Eka Kurniawan - Man Tiger

It had only been three days since Mameh had bathed her mother with water and flower petals. The baby was coming too early, and though it might still live, it would be better off staying put a while longer. He waited nervously, as if it was his own child. He found some clove cigarettes in his pocket, and smoked non-stop during those tense minutes, listening to Kasia’s voice offering solace and encouragement, and to Nuraeni’s groans as she tried to push the child into the world.

Near three in the morning, as Margio impatiently watched the clock, the baby’s cries were heard. The baby won’t like Komar, Margio thought, his trembling fingers throwing a cigarette into the ashtray. He wanted to get a look at the baby, despite his trepidation. He was still certain it would be a girl. Mameh and Jafar’s wife hadn’t moved from their post by the door. It wasn’t yet time to go in. Kasia hadn’t called them, though the baby’s cries were slicing through the darkness. Later, Jafar’s wife came out carrying the rolls of cloth, the bedsheet, and a blanket soaked with blood into the bathroom. Mameh was carrying a different bundle. A fetid smell hung in the air.

Kasia appeared at the door, disposing of her rubber gloves in a plastic bag, which she gave to Mameh to throw away, and reminded Margio to properly bury the other bundle Mameh had in her hands. Margio stood up, ready to obey, but he was held back at the bedroom door by the scene inside.

His mother lay there with the baby swaddled tight beside her, no longer crying, but feeding at its mother’s breast. A very emotional scene it was, under the dim light that always came in from the neighbors’ house via a cluster of wires dangling from their roof. Nuraeni was looking intently into the baby’s face, stroking the hair on her delicate head.

“Look, Komar,” Margio mumbled to his absent father, “her face is cursed to be very happy.”

Under the dim gleam of a peanut vendor’s lamp, she was as beautiful as a girl painted on a Chinese porcelain vase. Her abundant hair hung very straight. It was fine, sifted in the slightest wind and dancing with her every movement. She was five foot two and slender as a stork. Her figure was girlish, and her cheerful expression made more alluring by lips that pouted with every word she uttered. As befitting her name, Maharani, queen of queens, she could conquer anyone. When she took Margio’s hand in a firm grasp, he trembled and the valiant boar-vanquisher was nothing more than an adorably tongue-tied schoolboy.

People were flocking to the film screen set up in the middle of the soccer field, while across the way sat a pickup truck belonging to the herbal tonic company. A man was talking into a microphone about the properties of their tonics as the crowd waited impatiently for the film to start. Some of the townspeople gathered around the pickup, lured by prizes— umbrellas, fans, wall clocks, and, most valuable of all, an eighteen-inch television set — to buy tonics that would boost virility, tighten a woman’s sexual organs, work as a diet aid, improve the appetite, cure gastritis, overcome fatigue, and so on.

Margio and his friends stood behind the peanut vendor. After months at university, Maharani had become a real city girl, but it seemed that she couldn’t find a boy she liked better than Margio. She always came back for him. She was wearing a tight yellow sweater to ward off the chill, a pair of flared jeans, and flip-flops. Still holding Margio’s hand, the girl coyly tugged at his arm and kissed it sweetly.

They had never held hands like that before, and Margio was fascinated by the girl’s nerve. It made him feel confused and vulnerable. He couldn’t even turn to look at the face he so adored, and instead stared at the silhouettes of people going back and forth like fleeting shadows on the screen. He wanted very much to join them, but the skin of his arm retained a memory of the girl’s lips that distracted him. Sweat trickled down the nape of his neck. He had once gone to a brothel, with a group of friends, and when it was his turn to mount the voluptuous, middle-aged woman on the bed, Margio shivered violently, horrified rather than aroused. The way he felt now surpassed the panic he had felt then, which he only survived thanks to the prostitute’s skill in stroking and slowly stiffening his desire. Now he was looking for help from anyone at all. He was hoping the girl would free him from this awkward situation, and help did come when she squeezed his hand more tightly. Margio turned and met her gaze, her sparkling face. He took it all in at once, her slender nose, curved eyelashes, and parted lips.

“Do you know that I love you?” she said.

If she weren’t Anwar Sadat’s daughter and the younger sister of Laila and Maesa Dewi, perhaps Margio would have been more shocked to hear her say it. Trying not to upset her, the flustered boy nodded abruptly and squeezed her hand in return. It seemed to make Maharani happy, giving Margio time to turn his attention back to the blank screen and watch the shadows with a vacant stare.

Their relationship had never been as intense as this, despite the many years they had known each other. That night when Margio had accompanied her through the rain under his umbrella, they were just kids, but even then he had felt a growing awkwardness. This girl is a kind of untouched beauty, he thought, someone who sat on her sofa watching television with a family that didn’t know violence, sheltered by the warmth of her home. Meanwhile he was on the terrace sitting on a stool made from a coconut palm bole, peeking at the same television through a glass pane, with nothing to protect him from the elements. There was a wall separating them, even though it was a transparent glass wall that should have let them look at and confide in one another, yet it was impermeable. On the night he found himself walking with her under the pattering membrane of the umbrella, their shoulders touching, he had considered their closeness an unpardonable indecency. And Margio felt uncomfortable with her tonight, even after all these years.

Margio liked the girl because she possessed a natural beauty, the world’s ideal of beauty. He liked her for trying to close the distance between them. The boy couldn’t remember the first night that marvelous face came to occupy his imagination. He felt more and more miserable at the chasm between them. For him, the love that had suddenly emerged was a brilliant illusion too confusing to be real. Maharani, on the other hand, had been in love with him from a time before she could remember, and made increasing efforts to discover whether they really belonged together.

On that rain-washed night they were no more than two children becoming friends. Being the same age, they later found themselves going to the same school, across from the soccer field, in a building that had been there since the Dutch colonialists roamed the country, not long after the boundary-staking founders had arrived. Margio would walk to her place in the morning, and Maharani would be waiting. The two kids in their school uniforms would cross the soccer field chatting about their friends. Perhaps it was during times like this that the gods flew above them, enthusiastically spinning the cords of love. These cords could break, but for Margio and Maharani they grew stronger until the youngsters dreamed of being together, of sharing and owning each other. And when it was time to go home, Maharani would wait at the school gate, and Margio would be ready to walk side by side with her across the same green grassland.

The cords unraveled and refastened obscurely, ensnaring them, and Margio spent day after day at Anwar Sadat’s house. When he needed some physical help, Anwar treated the boy like a son. The man’s affection was sincere, thanks to Margio’s excellent behavior. It seemed that Anwar Sadar had begun to suspect that his youngest had fallen for the boy, but he couldn’t care less what kind of man his daughter chose, after all the tiresome episodes in the young lives of Laila and Maesa Dewi.