Man Tiger (8 page)

“What's he up to?” Margio asked Mameh, without Komar hearing.

“He's planning a ceremonial meal for Marian's seventh day.”

Perhaps it was this that drove the tiger out into the open. Margio could not tolerate the damned old man doing anything nice for the dead girl, whom he had completely ignored while she was alive. Margio had come to believe that Komar had killed his youngest, or had at least intentionally let her die. And now the accursed Komar was planning to arrange a seventh-day ceremony. Rot in hell, Margio thought, sure the baby's soul would accept nothing from this man. That was when Mameh caught sight of a reddish, spectral face, apparently covered in fur, a yellowish glint in its eyes. She heard an echoing roar and saw a white shadow dance in its pupils. She almost screamed before it disappeared again, settled behind a cage door that seemed to be shut tight. Margio had confined it, suppressed its savagery.

After the episode with the pan, Komar incarcerated himself in his bedroom, went out only to go to his barbershop, and returned to nestle in bed. Those were the moments when he thought Margio would attack, if not actually kill him. The boy had suddenly grown terrifying. Komar found himself weighing up his son's statistics, his present age, height, weight, as if Margio were a prizefighter, and worst of all was the possibility that he had inherited that damned tiger. The old man was wise enough not to worsen the friction between them. Margio was no longer the meek and submissive lad, sitting quietly in a corner of the house or leaving without a word. He could handle himself, and Komar bin Syueb knew better than to test those young muscles.

Later, Mameh saw her father leave his room, looking sweet as pie. No longer his old talkative self, Komar addressed himself to the chores he had often neglected. He took the palm leaf broom and began sweeping the floor, over and over, even though it was clean, and in the morning and afternoon he filled up the tub for them to wash. The next day, Mameh lost more of her regular tasks as, out of the blue, he deigned to wash their clothes. Mameh wanted to stop all this sweetness, annoyed that her father should have any energy left after his stint at the barbershop. He should have been tired out on his return, but he didn't seem to care. He ignored Mameh and left her with almost nothing to do.

She came to understand his intentions when she noticed the man himself slaughtering the chickens for Marian's seventh-day ritual. She only had to look at him to grasp the truth, as if a certain fate were written on his forehead. He was trying in vain to make peace with them, to erase the rancid traces that went a long way back. It was a vain effort. No one was moved by this overflow of questionable kindness. It was sad, too, because everybody felt it was too late for him to start again.

Margio was the least forgiving. His father's meekness was fuel to his son's hatred, which burned brighter than ever the minute the old man's intentions became clear. Don't think I'll forgive you, Margio thought. He left the house, unwilling to help with whatever Komar was doing, and wandered around various places, kicking the walls of the nightwatch post, drinking at Agus Sofyan's stall, or hurling coconuts in the abandoned plantation, while his father cleaned the chickens by himself, plucking their feathers, carrying the bodies to the kitchen, boiling and frying them, and cooking rice as well. Before dusk he visited the neighbors, inviting them to come after the Isha prayer, to gather together and read the Yassin, for the comfort of Marian's soul.

Margio returned after the neighbors had left, and the mats were still spread out. Up till then everything had been handled by Komar bin Syueb alone. Neither Mameh nor her mother had lifted a finger. Komar told Margio to eat—there was fried chicken and rice and potato stew—but Margio didn't want to touch it. He passed through the kitchen and went into his bedroom, came out again, went to the bathroom to piss and then stepped onto the terrace and stood under a lantern. Mameh came out to coax him to eat, but Margio's only response was to light a cigarette.

In the dim light, Mameh saw the increasingly luminous sheen and the yellow glint in his eyes. She still remembered how Margio had wanted to kill Komar. His eyes shone brilliantly with sharp, piercing rays, and Mameh thought that his stare alone could kill Komar bin Syueb. But she could see the boy's suffering, too. Sweet Margio was at war with evil Margio, and it wouldn't end until his father's life was over. Mameh could see he was exhausted from fighting himself. But Komar bin Syueb would not die at Margio's hands or from the fangs of his pet tiger. That night, after flicking his cigarette butt into the yard, Margio said to Mameh, “I'm leaving” He added, “Otherwise I'll end up killing that man.”

Mameh didn't take his words seriously. To her, he seemed to be saying, “I
want
to leave.” In truth, he had gone long ago. These last few years, Margio had clearly grown unhappy at home, and his true permanent residence had become the nightwatch hut and the surau. He might not come back again to the family house, but he would still be found at his usual places. Mameh later saw how wrong she had been.

One day, on a morning like any other, they suddenly lost Margio. His friends were the first to realize he had gone. They hadn't seen him all day. Someone said he'd been at the circus, but that was its last night in the village, and the whole crew had packed up and left, and no one knew where they were heading. The entire village was certain that one of the circus girls had lured Margio into joining them. Everyone was sure he would return to his birthplace and his true love, who they felt confident was Anwar Sadat's daughter Maharani. Eventually, when some of his friends dropped by the house to ask after him, Mameh realized Margio really had run away.

His disappearance made a lot of people sad, particularly Major Sadrah, who was all set to kill some boars; and also Komar bin Syueb, it seemed. For a week he tried to ignore his eldest child's absence, returning to a familiar routine, feeding the remaining chickens and the three pairs of rabbits. Every morning Komar took out his old bicycle, worn thin with rust, its chain creaking, and like most bikes in the village without brakes or lights. Komar went to the market to gather rotten carrots and cabbages from the vegetable vendors' garbage, and returned home after stopping by the rice mill to get some bran. All this went to his animals. The bran had to be mixed with warm water, stirred and served in several coconut leaves to prevent the chickens from getting in each other's way, while the rotten cabbages and carrots would simply be thrown into the rabbit hutch. Komar busied himself, especially with his extra chores, to make it seem as if he didn't care about Margio's disappearance. But Mameh knew how he really felt.

One morning Komar asked, “Is Margio back yet?”

“Not yet,” Mameh said quietly. “Believe me, he'll be back when it's time for him to get married.”

This was no comfort to Komar, and soon his health declined with the onslaught of various illnesses. The sense of loss he felt was severe; he was back to spending whole days in bed, became dreadfully thin, and muttered in delirium. He gave up on cutting hair, and instead trimmed away at his own soul, snip by snip. Komar complained about a nail inside his stomach, later verified when he vomited blood. His skin turned blue and his body swelled. Mameh went to fetch a hospital orderly, who told her to drag him to the hospital. Mameh called on her mother's two younger brothers, who carried Komar on a stretcher. He had more diseases than the doctors had time to discuss, and was left to sleep in a cold and haunted ward.

His wife didn't want to take care of him in his final decline, and Mameh had to shoulder the burden. She could see the final moment was near. As the ylang-ylang rapidly blossomed, so did the champak, and ravens cawed in the distance. After two days in the hospital, Komar asked to be taken home and said firmly to Mameh, “Don't call for any more doctors. I'm healthy enough to wait for my grave to be dug.”

That was when Komar could still talk. A morning came when he couldn't open his mouth anymore. It shut in defiance of its master, his jaws unbelievably stiff. This had happened before, healing only after a long series of massages from a shaman who rubbed his neck and toes with onion juice. This time Mameh didn't know whether Komar would ever open his mouth again. Three shamans tried unsuccessfully to knead his jaws back to life. It was an all-too-obvious omen of his approaching death. Komar suffered greatly, rolled about on his mattress, smacked his cheeks, clawed at his mouth, adding his own tortures to the pains that wracked his body. He couldn't eat unless the food was turned to pulp. Mameh had to feed him vegetable gruel, which Komar would push in with his index finger, making himself cough, slobbering on his mattress. Soon his hands couldn't move either, as if the nerves had been cut. Mameh had to feed him sweet tea, as there wasn't much that Komar could eat. Within a few days his shrunken frame resembled a quivering house lizard.

One night Mameh heard Komar growl and, going to his side, asked if he was in pain. But it wasn't his body that tortured him and forced out a second grunt. He wanted to speak, so Mameh leaned close and strained to make out what he was saying. It was no good. Komar's mumbling was incomprehensible. Mameh cleverly thought of handing him some paper and a pencil from her schooldays, but that only increased his despair, because Komar's hands no longer functioned. Mameh came up with a better idea. She took the paper and pencil and every time she wrote something suitable, Komar would briefly nod and his mouth would strain to form a smile. It took half the night, and it felt like much longer, to put together a simple short sentence. In this way, the dying man managed to convey his last wish: “Bury me next to Marian.”

The next day Mameh passed the message to her mother. For a long time, the woman had rarely opened her mouth, but to this wish she generously replied, “Tell that to the gravedigger.”

Clearly, Komar bin Syueb had sought reconciliation at the end of his life, and in particular to make amends to the baby who had perhaps died because of him. Lying in bed at night, Mameh heard a crow make a rumpus on their roof. When it flew away, its cawing echoed in her memory. She wanted to ignore superstition, but everyone said that when a crow perched on a roof, it meant there would be a death in that house. She didn't fall asleep until dawn, and that was when he died, the pain and suffering of waiting for his eldest child's return too much for him. Nothing made Mameh sadder than the thought of her father longing for his son, even though she was pretty certain that had Margio come back before his father died, he would have taken Komar's life himself.

That morning, Mameh saw her father sprawled on his bed. His body had deteriorated into an anonymous lump of flesh, a sight to put even a crow off its food. No one had slit his throat, even though Komar had suspected that someday someone in their home would do it. Even Margio had refrained from cutting off his head. The old man died of natural causes, his mind gone. “Sayonara,” he said, and slipped out through the grated window, towed along by the Angel of Death, looking back at his final days, at his sour-smelling mattress, his damp bedroom, and his barren world.

That was the end of a long-established household routine. Just before daybreak, Mameh had been the first to wake up at number 131. As if sleepwalking, she would finish the tasks her half-dead father could no longer handle, she would go to his room with a small bucket containing warm water with a face cloth floating on top. In his final days, with the pain worsening rapidly, the smell of cemetery soil in his nostrils, Komar repented a little and forced his ailing body to pray. Mameh helped with the ablutions, washing his hands, feet, and face, and let him pray lying down. Five times a day. One touch from Mameh's hand was enough to wake him, telling him that the call to dawn prayer was imminent, and Komar would open his eyes, not moving at all, as if he was glued to his sheet, his head sinking onto three tiers of rotten pillows, his limp body obscured beneath the black and white striped blanket from the hospital.

When dawn came and the touch of Mameh's hand didn't awaken Komar, she shook him, but he didn't even twitch. His eyes were open, but he was gone. When she realized this, she swiftly put the bucket on the floor before she dropped it. The girl touched her breast, mumbled in bewilderment, and then, prompted by deaths she had seen in movies, she closed her father's eyes. “Sayonara,” she said, your scissors and combs will testify for you. She looked around to make sure there was some exit from the room for his soul. Sat on the floor was a bowl containing the water she had used to cool Komar's forehead the previous night; elsewhere some vegetable gruel, an untouched green banana and a glass of fermenting sweet tea on the bedside table.

This was the daughter who in her entire eighteen years of life had never even been given a pair of earrings by her father. Hanging from her ears were coiled mattress threads, meant to prevent the pierced skin from sealing up. She had always been holding out for two or three grams of gold. True, Komar once took little Mameh out for a picnic by the sea, and proudly taught her how to make a sandcastle. True, Komar once told Mameh to go to a tailor to get herself a dress for Eid ul-Fitr. And one time he took her to the cinema to see
Pandawa Lima
. It was a safe bet that when he died, Mameh would remember none of those things, and the dead man knew it.

The muezzin's call floated in from the surau on the eastern side of Anwar Sadat's house. Following Ma Soma's husky voice came the sound of neighboring doors being opened, keys being turned or latches being slid into place, and the susurration of slippers dragging along the small alley to the surau, mongrels barking as they rose from a deep sleep, while roosters flapped their wings before crowing in four bursts of noise, the last one sounding like a long sigh. Mameh went to the room where she slept with her mother, and woke her to say: “Father's dead.” When her mother got up she made sure her husband had died of natural causes, and not from being strangled by her daughter.