Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

“I gave her the name Rengganis,” he said sadly. “And as everyone knows, Princess Rengganis married a dog.”

As the day of the wedding drew closer, he contacted a rental business to reserve some chairs for a festive party. He would present an orkes melayu on the street in front of his house. He did all this because he didn’t know what else to do.

“This is not right, Uncle,” said Ai. “She doesn’t want this wedding. Tell me, why does a pregnant girl always have to get married?”

He didn’t want to deal with her shrewish fretting and continued to prepare for the wedding as if it was his own. The doctor had confirmed the due date of the child growing in the Beautiful’s stomach, and they planned to marry her on the very next day after that. But when the baby was born with the help of a midwife, Rengganis the Beautiful once again insisted it was the offspring of a dog while her parents insisted she was to sit on the wedding dais. In response, the night before the wedding, she disappeared with her baby.

“She must have gone to Ai’s house,” said her father. The people looked for her there, but even that girl didn’t know what had happened. Panic began to spread. They returned, hoping they would find her back at the house, but what they found instead was a short message written on a slip of paper: “I’ve gone to marry a dog.”

CONFESSION: IT WAS Krisan who dug up Ai’s grave and hid her corpse under his bed.

In the old days, every morning he’d stand at his bedroom window looking out at the back veranda of Shodancho’s house. Of course Ai was still alive then, and he stood at his window just to watch her emerge, sleepily heading to wash her face at the water tap that poured down into the fishpond. He’d stand in the same spot every afternoon too, looking out at Ai chatting with her mother while chopping a chicken or some water spinach for dinner, but on this particular afternoon Ai wasn’t there, because Ai was dead and now her corpse was lying under Krisan’s bed.

He imagined people already knew about the violated grave and he pictured Shodancho, who was now really starting to show his age, but still kept his post as the head of the Halimunda military district, hearing that it had been dug up by a dog. He of course would not believe that the grave of his third daughter had been excavated by a dog, because that grave had been dug quite deep, and was protected by strong wooden planks.

“Only a human being could do it, and maybe the only one who would do it is Maman Gendeng.” Maybe that’s what Shodancho would say.

Krisan was happy to think he could outsmart people. He knew Shodancho still harbored an old grudge against the preman , Maman Gendeng, who would never have dug up Ai’s grave — all he thought about was being reunited with his daughter, Rengganis the Beautiful, who had run away. To repeat: it was Krisan who had dug up that grave, and now the corpse was carefully stored underneath his bed, and he was amazed that nobody suspected him of being the one who did it.

Indeed, he had done it just how he thought a dog would have done it, thinking that way Ai wouldn’t be angry, and in fact might be pleased. Krisan dug up Ai’s grave with his own hands and feet, raking through the pile of dirt that was still soft even though she’d already been buried for a week. He dug all night long, without taking a break. To make Ai happy, he had even brought a stray dog along, though the animal just watched silently, chained to a trunk of a frangipani tree. The dog’s tracks would trick people into thinking that a dog had done it, and Krisan neatly erased his own footprints.

It was hard to dig up a grave with one’s hands and feet, but wasn’t that how a dog would do it? Pretending he was a dog, Krisan even stuck out his tongue, and moved it in and out as he worked, believing Ai would be happy watching him from heaven. And when he became parched with thirst in the middle of his crazy task, he moved on all fours to the canal at the edge of the graveyard, and lapped the water. Working like that, he finally reached the wood planks at three in the morning after digging since seven-thirty in the evening.

The planks had been laid out in sloped row. Krisan only had to dismantle a few of the planks before he could lift up Ai’s body, wrapped in a burial shroud, from its crevice of earth. Her body was light, and Krisan’s heart jumped with a mysterious joy. He could finally hold her as tightly as he wanted, so he practically didn’t care that she was dead. From the burial shroud there wafted a strange fragrance, as if from a flower garden. Of course it wasn’t the smell of blossoms, but the aroma of the girl’s own body.

After freeing the stray dog, Krisan heaved Ai’s corpse onto his shoulder. He hastened home with cautious steps because at that hour people were usually already awake getting ready to go to the mosque. Some vegetable sellers would be heading to market to open their kiosks, and maybe a few people would be going to take a shit in one of the ponds lining the edges of the city not far from the graveyard.

He arrived at his house safely, without anyone spotting him, not even his mother or his grandmother (after the death of his father, his grandmother Mina had lived with them, taking care of all the sewing), who were both morning people. He entered through the kitchen door, tiptoed into his room, and hid Ai’s corpse under his bed. Then he retraced his steps to wipe up any mud that he might have dragged in — he cleaned up as efficiently as a school janitor, and then it was time for him to check on the corpse. He pulled Ai’s body out from under the bed and unwrapped her burial shroud.

Immediately, that fragrant scent burst forth even stronger and Krisan could see Ai’s body, which looked so fresh. The girl seemed to be merely lying on the floor, just sleeping for a moment. Krisan was not surprised, convinced that Ai’s body would never rot, not even if she were buried for years, or even centuries, and he gazed at her cheeks that were still slightly flushed, just as they’d been when she was still alive.

All of a sudden he felt embarrassed to be looking at her nakedness. He quickly covered her body once more with the burial shroud, leaving only her face exposed so he could continue to admire her beauty. And then he was weeping, this sappy kid, sad because she was dead and now he was all alone in a desolate world. But then the tone of his weeping changed, into cries of gratitude, thanking Ai because even though she was dead she hadn’t let herself rot. She remained in a state of eternal beauty, and he believed that she was doing it for him. Before he knew it, he was kissing the cheeks of that girl’s corpse.

Krisan had fallen in love with Ai long ago, and he was sure the girl had fallen in love with him long ago as well, maybe when they were still sleeping in the same cradle. She was his cousin, just as Rengganis the Beautiful was. Ai was born twelve days before Krisan, and hers was the very first face he saw the moment he was born, lying in her mother’s arms, as Alamanda and Shodancho and his own father stood waiting for his arrival. Who knows, maybe love at first sight can happen to babies too. And, what’s more, then Shodancho said something like “I hope our children will be a love match.” Krisan probably heard that just as he appeared on earth, and so he believed that they had been destined for each other. And they had been together ever since, crying together, peeing their pants together, going to the same kindergarten, and attending the same schools, until Krisan realized that he had always been in love with Ai.