Kitchen Curse Read online

  Honestly, I had never heard this story before.

  The conductor patted my shoulder and moved off towards the next passenger. All I could do was put my wallet back into my pocket and turn my head to watch him go.

  Even after his death, I thought, Dad is still paying my bus fare. I smiled and leaned back into my seat again. I took out my iPod and chose the song “Seasons in the Sun” by Terry Jacks. I put in my earphones and closed my eyes.

  Goodbye, Papa, it’s hard to die …

  And then I was fast asleep.

  CARONANG

  We brought one home to keep as a pet. Baby, our four-year-old, loved it. How could he not? It was like a living doll. And gentler than any breed of dog. The only thing that had us worried was that it was obviously no ordinary mutt. Where it came from it was called a caronang—and its most distinctive feature was that it walked on two legs.

  At first, I thought it might be a species of bear, one that raised itself up on its hind legs to attack. But it wasn’t. And it was small—about the size of a miniature poodle. It had given up walking on all fours almost completely. In fact, its anatomy had developed to make walking on two legs easier. You see, its thighs had grown longer, as had its calves, and its heels now rested on the ground (those heels that we always mistake for dogs’ knees, even though knees jut forward and heels jut backward). The soles of its feet had shortened and lay flat on the earth. Its digits looked a lot like those of a bear or a cat, but according to the book I read, The Flora and Fauna of Java Past, it belonged to the same family as the dog. Its Latin name was Lupus erectus. There was no name for it in Indonesian, or in English. The book said the caronang had gone extinct long before the Javan tiger. What the authors of the book didn’t know was that I had one living in my house.

  However it came to be, it had retained its ancestral form, its head identical in appearance to the head of a dog (even though certain features reminded me more of a bat), oval and slender like a Russian wolfhound, with thick white fur spotted with black. It even barked, and at night, sometimes, it howled.

  We never let it go outside, and we hid it whenever we had guests. The only person who knew we had a pet caronang was an old friend of mine, who’d introduced me to the animal in the first place, in its natural habitat. And it quickly learned that this discretion was all for its own good and that if anyone else knew of its existence, its peaceful life would soon come to an end.

  What we didn’t know at the time was that our own peaceful life was about to be cut short. We knew one of the most enjoyable aspects of having a dog was teaching it tricks, getting it to do things of no natural use to it. My wife trained the caronang to fetch the newspaper and to bring me my shoes every morning. But that was before we became aware it was capable of learning far more than a regular dog ever could. Before long, we were watching spellbound as it sat with Baby and busied itself with a coloring book. At the end of each day it would bathe itself, shampooing its whole body, though with a clumsiness that tickled us. If it had been no more than a clever poodle, not a caronang, we would have gotten rich exhibiting it at the circus.

  Everything was going well until one horrifying morning when it got out the hunting rifle, loaded it, and pulled the trigger. When it had learned how to use the gun, we hadn’t a clue. But not only did it know how to use a gun, it knew what a gun was for.

  It all began with Don Jarot, an old friend of mine. At the age of eighteen, he came to Yogyakarta to become an artist but ended up doing a college degree in philosophy instead. He lasted only three years before they kicked him out for killing a man in a fight over a girl. Then it was three years in Wirogunan Prison for him, where he killed some other thug in a brawl and was immediately transferred to Nusa Kambangan.

  Like all the other prisoners on that island, he wasn’t particularly happy about being there. He plotted his escape. It wasn’t prison walls or guards he’d have to deal with, but a wild strait as wide as a small ocean and teeming with crocodiles. The locals called that particular body of water Sagara Anakan—“The Sea Has Had a Child”—and he’d have to cross it, hiding in one bay after another, each overrun with man-eating animals. But that’s what he did. He swam half the night, almost died when he got hit by an oil tanker approaching land, was submerged and carried along by the current before he could regain his strength, and finally washed up on a small delta, surrounded by swamp, tall grass everywhere he looked.

  “My first meal? The leeches sticking to my body,” he told me.

  He hid in the swamp for weeks, swimming across bays, soaking in the dirty water—all while the military searched for him. Eventually, he got clear of the swamp and headed upriver, disappearing into the local villages, then moving on to the towns. The only stupid thing he did was to miss his girlfriend too much. One day he went to visit her, and that’s when they caught him. He spent the remainder of his jail sentence feeling worthless and depressed.

  Not long after his release, his crazy experience was made into a movie, with Don Jarot playing himself. Although the movie was successful, he never starred in anything else ever again, preferring instead to marry his girlfriend and sell stones that supposedly possessed mystical properties of some sort. The movie was true to life, but left out one part, which he recounted only to me.

  One day, probably succumbing to a malarial fever, he’d collapsed while hiding out in the swamps of Sagara Anakan. He felt like he was about to die and blacked out completely. When he came to, he found himself in something like a pigsty, with clumps of shrubbery fashioned into a kind of nest. He was surrounded by small dogs. At first, he thought he had found himself among angels, although he had never imagined angels looking like this. But as they nudged a few small fish towards him, expecting him to eat them raw, he realized they were that other mythical creature he and I had once read about—the caronang.

  Long before he’d gone to prison, we had discussed the matter of extinct animals. We had gathered together encyclopedias, travelogues, and folktales, and together we had come to the conclusion that perhaps such creatures weren’t really extinct at all. We hatched a wild plan to go on an expedition in search of the Javan tiger and, of course, the caronang, too—that is, before Don Jarot had to go to prison and the years passed us by.

  Not long after the premiere of his film, Don Jarot came to me and told me about his discovery of the caronang. I was thrilled when I heard about his plan to find them again. So off we went.

  The caronang could only be found in a handful of locations around Sagara Anakan. All of Java’s jungles had probably been swarming with them once, but they’d ended up clustered in that region alone.

  We left at seven in the morning from Cilacap Harbor, moving against the currents of the Citanduy River on a ferryboat full of farmers, traders, and teachers stationed in the interior. The panoramas were impressive: emerging from the throng of oil tankers and cargo ships, our pace slow, we drifted along a magnificent expanse. Ibises flew overhead, and monkeys dangled from the branches of the mangrove trees. Fishing boats moved lazily along.

  I had brought camping gear and hunting equipment in a large expedition pack, though I had no intention of doing any hunting and had brought the weapons only for self-defense—in case we encountered any dangerous animals. Don Jarot was busy with his Handycam and notebook, and since we’d left the harbor, he’d been recording anything and everything. We had decided to document our trip from the moment of our departure: maybe we could put together some good footage for the Discovery Channel or National Geographic. I had thought about hiring a guide, but Don Jarot assured me he knew this area like the back of his hand. Besides, he didn’t want others to know there were still real caronang in the area; not even the locals had seen them, and thought they were only a legend.

  We came to a stop in a strange place: at the border between the sea and the strait. Don Jarot pointed out the dividing line stretching before us, unwavering and brown. I thought someone had laid a ribbon down on the riverbed, but Don Jarot confirmed that the line
was really and truly a work of nature, the universe’s own creation. There were no docks where we could moor, so we got a ride on a dubious-looking wooden boat with no motor and were dropped off at the nearest island, inhabited by only three fishermen and their families.

  We rented the same boat to head into the interior. I protested a little at this and asked if it wouldn’t be better to rent a motorboat. Don Jarot just laughed, explaining that a motorboat would only be necessary on rough water. “There aren’t any waves in the river,” he said. Anyway, we were going into narrow streams where the surface of the water would be carpeted with algae and other plants. For the entirety of our journey, while he rowed, I was seized with a great panic. Though the boat certainly seemed stable, I was none too happy at the thought of the crocodiles and lizards lurking beneath.

  “Just a little while longer. There are miracles ahead,” said Don Jarot.

  It was true. Wondrous things were waiting for us once we penetrated the swampy interior. I saw a fish the size of a man’s palm walking in the mud on foot-like fins. In one cove, I found a small shark—extremely small, the size of someone’s ankle or wrist, living in fresh water. Joyfully, Don Jarot recorded everything, all the while shrieking, “Eureka, it’s the miracle of evolution, by Darwin Almighty!” There were other amazing things too that made me forget about the crocodiles. And then we came face to face with that true miracle: the caronang.

  On the days I didn’t have any work, I would laze about in the backyard, oiling a rifle—one I hadn’t tried hunting with yet. Sometimes I would shoot bullets into the sky, thinking they might make the clouds melt and pour rain into the hot air. It was most likely during one of those moments that our caronang had peered out the window without me knowing and seen me using the rifle. One night shortly before the incident, it had also seen me shoot a big rat that had made several annoying raids on the kitchen.

  That same night, the caronang had had a spectacular fight with Baby over something silly.

  “They’re fighting over the blanket,” my wife said.

  It was true. Both of them had been sleeping in one bed since we had brought the animal into the house. That fight, in which Baby cried and the caronang barked, ended with Baby kicking the caronang out of the bed. The caronang ran to my wife’s room and buried itself in her armpit. It was weeping. It wasn’t that surprising. We’d had a pet monkey once who behaved in a similar way: fussy and crybabyish. The caronang was probably acting like this because it was still so young.

  I’d succeeded in capturing it only after Don Jarot had drugged its pack; if he hadn’t, they’d certainly never have let us take a member of the family. And so that was how the darkest day in our lives came to pass. Very early in the morning, the animal got down from my wife’s bed, took the rifle and bullets from the storage room, then knocked on Baby’s door. Baby hadn’t even freed himself entirely from slumber yet—he was sitting there, dazed, when the rifle went off and ended his life. He was due to start kindergarten the month after next, and with two shots he was dead, dispatched by a caronang.

  Though devastated, I knew it didn’t make sense for me to tell anyone what had really happened. My wife felt the same way. And, so, right after the funeral, which Don Jarot also attended (he tried to cheer me up, but it was no use), the police arrested me. I offered no defense and confirmed all the charges against me. With the help of the police, we all came up with the following story:

  In the dead of night, I heard suspicious sounds and immediately thought it was a thief. I got out my hunting rifle and figured out that the noises were coming from Baby’s room. I called his name, but Baby didn’t answer. I broke down the door and saw a figure looming before me. It was actually Baby standing on top of his bed, but in my haste and surprise, I shot him.

  The trial proceeded without any complications. My wife testified that the story was indeed true. They sentenced me to three years in the light of my youth, remorse, and lack of a criminal record. The whole time, all I wanted to do was go home and kill that caronang with my own two hands.

  “You don’t need to,” my wife told me. “Don Jarot’s killed them all. Slaughtered them and sold them to a dog-kebab restaurant.”

  It was better that way. In any case, it was very dangerous to let them go on living—they might have grown even smarter.

  ROTTEN STENCH

  Bursting from the streets, the rotting stench drifted over alleyways and fields and rice paddies and garbage heaps, into kitchens and bedrooms where husbands and wives were making love and classrooms where children were studying and into mosques and whorehouses; and from the gutters it flowed to the rivers and to the bay and then to the ocean and the entire city was suffused with that putrid odor, but the city folk weren’t surprised at all because they had breathed in that horrible smell years ago, exactly eighteen years ago, when hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, were found sprawled out in the streets and the alleyways and lying in the fields and the rice paddies and in the ditches and the rivers, already corpses, in a state of decomposition and barely recognizable as human, and it wasn’t just the maggots and flies that were crawling all over them but dogs were fighting over their flesh too, and vultures, scorpions, crocodiles, and even chickens were pecking at those poor corpses’ genitals and if you have forgotten, that was after half of the communists in Halimunda were killed, some were shot in their houses while they were taking a shit or lathering their privates up with soap and some had their throats slit while they were sleepwalking or sitting in a barber’s chair and maybe one of them was stabbed with a bayonet while he was teaching his daughter how to ride her bike and most of the communists who died were just doing silly things like that because if they hadn’t been, then surely they would have escaped into the jungle or even fled the country in a small boat while praying there wouldn’t be a hurricane, but in fact it is better to die at sea than die in some absurd fashion at the hands of your cowardly fellow men who only have the courage to live alongside dead communists, not living ones—men who killed and left the corpses to rot with a foul stink that spread and wouldn’t go away for the next five years, sticking to the leaves and the walls of houses and the clothes you were wearing, a stink from the corpses left lying there just like that as if to let everyone know, both locals and visitors alike, that this is the fate you will meet if you are a communist who doesn’t believe in God, because people who profess to believe in God will finish you off just that viciously, horrifically, totally and mercilessly, and leave your corpse lying there just like all those corpses were left, without even one person attempting to bury them because to touch them would be unclean, more unclean than touching a pig or a dog, so they were just left lying there in every corner of the city for months, and even after the dogs and the vultures had eaten enough meat for seven generations the corpses were still there, but the city folk truly couldn’t have cared less about that rotten stench and that sordid sight, what’s more they threw cheerful garden parties and ate grilled goat, with a decapitated corpse lying there all torn apart right beside the dining table while their children used its head as their soccer ball, as the people of Halimunda, who had survived the years of slaughter, looked at the corpses that were more disgusting than demons in hell as if they were looking at piles of trash on the side of the road and they never gave them a second thought because they were the corpses of communists, and they still didn’t care even though the smell was so pungent that every visitor found it difficult to breathe on first arriving in the city and the next day would put on a mask and black sunglasses so as not to have to confront such a horrifying sight, and on asking the people passing by how it could be that they weren’t bothered by that revolting stink from the corpses, the people of Halimunda would just smile as if dead communists were completely commonplace and the visitors would shake their heads, unable to hide their disbelief, and wonder what kind of wax the people of the city had used to plug their nostrils so as not to smell that most foul rotten stench, but the city folk never answered, and in fact they
began to forget there had ever been a massacre in the city, and they lived in a contented peace, not caring that the rice they ate every day now also stank, and that collective amnesia took an even firmer hold once those corpses were finally gone, not because they were buried or thrown away or cremated, but because they were eventually eaten up by worms and maggots and after five years the rotten stench had disappeared, swept away by the ocean breeze, even though sometimes that same ocean breeze occasionally carried the smell back to the city too, but then the city folk would only sniff it with a sense of nostalgia, which of course was the time when those corpses were still strewn about, maybe still warm with blood that was still red even though their stomachs had already been ripped open by dogs and their hearts had already been pecked at by ducks and their eyes and ears had been made into key chains the witch-doctors sold as talismans and charms and things like that, and perhaps a few corpses were buried properly and given gravestones, but they had to be buried in backyards or under a cluster of bamboo since the public cemetery would certainly refuse them because the virtuous ghosts that guarded the graveyard would never be willing to share their home with the souls of such infidel scum and the people who buried them were usually their devoted children or their wives who truly loved them or their friends who, although they had taken a different path in life, were still loyal to them, but whoever buried these corpses ended up meeting a fate more tragic than that of the dead because then the other city folk wouldn’t associate with them, the women were forbidden to go to the market and the children forbidden to attend school because they were considered even more unclean and more rotten than the corpses of their fathers or husbands or friends, so that ultimately most of the corpses were not taken care of, they just slowly decayed in the grass or were crushed by car wheels in the street, but then even though their surviving family members hadn’t buried them, their relatives were still seen as the scourge of the city—yes, even those who hadn’t claimed or buried their loved ones—they were forbidden to enter the city hall, forbidden to become city employees, denied care at the city hospital, and if you were a communist who survived and didn’t become a corpse, you would suffer more than those who had died because you would be treated more or less like a living corpse and if dogs attacked you in the street the police and the neighbors would not come to your aid and more than that the city government would actually order you to wear a sign, maybe on your neck or forehead, or to carry a special identity card, indicating that you were one of those accursed atheists, as if inviting the dogs to bark at you and attack you, a sign that good people should stay at least fifteen meters away from the tips of your outstretched fingers, even though sometimes there were ignorant folks, most likely youngsters who thought of those events as so much ancient history or who hadn’t witnessed them because they were newcomers, and one day they would suddenly be startled by the foul odor carried ashore by the ocean breeze and they would ask where it came from, and these idiots would be considered lucky if they were then quickly captured by three or four soldiers and thrown into a holding cell behind the military headquarters, the place where more executions were held than in any other place, usually on incontestable charges of sedition because if they weren’t, then the city folk would think of these simpletons as crazy people and they would ultimately end up in shackles, eating in chains, and shitting on themselves and the children would throw rotten eggs at them for the rest of their lives, until eighteen years after the massacre of hundreds of communists in that city, the rotten stench came again, not the same old rotten stench that was sometimes carried in by the ocean breeze, but a rotten stench that came from corpses sprawled in the streets just like before, and just as might be suspected, the people of Halimunda were not at all surprised by that rotten smell, even the newborn babies were not surprised because they had inherited an immunity to it from their parents, who had grown accustomed to the rotten stench that had come eighteen years ago and was sometimes blown in by the ocean breeze, and now they were smelling it again as if experiencing a quiet nostalgia, and the people woke up in the morning as usual and when they went out onto their verandas to read the national newspaper or the local one published in the provincial capital, they of course would read about the rotten smell coming from the corpses strewn about in every corner of the city, but they would read about it as if it were news from a distant place or a piece of fiction or worse than that they would only think of it as a small tragedy on par with the local soccer club’s defeat in the Independence Day tournament, and they would quickly set that newspaper down on the table before drinking their coffee made with water from a well contaminated by those melting corpses, by the flesh and blood that had congealed into porridge, but they didn’t care and said how delicious the coffee was that morning, just as they didn’t care that the only thing that differentiated the current rotten stench from the one eighteen years ago was the fact that the current rotten stench wasn’t coming from the bodies of wretched communists, but from criminals, rapists, thieves, racketeers, pickpockets, pirates, and all kinds of bad guys you can find described in the holy books and so the virtuous city folk didn’t care about them, as if it were right for them to die, just as it had been right for those accursed communists to die eighteen years ago, so they left them there untouched because they too were more unclean than dogs and pigs and more misguided than even the demons in hell, so nobody buried them either, they just noted the fact that most of them had died riddled with bullet holes, sometimes with rusty bullets still lodged inside their flesh, and not one of them died from being stabbed or hanged, and even though there was no formal report as to who had finished off that human trash the city folk could guess that the soldiers at the military headquarters were probably behind all this, even though not one soldier had ever discussed it, because the fact was they were the only ones who had firearms and ammunition and the people of Halimunda, who were quick to come up with different scenarios about it all, were caught in a labyrinth of hearsay when someone said the soldiers were angry because the criminals had cheated at the gambling table—both the soldiers and the criminals placed bets on cockfights, pig fights, and dice—and someone else said the murders started with a scuffle over some prostitute at the whorehouse, but whatever the story was behind those corpses and the rotten stench that once again engulfed the city, the people of Halimunda soon lost interest and preferred to carry on with their lives just like usual without caring about the huge green flies now buzzing over their heads and occasionally dropping down to land on their lunch rice, because the men were truly happy that those cursed people were finally dead and now there was no one left to bother their women if they came out of the movie theater and their skirts were accidentally lifted for a moment by the wind, there was no one who would demand money every time the city folk took the train or rode the bus, and there was no one to confiscate their cigarettes at knifepoint on Saturday nights when they were getting romantic with their girlfriends on the beach, and the good and proper housewives were relieved because there was no longer anybody stealing the chickens out of their coops or swiping clothes off the laundry line or pots out of their kitchens, and the whole time the newspaper kept calling the killers “mysterious shooters,” who must have hidden in the dark and crawled through the brush, attacking in an ambush, and when one morning those corpses had filled the city again, and the streets were overrun with flies and worms and dogs and crocodiles gorging themselves in a merry orgy just as their ancestors had eighteen years ago, even though it could be appreciated that this time at least the assassins were a little more civilized about the whole thing because even though they didn’t bury the corpses and they were stumbled upon by people heading to market early in the morning to sell vegetables and newspaper boys and the people coming home from the mosque, at least they were wrapped in old gunny sacks used for rice at harvest time and there they were temporarily safe until the dogs that roamed everywhere throughout the city began to sniff the sacks and rip them open and the smell spilled out, spreading through t
he air and the water and permeating the sunlight until the entire city had a rotten stench, making the visitors once again put on their masks and some of them vomited and then suffered attacks of diarrhea and fever because of the food and water contaminated by human remains, but the city folk didn’t seem to suffer at all because they just kept eating and drinking and they weren’t bothered in the slightest by that pungent foul stink, as if they wanted to tell the whole world: We the people of Halimunda don’t care how many you kill or how horrible they smell, because history has taught us to endure all kinds of horror and evil and we are used to forgetting it all just as quickly as we forget every act of piety, because everyone ultimately dies in the end and all corpses ultimately give off a rotten stench, and we will still read our newspapers and drink our coffee and play soccer and make babies, in other words we will continue to enjoy our lives in the middle of this rotten stench, if you really think that the way this air smells can in fact be described as a rotten stench.