Eka Kurniawan: Man Tiger

Anwar Sadat had three daughters, all born in the early years of his marriage when he and his wife had enough fire between them to exhaust one another in bed. Years later, when their love had waned, people began to forget his wife’s name, Kasia, and simply called her Mrs. Midwife. Anwar Sadat was lucky to have no children by his other women. Bastard children would always be more of a curse to the father’s family than to the mother’s. His promiscuity was passed on to his children, as was his good looks.

His looks had enthralled a lot of girls over the years, and Anwar Sadat was handsome even in old age, when his body ballooned and his hair dwindled to patches. Even then, he drew the attention of adventurous would-be lovers. His fine looks were an astonishing contrast to those of his wife. With a nose like a parrot’s beak, thick jaw, and cold patrician manners, Kasia was more the witch than the princess. It wasn’t so much that she was exceptionally ugly, but she was definitely unattractive to the majority of men. There was a widespread conviction that the failed artist had married money, and with her money he could afford to sleep with a lot of women, most of whom his wife knew about, though she chose not to care, so long as he didn’t get any of them pregnant.

The eldest daughter, Laila, inherited her father’s sex appeal and lewd temperament. She was beautiful and full figured with a flawless, dewy complexion. Her face betrayed more than a little arrogance. By the age of sixteen, she was an exceptionally curvaceous schoolgirl, and a target for the boys as well as the teachers, until one day her father found out she was pregnant. Anwar Sadat searched frantically for a shaman to remove what was in her belly. His wife wouldn’t help, and the school would not accept a pregnant pupil. As soon as she graduated, Anwar Sadat dragged her and the classmate said to be responsible to a penghulu , who could officiate at the wedding. Two days later, the newlywed husband found her in bed with another man.

It became the town’s most sensational scandal. Anwar Sadat went red in the face at the slightest allusion to what happened, and Kasia disappeared for several days to a relative’s house. Both men, the husband and the adulterer, gave up on her after that. People started referring to her as the Widow, and when they saw her whispered, “She’s easy.”

Maesa Dewi, the middle sister and the most beautiful, was cut from a different cloth. She was not as curvaceous as the eldest, and possessed a mysteriously tender manner. She comported herself with more respect for propriety, a surface quality that outlived her father by many years. That was just the way she was. At school, her reports praised her intelligence — an achievement her sisters never matched. Maesa Dewi finished school without a blemish on her record. His little remaining moral sense gave Anwar Sadat enough insight to make him love and admire the girl, who, unlike her elder sister, never shared his lascivious nature. Confident she was still a virgin, her father agreed to let her go to university. He then managed to persuade his wife to sell a plot of land to raise the money for her education, even though Kasia no longer believed any one of her three daughters was mentally sound. When the Sweet One unexpectedly returned after a year, she brought back not a diploma, but a newborn baby and a jobless boyfriend she later married. No one whispered that she was easy. She seemed to be faithful. Nonetheless, the stories of the eldest and middle daughers created a notion among those who thought of themselves as moral that all three of them were wicked and out of control. They bet that one day Maharani, the youngest sister, would bring home a newborn, no matter how much evidence they saw that this would be wholly out of character.

At the pancake stall, after her sudden departure, he could not stop talking about Maharani. He spoke of the small items she had brought home. Maharani left her father a penknife, a large comb for her curly-haired mother, and a music box for her little nephew. Anwar Sadat retold his daughter’s jokes, even though some people had heard them straight from Maharani’s mouth throughout the holiday. Kasia tried to stop this exaggerated prattling, and the other two daughters didn’t conceal their burning jealousy, but it was Margio who finally put an end to it.

Now Anwar Sadat lay dead, waiting for his grave to be dug, for the bier to be cleaned, and most of all for his youngest daughter to return and witness the ghastly wound before sobbing more powerfully than Kasia, Laila, and Maesa Dewi combined. Anyone looking at them would see Kasia more disheveled than usual, on her knees, biting one end of a cloth coiling onto her lap. Why she brought the cloth was a mystery. Next to her was Laila the Widow, trying in vain to console her mother, despite having recently lost consciousness herself, only coming to her senses when someone sprinkled water on her face. Most shaken of all was Maesa Dewi, the first to see Anwar Sadat’s nearly detached head. Still howling with grief, as if her belly were full of boiling water, she folded her arms around her baby, whose crying nearly matched her own.

The other female mourners accompanied the four women’s grieving with softer, more subdued cries, like a choir that harmonized on different levels of grief. Their eyes were swollen and livid, visibly strained by sadness for the loss of this callous and unfaithful individual. And since Ma Soma, after wandering around the surau, had found the body, carried it from the crime scene, and then covered it with a batik cloth, none of these women had taken proper care of the dead man. Meanwhile Ma Soma fetched his bicycle and set off to find Kyai Jahro. He had found the cloth in the artist’s studio, the dyed patterns designed by the victim himself. That it would be used to wrap his corpse had never crossed Anwar Sadat’s mind. Soon Jahro and Sadrah arrived, and people looked at them with eyes that seemed to beg for either mercy or help. Kyai Jahro, the Koran teacher, was related to Anwar Sadat’s wife, and he immediately took control.

He and Sadrah carried the body, without removing the batik shroud, from the house to the front yard, leaving a shadowy reddish trail behind. He weighed eighty kilos, Major Sadrah thought, if he’d been a boar the ajaks would have ripped him apart. They took the corpse to a stool by the well, where Ma Soma had placed a pile of towels, sulphur soap, a bowl of water, flower petals, and of course borax. It was there that the kyai finally pulled down the cloth, slowly, bracing himself for the shock. With several men as witnesses, the hidden secret was now exposed. The Istighfar prayer slid from the kyai’s mouth, begging Allah for forgiveness over and over, while the other men, following his example, mumbled as they stared at the ragged wound on the pallid neck. They saw how the blood still flowed in fizzing bubbles. The scene was nauseating — more terrifying than any night-mare — and several of the men turned away.

Stimulated by a childish curiosity, Sadrah examined the body, hoping to find out more of what Margio had done. True enough an artery had been severed, dangling like the cable in a shattered radio. More savage than I imagined, he thought, seeing that the neck was almost cut in two, as if the butcher hadn’t quite finished his task.

“His father died a few days ago, following his little sister, who passed away a week after her birth,” Jahro said. “I think the kid’s gone mad.”

“He was crazy to have bitten a man like that,” said Sadrah.

The air became cold and Major Sadrah could hear from a distance his ajaks howling, asking to be caged, or more probably they had caught the smell of blood on the evening breeze in their carnivorous snouts. Before darkness descended, Jahro asked some people to bring buckets of water. The pumps whirred noisily as water spouted out. After vanishing for a while, Ma Soma reappeared carrying bags of cotton-wool balls. Jahro washed the wound himself, very solemnly, believing he could stop the unremitting stream of red, as if the fearsome gash was a child’s graze. He continued to mutter prayers. Sadrah, who had been through the brutal gauntlet of guerrilla warfare and seen bodies blown to bits by mortar fire, was genuinely awestruck by Jahro’s chilly composure. He almost proposed leaving the gash as it was, to remind the kyai that the corpse would eventually rot in its grave.