Man Tiger (10 page)

They were lucky to get a well, although they had to clean that too before a rope-and-bucket system was installed. The bathroom was the most luxurious thing in the house, made of a cement base mixed with fragments of ceramic tiles, with a clogged toilet that took a month to fix. Until then they had to shit in the cacao plantation or a small ditch behind the brick factory. The house had two bedrooms, for which Komar brought two wooden beds one morning, one for himself, Nuraeni, and little Mameh, and the other for Margio. Later on this changed. One room belonged to Nuraeni and Mameh, and the other to Komar bin Syueb. Margio was relegated to the divan in the living room, the nightwatch hut, the surau, or Agus Sofyan's stall.

The land itself belonged to an old woman named Ma Rabiah who, like Anwar Sadat's wife Kasia, owned land that stretched past the borders of several villages. The houses along the side of the big road had been built on lots successfully acquired from the previous owner. That had happened back when families would come and go, bringing frameworks for their houses, which looked as if they could all be folded and packed into sacks. Some of the newcomers on the narrow road never told Ma Rabiah what they were doing until she saw for herself the white houses stood there, the front yards adorned by beautiful jasmine trees. Should any squatters decide to move on, they would dislodge the bamboo walls, roll them up, and carry them away along with the house's wooden framework, and then someone would come to take their place.

“Here we are, waiting until Ma Rabiah kicks us out, when we'll have to roll all this stuff up again,” said Nuraeni, once they had made the house livable.

In her whole life, Ma Rabiah had never evicted a soul. The settlers came and went as they pleased. The old granny never even collected rent or came to ask for help with the taxes. She liked to talk about other matters and to pass the hours chortling away with other women before going home. She was the kind, old widow of an army veteran, and the only compensation the squatters gave their landlady was the tins of biscuits sent to her home every Eid ul-Fitr. She never asked for them, nor were her decaying teeth up to eating them.

Many years before, when the area was nothing but a jungle of shrubs except for where the fishermen lived along the shore, those plots of land had no owners at all. The first settlers were a band of nomads from the east who divided the land among themselves with boundary stakes. These people, said to be twelve men who arrived on donkeys, valiantly chased away the boars and the ajaks, set up houses and farms for the first time, and became owners of land that spread out past boundaries unseen. They awed the fishermen who congregated along the banks of the rivers. They cut down the bushes, cultivated rice, and came to be remembered as the founders of the township.

They brought in beautiful women, from the fishing villages and elsewhere, married them and their children inherited the land: the farms, rice fields, and coconut plantations. One of these founder families produced Ma Rabiah, and another spawned Kasia. Kasia came from the fourth generation of the boundary stakes people, while Ma Rabiah was said to come from the third, even though what she owned almost couldn't be calculated or charted, even after she divided the land among her cousins. When Komar bin Syueb came to reside there, the stakes were said still to stand where they were first planted.

As a girl Ma Rabiah married a soldier during the fledgling years of the Republic, and they lived quite prosperously without having to rely on her land, supporting themselves through open smuggling activities controlled by the local military. This lasted right through the revolution years and beyond. Mayor Sadrah could confirm all this as true. Thus the myriad pieces of land went to seed in the hands of two people who probably forgot even owning them. The lands reverted to a jungle of shrubs where cogongrass and reeds flourished wildly—until the day people began to arrive as the town took shape, regarding with wonder the endless parcels of neglected land. They came to Ma Rabiah's house, hoping to rent or buy, but since she didn't need money, she told them to live there for free. But some owners of the houses along the big road insisted on paying, because they didn't want to be disturbed or evicted, and because they could afford it.

Ma Rabiah and her husband had eight children, all of them well known among the townsfolk for their ruthless entrepreneurship. One of them was the first to build a cinema with screenings three times a day, every day of the week. Another opened a donut shop, advertising the number-one donuts in the world. Still another set up a shrimp factory, or rather bought up shrimp and fish from all the fishermen along half the southern coast, to be resold to shrimp-eating nations. People referred to his giant tanks and freezers as a factory. All these children traveled around in shiny cars and became the town's celebrities, as well as nightmares to those squatting on their mother's property.

Not long after their father's death, the siblings began to wrangle over land inheritance, not caring in the least that these plots belonged to their living mother. The eldest kicked out a family that had resided there for eighteen years. Indifferent to their pleas, he was going to build an ice factory. The family had to disassemble their home and move. Envious of the actions of the eldest, the younger siblings evicted several other families, making way for shops, factories, and fishponds, or simply letting some plots deteriorate into lairs for evil spirits. They set up new boundary stakes, dividing the land among themselves without consulting their mother.

No one uttered a word of complaint to Ma Rabiah, but she could read what she saw in her tenants' eyes. She had always enjoyed surveying her empire, walking from shack to shack and communing with her people. But now she was alarmed by the actions of eight ungrateful brats. She rebuked them for their arrogance in evicting people without telling her, but they were more obstinate than the devil himself, worse than she had ever imagined. Not only did they refuse to apologize, they retaliated with even more evictions.

Hurt by her children, she would say to various people: “Find me a way to write them out of my will.”

One day the plan arrived in a moment of inspiration. She'd been going from one house to the next, sitting with the men and women, telling them she was going to sell her land, that they would have to pay for the plots they occupied. Every one of her tenants, including Komar, wished they could call the land their own, but not many had the money. At some point in her travels through the neighborhood, Ma Rabiah arrived at one obvious, simple solution.

“I'll sell it as
cheaply
as possible.”

For Komar,
cheaply
meant he had to shave as many as one hundred and twenty heads pay for the land where his house stood and for the small front garden. It was their eighth year here, and Komar had been saving money to recover the wedding ring he had pawned, although until the day he died he never managed to retrieve it. The other neighbors withdrew their modest savings, borrowed money from Makojah, the town's moneylender, or sold their motorbikes and necklaces, so that in a year the plots of land quickly changed hands.

Transfer deeds were written up, signed, marked with the old woman's thumbprint, and sealed with revenue stamps. People's worries faded away. The day when they would have to fold their houses into sacks would never come. Their deeds were framed and hung in their living rooms, like degree certificates, their most valuable possessions. Their love for Ma Rabiah grew, even if a tin of unwanted biscuits was its only expression.

The sums paid were small, but cumulatively the deeds marked with Ma Rabiah's thumbprint added up to real wealth. She had never thought she would be truly rich, but the money was now literally piled under her bed. Even if she wanted to hide it somewhere safe, she would have no idea where. She worried her eight children would learn about the money scattered around her home, and then she found a solution. What she did would cause a sensation among the townsfolk for years to come, and would evolve into a tale passed between generations along with the town's other legends.

In the few remaining days of her old age, Ma Rabiah splashed out on a pair of horses, so gentle the children played with them, which she let loose by the seashore. She also bought a bus because, as people said, ever since her childhood she'd always loved riding on buses. But because she couldn't drive it, the vehicle just sat behind her house and became a chicken coop. One day she went to the cinema belonging to one of her sons without telling him, and bought up all the tickets to watch the film alone. Everyone still remembers that film,
Puteri Giok
, because she then bought up more tickets so that people could go see it free of charge for the next two days. Not quite done with her splurge, she went to a clothes shop and bought five wedding gowns she would never wear, except for one she slept in that very night and another for when she died. She bought a sack of bread and shared the contents with some little kids, and finished the remnants while riding a tricycle, on which she pedaled home in gales of laughter.

Her children only found out what was going on after a series of unsuccessful attempts to dismantle several houses. The newly titled owners stopped the evictions in their tracks by holding up the framed transfer deeds. It was only then they saw the horses cantering in the wild and with horror noticed the bus full of chicken shit. To top it all, the cinema manager ratted on their mother. Infuriated, the children plotted together to grab whatever was left, drew up a long letter saying she would bequeath them what remained, and tried to force Ma Rabiah to impress her thumbprint upon it. Dismayed, the old woman shook her head, refusing to give in.

As would be remembered forever, that morning Ma Rabiah wore one of her wedding gowns for the last time, having rejected her children's rough entreaties. She sat on a small bench before her house, eating the soil in her frontyard lump by lump. Some people tried to stop her, but she insisted she was better off eating the land, rather than letting it fall into the hands of her damned children, who cared more for their mother's wealth than for her. All the while she kept on scooping soil into her mouth. Someone reported all this to the children, as well as to the police and the officers at the military base. But by the time they arrived she was sprawled out in her beautiful satin and lace wedding dress, cold and lifeless. Somebody said she had choked on a handful of gravel. Ma Rabiah's stubbornness in guarding the land to her death became legendary.

That's how Komar bin Syueb came to own his house and the land it stood on. He never ceased to be surprised by this good fortune. Though still unquestionably poor, he had reached a level of affluence he always thought beyond him. Now he no longer gave haircuts on the terrace, but at the market instead, waiting with his bike under a tropical almond tree, next to a chicken and noodle stall, before handing the spot to a
bajigur
vendor who sold hot, sweet coconut milk at night.

Despite this good luck, Margio and Nuraeni never forgot their initial disappointment at finding House 131 no better than a lair for evil spirits, and as a young girl the family's deed of ownership brought Mameh no happiness. In reality not much had changed in the eight years they had been living there, except that Margio and Mameh had grown, and Nuraeni become more shrunken and disheveled.

Those who had known her since her childhood could see how far she had deteriorated. You only had to glance at her long-expired identity card, printed early in her marriage, and the beautiful woman pictured there, all curly hair and plump cheeks, radiant round eyes glowing. Compare that to her appearance now, a faded beauty, her eyes grey and dim, her cheeks hollow, and her fair skin no longer radiant but chalky. Nothing expressed her discontent more eloquently than her wasted looks. Komar bin Syueb knew it very well. The day he told Nuraeni the land was theirs she was no more thrilled than she would have been had he returned home with three kilos of rice.

“At least now you can plant it with flowers and no one will ever cut them down,” said Komar, trying to arouse her enthusiasm.

The enthusiasm never came. Nuraeni simply hid away in the kitchen, as she often did these days to avoid her husband. She sat on a small stool in front of the stove. Komar had registered her new habit and understood what it meant. He watched her talking to the stove and pan. At first he thought she was just moaning inarticulately, muttering noises not intended to be understood, but as the days passed it became clear that Nuraeni was actually conversing with these inanimate objects, engaged in conversations no one else could understand.

This was when he decided his wife had lost her wits. But perhaps she was just pretending to be crazy, since she behaved normally most of the time and could be coaxed into conversation. She still complained about this and that, told the kids to do their chores, berated Mameh for forgetting to sweep the house, or called Margio to shoo a gecko away. But quite often she would become unbalanced and recognize no one but herself. Komar saw this as lunacy, and her craziness seemed to be getting worse, as both Mameh and Margio would later discover.

He had married Nuraeni when she was sixteen years old and he was nearly thirty. As was common in the village, the match was an arranged one, and the engagement had lasted four years. On the day Syueb came with a pail full of rice and noodles and a dark blue scarf to ask for her hand in marriage on behalf of Komar, she was a girl whose breasts were only budding and with hair still sparse between her legs. Of course, the two fathers had discussed the matter already, meaning that even this proposal was arranged, a formality. They agreed that once Nuraeni was able to bear a child, the two would be married in the nearest surau. Present at the time were Syueb and the girl's father, their wives, and a couple of other relatives, whereas Komar was off somewhere, perhaps in the big city looking for work, like most of the local young men, and Nuraeni was probably out washing clothes at the water spout or searching for clams with her friends.