One weekend afternoon in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after twenty-one years of death. A shepherd boy was roused from a nap under a frangipani tree, urinating in his shorts before howling, and his four sheep ran aimlessly among the stones and headstones as if a tiger had been thrown into their midst. It all started with a commotion in an old cemetery, with its unmarked headstones and knee-high grass, but everyone knew it as Dewi Ayu's. She died at the age of fifty-two, came back to life after twenty-one years, and from then on, no one knew how to calculate her age.
People from the surrounding villages came to the grave as soon as the shepherd boy told them. They gathered behind cherry and castor bean bushes and in the banana groves, rolling up the ends of their sarongs, carrying children, carrying broomsticks, and even getting muddy in the rice paddies. No one dared approach, simply listening to the commotion from the old grave, like a crowd surrounding a medicine man, as they often do in front of the market every Monday. Enjoying it with awe, never mind that it would have been a terrifying horror if they had been alone. They even hoped for a little miracle rather than just the noise of an old grave, because the women in the ground had been prostitutes for the Japanese since the war, and the kyai always said that those covered in sin would surely receive punishment in the grave. The noise It must have come from the whip of a tormenting angel, and they seemed bored, hoping for another miracle.
The miracle, it came in its most fantastic form. The old grave shook, cracked, and the earth scattered as if blown from beneath, creating a storm and a small earthquake, with grass and headstones flying. Behind the rain of earth like a curtain, the figure of the old woman stood in an awkward, irritated manner, still wrapped in her shroud as if she and her shroud had been buried only overnight.
The people were hysterical, their screams echoing off the distant hillsides, running more chaotically than a herd of sheep. A woman threw her baby into the bushes, and a father carried a banana tree. Two men had fallen into a ditch, another was unconscious on the side of the road, and still another had run fifteen kilometers without stopping.
Witnessing it all, Dewi Ayu only coughed and was amazed to find herself in the middle of a cemetery. She had untied the top two knots of the shroud and untied the other two at her feet to free herself to walk. Her hair had grown miraculously, so that when she took it out of the calico blanket, it fluttered in the afternoon breeze, sweeping across the ground like glistening black moss in a river. Her face was radiant white, despite her wrinkled skin, with eyes so alive from their sockets, staring at the people huddled in the bushes before half of them fled and the other half fell unconscious. She grumbled to no one, who knew who, that people had done her a disservice by burying her alive.
The first thing she remembered was her baby, who, of course, was no longer a baby. Twenty-one years ago, she had died twelve days after giving birth to an ugly baby girl, so ugly that the midwife who assisted her was unsure if it was a baby and thought it was a pile of shit, because the baby's exit hole and the shit were only two centimeters apart. But the baby wriggled and smiled, and finally the midwife believed it was a baby, not shit, and said The mother, lying helpless and hopeless on the bed, revealed that the baby had been born, healthy, and friendly.
"It's a girl, isn't it?" asked Dewi Ayu.
"Well," said the midwife, "just like the three before her."
"Four girls, all beautiful. I should have my own brothel," said Dewi Ayu with perfect irritation. "Tell me, how beautiful is this youngest?"
The baby, wrapped tightly in cloth in the midwife's arms, began to cry and struggle. A woman came in and out of the room, taking dirty, bloody cloths and discarding the placenta. During this time, the midwife didn't answer her question, because she couldn't possibly call a baby who resembled a pile of black feces beautiful. Trying to ignore the question, she said, "You old woman, I doubt you can breastfeed your baby."
"That's right. It's been eaten by three previous children."
"And hundreds of men."
"One hundred and seventy-two men. The oldest was ninety-two years old, the youngest twelve, a week after being circumcised. I remember everything well."
The baby cried again. The midwife said she had to find a wet nurse for the little one. If there wasn't any, she would have to find cow's milk, dog's milk, or even rat's milk. "Yes, go," said Dewi Ayu. "Poor little girl," said the midwife, gazing at the baby's pitiful face. She couldn't even describe it, only imagining it as a cursed monster from hell. The baby's entire body was pitch black, as if burned alive, and its shape resembled nothing at all. She, for example, wasn't so sure the baby's nose was a nose, because it looked more like an electrical outlet than the noses she'd known since childhood. And its mouth reminded people of a piggy bank hole, and its ears resembled pot handles. She was sure there was no creature in the world more ugly than the poor little one, and if he were God, he would have hoped even more.
She would rather kill the baby than let it live; the world would punish her mercilessly.
"Poor baby," the midwife said again, before leaving to find someone to breastfeed her.
"Oh, poor baby," Dewi Ayu said, writhing on the bed. "I've done everything to try to kill her. I should have swallowed a grenade and detonated it inside her stomach. Poor little one, like criminals, poor people also have a hard time dying."
At first, the midwife tried to hide the baby's face from everyone, including the neighborhood women who came by. But when she said she needed milk for the baby, the people scrambled to see the baby. For anyone who knew Dewi Ayu, it was always a joy to see the tiny baby girls she gave birth to. The midwife seemed helpless against the onslaught of people who pulled back the cloth covering the baby's face, but when they saw it and screamed in horror they had never experienced before, she smiled and reminded them that she had tried not to show that hellish face.
They remained standing for a moment, their faces blank, before the midwife quickly left.
"She should have been killed," said one woman, the first to emerge from her sudden amnesia.
"I've tried," said Dewi Ayu as she reappeared. She was wearing only a rumpled housedress and a cloth wrapped around her waist. Her hair looked completely disheveled, like someone who had just escaped a bullfight.
People looked at her with pity.
"She's beautiful, isn't she?" asked Dewi Ayu.
"Um, yeah."
"There's no curse more terrible than bringing out Beautiful baby girls in a world of men who are as lecherous as dogs in mating season."
No one responded, except to look at her with pity for the lie about the beautiful little girl. Rosinah, the mute mountain girl who had served Dewi Ayu for years, led her to the bathroom. She had prepared warm water in the tub, and there Dewi Ayu soaked in fragrant sulfur soap, assisted by the mute girl who shampooed her hair with aloe vera oil. Only the mute girl seemed unfazed, although she was certain she knew about the ugly little girl, as Rosinah was the only one who accompanied the midwife while she worked. She scrubbed her mistress's back with a scrubbing stone, covered her with a towel, and tidied up the bathroom while Dewi Ayu stepped out.
Someone tried to lighten the mood and said to Dewi Ayu, "You should give her a good name."
"Yeah," said Dewi Ayu. "Her name is Cantik."
"Oh," the men let out short cries, trying to object in the most unkind way possible. Embarrassing.
"Or Luka?"
"For God's sake, not that name."
"Then, call her Cantik."
They watched helplessly as Dewi Ayu had already stepped into her room to get dressed, except for looking at each other sadly at the thought of a girl with an electric plug in her soot-black face being called Cantik. A shameful scandal.
However, it was true that Dewi Ayu had tried to kill her. When she learned she was pregnant, despite her half-century of life, experience had taught her that she was pregnant again. Like her other children, she didn't know who the father was, but unlike the others, she didn't expect him to live at all. So she swallowed five paracetamol pills she had obtained from a paramedic.
She drank it with half a liter of soda, enough to nearly kill her, but not the baby, as it turned out. She thought of another way, calling the baby's dikun, who would later remove the child from her womb, and asking him to kill the baby by inserting a small wooden stick into its stomach. She bled for two days and two nights, the stick coming out in pieces, but the baby continued to grow. She tried six other ways to subdue the baby, all in vain, before she gave up and complained:
"He's a true fighter, he wants to win the fight his mother never won."
So she let her belly grow, performed a ceremonial ceremony at seven months, and let the baby be born, though she refused to see the baby. She had given birth to three other daughters before, all beautiful like twins born late to each other; she was tired of such babies, who she thought were like mannequins in a shop window, so she didn't want to see the youngest, because she was sure she would be no different from her three older siblings. She was wrong, of course, and she didn't yet know how ugly her youngest child looked. Even when the neighborhood women whispered quietly that the baby looked like a strange cross between a langur, a frog, and a monitor lizard, she didn't think they were talking about her baby. And when they told her that last night the ajak-jak had been howling in the forest and that owls had come, she didn't think of it as a bad omen at all.
After dressing, she lay back down and immediately realized how exhausting it all had been: giving birth to four babies and living for more than half a century. And then she came to the sad spiritual realization that if her baby wouldn't die, why not let her mother die instead, that way she wouldn't have to watch her grow into a girl. She got up and staggered to her feet, standing in the doorway staring at the neighborhood women who were still huddled together gossiping about her baby. Rosinah emerged from the bathroom.
She stood beside Dewi Ayu, knowing her mistress would tell her what to do.
"Buy me a shroud," said Dewi Ayu. "I have given four daughters to this cursed world. The time has come for my coffin to pass."
The women screamed and stared at Dewi Ayu with their idiotic faces. Giving birth to an ugly baby was barbaric, and leaving her for dead was even more barbaric. But they didn't say anything, only persuaded her not to wish for a foolish death. They told her stories of people who lived to be over a hundred years old, and Dewi Ayu was still too young to die.
"If I live to be a hundred," she said with deliberate calm, "then I will give birth to eight babies. That's too many."
Rosinah went and bought her a clean white cloth, which she immediately put on, even though it wasn't enough to kill her immediately. So while the midwife went around the village looking for a woman with breast milk (which she soon discovered was in vain and ended up giving the baby rice washing water), Dewi Ayu lay quietly on her bed covered in a shroud, waiting with strange patience for the angel of death to come to pick her up.
When the rice washing water period had passed and Rosinah gave the baby cow's milk which was sold in the shop under the name Bear's milk, Dewi Ayu was still lying on her bed, not allowing anyone to take the baby named Cantik into her room. But the story of the ugly baby and its mother sleeping covered in a shroud quickly spread like a deadly plague, drawing people not only from the surrounding villages but also from the most distant villages in the district, to come to see what they said resembled the birth of a prophet, where they compared the wail of the cat to the star that the Magi saw when Jesus was born and the shrouded mother to the weary Mary. A far-fetched parable.
With the timidity of a little girl petting a tiger cub in a zoo, they stood before the traveling photographer with the ugly baby, after they had done so with Dewi Ayu, who remained lying with mysterious calm and completely undisturbed by the merciless commotion. Several people with terminal illnesses came hoping to touch the baby, which Rosinah immediately refused, fearing that all the seeds of their illnesses would torment the baby, and instead she provided buckets of well water that had been used to bathe the Beauty; others came to obtain useful tips for gaining business profits, or a little success at the gambling table. For all this, the mute Rosinah, who had acted quickly as the baby's caretaker, had provided donation boxes that were immediately filled with the visitors' banknotes. The girl had wisely anticipated the possibility that Dewi Ayu might actually die, to profit from such a rare opportunity, so she wouldn't have to worry about the Bear's milk and their future together in that house, as the Beauty's three older brothers were not expected to appear there at all.
But the commotion quickly ended, as quickly as the police arrived, accompanied by a kyai (Islamic cleric) who viewed the whole thing as heretical. He, the kyai, even began to grumble and ordered Dewi Ayu to stop her shameful actions and forced her to remove the shroud.
"Since you're asking a prostitute to undress," Dewi Ayu said with a mocking look, "you must have money to pay me."
The kyai quickly left, begging for forgiveness, and never returned.
Once again, only Rosinah remained unshaken by Dewi Ayu's madness in any form, and it seemed increasingly clear that she was the only one who truly understood her.
Long before she attempted to kill the baby in her womb, Dewi Ayu had said she was tired of having children, and Rosi-nah knew that if she said that, it meant Dewi Ayu was pregnant and would soon have a child. And so it was. If Dewi Ayu had said that to the neighborhood women, whose love of gossip outshone the habit of howling dogs, they would have sneered with mocking smiles and called it all nonsense. Stop being a prostitute and you'll never get pregnant, they'd say. It's just between us: tell that to other prostitutes, but not to Dewi Ayu. She never considered her three (now four) children a curse of prostitution. If they were fatherless, she said, it was because they truly were, not because their father was unknown, and especially not because she had never gone before the village head with a man. She even believed them to be the children of the devil.
"Because the devil is no less mischievous than the gods and God," she said. "Just as Mary gave birth to the son of God and Pandu's two wives gave birth to the sons of the gods, my womb became a place where demons abandoned their children, and I gave birth to the sons of demons. I'm bored, Rosinah."
As often happened, Rosinah simply smiled. She couldn't speak except for meaningless grunting sounds, but she could smile, and she loved to smile. Dewi Ayu loved her, especially for that smile, so much so that she once called her the elephant calf, because no matter how angry elephants were, they always smiled, as you could see them in the circus that came to town almost every year-end. Using her sign language, which couldn't be learned in schools for mutes unless learned directly from Rosinah, the girl told Dewi Ayu why she should be bored. She hadn't even had twenty children yet, while Gandhari had given birth to a hundred Kaurava children. That was enough to make Dewi Ayu laugh out loud; she loved Rosinah's childish sense of humor and kept laughing even though she could deny that Gandhari hadn't given birth.
A hundred children a hundred times, she gave birth to only one lump of flesh that would become a hundred children.
Thus, unperturbed, Rosinah continued to work. She cared for the baby, went to the kitchen twice a day, and washed every morning, while Dewi Ayu lay almost motionless, truly resembling a corpse waiting for people to finish digging her grave. Of course, this wasn't always the case. If she was hungry, she would get up and eat. Every morning and evening, she would also go to the bathroom. But she would return to covering herself with a shroud, lying upright with both hands placed on her stomach, her eyes closed, and even a slight smile on her lips. Some neighbors would try to peek at her through open windows. Rosinah repeatedly tried to chase them away, but always in vain. They would ask why she didn't just commit suicide. Unusually for her sarcasm, Dewi Ayu remained motionless.
The long-awaited death finally came on the twelfth day of the Ugly Beauty's birth—at least that's what everyone believed. Signs of her death had been present since the morning (she died that afternoon), when she told Rosinah that when she died, not to write her name on the tombstone, but she wanted an epitaph with her own words: "I gave birth to four children, and I died." Rosinah had excellent hearing, and could both read and write, so she wrote the message in full. However, her request was immediately rejected by the imam of the mosque leading the funeral service, who considered it a mad attempt to add to her sins and decreed that she would not receive any inscription on her tombstone.
She was found that afternoon by a neighbor who peeked through the window, sleeping as peacefully as they had seen her in her final days. But something was different: there was the smell of borax in the air of her room. Rosinah had bought it at a bakery, and Dewi Ayu had smeared herself with the preservative, although people sometimes...
used it to mix in meatball noodles. Rosinah had let the woman do whatever she wanted with her obsession with death, even if she was told to dig a grave and bury him alive, she would do it and pass it off as a joke of her employer's sense of humor, but not with that ignorant spy. The neighbor woman jumped in, convinced that Dewi Ayu had overstepped her bounds.
"Listen, you whore who has slept with all our men," she said with a hint of resentment. "If you want to die, then die, but don't preserve your body, because only rotten corpses are what we don't envy." She pushed Dewi Ayu's body, but she just rolled over without waking up.
Rosinah entered and signaled that she must be dead.
"This whore is dead?"
Rosinah nodded.
"Dead?" She showed her true nature, the whiny woman, crying as if the dead were her mother, and said with a little sadness, "The eighth of January last year was the most beautiful day in our family. That was the day my husband found money under the bridge and went to Mama Kalong's whorehouse and slept with this whore who died in front of me. He came home and that was the only day where he was so friendly and did not beat one of us."
Rosinah looked at him mockingly, as if to say, how whiny you are, making everyone want to beat you. He drove the whiner away to tell the people that Dewi Ayu had died. There was no need for a shroud because he had bought it twelve days ago; there is no need to bathe him, because he has bathed himself, he has even preserved his own body. "If possible," Rosinah said, gesturing to a nearby mosque imam, "she plans to pray for herself." The mosque imam looked at the mute girl with hatred, and said that he would not pray for a prostitute's corpse, let alone bury her.