Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

It wasn’t easy, but he finally succeeded in placing two of his men on each vessel — nowhere near enough, but better than nothing. Most of the fishermen grew impatient waiting to provoke the ship laborers, and urged Comrade Kliwon to burn the ships. Comrade Kliwon tried to calm them down.

“Give me some time to talk to Shodancho,” he said.

Comrade Kliwon’s first negotiations with Shodancho had failed to produce results; instead, Shodancho had added one more fishing vessel. The fishermen then once again urged him to take the shortcut of burning the ships down. A second time, Kliwon asked to speak with Shodancho. That was when he went to the house and saw Alamanda’s stomach, swollen but empty. And it wasn’t just Shodancho who had taken his words that day as the curse of a jealous man — Adinda had felt the same.

She came one afternoon, begging him, practically in tears, “Don’t hurt my older sister, she has already suffered enough, having to marry that Shodancho.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You cursed her so that she would lose her child.”

“That’s not true,” said Comrade Kliwon, defending himself, “I just saw your sister’s stomach and told what I saw.”

The girl didn’t believe him one bit. She sat in the same spot where she usually read books, her feelings a mix of anger and confusion. Usually Comrade Kliwon would leave her be, but this time he weakly pulled up a chair and sat down. There was no one else around that afternoon except the lizards on the wall and the spiders hanging from the ceiling spinning their webs.

“I’m begging you, Comrade, forget Alamanda.”

“I already forgot that was even her name.”

Adinda ignored that lame joke. “If you’re angry at her,” she said, “take out all your anger on me.”

“Alright then, I will squash you like a tomato,” said Comrade Kliwon.

“You can kill me or rape me whenever you want, I won’t put up even the tiniest bit of a fight,” said Adinda, not drawn in by his jokes. “You can make me your slave, or whatever.” She took a handkerchief from her skirt pocket, and wiped away the tears streaming down her cheeks. “You could even marry me if you wanted.”

A gecko called out seven times in the distance, a sign that she was looking for a mate.

If that baby was truly going to disappear from his wife’s stomach, Shodancho was sure it would be due to Comrade Kliwon’s curse — the curse of a jealous lover. A problem like this couldn’t be solved with weapons, nor with a seven-generation war; to save his first child he had to find a peaceful solution. He finally told Comrade Kliwon that he would order his captains to move their operations far away from the beach and the traditional fishing waters.

“But,” Shodancho then said, “please remove your curse far from my wife’s stomach.” He desperately wanted a child to prove to the world that he and his wife loved each other, that their’s was a happy marriage. Hearing that request, Comrade Kliwon smiled, not because he knew that Alamanda only loved him and didn’t love Shodancho at all, but because, “There’s no connection between an empty pot and those ships, Shodancho.”

As if he hadn’t heard what Comrade Kliwon said, Shodancho still moved his ships far back into the deep ocean.

The fishermen reveled in their victory — those ships no longer caught fish in their waters and no longer sold their fish in the local market, docking now in bigger cities that needed larger quantities of fish.

Comrade Kliwon tried to tell them as tangibly as possible, as his Marxist gurus instructed, what had happened and to discuss their new efforts, now that the big ships had been pushed into the distance and the fish had returned. But it turned out that as soon as the fishermen had some money, they bought a cow’s head and after celebrating on the beach with some bottles of tuak , they threw it into the sea as an offering to the queen of the South Seas, still so superstitious. Comrade Kliwon couldn’t do much about that, feeling sure that it would be difficult to teach them even the most basic logic, let alone instill the Marxist dialectic that he himself had only received in bits and pieces during his short stay in the capital. He was happy enough that they’d had the courage to fight back against the threat to their unity and their livelihood, but time and time again he told his friends that life wasn’t as easy as all that, that they shouldn’t let themselves get carried away by a small victory, and that the ties of their friendship must be knit even tighter, because even larger threats were sure to come.

The fishermen weren’t the only ones to hold a cheerful syukuran ritual of thanks. Shodancho was so happy that he was constantly throwing these blessing celebrations. Perhaps because he had been so worried by Comrade Kliwon’s curse, he also asked that a traditional ceremony be held for Alamanda’s safety and the safety of the baby growing in her stomach. For that ceremony, Alamanda bathed in water filled with all kinds of flowers in the middle of the night as a traditional midwife recited mantras. This midwife reassured Shodancho that his wife’s stomach was beautifully full, and the child was doing just fine in there, a baby girl who would be as beautiful as her mother.

Shodancho didn’t care about the sex of the baby, just knowing that he was going to have a child was good enough for him. But when he heard the midwife’s prediction that the baby was a girl, he jumped for joy, reassured that the curse was nothing but hot air from a man consumed with jealousy. He straightaway began to think of a name for the child and decided on Nurul Aini, not because it had any special meaning, but because it suddenly appeared in his mind, and yet it was for that reason precisely that he thought the child’s name was a divine inspiration he had to follow. Meanwhile the midwife was dousing his wife with scoopful upon scoopful of flower water, and Alamanda was shivering in the chilly night air, sure that she’d wake up the next morning with the flu. And elsewhere, out at sea, Comrade Kliwon was hoping that he had been mistaken, wishing for the couple to have a real baby.

But Alamanda never gave birth to Nurul Aini because the baby vanished, just like that, from inside her stomach just a few days before her predicted date of birth.

Alamanda herself didn’t know what had happened. Just as soon as she awoke she’d belched violently, pushing out a tremendous amount of air, and suddenly felt like a slim virgin, without any weight in her womb. She remembered quite clearly how Comrade Kliwon had said that her stomach was like an empty pot, filled with only air and wind, but she was still shocked, and she screamed out into the fresh and peaceful morning air. Shodancho, who was sleeping in another room, came scurrying in drawstring shorts and an undershirt, his face streaked with pillowcase creases and his arms covered in mosquito bites. He rushed to his wife’s room and was stunned to see her slim and shapely once again.

First thinking that his wife had already given birth, he looked for puddles of blood and for the little one, on top of the bed or even underneath it, but he didn’t find a newborn and he didn’t hear its cries. He stared at his wife who stared back at him, her face ashen. She tried to speak but her mouth just hung open, her lips trembling like someone with the chills, and not one syllable came out.

Shodancho remembered Comrade Kliwon’s words and in a rising panic he shook Alamanda violently, ordering her to tell him what had happened. But without saying word, Alamanda drooped weakly onto the bed just as the midwife arrived. The midwife, experienced in all manner of strange things, rearranged Alamanda into a more comfortable position, and said: “Sometimes this does happen, Shodancho — there’s no baby inside, just air and wind.”