“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 whore 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 whore 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 prostitute 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 prostitute’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.