Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

Comrade Kliwon said nothing and went straight into the guest bedroom, locked himself inside, and didn’t come out the next day even though Adinda and Krisan knocked on the door over and over inviting him to come eat dinner. When morning came and breakfast was ready, Adinda and Krisan took turns knocking on the door, but Comrade Kliwon didn’t make a sound, so with growing worry and suspicion they pounded on the door harder, but still there was no answer.

Finally, Krisan went to the kitchen and got the hatchet that he used to split wood to make cages for his doves and as Adinda looked on used it to smash down the door. It split down the center, and then with a few more blows, he finally had a hole big enough to put his hand through and unlock the door. They found Comrade Kliwon hanging from a sheet that he had rolled up and tied to a crossbeam, dead. Krisan grabbed hold of his mother as she lost consciousness.

The news of Comrade Kliwon’s appearance, which had been witnessed by his neighbors, had spread quickly. But everyone was too late. All they could see now was the convoy surrounding the man’s coffin heading toward the graveyard. They were too late, just like Krisan, who had never had and now would never have the opportunity to know his father. They had only met for such a brief period of time, hardly even a week, and that was not nearly enough time to truly get to know one another as father and son. Out of everyone, Krisan was the most dismayed by the death of Comrade Kliwon. He claimed the inheritance of the threadbare cap that he’d seen his father wearing in old photographs and he often put it on, to comfort himself and to feel close to his father.

Now there was one more communist ghost in that city, but thankfully he never showed himself to anyone.

ONE MORNING, WHEN Rengganis the Beautiful gave birth to a baby boy, the people of Halimunda abandoned all their morning rituals and came crowding to her house to see. There were many reasons for them to shirk their responsibilities of feeding the chickens their bran porridge or filling their washtubs to clean the dirty dishes. First, Rengganis the Beautiful was famous in Halimunda, especially after being selected as Beach Princess of the Year. Second, she was the child of Maman Gendeng, who was also quite well known even though he was also quite detested by the city folk. Third, and this was the most important, in the city’s long history it had never before come to pass that a young girl gave birth after having been raped by a dog.

When the midwife announced that what had emerged from the Beautiful’s womb was truly a human baby, people turned over the old piece of gossip that she had been raped by a brown dog with a black snout, the kind of dog you see wherever you look in Halimunda, just like whenever you look up at the night sky you see stars. It had happened in a school bathroom, more or less nine months ago, not long after the recess bell rang.

The whole thing started with the Beautiful’s bad habit of wagering, which she had inherited from her father. Her naughty friends had challenged her to drink five bottles of lemonade, saying she could have the drinks for free if she could finish them all without a drop left over. She did it, but when the entrance bell rang she paid the price, suddenly feeling like she was about to pee in her pants. It was bad timing, because lots of other schoolchildren were also going to the toilet, stretching out recess and cutting down on study time in a tradition that had been passed down from generation to generation. It was a cutthroat queue, and by the time your turn came, your pants or your skirt might already be soaking wet, but to go into class and risk peeing in your seat was also not a wise course of action, and even simpleminded Rengganis the Beautiful knew that, so she ran away from her snickering and giggling friends in the cafeteria, and headed quickly for that evil line.

There were fourteen toilets lined up behind the school building, and thirteen of them already had schoolkids waiting outside them, more likely planning to puff shared cigarettes than pee or take a shit, hidden from the eyes of the principal. The last toilet hadn’t been in use for years. One rumor had it that a girl had killed herself in there, and another that a girl had given birth in there and then strangled her bastard baby. Nothing could be proven, the only reliable fact was that the toilet seemed more like a cage for evil spirits than anything else.

Built in colonial times next to a cocoa and coconut plantation, the school had previously been a Franciscan school. After the Dutch had gone, it next belonged to the national government, and the most reasonable story about the fourteenth toilet was that at some point a coconut or tree branch had fallen through its roof and the school hadn’t had the money to repair it right away. As time passed, cocoa leaves had fallen through the hole into the toilet and gotten wet and moldy, and then lizards had made their nests beneath the detritus, and spiders had spun their webs. The water in the tub had filled with mosquito eggs and algae and weeds, and perhaps some people had taken a piss in there without ever flushing, but in any case that toilet became a place full of horror and now no one even dared stand in front of its door.

It hadn’t been touched for years, not until Rengganis the Beautiful went inside. The five bottles of lemonade in her bladder began to mutiny, and with no other choice, she approached that accursed toilet, looked inside and saw a dog busy sniffing at the cocoa leaves, looking for traces of a cat who’d slipped out through the hole in the roof. It was a neighborhood dog crossbred with an ajak , with brown fur and a black snout, and Rengganis the Beautiful had no time to chase it away, but just went in, closed the door, locked it, and then — trapped in the small space with this dog — all she could do was stand stock-still as her urine, seemingly more than the five bottles of lemonade in liquid volume, began to spill out before she even had the chance to pull down her underwear. The warmth flowed down her thighs and her calves, soaking her socks and her shoes.

Next she caused yet another uproar — one of the many uproars that she’d already caused during her sixteen years of simpleton existence — when she appeared in class as naked as the day she was born. All of the children stopped in their tracks, dropping books and tripping over chairs, and even the old math teacher, who was about to start complaining about his dirty chalkboard, suddenly realized that the impotence he had been suffering from for years was miraculously cured, and his weapon was standing stiff and strong. Everyone knew that she was the most beautiful girl in the city, the true descendant of Princess Rengganis, Halimunda’s goddess of beauty, but to see her body, that was just as beautiful as her face but usually hidden, dumbstruck everyone inside the classroom.

“I was raped by a dog in the school toilet!”

It’s all true, if you believe what she said about what happened when she peed in her pants, stuck in that toilet with this dog — for the first five minutes she stood stock-still, helplessly staring at her skirt, socks, and shoes, all wet and stinking of piss. Even when she could no longer hear the sounds of the other children outside the toilet, she was still inside there bemoaning her misfortune. Her brain, which still had the logic of a little girl, ordered her to take off all of her wet clothes, as well as her shirt and her brassiere, and in a bizarre trance-like state, she did so. She hung them all up on the rusted nails, hoping that the rays of sunlight breaking through the perforated roof would quickly dry the remaining urine, and like travelers who wait at the laundromat, she stood naked in front of this dog, who was instantly aroused. It was then, the Beautiful would say, that the dog raped her.