Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

The big problem was the baby. It kept on fussing. For the entire journey she had stuffed its mouth with the corner of its blanket, so that they wouldn’t be discovered. She had avoided public streets and instead ran under the cover of the shadows of trees, cutting through the banana orchards and cassava fields. Even then she still had to be very careful because lots of farmers roamed about at night to check on their land, and there were watchmen, and people out hunting eels and grasshoppers. The blanket worked pretty well to muffle the baby’s cries, but also almost killed it. When she entered the jungle on the promontory, she finally dared to take out the gag, thinking that no one else would be wandering there in the middle of the night, and ran into the thicket with that baby wailing on and on.

In the guerrilla hut the baby still fussed, even though its mother had at last nursed it, but then, in its final days, it refused to nurse. It had urinated and the swaddling blanket was wet, but Rengganis the Beautiful had no other blanket, so she just turned it a little bit so the wet parts were on the outside. But the baby still cried, with a voice that grew weaker and weaker as time passed. Only then did Rengganis the Beautiful realize the baby was sick with fever. A hot air came rising off its body, and yet it shivered. She didn’t know what should be done, so she just watched that baby suffer.

“Then on the third day it died,” she said.

And she still didn’t know what she should do. After unwrapping it from the blanket, she brought the baby out of the guerrilla hut, placing it on a rock that many years ago had been used by Shodancho and his men as a dining table, and for the entire day she just looked at her baby’s corpse, unable to think. It was already afternoon by the time she had the idea of throwing it into the ocean, but just then a pack of ajak came and encircled her and her baby, summoned by the smell of the corpse. Rengganis the Beautiful looked at those ajak , and saw how eager they were to get at that baby’s body, so she hurled the infant in their direction. They immediately fought over it, and then one dragged the baby deep into the forest, as the others trailed behind.

“You’re more gruesome than Satan,” said Krisan, shuddering.

“But that was easier than digging a grave.”

They both fell silent, maybe both imagining how those dogs must have torn apart that little poor baby’s corpse. Krisan didn’t know what Maman Gendeng would do if he knew this was his grandchild’s fate. Maybe he would go crazy and burn the entire city down, killing all the ajak and most probably killing all the people too. But now it would be pointless to search for its remains. Those ajak probably hadn’t left anything behind, because even its little bones were still tender enough to eat. Krisan almost puked imagining a dog swallowing the baby’s head whole.

“And you didn’t come,” said Rengganis the Beautiful, looking at Krisan with an expression torn between anger and disappointment. “I waited until yesterday afternoon, eating nothing but those hard nuts.”

“I couldn’t come.”

“You’re mean.”

“I couldn’t come,” said Krisan, gesturing to Rengganis the Beautiful not to talk so loud, worried that his mother and grandmother would catch them. “Because Ai got sick and then she died.”

“What?”

“Ai got sick and then she died.”

“That’s impossible.”

Krisan jumped up from the bed, groped for the corpse beneath his bed, dragged it out and showed it to Rengganis the Beautiful. Ai’s body was now lying on the floor wrapped in a burial shroud, still in the same condition as the first time Krisan had held her — so fresh, and so pretty.

“She’s just sleeping,” said Rengganis the Beautiful, coming down off the bed to inspect Ai’s face. She tried to rouse Ai. “Get up!” She shook her, forced the corpse’s eyes open, pinched her nose, and finally she sat with her own sobs, weeping over the death of the girl who had been her closest friend her entire life, who had been there whenever she needed her. Rengganis the Beautiful suddenly regretted not including Ai in her plans to run away, not inviting her to the guerrilla hut. She would have been even more distraught if she had known the girl had died from grief and worry over her disappearance. Meanwhile Krisan stayed completely still, mostly worried that the Beautiful’s ever-louder sobs would wake his mother and grandmother, until finally the girl asked:

“Why is she here?”

“I dug up her grave,” said Krisan.

“Why did you dig up her grave?”

He didn’t know what to say to her. He just looked at the girl silently, a little bit embarrassed, before a glorious idea appeared in his mind right at the moment he most needed it. “So that she could watch us get married.”

That explanation seemed to please Rengganis the Beautiful.

“And when are we getting married?”

The question annoyed Krisan. He sat at the edge of the bed and glanced at Rengganis the Beautiful, peered down at the face of Ai’s corpse below him, stared at the clothes hanging on the back of the door, considered the piles of his martial arts novels, examined his pillow, and then looked back. The girl was gazing at him expectantly.

“Tonight,” said Krisan.

“Where?”

“I’m thinking about that right now.”

And when the idea appeared, he immediately told Rengganis the Beautiful. They quickly removed the burial shroud wrapped around Ai’s body and gave her some clothes from Krisan’s closet, men’s clothes like the Beautiful was wearing — men’s underwear, jeans, and a t-shirt. Once the corpse looked just like an ordinary casually dressed girl who happened to be lying down, Krisan opened his bedroom door, checking his mother and his grandmother’s rooms to make sure they were still asleep. He quietly walked his minibike out through the back door, without making a sound. Then he went back and heaved Ai’s corpse onto his shoulder, walking out of the room followed by Rengganis the Beautiful, and locking the bedroom door. They tiptoed through the kitchen to the backyard. Rengganis the Beautiful rode on the back behind Ai’s corpse, which she hugged as tightly as she could, and Krisan sat in front. With one push of the pedal the bike had left the backyard and was speeding toward the ocean, in the middle of the night, underneath the street lamps.

They were lucky that not many people saw them. Even if one or two people were passing by, they weren’t that suspicious to see a seventeen-year-old guy with two young girls riding on the back of his bike, thinking the three were coming home late from a party.

Krisan stopped at a concrete seawall marking the division between the ocean and the shore. It was almost dawn, and he could see that some boats had already docked. A pinkish color was beginning to appear in the eastern sky. A very auspicious time, he thought.

“Wait here, I’m going to steal a boat,” said Krisan.

Still embracing Ai’s corpse so that it didn’t collapse, Rengganis the Beautiful sat against the wall, next to the bike, waiting for Krisan.

The kid reappeared, rowing someone’s boat. Or maybe it didn’t belong to anyone anymore, because it was in really bad shape, even though it didn’t have any holes in it. Krisan slid up close against the seawall where Rengganis the Beautiful was waiting. “Throw me the corpse,” he said. Rengganis the Beautiful threw Ai’s body into the hull of the boat, making it rock back and forth a bit, and now the corpse was lying there. Rengganis the Beautiful jumped to one end of the boat and sat down, while at the other end Krisan began to row away from the beach, toward the open ocean, the place where he had promised to marry her.