Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

“You!” he said. “Murderer of Rengganis the Beautiful, I have come to avenge her death!”

The prince wasn’t able to save himself when the rifle fired and its expertly aimed bullet lodged in the center of his forehead. He fell back onto the bed, dying. The man with the gun pumped the air again, loaded another bullet, and shot the prince again. He shot as many as five times, full of hatred, as Beauty screamed and screamed.

All anybody knew was that he was shot to death while visiting his grandmother’s house.

Krisan’s burial was attended by the entire family, with Adinda looking full of grief. Now it was complete: Alamanda had lost Shodancho and Ai, Maya Dewi had lost Maman Gendeng and Rengganis the Beautiful, and Adinda had now lost Krisan after having lost Comrade Kliwon. They had all lost everyone they loved.

The three of them followed Krisan’s coffin, heading toward the Budi Dharma cemetery, and along the road Alamanda and Maya Dewi tried to comfort Adinda.

“We are like a cursed family,” Adinda sobbed.

“We are not like a cursed family,” corrected Alamanda. “We are truly and completely cursed.”

Old Kamino was digging a grave for Krisan right next to his father’s grave, as Adinda had requested. She had already reserved the next plot over for herself.

Usually, women didn’t go to the graveyard. Only in special cases did a woman go, when she truly couldn’t bear to be separated from the dead, as had happened with Farida many years ago. But for Krisan’s burial, the attendants were the three sisters, plus six neighborhood men who served as pallbearers and the mosque imam, who would pray for the dead man.

There was no one else besides them, standing in their dark clothes under the parasols that protected them from who knows what, because the sun never shone very brightly in the afternoon and no rain was falling. There was only those three, until after a long while two dark spots appeared in the distance. They grew closer and closer and then those spots turned into figures, and when they were even closer it turned out they were two other women, also dressed in mourning clothes.

What was even more surprising was that those two women had also came to bid Krisan farewell, just as his corpse was being lowered and the earth began to swallow him up. Those three sisters were shocked, not just by their presence, but also by the hideous face that one of them had, which at first they thought must be the face of a graveyard ghost. But they soon remembered the gossip about Dewi Ayu’s fourth daughter, whom they had never met, but who was said to be as ugly as a monster. That woman, the ugly one, seemed to be quite distraught over Krisan’s death. She cried and looked desperately at the body wrapped in a burial shroud which began to disappear under the earth as if she wasn’t willing to let him go. She seemed even more upset than Adinda herself.

It was Alamanda who emboldened herself to ask, “Are you Beauty?”

Beauty nodded. “And I know that you are Alamanda, Adinda, and Maya Dewi.”

“We are all Dewi Ayu’s daughters,” said Alamanda. She embraced Beauty without a care for her monster face.

Beauty spoke again. “Please accept my condolences at the death of the only one that you all had left.”

When the funeral ceremony was finished they all went to Dewi Ayu’s house, where Beauty lived with Rosinah. They circled through the house, looking at the photos of themselves from when they were still small, looking at the photos of Dewi Ayu, and crying to remember their difficult past. They had become a gang of abandoned orphans. All they had now was each other, and their effort to try to truly belong to one another once again.

“Mama came back but she didn’t stay for very long, and left again before Krisan died,” said Beauty.

“That’s just how dead people are,” said Maya Dewi. “My husband came again too, on the third day after his death.”

After that, they each still lived in their own houses, continuing on with their quiet lives. To entertain themselves, they visited one another. After her first appearance at the funeral, even Beauty began to venture out of the house to visit her older sisters. She no longer cared about people’s stares. She wore long dresses and a veil that almost covered her entire face. The women took a deep pleasure in their new lives, trying to forget all the misfortune that had befallen them, loving each other, and satisfied with that love.

And it was that way until they grew old, to the point that people often gossiped about them, calling them “the gang of widows” when they all got together.

But they were so happy, and loved each other so much.

During the sixth month of her pregnancy, Beauty went into premature labor and her baby died without ever getting the chance to cry or shout. Her older sisters buried the baby in the garden behind the house, with the help of the mute Rosinah.

“Didn’t you give it a name before you buried it?” asked Alamanda.

“A name would only hurt me more.”

“If I might ask, whose child was that baby, in fact?” asked Adinda.

“Mine and my prince’s.”

Of course much still remained unsaid between them. So they didn’t force Beauty to say who he was, that man she called her prince.

The baby was buried and they went on with their lives, loving each other and guarding each other’s secrets.

When Rengganis the Beautiful’s corpse was found, Krisan suffered from a profound terror that people would finally discover that it was he who had murdered that girl. The fear grew worse because he had also hidden Ai’s corpse under his bed, and Shodancho was furiously looking for Ai everywhere.

He considered returning the corpse to the cemetery but was afraid someone would catch him at it, because ever since Shodancho found out that someone had dug up the grave and taken his child’s body, the cemetery had been guarded. Returning Ai to her grave was not a wise move at all, and he practically lost his mind trying to think how he could make that body disappear from underneath his bed before somebody discovered it.

He practically caged himself inside his room, with the door always locked, worried that his mother or his grandmother would enter and investigate the fragrant aroma that wafted up faintly from the space under the bed. He even swept his own room himself, so that his mother or grandmother wouldn’t try to come in and clean up the place.

Krisan had even tried to chop up the body of the girl he loved into small pieces so that he could easily dispose of them. Maybe making her into food for the dogs was safer than returning her to the grave, since that way she would never be found. But to see that beautiful face, that face that didn’t rot even in death, that face that looked just as if she was sleeping and at some point would wake up and rub her eyes, Krisan couldn’t do it. He loved her so much, and it made him cry to imagine himself chopping her up to bits, so that he no longer had the strength to lift the cleaver that he had ready, and he returned Nurul Aini, still wrapped in her burial shroud, to her place back under his bed.

He was at the point of desperation, about to confess all of his sins, when he thought of a brilliant idea. He would do it, and say goodbye to Ai.

Just as when he had gone to the ocean with Rengganis the Beautiful and Ai’s corpse, he dressed the body up in his own clothes. At night, as dawn was approaching, he lifted that corpse onto his back and rode his bicycle to the shore. He stole the same boat he had stolen before. He brought Ai’s corpse to the middle of the ocean. And not just her corpse, but also two large stones, almost twice as big as her head.

He reached the spot where he had killed Rengganis the Beautiful as the new day dawned. That part of the ocean was very deep, even the sharks wouldn’t find her there. He tied the girl’s body — with tears streaming down his face, but he had to do it — to the two stones, so tightly that bites from sail fish wouldn’t break the cords apart. With such heavy stones, when he threw her in, Ai’s dead body quickly sank to the depths of the ocean and disappeared without a trace. Shodancho would never find her, even if he sought her for a hundred years.