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and the adulterer, gave up on her after that. People started referring to her as the Widow, and when they saw her whispered, “She’s easy.”
    Maesa Dewi, the middle sister and the most beautiful, was cut from a different cloth. She was not as curvaceous as the eldest, and possessed a mysteriously tender manner. She comported herself with more respect for propriety, a surface quality that outlived her father by many years. That was just the way she was. At school, her reports praised her intelligence—an achievement her sisters never matched. Maesa Dewi finished school without a blemish on her record. His little remaining moral sense gave Anwar Sadat enough insight to make him love and admire the girl, who, unlike her elder sister, never shared his lascivious nature. Confident she was still a virgin, her father agreed to let her go to university. He then managed to persuade his wife to sell a plot of land to raise the money for her education, even though Kasia no longer believed any one of her three daughters was mentally sound. When the Sweet One unexpectedly returned after a year, she brought back not a diploma, but a newborn baby and a jobless boyfriend she later married. No one whispered that she was easy. She seemed to be faithful. Nonetheless, the stories of the eldest and middle daughers created a notion among those who thought of themselves as moral that all three of them were wicked and out of control. They bet that one day Maharani, the youngest sister, would bring home a newborn, no matter how much evidence they saw that this would be wholly out of character.
    At the pancake stall, after her sudden departure, he could not stop talking about Maharani. He spoke of the small items she had brought home. Maharani left her father a penknife, a large comb for her curly-haired mother, and a music box for her little nephew. Anwar Sadat retold his daughter’s jokes, even though some people had heard them straight from Maharani’s mouth throughout the holiday. Kasia tried to stop this exaggerated prattling, and the other two daughters didn’t conceal their burning jealousy, but it was Margio who finally put an end to it.
    Now Anwar Sadat lay dead, waiting for his grave to be dug, for the bier to be cleaned, and most of all for his youngest daughter to return and witness the ghastly wound before sobbing more powerfully than Kasia, Laila, and Maesa Dewi combined. Anyone looking at them would see Kasia more disheveled than usual, on her knees, biting one end of a cloth coiling onto her lap. Why she brought the cloth was a mystery. Next to her was Laila the Widow, trying in vain to console her mother, despite having recently lost consciousness herself, only coming to her senses when someone sprinkled water on her face. Most shaken of all was Maesa Dewi, the first to see Anwar Sadat’s nearly detached head. Still howling with grief, as if her belly were full of boiling water, she folded her arms around her baby, whose crying nearly matched her own.
    The other female mourners accompanied the four women’s grieving with softer, more subdued cries, like a choir that harmonized on different levels of grief. Their eyes were swollen and livid, visibly strained by sadness for the loss of this callous and unfaithful individual. And since Ma Soma, after wandering around the surau, had found the body, carried it from the crime scene, and then covered it with a batik cloth, none of these women had taken proper care of the dead man. Meanwhile Ma Soma fetched his bicycle and set off to find Kyai Jahro. He had found the cloth in the artist’s studio, the dyed patterns designed by the victim himself. That it would be used to wrap his corpse had never crossed Anwar Sadat’s mind. Soon Jahro and Sadrah arrived, and people looked at them with eyes that seemed to beg for either mercy or help. Kyai Jahro, the Koran teacher, was related to Anwar Sadat’s wife, and he immediately took control.
    He and