Roosters, it turns out, do not crow only at the break of day. They crow pretty much whenever they feel like it, and they feel like it all the time. Sometimes roosters appear to spontaneously erupt into crowing competitions, avian versions of John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, louder and louder, crowing into the midnight darkness.
They are part of the cacophony that is Indonesia. Salatiga is relatively quiet, but even so, sounds here are constant and varied. At night I’ll hear the wooden alert of the Pos Ronda, our neighborhood guard booth (where I do my weekly duty), pounding out some sort of code – although my neighbor said everybody has forgotten what the codes are for things like “somebody died” or “watch out for the pyroplastic cloud from the volcano” so I think they are just striking it to make noise. During the day the bread guy drives by on his motorcycle, with one song, and then the ice cream guy, he’s got another song, and they are the same bread and ice cream songs everywhere in Indonesia– four or five notes, maddeningly the beginning of a song that never even gets properly started before it repeats itself. In Bandung, or Bali, or Flores, you know it’s ice cream coming down the street. Of course the call to prayer, which is simply background music for life here; on certain holidays this is non-stop. During Ramadan, at about four every morning, a group of men with drums and whistles would come walking around the neighborhood waking everyone up so they could eat before the sun came up; they were astoundingly loud, like a drum corps in your living room, and the first time I heard them I shot out of bed in a kind of panic. In the morning our guard Jefri sweeps the driveway with a stiff straw broom – loud and meticulous, resulting in a very clean driveway. Motorcycles, bus horns, music from the three-day-long weddings that are always held in the street in front of the house, loudspeakers on trucks offering goods and services - it's a noisy place to live.
Our neighbors, whom we love and who have been so kind to us, used to have a dog at their house (Fritsom, readers will remember) who barked a lot, but they have moved him to another house they have somewhere. We were so happy about that, but then our guard, Pak Jefri, showed up one day with a dog. He told us it was his dog, and we thought he was just bringing it by for a visit, but the dog moved in, sleeping in a room in the utility building behind our yard, cute, sort of, but as he grew he got louder and louder and louder. Every morning, about five o’clock or so, the dog would come out and bark for a while, or whine for a while, and then the room was too small, so the dog slept outside at night, chained up somewhere, whining and barking at all hours of the night.
I pretend to myself that I am a patient and laid-back person, but it’s an unsustainable ruse for me in the presence of a constantly barking dog. Though I can find the Indonesian wall of sound charming and even comforting (I know I’ll wake up in Bozeman at 4:45, wondering where the call to prayer is), the dog added no ambiance to the soundtrack. As I had with Fritsom, I became increasingly irritable, and would go out to talk to Jefri in the morning, always polite (you lead everything confrontational here with a “Maaf,” which means “I’m sorry.” Even the signs say, “I’m sorry, please don’t throw your trash in the river.”), though I got increasingly more visibly angry as the days turned into weeks and then into a couple of months. I like Jefri, and I didn’t want to get him in trouble, so I put off complaining to the landlady (I have to complain through her daughter, who is my colleague and friend at the University, because our landlady doesn’t speak English, which makes it a little more awkward). Finally, though, I contacted her and asked if they could make Jefri move the dog.
It turned out, I learned after several emails, that the dog was the landlady’s idea, there for security, because apparently the night guard and the locked gate are not secure enough. And they were very keen on keeping the dog, which led to an empty threat of us moving out of the rumah besar that is the landmark in the neighborhood. (When we meet new people, we can just say, “We live in that really big house” and point vaguely in the direction of the house – people say “oh, ya” and smile and nod because they know the house.) And they moved the dog, and I had to go back out to Jefri, this time leading with a sincere “maaf” because I had been directing my frustration to him, thinking the dog was his. It turns out he’s just as happy as we are to see the dog go, and I assured him that we felt safe enough with just him, and the gate (and the nine to midnight volunteer guard booth down the street). For almost a week now, no dog.
For a while, I was becoming open to the idea of eating dog, which is served in particular places here, but now that the one I had my eye on has left, I’m not so sure anymore.
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