Kitchen Curse

by Eka Kurniawan

  Unexpectedly, The Stone didn’t feel at all happy to see the killer die—it felt even more dirty and debased.

  “Woman,” it muttered at first and then it snarled, “just you wait, I am going to settle the score with you!”

  Like all the stones in this world, it was dogged and spiteful.

  MY LIPSTICK IS RED, DARLING

  A woman with lipstick blazing like a lantern light was walking towards the door of Bar Beranda. Just then, five pick-up trucks pulled up right in front of the gate. Officers jumped out and busted into the building to the sound of women screaming and customers running every which way—it used to be there was a little advance warning for this kind of thing, so that the ladies working in the bar had more time to hide or go home. Marni, the woman in the lipstick, was shocked when five officers approached her too, then arrested her and brought her to one of the waiting trucks.

  “But I’m just a housewife!” she protested, after her shock subsided.

  “Save that story for your husband,” one of the officers replied.

  What a terrible night, she thought. The officers were talking about local prostitution laws, treating her as if she were a hooker. Privately, she might admit to having been one once, but that night she was willing to swear blind she was nothing but an ordinary housewife—she didn’t have a child yet, that was true, but she had a husband. The officers would have none of it; every prostitute told the same story.

  They took her to the station with the girls from the bar and interrogated her all night long. She asked the others to help her convince the officers she wasn’t one of them, but it had been three years and the girls were all new. She didn’t see any of her old friends among them—she didn’t know anyone anymore, and they had no idea who she was or what she had been doing at the door to Beranda at half past one in the morning.

  Just before dawn, Marni couldn’t take it anymore and began to cry. She again begged to be set free, saying that her husband must have noticed she was gone and maybe at this very moment was out looking for her.

  An officer scoffed. “If that’s true, and you really have a husband, then he’ll be here to come get you sooner or later.”

  “But my husband doesn’t know I’m here!” she replied.

  “So you sell yourself and your husband doesn’t even know about it, huh?”

  That offended her deeply. She began to think that perhaps the night wasn’t just terrible but actually cursed. Luckily, later that morning a kind woman from social services contacted her husband, Rohmat Nurjaman. After speaking with him, she offered to give Marni a ride home. Gratefully, Marni washed her face, sprinkled on some powder that she had borrowed from a bar girl, and applied her lipstick. She would go home and see her husband.

  But back at the house, after the social services woman had left, Marni was faced with a situation that was no better than the jail. A suitcase stuffed full of all of her things was waiting on the sofa. Rohmat Nurjaman was standing in the doorway, and he looked at his wife’s face—glaring especially at the lipstick on her lips—as if she had shamelessly gone astray. He said curtly, “I think we should get a divorce.”

  Marni wanted to explain, but she didn’t know what to say. And Rohmat Nurjaman didn’t seem to want an explanation anyway.

  Rohmat Nurjaman had never liked to see his wife wearing lipstick but was afraid that if he forbade her and then explained his reasoning, it would hurt her feelings. Marni surely wouldn’t have liked it if he had said, “When you wear that lipstick it makes you look like a whore.”

  The problem was he had in fact met his wife in a dimly lit room a number of years ago—but that was the distant past, and of course they had both agreed to forget all about it. Those had been the days when Rohmat Nurjaman and three of his friends spent their evenings in the dangdut folk music bars scattered along Daan Mogot Street. That was where Rohmat Nurjaman had met Marni.

  At first, their relationship was nothing but the bizarre little meetings between a girl and her customer. As everyone knows, girls who work at places like that jealously guard their customers, who might get snatched away by the competition—that would cut into their extra earnings, which turn out to be much bigger than what the bar owners pay them. Not infrequently, a quarrel would erupt when one of the girls scoped out someone else’s customer, but usually that happened with new girls, or when someone’s regular client didn’t show up.

  To the customers, or at least to Rohmat Nurjaman, this worked in his favor. It meant that every time he went to the bar, he was guaranteed to get a girl—and you’d better believe it’s not pleasant to be at a place like that, with a crooner on a small stage and a beer on the table, without a girl by your side.

  And so that was how it was. Every time he came to Beranda, one of the neighborhood dangdut bars, Marni would keep Rohmat Nurjaman company. The times when he went there and they didn’t meet up could be counted on the fingers of one hand—once it had been her day off, once she hadn’t been feeling well, and once she’d gone home to Banyumas for a visit.

  This casual relationship slowly grew serious, and then it deepened into a constant craving. One listless afternoon, Rohmat Nurjaman found himself texting her: What are you up to? Don’t go with anyone else tonight, I’ll be coming.

  And then, one morning, Rohmat Nurjaman found a message from her on his cellphone: Are you coming later tonight or not? I miss you.

  Of course, with a relationship like that, it took quite a while for Rohmat Nurjaman to decide to take the girl away from Bar Beranda and propose. The couple took the trip back to Marni’s hometown in the boondocks of Banyumas and there, witnessed by her family and his three old friends, he married her. Then he brought her back to Jakarta to live in a tiny house on the outskirts of the city.

  It was a difficult marriage. In the early days, Rohmat Nurjaman often had nightmares where he was watching his wife being taken to bed by other men in the back rooms of Beranda. Because those dreams had once been a reality, he often woke in a jealous rage. Marni in turn was troubled by fantasies of her husband going to Beranda and sleeping with other girls. That had actually happened too, and they both knew it.

  This jealousy made them squabble, and only their love could salvage the situation. One day, in the seventeenth month of their marriage, they both vowed to forget the past and bury all their mistrust. After that, it was smooth sailing.

  The only problem was Marni’s lipstick.

  She had learned how to wear lipstick from Maridah, the oldest working girl at the bar. Maridah had found her in Cibolang, a town too small to be found on any map, somewhere in the backwoods of Banyumas. Maridah had brought lots of rural teenage girls to Jakarta. From the very beginning, they knew they would be working at a bar like Beranda, but Maridah reassured them, saying, “You don’t have to become a prostitute, all you have to do is serve the customers beer.”

  And that was true, but only for a short while. The customers didn’t just want their beers poured, they also wanted the girls to sit next to them while they drank. “Just keep them company,” Maridah said. So, Marni would sit with them, drink and snack with them, and sometimes chime in when they were talking. It was no big deal if the customers could keep their hands to themselves, but inevitably their fingers grew restless. At first, they just brushed the back of her hand, but soon those fingers went crawling all over the place.

  After a while, she learned she could earn more money this way. Then she realized that if she wanted to really cash in, she should sleep with them. After five months Marni was no longer a virgin, and her life kept going like that from night to night until she met Rohmat Nurjaman.

  In certain ways, Rohmat Nurjaman wasn’t so different from the other customers, who all wanted her in their arms—he was worse, because sometimes he paid less. But there were certain differences that Marni appreciated. Unlike the other customers, who just before five in the morning would hurry to get her upstairs to one of the available rooms where they both could take their clothes off, Rohmat Nurjaman
preferred to take her with him to a motel when the bar closed, and that meant Marni wouldn’t have to give the bar owner a cut of her earnings. But that wasn’t all. In the motel, they didn’t feel like they had to hurry—they could take their time, until noon the next day if they wanted. Then they could go out together, looking for a late breakfast. And as this became a habit, they gradually fell in love.

  Rohmat Nurjaman knew their little story by heart. But despite the fact that they had been married for three years, something still nagged at him: his wife’s red lipstick, the same lipstick he had seen her wear in the haze of Beranda. When they made their wedding vows, they promised to pursue a new life as husband and wife, not as a bar girl and her customer. And yet, Marni was still wearing the same old lipstick in the same old way. Rohmat Nurjaman wanted to forbid it, but he worried that if he did, it would just remind them of their times at the bar. But morning after morning, night after night, that lipstick bothered him more and more, until finally Rohmat Nurjaman began to wonder what his wife was doing when he went off to work.

  Rohmat Nurjaman was suspicious, but he could never prove anything. He had come home without warning a few times but always found his wife there, waiting for him. Until one morning a woman from social services called, and he felt he finally had the proof he needed to punish her, harshly and with one curt sentence:

  “I think we should get a divorce.”

  There was no place for Marni to go except Beranda. The owner remembered her and let her to come back to work.

  But she was consumed by her memories of Rohmat Nurjaman. When she was with a customer, she would remember how they used to talk about all kinds of things. She hadn’t understood most of it, but she was happy to listen, and Rohmat Nurjaman never seemed to mind. Once, he had said to her, “Lots of women out there, including some of my ex-girlfriends, love to talk, but they don’t actually understand anything.”

  She had taken that as a compliment. But the happiest moment in her whole life was the night Rohmat Nurjaman said:

  “I think I love you.”

  After that, she would put on makeup whenever she knew she was going to see Rohmat Nurjaman. She felt like she didn’t have much to give her lover except a sincere smile, embellished with bright lipstick.

  But after they had been married for three years, Marni found that her husband had changed. Rohmat Nurjaman often stayed out late and he no longer made love to her with the same unruly passion. Maybe I’m not pretty anymore, she thought. Maybe it’s because we haven’t had a child, she said to herself. Or, maybe her husband had gone back to Beranda and found a sweeter girl there. Maybe that girl was only fourteen years old and wore one of those glossy lipsticks. Marni’s face grew hot, but she tried to chase away suspicion. Even so, one night when her husband hadn’t appeared and it was past midnight and all the questions spinning round her head remained unresolved, she decided to go out.

  Marni slid the lipstick across her lips, believing that would bring Rohmat Nurjaman back to her. She hailed a taxi and asked to be taken to Beranda. And there, just inside the gate, in the name of local prostitution laws, five officers had arrested her. Honestly, in retrospect, she had begun to think that maybe this had been punishment for her unfair suspicion that her husband had gone to Beranda to sleep with other women. In her mind, that awful night had started with those awful thoughts, and she truly regretted them.

  Now, back working at the bar, Marni was still certain that one night her husband would appear, and they would start over from the beginning. While she waited, she stuck to her promise, one that she had never made aloud: she didn’t wear any lipstick. A twelve-year-old girl who had just started working there asked why she didn’t, and Marni replied:

  “My lipstick is red, darling, and it’s only for my husband.”

  And indeed, ever since she had fallen in love with Rohmat Nurjaman, and for the whole time they were married, she had never colored her lips scarlet for any other man.

  PETER PAN

  The Princess still remembers how she met that infuriating person—the discourteous young man who kept her waiting. And she was willing to wait forever, even if it meant she ended up an old maid.

  It was a few years before his most subversive action, and he was just sitting there on the stairs with a downcast face. The Princess approached and tried to cheer him up, because she couldn’t bear to see such a crumpled frown. The man—who had already decided the tenth of April was to be their wedding day—looked up and said, “You’re so pretty.” He was really quite impertinent, but then his true complaint came out, even though it seemed painful to discuss: a certain book by Immanuel Kant had been eaten by a bookworm or a mouse, its pages falling out, whole sections of certain chapters lost, and paper left in tatters all over our campus library. He said it wasn’t worth the trouble stealing books like that, and that was what was making him so miserable.

  They were both new students at the time, and the Princess soon got to know him better. He was typically as unhappy as on that first occasion, because he found life maddening, and he was indeed a book thief. He confessed to stealing books anywhere he could, from the biggest libraries and chain bookstores to little secondhand shops in every far-flung corner of the city. He said that stealing books was a despicable thing, and he did it hoping to be caught and consequently reassured that the government loved books and hated book thieves. But clearly he was nothing but a miserable wretch—he had never been arrested, even though he had stolen thousands of volumes.

  “Against such a rotten government,” he declared once—the Princess would never forget the day, because immediately after Peter Pan professed his love for her—“we must launch a guerilla war.” And it wasn’t just hot air, he really would have done it if he hadn’t ended up carrying out his most subversive action first, during the year everything boiled over. He didn’t have the chance to begin his guerilla war, because it seemed like everything was already coming to an end.

  In his own way, though, he tried to realize his vision. He plastered his dorm room with Che Guevara posters and obsessively contacted other guerilla fighters around the globe. He scoured the thousands of stolen books piled high in his room, just looking for a good excuse to start his war. The Princess told him people were desperately poor everywhere while officials lived in luxury. International debt had driven the state to the brink of bankruptcy. The dictator had been in power far too long and needed to make way for someone who might have an actual talent for leading the country. According to the Princess, that was reason enough to start a war, but Peter Pan demurred. He said everyone knows those are good reasons, and yet somehow no one ever starts a war in response.

  “It’s better if we go to war for a more logical cause,” he said. “Specifically, for the government’s failure to capture me, the Library Book Thief.”

  And, so, he moved forward with his plan. He initiated his first political action by demonstrating in front of the campus library, along with ten of his friends, who, according to him, were the front line of his rebel forces. And that gang of kids—looking more like a youth soccer team than would-be guerillas—starting yelling their slogans at nine o’clock sharp, when the library was at its most crowded. They also sang, and they concluded with their revolutionary demand: give those books the humanitarian treatment they deserve! In the end, the demonstration wasn’t popular—the newspaper didn’t cover it, and it elicited nothing but scorn from fellow students. This obsessive man didn’t expand his cadre, and he actually lost all ten of his ten potential fighters. That was quite a bitter memory for him.

  But from the fierce look in his eye, people could see he was not a youth who gave up easily. And, what’s more, he actually had an extraordinary talent for gathering people together, for organizing and radicalizing them—especially through his poetry. This kid—who in all honesty had no talent as a poet—gained many faithful followers at his readings. His poetry, which had a whiff of romanticism about it, hypnotized many who read or heard it. The Princess still remembered
how, not long before that subversive day, the President himself had taken the time to make a surprise visit to the city and meet with this guy in his dorm room, accompanied by just one single bodyguard. The Princess was there at that time—she and Peter Pan had just been enjoying a little make-out session—and the President said,

  “Mr. Poet, I hate your poetry. It pierces me right to my heart, it wounds me. Stop reading it and, above all, writing it.”

  After that, the President disappeared. Who knows how he vanished so quickly? Half an hour later he reappeared on a live TV broadcast of a cabinet meeting, brimming with jokes that weren’t funny. Meanwhile, the Princess’s lover just laughed, smoked three whole packs of cigarettes in an attempt to relax, and told the Princess that the President’s words to him were akin to a declaration of war and he would heed them.

  At that point, he had already acquired the name Peter Pan. By and large, the moniker seemed apt. It had been years and years and he still hadn’t graduated college. By the time the Princess had been awarded her doctorate, he hadn’t even earned his bachelor’s. People accused him of not wanting to grow up, wanting to stay a student forever, wanting to be a perpetual teenager. Peter Pan didn’t really mind, because he liked the idea of adopting the name of a fictional character. Plus, he figured accepting the name didn’t have to mean accepting the rationale behind it—he knew the delay arose from his revolutionary activities, which had taken up more and more of his time, until he could no longer spare a moment to visit the lecture hall.

  One day, not long after his first failed demonstration, he met a guy who sold used imported books and had opened a small bookstore in the tourist district. Most of his customers were white tourists who came to buy novels or guidebooks or occasionally sell or barter their own volumes. Sometimes a student would come in, but usually just to look and hardly ever to buy, because students rarely had any money. Peter Pan went there with the Princess after it was recommended by a friend—who actually held a grudge against the bookseller and was hoping that Peter Pan’s stealing would bankrupt the guy. But something quite different occurred. Peter Pan became rather close with the shop owner, since they both loved to read.