Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

“What have we always said, the natives are like monkeys.”

The real tragedy occurred after they finished making love, when Ma Gedik invited his beloved to climb down the rocky hill and go home with him, so they could marry, live together, and love one another forever. That would be impossible, said Ma Iyang. Before they set one foot in the valley, the Dutchmen would throw them into a cage of ajak .

“So I prefer to fly.”

“That’s impossible,” said Ma Gedik, “you don’t have wings.”

“If you believe you can fly, you can fly.”

To prove what she said Ma Iyang, with her naked body covered in drops of sweat that reflected the rays of the sun like beads of pearl, jumped and flew toward the valley, disappearing behind a descending fog. People only heard the sound of Ma Gedik’s pitiful screams, as he ran down the slope looking for his love. Everyone searched for her, even the Dutchmen and the wild dogs. They scoured every corner of the valley, but Ma Iyang was never found, dead or alive, and finally everyone believed that the woman had truly just flown away. The Dutchmen believed it, and so did Ma Gedik. Now that all that was left was that rocky hill, the people named it after the woman who had flown off it into the sky: Ma Iyang Hill.

After that day Ma Gedik went to the swamps, where the Dutch couldn’t withstand the malaria in the wet season, and built a hut there. During the day he hauled a cart filled with coffee, cocoa beans, and sometimes copra and yams to the port, and except for his brief exchanges with other cart pullers, he only talked to himself or to the surrounding spirits. People began to think that his insanity had relapsed, even though he was no longer raping cows and chickens or eating shit.

Almost immediately after the hut was first built, more people started to arrive in the swamps, and the huts that sprung up turned the place into a new encampment. The only Dutch person who ever went there was a controller tasked with carrying out a census, and one week later he was found in his rented room, dead from a malarial fever, the last and only person to visit Ma Gedik for many years until the night when the Colibri driver shot his mongrel dog and a tough guy kicked in the door of his house, with the shocking news that Dewi Ayu wanted to marry him. He didn’t know why she wanted to marry him, so a dark story began to form in the back of his mind. Still shaking, he asked the tough guy:

“Is she pregnant?” She was probably being forced to marry him to hide the Dutch family’s shame.

“Is who pregnant?”

“Dewi Ayu.”

“If she wants to marry you,” said the tough guy, “it must be because she doesn’t want to get pregnant.”

Dewi Ayu welcomed her fiancé with joy. She ordered him to bathe and gave him nice clothes to wear because, she told him, the village headman would arrive soon. But that didn’t fill Ma Gedik with joy, just the opposite. He felt it was a complete catastrophe, and the closer the time of their marriage grew, the more morose he became.

“Smile, darling,” said Dewi Ayu. “If you don’t the ajak will eat you.”

“Tell me, why to you want to marry me?”

“This whole morning you keep asking me the same thing,” said Dewi Ayu, slightly annoyed. “You think other people have such a good reason for getting married?”

“It’s usually because they love each other.”

“And this is exactly the reverse, we don’t love each other at all,” said Dewi Ayu. “So that’s a good reason, isn’t it?”

Just sixteen years old, and like many mixed-blood girls, the girl was beautiful. She had gleaming black hair and bluish eyes. She was wearing a tulle wedding dress, with a small tiara that made her look like a fairy in a storybook. She was the only one in charge of the Stammler household now, ever since the rest of her family had packed their bags and flocked to the port with the other Dutch families to escape to Australia while they still had the chance. The Japanese army occupied Singapore, and although they hadn’t reached Halimunda yet, they had quite possibly already arrived in Batavia.

Talk of war had actually arrived months before, when they heard on the radio that fighting had broken out in Europe. At that time Dewi Ayu had already started at the Franciscan School, the school that years later became the middle school where her granddaughter Rengganis the Beautiful was raped by a dog in a toilet stall. She wanted to become a teacher for the very simple reason that she didn’t want to become a nurse. She would leave for school with her aunt Hanneke, who taught kindergarten, in the same Colibri car that soon after would come to get Ma Gedik, and with the same driver who would shoot the old man’s dog.

She had the best teachers in Halimunda: the nuns who taught her music, history, language, and psychology. Sometimes the Jesuit pastors from the seminary would visit to teach religious education, church history, and theology. They were impressed by her natural intelligence, but worried by her beauty, and a number of nuns tried to persuade her to take the vows of poverty, purity, and chastity. “There’s no way,” she said. “If every woman took a vow like that, humans would go extinct like the dinosaurs.” Her shocking way of speaking was even more troubling than her beauty. In any case, the only thing she liked about religion was the fantastical stories, and the only thing she liked about church was the dulcet tones of the Angelus bells.

When she was in her first year at the Franciscan School, war broke out in Europe. The radio that Sister Maria had set in the front of the class reported with alarm that German troops had invaded the Netherlands and it had only taken them four days to occupy it. The children were enthralled and amazed that war was real and not just some mumbo-jumbo written in their history books. What’s more, the war had broken out in their ancestral homeland, and Holland had lost.

“First France, now Germany is occupying it?!” said Dewi Ayu. “It’s really a pathetic country.”

“Why, Dewi Ayu, whatever do you mean?” asked Sister Maria.

“I mean we have too many merchants and not enough soldiers.”

She was punished for her inappropriate comment, and forced to read psalms. However, among her classmates, Dewi Ayu was the only child who enjoyed the news of the war and she even went so far as to make a chilling prediction: the war would reach the East Indies, and would even reach Halimunda. Even though she still joined in the prayers the nuns led for the safety of their families in Europe, Dewi Ayu didn’t care that much.

The anxiety about the war also engulfed her home however, especially because her grandfather and grandmother, Ted and Marietje Stammler, had a lot of family in the Netherlands. They continuously asked about letters from Holland, which never arrived. Above all, they worried about Dewi Ayu’s father and mother, Henri and Aneu Stammler, who had run away. They had left all of a sudden one morning sixteen years ago, without saying goodbye, leaving Dewi Ayu, who was still an infant, behind. Even though this had truly infuriated the family, the truth was they were still worried.

“Wherever they are, I hope they are happy,” said Ted Stammler.

“And if the Germans kill them, may they continue to live happily in heaven,” said Dewi Ayu. She then answered herself: “Amen.”

“After sixteen years, I am not angry anymore,” said Marietje. “You should pray that you might meet them instead.”

“Of course I hope to, Oma. They owe me sixteen Christmas gifts and sixteen birthday presents, and that’s not even counting the sixteen Easter eggs.”

She already knew about her parents, Henri and Aneu Stammler. Some kitchen servants had told her the story in whispers, because if Ted or Marietje Stammler knew that they had leaked the story, they most probably would have been whipped. But after a while Ted and Marietje understood that Dewi Ayu had heard everything, including the part that one morning they had found her lying in a basket on their doorstep. She was sleeping soundly, wrapped in a swaddling blanket, along with a short note with her name on it, explaining that her parents had sailed with the ship Aurora, bound for Europe.