Beauty Is a Wound (40 page)

All of this frenzied political activity worried his mother Mina terribly. She still remembered her husband, executed by the Japanese, and saw all the propaganda and carnivals as ridiculous and pointless commotion. Mina sometimes watched her son giving a speech in front of a mass of thousands, shouting slogans, like “Crush the landlords!” that would be enthusiastically echoed by the crowd. And he cursed not only the landlords, but also money lenders, factory owners, boat captains, plantation officials, and the railway company. Of course, he also cursed America and the Netherlands and neocolonialism, all with such eloquence it was as if God himself was whispering the words into his ear

Every time Comrade Kliwon went home for a visit, Mina would tell him that it wasn’t good to make too many enemies. “One friend is way too few, but one enemy is way too many. You are making a lot of people hate you,” she said worriedly. Comrade Kliwon would reassure her that what had happened to his father was not going to happen to him, then he’d smile and drink the tea that she had made for him before going to lie down.

One day, at the urging of the Communist Party, a group of young kids was thrown into the military prison. They had been having a party at school and all they did wrong was take the stage and sing some rock and roll songs, but Shodancho complied with the communists. Hearing this, Mina’s worry turned into anger and she marched to the Party headquarters and blew up at her son. “I can’t let this happen!” she screamed in the middle his crowded office. “Didn’t you used to play those songs on your guitar in the old days, didn’t
all
of you?” she said to the people gathered around. “And now you are ordering those kids into military custody for singing them?”

But party discipline had made Comrade Kliwon inflexible and his attitude toward his mother was cold. He just placated the woman, walked her out to the side of the main road, and asked a
becak
rickshaw driver to take her home.

He didn’t stop there, but started putting pressure on the city council, the military, and the police to confiscate those brain-rotting Western pop records and throw whoever listened to them—even in the privacy of their homes—into jail. “Crush America and may its false culture be cursed!” he shouted every time. In exchange, the Party began to generously support folk art, providing the usual snacks and some Party propaganda too, so that all the folk art that had been subversive in feudal and colonial times now began to jazz up the Halimunda scene. For the Party’s anniversary they performed
sintren
, with a pretty girl who disappeared inside a chicken coop and reappeared holding a hammer and sickle, looking even more beautiful in full makeup (and the audience clapped). The
kuda lumping
trance dancers didn’t just eat glass and coconut shells, but now also swallowed the American flag. The forbidden rock and roll records were also smashed and swallowed.

After his success building up the Party so rapidly, the Party members in the capital fixed their sights on Comrade Kliwon. It was heard that he had been asked to join the Politburo and that he was a strong candidate for the Central Committee of the Indonesian Communist Party. His political career was dazzling, but Comrade Kliwon refused all honors with an attitude of incomprehensible defiance, even one crazy offer that would have made him a member of the Comintern. He was not working for his own luminous career, he said. He was working so that communism might blossom on Halimunda soil, and so he didn’t want to leave the city.

Men began to return, reporting on the demonstrations in the streets. The military was prepared on all sides—the city forces had taken to the streets and had gained, led by Shodancho, who was motivated by his personal hatred for Comrade Kliwon.

“DN Aidit has been captured,” someone reported.

“Nyoto has been executed,” another report came in.

“DN Aidit met with the president.”

All reports were convoluted and the only information that could be gleaned was from the radio, which couldn’t be trusted. All morning it had been reporting the same exact thing over and over again, as if the news had been prerecorded:
The Communist Party attempted a coup d’état, which failed because the army acted quickly. The army has temporarily taken power in order to rescue the nation
. Another report arrived: The president was under house arrest. Everything was completely confusing.

“Do something!” said Adinda.

“What can I do?” asked Comrade Kliwon. “There is no word from the Soviet Union or China.”

The comrades planned to extend the demonstrations and protests into the night, and then indefinitely, but while everyone was busy preparing public soup kitchens, and the People’s Army veterans were preparing to make war against the regular soldiers, Comrade Kliwon still didn’t go down into the streets. Adinda left him there, on that very same veranda, waiting for his newspapers.

The next morning, as usual she prepared breakfast for her mother, who hadn’t yet returned home from Mama Kalong’s, and then she went to watch the protest. She next went to the Party headquarters, carrying some breakfast on a tray, and found Comrade Kliwon sitting on the veranda with a cup of coffee.

“How are you, Comrade?”

“Terrible,” he replied.

“Eat something, you didn’t eat anything all day yesterday.” Adinda placed the breakfast tray on the table between them.

“I can’t eat until my newspapers come.”

“I swear to you, they won’t come,” said Adinda. “The army has forbidden the newspapers to publish anything.”

“But the newspapers don’t belong to the army.”

“But the army has weapons,” said Adinda. “Tell me, when did you become such an idiot?”

“Then they’ll appear from underground,” Comrade Kliwon insisted. “That’s what usually happens.”

That morning the emergency meetings continued. Anti-communists had arrived in the streets and the two groups clustered in opposition. It seemed as if the war that the people had previously feared would break out between the soldiers and the local thugs was now going to happen with a new cast of characters: the communists against the anti-communists. The army and the police hovered around, but they couldn’t prevent small skirmishes and the throwing of a few Molotov cocktails. People also began throwing stones, and more emergency meetings were held.

“All this chaos started with the disappearance of my newspapers,” Comrade Kliwon complained.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Karmin. “Seven generals were murdered two days ago.”

“Why,” Comrade Yono couldn’t stop himself from asking, “do you care so much about those newspapers?”

“Because the Russian Revolution would never have succeeded if the Bolsheviks hadn’t had their newspaper.”

That explanation made more sense than anything else up until this point, and so they left him on the veranda with Adinda to wait.

As morning turned into midday, the waves of anti-communists grew larger and they were echoing the previous day’s radio report, that the communists had attempted a coup d’état.

Comrade Kliwon, who had not yet lost his sense of humor, commented, “They attempted a coup and censored their own newspapers.”

The first clash finally came at one o’clock. Stone throwing escalated into intense battles, where people used whatever they had to maim or kill. The hospital was soon overwhelmed. The Party opened a field hospital, and Adinda busied herself with the emergency paramedics, but Comrade Kliwon didn’t budge.

Wounded men started to arrive at the Party headquarters, and the place became seriously frenetic. Nobody had died in Halimunda yet, neither communist nor anti-communist, but a massacre in Jakarta was reported. One hundred communists had been killed there, and the rest were being captured, and hundreds of other communists had been murdered in East Java, and the massacres were beginning in Central Java. Everyone began to have a bad feeling that all this would spread to Halimunda.

In the end, someone
was
killed that afternoon. The first communist to die in Halimunda was a veteran revolutionary guerrilla named Mualimin. He was one of the Party’s most faithful members, a master of its ideology in both theory and practice, a true fighter who had struggled for the cause from the colonial times up until the neoliberal era. That was what Comrade Kliwon said in the short eulogy he gave at the funeral, which was held that very same day. A Muslim communist, Mualimin had always wanted to die for the cause, his
jihad
. Years ago he had already written in his will that if he died in battle he wanted to be buried as a martyr. So he wasn’t bathed, only prayed over and buried straightaway with his clothes still covered in blood. He had been shot by the army in an armed clash on the beach, the only man to die that afternoon. Mualimin left behind only one child, a girl of twenty-one named Farida. They’d been very close ever since the death of the girl’s mother many years before, so when the crowd started to leave the cemetery, Farida stayed by her father’s grave even though everyone tried to convince her to return home. In the end, they left her there alone.

Now here is a little romance: a love story in a city gripped in the crisis of war.

The gravedigger-cum-watchman of the fishermen’s district public cemetery was Kamino, a young man of thirty-two. He had been the gravedigger and watchman of the Budi Dharma cemetery since he was sixteen, when his father had died of malaria. Without any brothers or sisters, he had inherited his father’s post—an occupation that had been the family business, all the way back to his grandfather’s grandfather maybe, because nobody else wanted to do it, and his family was already quite familiar with the world of the dead. Accustomed to the silence of that place since he was a little boy, Kamino had no difficulty learning his trade. He could dig a grave as fast as a cat could dig a hole to take a crap. But the work presented him with a grave difficulty: no girls to marry, because nobody wanted to live in the middle of the cemetery.

The fact was, most of the people of Halimunda were superstitious. They still believed that demons, spooks, and all kinds of supernatural beings ran wild in the cemetery, living among the spirits of the dead. And they also believed that the gravedigger lived in close communion with all of these supernatural beings. Aware of his difficult situation, Kamino had never even tried proposing to anyone. His only interactions with other people happened in the course of his business. He usually just stayed at home, a humid house made out of moldy old concrete shaded by big banyan trees. The sole entertainment in his lonely life was playing
jailangkung
—calling the spirits of the dead using a little effigy doll—another skill that had been passed down through the generations of his family, good for invoking the spirits to chat with them about all kinds of things.

But now, for the first time, his heart pounded to see a kneeling girl refusing to budge from her father’s graveside: Farida. He had already tried to cajole her to leave after everyone else had failed, saying that the air there was the coldest in the city when night fell, that it would be better if she returned home. The girl didn’t look in the least bit afraid of a little cold air. So Kamino tried to tell her about the
jin
spirits and spooks, but saw that the girl was not at all swayed. That made his heart bubble over, and Kamino prayed silently that the girl was truly hardheaded and that she would never go home, and that after all these years he had finally found someone to keep him company in that place.

The Budi Dharma public cemetery was about ten square hectares, spreading out along the edge of the beach, and separated from human habitations by the cocoa plantation. Built in the colonial era, plenty of the cemetery’s plots were empty and overgrown with weeds, and a strong wind blew in from the ocean. When night came, Kamino once again approached the girl with a shining lantern, which he placed on top of the grave marker.

“If you really don’t want to go home,” said Kamino, without daring to look at the girl’s face, “you can stay at my house as a guest.”

“Thanks, but I’d never go to anyone’s house late at night all by myself.”

So as the night grew colder the girl stayed where she was, without any blanket or cushion, sitting directly on the sandy dirt. Feeling that his presence was disturbing her, Kamino finally left, going back into his house and preparing dinner. He reappeared with a portion of food for Farida.

“You’re too kind,” she said.

“Oh, it’s just a side job for gravediggers.”

“I bet not that many people sit by a grave until you give them some dinner.”

“True enough, but many souls of the dead are starving.”

“You
socialize
with dead people?”

Kamino saw a small crack through which he could slip into the girl’s life. “Yeah. I could even call your father’s spirit if you wanted.” And that was what happened. By playing
jailangkung
as he’d learned to do from his ancestors, Kamino called back the soul of Mualimin and let that old veteran possess his body. Now he became Mualimin, speaking with Mualimin’s voice, on behalf of Mualimin, who came face-to-face with his daughter, Farida. The girl was overjoyed to hear her father’s voice again, as if it was just like any other night, talking for a while after eating dinner before going into their own rooms to sleep. Now, after finishing the dinner that Kamino had given her, Farida found herself once again chatting with her dad, as if death didn’t exist, until she remembered and said:

“But you are dead, Daddy!”

“Well don’t be too jealous of me,” said her father, “you’ll get your turn someday.”

The conversation tired her out, especially because she’d been there since the early afternoon, and she fell asleep beside the grave. Kamino ended his
jailangkung
session, and went to get a blanket. He covered the girl, with the attentive gentle movements of a man intoxicated by love, and then stood gazing at her face which appeared, and then was swallowed by the darkness, and then appeared again in the quivering light of the lantern, tossing in the wind. After making sure the girl was safe inside her blanket and that the lantern would last until morning, Kamino went back to his house and tried to sleep, but he thought about the girl all night long, dozing only when the first morning light broke through the frangipani leaves.