Jennifer Mackenzie is a poet and reviewer, focusing on work from and about the Asian region. She makes regular appearances at festivals and conferences, including the Ubud, Makassar, and Irrawaddy Festivals. Her most recent work is ‘Borobudur and Other Poems‘ (Lontar, Jakarta 2012)
Village Wedding
It was early November and a gale was blowing off the sea. The official day for heating to be turned on was some weeks away. The cold leapt into you like a demon. You paced from room to room in the apartment, drinking tea, diving under the doona, reading while pacing, or on the sofa wrapped in the felt-like fabric which contained the essentials for a passable electric blanket.
It was the wedding of someone we knew who worked in another company, and a bus was to take us two hours northeast to a village of cobbled footpaths, neat buildings and an abundant market garden. The bus was unheated and circled the city twice before all the guests to be transported were catered for. A brown winter landscape confronted us. Grey thatched buildings, bare trees decked in plastic bags, dry and stony river beds where water had long ceased to flow, where garbage clogged their suppurating banks.
At the village, we moved through a sequence of small rooms to where the bride and groom were displayed. If our friend was cold, she showed no sign. Her full beautiful face was as round as the moon, perfectly made-up, her white frock hooped out, half-covering the suited legs of her new spouse, who looked as good as he ever would.
The wedding feast in a nearby restaurant was as cold as Heilongjiang in winter, and by the time the fish was served, the guests appeared decidedly blue, despite the warming power of a dozen toasts. The mood, however, was warm and generous; the ladies of the village laughed, cackled and debated their way through the banquet, pressing an array of tasty dishes and a knock-out mao-tai on the guests. When the bus driver woke from his nap, he blared the horn and we boarded, waited half an hour while the return route was decided, and drove into the black night.
The gale continued. A week later, we saw our friend. The whitegoods we had given her just squeezed into her tiny apartment. For the first time in our friendship of several years, she was not smiling. Her voice hit a pitch which had our ears ringing. He is never home, she said. I come home from work, and I sit here. He never washes. He comes home at three or more in the morning, in a suffocating odour of smoke and beer. He yells out, cursing me. I used to spend my evening with friends, and we’d talk about the future.