When the funeral ceremony was finished they all went to Dewi Ayu’s house, where Beauty lived with Rosinah. They circled through the house, looking at the photos of themselves from when they were still small, looking at the photos of Dewi Ayu, and crying to remember their difficult past. They had become a gang of abandoned orphans. All they had now was each other, and their effort to try to truly belong to one another once again.
“Mama came back but she didn’t stay for very long, and left again before Krisan died,” said Beauty.
“That’s just how dead people are,” said Maya Dewi. “My husband came again too, on the third day after his death.”
After that, they each still lived in their own houses, continuing on with their quiet lives. To entertain themselves, they visited one another. After her first appearance at the funeral, even Beauty began to venture out of the house to visit her older sisters. She no longer cared about people’s stares. She wore long dresses and a veil that almost covered her entire face. The women took a deep pleasure in their new lives, trying to forget all the misfortune that had befallen them, loving each other, and satisfied with that love.
And it was that way until they grew old, to the point that people often gossiped about them, calling them “the gang of widows” when they all got together.
But they were so happy, and loved each other so much.
During the sixth month of her pregnancy, Beauty went into premature labor and her baby died without ever getting the chance to cry or shout. Her older sisters buried the baby in the garden behind the house, with the help of the mute Rosinah.
“Didn’t you give it a name before you buried it?” asked Alamanda.
“A name would only hurt me more.”
“If I might ask, whose child was that baby, in fact?” asked Adinda.
“Mine and my prince’s.”
Of course much still remained unsaid between them. So they didn’t force Beauty to say who he was, that man she called her prince.
The baby was buried and they went on with their lives, loving each other and guarding each other’s secrets.
When Rengganis the Beautiful’s corpse was found, Krisan suffered from a profound terror that people would finally discover that it was he who had murdered that girl. The fear grew worse because he had also hidden Ai’s corpse under his bed, and Shodancho was furiously looking for Ai everywhere.
He considered returning the corpse to the cemetery but was afraid someone would catch him at it, because ever since Shodancho found out that someone had dug up the grave and taken his child’s body, the cemetery had been guarded. Returning Ai to her grave was not a wise move at all, and he practically lost his mind trying to think how he could make that body disappear from underneath his bed before somebody discovered it.
He practically caged himself inside his room, with the door always locked, worried that his mother or his grandmother would enter and investigate the fragrant aroma that wafted up faintly from the space under the bed. He even swept his own room himself, so that his mother or grandmother wouldn’t try to come in and clean up the place.
Krisan had even tried to chop up the body of the girl he loved into small pieces so that he could easily dispose of them. Maybe making her into food for the dogs was safer than returning her to the grave, since that way she would never be found. But to see that beautiful face, that face that didn’t rot even in death, that face that looked just as if she was sleeping and at some point would wake up and rub her eyes, Krisan couldn’t do it. He loved her so much, and it made him cry to imagine himself chopping her up to bits, so that he no longer had the strength to lift the cleaver that he had ready, and he returned Nurul Aini, still wrapped in her burial shroud, to her place back under his bed.
He was at the point of desperation, about to confess all of his sins, when he thought of a brilliant idea. He would do it, and say goodbye to Ai.
Just as when he had gone to the ocean with Rengganis the Beautiful and Ai’s corpse, he dressed the body up in his own clothes. At night, as dawn was approaching, he lifted that corpse onto his back and rode his bicycle to the shore. He stole the same boat he had stolen before. He brought Ai’s corpse to the middle of the ocean. And not just her corpse, but also two large stones, almost twice as big as her head.
He reached the spot where he had killed Rengganis the Beautiful as the new day dawned. That part of the ocean was very deep, even the sharks wouldn’t find her there. He tied the girl’s body — with tears streaming down his face, but he had to do it — to the two stones, so tightly that bites from sail fish wouldn’t break the cords apart. With such heavy stones, when he threw her in, Ai’s dead body quickly sank to the depths of the ocean and disappeared without a trace. Shodancho would never find her, even if he sought her for a hundred years.
Krisan headed for home with a heavy heart, but he was finally at peace. He passed by a fisherman who was out boating all alone, and that fisherman questioned him.
“What are you doing alone out on the ocean, without even one fish in your boat?”
What are you doing alone out on the ocean, without even one fish in your boat?
“Getting rid of a corpse,” said Krisan, shivering to hear that man’s voice echo, reverberating against who knows what.
“Heartbroken over a beautiful lover? Ha. Ha. Ha. Let me give you some advice, kid, look for an ugly lover. They will never hurt you.”
Heartbroken over a beautiful lover? Ha. Ha. Ha. Let me give you some advice, kid, look for an ugly lover. They will never hurt you.
Then the fisherman left, heading off in the opposite direction, but Krisan kept thinking about his advice. And when he arrived at the place where he had parked his minibike, he said to himself, “Maybe it’s true, I should look for an ugly lover. The ugliest in the world.”
Not long after Dewi Ayu was able to kill that mighty evil spirit, Kinkin played with his jailangkung at Rengganis the Beautiful’s grave. He was certain that this time he would succeed, because that evildoer who had always thwarted him had now been defeated. He planted an effigy in the shape of a wooden doll into the dirt on top of the grave, which would become the medium for Rengganis the Beautiful’s spirit, and then he began reciting mantras. The doll began to tremble, a sign that the spirit had been called, but then it shook violently, a sign the spirit was angry, and then it almost collapsed. Kinkin tried to calm it down, but Rengganis the Beautiful’s spirit rebuked him.
“You idiot, what are you doing?!”
“Calling your spirit.”
“Yes, obviously,” said Rengganis the Beautiful. “But listen up: no matter what, you will never be able to marry me.”
“I just want to know who killed you. Please permit me to seek revenge for you, and avenge my love,” said Kinkin while prostrating his body in front of that wooden doll, truly begging.
That wooden doll, Rengganis the Beautiful, said, “Even if you lived for a thousand years I would never tell you who killed me.”
“Why not? Don’t you want me to avenge your death?”
“No, because I still really love him.”
“Ok, then I’ll kill him and you two can meet in the world of the dead.”
“That’s bullshit. You’re just trying to trick me.” And Rengganis the Beautiful disappeared.
But finally he did find out the truth, not from the spirit of Rengganis the Beautiful but from another spirit, one he didn’t recognize. He called spirits at random, believing that now no one would be preventing them from speaking truthfully, and believing that all the spirits knew what human beings didn’t know. He called one of the spirits, who looked old and frail, but its voice was quite strong.