“And then, what happens when people know?”
He met her gaze, unable to answer.
She told him, then, that she had found her father’s body on the airfield in Sandakan, and she had been unable to carry him home, to bury him. She remembered that when the Allies finally arrived in Sandakan, in September 1945, they found people whose homes were gone, whose crops had failed, and who, even though the war was over, would still die of starvation and disease. What good did it do, after all, to remember, she said, to hold on to the past, if the most crucial events in life could not be changed? What good did memory do if one could never make amends?
She turned away from him, towards the sink, taking the chemicals she had mixed and adding them to the tank. “There was a time when I tried to imagine that things could arrange themselves in a different order,” she said, “because I couldn’t bear the thought that the past was irrevocable.” She paused, looking down at the liquid. “Are there days you wish you could erase from your life?”
It took him only a moment to answer. “I would forget that day in Algeria, if I could.”
She nodded. “If it were possible, perhaps I would do it, too. Not only my memories of the war, but the things that I regret. But how much would be enough?” she said. “Would I recognize the point at which I had gone too far, when I was changing so much that I was losing more than I imagined possible?”
They went to the Pondok Restaurant, the
kedai kopi
across the street. The road was crowded with people, motorbikes weaving between cars. The
betjak
drivers gathered at the far end of Jalan Kamboja. They lined up behind one another, carrying their own tin plates and bowls, wiping their faces clean with handkerchiefs as they waited their turn at the food stalls. Ani told him about the forests outside of Sandakan, how some of the trees were as high as 150 feet. When you looked up at the canopy, the outstretched branches did not overlap, they formed an intricate pattern of dark and light, of leaves and air. Those trees, she told him, were the height of an eighteen-storey building. Wideh had calculated it for her one evening, an exercise in mathematics.
She smiled. “I must have been seven years old. My father took me to the forest, because the largest trees were flowering and this happened only once every ten years. I had never seen it before. When the flowers fall, they fall in such great quantity that they cover everything on the ground. They pile up in the same way that snow piles up in cold places.” Ani had walked through the petals. She remembered the feel of them covering her feet, shifting smoothly around her legs. “My father told me that there were insects who laid their eggs in the buds. After the flowers had fallen to the ground, the newborns emerged, covered with pollen, and then they flew away to other flowers in other trees. He said that the insects are so tiny that for them the air feels very thick. Flying for them is like swimming in water for us.”
Sipke told her about his father’s farm. At dawn each morning, he had walked across the open pastures where no trees grew that tall, the way Ani described them. He remembered the horizon, trees and barns miniature against the sky. The heavens were a dome. He described the heat of a cow’s nose against his skin. They were curious animals; they would walk across the field to greet a visitor. He showed her photographs, glimmering canals, the geometric lines of a football game, the coastline of the North Sea. There was a game he had played with his brothers,
polsstokspringen
, in which they used a pole to leap across the canals. He remembered running across the grass, planting the pole in the water and using it to propel his body through the air. At the height of the arc, he would press his body forward, urging the pole to begin its descent, and then at the perfect moment, leap off to the other side. She laughed when he told her about the wooden shoes he’d had as a boy, made of willow, how he had worn a hole in them from all his days walking in the fields.
Ani asked him, “What kind of future do you see, Sipke?”
Perhaps, somewhere in his body, he knew the direction of his life had changed. There was only one answer he could give her. “Your son growing up. You and I in the world beside one another.”
“Yes,” she said, and her voice was just a whisper to him. “I imagine that, too.”
Outside of Sipke’s house, the lines of the canal have blurred into the night. His words are suddenly gone, and some feeling, distant and almost forgotten, is hovering on the edges of his consciousness. The room seems very dim, and his knees ache more than usual. He gets up to turn on the lamp and the room immediately brightens. “Do you mind if I stop and make a pot of coffee?”
“No,” Gail says. “Let me help.”
She fills the percolator, and Sipke rummages in the fridge for some bread and cheese. He can hear frogs croaking in the canal, the faraway
hush
of cars. For a moment, he cannot remember how they arrived here, from which direction they came. He feels as if they are adrift in another time, another country.
“If it’s difficult to talk about . . . ,” she says.
Sipke looks at her standing at the counter, and her expression, so patient and watchful, reminds him of Wideh, the way he sat with his mother in the garden near the end of her life. Wideh would beguile with her stories. He would remain beside her, counting the birds at the feeder, the boaters drifting by along the canals, watching his mother’s face as she slept, as day by day the world grew quiet.
“I love to say her name,” he tells Gail. “After she died, our friends told me that I had to go on, that I couldn’t remain in the past. But when I think of Ani, so much of myself, my own life, comes back to me.”
They stand together, sipping their coffee, and he remembers how Ani would come home from the market, her bicycle laden with groceries. Her skin smelled both sweet and cold. He used to wake in the night, open his eyes to find how she had wrapped herself around his body, as if to follow him into the world of his dreaming.
People hold other lives inside them, this is what Sipke believes. When Ani died, her friends and loved ones had gathered together, and in the stories they told, he had felt her presence again, more palpably than in his own familiar memories.
The three years in Jakarta will always remain another life inside him, untouched by future events. In the streets of the city, he had felt himself to be a foreigner, a stranger, but with Ani, in her apartment, they had created a kind of sanctuary for themselves. One part of his life had come to an end, and another, richer, more surprising, opened before him. “Are you married?” he says, meeting Gail’s eyes.
She says no, but she tells him she has been with Ansel for almost a decade.
“In Jakarta, everything in my life changed. There was something about the way we were together that was, that felt, essential.” He stops, searching for the words.
“Necessary,” she says. Her face is turned away from him, and he cannot see her expression.
“Yes,” he says, nodding. He follows her gaze towards the darkened fields. “Yes, like that.”
He had been in Jakarta for over two years, he tells Gail, and Ani and Wideh had become the centrepoint of his life. He would make dinner each night while Ani helped her son with his studies. In the evenings they walked to Freedom Square, or to the nearby park to watch the kite flyers, to be a part of the crowd. Business in the portrait studio was steady, and for a while he had felt as if he could stay there forever, that the peace in his life and in this country would hold. But by 1965 the political and economic situation in Indonesia had grown precarious. A quarter of the population in Jakarta were squatters, more coming in each day from the surrounding countryside. There were guerillas in the villages and a rising dissatisfaction. The papers hinted that President Sukarno was terminally ill. In private conversations, people wondered how much longer before the government splintered. How strong was the army. To Sipke, it seemed that only Wideh remained untouched by the turmoil. The boy spent hours gazing at maps, leafing through the heavy atlas that Ani had given him for his birthday. At night, lit by the glow of a kerosene lamp, he played marbles by himself, rolling them across the tiled floor.
He remembers the three of them sitting in the upstairs apartment, all the lights off, windows flung wide to let in the breeze. Ani’s apartment was only one room, divided by curtains into a sleeping area and a kitchen. Her bed was a thin mattress that during the day she kept behind the divan. Outside, pedicabs jostled in the road.
One night, as he stood gazing out at the traffic, Sipke listened to the sound of Wideh whispering a story in Indonesian, a traditional folk tale, to his mother. “In the beginning of the world,” he said, “there was the sea and the sky, and a single bird who had nowhere to rest. He flew from east to west, searching for a breeze to hold him aloft. One night, exhausted, falling through the clouds, he came up with a plan. And when morning came, he provoked a terrible quarrel between the sea and the sky.”
Wideh was lying on his side as he spoke, on his cot in the far side of the room. Ani sat next him, the mosquito net sheltering them both. The child seemed utterly contented. Sipke was reminded of something Ani had told him once, about the crater in Sandakan where she would go. How, when she was a child, this scar in the earth had been a place of safety.
“I don’t know what the quarrel was, but the sea was very angry. She raged and paced and shouted curses at the sky. Waves touched the clouds, and when they fell, they crashed into the sea like drums.
“The sky, too, raged and wept. Night after night, he threw boulders down upon the sea. For months on end, the sea and the sky stormed, and at the end of it all, when the quiet came, many islands were standing on the water. The bird flew from one to the next, very satisfied with his cleverness.”
When Wideh fell asleep, Ani got up carefully. She lit a kerosene lamp and they sat beside one another at the window, whispering so as not to disturb the child. She asked him, “What stories do you remember, Sipke?”
“Stories,” he said, almost as a question.
“When your mother sat at your bedside, and you could hear the wind on the farmhouse windows . . .”
He smiled. “There is something that I remember.
Nooit vergeet je de taal waarin je moeder van je hield.
Translated it means, Never do you forget the language in which your mother loved you.”
As he spoke, Sipke felt he could see her thoughts lifting away from them, trace their trajectory across the night sky. To where? he wondered. To North Borneo, to Sandakan. “Frisian words, Frisian phrases,” he said, continuing. “I remember waking up each morning, opening the curtains, and seeing my father in the fields. My mother going out to meet him. It isn’t the country that I miss, but the person I was then. I used to be afraid to go home and find that everything had changed, that I no longer belonged there.”
She nodded. “Every year that goes by makes it more difficult to return.”
Outside, vendors called their wares, pushing carts and trolleys around the potholes, through the crowds of people idling on the sidewalk.
They sat in silence for a few moments, and then he said, “If things keep going as they are, I may be forced to leave Indonesia. My papers may be revoked. I haven’t made any plans, but I’ve been thinking –”
“Do you really believe it will come to that?”
“Those are the rumours.”
“But only rumours.”
“Ani,” he said, “would you consider leaving Jakarta?”
She lifted her eyes, and he could sense her surprise, her confusion.
“Come with me,” he said. “I’ll arrange everything.”
“It’s the other side of the world, Sipke.”
“Come with me.”
He had the sense she could see something that he did not. “We could,” she said, finally. “Perhaps it could be possible.”
That night, they fell asleep together, Ani gathered in his arms.
In the morning, they woke to the sound of rifles. People fighting or celebrating, it was hard to tell which. They did not go downstairs or open the studio. On the radio, a commentator described how, here in Jakarta, rioters had set fire to the British embassy in protest over the proclamation of the new Malaysia. This was
konfrontasi
, the commentator said, and Indonesia must stand firm against the threat of British imperialism.
Outside, demonstrators gathered, a sea of black caps, of
pitjis
, growing in number as the morning wore on. Banners printed with slogans,
In the name of Allah Ever Onward No Retreat
. Wideh, a sarong tied around his waist, gazed down at the crowds, his bare shoulders, slender and fragile, leaning dangerously out the window. He had been examining one of Sipke’s cameras and now he held it to his eye. He moved slowly, framing shot after shot, practising without ever touching the shutter release.
On the radio, one official after another denounced the presence of British and Australian troops in North Borneo. Malaysia, they said, was a threat to Indonesian independence, an incitement to war. Sipke switched off the set. The floor seemed to tremble as the angry crowd marched, chanting. An effigy of the prime minister of Malaysia was set alight, and the smell of burning cut through the air. He and Ani moved as if in a dream, washing the dishes, cleaning the floors. Outside, they heard what sounded like firecrackers or gunshots.
At noon, when they sat down to a meal of rice and curry, Wideh still wore the camera around his neck. While they ate, Sipke began to talk about setting the light metre, adjusting the depth of field, the basics of composition. “The first pictures I took,” he told Wideh, in broken Indonesian, “were landscapes, because I was too shy to speak to anyone. Later on, an older photographer gave me advice. He said that if I was patient, if I waited, then people would forget the camera. Another part of them would drift up into view.”
Wideh surprised him by saying that he had been studying Sipke’s contact sheets. “What I wish for,” he said, politely, in English, “is to have a roll of film of my own.”
Sipke reached into his pocket, and placed a small plastic canister on the table between them. Wideh was ten years old. Below, the noise of the protests grew in volume, waves of sound cascading along the narrow streets. Wideh took the canister in his hand, the way Sipke and his brothers used to hold precious stones, newborn birds, or treasures unearthed from the depths of the canals.