Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan Page A

unbelievably stiff. This had happened before, healing only after a long series of massages from a shaman who rubbed his neck and toes with onion juice. This time Mameh didn’t know whether Komar would ever open his mouth again. Three shamans tried unsuccessfully to knead his jaws back to life. It was an all-too-obvious omen of his approaching death. Komar suffered greatly, rolled about on his mattress, smacked his cheeks, clawed at his mouth, adding his own tortures to the pains that wracked his body. He couldn’t eat unless the food was turned to pulp. Mameh had to feed him vegetable gruel, which Komar would push in with his index finger, making himself cough, slobbering on his mattress. Soon his hands couldn’t move either, as if the nerves had been cut. Mameh had to feed him sweet tea, as there wasn’t much that Komar could eat. Within a few days his shrunken frame resembled a quivering house lizard.
    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