Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan Page B

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.
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