Eka Kurniawan: Man Tiger

The kyai’s hands were still dancing, receiving balls of cotton and pressing them down, their color changing in an instant, before he bandaged the wound up and hid it under a muslin sheet. The wound now looked like a small cut on a living person, with the coiling muslin like a necklace. While he worked, other people stripped the body of clothes, bathed it, scrubbing it clean, and made it smell of flowers. There was a whiff of borax rising from the corpse, wafting around their heads.

Ma Soma brought a shroud from the surau, and then the body was wrapped up where they had been working.

“It’s not befitting,” said Kyai Jahro, “to leave him naked all night long,” adding, “if the girl Maharani wants to see her father’s head, we can still undo the knot of the shroud. But if she has any idea of what he looks like, she may not want to see him. Her mother and sisters will have lost their appetite for days, they’ll have nightmares for the rest of their lives.”

Now night had fallen, bringing with it cold and silence. Three people quickly carried the corpse into the surau, and people got ready to perform the funeral rites after the usual Maghrib prayers.

Despite his obsession with women, Anwar Sadat was a regular visitor to the surau. Even when he was busy, which was often, he would never forget to attend for the five daily prayers. Usually he would be the one who beat the big drum, and recited the adhan or the iqama . No one would trust him with the role of imam. His pious habits arose partly from the fact that most of his wife’s relatives were active members of the surau, some of them hadjis or kyais. Another explanation was his sense of responsibility, since the surau stood on his grounds, built by his father-in-law years before Anwar Sadat arrived to sell his paintings. For all the right reasons, nobody believed he was really close to God.

The murder, as everyone came to believe, took place at exactly ten past four, because ten minutes before that Margio had been with some of his friends, and ten minutes later he was back with them, in a shocking state. They were gathering at the soccer field to watch people gamble on the pigeon racing, and there was a great din from their shouting and whistling. Children competed with their pigeons, which would not return if they went farther than the village border, and therefore were let loose only from one side of the soccer field to chase a pigeon hen waved in a kid’s hand on the far side. The best pigeons flew in from neighboring villages, following speeding motorcycle taxis, flitting by the clouds, before swooping down at the sight of the hen. Ten minutes before the murder Margio was there, lying on the grass staring at the sky.

Laila was there too, in fact she talked to him. She had a suspicion that Maharani’s sudden departure had something to do with Margio, because she had seen them together every day that week. The previous night it was Margio who had gone with her to the movie screened by the herbal tonic company. Margio denied it and insisted he had nothing to do with Maharani’s leaving, that she was not a little girl and it was up to her when to go and when to stay. As he said all this, Laila took note of his dejected, pitiable expression. She said no more, and like all the others, had no idea Margio would kill her father.

All of a sudden Margio told Agung Yuda, a village bully and friend: “I have a shameful idea.”

He didn’t explain what that shameful idea was and instead took Agung Yuda to Agus Sofyan’s drink stall at one corner of the soccer field. He said he had some money and wanted a glass of beer. The stall had once been the lunch canteen for plantation employees and villagers, offering soups and small dishes to wives who were too lazy to cook. But since it was isolated, it became a hangout for toughs. Hidden by the rim of the cacao plantation, Agus Sofyan started selling beer and arak. Sometimes weed and white sleeping pills were sold more discreetly, making the place a spot for getting drunk and making out — a daytime version of the nightwatch hut.

The Widow Laila came here often, becoming a target for the wild boys who would pester and try to grope her. Usually she would just giggle, but other times, if she felt generous, she would willingly go to bed with one of them for free. Some women might agree to be taken into the plantation to be fucked there, but not Laila. It was at that stall, while Laila was still watching the pigeon-racing, that Margio asked Agus Sofyan for a bottle of cold beer, which meant that Agus Sofyan would have to stick the bottle between blocks of ice rather than serve it chilled with little ice-chips. Margio always said it tasted different, and he was totally against forcing himself to sip a tepid beer. He and Agung Yuda shared that bottle of beer. Margio poured it into two glasses, sat on a small bench behind the stall and, while the beer was still fizzing, started talking again.

“Right now, I’m afraid I’m really going to kill someone.”

Some time before his disappearance, Agung Yuda had heard Margio say he intended to kill his father. He had confessed there was something inside him, and that he could kill without hesitation. Agung Yuda had never asked what this something was, because he thought that even without it a boar herder could easily kill anyone. But of course nobody who hadn’t been there would believe these words came from Margio. He was the sweetest and the most polite of his peers. Everyone knew his father was abusive, especially to his mother. And they knew how much Margio loved her. But the boy would typically give in to his father’s brutality, damping down the old man’s aggression, just as he restrained his friends when they started quarreling.

Even if he had been serious about killing his father, the opportunity had passed. Komar bin Syueb was six feet under. The odds of him coming back to life were slim, about on a par with the chances of Margio making an enemy, and so there wasn’t a potential victim in sight. While some of his friends got into fights, he wouldn’t lay a finger on anyone.

They spoke no more, because Agung Yuda didn’t reply to Margio’s confession. They just sat and sipped their drinks, peering into the cacao plantation crisscrossed by paddy fields, ponds, and peanut gardens. Over there, darkness had arrived and clouds of mosquitoes had taken charge, but it was still bright by the marshland where people tending their ponds were still visible. Margio also saw Kyai Jahro clutching cassava and papaya leaves, and a cement sack filled with bran. His father had once cultivated rice there, too, but lacking agricultural skills, he’d neglected it. All that was left were groves of cassava that needed no tending, the leaves falling when the sheep that wandered there in herds rammed the plants. Margio never had any intention of taking over that plot of land.

The area around a grand colonial building at one side of the soccer field had become Margio’s hangout. Whenever he and his friends skipped a boring class they came here. They would hide between the cacao trees and smoke cigarettes, one time mixing the tobacco with thorn-apple seeds to get high. They read Enny Arrow’s mimeographed pornographic novels or the sexcapades of Nick Carter. Dime novels and comic books were banned at school, and no one dared to talk at their desks about comics like The Blind Man from the Haunted Cave or the one called Panji the Skull , about a hero who carried his lover’s coffin everywhere he went. They could read these only in the cacao plantation.

At other times it would become a place for fighting and for making out, and once in a while local thugs killed each other there. Their common enemies were the plantation’s foremen, who always accused the kids of stealing cacao and coconuts, which in truth they sometimes did. The foremen would chase them off the land on their bicycles. If anyone got caught, he would be dragged by the ear and handed over to the strict physical education teacher. Sometimes the plantation changed its function at night, when people with no toilet at home would take a dump there. Margio kept looking at the place, as if seeing the worst of his past.