Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

Only one guy, who was Kliwon’s childhood friend, was bold enough to ask what he was doing with the tree. Kliwon replied tersely, “Chopping it down,” and after that no one dared ask him anything else and he continued with his work.

After the tree was stripped of its branches and leaves, he began to chop it up into pieces of firewood. He split the largest branches into two or four so that in a matter of minutes the wood began to pile up on the side of the road. Kliwon walked to the baggage counter and there he took a length of coarse rope without asking for permission (although of course no one forbade him) and tied up the wood with it. After all this was finished, without speaking to any of the people who were still faithfully crowding around him, he put his machete back into his sarong, picked up the bundle of wood, and walked away from the station.

At first the people wanted to follow him, but the friend who had previously spoken and suddenly understood what was going to happen quickly said to them, “Let him go alone.” And it turned out that what his friend suspected was exactly what came to pass: Kliwon went to Alamanda’s house and found the girl overseeing the party preparations. Alamanda was surprised by his arrival and even more surprised to see the man she still loved so much hauling a stack of wood for who knows what purpose.

For a moment Alamanda wanted to leap toward him, embrace him and kiss him just as she had at the station, tell him that this was their wedding celebration, and that it was a lie that she was going to marry Shodancho. But she just as quickly came to her senses and tried to appear proud of her wedding to Shodancho, tried to look like a smug and self-satisfied girl. Kliwon let the wood fall from his shoulder to the earth, making Alamanda jump back to save her toes from getting squashed, and he finally opened his mouth to say, “This is that wretched almond tree, where we promised we would meet again. I am offering it to you, to be used as firewood on your wedding day.”

Alamanda waved her hands as if ordering him to leave, and so Kliwon left, without telling her how he had been truly swept away by that gesture, tossed into a storm of hatred that erased everything in its wake. He probably didn’t know that once he had gone and was completely out of sight, Alamanda ran to her room and wept, burning the remaining photographs of herself to ash. By the time she met Shodancho on their wedding dais the next morning, she had tried everything she could to hide the evidence of a night’s worth of tears, but without success and so for months, even for years afterward, it remained gossip for the city folk.

Kliwon disappeared for months after that, or at least Alamanda didn’t hear any more news of him, or maybe she just didn’t want to hear anything about him anymore. She assumed that he had returned to the capital to finish his schooling at the university or to join the communist youth, who knows. But in truth Kliwon didn’t go anywhere. He stayed in Halimunda, moving from one friend’s house to the next or hiding at his mother’s place. He even attended Alamanda’s wedding in secret. He greeted Shodancho and Alamanda in disguise, without the couple realizing it, and Kliwon could see that Alamanda had been crying all night long, undeniable evidence that she was marrying against her will, and irrevocable proof that she had chosen a husband she didn’t love. For his part Kliwon was no longer angry at Alamanda, just saddened by the tragic fate that had befallen the woman he loved.

But he kept wondering what had made Alamanda decide to marry Shodancho, whom she had only just met a few weeks before, until he heard a fisherman say that late one afternoon he had seen Shodancho driving a truck out of the jungle with Alamanda slumped unconscious beside him, and another fisherman swore that from the middle of the ocean he had seen Shodancho carrying Alamanda over his shoulder into the guerrilla hut. “I am saddened by what has come to pass between you and Alamanda,” said the fisherman, “but don’t act rashly. Or, if you plan to seek revenge, let us join with you and help.”

“I won’t seek my revenge,” said Kliwon. “That man wins every war he fights.”

For the time being Kliwon returned to the ocean with his friends as he used to do, and Alamanda went through the farce of a tense and anxious wedding night. She had drugged Shodancho with a sleeping pill so that the man straightaway fell snoring onto their wedding mattress, which was shining yellow with fragrant fresh flowers arranged prettily atop it. Exhausted, Alamanda unfurled a pallet on the floor and slept there, without the slightest inclination to lie down beside her husband the way most new brides do. But unpredictably, Shodancho awoke in the early morning hours and, looking all around, he was taken aback to find that his wedding night had almost passed him by and his new bride was lying on the floor on a thin pallet. Cursing himself at this unforgivable sight, Shodancho quickly bent down, scooped up his wife, and laid her down on the bed.

Alamanda awoke to see Shodancho smiling and saying how foolish it would be to pass their wedding night without doing anything, and when Shodancho took off all his clothes so that he was standing there naked, she turned her back on him and said, “How about I tell you a fairy tale before we make love?”

Shodancho laughed and said that was an interesting idea, then got into bed and cuddled up against his wife’s back, inhaling the scent of her hair saying, “Quick, start your story, because I’m already really in the mood.”

So as best as she could Alamanda began to spin a tale, inventing a story which circled endlessly with no resolution, so that there would be no time for them to make love — not until they died, or maybe not even until the end of the world. As Alamanda was telling her story, Shodancho was exploring Alamanda’s whole body with his two hands, impatient to get to the end of the tale, even though he couldn’t really tell where it was heading. He began to fumble with the buttons on Alamanda’s gown, opening them one by one. Alamanda tried to hold out by curling up into a tight little ball, but Shodancho’s strong hands turned her over easily and pinned her down as he rolled on top of her. Alamanda pushed Shodancho so that he rolled off again, and said, “Listen, Shodancho, we’ll make love when my story is finished.”

Shodancho shot a peevish look in her direction, detecting a whiff of antagonism in the game, and said that he could listen to the story while they were making love.

“But we already agreed, Shodancho,” said Alamanda, “that you could marry me but I would never make love to you.”

That angered Shodancho so that he didn’t care about anything anymore and roughly yanked at his new bride’s evening gown until it was torn. Alamanda let out a little scream but Shodancho quickly silenced her, pulling at her clothes. Just when it seemed that Alamanda was no longer really resisting and Shodancho had ripped off her gown, he cried out in surprise. “Damn it! What have you done to your crotch?” he asked, gaping down at a pair of underwear made out of metal, locked with a padlock that appeared to have no keyhole with which to open it.

Alamanda said with a mysterious calm, “This is an antiterror garment, Shodancho, I ordered it directly from a metalsmith and a sorcerer. It can only be opened with a mantra that only I know how to recite, and I will never ever open it for you, not even if the sky has fallen.”

That night, Shodancho tried to break the padlock using a number of different tools: he tried prying at it with a screwdriver, he pounded it with a nail and axe, and he even shot it with a pistol, which made Alamanda practically faint with fear. But everything failed to open the lock on that metal underwear and, finally caught in between lust and anger, all he could do was have relations with his wife without being able to actually penetrate her. In the morning he sliced the tip of his finger just a little bit and dripped the blood on top of the sheet, in the time-honoured symbol that a newlywed couple had to show the laundress.