Kitchen Curse Read online

  KITCHEN CURSE

  KITCHEN CURSE

  Stories

  Eka Kurniawan

  Translated by

  Annie Tucker and Others

  This collection first published by Verso 2019

  Translation, unless otherwise noted © Annie Tucker 2019

  Translation “Caronang” © Tiffany Tsao 2019

  Translation “Making an Elephant Happy © Maggie Tiojakin 2019

  Translation “The Otter Amulet,” “Graffiti in the Toilet”

  © Benedict Anderson 2019

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors and publishers of LONTAR, in which “Caronang” first appeared in English translation, and to the White Review, in which “Dimples” first appeared in English translation. Indonesian originals were originally published in Corat-coret di Toilet (Yayasan Aksara Indonesia, 2000; reissued by Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2014); Gelak Sedih (Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2005); Cinta Tak Ada Mati (Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2005, reissued 2018) and Perempuan Patah Hati yang Kembali Menemukan Cinta Melalui Mimpi (Bentang Pustaka, 2015).

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Verso

  UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

  US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

  versobooks.com

  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-715-4

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-716-1 (UK EBK)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-717-8 (UK EBK)

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Typeset in Electra by MJ&N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd., Croydon CR0 4YY

  CONTENTS

  1. Graffiti in the Toilet

  2. Don’t Piss Here

  3. Easing into a Long Sleep

  4. Caronang

  5. Rotten Stench

  6. No Crazies in this Town

  7. Auntie

  8. Pigpen

  9. The Otter Amulet

  10. Dimples

  11. The Stone’s Story

  12. My Lipstick Is Red, Darling

  13. Peter Pan

  14. Making an Elephant Happy

  15. Night Watchman

  16. Kitchen Curse

  GRAFFITI IN THE TOILET

  “Pilate answered, What I have written I have written.”

  John 19:22

  He pushed open the door of the toilet, enjoying the smell of still-fresh paint. Then he closed the door, locked it from the inside, and, a few moments later, standing in front of the toilet-hole, undid his pants. With a hiss, the liquid sprayed into the hole, giving off an ammoniac scent. The kid smacked his lips, grinning with satisfaction. When he was done, he shook what he was holding and bathed it with a few splashes from the dipper, tossing the rest of the water down into the hole. Then he buttoned up.

  The kid, twenty years old, dressed punk-style, stood there admiring the unspotted walls of the toilet. They had just been painted a tempting cream. He gave a little laugh, revealing four bad teeth, then groped in his backpack till he found what he was looking for: a felt-tip marker. With a triumphant grin, he wrote on the wall: “Asshole! Reformasi’s a total flop, Comrade! Let’s complete the democratic revolution!”

  At seven in the morning, before the students had begun to make a racket in their classrooms, a kid had already attacked the toilet, located precisely beneath the staircase. There was something wrong with his urinary system, maybe because he drank too much coffee or took too little exercise, so he had to go all the time. After finishing his boring morning ritual, he stared at the graffiti on the shimmering wall with mildly sadistic pleasure. With a pen, he scrawled an arrow aimed away from the first sentence. But the tip of the pen was too sharp to make the arrow very visible. Putting one hand into his bag, he fumbled around in search of something that would make the lines thicker. But he found nothing and had to make do with his pen. Someone banged on the toilet door, so he faked a groan, to let whoever it was know the toilet was occupied and the occupant didn’t want to be disturbed. Feeling fairly sure whoever it was would be patient, he retorted, in small but still legible letters, “Blabbermouth! Provocateur! The revolution was already dead in your grandpa’s time. Our nation loves peace, and a lunchtime nap. Let’s hunt up a wild girl and find the revolution in bed!”

  The next to show up was a tomboy with a hitchhiker’s knapsack. She was wearing very tight jeans and an oversize singlet. Sometimes the neckline would drop down, once or twice showing what was bra-less inside. She hated peeing, because it was such a hassle to undo her pants. She had once tried peeing standing up, mimicking the bad habit of boys, for convenience’s sake. The result wasn’t at all satisfactory—the annoying liquid sprayed out all over, and some of it dribbled onto her pants. But in this world everyone is condemned to pee, so she squatted down on that toilet, even though it was a hassle.

  As had happened with most of the toilet’s visitors, her eye was caught by the scribbles on the wall, and she felt tempted to add her own commentary. She fumbled for a felt-tip in her bag, but all she found was her lipstick. Before adding to the graffiti, she paused for a moment’s reflection. She searched in her bag for a small mirror but with no luck. She didn’t normally carry a mirror, even though she always had the lipstick. It didn’t matter. She applied the lipstick to her lips and then kissed the toilet wall. She smiled as she stared at the print from her lips, but then started to feel her message wasn’t clear enough. So, she wrote in lipstick, “You gotta be a henchman of the military! New Order running-dog! Feudalist, bourgeois, reactionary moron! Blabbermouth full of bullshit, get ready for the revolution!”

  For the next two days, nothing much happened in the toilet, until another kid stopped by. He took down his pants and squatted over the hole. Plop! Plop! He was startled by how loud it was. Very embarrassing! So, he opened the tap to let the whoosh of the gushing water compete with the disgusting plop-plop noise. While enjoying these stinking moments, the kid started to read the three comments on the toilet wall. He smiled at the last of them, trying to imagine what kind of girl had written it. After washing his behind, he stood and pulled up his pants, still staring at the rows of letters on the toilet wall. With a lewd smile, he leaned over and kissed the lipstick lips. Holding his own lips between two forefingers, perhaps asking himself what kind of warmth he should be feeling, the kid took out his pen and excitedly added his own contribution. “Hi, gorgeous! I like your red lips, as red and as hot as the spirit of a wild animal. I bet they feel good too—wanna know how mine feel?”

  Later, and in broad daylight, another girl showed up, a different type. A hedonist, and dressy. Her backpack was really much too small and filled with the usual this-and-that small arms of a girl who likes to flirt. Her appearance in the toilet obviously had nothing to do with peeing or conducting a “Plop! Plop! concert” or even with washing her hands or spitting. She visited the toilet almost every day simply to renovate her face, which would be a mess after several hours’ exposure to the soot-filled air. She wasn’t very self-confident, and naturally always had to fix her make-up.

  The girl stood by the little tank, staring at her reflection in the little mirror in her hand. She sprinkled her face—which she would never admit was filthy—with a pretty thick layer of powder and redid her eyeshadow. Nor did she forget to rouge her cheeks. Then she recombed her tangled hair and fixed it in place with a ribbon and a clip. As for her ashen lips, she swabbed
them with blazing red lipstick, as red as the national flag. Just at that moment, she read all the splenetic comments on the wall. With a flirtatious laugh, she made her own contribution, also in lipstick: “Bandit, you wanna know how these lips feel? Okay! Meet me at nine tonight at my grandma’s. N.B. Don’t bring along any spies!”

  On the umpteenth day after the toilet was freshly painted, a guy showed up there. A big guy, tall, with his stubbly scalp freshly shaven. A moustache and a thin beard adorned his fair-skinned face. A silver earring hung from his left lobe, and he had four or five necklaces around his throat. His floppy shirt was made of tie-dyed cloth and his pants were baggy. Anyone looking at him would certainly suspect him of being queer, though this could be hard to prove. Even from what he would later write on the wall, which expressed his deepest feelings, it would still be tough to determine his sexual leanings. He had gone into the toilet in search of a quiet place for a chat, away from the usual racket, and now pulled out his cellphone, which had been ringing for a while in his pants pocket. Using his right hand to hold the cellphone to his left ear, while his mouth kept up a steady chatter, he used his left hand to hunt for a pencil and found one while his brain was still making sense of the graffiti on the wall. This is what he eventually wrote: “Coward! Revolutionary in bed! Beaten up just once by the military and you run to mummy’s crotch. Hey, if you guys really wanna be revolutionaries, just show up here! Big mouths! Agitators! Communist maggots!”

  For a week thereafter, nobody could bear to enter the toilet, thanks to a frustrating development. Some bastard, some goddamn asshole without morals, and cursed by almost every faithful customer of the amenities, did something revolting. God knows on what day and at what hour he entered the toilet and immediately showered the bowl with a stream of rockets from out his ass. The idiot then went off without cleaning up those damned lumps of shit, which lay there nestled together in heap.

  You could be sure that from then on anyone entering the toilet after that lost the urge to do anything there. Everyone avoided the room. Everyone? Not quite! It turned out that there was one nutty kid who went in on purpose. It happened during a class period, and this kid tore out of the classroom clutching the front of his pants, scared he wouldn’t make it. He went to the first toilet on the top floor. Occupied. The second, also occupied. So was the first toilet on the ground floor. His legs began to tremble, and he leapt from side to side, struggling to prevent a disaster at the wrong time and in the wrong place. But because he couldn’t stand it a second longer, he entered the fatal toilet. In a single blind movement, he stood there, gave in to his need, and whoosh …

  All this time, he held his breath and kept his eyes tight shut. But when he was done, he performed an act of heroism, putting an end to the horror in the toilet. With his eyes still tight shut, and holding his nose, he sloshed water into the bowl, attacking the now almost desiccated mess, till it all came free and disappeared down the hole, a success achieved despite his nausea.

  Now the kid felt better, and he started to read the messages on the wall, still furious at the tragedy that had just occurred. He took out his blue-ink felt-tip pen and immediately wrote: “A real reactionary jerk, dropping a load of bombs without cleaning up afterward! Probably never even wipes his ass! Hey, shithead, yeah, I’m a Commie, a fan of Indonesian Comics! Wanna make something of it, huh?”

  Everyone knew that the toilet had been painted to make it look clean and pleasant. Before that, it had showed its true face: a small, marginal room where people liked to chat. The walls were completely covered with comical graffiti responding to one another—radical-progressive ideas, obscene sexual invitations, and the complete works of poets whose masterpieces won nothing but rejections. Amateur cartoonists embellished the walls, turning toilet humor into an art form. As a result, the walls were thickly covered with mischievous graffiti, some of it clever and some idiotic, just like the walls of public toilets everywhere—in bus terminals, train stations, schools, stadiums, and even government offices.

  Eventually, the toilet walls became such a dirty mess that the Dean decided to have the place repainted once again. Thus, the communal public diary was erased. But, as everyone knew, the first piece of fresh graffiti was soon to follow, succeeded by someone else’s commentary, and sure enough the toilet walls were once again covered with representations that tried to rival the reliefs on the walls of ancient temples. This situation troubled those pious students who loved beauty, loved harmony, and upheld the highest moral values.

  One such student eventually entered the toilet and was immediately irritated to see that the walls, nice and clean only a few days earlier, were again covered with the idiot fantasies of troublemaking loudmouths. This guy wasn’t a vandal and had never before damaged public property, but on this occasion he felt extraordinarily provoked. He was righteously indignant. So, he too started to write, even though in his heart he felt like crying. “Friends, please don’t scribble on the toilet walls. Keep them clean, for cleanliness is an aspect of morality. The toilet is not the place to let off steam. Please address your frustrations to the members of parliament …”

  As it turned out, within a single week, dozens of comments were scrawled below the words of this pious student. By the end of a month, there were over one hundred. There was no way to tell who had pitched in to return the walls to their natural state of filth. The comments on the pious student’s proposal had been scribbled with every kind of tool: pens, felt-tips, lipstick, pencils, bloody fingers, nails digging into the concrete, and even bits of brick and charcoal. The urge to comment was so great that the old proverb was perfectly exemplified: If there’s no rattan handy, any root will do. The first graffito read, “Blabbermouth, I don’t have any faith in our members of parliament. I have more trust in the walls of toilets.” The second went, “Asshole, I agree!” All the remaining one hundred and thirteen graffiti simply said, “Me too.”

  DON’T PISS HERE!

  She had pulled up in front of her shop and, the moment she opened the car door, the smell of piss filled her nostrils. It was coming from the low wall of the small parking lot. The intensity of the smell was almost enough to make the young woman, Sasha, throw up. She practically ran to the shop door, unlocked it, and hurried in, but the smell of piss followed her inside like a spoiled dog. This happened despite the fact she had hung a large handwritten sign on the wall outside: “Don’t Piss Here!” She imagined that every night, just before dawn, someone peed on it with blissful abandon.

  She grumbled to Marjan, one of her employees, “I hope God burns off his little pee-pee!”

  Marjan just laughed and commenced her usual task of spraying down the stinky corner of the lot. And she didn’t just splash some water on it, she mixed in some deodorizer, too. The stink of piss had to be completely gone before they opened the shop promptly at seven in the morning. What nauseated Sasha more than the acrid smell of urine was the fear it would drive customers away.

  Ever since she had rented this storefront and opened her small boutique for business, she had been in a constant bad mood. Men’s penises are a problem the whole world over, she would mutter, making Marjan laugh. Sasha was positive whoever was peeing on the parking lot wall was a human being with a penis.

  “If God isn’t going to burn off his pee-pee, someone needs to teach him some manners.”

  When she came out the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her husband, Matta, was waiting on the bed with a smile that had grown quite familiar over the years—it was a smile inviting her to have sex. She hated that smile, but she couldn’t do anything about it. She tried to avoid sex, they rarely did it, but because the request was so infrequent, she was reluctant to reject it outright.

  Sasha approached the bed and her husband stood up to embrace her eagerly. He kissed her cheeks and then her lips. His lips felt cold. There was nothing special about his touch—she had forgotten whether there had ever been a time when it had warmed her up or turned her on, even a little bit. Maybe it never had.


  Matta tugged on her towel, and Sasha stood there naked before him. Matta lay her down her on the bed, touched her, fondled her, whispered some dirty talk. Whenever this happened, she would close her eyes and try to think of something. Maybe a scene from a film she had seen (Basic Instinct?). Maybe a sentence from a book she had read (Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin?). Maybe a photo from a magazine (Al Pacino in Life?). Maybe a memory from her past (her first kiss?). Only things like that could make her hot, turn her on, get her wet.

  Then she would let Matta enter her, but only with her eyes shut tight. She would break out into a cold sweat. Her hands would ball into fists, gathering strength. She would try to stay focused on whatever image she had conjured up the moment before her husband’s penis had entered her body.

  Sasha bit her lip—it would be painful and she would have to bear it. She hoped it wouldn’t last long, and Matta could tell. He entered her, thrusted a few times, ejaculated. It was brief, over quickly, and then he rolled off her.

  Sasha felt herself freed from all her suffering. She hated the feeling of a penis penetrating her—it hurt, she didn’t get any pleasure from it at all. She wished she could put up a sign on her crotch for her husband and all men to see: “PRIVATE PROPERTY. Don’t Piss Here!” She thought that would be wonderful.

  At Marjan’s suggestion, Sasha replaced the sign that said, “Don’t Piss Here!” with “Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness.” People who enjoyed disobeying rules would be more likely to go ahead and do something if they saw the word “don’t.” But maybe if she cajoled them a bit by referring to God, they might hesitate to urinate on the parking lot wall.

  The next morning, Sasha pulled up in front of her store and walked to the wall. She was prepared for the stench, but it turned out she didn’t really smell anything. She sniffed a bit, getting a little closer. It was there, she thought. Someone had peed, but maybe not very much. The odor wafting up wasn’t as strong as usual. Maybe it was camouflaged by the smell of wet paint, or maybe her new sign had successfully prevented some people from pissing wherever they felt like it.