Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

“I hope it’s just gossip,” said Shodancho finally.

“Or just another bit of my daughter’s foolishness,” the thug replied dryly. He reminisced about all the dukun they’d visited to make his daughter more like other girls. Some said she was possessed by an evil spirit, while others suggested that her spirit was just refusing to grow up: she was a six-year-old child inside the body of a sixteen-year-old young woman. But whatever they said, they couldn’t do anything about it. “And you know, just to make them allow her in school I had to punch out three different teachers.” Growing a little mawkish losing his taste for the card game, he asked, “Are you all going to laugh at her as well?”

“Well, we always laugh at jokers,” said Shodancho.

Maman Gendeng left and as he walked home the wind began blowing down from the hills and he could hear the sea thrashing. A group of bats flew clumsily against the wind, like drunkards, in a sky as orange as the fruit. The fishermen were stepping out of their houses with oars and nets and vats of ice, while from the opposite direction, the field laborers were coming home with their sickles and empty sacks. The overcast weather made him uneasy.

But seeing the starfruit tree, flowering verbena, and the shady sapodilla growing in the front of their house lifted his spirits. His home almost always rescued him from any storms of gloom, but this time he found his wife sitting in front of a tub full of laundry, crying.

“I’m worried that she’s pregnant,” said Maya Dewi, this mild-mannered woman, in a tone of fury. “A month has passed and I still haven’t come across any bloodstained underwear.” And, with that, she hurled that laundry tub, spilling the contents out across the floor.

The thug mulled it over. “If that turns out to be true, then it couldn’t have been a dog,” he said with certainty. “And in any case, if anybody is going to rape anybody, it should be my daughter who rapes a dog.”

After his failed proposal in the bus terminal, Kinkin threw himself into his new hobby of hunting dogs lost in the graveyard and shooting them dead with his pellet gun. He was the only person who believed that Rengganis the Beautiful had been raped by a dog and, burning with a blind jealousy, he would not let even one dog under his dominion survive. If no dogs appeared, then he would buy posters of dogs that were sold in front of the market and hang them from the branches of a frangipani tree before shooting them to shreds. His father was the only one who knew about this odd behavior, and grew concerned.

“What’s wrong with you, child?” his father asked. “The only sin dogs are guilty of is barking too much.”

“Dogs are dogs, Dad,” he replied coldly without turning his head, still aiming at the poster swinging from his last bullet. “And one of them raped the woman I love.”

“I have never heard of a dog raping a woman. Or maybe you have fallen in love with a female dog?”

“Enough bullshit,” said Kinkin. “Go home, Dad, this final bullet is intended for a dog and not for you.”

Falling in love had totally destroyed any air of mystery that had surrounded him, or at least that was how his classmates saw it. No one had ever wanted to play with him, just as he had never wanted to play with anyone. His close friends were a gang that no other kids would like: jailangkung creatures. He had never even had a deskmate, because his uniform stunk of incense, and the teachers never called on him because sometimes he answered in the voice of a dead person. And even though the other children knew that he cheated during recitation by asking his jailangkung for the correct answers, no one dared tell on him nor ask for his help. He was like a bellybutton: everyone knew he was there, but they didn’t pay any attention to him. That was before he saw the Beautiful.

The first time he saw her was the first day she entered her new school: after nine boring academic years, a scuffle had broken out in the office and the children came running to see what had happened. Kinkin was maybe the last person to see it, a man pounding to the ground three teachers who had refused to accept his daughter at the school and had suggested a special school for retarded, idiot, and insane children, an idea the man rejected, saying that his daughter was just fine.

“The only thing that makes my daughter different is the fact that she is the most beautiful girl in this entire city, if not in the entire universe,” the man declared, glaring at the three teachers sprawled on the floor and at the principal quivering behind his desk.

The girl stood behind her father, wearing a brand new white and grey school uniform, still smelling of sewing machine grease, with sharp pleats in her skirt. She had tied her long hair in two braids that hung past the left and right sides of her waist, accented with red and white ribbons, in respect for the colors of the national flag. She wore the required black shoes, and short white socks with small lace flowers encircling the rims, her bare calves more captivating than anything that she was wearing. She clearly was not an idiot, anyone could see that, even Kinkin who was watching her from behind the glass window in the teacher’s office. She was nothing less than an angel, lost in this vicious world, and ever since his first glorious glimpse, Kinkin had been swept away in an uncontrollable fever of love. Although he had never talked to anyone at school, he approached the girl and, struck by Cupid’s arrow, asked her name. The girl, seeming confused, pointed to the small emblem that had been embroidered onto her shirt on top of her right breast, “You can read it right here: Rengganis.”

All the children had name tags stuck to the chest of their uniforms, but Kinkin couldn’t focus when the girl pointed to hers with the tip of her slender finger, instead staring at her breasts. He trembled for the rest of the first day of school, suffering alone in a corner of the classroom.

He suffered all the more, feeling the stares of his classmates, shocked to hear him speak up for the very first time since elementary school. They didn’t dare make fun of him, though, because they were paranoid that the weird kid might hurt them with witchcraft or black magic. Only one girl, seemingly put in the class as Rengganis the Beautiful’s guardian, had the guts to approach him.

“Listen to me, Jailangkung Boy,” the girl threatened, “if you bother my little friend here, I will slice your dick into pieces like a carrot.”

Ai quickly went and sat back down next to the Beautiful, leaving Kinkin almost in tears, imagining all the obstacles he would have to overcome in order to obtain the love that he so desired. To him, Ai was the most annoying creature on the planet. Everyday he hoped he could escort the Beautiful home from school, since walking next to her was of course the most rapturous thing that a schoolboy in love could ever imagine, but Ai always beat him. He was so pissed off, he once said to the girl, “Someone should murder you.”

“You’d do it yourself if you weren’t such a faggot.”

But he didn’t dare. So he missed every opportunity to walk the Beautiful home from school and his only happiness came in class, when he could turn his head and gaze at that beautiful face for as long as he wanted. He became the dumbest kid in school, because he no longer paid attention to any of the lessons. The only thing that helped his grades was the jailangkung , whom he consulted during exams. He also grew tragically skinny from not eating or sleeping enough, assaulted by love.

“You look worse off than me,” the Beautiful even commented, “like a real idiot.”

They brought her to the hospital, and the doctor said with complete certainty that the girl was in fact pregnant, seven weeks along. Both Maman Gendeng and Maya Dewi tried not to believe him, but five other doctors who examined her said the same thing. So did a dukun .