Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

When syphilis spread, Mama Kalong and the soldiers demanded that a hospital be built. It was actually a military hospital, but civilians came too. The brothel was threatened with bankruptcy, but she quickly came up with a number of good solutions. She tried to persuade some of the soldiers to take on their own private concubines, saying she could obtain such women for them for a fee. She traversed the villages and even ventured up the mountain to find young girls willing to become kept women for the Dutch troops.

She still cared for them all in her whorehouse, but they were each only used by one single soldier. She quickly got rich this way, with the guarantee that the women were not spreading foul disease. If the soldiers who felt choked by Mama Kalong’s merciless tariff decided to marry their concubines instead, she would demand an even more expensive indemnity fee. Meanwhile, she still rented the old prostitutes out to whoever was interested. For these whores she even had new customers to take the place of the soldiers: the sailors and dockworkers.

During the last years of colonial power, it is fair to say that she was the richest woman in Halimunda. She bought land sold by farmers who had lost everything at the gambling table and rented it back to them, until her property extended almost the entire length of the foothills. Her holdings were exceeded perhaps only by the Dutch plantations.

She was like a small queen in that city: everyone respected her, the natives and the Dutch alike. She rode a horse-drawn carriage wherever she went to take care of her business matters, the most important of which remained the women who peddled their private parts. Her public presentation was incredibly proper, with a tight sarong and a kebaya blouse and her hair in a bun. Of course, she wasn’t as skinny as she used to be, and this was when the people, following the habit of the young prostitutes, began calling her Mama. No one knows who started it, but her name then grew longer to become Mama Kalong. She liked that name and soon everyone, even she herself, had forgotten what her real name used to be.

“Now, after all the other kingdoms have collapsed, in Halimunda there is a new kingdom,” said an intoxicated Dutch soldier at the tavern, “and that is the Kingdom of Mama Kalong.”

Even though of course she was greedy, she never wanted to make her young prostitutes suffer. In fact quite the opposite, she tended to spoil them, like a granny taking care of a horde of grandchildren. She had servants who would heat warm water for them so that they could bathe after exhausting lovemaking sessions. On certain days, she gave them the day off and took them on outings to a nearby waterfall. She brought in the best tailors to make their clothes, and above all, their health was her highest priority.

“Because,” she said, “the most exquisite pleasure is to be found in a healthy body.”

Then the Dutch soldiers left and the Japanese soldiers came. But amid that era of change, Mama Kalong’s whorehouse remained exactly the same. She served the Japanese soldiers just as graciously as she had served her previous customers, and even sought out fresher, younger girls. One day she was called in by the civil and military authorities for a brief interrogation. It was nothing too troubling; basically, a number of high-ranking Japanese military officials in the city wished to have their own private whores, separate from the prostitutes for the low-ranking officers and especially separate from those used by the dockworkers and the fishermen. They wanted new prostitutes, who were truly pristine and excellently cared for, and Mama Kalong had to find those girls as quickly as possible because, just as she herself had said before, the men were dying from sexual frustration.

“It’s easy, Sir,” she said, “to find girls like that.”

“Tell me, where?”

“The prisoners of war,” replied Mama Kalong shortly.

When afternoon came and a number of Japanese men began to arrive, the girls began running frantically back and forth. They tried to find some crack through which to slip away, but every place was already guarded. The house’s fairly large yard was surrounded by a high wall, with just one gate in front and a small door in the back, neither of which could possibly be breached. A number of girls tried to climb onto the roof of the house, as if they hoped they could fly away or find a rope there that they could climb up into the sky.

“I already tried everything,” said Dewi Ayu. “There is no escape.”

“We are going to become prostitutes!” shrieked Ola, collapsing and weeping.

“It’s actually worse than that,” said Dewi Ayu. “I don’t think we’re even going to get paid.”

Another girl named Helena immediately accosted the Japanese officers who appeared and accused them of violating their human rights as outlined in the Geneva Convention. Not just the Japanese, but even Dewi Ayu laughed out loud.

“There are no conventions during wartime, honey,” she said.

Out of all of them, that girl Helena appeared to be the most upset by the knowledge that they were going to be made into whores. The funny thing was, she had decided to become a nun before the war came and everything dissolved into chaos. She was the only girl who had brought a prayer book to this place, and now she began to recite a psalm in a loud voice, in front of the Japanese, perhaps hoping the soldiers would run away howling in fear, like evil spirits at an exorcism. But, unexpectedly, the Japanese soldiers were very polite to her and at the end of every prayer they would reply:

“Amen.” While laughing, of course.

“Amen,” she responded, before collapsing weakly into a chair.

An officer brought some sheets of paper, giving one to each of the girls. There was Malay writing on them, which turned out to be the names of different flowers. “These are your new names,” said the officer. Dewi Ayu was excited to see her name: Rose. “Watch out,” she said, “every rose has its thorn.” Another girl got the name Orchid, and another got Dahlia. Ola got the name Alamanda.

They were ordered to go to their rooms while a number of Japanese men lined up at a table on the veranda to buy their tickets. The first night the prices were very expensive, because they believed that the girls were all still virgins. They didn’t know that Dewi Ayu was no longer pure. Instead of each going to her own room, the girls gathered around Dewi Ayu, who was still testing out the strength of her mattress and commented, “So it turns out someone will make the earthquake on top of it.”

Then the soldiers began to capture the girls one by one, in a battle they won with ease, gripping the girls in their hands like sick kittens thrashing about futilely as they were being taken away. That night Dewi Ayu heard hysterical screams coming from their rooms as the battle continued. A number of the girls even succeeded in running out into the hall stark naked, before the soldiers recaptured them and threw them back on top of their beds. They wailed all through those terrible unions, and she even heard Helena screaming out a number of psalm verses as a Japanese busted up her vagina. At the same time, she could hear the other Japanese men out on the veranda laughing at all of this uproar.

Only Dewi Ayu didn’t grumble, or let out even a peep. She got a Japanese officer who was tall and big, stocky like a sumo wrestler, with a samurai sword at his waist. Dewi Ayu lay down on top of the bed and looked up toward the heavens, not looking at him at all and certainly not smiling. She appeared to be much more focused on the sounds of the commotion outside her room than to whatever was going on inside it. She lay down like a corpse ready for burial. When the Japanese officer barked at her to take her clothes off, she remained perfectly still, as if she wasn’t even breathing.