Whispers of the Heart

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 p********e 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 s**t, since the holes where a baby comes out and where s**t 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 s**t, 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 s**t 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 i***t 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 p********e 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 w*****g 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 p********e, 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 w***e 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 w***e 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 p********e 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 p********e’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 p********e. 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 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 p********e 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, which she was able to give everyone that pleasing smile.