Freeman's: Power

John Freeman, John Freeman

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780802146397
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Collections littéraires

The "fresh, provocative, engrossing" literary journal explores the nature of power in its various forms with new stories, essays, and poetry (BBC.com). Spouse to spouse, soldier to citizen, looker to gazed upon, power is never static: it is either demonstrated or deployed. This thought-provoking issue of the acclaimed literary anthology Freeman's explores who gets to say what matters in a time of social upheaval. Margaret Atwood posits it is time to update the gender of werewolf narratives. Aminatta Forna shatters the silences which supposedly ensured her safety as a woman of color walking in public spaces. The narrator of Lan Samantha Chang's short story finally wrenches control of the family's finances from her husband only to make a fatal mistake. Meanwhile the hero of Tahmima Anam's story achieves freedom by selling bull semen. Booker Prize winner Ben Okri watches power stripped from the residents of Grenfell Tower by ferocious neglect. Meanwhile, Barry Lopez remembers fourteen glimpses of power, from the moment he hitched a ride on a cargo plane in Korea to the glare he received from a bear traveling with her cubs in the woods, asking—do you intend me harm? Featuring work from brand new writers Nicole Im, Jaime Cortez, and Nimmi Gowrinathan, as well as from some of the world's best storytellers, including US poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, Franco-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani, and Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, Freeman's: Power escapes from the headlines of today and burrows into the heart of the issue.

O

EKA KURNIAWAN

TRANSLATED FROM THE INDONESIAN BY ANNIE TUCKER

The monkey snarled, baring its canines. The soldier got mad—cursed the monkey, took out his rifle, and almost blew its head off—but another soldier quickly calmed him down, saying, It’s just a monkey circus. The two soldiers were the only ones watching the monkey; the tamer had fallen asleep next to a utility pole, with flies buzzing around his open mouth, trying to land on one of his teeth. The monkey kept working, playing all different characters—after all, two soldiers were still two young men, who perhaps needed some entertainment before their commander boxed their ears or the enemy attacked, and who knows, they might kindly throw some small change into the old sardine can lying on the sidewalk.

O was the only monkey acting in the monkey circus at that intersection. Now she was pretending to be a housewife shopping at the traditional market. She was wearing a housedress, carrying a basket in one hand and a parasol in the other, imagining herself walking along the muddy aisles, getting catcalled by the market toughs, her butt getting pinched by the coolies, her chest—even though it was flat—getting felt up by the rice merchant. She often played this role, as had the monkeys before her, and both soldiers finally chuckled, wiping the sweat from their brows.

Then O played a soldier. She carried a rifle, walked stiffly—one, two, one, two, left, right, left, right. She held her chin high, imperious. Her fierce eyes stared straight ahead. She stopped in front of the two soldiers and then cocked her rifle, aiming it right at one of their heads.

Bang!

Hungover from his bender the night before, the tamer couldn’t keep himself awake. He collapsed near a traffic light in a spot kept cool by the shadow of a concrete overpass. As often happened, he left the monkey to act alone, entertaining the people of Jakarta who passed by.

Even though the tamer had fallen asleep, O tried to carry out her task. If there was a brokenhearted youth contemplating suicide, she would be his personal entertainer, chasing away all his troubles and despair so that he would leave her planning to live for more than a hundred years. If there was a hotheaded young convenience store cashier, furious because a customer had just insulted her, the monkey would be there, like a refreshing wind blowing across the crown of her head, and the girl would leave smiling or even laughing, showing off a row of beautiful teeth. And if there was an old man, chilled to the bone from loneliness and boredom, this monkey would be the blanket to warm him up.

She did whatever she could for the people, even though the sun beat down on her mercilessly. Even though the exhaust smoke from the dilapidated city bus belched in her face. Even though hunger whimpered in her stomach.

A narrow chain encircled her neck. A long rope stretching out from that chain was tied firmly to the tamer’s ankle. If she walked too far the rope would stop her, and she would know that she had to move back closer to him.

Just like human beings, of course sometimes she got tired. Seeing that her tamer was asleep, she climbed onto their wagon, trying to get into a comfortable position. She could barely keep her eyes open. The wind blowing through the side streets gently rocked her. Her eyelids began to droop. She felt the world slipping away. She was almost asleep when the tamer’s bellow startled her.

“Get up, dummy!” He brandished his whip. “Who said you could take a nap?”

And the whip struck the monkey’s back.

A little dog was watching them. People called him Pup, which of course is what most puppies are called. He watched the tamer once again lie facedown next to the traffic light, and soon after that fall asleep with his mouth wide open. His threadbare shirt was left hanging open too—but that was just because he had lost a few of the buttons—displaying his emaciated chest. When he approached, the puppy could smell the man’s rank sweat.

He waited a few moments until he was sure the tamer was sound asleep, and then came out of his hiding place in the unkempt bushes by the roadside. He was already an expert at crossing the street safely, going just when the traffic stopped in front of the red light.

“You have to escape from that crazy goon,” the puppy said to O, who no longer dared to rest.

One of the puppy’s ears was partially torn off, and his body was covered in sores and scars, but despite his appearance he always seemed quite pleased with himself. When explaining why he felt the right to be so conceited, he would say it was because he didn’t have anyone controlling him or telling him what to do: he was the master of his own fate. He ate whatever he could find without having to wait for a human hand to satisfy his hunger. He could sleep wherever he wanted, go wherever he wanted, piss wherever he wanted, and bark at whatever he wanted to bark at.

“There’s nothing worse than becoming a slave to a human. You have to escape, Monkey.”

But, just as she had in all their previous conversations, the monkey simply said, “No.”

There was nothing more patient than the sardine can that hung around with the monkey circus. It sat on the sidewalk, waiting for someone to toss some small change into its belly.

Long ago, it had been filled with sardines, preserved and floating in a wallow of tomato sauce. The sardine can had sat in a row with its brothers and sisters on a convenience store rack, shivering a bit from the air-conditioning. They didn’t talk to one another and were only occasionally knocked into each other, patiently waiting for someone to fall in love with one of them.

An old woman with a shopping basket carrying a plastic bag full of eggs and a tub of butter had stood before them. Just by looking at her, the sardine can could tell she lived alone. And then, it understood that her husband had died, was nothing but a pile of bones in the dirt, but even so she was still collecting his pension (luckily, he had worked as a city government employee). The woman was going to use some of that pension to take one of the sardine cans home.

When it got to her house and heard the old nag talk, the sardine can also realized that none of her kids could stand to dine with her. She took all the fish out of the can’s belly, and they were enough for her breakfast, lunch, and dinner. While she ate, the old woman carped on and on to herself. The leftovers were thrown to the neighbor’s cat, who was always waiting faithfully at the window. Even the sardine can, which had extraordinary patience, was overjoyed when she finally tossed it into the trash heap in the corner of the yard and it didn’t have to listen to her anymore.

But at least it had filled her stomach, helped her live another day. Now, as it sat by the roadside waiting for coins to be thrown into its belly, plagued by boredom, it often remembered the old woman. Slowly but surely, its own body was growing old too, gnawed at by the weather. Here and there, it was starting to rust. At some point, it would be useless, but before that day came, it simply hoped that whatever was done with it could make other creatures happy.

“Every coin in my belly will help fill your belly, O,” it promised the monkey.

The can itself never felt hungry, nor did it ever feel full.

The tamer’s name was Betalumur. He looked to be about twenty-seven years old, but maybe in fact he was younger. The hot sun and dust from the street and the smog from the traffic had aged him prematurely—and had also sapped his wits.

He opened his eyes and stretched. A young woman who worked for an insurance company was crossing nearby, and when she saw him stir, she shied away. No woman in her right mind would want to walk near him. Only the flies wanted to hum around his nose, occasionally landing in his hair.

Betalumur glanced over at the sardine can. That was always the first thing he did after waking up underneath the overpass. He crawled towards the can, picked it up it, and peered inside its belly.

“Damn it!” he swore, and dumped the contents of the sardine can onto a torn sheet of newspaper lying flat on the sidewalk. There was only one bill and a few coins, and Betalumur cursed again. He snatched up all the money, crammed it into the pocket of his jeans—moldy because he’d been wearing them for weeks without a wash—and then, still feeling annoyed, he stood up and kicked the sardine can.

The can went flying and groaned softly, but it didn’t cry or fight back. There’s nothing more patient than a rusty old sardine can belonging to a monkey circus.

O picked up the sardine can and stroked it. The can was her friend. She knew that people threw coins into the can and those coins could help buy her a morsel of food. She kissed the sardine can and comforted it, saying, “Someday, we will be happy. If I achieve my life goal, I promise I will make you happy.”

Just the other day she had found the sardine can full of coins and bills. Praise God, she murmured. Betalumur seemed happy and stayed that way throughout the afternoon, into early evening. He went to a small shop and exchanged the money for a few bottles of Bintang beer, coconut oil, lemonade, and some other things that only he knew about. He went back to where they were staying, poured everything out into a bucket, and mixed the concoction with his own bare hands.

Under the pale light of the moon and the never-ending hum of Jakarta, he drank the moonshine by himself, straight from the bucket. He did it while singing sad songs—his favorite was “At the Outskirts of the City” by Tommy J. Pisa—and imagining he had a girlfriend. When he was drunk, he felt he must be the saddest person in the entire city.

He liked drinking moonshine straight from the bucket, letting his nose and cheeks get wet, his tongue flicking all around to lick up the moisture around his mouth. After a few good chugs, he started to get some of the lyrics wrong and stumbled to the bathroom. O just looked on—she never dared approach her tamer when he was drunk. A pungent odor wafted out of the bathroom as Betalumur’s piss splashed into the toilet. The tamer came out without flushing and returned to his previous position, burying his head in the bucket once again.

After a few dozen songs and with just a fingerful of his beer mixture left in the bucket, Betalumur began to cry. O was sure her master was desperately sad, and she grew even more reluctant to approach him.

When the alcohol was finished, he licked the inside of the bucket. He stood with the bucket still covering his face, walked back to the bathroom, and urinated again. Betalumur fell asleep in front of the bathroom door, his head buried in the bucket, and he sang another Tommy J. Pisa song in his sleep. This time, the song was so sad that O wept too.

The place where they lived couldn’t really be called a place to live. It was actually the ruin of a three-story building that had burned in a huge riot that had swept across Jakarta. Three people had died there. The owner had thought that the fire and the deaths were bad luck, so he was reluctant to rebuild. He tried to sell it off, but nobody wanted to buy it, especially because he didn’t want to sell it too cheap. So it was just left abandoned as it was, scorched black all over, walls crumbling pitifully, its yard slowly filling up with weeds. The owner hired a guard to keep watch there, and because the guard was lazy, he figured he could rent out the place to people who wanted it, and they could do his job of watching over it, on top of however much they paid.

At first, a few prostitutes tried their luck there, with a 30 percent commission going to the security guard. They lasted only four days—their only customer was a man with burns all over his body who just wanted them to fan him, moaning that he couldn’t stand the heat. After that, a gang of motorbike thieves convinced the guard to let them stash their stolen motorbikes in the garage. Initially, the guard was too scared, but after being offered a 35 percent commission from the sale of every stolen bike, he agreed. That lasted only four months—they ran off after one of the thieves found a faceless woman sleeping next to him, and then another found her riding behind him on his motorbike. They took their bikes with them and the guard ended up without any commission at all.

Finally, a pair of old trash pickers arrived with a cookstove, a pan, a folded-up mattress, a clothesline, and a cartful of garbage. They had just been chased out of their camp on the riverbank by a bulldozer and a flood.

“Let me be perfectly frank with you, this building is haunted,” the guard said.

“No problem,” the wife said. “People are more terrifying than ghosts.”

“I’ll take a fifty percent commission on whatever you both can scavenge.”

This time the husband spoke: “Half a pack of cigarettes a day, or we’ll look elsewhere.”

Because ultimately, he needed them to keep an eye on the building and the ghosts that haunted it, the guard was forced to agree.

And that was how the dilapidated building became occupied. Then, a few months after that, a pair of new inhabitants arrived. They weren’t afraid of ghosts either, because one was dim-witted and the other couldn’t tell the difference between people and ghosts. They were a tamer and his animal, arriving with a monkey circus wagon—one bringing his madness, the other her dreams.

“Don’t waste all your money getting drunk,” said Ma Kungkung, the scavenger’s wife, when she saw Betalumur slurping the last few drops from the bucket. “You should save some of it for your family back in the village.”

“I don’t have any family back in the village,” Betalumur said. He didn’t even take his head out of the bucket to reply.

“Well then, at least you could save your money for your future family.” This time it was the scavenger who spoke. His name was Mat Angin.

“No woman will have me.”

“Of course no woman will ever marry you if you keep living like this! No one is willing to put up with you except a stupid monkey.”

Even though Ma Kungkung could come off as a bit harsh, they were a well-meaning couple, but Betalumur was too dumb to understand that they were being kind. It was as if their advice couldn’t even worm its way into his earhole. Not only did Betalumur use the money that he got from pedestrians to get drunk and turn into the saddest guy in the entire city, he often forgot to put aside even just a little to buy food for his monkey, despite the fact that she didn’t eat very much—two pieces of banana were plenty, with a few boiled peanuts on the side, and sometimes some rice cake or a piece of fried tofu. The couple often reminded him not to starve his monkey, because if the monkey starved to death then so would he. But Betalumur didn’t even understand something so obvious.

In any case, one night Betalumur had bought O a banana. He had finished one bucket of moonshine and wasn’t too drunk yet when he remembered the banana, took it out of his pocket, and gave it to the monkey. O had just peeled it when Betalumur snatched it back and cut it in half. He gave one half to O, the other half he shoved into his own mouth.

“I don’t understand why that monkey doesn’t run away,” Ma Kungkung said. “She’d get more to eat in hell.”

Someday they’ll understand, O said to herself. Just like the sardine can, she was trying to forget the difference between hungry and full. She was learning to be patient.

The bucket of beer he had drunk the night before left him quite haggard the whole day. Betalumur fell asleep right after arriving at the arch of the overpass. He woke up for a moment to pee and then collapsed again. He woke once more to whip the monkey, who he thought seemed to be slacking off, but not long after that he was again sprawled out, covered in a blanket of newspapers, snoring loudly.

The afternoon wind was what finally woke him, and he no longer felt like the saddest man in the city. He felt hungry, like he could eat anything. He had already checked to see what the sardine can had in its belly, and hadn’t found much small change there, which made him grumpy—so...