Beauty Is a Wound (8 page)

“What will happen if I don’t marry you?” asked Ma Gedik finally, a short while after the headman arrived.

“You’ll be supper for the
ajak
.”

“Then let them have me.”

“And Ma Iyang Hill will be flattened.”

With that terrifying threat, he helplessly married Dewi Ayu around nine o’clock that morning, just as the Japanese soldiers began the ceremony marking their occupation of the city. No one was invited to celebrate their marriage except the servants and the security guards. Mr. Willie served as witness and the whole time Ma Gedik trembled and stammered and couldn’t say his vows properly. He finally collapsed, unconscious, and the headman formalized their union.

“The poor man,” said Dewi Ayu. “He would have been my grandfather, if Ted had not made Ma Iyang his concubine.”

When Ma Gedik regained consciousness later that afternoon, he found himself Dewi Ayu’s husband without understanding how it had happened, gaping at her as if she were a she-devil. He refused to touch her, shrieking whenever she forced herself near him, and hurling whatever he could grab at her. When Dewi Ayu relented, he curled up in the corner of the room shivering and crying like a baby in its cradle. Dewi Ayu waited patiently, sitting not far from him, still in her wedding clothes. Once in a while she would try to coax him to approach her and caress her, and even make love to her, since she was now his wife. But whenever Ma Gedik began to scream again, she would stop her seduction, and return to sitting there quietly, flashing him a smile now and then in her patient efforts.

“Why are you afraid of me? I just want you to touch me, and of course sleep with me, because you are my husband.”

Ma Gedik didn’t respond.

“Think about it, let’s say we are married and you don’t sleep with me,” she continued. “I will never get pregnant and everyone will say that your dick doesn’t work anymore.”

“You are a she-devil seductress,” stammered Ma Gedik finally.

“I’m a beautiful temptress,” Dewi Ayu added.

“You are not a virgin.”

“Of course that’s not true!” said Dewi Ayu, a little hurt. “Sleep with me and you will know that you’re wrong.”

“You’re not a virgin, and you’re pregnant, and you want to make me into the black sheep.”

“That’s not true.”

Their debate continued until the middle of the night, and then until the early morning, and neither of them changed their mind. When the new day came and the light streamed into their bridal chamber, Dewi Ayu was exhausted by the man’s electrifying screams and gave up on approaching him. She took off all of her clothes, her wedding dress and her tiara, and threw them on top of the bed. Stark naked, she stood in front of the still hysterical old man, and said loudly in his ear:

“Do it, and you’ll
know
that I’m a virgin!”

“I swear to Satan, I am not going to do it, because I know you are
not
a virgin!”

Then Dewi Ayu inserted her middle finger into her vagina, deep inside, right in front of Ma Gedik’s nose. The girl whimpered a little at the pain, and trembled every time her finger moved in between her legs, until she pulled it out and showed it to Ma Gedik. A drop of blood hovered on her fingertip, which she then smeared in a straight line from the tip of Ma Gedik’s forehead to the edge of his quivering chin.

“Well I guess you’re right,” said Dewi Ayu. “Now I am no longer a virgin.”

She left to bathe and after that she slept atop her wedding bed, as if she didn’t care about the old man who was still shivering in the corner of the room. She hadn’t had any rest for a whole day and night, and so she slept quite soundly, not responding when the servants tried to rouse her for lunch. She awoke in the afternoon and without bothering about Ma Gedik went right to the table, eating with gusto, and with no conversation as the servants looked on, waiting for her orders. When she returned to her room, she realized that the old man was gone. She looked for him in the bathroom, in the yard, and in the kitchen, but she didn’t find him. Dewi Ayu finally asked one of the guards in front of the house.

“He ran away screaming like he’d seen the devil, Miss.”

“You didn’t catch him?”

“He was running so fast, just like Ma Iyang ran sixteen years ago,” replied the guard. “But Mr. Willie chased him with the car.”

“And was he caught?”

“No.”

She ran to the stable and joined the chase on horseback. Dewi Ayu guessed, although she was slightly mistaken, that the man had run toward the peak of the rocky hill where Ma Iyang had flown down and was lost in the fog. It turned out Ma Gedik had not run to that hill, but to another hill located to the east. After questioning some people on the side of the road, they picked up some Colibri tire tracks, which led them to the foot of that hill. Dewi Ayu found Mr. Willie sitting on the back bumper of the car, looking like he couldn’t drive up any farther.

“He’s singing on the hilltop,” said Mr. Willie.

Dewi Ayu looked up and saw Ma Gedik, standing on a boulder and singing like an opera star on stage. She could hear him faintly, but she didn’t know that it was the same song that he had sung years ago on the last day of his sixteen year wait for Ma Iyang.

“He’s definitely going to jump, just like his beloved,” continued Mr. Willie. “And he’ll fly up into the sky and disappear behind the fog.”

“No,” said Dewi Ayu, “He will crash on the rocks and be banged up like a pile of chopped beef.”

And that was what happened: right as he finished his song Ma Gedik jumped into the open air. He appeared to fly, overjoyed, as no one had seen him be for many years. His arms flapped like the wings of a bird, but they couldn’t make his body fly any higher, and down he plummeted with ever-increasing speed. Even though he knew what was waiting at the end, he still smiled and whooped, full of excitement. He crashed onto the rocks, and his body was hacked to abysmal bits, exactly as Dewi Ayu had predicted.

They brought his remains, which looked more like broth or batter than a human corpse, home and buried him properly. Dewi Ayu named the hill Ma Gedik Hill, jutting up next to Ma Iyang Hill, and decided to mourn for a week. At the end of her mourning period she received word that Ted Stammler had fallen defending Batavia in the last battle before Holland’s surrender. His corpse never arrived, but Dewi Ayu decided to mourn again for another week. At the end of her second mourning period, delighted that she hadn’t received any more sorrowful news, she threw off all her mourning garments. She put on cheerful clothes, made herself up nicely, and went to the market as if nothing had happened. But upon her return home, she heard something way more surprising than news of another death.

Mr. Willie, wearing a jacket and tie and shiny leather shoes, approached her saying that he had some important business to discuss. Dewi Ayu thought the man was going to quit and go to Batavia to look for work, or maybe join the Japanese army. Neither of her guesses was even close. Mr. Willie’s face, red with embarrassment, did not give anything away until the moment he spoke. He only a uttered few words but they made her catch her breath:

“Miss,” he said. “Marry me.”

DEWI AYU HAD
forgotten that there was no way the Japanese soldiers could be winning the war without any information, such as the fact that she was the child of a Dutch family. It wasn’t just her face and her skin that gave her away, but also the city’s public records, the entire archive of which the Japanese now controlled, and so they weren’t going to believe she was a native, whether or not her name was Dewi Ayu.

“I guess that’s how it is,” she said. “Just like everyone knows that guy Multatuli is a drunk and not really Javanese.”

She was all by herself, feeling nostalgic and listening to the gramophone spin her grandfather’s favorite songs, Schubert’s
Unfinished Symphony
and Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Scheherazade
, while thinking about how she should reply to Mr. Willie’s proposal. She knew Mr. Willie was a very good man—she had even once hoped he might marry her Aunt Hanneke. Disappointing a good man like that was just as hard as recklessly marrying him, but whatever the circumstances, after her tumultuous marriage to Ma Gedik she would never even consider marrying anybody else.

Mr. Willie had come to Halimunda when her grandfather ordered their Colibri from the Velodrome store in Batavia to replace their ancient Fiat. The company belonged to a businessman named Brest van Kempen, a kind man who let people buy cars on installment plans. Her grandfather didn’t need an installment plan, but his friends had told him about the great promotion that the Velodrome was offering—the car came complete with free accident insurance, access to a great repair shop, and they were throwing in a driver who was experienced in handling engines. He returned home with Mr. Willie, who became their driver and mechanic, especially useful because they needed someone to take care of the plantation equipment. He was of medium build, in his mid-thirties. His vest was always left unbuttoned, his clothes perpetually covered in grease, and he carried a pistol to shoot rats and pigs. That was back when Dewi Ayu was still just an eleven-year-old girl, five years before Mr. Willie proposed to her.

“Think about it, Mister,” she said. “I’m sort of a crazy woman.”

“When I look at you I don’t see any signs of insanity,” said Mr. Willie.

“When Ma Gedik died, I realized I had only married him because I was so angry that Ted had destroyed his love. So, clearly, I’m crazy.”

“You’re just a little irrational.”

“And that’s just another way of saying crazy, Mister.”

But now her salvation came: she could run away and avoid having to reply to his proposal. It was still morning and the record had not yet finished playing its last song when she saw military trucks lined up on the beach, ready to round up all the remaining Dutch inhabitants and take them to a prison camp. The day before, the soldiers had come to their houses and ordered them to pack. That night, without saying anything to anyone, especially not to Mr. Willie, Dewi Ayu had gathered her things. She didn’t take much, just one suitcase filled with clothes, a blanket, a thin sleeping pallet, and documents proving her family’s holdings. She didn’t take any money or jewelry, because she knew all that would just get stolen. Instead, she gathered up some necklaces and bracelets that had belonged to her grandmother and flushed the jewelry down the toilet into the waiting shelter of shit. She divvied up the remaining portion into a number of small envelopes to give to the household servants so that they could survive while looking for work someplace else. For herself, she swallowed six rings inset with jade, turquoise, and diamonds. They would be safe inside her, would come out along with her shit, and then she would swallow them again, for as long as she was imprisoned. But now it was time to go—one of the trucks had stopped outside her house and two soldiers had gotten out with bayonets in their hands and they were climbing the steps to the veranda where she was sitting waiting for them.

“I know you guys,” said Dewi Ayu, “you’re the photographers who used to work at the bend in the road!”

“Yeah, that was fun. We got photographs of every single Dutch person in Halimunda,” answered one of the soldiers.

The other one spoke: “Prepare yourself, Miss.”

“You mean Madam,” said Dewi Ayu. “I’m a widow now.”

She asked for a moment to say goodbye to the household servants. They seemed to know that their mistress would be leaving. She saw one of the cooks, Inah, crying. Inah truly owned the kitchen, and Dewi Ayu’s grandmother had entrusted all the meals for family guests to her. Dewi Ayu would never again enjoy her tasty
rijsttafel
, maybe not for the rest of eternity—a good cook was an important part of any family’s wealth, but now the family had disappeared and the last member was herself leaving, to become a prisoner of war. As she gave the woman a golden necklace, Dewi Ayu was flooded with memories. When she was little, Inah had taught her how to cook, had let her grind spices and fan the stove embers. She felt a shock of sadness more overpowering than when she had heard the news that her grandmother and grandfather had died.

Next to the cook stood a houseboy, Inah’s son. Muin was his name. He always dressed sharper than anyone else, with his
blangkon
hat, impressing even the Dutch. His duty was to make rounds throughout the house, but he was busiest at mealtimes when he had to set and mind the table. Ted Stammler had taught him how to use the gramophone, often ordering him to change the record or search for a particular song. He was always happy to do it, turning the record and moving the needle as if he was the only man for the job. He had learned many classical pieces, and seemed to really enjoy them too.

“You can have all of that,” Dewi Ayu said to him, pointing to the gramophone and the shelf of records.

“I couldn’t!” said Muin. “They belong to our Master.”

“Believe me, dead people don’t listen to music.”

Years later, after the war ended and the republic stood, she saw Muin again. At that time there were almost no Dutch families left, and no one was rich enough to have very many servants. She knew that Muin couldn’t do anything much except set the table and work the gramophone; and there he was in front of the market playing the records inherited from her grandfather, while a clever little trained monkey passed back and forth pushing a little wagon or carrying an umbrella, dancing in time to the
Symphony No. 9 in D Minor
, and people threw small change into the
blangkon
that Muin now set out upside down. Dewi Ayu only watched him from afar, smiling at his good fortune.