Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

“But you came back to life,” said the kyai .

“I came back just so I could tell you that.”

That would be really good for the Friday midday sermon, and the kyai left with a radiant face. He didn’t need to feel embarrassed about visiting Dewi Ayu (even though many years ago he had shouted that it was a sin to visit that prostitute’s house and that you could roast in hell from just opening her gate), because as the woman had said, she was no longer a prostitute after twenty-one years of not being touched by a soul, and you’d better believe it that now and forever nobody would ever want to touch her again.

Who suffered the most from all the fuss over this old woman come back to life was none other than Beauty, who had to lock herself in her room. Luckily, no one ever stayed longer than a few minutes, because the visitors would soon sense an awful terror coming from behind Beauty’s closed bedroom door. With a strange nauseating smell, an evil wind, black and heinous, would sweep past them, sliding out from under the door and through the keyhole, with a penetrating chill that reached the very marrow of their bones. Most people had never seen Beauty, except for when she was a little baby and the midwife had circled the village looking for a wet nurse. But the idea of her was enough to make the hair on the napes of their necks stand up and their whole bodies tremble as they gazed at the monster’s door, when the evil aroma carried by the wind reached their noses and the sound of silence clamored in their ears. That was when their mouths would let out some nonsense small talk, and forgetting their desire to hear whatever amazing things Dewi Ayu had to say, they’d quickly stand up after forcing down half a glass of bitter tea and excuse themselves to go home and tell their story.

“However strong your curiosity about Dewi Ayu who rose from the dead,” they would say to anyone who asked after their terror-filled visit, “I advise you not to go into her house.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ll be scared half to death.”

When people no longer came to visit, Dewi Ayu began to notice Beauty’s peculiarities, aside from her habit of sitting on the veranda waiting for a handsome prince and predicting her fate by the stars. In the middle of the night, she heard a scuffle coming from Beauty’s bedroom, which made her climb down from her own bed and walk in the darkness and stand in front of the girl’s door apprehensively, growing more and more confused by the sounds emerging from that hideous young girl. She was still standing there when Rosinah appeared with a flashlight, passing it over her mistress’s face.

“I know these sounds,” said Dewi Ayu in a half whisper to Rosinah, “from the rooms of the whorehouse.”

Rosinah nodded in agreement.

“It’s the sound of people making love,” Dewi Ayu continued.

Rosinah nodded again.

“The question is, who is she making love to, or rather, who would want to make love to her?”

Rosinah shook her head. She wasn’t making love to anyone. Or, she was making love to someone, but you would never know who it was, because you wouldn’t see anyone.

Dewi Ayu stood there in awe of the mute girl’s equanimity, which reminded her of the time of her own insanity when it was only that girl who understood her. They sat together in the kitchen that night, in front of the same old stove, heating up some water for a cup of coffee and waiting for it to boil. Illuminated only by the glowing flame that licked the edges of the dry burnt kindling made of broken cocoa twigs and palm tree branches and the fibers of coconut rinds, they chatted just as they often used to do.

“Did you teach her how?” asked Dewi Ayu.

“How to what?” asked Rosinah, just the shape of her mouth without a sound.

“Masturbate.”

Rosinah shook her head. Beauty isn’t masturbating, she is making love to someone but you just won’t know who.

“Why not?”

Because I don’t know either. Rosinah shook her head.

She told Dewi Ayu about all the miraculous events, how when Beauty was still little the girl could speak without anybody teaching her how, and how she even began reading and writing when she was six years old and how, in the end, Rosinah didn’t teach her a thing, because the girl had already been able to do things that Rosinah herself couldn’t yet do. Embroidery at the age of nine, sewing at the age of eleven, and don’t even ask, she could cook whatever food you wanted.

“Someone must have taught her,” said Dewi Ayu in confusion.

“But no one comes to this house,” Rosinah signed.

“I don’t care how he came, or how he came without you or me knowing. But he must have come and taught her everything, even how to make love.”

“Yes, it’s true, he comes and they make love.”

“This house is haunted.”

Rosinah had never believed that the house was haunted, but Dewi Ayu had her reasons. Still, that was another matter, and Dewi Ayu didn’t want to say anything about all that to Rosinah, at least not that evening. She stood up and quickly went back to bed, forgetting about the boiling water and the cup of coffee.

In the following days, the old woman tried to spy on the ugly young girl, to discover the most sensible explanation for all of these miracles, because she didn’t want to believe a ghost was responsible, even if a ghost was truly present in the house.

One morning, she and Rosinah found an ancient man sitting in front of the blazing stove, shivering from the cold in the morning air. He looked like a guerrilla, with hair that was going every which way, matted and tied back with a wilted yellow leaf. The impression was reinforced by his face, sunken as if he had been starving for years, and by his dark clothing, covered in mud stains and dried blood. There was even a small dagger swinging on his hip, tied to his leather belt. He was wearing shoes like the ones the Gurkha forces wore during the war, way too big for his feet.

“Who are you?” asked Dewi Ayu.

“Call me Shodancho,” said the old man. “I’m freezing, let me spend a moment in front of your stove.”

Rosinah tried to size him up rationally. Maybe in the past he really had led a shodan , maybe he had been in a battalion in Halimunda and rebelled against the Japanese before running away into the forest. Maybe he had been trapped there for years, not knowing that Holland and Japan were already long gone and we now had a republic with our own flag and our own national anthem. Rosinah gave him some breakfast with a tender gaze and a show of respect that was just a little bit excessive.

But Dewi Ayu looked at him with some suspicion, wondering whether he was the prince her daughter waited for every evening, and whether it could be him who had taught her how to make love. But the man looked like he was more than seventy years old and should’ve been impotent for years, and with that Dewi Ayu’s unpleasant thoughts began to fade. She even invited him to live in the house, because there was still an empty room, and the man appeared to have lost all connection to the outside world.

Shodancho, who was indeed in a confused and sorry state, agreed. That was Tuesday, three months after Dewi Ayu rose from the dead, the day when they found Beauty sprawled out across her bedroom floor in a pitiful condition. Her mother tried to help her stand and with Rosinah’s help laid her across the bed. Shodancho suddenly appeared behind them, saying:

“Look at her stomach, she’s pregnant, almost three months along.”

In disbelief, Dewi Ayu looked at Beauty with a gaze that no longer showed confusion but only an anger not at all tempered by any ignorance and then demanded, “How did you get pregnant?!”

“The same way you got pregnant four times,” said Beauty. “I took off my clothes and made love to a man.”