Fifteen minutes later, your plane is ready for boarding. As you stand up, you spot a notebook lying on the floor. It’s not yours. You pick it up and look for the woman who was just sitting next to you, but she’s nowhere to be found. The journal has no name on it and still has many blank pages. You put the notebook in your bag. Maybe you’ll run into the owner again, but if it isn’t very important to her, maybe you can use it for shopping lists.
Now in the plane’s cabin, you take your allocated aisle seat; next to you sit a man and woman, a couple, it seems. You fiddle with the remote control and settle on a movie to watch.
After six hours in the air, you tire of watching. Your eyes close, but you’re not able to sleep. You open the notebook that you found. The first two pages are blank. On the third, you see scrawled:
Berlin/NY
NYC > SF/LA
LA > LA/CGK
Berlin. New York City. San Francisco. Los Angeles. And CGK, Soekarno Hatta Airport, Jakarta. Is this a travel route? Maybe she’s visiting these cities. How funny. You feel the route is for you.
On the next page you read:
Insert a toy piano and mirror. Visiting a haunted house?
You’re startled: the sentences are in Indonesian, and they’re written as if only the journal’s owner would understand what they mean. Insert a toy piano and mirror where? A shopping list, maybe. But visiting a haunted house? What does that mean? You concoct a scenario. She went somewhere and shopped for a toy piano and a mirror, and after that went on an excursion to visit a house of ghosts. You smile. Maybe the woman is a tourist, just like you, even though you prefer to call yourself a wanderer now.
You turn to the next page and see:
Garden gnomes and spices.
This isn’t funny. Why does she write garden gnomes here, and why does she link them to spices? No one should link the two but you. You turn to another page that contains the names of cities. NYC, SF, LA. Reading the notebook is like looking at a mirror reflecting your own image. You lean towards the passengers beside you and find them sound asleep. Somehow, though, you have to read it. Perhaps you feel a little frightened.
You turn to the next page. From that point she’s written at sufficient length to fill up the next three pages. The first words that you see are at the top:
Visiting a Haunted House
You’ve never visited a haunted house. You sigh, mildly relieved. This is someone else’s journal, someone else’s life. It has nothing to do with you.
You return to the long entry and begin to read.
Continue on to the next page.
Visiting a Haunted House
This isn’t your usual ghost story, you know. It’s a completely ordinary tale, nothing special. My grandmother died a natural death, as most grandmothers do, four days after I turned twenty-nine. I chose not to go to her funeral, to witness the women in headscarves chanting prayers and men in peci heaping soil on her body, far away down yonder. I, beloved granddaughter that I was, hoped she would forgive me for not shelling out fifteen hundred dollars to see her wrapped in a shroud. There’s no point in running after the dead.
I received the news of her passing in New York. I was hurrying towards West 4th Street Station when I got a text from my dad. Clutching the phone, I stopped and turned to look at a small playground on my left. A bunch of guys were playing basketball, surrounded by spectators, and a couple of pedestrians also looked on, puffing cigarettes. The game seemed to unfold in slow motion. A woman jostled my shoulder, giving a barely audible apology, and scurried down the subway stairs. It seemed for a split second as if I had fallen asleep. I felt I too should run, that way, in the direction the woman had gone, to catch my train. In my diary, I wrote a short note to my grandmother: I’m sorry, Grandma. I can’t see you off on your final train ride because I’m also on a train. My train keeps hurtling onward. It doesn’t stop. Not even for your death.
I’ve always liked my grandmother’s name. Victoria. I don’t know how she wound up with it. Maybe her mother was inspired by an incident in 1895 when Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands visited Queen Victoria of Great Britain. My generation was surrounded by old women, like my grandmother and great-grandmother, who’d been Dutchified. Maybe they were just trying to be fashionable, and all of us are just natives, inlanders, who want to be European. But I liked to say her name over and over: Victoria, Victoria. It reminded me of Victor Frankenstein, scientist extraordinaire. My grandmother wasn’t a genius like Victor, capable of creating human life itself, but, having been a teacher, she knew a thing or two.
A year after Victoria’s death I visited her home with my dad and an uncle. In we marched: Papa and Uncle and me, girl wanderer. Victoria’s children were impatient to sell the house because none of them wanted to look after it. Who in the world would buy it? mused Papa.
Like other deserted houses, my grandmother’s home seemed haunted. Someone who claimed to see spirits reported that Victoria’s house was inhabited by a kuntilanak, a long-haired demon who lived near the well, a woman no longer in our world, but not ‘over there’ either. Wherever ‘there’ was. You could be sure she wasn’t resting in peace.
Is Grandma wandering, too? I asked.
Hush! Don’t talk about your grandmother as if she were a demon.
My grandmother was devout. People say the devout rest at Allah’s side.
Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go wandering.
Papa and Uncle didn’t want to imagine Victoria as a spirit, even though her name fit all too well with ghost stories. But I felt her gliding through these rooms, watching my every step. The kuntilanak had set up house by the well, but my grandmother was not the domestic type. She might have found heaven dull with its repetitive pleasures: limpid streams, a surfeit of honey, olives ripe for picking (Victoria was never a fan of olives). When she was young, she found nothing more thrilling than riding a minibus to market in a floral-print cotton dress, toting a plaited purse and wearing sunglasses. It made perfect sense that in death she’d prefer a wandering state.
A dozen years ago, before Grandma fell ill, the house pulsed with life. I remembered where she slept, and right beside it, Uncle’s room, plastered with posters of Duran Duran and Phoebe Cates. (Whatever happened to Phoebe Cates, anyway?) Every Lebaran, Victoria baked kaastengels and layer cakes of all sorts, sinfully rich goodies laden with butter, milk and sugar. Nobody in my family baked like that any more. Who has eight hours to spend on a cake?
My father had come up with the idea of renting out Grandma’s house, but it hadn’t attracted any interest. It was too big and creepy. And now it had fallen into disrepair. ‘Uncle really doesn’t have the time to do some weeding and clear away the cobwebs?’ I asked my father pointedly.
‘Why would he want to do that?’ Papa replied, but added enviously, ‘Your uncle inherited a clove plantation from Grandma.’
Wow, a plantation. Good for him. I often fancy that only God has a garden, especially when I’m dashing around in bus terminals and airports with a backpack. God’s garden is eternal; all that is transient ends up in the clutches of corporations or the state.
Victoria’s house was slowly being emptied. Only recently had her children realised that most of her belongings had been siphoned off by amateur thieves. The house was begging for its own funeral; even the clock on the wall had stopped ticking.
‘Aunt Leila and Cousin Rika have been here,’ said Papa. They’d already taken anything of value. Antique lamps. Flower vases. The men in my family got there late. It had always been like that, really, but I’d forgotten. As the years come and go, you get fuzzy about people’s habits.
‘Now take what you want,’ said Uncle.
‘I don’t want anything.’
‘If you don’t, somebody else will.’
Fine. At least I understood two things. First, there’s no point in storing the possessions of the dead in their home. Second, there’s a good chance all their stuff will be stolen, and definitely not by a kuntilan
ak.
I opened my grandmother’s wardrobe. I’d lived two years in this house when I was small, and I would enter her closet and inhale the scent of her clothes. They smelled of laundry powder. I liked them better than the clothes that clung to her body, with its own scent, mingling with onion, oven-melted butter, and smoke from clove cigarettes. Gudang Garam was her brand of choice. The scent left me slightly woozy. A few clothes were still stored in her closet, some hanging, some folded, along with a prayer rug with the Ka’bah embroidered on it and a toy piano. The piano was mine. I remembered it, a light blue one, my plaything when I lived there. Papa and Uncle were still chatting. I took a tissue from my purse to wipe my eyes. Damn nostalgia.
The clothes were not the best quality, except for one grey suit that had belonged to my grandfather. The others had been spirited away. Victoria had always wanted her husband to remain a dandy, ever elegant, like when they’d first met and danced and danced. Sometimes I wonder if they didn’t feel guilty for living it up in those colonial times, but back then few other dreams were available. Natives knew no ambitions beyond boarding ships, going to parties or travelling to far-off lands. My grandmother had always wanted to go abroad, but she had to make do with riding a minibus to the market in her beautiful dresses. As for my grandfather, he died in the mid-1980s, and I have few memories of him. All I remember is that he’d ferry me around town on a Vespa, light blue like my toy piano, and that he’d give me Sugus sweets, those strawberry-, orange- and grape-flavoured squares. (Do kids these days still chew Sugus sweets?)
Everyone wanted to get away but couldn’t, so they set down roots at home, in the soil, in the garden.
‘You have to keep what’s left.’
I didn’t know who was causing the fuss this time, Papa or Uncle. I wasn’t paying attention.
I was more attracted to the cloudy mirror and dusty dressing table in my grandmother’s room. On the table lay a small book of Islamic scripture, empty perfume bottles and broken tubes of red lipstick. Red, like the mouth of a baby-devouring kuntilanak. Who made herself up in front of the mirror now?
Papa’s and Uncle’s voices rose higher and higher, like touts at a bus terminal, more and more desperate to rescue what they could.
This one. Take this jar. This cup. This painting.
What about the wardrobe? asked Papa.
Or this. An antique chest from Bali. It used to be your great-grandmother’s.
The wooden chest was like something that might belong to a sorceress. Dark and beautiful. I considered taking it. Then I would finally have something solid, heavy, venerable, something befitting a Sumatran matriarch like my grandmother, or my great-grandmother, or Aunt Leila.
‘But where would I keep it? I don’t even have a house.’
‘Take it to New York,’ said Papa.
‘That’d be so expensive! And who knows where I’ll move afterwards. Sydney, probably.’
‘I can hold on to it until you come back home.’
‘Back home? Home where? When?’
Something loomed in the cloudy mirror. I turned away. The question returned, but now it disturbed me: who made herself up in the reflection now?
A kuntilanak.
I didn’t want to find a kuntilanak in the mirror. I wanted to see Grandma’s spirit. Victoria. I wanted Victoria, whose body I hadn’t seen as it was being covered with earth. I would smash a mirror to hold her in my arms. I stepped in closer to get a good look at the woman’s face. My knees trembled and, at that moment, I realised that my grandmother was no wandering spirit, at least not in this house. The wandering spirit was me.
My feet do not tread the ground anywhere. I have no home, I know no love of any soil. But what is a home? The house had long since rotted away, long before the kuntilanak arrived; it was disintegrating along with Victoria’s maggot-infested corpse. Taking what was left behind would rescue nothing. Papa and Uncle didn’t know that. But I knew. For my feet do not tread the ground.
I decided to take a memento: the toy piano, which at least was actually mine. A souvenir from childhood turned airplane stowaway, because there was no grave to bury it in. It wanted to transit with me through Hong Kong.
My flight left three days later. Maybe if I go back in a few years I’ll find the house. Victoria won’t care because she’ll be in New York, Tokyo or Paris with her flowery cotton dress and sunglasses. (Did I mention that she wasn’t an olive fan?) Maybe it’s Amsterdam that she haunts, since she was fond of speaking Dutch. Then we’ll meet, in another dimension, if not in this material, visible world.
Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go wandering. See, Victoria? I really am your beloved grandchild.
Turn to page 399.
You walk to West 4th to take the E train to John F. Kennedy Airport. The carriages are quiet because you’re travelling against the morning commuter flow. You transfer at Sutphin Boulevard Station and take the elevator for the AirTrain, which will bring you to the terminal from where your plane departs. There’s nothing special about the journey. You try to rouse romantic memories since this will be your last time on the subway, but the trip is so long that you start to feel bored. As soon as you plant your butt down on the AirTrain, you close your eyes. You seem to have dozed off for five or ten minutes, but when you wake, the train door is open. In a panic, you rush to drag your suitcase out the carriage, but as you arrive at the bottom of the escalator, you realise you’re at the wrong terminal. You look around, confused. How stupid can you get? Where do you need to go now?
Turn to page 27.
You refuse to surrender your red shoes and their fate to Devil. Clutching them against your bag, you push through the crowd of people waiting for the train and run. Some swear at you, but you don’t care. You must flee from Devil, as fast and as far as possible. You sprint up the stairs, shoving aside anyone in your way.
When you arrive at the top, your knees start to feel weak. Your lungs ache, but you have to keep running. Where? You think you hear a voice.
‘There!’
You turn. In the distance, you see the woman you met in the garden waving in your direction. Victoria. She knows you’re being chased. She motions for you to turn right.
‘Thanks!’
‘See you later, honey!’
You dash towards a hallway and spy a black signboard hanging in front of you, with a round red symbol and the number one in the middle. You use your last iota of strength to race on.
Once you finally feel you’ve run far enough, you look back. Devil isn’t following you now.
Why is it so quiet here? What number was that just now? 1? The 1 doesn’t stop at Bryant Park Station, only the B, D, F and M trains. Lines with orange icons.
Suddenly you realise something. You didn’t see a number 1 but the letter I. You went wrong because the 1, like the 2 and 3, always has a red circle as its symbol.
There is no I train in New York, there never has been.
You’ve been tricked. But by whom? Your mind conjures up the figure of the granny in her yellow jacket and beret decorated with a sunflower. The woman in the park – why did she point you to the I train, a train that never existed?
You hear the sound of ceramic cracking. The floor in front of you gives way, collapsing, and a roar deafens you as you slip into a long tunnel.
Continue on to page 414.
You don’t know what to do. You lie silently in bed, clenching yourself tightly. You have no idea who’s knocking, but you refuse to open the door. You will stay here, motionless, in this room with a pink glow. Playing dead, like kids in their games.
Someone is pounding on the door, hard. Your heart is also pounding. You close your eyes. One person – or is it two? – somehow forces a way inside.
You open your eyes slowly and find yourself lying on a velvet sofa, under a blanket. You’re wearing pyjamas but you last remember being in a display window in lace lingerie, trembling with fear. Who dressed you in pyjamas? You step on soft carpet. You find yourself in a large li
ving room; in front of you is a small table with a teapot and two cups, a rocking chair and an old-fashioned fireplace. Your gaze lands on four gnome figurines flanking the fireplace, each wearing a pointed cap.
You’re trying to remember what happened to you. Two men, their faces masked, somehow broke in and covered your mouth with a handkerchief. You remember nothing after that. No doubt about it: you’ve been kidnapped.
You hear footsteps descending a staircase. You clutch the blanket tight. A figure in a long black robe approaches, his appearance slowly becoming clearer. What sort of devil is this? He wears a white mask with a pointed chin, like the kind one might wear at a carnival. You edge to the far end of the sofa, eyes downcast. You panic: a kidnapper in a strange costume? Or a pimp who now controls your life?
‘My apologies for having to bring you here this way.’
You’re startled. Not a male voice, but female, soft and sweet. You summon the courage to lift your head, staring at the white mask.
‘You kidnapped me.’
‘I sent some friends to save you,’ she says. ‘I don’t kidnap humans. At least those who encounter me don’t feel like they’ve been kidnapped. I only kidnap garden gnomes.’
She points towards the four bearded figurines. They remind you of the dwarf your sister bought to look after her house. The gnomes and all her words make you even more confused. Why are you here, and why is this woman masked? Then you remember the woman that Maria talked about.
The Whore of Babylon.
The woman saved you because she is the Whore of Babylon, a powerful mother figure.
She laughs mockingly from behind her mask.
‘Honey,’ she says, ‘that’s just a myth.’
She removes her disguise. Her face is stunning – so beautiful and so familiar. You’ve seen it. She pours the tea, ready on the table, and invites you to drink. Then she sits in the rocking chair by the fireplace.
The Wandering Page 32
