Collected Philippine Short Stories

The Devil Is In The Details | Cárlos Cortés

NEXT in line was a typical family: man and woman and a kid about two years old, and a baggage cart laden with their boxes and suitcases. The man handed over their tickets and passports. The flight was for Singapore, with many of the passengers having outbound connections: some to Jakarta, others to Cairns, still others to Auckland, Heathrow, or JFK. This family, two Germans and a Filipina, was bound for Frankfurt.

When I say they were Germans and a Filipina I am going by their passports, of course; in my line of work one speaks of these things in a technical manner, disregarding racial and ethnic considerations. The man happened to have the Aryan features associated with the typical German, such as blond hair and blue eyes. For me, however, all that mattered was that he had a German passport.

The boy was German, too, but if I hadn't seen his passport I would have guessed him to be Filipino. His mother was cooing to him, in babytalk of course, but Cebuano babytalk, in which I detected a faint Boholano accent. The kid was repeating some of her words; he was taking to her language in much the same way he took after her. He had only the slightest hint of the mestizo alemán about him. To be sure, his complexion was rather light and his hair was brownish. But he did not look Nordic at all. He could have been a son of mine: he looked Visayan enough. The only thing German about him was a piece of paper. However, I was trained to give due credit to such pieces of paper.

The kid's passport was literally a piece of paper. It wasn't the kind of German passport his father had, the booklet with a hard maroon cover that had the words Europäische Gemeinschaft, then below that Bundesrepublik Deutschland, then below the heraldic eagle the word Reisepass. That kind of passport was sometimes issued to children too, but not often; the German government offered a children's version of its passport, and since the processing fee for the Kinderausweis, as it was called, was much lower, it was what German children almost always had. A single sheet of green paper folded and refolded upon itself so that one could unfold it into four pages, the Kinderausweis looked like a fun passport; one could imagine it had been made in a gingerbread house, whereas the Reisepass could only have come from an office.

WE used the Departure Control System, DCS for short, a simple and good computer program. Accepting passengers for a flight was a breeze in DCS. For international flights, however, we had to input so many things the entries often became cumbersome. Care was essential. A single typo was all it took for the whole entry to be invalid, and then one would have to start all over again.

I would assign them good seats, one seat by the window for the kid, for both flights. I would tag their baggage for Frankfurt and waive the charge for excess weight of—I checked the readout on the weighing scale—seven kilos. But first things first. Were their documents in order?

The German was at the top of the name list. On my screen he was EFKEMANN/HEINZJUERGENMR and now I entered the supplementary information for him: PASDE6792035487.DOB09OCT67. The code PAS DE meant Passport Deutsch. The numerals were his passport number. DOB was date of birth, 10-09-67 on his Reisepass. The name on the passport, Efkemann, Heinz Jürgen, matched the name on the ticket, except for the spelling of Jürgen. No big deal. I knew the u with an umlaut was usually written as ue on tickets. I idly wondered if they could print out the umlaut on tickets issued in Germany. I could ask this guy, but in this line of work one did not ask too many irrelevant questions.

The kid was EFKEMANN/PETERMSTR and I put in the details from his Kinderausweis: PASDE2057644.DOB07AUG00. His color picture on the inside page showed him to be a beautiful baby, brownish hair topping a face more Visayan than Eurasian. It didn't seem jarring to me, because brown hair appeared in my family too, about once a generation...we got it from a friar or two somewhere in the family tree; a recessive gene, but one that popped up now and then: my sister's hair, jet black indoors, blazed with chestnut highlights in afternoon sunshine; my aunt had hair that was nearly auburn; my great-grandmother was supposed to have been a real blonde...my mind was wandering again. I wrenched it back to the present, to this little boy I was accepting for the flight, Master Peter Efkemann. I was glad to see they hadn't given him one of those uniquely German names like Dietmar, Detlev, Heinrich, or Wolfgang. Peter was a very German name, but it was also very Anglo, very American, very Filipino: a good international name.