A Voice in the Airports

2018/12/03

This is an English translation for “Suara di Bandara”, an Indonesian short story that appears in the newspaper Kompas on 2 December 2018. // Ini terjemahan bahasa Indonesia untuk “Suara di Bandara” karya Budi Darma yang terbit di Kompas, 2 Desember 2018. // Original text: here.

I wake up just as the plane is entering Hungary. In time, it will arrive in Amsterdam. This is what it means to be a publisher: I travel, I work on getting translations, I market the books in Europe, I trade in copyrights, I negotiate. And all this traveling, I can only do it once a year, sometimes once in two years.

But, in the last few months, because I keep hearing a woman’s voice in major airports, I try to travel more often. If I don’t do it often enough, they might change the voice recording with someone else’s. There’s no guarantee that their departure and arrival announcements will stay the same forever.

Airport announcents are usually voiced in English, German, French, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese; but that’s ordinary. When it’s voiced in Indonesian and ethnic Javanese, that’s extraordinary.

Her voice is soft but loud, calm but also hard, and every word intoned with just the right diction and punctuation to inspire confidence. Everything fits perfectly, as if all those languages are in her mother’s tongue.

I couldn’t believe it at first, but after hearing for a while, I was sure. The voice belongs to Sandra Liangsi, a student majoring in German Literature in UNESA, who one day disappeared entirely from her home and campus. People said she ran away, and that her parents followed after her, who knows where.

I used to go to the same school, majoring in English Literature, and it was how I knew a little bit about Sandra. She was beautiful, quick, brave, and happily insulted others. She had an oval-shaped face and when she smiled, two curves formed in her cheeks, making her look pretty even when that smile was a sneer that projected superiority.

When she was in college, Sandra was an important figure in our outdoor activity club. I’m sorry, but I didn’t know much about her until my sixth semester, because I worked part-time until my fifth semester, and I had to take three semesters off. I used to help sell vegetables in Keputran Market, I used to sell bread, I used to be a bouncer for the public bus, and at the end I was once a bus driver. I wasn’t just any bus driver, I was the best in the field during the times when Doctor Pumono Kasidi was mayor. Because of that position, I was hired by a pilgrimage agency to be a driver in Saudi Arabia for three months.

I had the worst times when I was working at Keputran, a vegetables market that opens at six in the evening and closes at five in the morning. Whether I like it or not, I was always sleepy, and if I fell asleep in class, Ms. Rimpun, a professor of mine who looked evil but was actually quite nice, would throw a chalk at my face: “Adlan, wash your face!”

I couldn’t take it, so I stopped working there and started selling bread. I picked up the bread from a bakery in Darmo Kali at a half past four in the morning. With a bicycle, I would ride through the towns every day, offering my fresh products.

The result was the same: sleepiness, I would come to class late, and sometimes I’d fell asleep in class. All the other students have the same idea: the longer I sleep, the better they’ll be, because then they can easily steal my bread. The end result was that I had my ears torn off everyday by the owner of the bakery. Under Ms. Rimpun, the other professors pooled enough money to pay back for all the bread that was stolen, which they gave me with teases and laughters.

And so, I did each of my job with good honest effort until I had enough money to live as a university student in the real meaning of the word. One day, when I was passing by the engineering faculty building, I saw a bunch of students crowding in one corner, watching Sandra’s prowess. With no equipments, she was climbing a massive tree. Once she’d reached the top, with an exaggerated flourish, she jumped to the top of the next tree over. Immediately at that moment, I signed myself up for the outdoor activity club.

Sandra gave us the basic training: inhaling through our nose, exhaling through our mouth, flexing ourselves in God knows how many ways, run forward, run backwards, jump, somersault, everything with a weight on our shoulder. The worst was when she made us scale the climbing wall in Gema building while carrying a heavy weight, and we had to do it faster than a gecko running up a wall.

She yelled at everyone, but she never treat them like idiots, except for me. She often threw me around like a wet blanket, and one day she whispered to me, “You’re an idiot! That’s it, I’m calling you Idiot. That’s your name now.”

Three months later, she was the leader for our training trip in the Pacet highlands, to anticipate for bad weather, rain, fog, muddy grounds, and chances of landslide, for two nights. We were provided with two large eight-wheeled trucks from the local military base, and from that moment on, I was worried. Trucks like these are supposed to be manned by one of the military, but she insisted that she be the one to drive the truck, and she forced me to take the other one. It was meant to insult me; she was sure as hell that I didn’t have a driver’s license.

When I told her that yes, in fact, I did have one, and when I showed her my international driver’s license, her face grew red as flames. The army drivers and I disagreed with her, but because she was clever with her words, we lost. The two army drivers were passengers, while Sandra and I were the drivers.

We started from campus during a heavy rainstorm streaked with thunder. All the roads reaching the highway were blocked by flood high enough to almost reach a grown man’s knee.

When we arrived at Pacet, she ignored every single thing the army drivers and I said to her. We knew where we were parking could be dangerous, but she didn’t care. She even told the two army drivers to go home, even though they refused.

On the first night, when nearly all the others were asleep and the weather was good, she asked me to sit with her, not far from the edge of the cliff, to watch the blinking of lamplights off in the distance.

“Hey, Idiot, I didn’t expect that you have an international license.”

I told her my story.

“So you’re an orphan?”

I didn’t answer, and she looked like she understood.

“If you need money, I can help you,” she said.

I refused.

“Idiot, don’t you feel like you loss something? I stole a book from your bag.”

“I know.”

“So you like Kafka, eh? Die Verwandlug.”

That’s the original title of The Metamorphosis. It was the book that was stolen.

The conversation was fun, but it had to end in a quarrel. I asked her to move the truck. She firmly refused.

The next night, disaster struck: most of the others were asleep, and all of a sudden, Sandra’s truck slipped backwards. It fell on the tent, and on those who were asleep inside it.

From that moment, she disappeared. The two army drivers and I were jailed for a month as a result.

Andre van Claver is already waiting for me in Amsterdam airport. When he hears Sandra’s voice recording in Javanese, he laughs, then says to me:

“You’re wise, Adlan, to choose this very special flight.”

“Yes. On 7 September 2004, in flight GIA 974, a human rights advocate, Munir Said Thalib, loss his life in Hungarian airspace on his way to Amsterdam. The director of Dutch Forensic Institute said he was poisoned. 460 miligram of Arsenik, enough to kill him. His flight number is the same. His flight route also.”

“If you want to publish Munir’s story, I can find someone to write it.”

“I just publish fiction, nothing else.”

“So we can publish his story as a novel, then?”

“Hand it to publishers who work with history books. I’ll have to think about it.”

On the day when I’m going to leave Amsterdam, I come to the airport in the morning, just to hear Sandra’s voice, despite the fact that my plane won’t fly until tonight.

In Hamburg I finish negotiation with two German publishers, and I meet A. Fuadi by chance, the writer of The Land of Five Towers, because he has just finished his dissertation in Hamburg University. He knows about the Indonesian voice in Hamburg airport, but because time is an issue, I can’t talk a lot with him about anything beside German culinary works.

At the end of my trip, for personal reasons, I fly to Prague, to see the hospital that was in The Metamorphosis, to see the museum that was once Kafka’s home, and the building of Dr. Faust, where he signed a deal with the devil Mephistopheles during the Middle Ages. Written in blood, the deal was so that for 23 years, Mephistopheles would be Dr. Faust’s slave, but after those 23 years had passed, Dr. Faust would be Mephisotpheles’s eternal slave. In the spirit world as a controller of the real world, Mephistopheles and Faust spread eternal evil. They were fought by Michael with his eternal power to spread good. And so, good will always fight evil in the real world.

I want to walk into the house where Kafka once lived, to imagine how Gregor’s father treated his son, and especially after his son transformed into an insect. In his essay “Brief an den Vater” Kafka told of how cruel his father was, and how scared he was to face him, as mirrored in The Metamorphosis.

Before running away, Sandra once told me that, when one day she reaches Prague, she will spread flowers on the grave of a crazy wman named Felice. She was puzzled as to why Felice would take Kafka as a lover, who was at the time a failed writer, a sufferer of bloody fever, constipation, abscess, and insomnia.

I am sitting in a café not far from the statue of Kafka, and I see a crowd of tourists from the Baltic, accompanied by two female guides. One at the front, one at the back. They are carrying three flags chained into one, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, while shouting commands at their charge.

I know. The woman at the front, is none other than Sandra, and my mind is flung to a time long ago, when her truck rolled backwards, fell on the tents, and killed my friend.