That afternoon, while Matthew slept, his uncle came to the house. He was a tall, imposing man dressed in a jacket and tie. Ani had spoken to him before only in passing, but when Mas opened the door, it did not surprise her to see him, awkward and dignified on the front steps. Mas invited him in. They went together to the sitting room.
“Matthew is resting, I hope.”
“Yes,
datuk
,” Ani said.
His uncle nodded. He and Mas talked of other things, of the primary school and the construction of a new gymnasium on the grounds.
Ani’s attention was distracted by the sounds drifting in from outside, the children running between the houses, their voices rising and falling with the momentum of their game.
At last, he turned to Ani, and what he had come to say was finally in the open. “Matthew should go to Tawau as soon as he is able. He does not belong in Sandakan.” He paused, looking at her. She thought she saw pity in his eyes, a feeling of compassion. “I have said all this to him already. I suspect he knows it is true.”
Her body tensed, and she kept her hands clasped in her lap.
Mas said softly but firmly, “They are adults now. We cannot make their choices for them.”
“They are acting like children,” he said. “And they must let go of it.”
In her confusion, his words seemed to lose their meaning. She reached for an answer that would not come. “He has only just returned here.”
“He is ill,” his uncle said. “And he need not be.” He began to describe Sydney and Melbourne, where young people from across Southeast Asia were being trained as doctors and engineers. When they returned home to their countries, they would bring with them a sea change.
She did not know how to respond to him, how to explain what he was asking of her. She said perhaps she could go with Matthew, they could travel to Australia together.
“No, Ani,” Mas said. “Immigration is strict. That is not possible.”
The silence seemed to stretch on for minutes until, finally, Matthew’s uncle stood, preparing to go.
“In the end, the decision belongs to you both,” he said. “But I am only thinking of Matthew’s future. All I ask is that you do the same.”
The next day, Ani went alone to the hospital clinic. An hour passed, and then another, as she sat in the waiting room. Beside her, a young woman drowsed, her baby sheltered in a sling tight against her chest, fast asleep. The doctor who eventually examined Ani, an elderly Chinese man, was hurried, preoccupied. He gave her the results of her test, saying that her baby was due in seven months. Then he smiled, congratulated her, and left the room to see his next patient. Ani sat in the room, unable, for a time, to stand and walk into the afternoon heat.
She remembered being underwater with Lohkman. How the glare of the world had disappeared, softened by the water. She had taken a breath, then dived straight down, exhaling, air escaping from her lips. Her body had sunk towards the sea floor, moving among the crevices of rock and the waving vegetation. There was a puffer fish that Lohkman had captured in his hands, rolling it through the water like a child’s toy. He wanted her to listen for the shoals of fish, to learn this talent that he himself had acquired. But all she heard was a dull roar, every sound blurred and inseparable. She wondered if her child would soon be able to hear her voice through the echo chamber of her body, if it would be able to distinguish it from all the others – just as in dreams she heard her own mother, one voice rising from the din, calling to her across the divide, telling her to let go, to stop searching backwards. You cannot save us, she said. You cannot change our fate. The past is done.
Outside, the light, the brightness of the sky, caused her to stumble, and she grabbed hold of a railing for support. An elderly man, standing on the steps, offered his umbrella to shade her from the sun, but she shook her head, recovering. She went slowly out into the road and turned in the direction of home.
So she was the one who began it, who turned their conversation in another direction. On a beach west of town, they walked together along the empty sand. In the distance, she could see the red hills of Berhala Island, the currents sweeping past, the tide curling against the shore. She said that now, after all these years, she was finally ready to leave Sandakan, to go to her mother’s family.
His face, when he looked at her, shook her resolve. She saw his confusion giving way to fear. “When did you decide? Why have you decided this now?”
The words caught in her throat, but she forced herself to speak them aloud. “If things were different, if there was nothing to hold you here in Sandakan, what would you do?”
He refused to answer, but she would not relent. He shook his head. “Nothing has changed for me.”
“But Australia.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
The tide was going out, and it left a smooth plain of sand at their feet. This was the future, she said. He would stay in Sandakan, on the plantation, and they would never be free. Perhaps they could go to Australia together, find the way to begin a different life. But the love that she felt for him could not be separated from the childhood they shared; it could not admit forgetting. The words seemed to come from far away. “I won’t let this happen to us,” she said.
He took her hand, trying to draw her towards him, but she pulled back. “What is happening, Ani?” He asked if she truly meant to leave, to not return.
She felt cold, a chill radiating through her limbs. “I didn’t realize it for so long. I thought as you did. But what we wanted is not possible.” She struggled to keep her voice steady, but tears stung her eyes. “Our parents would not wish us to be bound by the past.”
“I know you, Ani. Something has changed you.”
She shut her ears to the disbelief in his voice, to her own grief. She told him that they were alike, two pieces of the same puzzle, but in the end, if you laid them down beside each other, you’d see an empty space, the jagged edges. And in this space, she knew there was no oxygen, no relief. It was a place they had made together when they were children. They had filled it with all the things they wanted to forget, a landscape of craters and bodies. She said that their feelings for one another had blinded them to the truth, what lay between them was too far-reaching, too vast. They could not hold it or push it down.
Some part of her was spinning loose, split open. She got to her feet and began to walk away from him.
He followed her, calling her name, and finally she turned and shouted at him to leave her, to let her alone. At the sudden noise, birds lifted up around them, fluttering up into the trees. He stared after her, shocked. But she continued along the beach to the harbour, where the last of the night boats were heading away from the shore.
As she walked, the water ran across her feet, and she imagined the tide sliding under her, pulling her away from Sandakan, this life and the pain that she kept adding to, as if she could bear any sacrifice, any tragedy, as if the war had made her strong enough to survive all that the future necessitated. She listened for Matthew’s footsteps coming across the wet sand, coming to join her, but all she heard was the tide and the trees, the nightjars and insects.
These years in Jakarta have not changed the longing she feels. Sometimes, now, falling asleep, she imagines a different ending. One in which she stands up from the sand and she tells him the truth. Everything that she set in motion that night, the words that can never be taken back, comes to rest. Life moves in reverse. She tells him that she will go to Tarakan, she will wait for him to return from Australia. When we find one another again, we will know how to continue.
Tonight, after a light supper of rice and vegetables, Ani changes her son into his pyjamas, and they go downstairs to begin her shift in the photo studio.
Across the street, the Pondok Restaurant is overflowing, and the reflections of the neon signs flash slowly against the walls of the studio. Holding Wideh’s hand, Ani unlocks the door, and they make their way through the foyer. The office is quiet. There are plastic covers on the telephone and typewriter to protect them from dust, and the curtains are tightly drawn. In the developing room, the day’s prints are hanging neatly along several lines, and a dozen film canisters sit waiting on the counter.
Ani makes a place for Wideh on the tiled floor, opening blankets and fluffing cushions, then she lays him down. He is three years old already, and he smiles up at her, repeating the word
Ibu
, “Mother,” playing with the sound until the word is lost amidst a jumble of different noises.
Each evening, she works here, in the darkroom, developing rolls of negatives. In the day, someone else will come and use the enlarger to transform these negatives into prints, but this first step is hers. In the dark, Ani takes the lid off the first canister, removes the film spool and cuts it free. Feeling for the guides, she loads the film onto the tank reel. Only when this is secure, and the lid is firmly in place, does she reach her hand out and switch on the developing lamp.
Ani has never taken a photograph. All she knows of the process is this one part, but she knows it well. When, at Saskia’s recommendation and with no experience, she had come to Frank Postma looking for work in the studio he owned, she had come halfheartedly, expecting little. Perhaps some evening shifts cleaning and tidying the office, she had suggested. But that was not what he wanted, he told her, first in fluent Malay, then switching to English, sometimes forgetting himself and lapsing into Dutch. “I need help,” he had said, waving his arms at the stacks of film. “And Saskia spoke so highly of you.”
He had served coffee, and, sitting in the studio, Ani told him that she had met Saskia and Siem Dertik in 1953, on the outer decks of the boat that had carried them to Jakarta. Ani had been on her way from Tarakan, where the last of her mother’s family remained. From there, she had felt the wish to be a part of something greater, to lose herself in the city, and so she had continued to Jakarta.
“People come here from all over the world,” he had said. “It’s a good place to begin again.” He set down his coffee and opened box after box of photographs. Pictures of Dutch families released from internment camps, Balinese dancers, canals shining like ribbons in the field. “Light on surface,” he had said. “Most of the time, to each other, all we are is light on surface.”
Then he had taken her into the developing room and shown her, as if it were no more difficult than preparing a meal, how to measure the chemicals, remove the film, soak and rinse it, then hang the finished negatives to dry.
In the corner of the studio now, Wideh raises his arms above him, turning his hands from side to side, delighting in the movement. While she works, Ani talks to herself and to him, walking herself through the steps. Start the timer, pour the developer, tap the container lightly on the counter. Agitate the contents and never lose track of the time.
She is at home in this studio, protected for a brief while from her memories, from the chaos and uncertainty of Jakarta. Studying the row of negatives, she follows the trajectory of the photographer’s gaze. She travels beside him as he feels his way through the scene like a child in a darkened room.
At midnight, long after Wideh has fallen asleep, she is finally finished. The negatives are pinned on a line, and she dries each carefully with a small sponge. Picking up a magnifying glass, Ani examines the work. There are pictures of Indies families posed in front of their former plantations, the men dressed in Western slacks and shirts, the women in
kain
and
kebaya
. She cannot read their faces, they have taken care to cloak their emotions. But in one, there is a boy caught unaware. He stands at a gate that is closed to him, his entire body yearning towards the house.
She knows that these photographs, once printed, will be carefully wrapped, then tucked within soft materials and laid inside a piece of luggage. She has been doing the very same for Saskia. In some distant country, taken out and looked at again, these photographs will become the shadow that follows them, the past that never changes, that never disappears. When all other memories fade, these, at least, will not be lost.
When she left Sandakan, she brought almost nothing. Arriving in Tarakan, Ani had been two months pregnant. Bashir, her mother’s oldest brother, was dying, and all the other family had scattered during the war years. If that is what you want, he had told her, go to Jakarta. He gave her the money and family keepsakes that remained. All our young people now, he said, are taking their dreams to the city. He brought her to the local magistrate, signing a declaration that her parents had been born here, in the former Dutch East Indies. When she left Tarakan, she had in her possession documents attesting to her Indonesian citizenship. She had, in some way, come home at last.
Ani lifts her son from the cushions and he wakes up, momentarily, reaching out to touch her face with one small hand. Then, sighing, his eyelids flutter, blink, and slowly close again.
With his body warm against hers, she leaves the studio, locking the door behind her. She climbs up the stairs to the apartment where they live. Inside, by the light of the street lamps, she lays him down and tucks the mosquito net around the edges of his cot.
Ani stretches out on the divan in the corner of the room, and eventually, as her mind lets go of the day, the street outside grows quiet, the traffic begins to lessen, and the neon lights of the Pondok Restaurant flicker and turn out. Surrounded by darkness, she sees him standing at the harbour, coming to meet her finally. In the face that she remembers so well, the glimmer of recognition, of understanding.
The next night, over dinner, Siem says that he has bought tickets for everyone to see the Shanghai Acrobats that evening. This is his family’s last night in Jakarta, and though the tickets cost six hundred rupiahs apiece, a week’s salary, Siem waves it off, grinning like a small boy. He says that they should not spend their last night morose, washing dishes, cleaning the house. It has become evident, he says, with a flourish of his hands, that there is too little magic in the world.