Beauty Is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan, Annie Tucker Page A

about America’s victory and Germany’s defeat was spreading by word of mouth throughout the camp. It comforted them a bit, no matter how elusive that hope might be, but the days continued to follow one another, as did the weeks, and the months. Finally the second Christmas arrived, and Dewi Ayu celebrated it that year just to entertain Gerda. She broke a branch from a banyan tree growing in front of the camp’s gate, decorated it with paper ornaments, sang Jingle Bells , and felt very happy to have Ola and Gerda, for a moment forgetting how miserable it was to spend all one’s days in a prison camp.
    They started to discuss their plans for when the war was over, however it might end, once they were finally free. Dewi Ayu said she would return to her home, set everything in order, and live just as she had before. Maybe not truly just like before, because maybe the natives would form their own republic and resist the old ways, but she would return to her home and live there. She would be pleased if Ola and Gerda could join her. But Ola thought rationally that maybe the Japanese had already stolen the house and sold it to someone. Or maybe the natives had, and now it belonged to them.
    “We can buy it back,” said Dewi Ayu. She told them the secret of the treasure she had left there, even though she didn’t say exactly where it was stored. “Even if the Japanese have already bombed it and all that’s left is a heap of tiles, we can buy it back.” Gerda was really happy to hear such a tale. She was now eleven years old, but she had wasted away and her body hadn’t developed at all in the past two years. But everyone was in the same boat, shrunken and skinny. Dewi Ayu was sure she had lost ten or fifteen kilos of flesh off her body.
    “And that’s enough for fifty bowls of soup,” she said with a small laugh.
    The real insanity began after almost two full years in the camp, when the Japanese soldiers began making a list of all the women who were between the ages of seventeen and twenty-eight. Dewi Ayu was already eighteen, almost nineteen. Ola was seventeen. At first they thought the list meant they’d be assigned to harder forced labor, until one morning a few military trucks arrived across the river and a handful of army officers boarded the ferry heading for Bloedenkamp. They had already come a number of times, for inspections or to give new rules and orders, and this time the order was to round up all those women between the ages of seventeen and twenty-eight years old. Chaos immediately descended, as the women realized that they were about to be separated from their friends and family.
    A number of young girls, including Ola, tried to make themselves up to look like old women, which of course didn’t work. Others ran, hiding in the toilets or climbing up onto the rooftop and crouching there, but the Japanese soldiers found them all. An old woman, who feared she was about to lose her daughter, tried to protest and said if the young women were to be taken then all should be taken. In response, two soldiers beat her black and blue.
    Finally all the young women stood in rows in the middle of the yard, shaking in fear while their mothers huddled together in the distance. Dewi Ayu saw Gerda clinging to a post all alone gulping back tears, and beside her Ola didn’t dare look anywhere except down toward her ugly tattered shoes. She heard a number of the girls crying and murmuring prayers. Then the officers came, examining them one by one. They stood in front of each woman, laughing quietly while scrutinizing her body, from the top of her head down to the tips of her toes. Sometimes, to get a better look at her face, they’d lift up her chin with their fingertips.
    Then there was a selection. A number of women were separated off to the side and every time a young girl was released, it was like an arrow shooting from the group of girls to the group of mothers. Now only half of them were still standing in the middle