Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

“We are lucky that neither the Japanese nor the Allied troops destroyed it,” she said to herself.

That was when she got word from Ola and Gerda. They had reunited with their grandmother and grandfather, and it even turned out that their father was safe after having been held in a POW camp in Sumatra. Ola was engaged to an English soldier and they were going to be married later that year, on the 17th of March, in the Church of Saint Mary. Dewi Ayu could not attend their celebration, but she sent some photos of her little girls, and received their wedding photo in return. She hung it on the wall, so that Ola could see it if she ever came to visit.

After most of the household duties were taken care of, she began to think about digging up the treasure. She already trusted the gardener, who was named Sapri, so she called him and told him about her plan to dig up the sewer pipes. She said that if she didn’t, she would never be able to pay his wages. And so the gardener brought in a crowbar and a hoe, and Dewi Ayu rolled up her jacket sleeves, put on her grandfather’s pantaloons, and helped Sapri dismantle the floor and dig up the dirt along the water pipe that was heading for the septic tank. Their work was made easier thanks to the fact that the toilet hadn’t been used since the war began. They didn’t find warm stinky shit, only crumbling loose dirt teeming with angrily writhing earthworms.

They worked all day while Mirah watched the two little kids, only stopping for a moment to eat and rest before continuing to dismantle the concrete and stir what was left of the shit that had already turned into dirt. But they didn’t find anything. Dewi Ayu was sure that they had already removed all the excrement and soil from the pipes, but she still hadn’t found any of the jewelry that she had stashed there. There were no necklaces or golden bracelets — there were only mounds of rotting earth, brown and humid. She didn’t believe that the jewelry could have rotted away with the shit, so she abandoned her work and gave up, grumbling:

“God stole it.”

In the revolutionary era, people boldly shouted flashy slogans and wrote them on the walls alongside the street, waved them on banners, and even scrawled them in school notebooks. Mama Kalong decided to rename her whorehouse in the same spirit, with a new title to represent the very essence of her soul. She’d already used “Make Love or Die,” and then “Make Love Once, Make Love Forever,” but finally decided on “Make Love to the Death.”

Alas, that came true — a KNIL soldier died while making love, his throat slit by a guerrilla soldier, and a guerrilla died while making love, shot by a KNIL soldier, and a prostitute also died in the middle of a lovemaking session, after she’d been kissed so long she couldn’t breathe.

And so it was there, in “Make Love To the Death,” that Dewi Ayu became a prostitute. She didn’t live there, because she had a house. She just went there when dusk fell, and returned home when morning came. Now she had three young girls to take care of: Alamanda, Adinda, and Maya Dewi, born three years after Adinda. At night, the children were cared for by Mirah, but during the day she took care of them herself just like any regular mom. She sent the kids to the best schools, and to the mosque to recite prayers with Kyai Jahro.

“They won’t become prostitutes,” she said to Mirah, “unless that’s really truly what they want.”

She herself had never honestly admitted that she was a prostitute because that was what she truly wanted, in fact just the opposite; she always said that she had been forced into prostitution due to circumstance. “Just like circumstance makes somebody a prophet or a king,” is what she told her three children.

She was the city’s favorite whore. Almost every man who had ever been to the brothel had slept with her at least once, not caring how much he had to pay. It wasn’t because they had some long-standing obsession to sleep with a Dutch woman, it was because they knew that Dewi Ayu was an expert lovemaker. No one handled her roughly, as the other prostitutes were handled, because if someone did so all the other men would go nuts as if the woman was their own wife. Not one night passed without her entertaining a guest, but she strictly limited herself to just one man per evening. For this apparent exclusivity, Mama Kalong charged a high price and the extra profit went to her, that bat queen who never slept at night.

Yes, Mama Kalong was the queen in that city and Dewi Ayu was the princess. They had the same tastes, the kind of women who took good care of themselves and wore clothes way more modest than those of the virtuous ladies. Mama Kalong liked handmade batik that she bought straight from Solo, Yogyakarta, and Pekalongan, with a kebaya and her hair in a traditional bun. She even dressed that way at the whorehouse, and only when she was relaxing did she wear a loose housedress. Meanwhile Dewi Ayu copied everything she wanted exactly from the pages of women’s fashion magazines and even the virtuous ladies furtively copied her.

The two were the city’s source of joy. There was not one important event that they were not invited to. Every Independence Day Mama Kalong and Dewi Ayu sat with Mayor Sadrah, the regents, and of course Shodancho when he finally emerged from the jungle. Even though the virtuous and proper ladies really hated them, knowing that their husbands disappeared in the middle of the night to patronize “Make Love to the Death,” they were polite to their faces (and bitched behind their backs).

Then one day a man got the idea in his head that he had to have the princess all to himself — he even wanted to marry her. No one dared cross him, because it was said he was invincible. That man was called Crazy Maman, or Maman Gendeng.

And so the happiness of the men in Halimunda came to an end, and wide smiles spread across the faces of their wives and sweethearts.

TO THIS DAY, people clearly remember how that man arrived one stormy morning when Dewi Ayu was still alive and fought on the beach with some fishermen. Yes, the people of Halimunda know all his exploits by heart, as well as they know all the parables in the Holy Book.

When he was still very young, Maman Gendeng was already a warrior in the last generation of grandmasters, the sole student of Master Chisel from Great Mountain. At the end of the colonial era he left to wander and seek his fortune but encountered not a soul, neither friend nor foe, until the Japanese came. Then he fought for The People’s Army, and during the revolutionary war he awarded himself the rank of colonel. But during a restructuring of the troops he was one of the thousands of soldiers who got sacked, and was left with nothing except the glory of having fought in the struggle. Yet Maman Gendeng was not upset at all. He returned to his wandering and spent the rest of the war earning a new reputation: that of a bandit thief.

His thieving instinct came from his hatred of rich people, and his hatred of rich people was completely understandable. He was the bastard son of a Regent. His mother had worked in the Regent’s house as a kitchen maid, as had generations of her family before her. No one knew when they began their secret affair, but everyone knew that the Regent’s hearty sexual appetite meant that his wife and concubines and mistresses alone could never satisfy him. On certain nights he would still drag one of the servants into his quarters. Maman Gendeng’s mother was one of the women who met that unfortunate fate, and ultimately she got knocked up. The Regent’s wife found out about it, and to preserve the family’s good name she banished the kitchen maid. She didn’t care that the maid’s family, from her mother and father to her grandmothers on both sides, to both her grandmothers’ mothers and fathers, had served in that household. Without anything except the baby growing in her stomach, the unfortunate woman hacked her way through the jungle and was soon lost on Great Mountain. She was found by Master Chisel, an old guru who helped her give birth under a sugar palm tree.