Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

But it wasn’t an easy matter to tell her that he loved her, because Ai was his cousin and they were such close friends. Such a confession could destroy their sweet relationship, but if he didn’t say anything, maybe the girl would never realize that he would love her for as long as she lived, and he would regret it if she was taken by another. That was the thing he was most afraid of: he would rather hang himself than endure that heartbreak.

There was another serious problem: Krisan had no friends other than Rengganis the Beautiful and Ai to talk to. There was no way he was going to talk about it to his grandmother or his mother, much less his two uncles or aunts. And he couldn’t write about it in a diary, because Ai would certainly find it and read it no matter where he hid it. That wouldn’t be a problem if he knew that Ai loved him too, but he only suspected that she might, and he was afraid that he was hoping for too much. It would be awful if Ai found out that he loved her but it turned out that she didn’t love him. The whole thing was quite troublesome. He often cursed his own fate and wondered why he had to be born as the girl’s cousin. When that jailangkung boy had asked Maman Gendeng for Rengganis the Beautiful’s hand in the bus terminal, terror had swept over Krisan. Someone had announced to the world that he loved Rengganis the Beautiful, and soon someone else would certainly come to Shodancho to propose to Nurul Aini. Krisan was determined to get that girl before someone else did.

He planned his declaration of love for weeks, weeks filled with excruciating pain.

Krisan began to write love letters, and every time he had to write the word Ai, he would purposefully leave the space blank by not writing those two letters, just in case. He wrote ten long love letters, each like a short story, but he never sent any of them, just stashed them under a pile of underwear in his closet. That’s not because he was perverted, but because it was the safest place. Ai came over all the time and got into everything, taking whatever she liked, especially Comrade Kliwon’s martial arts novels. There was an unwritten agreement between the three of them — Krisan, Ai, and Rengganis the Beautiful — that what belonged to one belonged to all. Except his underwear. Ai had never wanted to touch those, so the proof of his unspoken passion was safe underneath them.

Then the boy decided it was stupid to write letters. He would just plainly say that he loved her, more than as just a cousin, but the way a man loves a woman. He was consumed with the feeling that even though they were so close and their friendship was so warm, and even though fate had already determined that one day they would marry, life would be flat and flavorless until he could voice his true feelings.

He spent days practicing his declaration, standing in front of his mirror imagining the girl was standing next to him — maybe they would be looking at a seagull swooping down over the surface of the ocean during a trip to the beach — and he would say, “Ai,” and then he’d pause on purpose, assuming that he would need a moment for Ai to look at him, or at the very least to perk up her ears. Then he would continue with a strong voice that would be heard clearly over the cacophony of pounding waves and the wind shaking the leaves of the coconut trees and the pandan bushes. “Do you know that I love you?”

Just one line, one short sentence. Krisan believed that he could say it, and he could imagine the girl then blushing — it would be like that even though she had known for a long time that Krisan was secretly in love with her. Of course maybe Ai would not look at him, Ai tended to be shy, and so maybe she would bow her head, afraid of seeming too overjoyed. But then, without looking at him, she would confess that she loved him too.

What would happen next was way easier for Krisan to imagine. He would take the girl’s hand and then everything would be happy ever after as they’d get married, have children, see their grandchildren, and die together many decades later. But all that was so beautiful it would make Krisan unsure of himself all over again, so he’d practice even harder, repeating that short one-line sentence over and over: in the bathroom, lying in bed, wherever he went.

One afternoon he even tried to turn his grandmother into his lab rat. As Mina was sewing on the front veranda and he was sitting next to her he suddenly said, “Grandma. .” And just as he had practiced, he stopped right there.

Mina stopped working and turned her head to look at him with a questioning glance from behind her thick glasses, figuring that the kid wanted to borrow some money to buy some silly thing he didn’t need, as usual. But how shocked Mina was when Krisan continued:

“Grandma, do you know that I love you very much?”

Mina’s eyes welled up and she immediately put down her sewing, scooted her chair over and embraced Krisan, with her tears flowing faster and faster, saying, “How sweet you are. Even that crazy Comrade, my very own son, never said anything like that to me.”

But every time Krisan was with Ai, even if it was just the two of them alone without Rengganis the Beautiful, which almost never happened, everything he had memorized evaporated. He would vow to tell her at another opportunity, and then the words would again disappear. Ai always struck him dumb. It was like she pierced him to the heart, left him lost in a storm of unspeakable love.

Until one day this happened: Rengganis the Beautiful gave birth to a baby and disappeared from her house. The person most upset, maybe even more upset than Rengganis the Beautiful’s parents Maya Dewi and Maman Gendeng, was Ai. Everyone knew Ai thought of herself as Rengganis the Beautiful’s protector, and now that the girl had gotten pregnant without knowing who had impregnated her (even though Rengganis had confessed: a dog), and then had given birth to a baby, Ai was devastated. She fell ill on that same day, stricken with a high fever and calling out Rengganis’s name in her sleep. It made sense, even though it still made Krisan quite jealous. Krisan knew the two girls were extremely close, way closer than either of them had ever been to him, maybe because they were girls.

Her fever continued for days, and no doctor could figure out what kind of sickness it was. All the tests showed she was in perfect health.

“She’s possessed by the ghost of a communist,” Shodancho said.

“Shut your mouth!” screamed Alamanda.

In the afternoon, after coming home from school, Krisan was her most faithful attendant, sitting at her bedside and looking at her lying there weakly with an empty gaze, her feverish body shivering. Clearly this was not the right time to tell her that he loved her the way a man loves a woman: at this point they were both seventeen years old.

Ai often suddenly appeared in Krisan’s room. Sometimes through the door, but just as often she would jump right in through the open window, even right before she got sick. One night, around seven o’clock, she appeared again, jumping through the window with a mischievous smile as if she had a naughty plan. She looked so beautiful, so sweet, and so healthy. She was dressed all in white frilly lace, so clean and pure, as if she was wearing a set of new clothes to celebrate Eid. Her face and body were radiant, and her dark straight hair fell loose down her back. Her piercing eyes were shining, her pink cheeks were adorable, and that naughty smile of hers displayed her beautiful tempting lips. Krisan had just lay down after eating dinner, and was startled by the sudden visit.

“You!” he exclaimed, sitting up on the edge of his bed. “You’re all better?”

“As healthy as a female olympian,” said Ai, chuckling and raising up both her arms to flex like a bodybuilder.