Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

There amid all the spectators he saw a very beautiful young girl, who was seemingly unperturbed by the fact that most of the other spectators were men. She was maybe just sixteen years old, and looked exactly like an angel who had fallen to earth. Her hair was gathered back in a dark green ribbon, and even from afar Shodancho could see her adorable piercing eyes, her shapely nose, and her rather cruel-seeming smile. Her skin was gleaming white, as if it were shining, and she was wrapped in an ivory dress that fluttered in the afternoon sea breeze. The girl took out a cigarette from her pocket, and with an extraordinary calm she smoked, her eyes all the while on the dogs and pigs in battle. Shodancho had been watching her ever since she came up the stairs, and it appeared that she was there alone. Intrigued, he asked Major Sadrah standing beside him, “Who is that girl?”

Tracking his gaze, Major Sadrah answered, “Her name is Alamanda. She’s the daughter of the whore Dewi Ayu.”

After the pig-hunting business was over, Shodancho divvied up his ninety-six ajak among the citizens of Halimunda. Most of them were given to the farmers to help them guard their paddies and fields, and the rest were given out randomly. Shodancho ordered those who did not yet receive one yet to wait patiently, because soon enough they would have puppies. Halimunda would become filled with dogs, who were all the descendants of those ajak .

Shodancho should have just returned to the jungle, as he had initially intended. When he had first arrived, he’d told Major Sadrah that he would stay in the city only until the pig business was settled. But since seeing Alamanda in the pig arena, he hadn’t slept. “This must be love,” he said to himself. And it was love that made him tremble and try to think of excuses to stay in the city longer, and maybe never leave it ever again.

A solution came when Major Sadrah said, “Don’t go right away, we have more festivities to celebrate our victory. Orkes melayu .”

“Out of my love for this city, I will stay a little longer,” Shodancho quickly agreed.

He saw her again, that girl, the night of the orkes melayu performance. It was held in the same soccer field, but this time there was no ticket required, so the place was way more crowded. A band of musicians came from the capital, bringing singers that no one had ever heard of, but nobody cared, it was still good music for dancing, and Halimunda’s young men and women could rock and sway, thanks to the rhythm or maybe the booze.

The songs always had whiny lyrics about broken hearts, about unrequited love that was like one hand clapping, about cheating husbands, but no matter how tragically sad the song, the singers didn’t cry — instead, smiling and laughing in their sexy makeup, they would turn their backs to the audience and shake their asses. After being applauded for their butts, they would then turn around and face forward, squatting a little bit, and the people would clap even more, because the girls were wearing miniskirts so that everyone could see what they were intended to see. That particular mingling of music, sentimentality, and lasciviousness was what made so many people feel so overjoyed that evening.

Shodancho saw Alamanda again, walking all by herself. This time she was wearing jeans and a leather jacket, and once again a cigarette was perched between her sweet lips. Shodancho gave wholehearted thanks that he had come out of the jungle and could meet a real live angel in his beloved city. The girl wasn’t swaying in front of the stage. Instead she just stood next to one of the food stalls scattered around the soccer field, watching. Unable to resist the provocation of her beauty, Shodancho approached her. His popularity made the journey to the girl quite bothersome, because he had to field so many friendly greetings, but finally the girl was right in front of him, or he was standing right in front of the girl, and he could experience her stunning natural beauty from up close. He tried to smile, but Alamanda just gave him an indifferent glance.

“It’s not good,” Shodancho said, to start some small talk, “for a young woman to be roaming around at night all by herself.”

Alamanda looked straight into his eyes. “Don’t be stupid, Shodancho, I’m roaming around with all the hundreds of other people here tonight.”

And with that, Alamanda departed without another word. Shodancho was frozen in disbelief. That crazy exchange had been far more terrifying than any battle he had ever fought. He turned around and started walking, with a body and soul truly drained of all power.

Is there a guerrilla strategy to defeat love? he asked himself in a brief lament.

He tried to forget the girl’s image, but the more he tried to forget it, the more that half-Japanese half-Dutch and a-little-bit-Indonesian face haunted him. He tried to come up with reasons for why he couldn’t love that girl. Just think about it, he said in the moments before he fell asleep (even though he clearly would never be able to sleep well again), that girl had probably just been born the same year I became a shodancho and was plotting the rebellion. There was an age difference of twenty years — and now, a man who had been named a great commander and had received the rank of general from the first president of the Republic of Indonesia had to surrender to a sixteen-year-old girl. Thinking further about that made everything all the more painful, and he found himself even more mired in a bottomless love.

One morning he awoke, and swore that he would stay in Halimunda forever and Alamanda would be his wife.

But he didn’t tell his thirty-two faithful soldiers, who awaited his orders, until finally Tino Sidiq asked, “When are we going to return, Shodancho?”

“Return where?”

“To the jungle,” replied Tino Sidiq, “where we’ve been living for the past ten years.”

“Going back to the jungle would not be a return,” said Shodancho. “Me, and you, and everybody else was born here, in this city, Halimunda. Here we have returned.”

“So you don’t want to go back to the jungle?”

“No.”

He proved this by putting up a nameplate in front of his old shodan headquarters: Military District of Halimunda. To Major Sadrah, who suddenly appeared after hearing about Shodancho’s decision to stay in the city and about his impulsive establishment of a military district, he said shortly, “Here I am, the commander of the military district, faithful to my sworn soldiers and awaiting further orders.”

“Don’t be silly. You are a general and your place is next to the president.”

“As long as I can stay in this city, next to the girl whose name you told me,” he said in a heartbreaking tone of voice, “I’ll become anyone or anything — even if it means I have to turn into a dog.”

Sadrah looked at his friend with a gaze full of pity. After hesitating for a moment, Major Sadrah said, “That girl already has a sweetheart.” He couldn’t bear to look at Shodancho’s face, so looking away he continued, “He is a young man named Kliwon.”

He knew that he was saying something that pierced right to the heart.

NO ONE KNEW how Comrade Kliwon ended up becoming a communist youth, because even though he had never been rich, he’d always been a hedonist. His father of course had been quite the communist, and a master speechmaker. He had managed to avoid being sent to Boven-Digoel by the colonial government and so for a time survived, but he was finally executed by the Japanese after his endless meddling and pamphlet writing made the Kempeitai realize he was a communist rebel. Still, there had been no sign that Kliwon would follow in his father’s footsteps. He was good at school and had even skipped two grades, and it seemed as if he could be anything he wanted when he grew up.