throw the swimmers into an uproar, but no one was ever attacked. Halimunda Beach was too shallow and they usually just swam back out to sea. Sometimes small sharks would get tangled in the fishermen’s nets, but the fishermen always set them free, saying it was bad luck to keep them. Sharks were not the only animals to fear, since crocodiles lived near the mouth of the river and they liked to eat people too.

Now the bay, with all its gentle waves, must have been filled with only native kids, who always went barefoot and whose bodies were always crusted with dirt, and who always moved aside when the young ladies and gentlemen went swimming. Dewi Ayu wondered whether they would be allowed to go swimming in prison.

“Pray that we don’t meet a crocodile,” said a middle-aged woman with a baby in her lap.

She said this with good reason. To reach the prison in the middle of the delta, they would have to cross the water. After their unpleasant journey in the truck, they now stopped at the river. Japanese soldiers roamed the banks, screaming at the women in their own language, which no one understood.

The women were crammed into a ferryboat, which was way more frightening than the truck, because now there was the chance they could drown, and as the woman had said, a crocodile could appear at any time and none of them could outswim such a beast. The ship moved excruciatingly slowly, circling to avoid facing the current directly. Clumpy with black soot, smoke from the chimney pipe floated up into the sky. A group of herons was startled by the noise and took flight, coming to perch in the shallow water; yet this view did not feel beautiful as they arrived at an old building standing behind some bushes, looking as if it had been emptied out especially to hold prisoners of war. This was Bloedenkamp, a prison with a bloody history, feared even by criminals. Once inside, there was little chance for escape unless you could swim a mile across the wide river faster than a crocodile.

Once the boat docked the Japanese soldiers started screaming again, and the women jumped down as quickly as they could. Children began to cry, and there was some commotion: a suitcase was flung into the river and its owner got drenched trying to catch it, a sleeping pallet fell into the mud, and a mother was separated from her child who was trampled in the chaos. The group walked toward the prison, passing through three iron gates guarded by soldiers. Before entering, they lined up in front of a table where two Japanese men sat clutching a list. Next to them there was a basket for money and valuables. A number of women were already taking off their jewelry and tossing it in.

“Do it before we search you,” ordered one of the soldiers in proper Malay.

You can go ahead and search my shit,
Dewi Ayu thought to herself.

The prison was way more disgusting than a pigsty. The roof leaked, the walls were splattered with old blood, with moss and weeds growing through the cracks, and the floor was dirty, teeming with lice, cockroaches, and leeches. Sewer rats as big as a child’s thigh ran around in a frenzy, startled by the newcomers, zigzagging in between the women’s legs as they hopped up and down shrieking. The women scrambled to mark their own territory with their suitcases as quickly as possible, cleaning up and sobbing all the while. Dewi Ayu claimed a small spot in the middle of a hall, unfurled her mattress, and with her suitcase for a pillow, she lay down exhausted. She was lucky she didn’t have a mother or a child who needed tending and that she hadn’t forgotten the quinine tablets and other medicines, because there was the threat of malaria and dysentery: the toilet didn’t work.

That evening there was no food. The small scraps that each of the women had brought had been finished by lunchtime. Someone asked the Japanese men about food, and they replied maybe tomorrow or the next day. That night they would have to go hungry. Dewi Ayu went out of the hall toward the fields. The three prison gates were open and people could roam out of the fort to walk around. When she had arrived earlier, Dewi Ayu had spotted some cows. Maybe they belonged to the native wardens or the farmers who lived in the delta. She had gathered a bunch of leeches while cleaning her spot in the prison hall, stacking them inside a Blue Band margarine tin. She found one of the cows grazing, the fattest one, and plastered the leeches onto its hide. The cow only glanced up for a moment, undisturbed, and Dewi Ayu sat on a rock waiting. She knew the leeches were sucking the cow’s blood, and when they were full, they would fall off like ripe apples. She plucked them off the ground and put them back inside the tin. Now they looked swollen and fat.

Making a small campfire, she boiled all the leeches in the tin with some water from the river. Without adding any seasoning, she quickly brought them back to the hall that was now her new home. “Dinner is served,” she said to a number of women and children who were living near her, her new neighbors. No one was interested in eating leeches, and one woman practically retched at the very thought of such a meal. “We’re not eating the leeches, but cow’s blood,” Dewi Ayu explained. She split open the leeches with a small knife, pulled out the clots of cow’s blood inside them, stabbed them with the point of the knife, and swallowed them. Nobody moved to join in her savage meal, at least not until night fell and they could no longer bear their hunger. Then they tried it. It tasted bland, but sort of good.

“We won’t starve,” said Dewi Ayu. “In addition to leeches, there are geckos, lizards, and mice.”

“Okay,” the women said hurriedly, “great, thanks.”

That first night was truly gruesome. Daylight disappeared quickly, as it does in the tropics. Though there was no electricity, almost everyone had brought candles, and their small flames crowded the walls with trembling shadows that terrified the small children. Stretched out on sleeping pallets, looking quite pitiful, no one could get any sleep. Mice skittered over them in the dark, mosquitoes buzzed from one ear to another, and flying foxes crisscrossed overhead. Even worse were the surprise inspections from the Japanese soldiers, looking for people who were still hiding money or jewelry. Morning came but promised nothing.

Bloedenkamp was filled with about five thousand women and children, gathered from who knows where. The only ray of hope came from a fortune-teller, who consulted her deck of cards and told them that American pilots were dropping bombs on the Japanese barracks. Dewi Ayu quickly rushed to the toilet, but a long line of people were already waiting so she took some water in her Blue Band margarine container, and went out to the fields. There, in between some yam trees, she dug a little hole and defecated like a cat. After she washed herself, saving a little bit of leftover water, she scraped at her own excrement looking for her six rings. A number of other women imitated her nasty routine at a safe distance, but they didn’t know that Dewi Ayu was guarding treasure. She then washed the rings with the rest of the water and swallowed them down again. She didn’t know what would happen after the war. Maybe she would lose her house and the plantation, but she vowed that she would not lose her rings. She returned to the hall not knowing if she’d be able to bathe that day or not.

That morning, the newcomers had to stand in the field baked by the sun, the children crying and the women about to faint, waiting for the camp commandant and his staff. The commandant then appeared with a thick mustache and a samurai sword swinging back and forth at his hip, his boots reflecting the blinding rays of the sun. He told the prisoners they had to bow down deeply, past their waist, to all the Japanese soldiers as soon as the order
Keirei!
was given, and they could only stand up straight again once they had heard the order
Naore!
“That is the sign of respect for the Japanese Empire,” he explained through his translator. Those who did not obey would get a fitting punishment: they would be given extra work, be whipped, or even be killed.