Free Beauty Is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan, Annie Tucker Page A

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