The Wandering

by Intan Paramaditha

  Your mind is made up. The mirror can show you who you are and, perhaps, your New York life before you found yourself in a taxi on the way to the airport. What sort of life did you lead? Maybe, if you remember it and retrieve your history, you’ll be able to get along better in this city. Without history, no one can take a step anywhere.

  So, tonight you count.

  Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two … Your apartment darkens for an instant. You hold your breath. Has the mirror game begun? You try to purge negative thoughts. Maybe, as in Indonesia, people here also have to deal with random blackouts. No need to panic or contact the doorman. You walk, feeling your way along the wall with your hand, moving towards your bedside table, where you grope for the flashlight stored in the second drawer. You remember having placed it there, just in case. Flicking on the torch, you try to find your phone, but something tempts you to glance at the mirror. You’re afraid, but you also desire to know. You point the torch at the mirror. A face is reflected within it.

  You’re startled but then realise it’s only your own reflection. Your black sweater renders your curves almost invisible.

  You keep shining the torch at the mirror. Nothing. Instead, you become aware that the beam of light makes you look radiant. You’ve never seen yourself so beautiful. You smile, admiring the image that follows your movements, and remember the letter from Devil.

  Maybe the mirror is telling you who you really are. You are beautiful, you are content, you don’t need red shoes to run away.

  Then you hear a soft whisper,

  They don’t know you’re a murderer.

  You feel a chill on your neck. There’s no one behind you. The whisper has come from the mirror. You move closer. And then it dawns on you: either your reflection is too beautiful or you’re looking at another woman.

  You retreat slowly. You want to cry out, but your throat is dry. The woman in the mirror is still wearing your warm, black sweater, but she stays in place, no longer following your movements. Her face carries a smile, but yours has vanished. Now her eyes gaze straight at you:

  ‘You. Murderer.’

  And she starts to tell a story.

  Continue to page 179.

  You lay yourself down on the hotel bed. The sweater you’ve worn all day still clings to your body. This room is so quiet. You stare at the white ceiling, clean and sterile, and then recall your room in the boarding house back in Jakarta with its faded cream paint and the sonic assault from outside: the roar of motorbikes, the hubbub of food vendors, recitations of the Quran before Friday prayers. The trap lies not in alienation, but in the crowd. You feel as if in Juwita Padmadivya you’ve discovered yourself and all your hatred for the hustle and bustle of the city. What happened to her? Did she really kill herself? What was the point of her death? Is she someone who has been defeated or a martyr?

  So many questions come to mind, and you want to talk to Yvette, who has curated Juwita’s story. You’ve viewed Juwita through her lens.

  Yvette’s cell phone number is tucked away in your bag, but the awkward moment in front of the hotel makes you hesitate to call. The clock says eleven. You want to admit your regret in not inviting her up to your room. Had Yvette expected it? Are you embarrassed for being impolite, or ashamed to admit your own hopes?

  What do you hope for?

  You head to the bathroom and wash your face with warm water. Call her. Don’t call her. Call her. No, maybe you’re not supposed to. There’s a difference between calling her tonight and calling tomorrow.

  If you want to call her tonight and express regret for not inviting her to your room, proceed to page 157.

  If you wait until tomorrow, when Yvette arrives at her office, to talk about what she has written about Juwita Padmadivya, turn to the next page.

  The next day you call Yvette, but she doesn’t pick up the phone. Then you call her office, but the receptionist says Yvette hasn’t been seen all morning. You keep trying to reach her until the afternoon, with no luck. After two days, you decide to stop by where Yvette works, a small office on the second floor of an old building. The office appears to consist of just a few staff members. The receptionist whom you spoke to sits by the door. Again she tells you that there’s been no word from Yvette. You’re desperate. As you turn to leave, a woman stops you. Her name is Kristina, a good friend of Yvette.

  ‘She left for Indonesia last night.’

  You’re stunned. Yvette had said nothing to you about that.

  ‘May I see Juwita Padmadivya’s documentary?’

  Kristina looks taken aback by your question. She may be surprised that Yvette shared the story of the video with you.

  ‘Nobody has ever seen the video except Yvette.’ A little hesitant, Kristina continues, ‘And as far as Juwita goes, I’m not sure Yvette will find her. I think it’s just a game. Juwita’s name doesn’t even show up on the Internet.’

  You feel you’ve arrived at a dead end. There’s nothing else you can do. You say goodbye to Kristina, but as though suddenly remembering something, she asks you to wait a moment. She goes into her office and returns with a package.

  ‘Yvette left this. She said it’s a present for you.’

  Confused, you accept it with a thank you and hurry out of the office. There’s no point in lingering. You go back to your hotel and sit down at the guest computer in the lobby. You type Juwita’s name into Google. No results.

  Es wurden keine mit Ihrer Suchenfrage – ‘juwita padmadivya’ – übereinstimmenden Dokumente gefunden.

  Of course not. Kristina already told you so.

  In your room, you unwrap the gift from Yvette. A video camera. No card, no explanation. You cradle the camera for a long time. Yvette is avoiding you. You’ve received a gift again, but you feel like you’ve been dumped.

  Berlin begins to seem unfriendly. Suddenly you feel lonely. You still don’t know what you’d hoped for from your encounter with Yvette. The meetings on your journey linger for a moment before they slip away and disappear, and soon you find yourself scavenging the memories of what’s left, like a loser. Just the way it has always been. Nothing strange about that.

  Maybe one day you’ll meet her again. But by then you’ll probably have become another person.

  All right, let’s continue our journey. You have to get out of here, but where? Amsterdam, maybe. Or Zagreb.

  If you choose Amsterdam, turn to page 204.

  If you choose Zagreb, turn to page 214.

  After thinking it over and over and over again, you finally pick up the hotel phone. You tap the table impatiently as you listen to it ring.

  ‘Yvette?’

  ‘Hey.’

  Her voice is a little husky.

  ‘Is Juwita still alive?’

  ‘I don’t know. I keep looking for her.’

  Her voice sounds as it did when you went your separate ways in front of the hotel, friendly and formal, like a telephone operator.

  ‘I’m sorry for not inviting you upstairs.’

  ‘You regret it?’

  You sigh, then say quietly, ‘Yes, I regret it.’

  ‘Do you know what will happen if you invite me?’

  You fall into a lengthy silence. You don’t know how to answer. Then she laughs, warmly. She doesn’t say anything, just gives a long laugh, and you look at your face in the mirror on the hotel wardrobe. There’s a glimmer of a smile there.

  ‘You should come over,’ you say.

  ‘It’s late, it’s already midnight. And I’m not eighteen any more.’

  But that night you talk on the phone for ages. You don’t know how long it’s been since you’ve done that – maybe high school or college, when everyone had all the time in the world and didn’t know what to do with it. You feel like a teenager.

  At one in the morning, you turn off the lights, but you’re still listening to Yvette’s voice on the phone. You ask her if she’s ever wanted to kill herself.

  ‘I’ve been through that. I chose to liv
e.’

  You wonder if this is what attracts Yvette to Juwita Padmadivya.

  ‘I desperately wanted to die, but I was still a kid,’ Yvette said. ‘I was only nineteen.’

  ‘A young woman, you mean.’

  ‘Kid, young woman. As far as I’m concerned the difference is small. Maybe it’s just sex that separates them. Sex makes you a young woman. But in other ways, you’re still a kid.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When you’re young, you know only one kind of power: the power your oppressors hold. Power belongs to the state, schools, parents. They’re all the same. In those days I thought about suicide. Suicide is the sincerest protest you can make against authority. At least that’s what I used to think, but I made it through that phase. As a kid, or, if you prefer, as a youth, all you want is to be in a position to resist power. Once you’re an adult, you desire power yourself, even when it presents itself in shards, or mere specks of stardust. Even the rebels you admire as a kid possess it. You crave power because there’s nothing you can do without it.’

  Silence. The phone receiver begins to feel hot, and you move it from your right ear to your left. You keep listening to Yvette. You feel like you’re asking a lot of things, and that years later you’ll forget whether the questions genuinely mattered or you were just buying time. But you’ll always remember her voice, so soft and crisp, at the conversation’s end.

  ‘Time to sleep. Sweet dreams.’

  Speculation about Juwita dominates your conversation in the following days. You and Yvette write out a few possibilities:

  1) Juwita really committed suicide. She’d been planning it for a long time and the film was just a pretext to carry out her mission. But why wasn’t her death reported in the paper? It may have been reported, you say, but the police referred to her only as ‘J.P.’. If so, we should start searching archives for the deaths of people with the initials ‘J.P.’.

  2) Juwita didn’t commit suicide. Isn’t it true that after the camera pans over the white pills and the sheet of paper with the mysterious message we don’t see anything else? Maybe she’s leading an ordinary life now. She married a rich guy, and is living comfortably as a housewife who gets to travel the world. ‘Hmm, good for her,’ Yvette says. ‘But that’s such a boring ending.’

  3) Juwita Padmadivya is a fictional character. She’s the invention of a woman who made a movie about her and played Juwita’s role. Maybe that person is also called Juwita, but this Juwita made a film about Juwita Prime (like A in A' – remember that lesson in school?). At this point you say: I didn’t like maths. How should we refer to Juwita the Director as opposed to Juwita the Character? If so, we have to add more possibilities to the list:

  4) Juwita is a film made by a director other than Juwita.

  You discuss scenarios in detail. If Juwita’s film was directed by someone else, who was it? Nadya Shafik? Yvette protests: Why not Retno Wahyuni? She’s dead, you say. Even if she’s not, Retno ​​was hardly brave enough to make a film like that.

  Tsk tsk. Yvette shakes her head. Don’t be fooled by appearances. Maybe, in spite of her obedience to order and determination to maintain the concept of ​​a home, Retno found Juwita inside herself.

  One day, in the umpteenth cafe you visit with Yvette, you ask, ‘Why are you so obsessed with Juwita?’

  ‘But she fascinates you too, doesn’t she?’ Yvette says. ‘Maybe it’s because she returned home only to leave again.’

  Juwita the Wanderer. Maybe there’s a little Juwita in all of us.

  Sitting at the hotel computer, you delete several emails from your sister. You always read the personal letters, though you rarely reply. But she also likes to share random information unprompted. Often these messages are forwards: ‘FWD: The Beauty Benefits of Cucumbers’; ‘FWD: Best International Islamic Primary Schools’; ‘FWD: Beware of Formula Milk Campaign in Hospital A’. Your sister follows several mailing lists, from those for alumni of the various schools she’s attended to organisations that interest her – parent–teacher associations, Quranic recitation groups, Muslimah fashion business networks, breastfeeding advocacy. You don’t know if she’s added your email address to a group, but you’re always getting propaganda – Islamic or not – that you never open. Your sister probably realises that you immediately delete her chain emails, but that doesn’t slow her down.

  You casually delete the string of emails, but one subject line stops you short: ‘FWD: Threat of LGBT Stalkers in Schools’.

  A mother at school X reported that her son was reading a book with no educational value whatsoever. It tells the story of a child raised by two fathers. According to the book, families come in all shapes and sizes and puts forth the idea that parents do not have to be a father–mother pair alone – gay couples can be parents. School X must take responsibility for spreading this immoral material. What will happen to our children if they are infected with the LGBT lifestyle? Of course, we have heard of sodomy cases that occurred in the bathroom at school Y in broad daylight. LGBT predators target schools. This news is thoroughly unsettling. Safeguard the future of our children beginning now.

  You want to write to your sister and challenge her outright: what do you mean by sending me an email like this?

  But you’re too tired. You point the cursor towards the trash. Click. The email has found a more appropriate home.

  The wall that divides you and your sister is too high to scale. You don’t know what would happen if you returned home. Maybe you’d be turned into stone, like Malin Kundang.

  You wonder how Malin Kundang is doing now.

  If you want to take another look at the story of the faithless child, go to page 23, and then return here.

  Seven in the evening. The elevator doors open and you walk towards Yvette, who has been waiting for you in the lobby. From a distance you see that she’s sitting on the couch and reading a book. She wears her usual red boots. You glance at the mirror and smile seeing yourself, dressed in black, looking slightly different tonight. More beautiful, because you’re wearing your red shoes. You stop in front of Yvette. She lifts her gaze and puts away her book. She surveys you from head to toe, then fixes her eyes on the shimmering red shoes.

  ‘You also –’ she stammers. ‘Et tu, Brute?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You look gorgeous. Your shoes too. They’re like Dorothy’s.’

  ‘Dorothy’s?’

  ‘You know The Wizard of Oz, don’t you?’

  You feel as if you do know. But if you need to refresh your memory, go to page 21. Then come right back.

  It seems to you that you’ve been in this situation before. You pause to recall The Wizard of Oz and its familiar images: a bored Kansas girl in a black-and-white village. Later adventures full of dazzling colour, and hand-me-down ruby slippers from a dead witch. But where have you experienced this? Is this déjà vu?

  ‘Don’t go back to Kansas,’ Yvette whispers.

  ‘I want to keep travelling and travelling, without ever going back home.’

  You leave the hotel and walk towards a train station. She takes you to a bar. ‘There’s a band from New York,’ she says. ‘Do you know the Rat King?’

  You shake your head. Should you? What’s so special about a band from New York?

  ‘Nothing.’ Yvette laughs. ‘I’m just curious. And maybe also because you’ve come from New York. How many rats are in New York? I hear there are lots.’

  City of rats. That’s not your image of New York at all. But you don’t know what it’s like to live there since the red shoes dropped you into the middle of an adventure, and you skipped New York to travel elsewhere. You wonder what you’d have experienced if you had called off your trip to Berlin. Would your adventures have been more thrilling? But your choice has left you here, walking the city in red shoes, with someone who has her own tale to tell. You don’t regret it.

  It appears that quite a few people are keen to see the Rat King from New York. You begin to wonder if
the band is well known. You and Yvette queue for a long time before entering the bar. Yvette says the place is always full on weekends, with or without the Rat King.

  You still find the name ridiculous.

  ‘But you know about the Rat King, right? Rattenkönig.’

  ‘Is there actually a Rat King?’

  The bouncer gestures for you and Yvette to go in. Yvette takes you by the hand and says a little hastily, ‘Rattenkönig – oh, you don’t want to see one.’

  Yvette buys you a beer. In the darkness, you can make out that the band has set up already. The stage lights soon come up, showcasing the Rat King, a band from New York that covers American songs from the fifties and sixties. Their originals also supposedly draw on older rock and roll. The vocalist, a little man with a moustache, wears white bell-bottoms and a T-shirt that reads ‘Little Johnny’.

  ‘Don’t you just want to give the singer a squeeze?’ Yvette whispers.

  You giggle. Little Johnny, stocky and squat, reminds you of a garden gnome.

  ‘Good evening, Berlin!’

  Drumbeats, accompanied by the audience’s applause, open the first song. The guitar kicks in, and Little Johnny starts prancing around. The Rat King performs Roy Orbison’s ‘Pretty Woman’. Little Johnny shakes his hips, does the twist, and the crowd claps. It turns out that he doesn’t resemble a garden gnome. His movements are too lively, like those of a rodent. You remember what Yvette has just said about the Rat King.

  ‘Is that what the Rat King is like?’

  Yvette shakes her head. ‘The Rat King is scary,’ she says. ‘Little Johnny is sexy.’

  After ‘Pretty Woman’, the band perform one of their own numbers. You don’t learn the title, but the music gets you moving.