Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

“Yes, I have seen her stomach,” said Comrade Kliwon. “So maybe this is just the grumbling of a jealous man.”

ONCE UPON A time, the citizens of Halimunda were thrown into an uproar by the discovery of a baby, found lying in a garbage heap. It was a boy and he was still alive even though he was being dragged back and forth by dogs, so people knew he would grow up to be a strong man. For days they tried to find his mother, but she never came forward, so they couldn’t begin to guess who his father might be.

The baby was cared for by an old spinster named Makojah, the most hated granny in the city, and yet the old lady everyone most depended on. She made her living by loaning money, because that was the only thing she could do. She couldn’t farm, because no one would sell her any land and all she had was the tiny patch of earth she had inherited and on which she lived, and she couldn’t work because nobody would give her a job. She couldn’t even get a husband for as long as she lived, even though she had proposed to about sixteen men. Her life was lonely and full of misery, but she got her revenge by pretending to be charitable and loaning those city folk who had fallen into poverty money and then asphyxiating them with her high interest rates.

So, to repeat, everybody hated her, especially those drowning in their never-ending debt. Everyone avoided her, shunned her, and considered her worse than a demonic sinner. But if a hard-pressed time came and they had tried everything else to no avail, they would come knocking on her door, because they knew that just behind it temporary assistance could be found. Makojah knew all their polite bowing was just a charade, and their fake smiles masked their real plea, but she didn’t care — it was all part of her business.

People sometimes wondered where all the money she collected went, because she never seemed to get any richer. Her house was just as it had always been, except for the occasional paint job or small repairs. She didn’t live extravagantly, she didn’t have any relatives, and they never saw her go to the bank to deposit the money she wrung out of them, so they began to think the old spinster must be stashing their money under her mattress. So one night, in a stealth operation, four men came to her house to rob her. Her neighbors, who knew all about it, watched from behind their curtains. Makojah calmly looked on as they searched every corner of her house. No matter where the thieves looked, they didn’t find the money — there was nothing underneath her mattress, nothing in her stove, and nothing in the water jug. Her wardrobe held only clothes, and all her kitchen cupboard had inside it was a plate of rice and some carrot soup. Giving up, the four masked thieves called off their search and approached Makojah, who was still just standing there in her bedroom doorway.

“Where’s your money?” asked one of them, annoyed.

“I would be more than happy to give it to you,” said Makojah smiling, “at forty-percent interest, to be repaid in full by the end of the week.”

They left her without saying another word.

No one tried to steal from her again, especially not after she took in the baby. Makojah cared for the little one mostly because she had always dreamed of having a child, but also because no one else was willing to take him from the trash heap. So the baby grew up with her. Makojah gave him a good name, Bima, after the strong prince in the Mahabharata, but everyone else called him Idiot, due to his truly annoying and aggravating behavior, and then the people forgot that his real name was Bima, including Makojah, and then the little kid himself forgot it too, so his full name became Edi Idiot.

An accursed fate was predicted to soon befall that child, because the old spinster brought misfortune — her mother had died giving birth to her and then, when she was five years old, her father died too, stung by a scorpion that had scuttled into the kitchen. Then Makojah was cared for by a childless widow auntie, who came to live with her. When Makojah was seven years old the auntie also died, struck on her head by a falling coconut. In any case, her father had owned a pawnshop and Makojah received a more than adequate inheritance, enough to hire a servant to take care of her daily needs, though her servant in turn died from a spiking fever when Makojah was twelve. After that, nobody wanted to live with her, thinking she brought bad luck.

When she was still young, she was honestly quite beautiful. Many men were secretly in love with her, but they knew everyone who had lived with her had died and preferred to marry other girls, who weren’t as good looking but with whom they’d live long after their wedding day, as opposed to marrying Makojah and then dying right after. Nobody knew where all her bad luck came from, and nobody considered all those deaths to be mere coincidences. Everyone preferred a darker interpretation, and in fact she’d never be touched by a man up until the day she died.

Makojah had her business of money lending, but she was starting to get old and was sure that she wouldn’t survive living all alone. She tried proposing to good men, but they refused her. She tried proposing to bad men, the gamblers and the drunks, but they refused her too. She even tried proposing to beggars, but they preferred to live in poverty rather than to live in luxury with her. Finally, when she was forty-two years old, she stopped trying to find a husband and tried to adopt a child, but this failed too, and she was all alone until the day she finally pulled that baby from the trash heap.

Edi Idiot grew up in her care with no sign of the curse. The only unlucky thing about him was that none of the other little kids wanted to play with him, infected by the prejudice toward the family. The children avoided Edi Idiot just as their parents avoided Makojah, except when they needed her money. This turned the boy into a difficult hothead who annoyed all the other kids. He’d tantrum anytime he didn’t get his way. He berated people at the slightest perceived slight, and this made the other children withdraw from him even further.

He tried to develop friendships by spreading fear as the strongest kid in the city.

But in the end he found some real friends, in other outcast classmates. He noticed two crippled children made into the butt of other kids’ jokes. He saw a starving and bone-skinny kid get teased, and another shunned because his parents were a coolie and a pickpocket. Edi Idiot was always there for them, coming whenever those kids were getting bullied, mercilessly attacking their tormenters. He became their protector and the group developed such a close friendship that the schoolchildren were divided into two groups: the good kids, and the delinquent kids led by Edi Idiot.

They began to grow into the city’s public enemies. Unlike the other kids, who just caused small-time chaos and confusion, Edi Idiot did not hesitate to clean out all the chickens from someone’s coop for a feast at the seashore. When he was just eleven years old, he had already robbed a tavern, wounding its owner and grabbing bottles and bottles of arak and beer, then getting drunk with his friends in a cocoa orchard. They had also started sampling almost all the prostitutes in the city. And they had the unique distinction of seeing the inside of a prison cell before they were teenagers. In such situations, Makojah would rescue them by bribing the police, not in the least bit upset by anything that Edi Idiot did. On the contrary, that old spinster was quite proud of him.

“He’ll hurt the people of this city,” Makojah said once, to the policemen guarding him, “just as they have hurt me for so many years.”