Certainty (23 page)

That night, Sipke sat up with Ani beside the radio. The light from the street lamps wavered, occasionally cutting out. “The West can help us,” a speaker said. He sounded like an older man, perhaps one who had fought in the wars of the last two decades. “But they must let us find our own way; and the best it can do is to set examples and help us to reach up to them. It should not be concerned whether our director of agriculture or education or health is a Communist or a Nationalist: that is our affair. If you honestly want to help us, you must not ask questions. You must not demand that we love you. You must earn our respect and then learn to return it.”

Sipke watched her eyes. To him, they were full of anxiety, her fingers adjusting the dial as she listened to the voice distorted by static. The curtain had not been closed, and on the other side of the room, Wideh was still visible, asleep behind the mosquito net.

Together they lifted her mattress out from behind the divan and set it on the floor, then she lay down, leaving a space beside her.

Soon, she said, she would celebrate her thirtieth birthday, she would be older than her parents had been when they died. She spoke openly, her thoughts spilling free in a way he had not heard before. She told him that, often, her thoughts returned to Sandakan, that the pull of home had not diminished. She still imagined going back there some day. It was the place where her parents were buried. In the war, so many lives had been destroyed, others forever altered. Even if she tried, she could not measure what she had lost, or know what she had never attempted. In 1953, when she left Sandakan, she had carried a single hope, that Wideh would be one of this new, modern generation. That he would make his way in the world, unhindered, free to make his own destiny.

Afterwards, he remained by the window while she drifted to sleep. So many voices rose up, carried by the heat and air, a ghostly sound, moving against the walls.

In the house, the phone rings. Gail does not start, but Sipke’s hands jump out in front of him, instinctually, towards the sound. He takes the receiver, turns his face to the darkened window. “Sipke Vermeulen.”

It is Joos, from the farmhouse down the road.

Gail stands up, puts her hands on her hips and tilts her upper body to one side and then the other. She walks into the kitchen. Sipke can hear the refrigerator door opening and swishing shut. Two glasses filling with water.

He finds himself in a rambling conversation with Joos about a kind of bird that seems to have disappeared from the Netherlands. “We saw them when we were boys, didn’t we?” Joos says, in his usual mournful voice. “
Ooievaars
, swooping across the fields. And now they’ve disappeared to some other country. Probably Norway or Canada, like everyone else. Even so, this country is so crowded, Sipke. When we die they will have to bury us standing upright.”

After he finally manages to comfort Joos, Sipke asks Gail if she would like to go for a walk. Smiling, she agrees, and they bundle themselves in big coats and pull on woollen toques. Outside, there’s the sound of wind moving through the banks of reeds and the swaying alders. As they walk, he tells her that Wideh lives in Jakarta now. “He is a photojournalist. Perhaps, later on, you would like to see some of his work.”

“Yes, I would love that.”

A light snow begins to fall. Gradually, she tells him about her documentaries, about Ansel and the life that they share in Vancouver.

“And your Ansel,” Sipke says. “He also works in radio?”

“He’s a doctor, a pulmonary specialist.”

“Ah, wonderful. And you have children.”

They curve along the water’s edge. “No, not yet.”

“One day?”

“Maybe one day.” His questions seem to relax a reserve in her and she begins to talk. She tells him that she had seen his letter one day at her parents’ house, the letter telling her father of Ani’s death. “Hers was a name my parents both knew,” Gail says, “and between them, it seemed to have a meaning, a weight.”

She says that she held on to the memory as if it were a touchstone, something that could anchor her. She knows, has always believed, that there is a secret that has coloured her life, her childhood. In the last few months, she has felt as if, day by day, she is losing her footing. There are fissures, openings, that she no longer knows how to cover over.

They are surrounded by darkness, lights from the distant farmhouses just visible. Her face, so reminiscent of Wideh, is filled with yearning.

“And so you came here,” he says, “looking for an answer to your questions.”

For a long time, she looks at the ice that is beginning to form in the canal, the silvery sheen of the surface. “I don’t know,” she says, finally. “Perhaps I’m looking for an answer that isn’t real. That doesn’t exist.”

He closes his eyes, opens them again, sees the snow disappearing in her hair.

They continue walking, and their path takes them back along the road, past the sweep of farmland that divides each property here. They come in sight of Sipke’s house, where he has left a single light burning.

Inside, after they have shed their layers of coats and scarves, Gail tends to the fire. Then, he and Gail sit down once more, across from each other at the kitchen table.

Between them, Sipke has laid out a handful of black-and-white photos: the studio, Ani and Wideh at the harbour in Sunda Kelapa, the canal that runs along Jalan Kamboja. He tells her that, by mid-1965, Indonesia was on the brink of collapse. Sukarno was ill, it seemed. Possibly dying. Already the speculation was rife as to which faction – the army, the Communists, or Darul Islam – would set the inevitable coup in motion. Sipke’s request to extend his residence permit had been denied, and he had been given three months to leave the country.

“It was in June of that year,” he says, “when Ani received a letter from Canada, from your father, saying that he wished to see her.”

Sipke watches Gail as he speaks, more than anything not wanting to injure her. All her movements are stilled, but she does not look away.

“Some time later, Ani told me something that I’ve always remembered. She said that it was your mother who had encouraged your father to travel to Jakarta. She asked him to go, to find what he needed to know, believing that the truth was capable of bringing about a change in all their lives.”

Gail picks up a photograph from the table, and in her hands it appears fragile, aged, the edges curving up.

The photo catches the light, and Sipke sees Wideh, just a child, kneeling on the ground in Ani’s apartment in Jakarta, carefully setting up a game of marbles. His hands reach out towards the small glass spheres, but the aperture is narrow, and only his face is clear and in focus. In the foreground, the marbles blur like stars. Gail lifts her face, meeting his eyes, and she holds his gaze silently. What he sees in her face is not hurt, not anger. Her expression reminds him of Wideh’s face on the day Sipke taught him to develop his own negatives, how the boy had clutched the film in his hands, watching the lines come clear, grow together. As if a shadow, a darkness, was becoming more than its form, as if something barely glimpsed had now been breathed into life.

After a moment, she says, “How old is Wideh now?”

“Next month he will turn forty-five.”

At first, because she does not respond, he thinks she has not heard him. But then she sets the photo down. Outside, the snow has painted the darkness white. He can hear the low whistling of the wind.

“When I was a child,” she says, “my father had just one ritual. He would gather us into the car each Sunday, my mother in the passenger seat and me in the back, and we would drive away from our house, towards downtown, the ocean. He loved the city at night. When he was a student at university, my father studied history. He thought he would teach one day, but that never came to pass. The books are still there on the shelves, remnants of a different life. As we drove, he would keep up a running commentary, proudly pointing things out to me, to my mother. Naming the landmarks, wanting us to see the things he saw.”

He reaches out his hand, and rests it on hers.

She says, “You said you would show me Wideh’s photographs.”

He gets up and leaves her for a moment. When he returns, he has an archival box containing tear sheets and prints, and he sets it on the table.

She rests her hands on the lid, but she does not open it. Exhaustion seems to shape the air around her.

“It’s late,” he says. “Perhaps we should rest.”

“Yes.” She is lost in her own thoughts. He can see her as a child, the car that winds back through the city, the same roads traced and retraced.

“Tomorrow, there is a place I would like to show you. I used to go there often with Ani and Wideh, a long time ago. It is called Schokland, and in the past it was an island, surrounded by the sea.”

Slowly they gather the cups and dishes and set them in the sink. She smoothes the cloth on the table, then, leaning forward, her face young in the candlelight, she blows out the flames.

Sipke finds a place by the windows. When he closes his eyes, the morning humidity of Jakarta sits heavily, once more, on his skin. Outside, the first calls of the vendors are audible, the ringing of bells, makeshift carts clattering over the sidewalk.

That day when the letter from Matthew Lim arrived, Sipke had asked her what it was that she wished to do. “I don’t know,” she had said, over and over. But, along with the surprise that he saw, there was a thread of hope running through her, so fine as to be almost invisible. He could not help but see it.

Over the next month, he busied himself with things that needed to be done. He prepared to close the studio down and put the space up for sale. He sat for hours in the Dutch embassy, beside Indonesian mothers and grandmothers, flanked by the children they brought with them. Sipke took forms to one building to get stamped, another to get signed. To obtain departure permits for both Wideh and Ani, he visited as many as a dozen offices, continuously taking out his wallet and laying bills on the table. He returned to the Dutch embassy, took a number, and fell asleep under the tall windows.

He did not know if Ani had written to Wideh’s father. He could not bring himself to ask the question, he tried to go on as if nothing had changed. He closed his eyes against her pain, because to acknowledge it would mean admitting the possibility that she would remain here, that she would allow him to leave and not follow.

One night, a few weeks after the letter had arrived, he and Ani stood at the window of their upstairs flat, looking down at the street. The power had been cut again and the kitchen taps were running only a muddy froth. The night was humid, and the air thin. He told her that their visas had been approved, that they could leave before the end of the dry season. “When we arrive in Amsterdam,” he said, “I’ll apply for citizenship for you and Wideh.”

“I don’t know if I can do this, Sipke.”

A strange panic, one he had never known before, seized his chest. What was decided now would be unalterable. He bowed his head against hers. “The decision belongs to you,” he said. “You do not need to be afraid.”

In the days that followed, Sipke found ways to distract himself, to avoid Ani. He walked through the crowded market, along the canals, taking photographs of faces, of children laughing as they splashed in the water. Military exercises were taking place every hour, growing in intensity, blocking the roads. He had no ideas, no plans, only a feeling of deep foreboding. He papered up the windows of the studio, and taped a sign to the door.
Tutup.
Closed.
Gesloten.

Each day, he left the apartment early and walked along Jalan Kamboja. Those who slept on the street were just beginning to wake. One morning, Sipke watched a woman and her two children, a boy and a girl, barefoot, in faded sarongs, washing themselves with the water that trickled from a pipe alongside a house. He had his camera with him. He held it to his eyes, framing the children in the viewfinder, releasing the shutter a half-dozen times. The children cupped their hands together, catching the water patiently. Behind them, the paint was stained and peeling. The little girl watched him for a moment, then she stood up and ran towards him, followed by her brother. He was overwhelmed. Without thinking, he slipped a few rupiahs, all the money he carried, into their open hands.

That week, the paperwork for Ani’s visa was concluded, and he brought the documents home and showed them to her.

She said the words that he dreaded hearing. “Sipke, we are not coming with you.”

For several seconds, he did not answer. “I’ll stay, then,” he said. “There must be some way.”

She said that she had written to Wideh’s father, and that she had decided to remain in Jakarta until his arrival. That much she must do for him. For herself. They both had to have the truth between them, to understand what had been lost, to know how to go forward. For the rest, she could only wait and see.

Fear rose up inside him, but most alarming to him, a feeling of acceptance that it could be no other way.
Sipke
, she said, but he left the apartment and went downstairs to the studio. The front windows were covered, but all the equipment remained in place. A line of negatives rested on the light box, waiting for him. There, in the half-light, he carried on working, trying to lose himself in the stillness of the room.

Ani let herself in. He was mixing chemicals in the bath, and he concentrated on the movements of his hands. They stood side by side, watching as he poured a measure of liquid into the tank.

There were photos scattered on the table. Sunset on the harbour at Sunda Kelapa, the tall masts of painted boats glowing, luminous. In the foreground, Wideh and Ani stood in the water, laughing as they looked up to see him.

She put her hand on his shoulder, the faintest touch, as if afraid he would turn away. She said that no choice existed for her.

That night, lying alone in his own apartment, unable to sleep, he got up and dressed quietly in the dark. Outside, he crossed the street and sat at a table in the
kedai kopi
. A man was coming along the road now, drunk and staggering. He was reciting poetry or singing a song. “Turn your heads as you pass,” he said. “We shall die soon enough from a surfeit of words. We do not need the slow poison of your pity.”