Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

He was captured without anyone caring whether he was to be taken to the courthouse or not. In his solitary cell, Kliwon found his peace returning, his old solemnity slowly reemerging and gathering force. The only disturbance he caused now was at night, when he would talk in his sleep, deliriously calling Isah Betina’s name with earsplitting shrieks, drowning out the howls of the wild dogs and the yowls of mating cats. The news of the man imprisoned because he was suffering from lost love spread and reached his mother. Kliwon was held for seven months until Mina came and bailed him out. She dragged Kliwon home like an angry mother who finds her kid playing in the cow stables. “Is there nothing more important to you than the love of a woman?” she asked crankily, bathing him herself despite the fact that her son was now a grown man.

The house was still just as it had been when he left. All of the furniture and things were right where he had left them. He read pulp novels and love stories with happy endings, which girls had given him as gifts, in a fruitless attempt to make himself feel better. He also read the many love letters that those same girls had written him, but of course it all just made him more and more gloomy. It was as if everything had gone back to the beginning, to the same sadness, the same heartbreak. He tried to find his friends, a number of whom were now married with children, asking for just a little bit of their happiness. He also visited a number of his old girlfriends, a number of whom were also married, and some of whom were even already divorced, and he tried to sleep with three or four of them again, just to feel the warmth of love one more time. But it all made him miss Isah Betina all over again.

“Go back to living on the streets,” said his mother. “Maybe you can find another love.”

“That’s what I’m going to do,” he said.

He had already packed up all his things, with the hope that if he returned one day, they would be waiting for him nicely and neatly. He had taken the books that were previously scattered across his bed, table, and floor and had arranged them into cardboard boxes which he stacked in a corner of his room. He had also straightened up all the clothes in his closet, put away his old guitar, and stored all of his records. He had even neatly stashed his razor and his toothbrush in a drawer. There was only one thing that remained on top of the table, but he wasn’t going to store it anywhere, because he chose to wear it instead: the cap Comrade Salim had given him. He stood in front of the mirror, looking at his reflection there. His body had become quite slender from his years of suffering, and he had a gaunt face and dull eyes. His hair still hung in inch-long ringlets. He stood there for a long time, peering at the cap and wondering whether it was true what the communist had told him, that all the laborers in Russia wore that kind of hat.

“Look at this gloomy person,” he said to his reflection. “Gloomy enough to wear this hat.”

Mina then appeared and stood in the doorway, looking at her son still standing in front of the mirror. She tried to guess where Kliwon was going wearing his neatly ironed pants, his cotton shirt, and that cap.

“You don’t look like a beggar, child.”

“Starting now and from this day forward,” said Kliwon while turning to face his mother, “call me Comrade Kliwon, Mama.”

ONE FOGGY MORNING, the throngs of people crowding the platform of Halimunda Station were astonished by a fantastic sight the likes of which they had never seen before. In front of the ticket counter, under an almond tree, two lovers were kissing passionately with no thought for the time or place. Their kisses were so full of heat that the people who witnessed the event and told the story for years to come would swear they saw a flame ignite between the couple’s lips. And this became legend, because those two lovers were Kliwon and Alamanda. Both men and women would remember the event with a keen envy.

The couple’s provocative behavior had indeed already become quite well known during those last weeks before Kliwon went to Jakarta, the capital city, to study at university.

Alamanda and Kliwon were dating and everyone thought they were the most beautiful couple that had ever existed on the face of the earth, except for Adinda. But Alamanda would shove her fingers in her ears when Adinda said you are a cheap slut who likes to break men’s hearts, stop it right now, at least for the sake of this one man. Perhaps the girl still remembered how hard Kliwon had fallen for Alamanda when her older sister was only eight years old, and perhaps she felt it would be a shame for her sister to purposefully destroy a love as incredible as that. Adinda even swore that if Alamanda dared hurt the man, she would kill her. According to her, to flat out refuse his love would be way better than to accept it only to then toss it aside like trash. Alamanda didn’t care about any of the threats that came out of her younger sister’s mouth, and it became all the more evident that she was a stubborn young woman who couldn’t be told what to do.

“Just admit that you are jealous, little girl,” she said.

“If I was going to be jealous of someone it would be Mama, who has already slept with hundreds of men,” said Adinda.

“You think I can’t sleep with a man?”

“I’m sure you could sleep with every single man in this city, and be just as awesome as Mama,” said Adinda, “but there’s no way that you could properly love all of them.”

Unlike her sister, who tended to be a homebody, Alamanda spent her days going to concerts with her sweetheart and their friends, and gathering in any place they could find to sing along to a guitar. They went out on the town and they went to the movies, so that sometimes she didn’t come home until night was already turning into dawn. Even though her two little sisters would be waiting at the window with anxious faces, she would go straight to her room without saying a word, still humming some bars from one of those whiny love songs that were so popular at the time.

“You’re worse than a prostitute,” said Adinda crankily. “At least when prostitutes come home they bring some money with them.”

“Just say it, Little Miss Grouch,” said Alamanda from inside her room. “Or should I say it for you once again? You’ve fallen in love with Kliwon.”

“Even if I was in love with him, I would never say it because if I did you would kill yourself.”

It was not just a rumor, the youth was indeed quite popular with the ladies, not just in that house but throughout all of Halimunda. Actually, he had been that popular ever since he was a little boy, when people had been surprised by his brainpower because he could solve sixth-grade exam problems when he was still only in fifth grade and the principal decided to let him skip a grade. In middle school he won all the math competitions, and because he could also play the guitar and sing and his handsome face was so convincing, he began to go out at night, accompanied by the gangs of girls who had fallen in love with him.

That was when he would go out with whichever girl he wanted, before he fell in love with Alamanda who was only eight years old, became homeless, and had a relationship with a crazy girl named Isah Betina. Now everyone said that he and Alamanda were an extraordinary couple, a bright and handsome youth and a beautiful young girl heir to the most esteemed prostitute in the city. Everyone except Adinda, that is, who felt that it was nothing short of a complete catastrophe. So far Alamanda had already been with a lot of men, and had cast them each aside one by one. She had a bad reputation, and everyone knew it, including Adinda.