Beauty Is a Wound (15 page)

Dewi Ayu realized that there was no way to fight the woman with words. She quickly left, pushing the baby carriage, but she remained determined to get her house back. She went to the temporary civil government and military offices, met a KNIL commandant, and asked his advice. His recommendation was quite disappointing, telling her to swallow any hope of getting her house back any time soon. The situation did not yet allow it, he said, because guerrillas were still roaming about. If that house belonged to a guerrilla family, it was better to let it go, unless she had the money to buy it back.

But she didn’t have the money. Her five remaining rings would never be enough to buy a house. Her only hope, her treasure, was still in the toilet, and she would never be able to get at it without owning the house first. She met with Mama Kalong straightaway, knowing that the woman was always quick to help anyone in need, and spoke as frankly as possible. “Mama, loan me some money. I want to buy my house back.”

Mama Kalong looked at everything from a financial angle, and could always spot a good business opportunity. “And how will you repay me?”

“I have family treasure,” replied Dewi Ayu. “Before the war I buried all of my grandmother’s jewelry in a secret place and no one knows about it except me and God.”

“And what if God stole it?”

“Then I’ll come back and whore for you to pay off my debt.”

They agreed on this as the best possible idea. Mama Kalong even offered to become the mediator for the repurchasing of the house, because if Dewi Ayu did it herself, there was the possibility that old guerrilla woman would refuse to sell. A native would never trust her, with her Dutch appearance, and in any case Mama Kalong was very experienced in buying properties from people like them, who needed money. She promised Dewi Ayu she would bargain for the lowest possible price.

The whole business took almost a week. Mama Kalong went back and forth every day to meet with this fierce old woman before finishing the transaction. The guerrilla granny agreed to sell the house if she could get another house and some cash in exchange. Mama Kalong handled it well, so that Dewi Ayu could finally order the woman to leave the house and never set foot there again. Accompanied by Mama Kalong, Dewi Ayu quickly moved in with her two small children, using a military jeep that belonged to a KNIL customer at the whorehouse. How happy she was to return to her home, with the assurance that it now belonged to her.

“So when will you pay me back?” asked Mama Kalong finally.

“Give me one month’s time.”

“Yes, that’s enough for an excavation,” she said. “If someone disturbs your house, you just come to me. I have good friends who are guerrillas and of course I know KNIL soldiers. They are all my customers.”

Dewi Ayu did not immediately begin the dig. She first looked for a baby nurse, and she found her in the encampments in the foothills, an old woman named Mirah who used to be a Dutchman’s servant before the war. Dewi Ayu told her firmly that she was not Dutch, she was a native woman named Dewi Ayu. Through Mirah, she found a gardener who could get the unkempt grounds in order. It was a week before she could relax and see everything returning to how it used to be, with a clean yard and fresh-looking plants.

“We are lucky that neither the Japanese nor the Allied troops destroyed it,” she said to herself.

That was when she got word from Ola and Gerda. They had reunited with their grandmother and grandfather, and it even turned out that their father was safe after having been held in a POW camp in Sumatra. Ola was engaged to an English soldier and they were going to be married later that year, on the 17th of March, in the Church of Saint Mary. Dewi Ayu could not attend their celebration, but she sent some photos of her little girls, and received their wedding photo in return. She hung it on the wall, so that Ola could see it if she ever came to visit.

After most of the household duties were taken care of, she began to think about digging up the treasure. She already trusted the gardener, who was named Sapri, so she called him and told him about her plan to dig up the sewer pipes. She said that if she didn’t, she would never be able to pay his wages. And so the gardener brought in a crowbar and a hoe, and Dewi Ayu rolled up her jacket sleeves, put on her grandfather’s pantaloons, and helped Sapri dismantle the floor and dig up the dirt along the water pipe that was heading for the septic tank. Their work was made easier thanks to the fact that the toilet hadn’t been used since the war began. They didn’t find warm stinky shit, only crumbling loose dirt teeming with angrily writhing earthworms.

They worked all day while Mirah watched the two little kids, only stopping for a moment to eat and rest before continuing to dismantle the concrete and stir what was left of the shit that had already turned into dirt. But they didn’t find anything. Dewi Ayu was sure that they had already removed all the excrement and soil from the pipes, but she still hadn’t found any of the jewelry that she had stashed there. There were no necklaces or golden bracelets—there were only mounds of rotting earth, brown and humid. She didn’t believe that the jewelry could have rotted away with the shit, so she abandoned her work and gave up, grumbling:

“God stole it.”

In the revolutionary era, people boldly shouted flashy slogans and wrote them on the walls alongside the street, waved them on banners, and even scrawled them in school notebooks. Mama Kalong decided to rename her whorehouse in the same spirit, with a new title to represent the very essence of her soul. She’d already used “Make Love or Die,” and then “Make Love Once, Make Love Forever,” but finally decided on “Make Love to the Death.”

Alas, that came true—a KNIL soldier died while making love, his throat slit by a guerrilla soldier, and a guerrilla died while making love, shot by a KNIL soldier, and a prostitute also died in the middle of a lovemaking session, after she’d been kissed so long she couldn’t breathe.

And so it was there, in “Make Love To the Death,” that Dewi Ayu became a prostitute. She didn’t live there, because she had a house. She just went there when dusk fell, and returned home when morning came. Now she had three young girls to take care of: Alamanda, Adinda, and Maya Dewi, born three years after Adinda. At night, the children were cared for by Mirah, but during the day she took care of them herself just like any regular mom. She sent the kids to the best schools, and to the mosque to recite prayers with Kyai Jahro.

“They won’t become prostitutes,” she said to Mirah, “unless that’s really truly what they want.”

She herself had never honestly admitted that she was a prostitute because that was what she truly wanted, in fact just the opposite; she always said that she had been forced into prostitution due to circumstance. “Just like circumstance makes somebody a prophet or a king,” is what she told her three children.

She was the city’s favorite whore. Almost every man who had ever been to the brothel had slept with her at least once, not caring how much he had to pay. It wasn’t because they had some long-standing obsession to sleep with a Dutch woman, it was because they knew that Dewi Ayu was an expert lovemaker. No one handled her roughly, as the other prostitutes were handled, because if someone did so all the other men would go nuts as if the woman was their own wife. Not one night passed without her entertaining a guest, but she strictly limited herself to just one man per evening. For this apparent exclusivity, Mama Kalong charged a high price and the extra profit went to her, that bat queen who never slept at night.

Yes, Mama Kalong was the queen in that city and Dewi Ayu was the princess. They had the same tastes, the kind of women who took good care of themselves and wore clothes way more modest than those of the virtuous ladies. Mama Kalong liked handmade batik that she bought straight from Solo, Yogyakarta, and Pekalongan, with a
kebaya
and her hair in a traditional bun. She even dressed that way at the whorehouse, and only when she was relaxing did she wear a loose housedress. Meanwhile Dewi Ayu copied everything she wanted exactly from the pages of women’s fashion magazines and even the virtuous ladies furtively copied her.

The two were the city’s source of joy. There was not one important event that they were not invited to. Every Independence Day Mama Kalong and Dewi Ayu sat with Mayor Sadrah, the regents, and of course Shodancho when he finally emerged from the jungle. Even though the virtuous and proper ladies really hated them, knowing that their husbands disappeared in the middle of the night to patronize “Make Love to the Death,” they were polite to their faces (and bitched behind their backs).

Then one day a man got the idea in his head that he had to have the princess all to himself—he even wanted to marry her. No one dared cross him, because it was said he was invincible. That man was called Crazy Maman, or Maman Gendeng.

And so the happiness of the men in Halimunda came to an end, and wide smiles spread across the faces of their wives and sweethearts.

TO THIS DAY,
people clearly remember how that man arrived one stormy morning when Dewi Ayu was still alive and fought on the beach with some fishermen. Yes, the people of Halimunda know all his exploits by heart, as well as they know all the parables in the Holy Book.

When he was still very young, Maman Gendeng was already a warrior in the last generation of grandmasters, the sole student of Master Chisel from Great Mountain. At the end of the colonial era he left to wander and seek his fortune but encountered not a soul, neither friend nor foe, until the Japanese came. Then he fought for The People’s Army, and during the revolutionary war he awarded himself the rank of colonel. But during a restructuring of the troops he was one of the thousands of soldiers who got sacked, and was left with nothing except the glory of having fought in the struggle. Yet Maman Gendeng was not upset at all. He returned to his wandering and spent the rest of the war earning a new reputation: that of a bandit thief.

His thieving instinct came from his hatred of rich people, and his hatred of rich people was completely understandable. He was the bastard son of a Regent. His mother had worked in the Regent’s house as a kitchen maid, as had generations of her family before her. No one knew when they began their secret affair, but everyone knew that the Regent’s hearty sexual appetite meant that his wife and concubines and mistresses alone could never satisfy him. On certain nights he would still drag one of the servants into his quarters. Maman Gendeng’s mother was one of the women who met that unfortunate fate, and ultimately she got knocked up. The Regent’s wife found out about it, and to preserve the family’s good name she banished the kitchen maid. She didn’t care that the maid’s family, from her mother and father to her grandmothers on both sides, to both her grandmothers’ mothers and fathers, had served in that household. Without anything except the baby growing in her stomach, the unfortunate woman hacked her way through the jungle and was soon lost on Great Mountain. She was found by Master Chisel, an old guru who helped her give birth under a sugar palm tree.

On the verge of death the woman said, “Name him Maman like his father. He is that Regent’s misbegotten bastard son.” She passed away before she could gaze upon her child again. The old master, deeply saddened, brought the child home.

“You will become the ultimate warrior,” he told the baby.

He cared for him well, gave him plenty of food and started to toughen and train him before he could walk. He dunked the infant in freezing cold water and roasted him under the noonday sun. When he was still just a toddler, the old man threw him into the river and forced him to swim. By the time he was five years old, believe it or not, he was the strongest little kid on the face of the earth. Maman Gendeng, which was by then his name, could already pulverize a stone into teeny soft grains of sand with only his bare hands. Unlike the other gurus, Master Chisel taught the kid everything he knew, holding nothing back. He taught him all the good fighting moves, gave him all the talismans and amulets, and even taught him how to read and write ancient Sundanese, Dutch, Malay, and Latin. He taught him how to meditate, and with the same seriousness of purpose he taught him how to cook.

When Maman Gendeng was twelve years old, Master Chisel died. After burying the old man and mourning for a week, he came down off the mountain and began his odyssey to get revenge on his biological father. But this happened at about the same time that the Japanese troops arrived and he did not find his father in his house, because the family was already in ruins, devastated by the war. The Regent had run away as an accomplice of the Dutch, and so Maman Gendeng had to search for his enemy, who had banished his mother and was responsible for her death, for three years. But even after those three years he was still unable to exact his revenge, because when he found his father the man had just been executed by a firing squad. He saw his father’s corpse but did not deign to bury him.

After the Japanese left and independence was declared and the revolutionary war began, he joined a group of guerrillas. They stayed in fishermen’s huts on the northern coast during the day and fought at night, but the KNIL troops usually won the skirmishes. Nothing much interesting happened during this time, except for one thing: he became infatuated with a very young fisherwoman named Nasiah. She was a dainty girl with dimples in her cheeks and lovely dark skin. Maman Gendeng would see her when he went walking along the beach gathering fish for his afternoon snack. She was friendly, and would sneak out to bring the guerrillas whatever food she had, smiling the sweetest possible smile.