One night Mameh heard Komar growl and, going to his side, asked if he was in pain. But it wasn’t his body that tortured him and forced out a second grunt. He wanted to speak, so Mameh leaned close and strained to make out what he was saying. It was no good. Komar’s mumbling was incomprehensible. Mameh cleverly thought of handing him some paper and a pencil from her schooldays, but that only increased his despair, because Komar’s hands no longer functioned. Mameh came up with a better idea. She took the paper and pencil and every time she wrote something suitable, Komar would briefly nod and his mouth would strain to form a smile. It took half the night, and it felt like much longer, to put together a simple short sentence. In this way, the dying man managed to convey his last wish: “Bury me next to Marian.”
The next day Mameh passed the message to her mother. For a long time, the woman had rarely opened her mouth, but to this wish she generously replied, “Tell that to the gravedigger.”
Clearly, Komar bin Syueb had sought reconciliation at the end of his life, and in particular to make amends to the baby who had perhaps died because of him. Lying in bed at night, Mameh heard a crow make a rumpus on their roof. When it flew away, its cawing echoed in her memory. She wanted to ignore superstition, but everyone said that when a crow perched on a roof, it meant there would be a death in that house. She didn’t fall asleep until dawn, and that was when he died, the pain and suffering of waiting for his eldest child’s return too much for him. Nothing made Mameh sadder than the thought of her father longing for his son, even though she was pretty certain that had Margio come back before his father died, he would have taken Komar’s life himself.
That morning, Mameh saw her father sprawled on his bed. His body had deteriorated into an anonymous lump of flesh, a sight to put even a crow off its food. No one had slit his throat, even though Komar had suspected that someday someone in their home would do it. Even Margio had refrained from cutting off his head. The old man died of natural causes, his mind gone. “Sayonara,” he said, and slipped out through the grated window, towed along by the Angel of Death, looking back at his final days, at his sour-smelling mattress, his damp bedroom, and his barren world.
That was the end of a long-established household routine. Just before daybreak, Mameh had been the first to wake up at number 131. As if sleepwalking, she would finish the tasks her half-dead father could no longer handle, she would go to his room with a small bucket containing warm water with a face cloth floating on top. In his final days, with the pain worsening rapidly, the smell of cemetery soil in his nostrils, Komar repented a little and forced his ailing body to pray. Mameh helped with the ablutions, washing his hands, feet, and face, and let him pray lying down. Five times a day. One touch from Mameh’s hand was enough to wake him, telling him that the call to dawn prayer was imminent, and Komar would open his eyes, not moving at all, as if he was glued to his sheet, his head sinking onto three tiers of rotten pillows, his limp body obscured beneath the black and white striped blanket from the hospital.
When dawn came and the touch of Mameh’s hand didn’t awaken Komar, she shook him, but he didn’t even twitch. His eyes were open, but he was gone. When she realized this, she swiftly put the bucket on the floor before she dropped it. The girl touched her breast, mumbled in bewilderment, and then, prompted by deaths she had seen in movies, she closed her father’s eyes. “Sayonara,” she said, your scissors and combs will testify for you. She looked around to make sure there was some exit from the room for his soul. Sat on the floor was a bowl containing the water she had used to cool Komar’s forehead the previous night; elsewhere some vegetable gruel, an untouched green banana and a glass of fermenting sweet tea on the bedside table.
This was the daughter who in her entire eighteen years of life had never even been given a pair of earrings by her father. Hanging from her ears were coiled mattress threads, meant to prevent the pierced skin from sealing up. She had always been holding out for two or three grams of gold. True, Komar once took little Mameh out for a picnic by the sea, and proudly taught her how to make a sandcastle. True, Komar once told Mameh to go to a tailor to get herself a dress for Eid ul-Fitr. And one time he took her to the cinema to see Pandawa Lima. It was a safe bet that when he died, Mameh would remember none of those things, and the dead man knew it.
The muezzin’s call floated in from the surau on the eastern side of Anwar Sadat’s house. Following Ma Soma’s husky voice came the sound of neighboring doors being opened, keys being turned or latches being slid into place, and the susurration of slippers dragging along the small alley to the surau, mongrels barking as they rose from a deep sleep, while roosters flapped their wings before crowing in four bursts of noise, the last one sounding like a long sigh. Mameh went to the room where she slept with her mother, and woke her to say: “Father’s dead.” When her mother got up she made sure her husband had died of natural causes, and not from being strangled by her daughter.
Afterwards, this woman Nuraeni just went to the kitchen and sat on a small stool facing the stove, mumbling to herself, to the stove and to the pan, which wasn’t that unusual. She was a bit out of her mind, or at least that was how her daughter saw it. Mameh followed her to the kitchen, stood in the doorway, stared through the dimness, and waited. She had no idea what to do with her dead father. She hoped Margio would come back soon and bring them some direction, or else they might just let Komar bin Syueb rot in his bed.
In that stillness, Mameh heard a kind of sobbing, a soft whimper that seeped between her mother’s meaningless mumbling. It shocked Mameh greatly to discover that this woman could miss the husband who spent his whole married life beating her up for this or that mistake or for no reason at all. Mameh was pretty well convinced that her mother was heartbroken not because she had loved Komar, but because she had grown used to a life with him, as tormenting as it was.
The animals Komar kept caged in the backyard were noisy, eager to be fed. Ever since Komar’s decline began, there had been neither rotten vegetables nor bran for those poor creatures, and Mameh took over the task of caring for them, providing whatever leftovers she could find in the kitchen. Perhaps they might die now their master had left, she thought. But then again they might be sent after him sooner than that, should anyone wish to send him prayers in a ritual later that day. Mameh would be happy to cut off their heads, the way Margio had often secretly done.
The sobs from the kitchen droned on, and Mameh was still standing in the doorway, as if, at the end of a play’s final act, she waited for the curtains to close on her. She wanted to distract her mother, to force her to do something, but she backed off, conceding that neither of them had any idea what was required. Mameh now turned on the kitchen lamp, whose switch was in the rice storeroom. It wasn’t really a rice storeroom, more like a big boxroom containing a trunk in which papayas and bananas had been left to ripen, next to no more than two or three kilos of rice, which Komar would have bought from the market after trimming people’s hair. Under the bright beam, Nuraeni’s whimpering paused, but she remained in an ecstasy of sadness, staring at the stove with her back to Mameh.