Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

It was near midday when the Japanese arrived, the sound of their boots filling the house. The girls immediately remembered that despite it all they were still prisoners, and it felt strange that they had just been so happy. They retreated until their backs were against the wall, once again overcome with gloom. Except Dewi Ayu, who quickly greeted one of the guests.

“How are you?”

He just looked at her for a moment, not bothering to speak, and then went to find Mama Kalong. They spoke for a moment, then he returned and counted the girls before going back out again. The house grew quiet with only the girls and Mama Kalong and a couple of soldiers patrolling outside.

“He was counting us as if we were a group of soldiers!” one of them complained.

“That’s the job of a commandant,” said Mama Kalong.

That whole day they didn’t do anything except hang around in the living room or in one of their bedrooms, and boredom overcame them. After getting nostalgic about their happy childhoods before the war, they ran out of things to talk about. They didn’t say anything more about the Red Cross, because there was no indication that they were really going to become volunteers. The Japanese didn’t speak about it, but they didn’t speak about anything at all. The women thought there really should be some kind of training if they were going to be volunteers, but it looked like they were just going to rot away inside the house, amid all that nonsensical luxury. What’s more, if you think about it, said one of them, the front is far away from here, who knows where, maybe in the Pacific Ocean, maybe in India, but definitely not in Halimunda. There were no wounded soldiers in this city, and nobody needed the Red Cross.

“They still need neck amputators, though,” said Dewi Ayu.

That joke no longer seemed funny, especially since the person telling it looked like she didn’t have a care in the world. She seemed to be enjoying everything, eating the apples that had been set out, and then just as greedily eating the bananas and papayas.

“Are you starving to death, or just being greedy?” asked Ola.

“Both.”

By the following day, nothing had happened yet, making them more and more confused. Ola tried to comfort herself, thinking that maybe they were going to be exchanged with other prisoners of war, and that’s why they were being given good food, a house and clothing, so that they wouldn’t appear to have been suffering. None of the girls believed that. The opportunity to ask questions came when a number of Japanese men appeared at the house, along with a photographer. But none of them could speak English, Dutch, or Malay. They just pantomimed to the girls to look stylish, because they were going to be photographed. Reluctantly the girls lined up in front of the camera, with forced smiles, hoping Ola was right that their portraits would be part of a campaign about the condition of the prisoners of war, and that there would be an exchange.

“Why don’t you ask Mama Kalong what’s going on?” suggested Dewi Ayu.

They found the woman and accosted her.

“You said we were going to be Red Cross volunteers!”

“Volunteers, yes,” said Mama Kalong, “but maybe not Red Cross.”

“So?”

She looked at the girls, who looked back at her expectantly. They waited, their innocent faces almost completely without sin, until Mama Kalong just shook her head weakly. She left them and they quickly followed her, demanding, “Say something!”

“All I know is that you are prisoners of war.”

“Why are we being given all this food?”

“So that you don’t die.” Then she disappeared into the back yard. The girls didn’t know where she was going and they could not pursue her because the Japanese soldiers intercepted them and let the woman go.

Their annoyance only grew when they returned to find their friend Dewi Ayu sitting in a rocking chair, humming softly and still eating her apples. She looked in their direction, and smiled to see their faces holding back rage. “You look funny,” she said, “like a bunch of rag dolls.” They stood around her in a circle, but Dewi Ayu stayed silent, until one of them finally spoke:

“Don’t you feel like something strange is going on? Aren’t you worried about anything?”

“Worry comes from ignorance,” said Dewi Ayu.

“So you think you know what is going to happen to us?” asked Ola.

“Yes,” she replied, “we are going to be made into prostitutes.”

They all knew it, but only Dewi Ayu was brave enough to say it.

MAMA KALONG’S BROTHEL had been around since the opening of the massive Dutch colonial army barracks. Before that, she had just been a girl who helped out at the tavern owned by her evil aunt. They sold rice wine and cane sugar tuak , and the soldiers became their regular customers. Even though the influx of troops into the city made the tavern livelier than ever, the young girl still wasn’t making enough to get by. Instead, she was ordered to work from five in the morning until eleven at night and all she was given in exchange was two meals a day. But then she discovered a way to take advantage of her limited free time and earn her own money.

After closing the tavern, she would go to the barracks. She knew what they needed and they knew what she wanted. The soldiers paid her to straddle their laps naked. Three or four of them would take turns screwing her before she went home with their money. After a while, she began to pull in way more than what her aunt was making. She had a good business instinct. One day, after getting scolded for falling asleep at work, she left her aunt and opened up her own tavern at the end of the wharf. She sold rice wine and cane sugar tuak and also her own body. She never went to the barracks anymore, the soldiers came to her tavern instead. By the end of the first month she had already found two young girls around twelve or thirteen years old to help her at the tavern, both as waitresses and as whores. She had begun her career as a madam.

After three months, there were six whores there, not including herself, enough for her to expand the tavern, building a few rooms with walls made from plaited bamboo. One day a colonel came to inspect the military post and visit the brothel, not to hire a prostitute for himself but to see whether the place was good enough for his soldiers.

“This is like a pigsty,” he said. “They will die from such squalor before they even meet the enemy.”

Mama Kalong, with a demeanor that was appropriately respectful for a colonel, quickly replied, “But they will die from sexual frustration if they are forced to wait for a better brothel.”

The colonel came to believe that the brothel built up his men’s morale and was good for their fighting spirit, so he wrote a favorable report and a month and a half after his visit the military decided to build more permanent facilities. They got rid of the bamboo walls and the sugar palm leaf roof, and installed cement floors and walls as strong as a defense fort. Almost all the beds were made from teak and the mattresses were stuffed with choice cotton batting. Mama Kalong, who received all of this at no cost, looked pleased and said to every soldier who came:

“Feel free to make love here as if you were in your very own home.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said one soldier. “All I’ve got at home is my mom and my old granny.”

And from then on, whoever came to that place would be pampered and doted upon. The whores dressed and did their makeup better than the most respectable Dutch women, and they were more beautiful than the queen.