Beauty is a Wound E-Book

Eka Kurniawan

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 781

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

'Scandalous, lively, beautiful and dark' Jeff VanderMeer 'Exuberant, funny, crackling with invention' The Times A colour-drenched, fantasy-tinged epic tale. One stormswept afternoon, after twenty-one years of being dead, Dewi Ayu rises from her grave to avenge a curse placed on her family. Amidst the orange groves and starfruit trees, her children and grandchildren have been living out lives of madness, incest, murder and heartbreak. They are creatures of breathtaking beauty - all but one of them, whose ugliness is unparalleled. And Beauty is her name. Beauty Is a Wound is a bawdy, epic tale of fearsome women and weak-willed men, communist ghosts and chaste princesses. In this satirical portrait of Indonesia's painful past, Kurniawan weaves together history with local legend to spin a fantastical masterpiece in which darkness and light dance hand in hand. Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.Translated by Annie Tucker Eka Kurniawan was born in Tasikmalaya, Indonesia in 1975. He studied philosophy at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta and has since published several novels and short stories. The rights to Beauty is a Wound have now been sold in 27 territories. Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash is also available from Pushkin Press.

Leseprobe

‘An old-school gothic folk tale, full of dark magic, hyperbole and gratuitous violence’

GUARDIAN, BOOKS OF THE YEAR

‘A howling masterpiece’

CHIGOZIE OBIOMA, AUTHOR OF THE MAN BOOKER-SHORTLISTED THE FISHERMEN

‘A literary child of Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, and Salman Rushdie’

NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

BEAUTY IS A WOUND

EKA KURNIAWAN

TRANSLATED FROM THE INDONESIAN BY ANNIE TUCKER

PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS

Having cleaned his armor and made a full helmet out of a simple headpiece, and having given a name to his horse and decided on one for himself, he realized that the only thing left for him to do was to find a lady to love, for the knight errant without a lady-love was a tree without leaves or fruit, a body without a soul.

– Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Contents

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ONE AFTERNOON ON a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years. A shepherd boy, awakened from his nap under a frangipani tree, peed in his shorts and screamed, and his four sheep ran off haphazardly in between stones and wooden grave markers as if a tiger had been thrown into their midst. It all started with a noise coming from an old gravesite with an unmarked tombstone covered in knee-high grass, but everybody knew it was Dewi Ayu’s grave. She had passed away at fifty-two, rose again after being dead for twenty-one years, and from that point forward nobody knew exactly how to calculate her age.

People from the surrounding neighborhood came to the grave when the shepherd boy told them what was happening. Rolling up the edges of their sarongs, carrying children, clutching broomsticks, or stained with mud from the fields, they gathered behind cherry shrubs and jatropha trees and in the nearby banana orchards. No one dared approach, they just listened to the uproar coming from that old grave as if they were gathered around the medicine peddler who hawked his goods at the market every Monday morning. The crowd wholly enjoyed the unnerving spectacle, not caring that such a horror would have terrified them had they been all alone. They were even expecting some kind of miracle and not just a noisy old tomb, because the woman inside that plot of earth had been a prostitute for the Japanese during the war and the kyai always said that people tainted with sin were sure to be punished in the grave. The sound must have been coming from the whip of a tormenting angel, but they grew bored, hoping for some other small marvel.

When it came, it came in the most fantastical form. The grave shook and fractured, and the ground exploded as if blown up from underneath, triggering a small earthquake and a windstorm that sent grass and headstones flying, and behind the dirt raining down like a curtain the figure of an old woman stood looking annoyed and stiff, still wrapped in a shroud as if she’d only just been buried the night before. The people grew hysterical and ran away even more chaotically than the sheep, their synchronous screams echoing against the walls of the faraway hills. A woman tossed her baby into the bushes and its father hushed a banana stalk. Two men plunged into a ditch, others fell unconscious at the side of the road, and still others took off running for fifteen kilometers straight without stopping.

Witnessing all this, Dewi Ayu only coughed a little and cleared her throat, fascinated to find herself in the middle of a graveyard. She had already untied the two highest knots on her burial shroud, and then set to loosening the two lowest ones to free her feet so she could walk. Her hair had grown magically so that when she shook it loose from the calico wrap it fluttered in the afternoon breeze, sweeping the ground, and shimmering like black lichen in a riverbed. Her skin was wrinkled, but her face was gleaming white, and her eyes came alive inside their sockets to stare at onlookers abandoning their hiding places behind the shrubs—half of them ran away and the other half fainted. She complained, to no one in particular, that people were evil to have buried her alive.

The first thing she thought of was her baby, who of course was no longer a baby. Twenty-one years ago, she had died twelve days after giving birth to a hideous baby girl, so hideous that the midwife assisting her couldn’t be sure whether it really was a baby and thought that maybe it was a pile of shit, since the holes where a baby comes out and where shit comes out are only two centimeters apart. But this baby squirmed, and smiled, and finally the midwife believed that it really was a human being and not shit, and said to the mother, who was lying weakly across her bed with no apparent desire to see her offspring, that the baby was born, was healthy, and seemed friendly.

“It’s a girl, right?” asked Dewi Ayu.

“Yes,” said the midwife, “just like the three babies before her.”

“Four daughters, all of them beautiful,” said Dewi Ayu in a tone of complete annoyance. “I should open my own whorehouse. Tell me, how pretty is this one?”

The baby wrapped up tight in a swaddling cloth began to squirm and cry in the midwife’s arms. A woman was coming in and out of the room, taking away the dirty cloths full of blood, getting rid of the placenta, and for a moment the midwife did not answer because there was no way she was going to say that a baby who looked like a pile of black shit was pretty. Trying to ignore the question she said, “You’re already an old woman, so I don’t think you’ll be able to nurse.”

“That’s true. I’ve been used up by the three previous kids.”

“And hundreds of men.”

“One hundred and seventy-two men. The oldest one was ninety years old, the youngest one was twelve, one week after his circumcision. I remember them all well.”

The baby cried again. The midwife said that she had to find breast milk for the little one. If there was none, she’d have to look for cow’s milk, or dog’s milk, or maybe even rat’s milk. Yeah, go, said Dewi Ayu. “Poor unfortunate little girl,” said the midwife, gazing at the baby’s upsetting face. She wasn’t even able to describe it, but she thought it looked like a cursed monster from hell. The baby’s entire body was jet black as if it had been burned alive, with a bizarre and unrecognizable form. For example, she wasn’t sure whether the baby’s nose was a nose, because it looked more like an electrical outlet than any nose she’d ever seen in her entire life. And the baby’s mouth reminded her of a piggy-bank slot and her ears looked like pot handles. She was sure that there was no creature on earth more hideous than this wretched little one, and if she were God, she would probably kill the baby at once rather than let her live; the world would abuse her without mercy.

“Poor baby,” said the midwife again, before going to look for someone to nurse her.

“Yeah, poor baby,” said Dewi Ayu, tossing and turning in her bed. “I already did everything I could to try to kill you. I should have swallowed a grenade and detonated it inside my stomach. Oh wretched little one—just like evildoers, the wretched don’t die easy.”

At first the midwife tried to hide the baby’s face from the neighbor women who arrived. But when she said that she needed milk for the baby, they pushed against each other to see it, since it was always fun for those who knew Dewi Ayu to see her adorable little girl babies. The midwife was unable to stave off the onslaught of people pushing aside the cloth hiding the baby’s face, but once they’d seen it, and screamed from a horror unlike any they had ever experienced before, the midwife smiled and reminded them that she had tried her best not to show them the hellish countenance.

After that outburst, as the midwife left in a hurry, they just stood for a moment, with the faces of idiots whose memories had been suddenly erased.

“It should just be killed,” said a woman, the first one freed from her sudden-onset amnesia.

“I already tried,” said Dewi Ayu as she appeared, wearing only a rumpled housedress and a cloth tied around her waist. Her hair was a total mess, like someone staggering away from a bullfight.

People looked at her with pity.

“She’s pretty, right?” asked Dewi Ayu.

“Um, yes.”

“There’s no curse more terrible than to give birth to a pretty female in a world of men as nasty as dogs in heat.”

Not one person responded, they just kept looking at her with sympathy, knowing they were lying. Rosinah, the mute mountain girl who had been serving Dewi Ayu for years, led the woman into the bathroom, where she had prepared hot water in the tub. There Dewi Ayu soaked with fragrant sulfurous soap, attended by the mute girl who shampooed her hair with aloe vera oil. Only the mute seemed unfazed by any of this, even though she surely already knew about the hideous little girl, since no one else but Rosinah had accompanied the midwife while she worked. She rubbed her mistress’s back with a pumice stone, wrapped her in a towel, and straightened up the bathroom as Dewi Ayu stepped out.

Someone tried to lighten the gloomy mood and said to Dewi Ayu, “You need to give her a good name.”

“Yeah,” said Dewi Ayu. “Her name is Beauty.”

“Oh!” the people exclaimed, embarrassingly trying to dissuade her.

“Or how about Injury?”

“Or Wound?”

“For God’s sake, don’t name it that.”

“Okay then, her name is Beauty.”

They watched helplessly as Dewi Ayu walked back into her room to get dressed. They could only look at one another, sadly imagining a young girl black as soot with an electrical outlet in the middle of her face being called by the name of Beauty. It was a shameful scandal.

However, it was true that Dewi Ayu had tried to kill the baby back when she realized that, whether or not she had already lived for a whole half century, she was pregnant once again. Just as with her other children, she didn’t know who the father was, but unlike the others she had absolutely no desire for the baby to survive. So she had taken five extra-strength paracetamol pills that she got from a village doctor and washed them down with half a liter of soda, which was almost enough to cause her own death but not quite, as it turned out, enough to kill that baby. She thought of another way, and called a midwife who was willing to kill the baby and take it out of her womb by inserting a small wooden stick into her belly. She experienced heavy bleeding for two days and two nights and the small piece of wood came back out in splinters, but the baby kept growing. She tried six other ways to get the better of that baby, but all were in vain, and she finally gave up and complained:

“This one is a real brawler, and she’s clearly going to beat her mother in this fight.”

So she let her stomach get bigger and bigger, held the selamatan ritual at seven months, and let the baby be born, even though she refused to look at her. She had already given birth to three girls before this and all of them were gorgeous, practically like triplets born one after another. She was bored with babies like that, who according to her were like mannequins in a storefront display, so she didn’t want to see her youngest child, certain she would be no different from her three older sisters. She was wrong, of course, and didn’t yet know how repulsive her youngest truly was. Even when the neighbor women furtively whispered that the baby was like the result of randomly breeding a monkey with a frog and a monitor lizard, she didn’t think they were talking about her baby. And when they said that the previous night wild dogs had howled in the forest and owls had flown in to roost, she didn’t in the least bit take those as bad omens.

After getting dressed, she lay down again, suddenly struck by how exhausting it all was, giving birth to four babies and living longer than half a century. And then she had the depressing realization that if the baby didn’t want to die then maybe her mother should be the one to go, so that she would never have to see it grow into a young woman. She rose and staggered to the doorway, looking out at all the neighbor women who were still clustered together gossiping about the infant. Rosinah appeared from the bathroom and stood at Dewi Ayu’s side, sensing that her mistress was about to give her an order.

“Buy me a burial shroud,” said Dewi Ayu. “I have already given four girls to this accursed world. The time has come for my funeral procession to pass on by.”

The women shrieked and gaped at Dewi Ayu with their idiot faces. To give birth to a hideous baby was an outrage, but to abandon it just like that was way more outrageous. But they didn’t come right out and say so, they just tried to talk her out of dying so foolishly, saying that some people lived for more than one hundred years, and that Dewi Ayu was still much too young to die.

“If I live to be a hundred,” she said with a measured calm, “then I will give birth to eight children. That’s too many.”

Rosinah went and bought Dewi Ayu a clean white calico cloth that she put on immediately—though that wasn’t enough to make her die right away. And so, as the midwife was traversing the neighborhood looking for a lactating woman (although this was in vain and she ended up giving the baby water that had been used to rinse rice), Dewi Ayu was lying calmly on top of her bed wrapped in a burial shroud, waiting with an uncanny patience for the angel of death to come and carry her away.

When the time of rice-rinse water had passed and Rosinah was feeding the baby cow’s milk (sold in the store as “Bear’s Milk”), Dewi Ayu was still lying in bed, not allowing anyone to bring the baby named Beauty into her room. But the story of the hideous baby and its mother wrapped in a burial shroud quickly spread like a plague, dragging people in not just from the surrounding neighborhoods but also from the farthest-flung villages in the district, to come see what was said to be like the birth of a prophet, with people comparing the howls of the wild dogs to the star seen by the Magi when Jesus was born and comparing the mother wrapped in her burial shroud to an exhausted Mary—a pretty far-fetched metaphor.

With the terrified expression of a young girl petting a baby tiger in the zoo, the visitors posed with the hideous infant for a roving photographer. This was after they had done the same with Dewi Ayu, who was still lying in her mysterious peacefulness, not at all disturbed by the merciless clamor. A number of people with grave and incurable illnesses came hoping to touch the baby, something Rosinah was quick to forbid because she was worried that all the germs would infect the infant, but in exchange she prepared pails of Beauty’s bath water. A number of others came hoping for a little luck at the betting table or sudden insight on how to make a business profit. For all of this mute Rosinah, who had quickly sprung into action as the baby’s caretaker, had prepared donation boxes that were soon filled with the visitors’ rupiah bills. The girl, wisely anticipating the possibility that Dewi Ayu might actually die in the end, acted in order to make some money from such a rare opportunity, so that she wouldn’t have to worry about the Bear’s Milk or their future alone together in the house, since Beauty’s three older sisters could never be expected to turn up there at all.

But the ruckus quickly came to an end as soon as the police came with a kyai who considered the whole thing heresy. That kyai began to fume and ordered Dewi Ayu to stop her shameful behavior, even demanding that she remove the burial shroud.

“You are asking a prostitute to take off her clothes,” said Dewi Ayu scornfully, “so you’d better have the money to pay me.”

The kyai quickly prayed for mercy, moved along, and never came again.

Once again the only one left was young Rosinah, who was never troubled by Dewi Ayu’s insanity no matter what form it took, and it became all the more evident that the girl was the only one who really understood that woman. Way before she tried to kill the baby inside her womb, Dewi Ayu had said that she was bored of having children, and so Rosinah had known that she was expecting. If Dewi Ayu had said such a thing to the neighborhood women, whose penchant for gossip beat the habit of yowling dogs, they would have smirked with contemptuous smiles and said that was just hot air—stop whoring yourself out and you’ll never have to worry about getting knocked up, they would have said. But just between you and me: tell that to another prostitute, but not to Dewi Ayu. She had never thought of her three (and now four) children as a curse of prostitution, and if the girls didn’t have fathers, she said, that was because they really and truly didn’t have fathers, not because they didn’t know who their fathers were, and certainly not because she had never stood next to some guy in front of a village headman. She believed them instead to be the children of demons.

“Because Satan loves to get his kicks as much as God or the gods,” she said. “Like Mary gave birth to the Son of God and Pandu’s two wives gave birth to their god children, my womb is a place where demons deposit their seed and so, I give birth to demon children. And I’m sick of it, Rosinah.”

As often happened, Rosinah just smiled. She couldn’t speak, except in an incoherent mumble, but she could smile and she liked to smile. Dewi Ayu was very fond of her, especially because of that smile. She had once called her an elephant child, because no matter how angry elephants get they always smile, just like the ones you can see in the circus that comes to town at the end of almost every year. With her sign language, that couldn’t be learned in any school for mutes but had to be taught directly by Rosinah herself, the girl told Dewi Ayu that she shouldn’t feel fed up—she didn’t even have twenty children, meanwhile Gandari gave birth to a hundred of Kurawa’s children. That made Dewi Ayu laugh out loud. She liked Rosinah’s childish sense of humor and was still laughing as she retorted that Gandari didn’t give birth to a hundred children a hundred separate times, she just gave birth to one big hunk of meat that then turned into one hundred children.

That was the cheerful way Rosinah kept working, not in the least bit put out. She took care of the baby, went into the kitchen twice a day and did the washing every morning, while Dewi Ayu lay almost without moving, truly looking like a corpse who was waiting for people to finish digging her grave. Of course if she was hungry, she got up and ate, and she went to the bathroom every morning and afternoon. But she would always return and wrap herself back up in her burial shroud to lie with her body stiff and straight, with her two hands placed on top of her stomach, her eyes closed, and her lips curved in a faint smile. There were a number of neighbors who tried to spy on her from the open window. Time after time Rosinah tried to shoo them away but she never succeeded and the people would ask, why didn’t she just kill herself instead. Refraining from her usual sarcasm, Dewi Ayu remained silent and completely still.

The long-awaited death finally came on the afternoon of the twelfth day after the birth of hideous Beauty, or at least that was what everybody believed. The sign that death was near appeared that morning, when Dewi Ayu instructed Rosinah that she did not want her name on her grave marker; instead she wanted an epitaph with the sole sentence, “I gave birth to four children, and I died.” Rosinah’s hearing was excellent, and she could read and write, so she wrote down that message in its entirety, but the order was immediately refused by the mosque imam leading the burial ceremony, who thought that such a crazy request made the whole situation even more sinful, and decided himself that the woman wouldn’t get anything at all inscribed on her headstone.

Dewi Ayu was found in the afternoon by one of the neighbors who was spying through the window, in the kind of tranquil sleep that is only seen in a person’s last days. But there was something else too: there was the smell of borax in the air. Rosinah had bought it at the bakery and Dewi Ayu had sprinkled herself with the corpse preservative that others sometimes mixed in with their mie bakso meatballs. Rosinah had let the woman do whatever she wanted in her obsession with death, and even if she had been ordered to dig a grave and bury Dewi Ayu alive she would have done it and passed it all off as part of her mistress’s unique sense of humor, but it wasn’t that way with the ignorant snoop. This woman leapt in through the window, convinced that Dewi Ayu had gone too far.

“Listen up, you whore who slept with all of our men!” she said resentfully. “If you are going to die, then die, but don’t preserve your body, because it’s only your rotting corpse that nobody will envy.” She shoved Dewi Ayu, but her body only rolled over without being awakened.

Rosinah came in and gave a signal that she must already be dead.

“That whore is dead?”

Rosinah nodded.

“Dead?!” She revealed her true character then, that whiny woman, crying as if her own mother had passed, and said between throaty sobs, “The eighth of January last year was the most beautiful day for our family. That was the day when my man found some money under the bridge and went to Mama Kalong’s whorehouse and slept with this very prostitute who is now lying dead before me. He came home afterward, and that was the one and only day when he was kind to the family. He didn’t even hit any of us.”

Rosinah looked at her disdainfully as if to suggest one couldn’t blame him for wanting to hit such a bellyacher, then got rid of that whiner by telling her to spread the news of Dewi Ayu’s death. There was no need for a burial shroud because she’d already bought one twelve days ago; there was no need to bathe her, because she’d already bathed herself; she had even preserved her own body herself. “If she could have,” Rosinah signed to the imam of the closest mosque, “she would have recited the prayers for herself.” The imam, looking at the mute girl with hatred, said that he himself was not inclined to recite the prayers for that lump of a prostitute’s corpse or what’s more, to even bury her. “Since she is dead,” said Rosinah (still with sign language), “then she’s no longer a prostitute.”

Kyai Jahro, that mosque imam, finally gave up and led Dewi Ayu’s funeral.

Up until her death, which few had believed would come so quickly, she truly never saw the baby. People said that she was really lucky, because any mother would be unthinkably sad to see her baby born so hideous. Her death would not be tranquil, and she would never be able to rest in peace. Only Rosinah wasn’t so sure that Dewi Ayu would have been sad to see the baby, because she knew that what that woman hated more than anything in the world was a pretty little baby girl. She would have been overjoyed if she knew how completely different her youngest one was from her older sisters; but she didn’t know. Because this mute young girl was always obedient to her mistress, during the days before her death she didn’t force the baby upon its mother, despite the fact that if she had known what the baby looked like, Dewi Ayu might have postponed her death, at least for a couple of years.

“That’s nonsense, the moment of death is up to God,” said Kyai Jahro.

“She was fixing to die for twelve days and then she died,” Rosinah’s gestures said, inheriting her mistress’s stubbornness.

According to the will of the dead, Rosinah now became the guardian of the wretched baby. And it was she who then busied herself with the pointless task of sending telegrams to Dewi Ayu’s three children saying that their mother had died and would be buried in the Budi Dharma public cemetery. Not one of them came, but the funeral was held the next day with a festivity that had not been rivaled in that city for many years before, nor would it be for many years to come. This was because almost all the men who had ever slept with the prostitute saw her off with tender kisses breathed into bouquets of jasmine blossoms that they then tossed all along the road as her casket passed. And their wives and lovers also crowded the length of road pressed up against their men’s backsides looking on with a lingering jealousy, because they were sure that those horny men would still fight each other for the opportunity to sleep with Dewi Ayu again, not even caring that she was now just a corpse.

Rosinah walked behind the casket carried by four neighborhood men. The baby was fast asleep in her embrace, protected by the edge of the black veil she was wearing. A woman, the whiner, walked next to her with a basket of flower petals. Rosinah grabbed the flowers, throwing them into the air along with coins that were quickly fought over by the young children who ran underneath the casket to grab them, risking being tumbled into the irrigation channel or trampled by the mourners chanting the blessings of the prophet.

Dewi Ayu was buried in a far corner of the cemetery among the graves of other ill-fated people, because that was what Kyai Jahro and the gravedigger had agreed upon. Buried there was an evil thief from the colonial era, and a crazy killer, and a number of communists, and now a prostitute. It was believed that those unfortunate souls would be disturbed by ongoing tests and trials in the grave, and so it was wise to distance them from the graves of pious people who wanted to rest in peace, be invaded by worms and rot in peace, and make love to heavenly nymphs without any commotion.

Just as soon as that festive ceremony was done, people promptly forgot all about Dewi Ayu. Since that day, nobody came to visit the grave, not even Rosinah and Beauty. They let its ruins be pummeled by ocean storms, covered by piles of old frangipani leaves, and grown over with wild elephant grass. Only Rosinah had a convincing reason for why she didn’t care for Dewi Ayu’s grave. “It’s because we only tend to the graves of the dead,” she said to the hideous little baby (with her sign language that of course the baby didn’t understand).

Maybe it was true that Rosinah had the ability to see the future, a modest skill that had been handed down by her wise old ancestors. She had first arrived in the city five years earlier with her father, a sand miner in the mountains who was old and suffering from severe rheumatism, when she was just fourteen years old. They had appeared in Dewi Ayu’s room at Mama Kalong’s whorehouse. At first the prostitute was not at all interested in this little girl, nor in her father, an old man with his nose in the shape of a parrot’s beak, his silver curly hair, his wrinkled skin dark as copper, and above all his overly cautious way of walking as if every last one of his bones would collapse in a heap if she shoved him the tiniest little bit. Dewi Ayu immediately recognized him and said:

“You are addicted, old man. We made love two nights ago.”

The man smiled shyly, like a young kid meeting his sweetheart, and nodded. “I want to die in your arms,” he said. “I can’t pay you, but I’ll give you this mute child. She’s my daughter.”

Dewi Ayu looked at the little girl in confusion. Rosinah stood not very far from her, calm and smiling at her in a friendly way. At that time she was very skinny, wearing an embroidered dress that was way too big for her, barefoot, and with her wavy hair tied back by only a rubber band. Her skin was smooth, like most mountain girls, with a simple round face, intelligent eyes, a flat nose and wide lips, with which she was able to give everyone that pleasing smile. Dewi Ayu had no idea what use a girl like that would be to her and she looked back at the old man.

“I myself already have three daughters, so what would I do with this child?” she asked.

“She can read and write, even though she can’t talk,” said her father. “All my children can read and write and they can talk,” said Dewi Ayu with a teasing laugh. But the old man was hell-bent to sleep with her and die in her arms and give her the mute young girl as payment. She could do whatever she wanted with the girl. “You can turn her into a prostitute and take the money she earns for as long as she lives,” said the old man. “Or, if there’s no man who wants to be with her, you can chop her up into bits and sell her flesh at the market.”

“I’m not really sure that anyone would want to eat her flesh,” said Dewi Ayu.

The old man refused to give up and after a while he started to resemble a little kid who can’t hold in his pee any longer. It wasn’t that Dewi Ayu didn’t want to be kind and give the old man a few beautiful hours atop her mattress, but she was truly confused by this strange transaction, and over and over again she looked back and forth from the old man to the mute child, until the girl finally asked for a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote:

“Go ahead and sleep with him, any minute now he is going to die.”

So she slept with the old man, not because she agreed to the deal, but because of the child’s suggestion that he was about to expire. They wrestled on the bed while the mute girl sat on a chair outside the bedroom door, clutching a small bag filled with her clothes that had just a moment ago been carried by her father, waiting. As it turned out, Dewi Ayu didn’t need that much time, and she admitted that truly she didn’t feel much, just a little tickle in the middle of her crotch. “It was like a dragonfly scratching at my bellybutton,” said the prostitute. The man attacked her fiercely, with almost no small talk, like a battalion of Dutch soldiers approaching with a mission to destroy, moving freely and forgetting his rheumatism. His haste quickly bore fruit when he let out a brief groan and his body spasmed; at first Dewi Ayu thought it was the spasm of a man spewing the contents of his balls, but it turned out it was more than that—the old man also spewed his soul. He died sprawled out in her embrace with his lance still wet and outstretched.

They buried him quietly in the same corner of the cemetery where later Dewi Ayu would also be buried. Even though she never cared for her mistress’s grave, Rosinah always took the opportunity to visit her father’s grave at the end of every fasting month, weeding the grass and praying without conviction. Dewi Ayu brought the mute young girl home, not as payment for the sad evening, but because the mute no longer had a father or mother or anybody else she could call family. At least, Dewi Ayu thought at the time, she could keep her company at home, search for lice in her hair every afternoon, and keep watch over the place when she went to the whorehouse.

Rosinah did not at all find the lively house that she had expected, but a simple home that was quiet and still. There were cream-colored walls that looked like they had not been painted for years, dusty mirrors, and moldy curtains. Even the kitchen looked like it was never used except to make an occasional pot of coffee. The only rooms that looked well taken care of were the bathroom, with its large Japanese-style bathtub, and the bedroom belonging to the lady of the house. In her first few days at the house, Rosinah proved herself to be a young girl worthy to be kept on. While Dewi Ayu took her afternoon nap, Rosinah painted the walls, cleaned the floors, scrubbed the window panes with some sawdust that she got from a woodcutter, changed the curtains, and started to organize the yard, which was soon filled with all kinds of flowers. When afternoon came, Dewi Ayu awoke and for the first time in a long time encountered the aroma of herbs and spices coming from the kitchen, and they ate dinner together before Dewi Ayu had to go out. Rosinah was not in the least bit disturbed by the ramshackle house that needed so much tending, but she was intrigued by the fact that only the two of them lived there. At that time Dewi Ayu had yet to learn the sign language of the mute girl, so Rosinah wrote again.

“You said you had three children?”

“That’s right,” said Dewi Ayu. “They left as soon as they learned how to unbutton a man’s fly.”

Rosinah immediately remembered that comment when a number of years later Dewi Ayu said that she didn’t want to get pregnant again (despite the fact that she was already pregnant), and that she was sick of having children. They often chatted in the afternoon, sitting in the kitchen doorway while watching the chickens that Rosinah had started to raise claw at the dirt, and like a Scheherazade Dewi Ayu would tell many fantastical tales, mostly about her beautiful daughters. That was how they established a friendship that was full of understanding, so that when Dewi Ayu tried to kill the baby in her stomach in all those different ways, Rosinah did not try to stop her. Even when Dewi Ayu began to show signs of despair, Rosinah again proved herself to be a wise young girl and signed to the prostitute.

“Pray that the baby will be ugly.”

Dewi Ayu turned to her and replied, “It’s been years since I believed in prayer.”

“Well, it depends on who you’re praying to,” Rosinah said and smiled. “Indeed some gods have proven to be quite stingy.”

Tentatively, Dewi Ayu began to pray. She would pray whenever it crossed her mind; in the bathroom, in the kitchen, on the street, or even if an obese man was swimming on top of her body and she suddenly remembered, she would immediately say, whoever is listening to my prayer, god or demon, angel or Genie Iprit, make my child ugly. She even began to imagine all kinds of ugly things. She thought of a horned devil, with fangs sticking out like a boar, and how very pleasing it would be to have a baby like that. One day she saw an electrical outlet and imagined that as the baby’s nose. She also imagined its ears as the handles of a pot, and its mouth as the mouth of a piggy-bank slot, and its hair that would look like the straw from a broom. She even jumped for joy when she found some truly disgusting shit sitting in the toilet and asked, couldn’t she please have a baby like that; with skin like a komodo and legs like a turtle. Dewi Ayu ran with her imagination that grew wilder every day, and all the while the baby in her womb kept growing.

The height of it came on the night of the seventh full moon of her pregnancy when, accompanied by Rosinah, she bathed in flower water. This is the night when you make a wish for how your baby will be and draw their face on a coconut rind. Most mothers would have drawn the face of Drupadi, Shinta, or Kunti, or whichever wayang character was the prettiest, or if they were hoping for a boy they would have drawn Yudistira, Arjuna, or Bima. But Dewi Ayu—perhaps the first person in the world to do so, and because of that even up until the day she died she could not be sure of the outcome—used a piece of black charcoal to draw a hideous baby. She was hoping that her baby would not be like anyone or anything she had ever seen, except maybe a wild pig, or a monkey. So she drew the figure of a frightening monster such as she had never seen nor would ever see before the people buried her dead body.

But then finally she did see her, after those twenty-one years, on the day she rose again.

At that time, day was turning into night, and rain poured down in the cyclone storms that signaled the season was about to change. The wild ajak dogs howled in the hills with shrill voices that drowned out the muadzin who was calling people to Maghrib prayer at the mosque, and who was apparently failing, because people didn’t like to go out when it was raining heavily at twilight and they could hear the sound of howling dogs, and especially not when there was a ghost in a burial shroud walking along the roads in a bedraggled condition and whimpering.

The distance from the public cemetery to her house wasn’t a short distance, but ojek drivers preferred to crash their motorcycles into a ditch and run away as fast as they could rather than give Dewi Ayu a ride. No minibuses would stop. Even the food stalls and stores along the road chose to close down for the day, locking their doors and windows up tight. There was no one in the street, not even any homeless or crazy people, no one except this old woman who had risen from the dead. There were only the bats who flew with all their might, slamming against the storm, moving in the sky, and the curtains that occasionally parted to reveal faces pale with fright.

She shivered from the cold, and was hungry too. A few times she tried to knock on the doors of people who she thought might still remember her, but the inhabitants preferred to stay quiet, if they hadn’t already fainted dead away. So she was overjoyed when from a distance she recognized her own house, which still looked just as it had before the people had laid her in the grave. Bougainvillea blossoms lined the length of the fence, with chrysanthemums along the perimeter looking peaceful under the sheets of rain, and there was a warm light coming from the veranda lamp. She missed Rosinah terribly and fervently hoped a plate of dinner was waiting for her. The image made her hurry a little, like people in train stations and bus terminals, which in turn made her burial shroud come loose as it was tossed by the storm, revealing her naked body, but her hand quickly grabbed the calico cloth and wrapped it back around herself like a young girl in a towel after a bath. She missed her child, the fourth one, and hoped to see what she was like. It’s true what people say, a good deep sleep can bring a change of heart, especially if it lasts for twenty-one years.

A young girl was sitting on a chair on the veranda alone underneath the ghostly halo of light, right where Dewi Ayu and Rosinah used to spend the afternoon hunting lice in each other’s hair. She was sitting as if expecting someone. At first Dewi Ayu thought it was Rosinah, but as soon as she stood in front of her, she realized that the girl was unfamiliar. She almost shrieked when she saw the horrifying figure, who looked as if she had suffered severe burns, and a malicious voice inside her head said that she had not returned to earth, but was instead wandering through hell. But she was sensible enough to quickly realize that the hideous monster was nothing more than a wretched young girl; she even gave thanks that she had finally met someone who did not run away at the sight of an old woman wrapped in a burial shroud passing by in the middle of a downpour. Of course she didn’t yet realize that it was her daughter, since she didn’t yet realize that twenty-one years had passed, and so to clear up all of the confusion, Dewi Ayu tried to greet the girl.

“This is my house,” she said in explanation. “What is your name?”

“Beauty.”

Dewi Ayu erupted into a truly impolite laugh, before quickly stopping herself and understanding everything. She sat in another chair, separated by a table covered with a yellow tablecloth and a cup of coffee belonging to the girl.

“Like a cow who sees that her glazed calf already knows how to run,” she said mystified, and then politely asked for the coffee on the table, which she drank. “I’m your mother,” she added, full of pride that her daughter was exactly what she had hoped for. If the rain hadn’t been coming down, and she hadn’t been starving, and the moon had been shining brightly, she would have loved to run and climb up to the rooftop and dance in celebration.

The girl did not look at her and didn’t even say anything.

“What are you doing out here on the veranda in the middle of the night?” Dewi Ayu asked her.

“I’m waiting for my prince to come,” the girl said finally, even though she still did not turn her head. “To free me from the curse of this hideous face.”

She had been obsessed with that handsome prince ever since she realized that other people were not as ugly as she was. Rosinah had tried to bring her to neighbors’ houses back when she was only a babe in arms, but not one person received them, because their children would scream and cry for the rest of the afternoon and the old folks would instantly come down with fever and die two days later. They rejected her everywhere, and it was that way too when it was time for her to attend school; not one school accepted Beauty. Rosinah had even tried begging a principal, but he seemed more interested in the mute young woman than in the ugly young girl and had boorishly fondled her in the office once the door was closed. Wise Rosinah thought, where there’s a will there’s a way, and if she had to lose her virginity to get Beauty into school, she would give it up in any way possible. So that morning she found herself naked on the principal’s swiveling office chair and they made love under the drone of the fan for twenty-three minutes, but it turned out that, even so, Beauty was still barred from admission, because if she attended the other children would refuse to enroll.

Without giving up, finally Rosinah planned to teach her herself at home, at the very least her numbers and letters. But before she had the chance to teach her anything, Rosinah was dumbfounded to realize the girl already knew how to correctly count the lizard calls. She was even more surprised when one afternoon Beauty pulled out a pile of books left by her mother and read them aloud at the top of her lungs without anyone ever even teaching her the alphabet. There was something not right about these astonishing events, which had actually started years before when, to Rosinah’s amazement and without knowing who had taught her how, the girl had learned to speak. Rosinah tried to spy on the little one, but the child never went farther than the fence and not one single person appeared, and so she never met anyone except the mute servant, who spoke with her hands. And yet she knew the words for all visible and invisible things, for cats and lizards and the chickens and the ducks that roamed around their house.

Aside from all these marvels, she was still an unfortunate, ugly, and pathetic little girl. Rosinah often caught her standing behind the window curtain, peeking out at people in the street, or gazing at her when she had to go out to buy something, as if asking to be invited along. Of course Rosinah would have been happy to take her along, but the little girl herself would protest, saying in her pitiful voice, “No, it’s better I don’t come, because people will lose their appetites for the rest of their lives.”

She would go out in the early morning when people had not yet awoken except for the vegetable sellers hurrying to market, or the farmers hurrying to the fields, or the fishermen hurrying home, walking or gliding by on their bicycles, but those people wouldn’t see her in the dimness of the dawn. That was the time when she could get to know the world, with bats who went home to their nests, with sparrows who alighted on the buds of the almond trees, with chickens who cockadoodledooed loudly, with butterflies who hatched from caterpillars and flew to perch on hibiscus petals, with kittens who stretched out on their mats, with the aromas that wafted from neighbors’ kitchens, with the clamor of engines being revved in the distance, with the sound of a radio sermon coming from somewhere, and above all with Venus incandescent in the east, all of which she would enjoy while sitting on her swing that hung from the branch of a starfruit tree. Rosinah didn’t even know that the small gleam that glowed so brightly was called Venus, but Beauty knew it very well, as well as she had come to know the astrological portents of all the constellations in the sky.

As soon as day dawned, she would vanish inside the house, like the head of a turtle shying from those who disturb it, because schoolchildren always stopped in front of the fence gate, hoping to see her, staring at the door and the windows in their curiosity. The old folks had already told them the scary tales about terrifying Beauty, who lived in that house, ready to cut off their heads at the slightest disobedience, ready to gobble them alive for any whiny complaint: all these stories haunted them, and yet at the same time heightened their desire to meet her and determine whether such a frightening specter truly did exist. But they never met her, because Rosinah would quickly appear brandishing the handle of an upside-down broom, and they would run away screaming insults at the mute young woman. In truth, it wasn’t only children who would stop in front of the fence gate hoping to see Beauty, because the women who passed by in becak rickshaws would also turn their heads for a moment, as would the people leaving for work and the shepherds leading their sheep.

But Beauty did go out at night, when children were forbidden to leave their houses and parents were busy taking care of their children, and the only people out were the fishermen hurrying to the sea, carrying oars and nets on their backs. She would sit on a chair on the veranda, kept company by a cup of coffee. When Rosinah would ask what she was doing late at night on the veranda, Beauty would reply just as she had to her mother, “Waiting for my prince to come, to release me from the curse of this hideous face.”

“You poor girl,” said her mother that night, the first night they met. “You really should dance for joy at such a blessing. Let’s go inside.”

Dewi Ayu once again experienced graciousness à la Rosinah, wherein the mute girl had almost instantly prepared warm water in her old bathtub, complete with sulfur and a pumice stone and pieces of sandalwood and betel leaves that made her appear refreshed at the dinner table. Rosinah and Beauty gaped at her ravenous appetite, eating as if she was making up for the years upon years that had gone by without food. She finished two whole tuna fish, including their bones and spines, and a bowl of soup and two plates of rice. Her beverage was a clear broth with bits of birds’ nests floating in it. She ate faster than the two women accompanying her. After finishing the food, her stomach gurgled continuously, and after emitting a rumbling sound out of her asshole, the kind of fart that can’t be held in, she asked while wiping her mouth with a napkin:

“So, how long have I been dead?”

“Twenty-one years,” said Beauty.

“I’m sorry, that was way too long,” she said regretfully, “but there are no alarm clocks in the grave.”

“Don’t forget to bring one the next time,” said Beauty attentively, then added, “and don’t forget a mosquito net.”

Dewi Ayu ignored Beauty’s words, which were said in a small shrill lilting soprano, and continued, “It must be confusing that I rose again after twenty-one years, because even that long-hair who died on the cross was only dead for three days before he rose again.”

“It is very confusing,” said Beauty. “Next time, do send a telegram before you come.”

Somehow, Dewi Ayu just couldn’t ignore that voice. After thinking about it for a while, she began to sense a tone of hostility in the young girl’s comments. She looked in her direction, but the hideous girl just gave her a smile, as if to imply that she was merely reminding her not to act so carelessly. Dewi Ayu looked at Rosinah, as if hoping for a clue, but even the mute woman just smiled, seemingly without any double meaning at all.

“Just like that, Rosinah, you are already forty. In just a little while longer you’ll be old and wrinkled.” While saying that, Dewi Ayu laughed softly, trying to lighten the dinner table atmosphere.

“Like a frog,” said Rosinah with sign language.

“Like a komodo,” joked Dewi Ayu.

They both looked at Beauty, waiting for her to say something, and they didn’t have to wait long.

“Like me,” she said. Short and dreadful.

For a number of days, Dewi Ayu, busy with the visits of old friends who wanted to hear stories about the world of the dead, could ignore the presence of the annoying monster in her house. Even the kyai, who years ago had led her funeral with reluctance and looked at her with the disgust a young girl feels for earthworms, came to visit her with the virtuous manners of the pious in front of a saint, and with sincerity said that her rising again was like a miracle, and surely no one would be granted such a miracle if she wasn’t pure.

“Of course I am pure,” said Dewi Ayu lightly. “Because not a single person has touched me for twenty-one years.”

“What does it feel like to be dead?” asked Kyai Jahro.

“Actually, it’s pretty fun. That’s the main reason why, out of everyone who dies, not one person chooses to come back to life again.”

“But you came back to life,” said the kyai.

“I came back just so I could tell you that.”

That would be really good for the Friday midday sermon, and the kyai left with a radiant face. He didn’t need to feel embarrassed about visiting Dewi Ayu (even though many years ago he had shouted that it was a sin to visit that prostitute’s house and that you could roast in hell from just opening her gate), because as the woman had said, she was no longer a prostitute after twenty-one years of not being touched by a soul, and you’d better believe it that now and forever nobody would ever want to touch her again.

Who suffered the most from all the fuss over this old woman come back to life was none other than Beauty, who had to lock herself in her room. Luckily, no one ever stayed longer than a few minutes, because the visitors would soon sense an awful terror coming from behind Beauty’s closed bedroom door. With a strange nauseating smell, an evil wind, black and heinous, would sweep past them, sliding out from under the door and through the keyhole, with a penetrating chill that reached the very marrow of their bones. Most people had never seen Beauty, except for when she was a little baby and the midwife had circled the village looking for a wet nurse. But the idea of her was enough to make the hair on the napes of their necks stand up and their whole bodies tremble as they gazed at the monster’s door, when the evil aroma carried by the wind reached their noses and the sound of silence clamored in their ears. That was when their mouths would let out some nonsense small talk, and forgetting their desire to hear whatever amazing things Dewi Ayu had to say, they’d quickly stand up after forcing down half a glass of bitter tea and excuse themselves to go home and tell their story.

“However strong your curiosity about Dewi Ayu who rose from the dead,” they would say to anyone who asked after their terror-filled visit, “I advise you not to go into her house.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ll be scared half to death.”

When people no longer came to visit, Dewi Ayu began to notice Beauty’s peculiarities, aside from her habit of sitting on the veranda waiting for a handsome prince and predicting her fate by the stars. In the middle of the night, she heard a scuffle coming from Beauty’s bedroom, which made her climb down from her own bed and walk in the darkness and stand in front of the girl’s door apprehensively, growing more and more confused by the sounds emerging from that hideous young girl. She was still standing there when Rosinah appeared with a flashlight, passing it over her mistress’s face.

“I know these sounds,” said Dewi Ayu in a half whisper to Rosinah, “from the rooms of the whorehouse.”

Rosinah nodded in agreement.

“It’s the sound of people making love,” Dewi Ayu continued.

Rosinah nodded again.

“The question is, who is she making love to, or rather, who would want to make love to her?”

Rosinah shook her head. She wasn’t making love to anyone. Or, she was making love to someone, but you would never know who it was, because you wouldn’t see anyone.

Dewi Ayu stood there in awe of the mute girl’s equanimity, which reminded her of the time of her own insanity when it was only that girl who understood her. They sat together in the kitchen that night, in front of the same old stove, heating up some water for a cup of coffee and waiting for it to boil. Illuminated only by the glowing flame that licked the edges of the dry burnt kindling made of broken cocoa twigs and palm tree branches and the fibers of coconut rinds, they chatted just as they often used to do.

“Did you teach her how?” asked Dewi Ayu.

“How to what?” asked Rosinah, just the shape of her mouth without a sound.

“Masturbate.”

Rosinah shook her head. Beauty isn’t masturbating, she is making love to someone but you just won’t know who.

“Why not?”

Because I don’t know either. Rosinah shook her head.

She told Dewi Ayu about all the miraculous events, how when Beauty was still little the girl could speak without anybody teaching her how, and how she even began reading and writing when she was six years old and how, in the end, Rosinah didn’t teach her a thing, because the girl had already been able to do things that Rosinah herself couldn’t yet do. Embroidery at the age of nine, sewing at the age of eleven, and don’t even ask, she could cook whatever food you wanted.

“Someone must have taught her,” said Dewi Ayu in confusion.

“But no one comes to this house,” Rosinah signed.

“I don’t care how he came, or how he came without you or me knowing. But he must have come and taught her everything, even how to make love.”

“Yes, it’s true, he comes and they make love.”

“This house is haunted.”

Rosinah had never believed that the house was haunted, but Dewi Ayu had her reasons. Still, that was another matter, and Dewi Ayu didn’t want to say anything about all that to Rosinah, at least not that evening. She stood up and quickly went back to bed, forgetting about the boiling water and the cup of coffee.

In the following days, the old woman tried to spy on the ugly young girl, to discover the most sensible explanation for all of these miracles, because she didn’t want to believe a ghost was responsible, even if a ghost was truly present in the house.

One morning, she and Rosinah found an ancient man sitting in front of the blazing stove, shivering from the cold in the morning air. He looked like a guerrilla, with hair that was going every which way, matted and tied back with a wilted yellow leaf. The impression was reinforced by his face, sunken as if he had been starving for years, and by his dark clothing, covered in mud stains and dried blood. There was even a small dagger swinging on his hip, tied to his leather belt. He was wearing shoes like the ones the Gurkha forces wore during the war, way too big for his feet.

“Who are you?” asked Dewi Ayu.

“Call me Shodancho,” said the old man. “I’m freezing, let me spend a moment in front of your stove.”

Rosinah tried to size him up rationally. Maybe in the past he really had led a shodan, maybe he had been in a battalion in Halimunda and rebelled against the Japanese before running away into the forest. Maybe he had been trapped there for years, not knowing that Holland and Japan were already long gone and we now had a republic with our own flag and our own national anthem. Rosinah gave him some breakfast with a tender gaze and a show of respect that was just a little bit excessive.

But Dewi Ayu looked at him with some suspicion, wondering whether he was the prince her daughter waited for every evening, and whether it could be him who had taught her how to make love. But the man looked like he was more than seventy years old and should’ve been impotent for years, and with that Dewi Ayu’s unpleasant thoughts began to fade. She even invited him to live in the house, because there was still an empty room, and the man appeared to have lost all connection to the outside world.

Shodancho, who was indeed in a confused and sorry state, agreed. That was Tuesday, three months after Dewi Ayu rose from the dead, the day when they found Beauty sprawled out across her bedroom floor in a pitiful condition. Her mother tried to help her stand and with Rosinah’s help laid her across the bed. Shodancho suddenly appeared behind them, saying: