Major Sadrah visited him after the funeral prayers to make sure they didn’t mistreat him. Soldiers on duty were always itching to deal roughly with any captured prey. They still respected the old veteran and would listen to what he said. So he hurried down there, where people milled around the Siliwangi tiger statue and the flagpole, laughing. They turned to him expectantly, hoping for a still more amazing story.
“I arrested him to prevent any unnecessary act of vengeance,” Joni Simbolon said.
“Nonsense, Anwar’s three children are all women,” said the old veteran.
But there were still relatives, and others who might not be happy about the brutality of what had taken place in their neighborhood. Sadrah told them to keep him locked up until dawn, when the police would come. He wondered how Maharani would react if she came home tomorrow morning and found that her father was dead and the killer the boy who had taken her to the movies. The crime was cut and dried, but he was looked for the malevolent spirit behind it, for some secret motive no one yet understood. His wife, who accompanied him and had been among the mourning women, whispered something that had become common knowledge, that the girl was crazy about Margio. But Major Sadrah hadn’t seen any sign of Anwar Sadat objecting.
His feet brought him to the cell. He stood by the door, watching Margio shiver on the mattress, hoping that the secret would be revealed with a simple question. But bitterness and pity weighed on him, preventing him from speaking, and as he struggled Margio turned to him and understood his unspoken question.
“It wasn’t me,” he said calmly and without guilt. “There is a tiger inside my body.”
Two
The tiger was white as a swan, vicious as an ajak. Mameh saw it once, briefly, emerging from Margio’s body like a shadow. She would never see it again. There was one sign that the tigress was still inside Margio, and Mameh didn’t know if anyone else had spotted what it was. In the dark, the yellow glint of a cat’s eye shone in Margio’s pupils. At first, Mameh was scared to look into those eyes, terrified that the tiger might actually reemerge. But with time and frequent exposure to Margio, she grew used to seeing those eyes light up in the dark, and she stopped worrying. The tigress wasn’t her enemy and wouldn’t hurt her; maybe it was there to protect them all.
Margio himself chanced upon it one morning, waking up from a solitary sleep in the surau, weeks before he ran away. The tiger’s dancing tail brushed his bare feet and disturbed him, and for a moment he thought it was Ma Soma patting him awake so they could perform Subuh prayers together. He opened his eyes to see not steaming coffee on a tray or a plate of fried rice, but a white tiger lying next to him, licking its paws. It was past daybreak. The sky presented to the world an endless wet grey countenance. It had plainly been raining hard all night, and no one had emerged to do the prayers. Naturally Margio was stunned. All he could do was stare in awe at the stout beast as it contentedly groomed itself.
He knew the beast wasn’t really alive. In his twenty years on the planet, he had gone in and out of the jungle on the outskirts of town and never seen such a thing. There were boars, small clouded leopards, ajaks, but no white tigers nearly the size of a cow. It reminded him of his grandfather, who had passed away years ago. He teared up and slowly extended a hand, reaching for the tigress’s front paw. It was really there, with fur as soft as a feather duster. Its retracted claws signaled friendship, and as the paw rose up, Margio’s hand reached for it again, and the tigress gave him a playful, kittenish tap. Margio tried to grap the animal’s paw, but it rolled away from him, and then crouched, set for attack. Before Margio could dodge, the tigress lunged, and the pair started wrestling. He was laying flat on his back, breathless, when the tiger backed off, sat down next to him, and resumed licking its paws. Softly Margio patted its shoulder.
“Grandpa?” he said.
His grandfather had lived in a village far away. Margio would take a motorcycle taxi to the edge of the jungle, where a row of small shops known as the Friday Market was a terminus for various vehicles that made the journey up the ascending dirt path. An ox cart might be able to push its way farther uphill, but motorcycles would have a hard time of it, and the taxi drivers were reluctant. To visit Grandpa, Margio had to trudge up the hill through albizia trees and clove woods, on paths lined by mahogany trees, deep into the wild jungle known only to hunters. It took an hour to cross a stretch of hill as familiar to Margio as it was to the boars who would one day become his quarry. Behind the hill was a hamlet, bordering a madrasa with rice fields and fishponds. His grandfather didn’t live there, but it was a place where Margio could unwind. He had come to know several locals after passing through time and again, but he couldn’t hang out for too long. He had to continue his journey before evening fell and the ferry service stopped. The ferry was a raft of bamboo poles, attached to a wire stretched across the river. The steersman stood by the prow, pulling on the wire, dragging the raft slowly to the other side. If the current rendered the raft unsteady, he would use a long pole. The river was deep and the current gentle. There were no crocodiles, but there was the River Spirit, a great rolling wave, never seen but greatly feared by children. The raft cost a mere ten pennies per crossing and could carry dozens of people, as well as cows and sheep and sacks of rice and other crops. Getting off the raft was not the end of Margio’s journey. He had to go up another hill on a truly slippery path. From the summit he could see a wide expanse of paddy fields below. In the middle of the vastness was a hamlet, full of greenery and houses, like a desert oasis, with coconut trees almost touching the sky. This was where his grandfather lived.
Margio first made the journey on his own when he was eight. Afterward he took every opportunity to go there, to see Grandpa, despite the journey taking half a day. He always had a good time, and always would come home with a bunch of bananas or a basket of langsat and durian fruit, which would definitely make Mameh happy, as well as his mother and father. Sometimes, if he badly wanted to go but had no money for the motorcycle taxi, he would walk to the Friday Market and keep walking until he arrived at Grandpa’s house, happy despite the exertion. So often did he take the path that he changed his route at times, quickly making friends with the villagers and the genies who inhabited the jungle. Later, his fellow boar hunters would never have to worry about getting lost so long as he was with them.
Despite his head of silver hair, Grandpa was not crook-backed but fit and vital. He was healthy right up to the moment he passed away in his bed, leaving a contented-looking body to be found later in the hut. Every day he took care of a rice field and a plantation, until the whole lot vanished without a trace in a transaction made by Margio’s father. Margio really loved his grandfather. The old man would take the boy to a rivulet he called the Kingdom of Genies. Never ever tease a girl genie, he always said, but if one of them falls in love with you, take her, for that is a blessing. His grandfather said that girl genies were very beautiful. Margio always wished that one day he would meet one and that she would fall in love with him, but that promise hung tauntingly in the future no matter how many times he visited the rivulet.