Free Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan Page A

couldn’t cry, lay crumpled on its mother’s lap. As for a name, Komar didn’t make any suggestions. He chose to disappear, and their mother eventually proffered a single name—with no middle or family name attached.
    â€œMarian.”
    When the end came, there was one source of comfort: the girl died with a name and with her head shaved. Margio managed to carve the name on her tiny tombstone, which stood under a frangipani tree that Mameh planted, where the aroma of ylang-ylang petals lingered. The baby’s death fired Margio’s hatred for his father; he thought that if he were ever to kill Komar, now was the time.
    Komar bin Syueb came home just before dawn, not long after Marian’s burial, neither guilt nor surliness evident in his face. He might have slept at the brothel or the garbage dump; no one cared. No one greeted him, neither his family nor the neighbors. He was a half-dead, senile old man with no control over himself, entering the house without thinking to ask why everyone was sad. Yet he must have been aware of Marian’s death, for it was the ritual meal that brought him home. He sat in the kitchen and shamelessly ate the leftover chicken, and then went to sleep, snoring horribly. Eventually Margio couldn’t stand it any more. He snatched up a pan, the only pan they had, and slammed it on the floor, waking Komar with a great explosive crash.
    With this action, the truce they had maintained for so many years came to an end. Komar understood that the boy had reached the limit of his patience. After that, the old man withdrew into his shell, spending long hours stock-still in bed, pretending to be oblivious to everything. It was the first time Margio had let out his anger—he had never dared before— and now his father understood what a furious cobra his son kept in his belly. Actually, Margio was as surprised as anyone by his outburst, which had set everything in motion; he had to ready himself. He was twenty, and he had absolutely nothing to fear from his fifty-year-old father. The old man, perpetually in bed, understood the limits age had set, grasping with a melancholy resignation the fact that Margio was no longer a young boy, but a man, against whom he had no means of defense.
    In the days that followed, they kept their distance, preparing for battle and at the same time evading it. Komar bin Syueb was now so feeble and abstracted that Margio, seeing his father’s helplessness, willed himself not to act too soon, holding his hatred in check, though it boiled white-hot right up until the morning he met his white tiger. His Brahala.
    Mameh saw the tigress briefly, slipping out of Margio as easily as the boy might slip out of a shirt and pants. She recoiled, convinced the beast would pounce, and couldn’t move for fear until it returned to its lair, deep inside Margio’s chest. That was the evening when Margio came home to find their father slaughtering chickens. Komar asked no one for help, but clamped their feet and wings with his sandals, one hand gripping the poor chicken’s head, the other swinging the kitchen knife. Slash, slash, he cut off their heads one by one, and threw the remains into the cage, their wings flapping to hold off the clutch of death.
    â€œWhat’s he up to?” Margio asked Mameh, without Komar hearing.
    â€œHe’s planning a ceremonial meal for Marian’s seventh day.”
    Perhaps it was this that drove the tiger out into the open. Margio could not tolerate the damned old man doing anything nice for the dead girl, whom he had completely ignored while she was alive. Margio had come to believe that Komar had killed his youngest, or had at least intentionally let her die. And now the accursed Komar was planning to arrange a seventh-day ceremony. Rot in hell, Margio thought, sure the baby’s soul would accept nothing from this man. That was when Mameh caught sight of a reddish, spectral face, apparently covered