Eka Kurniawan - Man Tiger

They stayed silent a long time until she heard the voices of people returning from the surau. It crossed her mind to go outside, to greet them and announce that Komar bin Syueb was dead in the hope they would offer some help in dealing with the body, but she didn’t know how to explain herself. It would be embarrassing and inappropriate to say, “Uncle, my father is dead,” because the cheerful tone in her voice would betray her. She waited for the sound of footsteps to disappear, wishing Nuraeni would provide some advice, perhaps telling her to go to a particular house to deliver the news. When Marian died, Margio handled everything. Mameh didn’t even know who to speak to.

Sounds of life multiplied, right and left, from the neighboring houses, as earthen and oil stoves were lit and children pissed on banana plants. Dirty dishes were stacked in the washbasins, water buckets were hoisted from the wells, and tubs were filled. She could hear bicycles passing by, rushing to the market carrying empty baskets, or full ones if the bicycle’s owner was off to sell. Far along the street the bells of horse carts clanked in harmony with the clatter of iron horseshoes. Again the dogs barked, before rolling on the sandy ground to snooze once again. But in the kitchen there was only the sound of the simmering water and the soft rustle of Nuraeni’s shaking shoulders. This is the woman Komar bin Syueb used to ride so cruelly, Mameh thought.

It was an incident long past, but Mameh would never forget what happened on a night so cold it brought on a frantic need to piss. She dammed up the urge until a flood threatened. Her bladder would be contained no longer and forced her out of bed. When she couldn’t find her mother, she went to another room where Margio slept like a dead man. It was such a dark night that Mameh didn’t have the courage to go to the bathroom alone, but the tranquility of Margio’s sleep discouraged her from waking him up. Wondering where her parents were, Mameh crawled toward the kitchen, feeling around for the storeroom’s light switch.

She didn’t turn on the light. A neighbor’s terrace lamp gleamed through the lattice window into the storeroom. Upon the trunk she saw two naked figures struggling with each other like the jockey and steed she had once seen at a Sunday horse race at the coconut plantation. As she stared at the silhouettes on the big trunk, images from that race flashed vividly through her mind. Nuraeni was bent forward like a horse at the gallop, and Komar bin Syueb was thrusting into her from behind. She could see Komar’s buttocks whipping savagely, and each thrust was followed by Nuraeni’s moan, like a cow whose throat was being cut. That idea was vivid, too, since Mameh had herself seen a cow’s throat slashed for the Festival of Sacrifice.

She nearly wet herself, standing there, watching the sweat-soaked figures and listening to the moans of her mother being violently penetrated. She crawled to the bathroom, spilled the contents of her bladder, and returned to her room without once wanting to peek again into the storeroom. She couldn’t sleep afterward. Over the years, the memory lived on, producing sadness and disgust respectively at the sight of her mother and father.

Mameh was only fourteen then, an age when she was perturbed and fascinated by the changes in her body, and in particular by the flesh that, as she put it, talking to herself, “had suddenly poked out of my chest.” She looked at her nipples and thought, half-proudly, “They’re like bullets,” somewhat annoyed by their inconspicuous shape. If her shirt exposed her breasts, however slightly, men probed her with their eyes unpleasantly. Every morning her chest size seemed to have expanded overnight, a thought that sometimes made her wonder if a separate woman wasn’t starting to emerge from the teenage girl.

She was happiest with her body when shut away in the bathroom. There was a large mirror over the water tub, the remains of a cupboard a cat had knocked over and smashed. The mirror was a magic window into an alternate world. Half of Mameh’s time in the bathroom was spent standing naked, admiring her own form and those growing breasts. Here she felt like a complete woman. She liked her new breasts, praised them, cupping them with her hands, measuring their growth from one shower to the next, and sometimes jiggling them, wondering what was inside. She was urged on by her admiration of the bold and curvaceous mature women seen on the neighborhood streets. She was smaller in size, but in front of the mirror she mimicked the movements of the bigger, older women.

But the world accessed through that mirror was a vulnerable one, because the bathroom door no longer had a latch. Everyone thought to buy one when they took a shower, but no sooner were they dry than the idea was gone. Noise was the only sign that the room was occupied, and once, when Mameh had not touched the bathwater for minutes as she stood examining her new figure, the door was abruptly flung open. Time stopped.

Komar bin Syueb stood there in briefs and an undershirt, a cigarette in his mouth, hands holding the briefs’ string to prevent them from slipping. Mameh screamed, floating and drifting a moment in consciousness, before collapsing and burying her face between her knees. Mameh would always recall the incident as taking a long time, lasting longer than her own life. Without lifting her face, Mameh heard Komar shut the door and slowly walk away without a word, feet wide as he struggled to restrain his need to shit. The moment he was gone, Mameh pissed herself.

Father knows my breasts stick out and there’s a bush between my legs, she thought. He had uncovered his daughter’s secrets. Throughout the years, Komar knew Mameh wished he could forget what had happened. Komar never did, though no one can say why. And Mameh knew as much. At first she avoided him whenever possible, and Komar had to leave her pocket money on the table. He had never wanted to see his daughter naked, and didn’t now, despite the demonic nature that could possess him. But Mameh felt violated, and he could tell she did and prepared himself for the day when she came at him with a kitchen knife. But like Margio, she demurred. Instead she nursed him as he died.

Komar’s death was a happy event for Mameh. That same sense of happiness should have come to Nuraeni. Or was her sobbing a way of celebrating, a form of release?

Morning had come, and neither woman had done a thing with the body, which was stiffening on its bed. They remained imprisoned in the kitchen, moving around from time to time to ease their aching joints. The water had come to a boil with a whistle, and Mameh turned it off. She should be cooking rice, but the urge to get busy wilted at the sight of Nuraeni still ensconced on the stool in front of the stove.

Outside, schoolchildren had already passed by and the world had become warm and full of song. Only inside the house did the murkiness increase, with the closed doors, the scruffiness of the two women, their faces unwashed since daybreak, with no desire to shower. Time had stopped. Mameh turned to stand by the door, and Nuraeni gradually stopped crying but didn’t move. The smell of death had become less oppressive with the day’s arrival, the sunlight slanting through the perforated ceiling, the lattices and the cracked walls.

It was one o’clock before they knew it, and Mameh went to the bathroom to piss. She opened the door without thinking, and dazzling daylight burst into the kitchen, while her feet moved on aimlessly, her nostrils widened to the fresh aroma of the front yard and its lush flowering shrubs. She stood on the terrace in her crumpled clothes and tangled hair, resembling a scarecrow hit by the previous night’s storm, until their neighbor Jafar approached the house and stopped to consider Mameh’s wretched appearance. They stared at each other. Mystified, Jafar thought the girl had lost her mind. Her eyes were blank and lusterless.