Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

“The power of some evil spirit is protecting her,” he said to himself.

“She will die in a few days time,” said Maya Dewi, weeping. “She’s not going to know what she can eat on such a journey, and she didn’t bring any money, not even one penny.”

“I don’t see any reason that she should die,” said Maman Gendeng, trying to comfort his wife. “If she gets too hungry, she can eat the baby.”

The members of the search party began to return one by one without any success. No one had seen a trace of her, not even one clue. “There’s no way she was taken up into the heavens, body and soul,” said Maman Gendeng. “She can’t have reached moksa, because she has never even tried practicing meditation.” So the search parties went out again, tracking her bush by bush, looking in the city alleyways and the slums, but they still didn’t find her. Maya Dewi tried visiting each of her daughter’s girlfriends from school, but only Ai and Krisan had been her close playmates. Maya Dewi was a nervous wreck, and regretted that she hadn’t stayed by her daughter’s side the night she disappeared.

After the new year, the city grew even more crowded with tourists. A number of people drowned, as announced by the workers, and Maman Gendeng and Maya Dewi examined every corpse, one by one. Most of them were tourists who had disobeyed the signs indicating where it was forbidden to swim, but finally they found her. She was immediately recognizable, since not even the seawater could ravage her beauty. Although no one knew how long ago she had drowned before the waves carried her to shore, Maman Gendeng and Maya Dewi were immediately informed about the discovery. She was lying on her back with her clothes almost completely disintegrated. Her face was still that alluring face, with her hair floating on the surface of the water, played with by waves. They quickly realized that her stomach wasn’t bloated, like most people who drown, and there were blackish bruises on her neck. Someone had killed her before throwing her into the ocean. Maya Dewi broke out into wracking sobs.

“Whatever has happened, she must be buried,” said Maman Gendeng, holding back his fury, “and then we will find that bastard murderer.”

“There’s no way a dog strangled her,” said Maya Dewi, leaning against her husband’s shoulder, practically unconscious.

Maman Gendeng carried Rengganis the Beautiful’s corpse home himself, found at the farthest point of Halimunda beach almost one month after she had disappeared from her home. Maya Dewi followed behind, with swollen eyes and unstoppable tears, and sympathetic onlookers trailed behind.

That afternoon, after all the funerary rituals had been performed, Rengganis the Beautiful’s casket cut across the city toward the Budi Dharma cemetery. Kinkin, who almost fainted when he discovered the burial that day would be that of the girl he loved, joined his father in digging her grave, lost in an inconsolable grief. He even helped lower the body, with Maman Gendeng and Kamino. And after Maman Gendeng scattered the first handful of earth on top of her burial shroud, Kinkin joined him in covering up the grave of his beloved, lovingly placing her wooden grave marker in the dirt.

“I will find out who killed her,” said Kinkin with a voice full of hate, “and I will avenge her death.”

“Do it,” said Maman Gendeng, “and if you catch him, I will let you kill him.”

That night the two met at Rengganis the Beautiful’s grave. Kinkin called her spirit while Maman Gendeng looked on. The game of jailangkung was begun, but the spirit of Rengganis the Beautiful did not appear. Kinkin tried to call another spirit, to ask who had killed the girl, but none of them knew the answer, just as before they hadn’t known where she had run to.

“We can’t do it,” said Kinkin giving up and ending the jailangkung session. “A mighty evil spirit has been thwarting all my efforts from the beginning.”

“If it’s necessary, I will meditate myself into the spirit world in order to combat it in the afterlife,” said Maman Gendeng. “I still want to know who killed her.”

That was when he and his wife began to lie to themselves by imagining that Rengganis the Beautiful was still alive. They prepared a seat for her at breakfast and dinner, and dished out a portion of food for her, even though Maya Dewi just had to throw it out after. Meanwhile the police dug up Rengganis the Beautiful’s grave to conduct an investigation before burying her again. Maman Gendeng tried to believe the police would find her killer, but for a week, and then a month, there was no explanation, not even one clue. They did interrogate lots of people though: everyone was called to the police station and questioned, Maman Gendeng and Maya Dewi each went five times, and other people just as many, but everything seemed to take them farther away from the discovery of Rengganis the Beautiful’s killer. The whole thing was exhausting, and Maman Gendeng no longer trusted the police. He rebuked the last cop who came to his house to conduct an investigation.

“You are never going to find the killer in this house,” he said annoyed, “and you were stupid to have ever thought that you would.”

At that moment, as if receiving a divine revelation, the preman understood very clearly what he had to do.

“If no one knows who killed her,” he said full of certainty, “then that must mean the entire city is responsible for her death.”

On the following Monday, with about thirty of his men, he took action. It was brutal, and the people of the city would remember it as a horrifying time. The men began by going to the police station, destroying whatever they found there, and challenging any policemen who tried to stop them. Maman Gendeng brought the visit to a close by burning the place down, to vent some of his rage over their incompetence.

The city was stunned. The smoke rose high into the sky and even the fire brigade was unable to put out the blaze. No one dared to come to watch that station burn the way they usually did with other fires, once they heard that Maman Gendeng and his scoundrel friends were in the throes of an uncontrollable rage. The people stayed quiet, passing the news by word of mouth, while trembling to imagine what that terrifying man might do next.

Despite the fact that Maman Gendeng was now an old man who had already lived more than a half century, everyone knew that his strength wasn’t the least bit diminished. And now he had lost his beloved daughter in the most bitter way possible: someone had murdered her and thrown her corpse into the ocean, and he didn’t know who. He regretted that he hadn’t done something as soon as the girl had said that she had been raped by a dog in the school bathroom. Why hadn’t he looked for that dog from the very start, or why hadn’t he butchered all the city dogs just as that kid Kinkin had tried in his quite amateur way?

“ Mijn hond is weggelopen ,” he said. My dog ran away. But it wasn’t clear what he meant by that.

After burning down the police station, he found his first dog, a stray dog scavenging through the trash, and he captured and killed it, twisting the dog’s neck until it broke and the animal sprawled out dead.

“What’s the use of me having power if I can’t even protect my own daughter from a dog?” he said. “Let’s kill every dog in this city.”

His thugs began to spread out in large groups, carrying their deadly weapons. A number of them carried pellet guns, others had machetes and unsheathed swords.

“I’m going to do it, even if it brings me no peace,” Maman Gendeng said with a sigh.

“Can’t you just make another child?” That was Romeo’s stupid question.

“Even if I have ten other kids, someone has already killed this one and because of that there is no way I can rest.” His eyes stared down the cobblestone alleyways hoping to find another dog, and he added sadly, “She was only seventeen years old.”