It was one o’clock before they knew it, and Mameh went to the bathroom to piss. She opened the door without thinking, and dazzling daylight burst into the kitchen, while her feet moved on aimlessly, her nostrils widened to the fresh aroma of the front yard and its lush flowering shrubs. She stood on the terrace in her crumpled clothes and tangled hair, resembling a scarecrow hit by the previous night’s storm, until their neighbor Jafar approached the house and stopped to consider Mameh’s wretched appearance. They stared at each other. Mystified, Jafar thought the girl had lost her mind. Her eyes were blank and lusterless.
“What’s wrong, kid?” Jafar asked.
The reply came out of nowhere, and Mameh didn’t mean to phrase it this way: “My father is dead and rotting.”
It took a while for Jafar to grasp what she meant.
“Oh God. Has it been weeks?”
“Last night.”
Finally, here was someone to take care of the dank and putrid body before it really started to decompose. Jafar told Kyai Jahro, and then Ma Soma made an announcement over the surau’s loudspeaker, bringing more of their neighbors to the house. Someone brought a divan and prepared buckets of water for the washing of the body. The gravedigger measured Komar’s corpse with a bamboo pole and bummed a cigarette from the kyai. Before he left, Mameh told him to dig the grave right beside Marian’s. Repeatedly, she insisted that he respect the dead man’s wishes.
Even with the bustle of activity around them, the body being carried onto the terrace, to the well, and to the surau, Mameh and Nuraeni remained stupefied, staring numbly at what was happening or at nothing at all. Mameh was perhaps a little more lucid, talking to people, to some of her uncles, although she still hadn’t combed her hair, changed her clothes, taken a shower or even washed her face. Nuraeni, on the other hand, was still in the kitchen. Now realizing that the moment for Komar bin Syueb to be buried was drawing nearer, she relapsed into grief and sobbing. No one bothered her, knowing her tendency to lose her wits. They would let her do as she liked, so long as she didn’t insist on being buried, too.
This was when Margio returned home, his face shining as if the whole world were lit up by his presence. He took over the burial procession, the well-mannered child apparent once more, and went on to the surau to deliver the burial prayers. No one could fail to see how happy he was. Mameh picked flowers from their yard, all planted by Nuraeni, who was clearly unhappy with what she was doing. In some deft and complex manner, this crazy woman expressed both her grief and her objection to flowers being picked for her excuse of a husband. But Mameh didn’t care. She kept plucking flowers, collecting them in a basket.
The coffin was covered by a golden sheet with silvery tassels, inscribed with the words of the Shahada. Kyai Jahro led the salawat chants as it left the surau, a few people following behind, mostly Margio’s friends who had been hunting boars on the mountain and gave no thought to their mud-smeared clothes. Margio was among them, right next to the coffin, scattering the flowers Mameh had picked along the way. Komar bin Syueb was to be buried at the Budi Darma public cemetery, accompanied by frangipani and champak, a furious little Marian waiting for him on the other side.
They left, and the house was quiet again, save for the slowly fading salawat chants. Mameh and Nuraeni were returned to silence. Nuraeni had come out of the kitchen, looking hungry and stiff, but there was no food, so she dragged herself past the living room, slouched onto the terrace and sat on the divan where Komar had been washed. She could see that most of her favorite flowers had vanished. Mameh followed her with her eyes, still carrying the image of her miserable mother from that terrible night, when Nuraeni was near dead on that trunk, lying beneath her husband, groaning like a cow with its throat cut. Suddenly a thought came. Mameh walked over to her, and spoke in a sharp voice.
“You should remarry, mother.”
Nuraeni came to her senses and slapped her daughter hard. Mameh’s cheek was hot and stinging.
Three
They moved to House 131 when Margio was seven, a trip he would later refer to as the Cow Family Joyride. It was a dramatic three-hour journey to a place Komar repeatedly called “our own house,” passing along coral-paved paths that turned into swamps for the water buffaloes, which the family had to cross like the Jews at the parting of the Red Sea, a story Ma Soma would occasionally relate in the surau after teaching the Koran.
The family rode in a cart pulled by a pair of fat cows, borrowed at no cost from the owner of the rice mill. A truck was beyond their means. The man sat upfront, one hand dandling the reins ineffectively, the other energetically brandishing a whip to which the cows paid no heed. Beside him sat Nuraeni with little Mameh on her lap. Her head covered by a dark green veil with a silver floral motif, she tried to reassure her children as they whined about their relocation. Margio sat on the rolled-up mattresses, trying to keep their pan and buckets from falling off, despairing when a bump in the road threw their belongings to the ground. Margio would then have to get down to pick them up while the cart trundled on. Then he’d run after the cart, throw in the fallen objects, and leap back up, either to sit or lie down to watch the birds above.
There was actually a shortcut in the form of a wide asphalt road that hugged the coastline, much used by buses and trucks, but Komar bin Syueb worried about how the cows would react to the traffic. Instead, he pursued a meandering route, crossing hills, cutting through rice fields, passing through villages with rows of houses shaded by clumps of bamboo, the women out drying rice in the yards and the men collecting firewood. In every village people would stop working to stare in awe at the joyride, causing Nuraeni to sink deeper behind her veil, although Komar bin Syueb was unabashed. He said his hellos, and whenever someone asked where they were moving to, he would unhesitatingly reveal their destination.
Margio couldn’t care less about the barefoot, half-naked children staring at them from the roadside. He was too busy reading his Mahabharata trading cards, chewing over which one was Arjuna and which Karna, and desperately trying to tell the twins Nakula and Sadewa apart. He was only disturbed when a poorly tethered teapot or bag of clothing sprang out as the wheels hit a fallen branch or a rock the size of someone’s head. He did resent having to leave his previous home, losing the friends he traded cards and marbles with, who flew kites and went hunting for crickets with him. There was no guarantee that in the new place he would find anyone half as good.
Their home had stood at the intersection of two coral-paved roads, where a market was held every Monday. Once a week, it would be teeming with vendors setting out their baskets at the roadside or on terraces or filling up empty lots. They sold coconuts, bananas, papayas and cassava, and some spread out beautiful clothes over wooden frames mounted on their bicycles. An old woman sold flowers in trays, and there were people leading cows, water buffaloes, and sheep they hoped to sell. There were chickens tied by their feet to ducks, and buckets of fish and eels. Women came here to shop, and small trucks were sometimes loaded up with produce, leaving almost nothing behind. If there was anyone outside on his terrace on days other than Monday, it was Komar bin Syueb the barber, set up with a large mirror leant against a table, a shaving kit, and a chair, with towels and cotton cutting capes hung from a few well-placed nails.
Home hadn’t been a real house. It was nothing more than a coconut godown. Beside it stood a grand mansion, with large glass windows and a floor of glistening ivory tiles, scrubbed clean by the housemaid every day. Around it were orchards of rose-apple, orange, and mango trees, and a yard where two trucks were often parked overnight. One day the owner of the mansion had built a bigger godown behind his cooking-oil factory, and then mysteriously abandoned his wife and children. The original godown was left vacant until Komar and Nuraeni settled there — Margio still crouched in his mother’s belly — renting it for the price of twelve heads on the shaving chair every month and with the obligation to look after the mansion together with the occupants.