BEST PHILIPPINE SHORT STORIES: THE DOLL

THE DOLL
by Egmidio Enriquez

THE was christened Narciso and his mother called him Sising. But when be took a fancy to his mother’s old rag dolls which she preserved with moth balls for the little girls she had expected to have, his father decided to call him Boy. His father was excessively masculine, from the low broad forehead and the thick bushy brows to the wide cleft chest and the ridged abdomen beneath it; and the impotence of his left leg which rheumatic attacks had rendered almost useless only goaded him to assert his maleness by an extravagant display of superiority.
“We’ll call him Boy. He is my son. A male. The offspring of a male.” Don Endong told his wife in a tone as crowy as a rooster’s after pecking a hen. “A man is fashioned by heredity and environment. I’ve given him enough red for his blood, but a lot of good it will do him with the kind of environment you are giving him. That doll you gave him—”
“I didn’t give him that doll,” Doña Enchay explained hastily. “He happened upon it in my aparador when I was clearing it. He took pity on it and drew it out. He said it looked very unhappy because it was naked and lonely. He asked me to make a dress for it—”
“And you made one. You encouraged him to play with it,” he accused her.
Doña Enchay looked at her husband embarrassedly. “I had many cuttings, and I thought I’d make use of them,” she said brushing an imaginary wisp of hair from her forehead. It was still a smooth forehead, clean swept and unlined. It did not match the tired look of her eyes, nor the droop of her heavy mouth.
Don Endong saw the forehead and the gesture, took in the quiver of the delicate nostrils and the single dimple on her cheek. “You are such a child yourself, Enchay,” he told her. “You still want to play with dolls. That is why, I suppose, you refuse to have your son’s hair cut short. You’ll make a sissy out of him!” His eyes hardened, and a pulse ticked under his right ear. “No, I will not allow it,” he said struggling to his feet with his cane and shouting, “Boy! Boy! Boy!”
His wife leapt forward to assist him, but as he steadied himself on his cane she couldn’t touch him. Even in his infirmity she could not give him support. His eyes held her back, melted her strength away, reminded her she was only a woman—the weaker, the inferior, the dependent. She felt like a flame in the wind that had frantically reached out for something to burn and having found nothing to feed itself on, settled back upon its wick to burn itself out. She watched him struggle to the window.
When he had reached it and laid his cane on the sill, she moved close to him and passed an arm around his waist. “The curls will not harm him, Marido,” she said. “They are so pretty. They make him look like the little boys in the story books. Remember the page boys at the feet of queen? His hair does not make him a girl. He looks too much like you. That wide thin-lipped mouth and that stubborn chin, and that manly chest—why you yourself say he has a pecho de paloma.”
Don Endong’s mouth twitched at one corner, looking down at her, he passed an arm across her back and under an arm. His hand spread out on her body like a crab and taking a handful of her soft flesh kneaded it gently. “All right, mujer,” he said, “but not the doll!” And he raised his voice again. “Boy! Boy! Boy!”
The boy was getting the doll ready for bed in the wigwam of coconut fronds he had built in the yard below. The doll was long, slender, rag-bodied with a glossy head of porcelain. He had pulled off its frilly, ribbon trimmed dress, and was thrusting its head into a white cotton slip of a garment that his mother had made and was a little too tight. His father’s stentorian voice drew his brows together. At whom was his father shouting now? His father was always shouting and fuming. He filled the house with his presence, invalid though he was. How could his mother stand him?
“Boy! Boy! Boy!” came his father’s voice again.
Ripping the cotton piece from the head of the doll where the head was caught, he flung the little garment away, and picking up the doll walked hastily towards the house.
His father and mother met him at the head of the stairs. He looked at his father’s angry face and said without flinching: “Were you calling me, Father? My name is not Boy!”
“It is Boy from now on,” his father told him. “That will help you to remember that you are a boy. A boy, understand?”
His father looked ugly when he was mad, but he was not afraid of him. He never beat him. He only cursed and cursed. “I don’t understand, why?” he asked.
“Because little boys don’t play with dolls,” Don Endong thundered at him, “that’s why!” And snatching the doll from the boy, Don Endong flung it viciously to the floor.
Boy was not prepared for his father’s precipitate move. He was not prepared to save his doll. One moment it was cradled snugly in the crook of his arm. The next it was sprawled on the floor, naked, and broken, an arm twisted limp beneath it, another flung across its face. as if to hide the shame of its disaster. Suddenly it was as if he were the doll. There was a broken feeling within him. The blood crept up his face and pinched his ears. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t move. He could only stare and stare until his mother taking him in her arms cradled his head between her breasts.

ONE day in May his mother came home from a meeting of the “Marias” at the parish rectory in a flurry of excitement. Our Lady of Fatima was coming to town. The image from Portugal was making a tour of the Catholic world and was due in town the following week. Doña Enchay had been unanimously elected chairman of the reception committee. ‘‘What shall I do? What shall I do?” she kept saying.
“To be sure, mujer, I don’t know,” Don Endong told her. “Ask the Lady herself. She’ll tell you. maybe.
“Endong! you mustn’t speak that way of Our Lady of Fatima.” she told him in as severe a tone as she dared. “She’s milagrosa. haven’t you heard how she appeared on the limb of a tree before three little children—”
“Oh, yes! Also the countless novenas you have said in my behalf.”
“Ah,. Endong, it is your lack of faith, I’m sure. If you would only believe! If you would at least keep your peace and allow Our Lady to help you in her own quiet way, maybe—” She sighed.
He couldn’t argue with her when she was suppliant. There was something about feminine weakness which he couldn’t fight. He kept his peace.
But not the boy.
It was like the circus coming to town and he had to know all about the strange Lady. He and his mother kept up an incessant jabber about miracles and angels and saints the whole week through. Boy easily caught his mother’s enthusiasm about the great welcome as he tagged along with her on her rounds every day requesting people living along the route the procession was to take from the air port to the cathedral to decorate their houses with some flags, or candles. or paper lanterns… She fondly suggested paper buntings strung on a line across the street. “Arcos” she called them.
“Don’t deceive yourself,” Don Endong told her. “You know they’re more like clothes-lines than anything else. Does the Lady launder?”
“Que Dos te perdone, Endong!” Doña Enchay exclaimed, crossing herself and looking like she was ready to cry.
Boy wondered why his father loved to taunt his mother about her religious enthusiasm. Sometimes he himself could not help but snicker over the jokes his father made. Like when Mr. Wilson’s ice plant siren blew the hour of twelve and the family was having lunch. His mother would bless herself and intone aloud: “Bendita sea la Hora en que Nuestra Señora del Pilar vino en carne mortal a Zaragoza,” and begin a Dios te Salve. His father would ostentatiously bend over the platter of steaming white rice in the center of the table and watch it intently until someone inquired, “What is it?” Then he would reply, “I want to see by how many grains the rice has increased in the platter.” If Boy had not seen his father’s picture as a little boy dressed in white with a large silk ribbon on one arm and a candle twined with tiny white flowers in one hand, he would think maybe, he was a protestante—like that woman his mother and he happened upon one day on their rounds.
The woman had met them on the stairs of her house and said to his mother: “The Lady of Fatima did you say, Ñora? You mean some woman like you and me, or your little girl here,” pointing at him, “with such pretty hair, who can talk, and walk. and laugh. and cry?” His mother retreated fanning herself frantically and flapping the cola of her black saya. “To be sure she can’t, but she stands as the symbol of one who can!” she explained with difficulty as though a fish bone was caught in her throat. He hated the woman for making his mother feel that way, and on the last rung of the steps vindictively spat her error at her: “I am not a girl. I’m a boy! A boy! You don’t know anything!”
When they arrived home he told his mother he wanted his hair cut short. “1 don’t want the Lady of Fatima to mistake me for a girl like the Protestant woman,” he told his mother.
“But Our Lady knows you are a boy. Her Son tells her. Her Son is all knowing.” But Boy threw himself on the floor and started to kick. “I want my hair cut! I want my hair cut!” he screamed and screamed.

THE Lady came on a day that threatened rain. The brows of the hills beyond the rice fields were furious with clouds. The sun cowered out of sight and the Venerable Peter dragged his cart across the heavens continuously drowning all kinds of human utterances—religious, profane, ribald, humorous, sarcastic-from the milling crowd gathered at the air port to see the Lady of Miracles arrive. There were the colegialas in their jumpers and cotton stockings, the Ateneo band and cadets in khaki and white mittens, the Caballeros de Colon with their paunches and their bald heads, the Hijas de Maria with their medals, the Apostolados with their scapulars, the Liga de Mujeres with their beads… there was no panguingue, nor landay, nor poker sessions anywhere in town; nor chapu, nor talang, nor tachi in the coconut groves, for even the bootblacks and the newsboys and the factory boys were there to see the great spectacle. Even Babu Sawang, the Moro woman who fried bananas for the school children. was there, for was not Our Lady of Fatima a Mora like herself, since Fatima was a Moro name?
But when the heavens broke open and rain came tearing down, the people scampered for shelter like chickens on the approach of a hawk. All but a few old women and the priests and the bishop and Doña Enchay and Boy hung on to the Lady on her flowered float intoning hymns and repeating aves.
The bishop laid a hand on Boy’s head and Boy immediately shot up into manhood. His chest filled out, his arms grew thick, and his strides stretched as long as the giant’s of the seven-league boots. He felt a thousand eyes leveled at him, and he gathered those eyes and wore them on his breast as a hero wears his medals in a parade. “You are a brave little boy,” the bishop told him. “Our Lady must be well pleased with you.
Boy took a look at the Lady. She was smiling brightly through tears of happiness. Her eyes spilled water of love, her lips dropped freshets of sweetness. And her checks—they were dew-filled calyxes of kindly care. Suddenly, he was seized with a great thirst. His lips felt cracked and his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. An urgent longing to drink possessed him. He felt he should drink, drink. drink-of the Lady’s eyes, of the Lady’s lips, of the Lady’s cheeks…

AS he grew older his thirst intensified. He felt he should drink also from the cup of her breast, from the hollow of her hands, from the hem of her trailing white gown, from the ends of each strand of her long brown tresses. But when he approached his Lady at various shrines in the town chapel, whether she had a serpent at her feet, a child in her arms, or beads in her hands, his cracking lips climbed no higher than her pink and white toes and his thirst was quenched.
When he was nineteen and graduated from high school, he told his mother he wanted to take Our Lady for a bride. “Que dicha!” his mother said. “To wed the Mother of God. To be a priest and sing her glorias forever. Que dicha!”
But his father said: “A priest? Is that all you will amount to—a sissy, a maricon, a half-man? I’d rather you died. I’d rather I died!”
It was night, and late, when the household was making ready to turn in. The feeble light of a single electric bulb lit the veranda where Boy stood facing his father in his wicker chair; but the yellow light was flat on the boy’s face and Don Endong saw that it was a dead mask except for the eyes which held a pointed brilliance. The boy’s voice was as taut as the string of an instrument that is about to snap. “The priesthood is the noblest profession on earth. Father,” he said. “It is the most manly, too. One who is master of himself, who can leash the lust of his loins to the eye of the spirit. is indeed the man! A man is not measured by the length of his limbs and the breadth of his chest or the depth of his voice, but by the strength of his mind, the depth of his courage, the firmness of his will!”
“God gave you the body of a male to do the functions of a male—not to hide under a skirt!” Don Endong goaded him.
Boy gripped the back of a chair until the knuckles turned white. Sweat broke out on his forehead and a trembling seized his frame.
“Strike! Strike your father! Raise your hand against the man who was man enough to give you the figure of a man!”
“Boy! Boy!” His mother’s voice pierced through his clouding mind, unnerving him, leaving him strengthless. Suddenly, he couldn’t look his father in the face. His mother’s wail followed him as he fled into the night.

ON the little deserted and unlighted dock where the wind was carefree and all was still except for the muffled cry of a hadji in the distant Moro village and the mournful beat of an agong, Boy faced the night and the sea He flung his eyes to the stars above and gave his body up to the wind to soothe…
Fingers touched him lightly on the shoulder, a little nervously, like birds about to take flight at the least sign of danger. Fingers dipped into his sensitive flesh, and melted into the still pounding rivers of his blood. A strong. sweetly pungent scent invaded his nostrils, and his heart picked tip the beat of the distant agong.
“What do you want with me?” he asked the woman without turning around. He had not sensed her coming. She could have sprung like Venus from the foam of the sea—but there she was, and her perfume betrayed her calling.
Her hand dropped from his shoulder to the bulge of his biceps. “You are a large man. You are very strong. And you are lonely,” she said.
Her voice was cool as water from a jar and soft as cotton. And it had a sad tingle. He checked a rough rebuke. Who was he to condemn her for what she was? Had not Christ said to the men outside the city walls who were about to stone the adulterous woman, ‘‘Let him among you that is without sin cast the first stone”?’
He looked up into her face. Stars were beating in her eyes. And on her wet lips were slumbering many more. Her arms were long and white and slender like fragrant azucenas unfolding in the night…
“Yes, I am strong, and I’m lonely,” he said. “And I’m a man. A big man,” he added almost angrily, “am I not?”
“Oh, but of course,” she said. “I can see that. and I can feel that!”
And fragrant azucenas folded about him in the night.

HE opened his eyes in total darkness. He couldn’t see his hand before him, but the air was thick around him, and he had a feeling he was trapped in a narrow place. He flung an arm out and the body of a woman slithered under his arm. She turned toward him and her breath pushed into his face. He raised himself on his elbow for air. The woman stretched herself awake, and slowly a long clammy coil like the sinuous body of the serpent at the feet of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception in her shrine in the town church began to close around his neck. His flesh crawled. With a quick movement he caught the coil in a strong grip, twisting it.
The hoarse cry of a woman lashed out and cracked the stillness of the night. A mouth found his shoulder and sharp vicious teeth sank into his flesh. The stinging pain sent a shiver through the length of his long frame. but he hung on to the squirming limb, squeezing and twisting it… until the clamor of angry voices, and a splintering crash, and a sudden flood of light burst upon him…
Lying at his feet before him was a woman, naked and broken. But a short while before, under the sheet of night, she was cradled in his arms, receiving the reverence of his kisses. Now, under the eye of light, she was but a limp mass of woman flesh, sprawled grotesquely on the floor, an upper limb twisted behind her another flung across her face as if to hide the shame of her disaster.
Two men grabbed him and dragged him out into the street. Angry cries and curses followed him. But as he felt the clean air of morning sweep against his face, his chest filled out, his arms grew thick, and his sturdy legs stretched long like the giant’s of the seven-league boots

BEST PHILIPPINE SHORT STORIES: THE DEVIL IN THE DETAILS

THE DEVIL IN THE DETAILS

by Carlos 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.

ONE had to anticipate how things would be at the destination, in this case Frankfurt. From the German point of view the two males, holders of German passports, would be natives coming home; no problems there. It was different for the woman. As a Philippine passport holder, she would be a visiting alien. Here I had to be careful. If Frankfurt found this one inadmissible, she would be deported and the airline would be fined five thousand Deutschmarks. They wouldn’t deduct that amount from my salary but an investigation would be launched, explanations would have to be submitted, and I would probably wind up getting a week’s suspension. A week’s pay for me wasn’t quite DM5000, but it was hefty enough.

For EFKEMANN/CHERILYNMS I typed in PASPHZZ395624. The passport had been issued in Cebu on February 20, 1998. Philippine passports were valid for five years, and hers would expire in 2003: good enough. As a general rule, anyone going to a foreign country had to have at least six months’ validity left in his passport.

After doing DOB24AUG75 I glanced at her to check if she was indeed 26 going on 27. She actually looked somewhat younger, but it had to be because she was a very lovely girl. I noticed the passport had been issued to Dayonot, Cherilyn Hawak, place of birth Talibon, Bohol. I turned to page 4 and sure enough the amendment was there: a change of name from Dayonot to Efkemann due to marriage to Efkemann, Heinz Jurgen, on 28 January 2000. The DFA official who signed the amendment hadn’t put the umlaut over the u in Jürgen, but I supposed he had merely copied the name from the marriage contract. If the wedding had been in Bohol there was little chance an umlaut would have appeared on that marriage certificate.

There would be a German visa inside that passport, I knew. I didn’t think it would be the one called the Aufenhaltsberechtigung, as I knew that kind of visa got issued only to foreigners who had been in Germany for some time. It was roughly the German equivalent of the American green card: it had no expiry date, and it doubled as a work permit. I had no idea how the word Aufenhaltsberechtigung translated, only that people who had that visa could speak German very well and knew their way around the country.

Perhaps her visa would be the Aufenhaltserlaubnis. This one had an expiration date, found in the space after gültig bis (“valid until”). In many cases, instead of a date there would be the word unbefristet. This meant something like “indefinite” and was what I most often saw on the visas of Filipinas married to Germans. This unbefristet was usually written on the visa in longhand, by someone with a Teutonic scrawl.

There were entry and exit stamps showing she had been to Hong Kong and Taipei but I barely glanced at those; they were irrelevant. She had an expired visa for Dubai with corresponding entry/exit stamps: she must have been an OFW not too long ago, but this too was none of my concern. When I found it, her German visa was the Schengen Staten type, which is valid for only a few months. All right, this probably meant she was going to Germany for the first time. Married three years and never yet been to her husband’s homeland? A question for the curious, but one I did not ask; it wasn’t politic to ask too many impertinent questions in this business.

Unlike the Aufenhalstserlaubnis, which was valid as soon as it was issued, the Schengen Staten visa did not become valid until a certain date, which might be a month or more from its date of issuance. The words to look for were gültig vom and gültig bis, “valid from” and “valid until.” On Cherilyn’s visa I saw a gültig für Schengener Staten, then below that a vom 04-05-02, which was tomorrow’s date, and a bis 07-07-02, which was months away in the future, as the expiration date should be.

So now the entry for EFKEMANN/CHERILYNMS was PASPHBB335622.DOB08 JAN 75.VISD13581677. The visa number belonged more or less to the same series I had seen on other Schengen Staten visas. Everything about this visa looked and felt authentic, down to the imprinted curlicues and the holograph.

Efkemann had waited in silence as I pounded the computer keys but now, from the amount of time I had spent scrutinizing the visa, he must have thought I looked unsure of the German words in it.

“Issued yesterday,” he said, “by ze Cherman Embassy in Manila.”

“Sus, kapoya gyud uy,” said Cherilyn. “We flew back from Manila last night, and now we are flying off again. Give us seats near the front, won’t you? I get seasick when I sit at the back, and Singapore to Frankfurt is such a long flight.”

“Ja, ja,” said Efkemann, “give us seats by ze emerchency exit. I haf fery long legs.”

Today was April 4; by the time their connecting flight landed in Frankfurt it would be early in the morning of April 5, the first day Cherilyn’s visa was valid. That was all right, then. I couldn’t assign them to seats in any of the exit rows, as they had a child with them. Safety regulations required that only able-bodied adults be put in those rows. Nor could I put them in front, as all the seats there were taken. I would have to explain these things tactfully and put them where I could.

An itch in my groin bothered me. I pushed the irritation away from the forefront of my consciousness and concentrated on the task at hand. Had I missed anything? Was there something not quite right? I was glad Cherilyn was a very poised young lady. I had been nonchalant, and so had she. I had never seen her before. She had never seen me before. I was just the guy at the counter and she was just another passenger...

They were all passengers: veteran travellers, first timers, it was always passengers and more passengers. Every day I sat there and took on long lines of passengers: rich tourists, backpackers, businessmen, contract workers, domestic helpers, emigrants, nuns, monks, refugees, laissez-passiers, diplomats, envoys, mercenaries; Sikhs, Arabs, Orthodox Jews, Amish, Hottentots, Lapps, Australian aborigines; Koreans, Czechs, Rwandans, Turks, Brazilians, Swedes, Zambians, Greeks...I had seen them all, I would see many more of them tomorrow, it was all one long line, stretching on across the years I had spent in this job, an endless line that snaked around the globe, passengers joining the line in Timbuktu and Xanadu and Cuzco and Urumqi and inching forward until one day they reached me at the counter...

THE difference between the American and the European styles of writing dates all in numbers was what had been bothering me. Only now did I remember that a date written as 01-02-03 would mean January 2, 2003 to an American, but would be read as 01 February 2003 by a European. I for that matter would tend to read it as January 2, as I had learned this shortcut for writing dates in elementary school, and it was the American system that had been taught to us.

I looked at the visa again. Of course, why hadn’t I seen it before? The gültig für Schengener Staten vom 04-05-02 did not mean April 5; it meant 04 May. I had been blind. I had wanted to see a visa that would become valid only a few hours before its holder entered German airspace. I had trusted Efkemann: like any methodical German, he would have made sure everything was in order. If their flight would bring them to Frankfurt on April 5, his wife’s visa would be valid on April 5. Unthinkable for it not to be.

Yet there it was, staring me right in the face, gültig vom 04-05-02, and it seemed the height of silliness to point it out, but this visa was definitely not in order. No doubt about it. The German immigration officer who would be looking at this visa in Frankfurt would interpret 04-05-02 as 04 Mai and inform Herr Efkemann that Frau Efkemann’s visa was not valid, would not be valid for another month, and very sorry about this, mein Herr, but we are only doing our duty. We must deport her.

My finger was about to hit ENTER but now I desisted. I would have to break the information to them as succinctly as I could. You just did not pussyfoot around a German. You had to come right to the point.

“Very sorry, Herr Efkemann,” I said, “but this visa is not yet valid. It will be valid on May fourth, a month from now.”

I showed it to him.

He did not say anything. He took the passport and peered at the visa. Then, handing the passport to Cherilyn, he stepped off to the side and whipped out a cell phone. Soon he was talking in rapid German.

“It’s a mistake!” Cherilyn said. “We told the people at the Embassy we had a booking for April 4, we would arrive in Germany on April 5! Susmariosep, I’m sure somebody inverted those numbers!”

Germans, I reflected, obeyed traffic lights and all kinds of signs. That one there had seen a sign that said gültig vom 04-05-02, and it never occurred to him that it should not be obeyed. Filipinos on the other hand always looked for exemptions, for a way out. This one in front of me was trying to put it all down to some clerical error.

I went to apprise my supervisor of the situation. When he came out with me, Efkmann was still talking on his phone. We waited for him to finish.

“Gott in Himmel,” he muttered as he put the phone back into his pocket.

“Mr. Efkemann?” my supervisor began, “Very sorry, but we cannot check in Mrs. Efkemann all the way to Frankfurt. We could check her in, but up to Singapore only. Do you still want to take the flight? Maybe it would be better if you rebook for May 3 or 4.”

He was outlining the options. None of those scenarios had been in this family’s mind a few minutes ago. But the German, I could see, was adjusting his thinking to the changed situation as quickly as anyone could.

“It’s those Filipina office workers at the German Embassy,” Cherilyn said. “They must have mixed up the date. We told them we were leaving April 4, nicht wahr, mein schatz?”

I didn’t know about that. I had a couple of friends who had been to Germany; if I understood it right, there was a space in the visa application form where one filled in one’s desired date of entry in DD/MM/YR form. In most cases the Embassy, if it could, simply gave you what you wanted. Was that the most likely explanation, then? That Cherilyn herself had mixed up the date? She had gone to school in Bohol: she must have learned to write dates in number format the American way. The confounded date was a dumb mistake, but quite natural in this context. I might have made the same mistake myself, and the chances were I wouldn’t have noticed it until it was too late to do anything about it.

What Cherilyn did not fully appreciate was that Germans would follow the letter of the law in things like this. It would be of no moment that some silly mistake had been made; what had been written was written and that was that. She seemed to be holding on to the hope that a spoken word from some German Embassy official would make everything all right and they could then get on the flight and reach Frankfurt to find the mistake smoothed over. She looked at her husband expectantly.

“Ach, to make in ze visa a refision ve must haf to go to ze Cherman Embassy in Manila, ja? No, I zink ve must rebook.”

“Very well, Mr. Efkemann,” said my supervisor, “would you come inside the office please? We will rebook your tickets now.”

CHERILYN remained in front of me at the counter, her little boy in her arms; most of the booked passengers had checked in by now and gone on to the Immigration counters.

“That’s probably what happened,” I said. “Some Filipino wrote April 4 the Filipino way.”

“God, how dumb. And it turns out to be May 4 to the Germans.”

“Yeah, all of them in Europe write it that way.”

“Oh, I guess we were dummies, too. We looked at the visa when we got it yesterday, but we never saw that. Jürgen should have seen it. I don’t know why he didn’t. But we were in a hurry. We had to catch the flight back to Cebu.”

“Things like that, everything looks okay...until you read the fine print.”

“Bitaw, ma-o gyud! It’s the fine print that gets you every time. The devil is in the details.”

“Handsome boy you’ve got there. Takes after the father, doesn’t he?”

“Hoy, abi nimo, when he came out I was relieved to see he had light hair. Up until that moment I was afraid he might take after you.”

“Well, he didn’t, did he?”

“He’s got your eyes.”

“Yeah, I can see that.”

“But it’s his hair that clinches it. Your hair’s black. His is brown.”

“Right. I guess that’s the clincher all right.”

“No doubt about it.”

There was no point in mentioning that brown hair popped up in my family every now and then. That would be the height of silliness. In this business, one did not say too many unnecessary things.