Certainty

5. The Bird Feather

JAKARTA

1957

In the heat of the afternoon, Ani’s son sleeps peacefully in her arms. Through the half-shuttered windows, she can hear the sound of the city drifting by, bicycle bells, the nervous rattling of mopeds and bemos. The vendors call out their wares, singing the words above the traffic. On Ani’s stomach, Wideh’s breaths are deep and easy. He presses his mouth against her chin, opens and closes his lips as if he is chewing, dreaming once more about food. She loops her arms around his warm and sweating body, keeps time by the rhythm of his breathing.

In the kitchen, she can hear the muted brushing of Saskia’s slippers on the tiled floor as she sets a pot of water to boil. Saskia’s daughter, Tash, is whispering, I’m hungry, Ibu, as she rummages in the cupboard for cookies. Ani closes her eyes and the apartment falls away, her few belongings, a divan, cot and a small charcoal brazier, the thin blue curtain that divides the room.

Four years ago, she had left Sandakan, boarding the steamer for Tarakan. There, she had met her mother’s eldest brother, Bashir, who was ill, and from there she had gone to Ujung Padang, then Pontianak, continuing on to Jakarta. It was on the boat from Pontianak that she had met Saskia, born in the same year as Ani. Saskia and her family had welcomed her into their lives, helping her to find her place here. In this city of three million people, she feels as if she has disappeared, slipped into the outline she has made for herself: a twenty-two-year-old woman, known as a widow, alone in the world except for her small son.

A canal runs along the far side of Jalan Kamboja. Lying on the divan, she can hear the watery murmur of people bathing, the high, laughing voices of women and children. They sit on the stone steps, or crouch low, scrubbing their clothes. She imagines the colours of their sarongs turning bright when they emerge from the canal, the children holding their noses and submerging their faces as they balance in precarious handstands. They take turns leaping into the warm water.

Tomorrow morning, she will go to Saskia’s house in Kebajoran and they will run through the list one last time, complete all the necessary preparations for Saskia’s departure at the end of the week. The notice had come just forty-eight hours ago, with the news that her family had secured a place on the next boat leaving for Holland. Since early January, more than ten thousand Dutch and Indonesians have been repatriated, families starting over in another country, now that the Dutch East Indies have ceased to exist.

“From the time I was a little girl,” Saskia had said, “I thought I would always live here, that I would be buried beside my parents, and that I would live for eternity with the spirits from ages past.”

“You might come back one day. Nobody knows what the future brings.”

“ Tempo dulu. Those times are gone now.”

“If it were possible, would you change something in your life?”

“It’s like a Dutch sentence, twists and turns and finally, at the very end, the verb that you’ve been waiting for. You can’t really say anything about the sentence until it’s finished.” She laughed. “Quite a trick, if you ask me.”

Over the past few days, Ani has helped fill her trunk with woolen sweaters and socks, with neatly packaged spices, heirlooms and photographs. Weary, they collapsed in Saskia’s sitting room, household goods scattered around them, their children circling on tiptoe.

Saskia’s husband, Siem Dertik, teaches engineering at the technical school in Jakarta. He reminds Ani of her father, and this resemblance both pains and steadies her. Their family is a mirror of Ani’s own, the mother and father whom Ani carries in her memory, the little girl who was once so treasured.

Siem is patient and endlessly curious. Like Ani’s father, he takes pleasure in knowing the names of things, in explaining their origin. He reads books in Indonesian, Dutch, French and English, the languages of his mixed background. In the evenings, while the children listen raptly, he tells them about space in the universe, how it stretches, collapses and folds. He writes equations for the way objects fall through space, following the trajectory of force and gravity. The trajectory of the object, he explains, can be plotted, point by point, a graph revealing the past, the present and the anticipated future.

Once, in the kitchen, she had seen Wideh standing beside Siem, imitating the movements of his hands as he prepared the evening meal. Wearing identical slippers, he imitated Siem’s walk, a quick shuffle, as he moved in the small room.

Here, in Jakarta, nothing holds to a steady state. Electricity and water can’t be depended upon, and the military parades in Freedom Square now spill onto the streets, taking over the roads. Only in Wideh can she recognize the passing time. Ani puts her nose to his hair, she smells the sweetness of his skin, talc and sweat. When she looks at him, she is moved by his resemblance to his father, the high cheekbones, the searching eyes. He is an echo of the boy she knew long ago. She wraps one of her hands around his, and it reminds her of Chinese boxes, one disappearing completely within the other. Ibu, he says, half waking, and Ani whispers his name, Wideh. He sighs, gazing at her for a moment, then returns to his dreams.

There was a time when she could find her way in Sandakan without seeing the landmarks, the sea or even the horizon. This was 1953, and in the mornings, at first light, she folded her sarong between her legs, climbed onto her bicycle, pedalled hard until gravity pulled her down the slope of the hill. In the fog, nothing was visible. People on the road could hear her coming. They ran from her, the baskets on their backs toppling, root vegetables spilling onto the ground as she sped past, missing them by inches. Murderous child! She only heard murder – before she left them behind.

The bicycle, an Australian-made Malvern Star, was painted blue, and the frame felt almost weightless. When she leaned her body forward, the wheels seemed to lift off the ground. She skittered over the rocks, the pedals throwing her feet off, and then steadied again. The road curved downhill, towards the market and the sea. Ani steered with her hips. Beware, beware, and children ran. She was more than Ani, then. She was unpredictable, a piece of light streaking across the ground.

The market gardeners laid their offerings on straw mats. A yellow pyramid of bananas, hillocks of red and green chili peppers, everything neat as the stones in a congkak game. Under a pink umbrella, her neighbour Eika crouched on the ground, chattering about the ginger bulbs and lemongrass. Beside her, watermelons and spiny jackfruit, Hooi-joo smoking, exhaling with her face lifted towards the sky. They took turns jingling their pockets, shouting out, “Sister, sister, take a look here.”

This morning, the market was full of old women. The older they were, the more they pushed. But Ani would have none of it. She shoved right back, sticking her elbow into someone’s arm, then propelling herself forward. “You’ll make a fine old maid,” someone snapped, and Ani turned her body, shoved the woman aside. Eika pressed something into her hand, a paper bag filled with seeds. “Take this to Lohkman for me?” she asked, blushing when she said his name. Ani took it from her hand, smiling, and then she was carried past by the crowd. At the fish market, Lohkman was bargaining with a dealer, both men seated cross-legged on a tarpaulin. “At thirty, I won’t give,” he said.

“Give me your basement price then.”

“Thirty-five.”

“Lohkman, my friend, speak decently. A little lower perhaps?”

He ignored the dealer, turning to Ani. Kelah and black pomfret, lines of shiny blue wandering beneath the fishes’ skin, were stacked neatly at his feet. “Will you have coffee tonight?” she asked him.

He faked a yawn, stretched his arms into the sky. “Not with the money they’re offering me.”

She laughed and handed him the paper bag from Eika. “From an admirer.”

“Not another one.”

“Are we fishing tonight?”

Lohkman nodded. “My brother says the sea is too choppy for dorab. We can use the casting nets.” As she turned to go, he said, “Don’t be late, Ani. If you are, I’ll make you swim for the boat.”

The dealer, half teasing, laid his head-cloth on top of the fish, put his head on it and pretended to go to sleep. “Should I bid?” he said, in a tragic voice. “I don’t know. The seller ignores me.”

Riding home, loaded down with vegetables, was when she felt the worth of her Malvern Star and its never-before-seen-in-Sandakan metal carrier. She balanced on the pedals, the bicycle shifting side to side with her weight. Ani passed women who walked tilted over, bamboo poles heavy across their backs. When she looked over her shoulder, they were only shadows on the ground, swaying with the trees. From the ridge, she could see Sandakan harbour, a stroke of blue beneath the mist. The town was two straight lines of atap roofs and a swirl of people.

In the last year, concrete and glass had come to Sandakan. There were new British administration buildings south of the market, and the padang was busy again with picnics and cricket games. Each night, families spread woven mats on the grass. They turned their faces towards the west, hushed in reverence as the sun fell behind the hills.

In her room, there is a calendar on the wall, and each morning she tears off the previous day and unveils the new one. She has the sense that the days are precise and ordered, free from overlap or confusion. Her life now with Mas’s family, in the house on the hillside with a view of Sandakan town, is more than she dared to imagine. But even now she wonders what it would be like to leave here, finally, to travel to Tarakan, and keep the promise she made to her mother so many years ago.

In what remained of the buildings taken over by the Japanese during the war, the British had set up temporary offices and also an orphanage. Ani had stayed there for a month until Mas, a cousin to Ani’s mother, had found her. Before the war, Halim and Mas’s had been a family of six, now they were four. All of the children had been boys. The eldest had died early on. But if the war had ended sooner, Mas once said, a few weeks or a month, perhaps her youngest might have survived. She said this and half-smiled, her eyes pained, knowing that it was not useful to wish for a different present.

Ani had been ten years old when she came to live with them, a small, thin girl, and Halim used to joke that even her shadow was malnourished. It traipsed behind her, finally disappearing when she dove into the water to swim with Lohkman and her friends. One morning, she had woken to the call of the muezzin, a sound she had not heard since before the war. The lone voice travelled across the hillside, calling the faithful to prayer, his words lingering above the houses. She had lain awake remembering the long journey she made with her parents from the Dutch East Indies to Sandakan. They had walked barefoot along a mud track, where the flowers were taller than she was. She remembered her father’s hand against the back of her head, the sound of her mother’s feet always behind her. They ate mangoes from the nearby trees. In her memories, she fell asleep eating, the sweetness coating her tongue and lips, her limbs exhausted, warm air settling down on her.

Mas believes in spirits. They live in shapes and in the air; sometimes they are the souls of those who have not yet found their way to the land of the dead. Without them, she says, the world would be too bleak. But for Ani it is different. She knows that her parents are gone, that they do not remain in the air around her, they are not embodied by the sunlight or the curve of the Earth. She doesn’t dare say it aloud, and yet Mas knows.

So many in Sandakan cannot speak about the war at all. To them, it is something left at the wayside, best forgotten. Sometimes, that is why she prefers to be with Lohkman. He is eighteen, the same age as she is, and they have both completed their studies at the mission school. She feels at ease with him, because they believe the same things; what happened in the past is there, unaltered by spirits or wishes. It will never disappear.

Ani changed out of the sarong she had worn to the market and replaced it with a clean one, smoothing the material against her body. On the dresser was her mother’s jade pendant, carved in the shape of a bird. She had kept it safe all these years. Closing her eyes briefly, she ran one finger over the delicate stone. Tomorrow morning, she would see Matthew; they had arranged to meet near the harbour, after the night fishing was done. Since the end of the war, he had been living in Tawau with his mother, returning to Sandakan only a few weeks ago. When she looked up again, she barely recognized herself, a young woman in the mirror, the happiness that she possessed.

In the outdoor kitchen, Mas sighed and puttered, moving around the fire as if in conversation with it. Ani reached over Mas’s shoulder, stirring the mixture of coconut and warm water. The two boys ran circles around them, hollering, then screamed back inside the house. Mas waved her arm meditatively across the food to push the flies away. On the edge of the road, Halim was deep in conversation with a neighbour. People passed by, on bicycles, going to work or the market, and they lifted their hands towards Halim, sounding their bells in greeting.

When breakfast was done, Ani cleared the dishes, stacking them neatly on the sideboard. Halim was the first to leave, setting off for town, where he worked as a clerk for the Hong Kong Bank. A few minutes later, Mas hurried out of the house, the boys running to keep up with her, towards the school, where she taught the Form Three class.

Sandakan, after the war, was not so different from the way Ani imagined it would be. The harbour was crowded with boats again, with prahus and steamers; on windy nights, their hulls knocked together like a great wooden chime. When she was fourteen, the British North Borneo Company had organized a dance, setting up a phonograph on the new padang. Men and women twirled gracefully in one another’s arms, the pattern of the women’s dresses blurring together, colours fading as the field turned slowly to darkness. Each time they moved past her, she felt a breeze on her skin, ethereal and cool. She could look up and find her parents there beside her. Later, they would carry her back to the house on Jalan Satu. Minutes passed, and she stood at the edge of the field, her heart pounding, afraid to step onto the grass and break the spell.

On the hillside overlooking Sandakan, there had once been hundreds of crosses and markers to remember the dead. Later, these graves were cleared to make room for the new houses. People said that on the ocean floor there were Allied planes shot from the skies, lying side by side with Japanese battleships, the twisted metal still holding their crew. The sea would always keep them.

In the reopened school, she had learned how to chart the course of the rainy season. During the monsoons, the skies cloud over at a precise moment and the mangroves sink a little farther into the sea. The roads wash away. In the new Sandakan, steamers round the northern tip of Borneo, and new roads link the coast to the interior towns. Commercial flights land at the aerodrome, lifting off to Kota Kinabalu, to Singapore and Hong Kong. She would sit at her desk in the schoolroom, holding her worn textbooks for English and Mathematics, staring at the letters and numbers until her eyes grew tired and the meaning slid from her grasp. The words edged themselves into her thoughts, set their roots down inside her memory, trying to ease out the old words that still remained.

Well past midnight, she rose in the dark and dressed quickly, then walked down to the harbour, where she found Lohkman and his brother gathering nets into the boat.

They spoke for a few minutes about the night’s work, then they pushed the boat away from shore, climbing deftly in. Lohkman pulled the cord, the engine stuttered to life, and they slid over the glassy water. From the bay, she could see the town for what it was, a small opening in the jungle, the cloth of the Union Jack moving to and fro above the neat white buildings and the green padang. To her right, stilt houses crowded out from the land, a water village balanced on floating docks. On every side, the green repetition of the trees, the kendilong, closed in on them.

Lohkman came from a family of fishermen. During the war, his family’s boats had been confiscated and they had hidden in the jungle. When the war ended, only Lohkman, his brother, Tajuddin, and Tajuddin’s wife remained, and they had built a small dwelling in the water village.

Lohkman cut the engine and the boat drifted. His brother crouched at the stern of the boat, slowly murmuring a prayer. Tajuddin was in his thirties, and his hair, already white, stirred in the wind. Tajuddin extended his leg over the side, touched his bare foot to the water. “There is but one God,” he said, his voice dissipating on the wind. Still wearing his clothes, he let his body fall overboard.

The sound of the water opening eventually turned into a hush and then silence. Ani watched the hand that still held tight to the gunwale, the rest of the body invisible beneath the surface. Lohkman kept the boat steady. Underneath the water, Tajuddin was listening for the shoals of fish. Each species had a distinctive sound, and if he waited and listened, he could recognize them and follow the sound to where they lay. Years ago, he had taught Lohkman all he knew of fish-craft, about the wind and currents, how to handle the boat and make use of the many types of nets. Lohkman had told Ani that for six months he had studied the art of listening for the fish. At first, he could not distinguish them from the sound of the sea and the waves, but over time the skill had come to him.

They heard his brother before they saw him, a ripple of water, and then his face, silver hair falling across his eyes. He climbed up into the boat, ignoring Lohkman’s outstretched hand, started the engine, and steered the boat west.

At the appointed place, she gathered the jala, a circular net weighted with metal rings. Turning her body, Ani opened her arms and cast the net. It bloomed in the air, unfurling in the shape of a bell, falling smooth and flat. The swaying movements of her arms swept the fish into the folds. Lohkman’s brother had taught her how to throw the casting net when she was only thirteen. She had a talent for it, and a love of the water, and so, even though girls rarely went out with the men, he had given her a place on his boat. Two or three nights each week, depending on the season and the tides, they went out together.

Once, Lohkman had taken her underwater. He had shown her how to release the air from her lungs, a stream of bubbles trailing from their lips, their weight sinking them to the sea floor. Schools of fish brushed their bodies, circling them in a well of colour. Below, weeds unfurled to touch them. When they came up for air, he told her how to listen for the sound of the ikan selar kuning, with its deep-yellow stripe, which made a noise like the wind. He touched the small of her back, bringing her attention to the waving sea life, the colours so bright it sent a slow thrill along the length of her body.

Taking turns now, moving from one side of the boat to the other, they cast their nets out, speaking little. They poured their catch into the hold beneath the floorboards of the boat. Occasionally, Tajuddin would dive again, surfacing to direct the boat to a different location.

In the quiet, she thought of Matthew, of that morning, last month, when she came off the boat at dawn and saw him standing on the shoreline. His bicycle leaned against his hip, his eyes searching the returning boats, the crowd of people, finally coming to rest on her. Later, she learned that when he had asked for news of her, people told him to come here, saying that it would be easy to find her on Tajuddin’s boat, with its red phoenix painted on the hull. She was carrying her take-home bundle of fish and prawns, and she held the bundle in the crook of one arm, awkwardly, surprise holding her still. He had been a child when she last saw him. Changed, she thought, yet utterly familiar. She stood on the sand, the tide running over her feet, and another lifetime flooded her memory.

Later that day, in the evening, they had walked along Leila Road, and then into the rubber plantation that had once been owned by Matthew’s father and now belonged to his uncle. It was why he had returned to Sandakan, Matthew said, to help his uncle manage the plantation. In four months, he would leave for Australia to begin university. The end of the war was still so vivid to them both, the day on which the Australian soldiers arrived, when the Japanese surrendered the town. She remembered that night, on the shore, when Matthew had described to her the burning cigarettes, his father running blindly, then pushed to his knees and shot. His face had seemed to her like a mask then, vacant, frightening to see. She had feared that if she reached out to touch him, he would splinter in her hands. And then, suddenly, he had disappeared from her life. Two days after his father’s murder, Matthew and his mother had fled Sandakan. They had taken the first steamer they could arrange passage on.

She told him about the orphanage, where her life had faded into a kind of stillness, an endless grieving, with all those that she loved disappeared. “There was a story that I told myself,” she said. “In my imagination, you had found a way into Sandakan, the way it once was. When the adults around me spoke of an afterlife, of wandering souls, this was the place I imagined. Not something in the future, but something known from before. A place that I, myself, had once seen.”

Behind them, the sun set, illuminating the ridges of the hills, trailing darkness behind it. The plantation lamps were lit, row by row, and she felt as if she were walking the corridors of an infinite house.

He described Tawau to her, his mother’s extended family, and the stilt house where they lived for three years. Then, the year he turned twelve, his mother had remarried, and the photographs of his father, the letters and writing pens, had been put into boxes and packed away. His mother, he said, needed to go on with her life, to leave the stigma of her first marriage behind. “But sometimes, at night,” Matthew said, “even now, my mother leaves the back door propped open with a stone. After the war, everything was left unfinished. We never found my father’s body and she never had the chance to bury him. He’s gone, of course. She knows this. And yet some part of her still believes he’ll come back again.”

He said that he remembered watching Ani sing the Kimigayo, the way she once traded stolen cigarettes for food. He could describe the sarong that she wore, the long braid of her hair. He remembered her when she had lived through the worst of her solitude.

They had walked between the rows of trees, stopping every now and then to catch their breath, to look up through the high leaves and thereby slow the passing of time. They talked about Mas and Halim, about the fishing boats and the peaceful routine of each day. In Sandakan, she had seen new buildings rise from the ground – the hospital and Magistrate’s Court, the administration offices – all the while unable to forget what had lain there before, the rubble and waste, and even further back, like something imagined, the old town.

In the plantation, that first kiss had surprised them both. She remembered the rush in her body, a trembling that grew, second by second, causing a pain that she didn’t recognize. The kiss lengthened, drew itself out, began again, the pain beginning to diminish, replaced by some greater feeling, hope, release.

Now, coming back to the shore, the sun was already free from the horizon. The engine hummed, and the boat sped through the water, carried by the tide. Tajuddin was murmuring a prayer, eyes half-closed, giving thanks for their nets full of scabbard fish, of mackerel and prawns. She listened to the noise of the hull, low and rumbling, like a ghost voice that could not speak above the water. From the shore, she could see the day boats heading out. A fleet of five buatan barat, painted a brilliant red, their sails taut against the wind. When Lohkman slid the boat against the sand, she looked immediately towards the road, searching for a glimpse of Matthew. “Dear Ani,” Lohkman said, as he helped her ashore. “Be careful.”

She took his hand gratefully, jumping into the shallow water.

On Jalan Satu, Matthew was waiting for her, his bicycle leaning against the fence. When she came up to him, he put away the magazine he had been reading and they began to walk together, past the stores and restaurants where the long shutters were being lifted off in preparation for the day ahead. Eventually, Matthew climbed onto his bicycle, beginning to pedal, and when he had picked up enough speed, she hopped lightly onto the back carrier. She crossed her ankles, and placed one hand on Matthew’s hip to steady herself. As they rose higher, the trees parted, and Ani could see the calmness of the bay, a silver mirror on which the clouds rested. Above them, the low moon was still visible, though pale as smoke.

Ani described the night fishing to him, and the baskets of fish and prawns that Lohkman would take to market this morning. He laughed at her description of the envious gazes that had followed them as they unloaded their catch. How the other fishermen had hurried to decorate their boats with garlands of flowers, knowing that a well-kept vessel would appease the spirits. “And it encourages the fish, too,” she said, “because if they must be caught, they’d prefer to be caught by something beautiful.”

As he pedalled, Matthew told her he had been awake for hours, had accompanied the rubber tappers through the plantation, helping to collect tins of syrup. In a few hours, when the syrup had thickened, he would return to help wash the latex and roll it into sheets, which they would hang to dry, smoking the rubber over a wood fire.

When they reached Halim’s house, he coasted towards the front door, and she slid off the back of the bicycle. It was a weekday morning, and the house was quiet, everyone had left to begin their day. Inside, Ani lit the charcoal brazier and set a pot of water to boil. Matthew had brought her a paper bag full of warm bread and pastries from the market, and he took one out, placing it in her hand. “Eat a little something first,” he said.

He took over the coffee-making, and after she had eaten, she carried the rest of the boiling water into the mandi. She filled the basin, adding a little hot water, and began by washing the saltwater from her hair. She could hear Matthew in the kitchen, taking the bundle of fish and prawns from her basket and setting them in the cool box. When her hair was clean, she twisted the length of it, then coiled it over her shoulder. She found a square of soap and began to wash herself.

He stood on the other side of the door, talking about acquaintances he had met, about his stepfather’s sons, who might come up to visit from Tawau. They were interested in helping out on the rubber plantation. “Barely ten, and they want to be landowners already.”

She tied a clean sarong around her waist and pulled on a cotton shirt. When she came out, he smiled to see her, and she went to him immediately.

“Ani,” he said. “You look happier than I’ve ever seen you.”

They came together, as they had often during the last month, their hands moving over each other’s body. She unbuttoned his shirt, and he slipped his hand beneath the edge of her sarong, moving it across her stomach, cradling her hips. She felt her body relaxing, warmth spilling through her limbs. They did not rush as they had the first time, returning again to the plantation, barely concealed by the trees. There was no hurry now, no fear that the other might vanish. In her bedroom at the back of the house, she helped him undress, then she undid her own sarong. They lay in bed together, their movements slowing, kissing, then holding back.

Outside, they could hear people walking on the gravel road, trucks passing, a bicycle bell. Nothing had prepared her for love, the physical ache that overwhelmed her body, that diminished the world around her to sense, to touch. He was so close, moving on top of her, she had to fight to hold the sound in. She trapped her breath against his skin.

For a long time, he rested his head in the curve of her neck. Their breathing ran together, the slow, even comfort of it. Last night, he said, he couldn’t sleep, thinking of all that he still wanted to tell her, about Tawau and of the terrible days after his father was killed, how he and his mother seemed invisible to all who knew them. Yet now that it was daylight, he found that words were useless to describe what had happened. She was already half dreaming by then, and the sound of his voice travelled in her thoughts, as if they were her own. He said that sometimes when he walked on Leila Road, he became confused, and he did not know where he was in time. “The houses, the buildings, everything is different,” he said, “but the way the sun sets over the hill, the way it reflects off the sea, reminds me of being a child again. It reminds me of things I thought I had put away long ago.”

She slept the rest of the morning, opening her eyes briefly when Matthew rose to return to the plantation. “Don’t wake up,” he whispered. When she dreamed, there were no faces, no people. Just lightness flooding her, lifting her away from the earth. She felt her mother’s arms, felt the blanket of her mother’s hair around her.

Around noon, she woke to the sound of voices. Someone had wheeled the neighbourhood radio out. She could hear the footsteps of children running towards the sound. When she stood up and looked through the curtains, she saw them standing pressed together, transfixed by the voice, their mouths open as if to taste the words. The dial was fixed to Radio Sabah in Jesselton. When the announcer introduced a song, “Goodnight Irene,” the children scuffed their bare feet in the dust, bringing up small clouds, the particles expanding as the first chords began. The hottest part of the day was just beginning. Someone brought out an umbrella, and the children gathered together under it, grateful for the shade.

Late in the afternoon, the rains came, and thunder broke in the sky. The two boys ran inside, soaking wet. Then, when they saw their father in his study, they hurriedly opened their schoolbooks. Ani and Mas sat together at the kitchen table, listening to the wind rattling the roof and the doors. Trees swooped and whistled, setting loose a downpouring of leaves.

“Wonderful,” Mas said, smiling. “We haven’t had a storm like this in months.”

They unrolled several yards of fabric and laid the cloth across the kitchen table. Mas had an old shirt of Halim’s, and she undid the seams, laying the pieces one on top of the other as she pulled them loose. Ani heated the iron. They worked slowly, Mas, seated at the treadle machine, keeping up a low, running monologue as she pulled threads. Ani smiled at Mas’s laughing indignation at the latest teaching methods of the new Form One teacher: “All those children do,” she said, “is sit in the grass and sing songs.” She spat a piece of thread emphatically into her hand. “As if singing nursery rhymes will turn them magically into doctors.”

When all the pieces lay neatly before her, Mas stood up to stretch her legs. The storm had begun to ease off, and she wandered into the sitting room and began to turn the dial of the radio. After a moment, music came through, the reception occasionally disturbed by faint crackling. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” she said, when she returned to the kitchen. She spoke in English, wanting to keep the conversation private from the two boys. “We received a letter from my cousin Bashir. He is the eldest in your mother’s family, and he lives in Tarakan.”

Ani set the iron aside, listening.

“He says that if you can make the journey to Tarakan, he would like to see you. In two months, he is going into the hospital for treatment, and he thinks you should come before then.” She sat down at the machine. “Will you go to see him?”

“I will.”

“And then, afterwards? Will you stay in Tarakan, or will you come back here?”

Ani hesitated, unsure how to read Mas’s question. “I’ll come back.”

Mas nodded. She nudged the hand crank and fixed the needle into place. But after laying down a few threads, she stopped again. “When I finished teaching my lessons this morning, Matthew Lim’s uncle came to see me. He said that his nephew was accepted at the University of Melbourne.” Mas paused, as if still in wonder at what came next. “It seems that Matthew is thinking about turning this opportunity down.”

“Yes,” Ani said. She felt a warmth in her cheeks as she went to sit at the low stool by Mas’s knee. “He told me.”

Mas reached out, smoothing Ani’s hair. “I couldn’t help but remember you, after the war. Thin as a sheet of paper, and so still, so quiet. I think of you as my own sister, my own child.”

“I’ve never felt so at peace here, Mas.”

“So it is you, as well, who wants to remain.”

Mas looked at the two boys in the sitting room, holding their pencils, beginning to write. She said that, during the war, Halim had been forced into a work camp, and she had been left alone with the children. It was the jungle that had kept them safe. Nothing was what it appeared to be in the light, or in the darkness. There was even food to be found, if you knew where to look. So many people disappeared. A life had been worth no more than a bird feather, that’s what she told herself, when first her eldest child, and then her youngest, died. When the war ended, she felt as if she had awoken from a deep sleep to find herself one of the lucky ones. She had survived, but at what cost? One part of her would always be buried with her children, no matter how many days accumulated, no matter how much distance she put between them. “Your life is changing, Ani,” she said. “There is only one thing that I learned from that time. Try to decide what you want, now, before you are forced to choose.”

Ani thought of her parents, her father walking each day to the airfield. “And if there is no right choice?”

But Mas went on as if she had not heard. “Before choice is taken from your hands,” she said, turning away. “By then, it will always be too late.”

When evening came, Ani walked down to the harbour. She was early, and she watched the last of the lift-net boats coming in. Twenty to thirty feet out, they let their sails fall slack, and their momentum carried them to shore.

It was busy tonight, the dealers and fishermen still bargaining over the last of the day’s catch. Women sat with their children, mending nets, or packing up what had not been sold. On the beach, a group of fishermen lay one beside the other, their feet resting against their boat. They used sand and water and the rough, callused soles of their feet to scrub the hull. Every now and then, a burst of laughter would erupt, and the sand would go flying.

Tajuddin came and sat beside her. He was chewing betel nut and repairing one of a half-dozen metal rings he had set in his lap. “ Selamat petang, Ani,” he said, and she returned the greeting. He told her that he had caught four handsome dorab that afternoon, and he believed that the seas would be bountiful tonight.

After a pause, he said, “Are you well, Ani?”

“Yes, datuk.”

He nodded, unconvinced, then returned his focus to the metal rings.

On the shore, Ani could see the high pyramid of fish, glistening with a sheen of water. Women and children gathered around, and the fishermen talked excitedly, gesturing as they spoke.

When Lohkman arrived, the two men went to see the catch. Ani watched their progress along the sand. They stopped every few steps to be greeted by other fishermen, to examine a newly mended net, or admire a neighbour’s boat. With the wind moving against her face, she did not think about Matthew, or Tarakan, she let all feelings subside. She saw their boat waiting on the beach, the glow of the bird on the prow and the warmth of the orange hull. People gathered to carry a lift-net to its storage quarters. They came in a long line, spaced ten to fifteen feet apart, moving along the water’s edge like a ribbon, each carrying a part of the rolled-up net. Children ducked between them, calling to each other as the men passed. The line moved past her, a slow and joyous procession, beads of water on the lines shimmering in the light.

The child that she remembered, the child walking along the ghost road, no longer hid from her. She could reach her hand across the barrier of time and grab hold. She could save her, finally. Don’t be afraid, she thought. We are here, we have made it to the other side.

She saw the shoreline crowded with people, the bright colours of their sarongs, and then the sea, which she imagined hung like a curtain at the edge of the world.

In the days that followed, Matthew told her that he had made his decision. He did not want to leave Sandakan. “And Australia?” she asked him. He said there was enough work on the plantation, and perhaps, later on, he could take a teaching position at the mission school. What he desired most of all was a life with her, a life free from uncertainty.

She pictured their lives unfolding like the casting of a net, when the lines left your hands, you knew where the entirety would fall.

Then one evening, walking in town together, they were approached by a young man she recognized from her years at the mission school. He wore a white shirt and slacks and carried a satchel over his shoulder. After he had confirmed Matthew’s name, he said, “I remember your father.” At first, the young man’s voice was measured and calm. He told them that he still had the papers, signed by Matthew’s father, that had been issued when his family’s crops were confiscated during the war. Then his voice began to rise, and people passing by on the street stopped, curious, looking from one to the other. The young man took another step forward. “My mother and sisters died of starvation,” he said, his voice shaking. “My father died a broken man.” He gazed into Matthew’s face, as if he could see through to the centre of him, to the man he would inevitably become. “You have no right to live amongst us.” The young man leaned forward, his body tensed, rigid. Then he turned abruptly and walked away.

Matthew remained where he was, his arms loose at his sides. When the shock on his face faded, it was replaced by something else, grief, anger, hardening his expression. Eventually, the crowd retreated. The street flowed around them once more. Ani took his hand, cold to her touch, and pulled him along with her, away from Jalan Satu, towards the harbour. The heat bore down on them. Frogs chorused in the grass, a singing that filled her ears. She slipped her sandals off and walked into the water, Matthew following behind, and the tide slipped past them. She saw the boy that she remembered, a boy who loved his father. She recognized the heaviness of this devotion.

After the war, she told him, there had been trials. But Mas and Halim both said that these had brought no relief. A handful of Japanese soldiers had been sentenced, but the ones who had given the orders were never tried, and they received no punishment. “There was no one to hold responsible,” she said. “No one to go to for justice. He carries those papers with your father’s name because it is all he has, it is the only answer given to him.”

“My father lived here from the time he was ten years old, but when he died, no one came to see us. No one grieved him. They looked away when they saw my mother. We were nothing to them.”

He said that in Tawau, those memories had begun to fade. He did not know how such a thing was possible, but the past had become like a book submerged in the water, the ink running across the lines, all the detail lost.

She looked at him, bewildered. “You must have known that forgetting could not last. Not in this place.”

Matthew continued as if he had not heard her. “I can’t help but think about him. I wish to go back and save him somehow. He was an educated man, a good man. In the end, his desires were so ordinary, to protect us, to keep us safe, but he paid for this desire with his life. If I had to face what he did, would I not do the same? If it were you and I, Ani, if it were our children, there would be no choice.”

The next day, Matthew did not come to meet her at the shore. She walked up the hill, searching for him, at each bend of the road hoping he would appear. When she came in sight of Halim’s house, Matthew was there, sitting on the front step, but he did not turn as she approached. She sat down beside him. On the road, a line of schoolchildren walked side by side; a truck came behind them, and the children scattered like a flock of birds taking flight, jubilant and laughing.

He told her that he had woken suddenly in the night, had put on his clothes and let himself out of his uncle’s house on the hillside. The humid air had enclosed him in warmth. He remembered looking up at the sky and thinking how beautiful the moon was, simple and round, as it sank towards the horizon. He had followed it, walking towards his father’s former plantation. Once there, he saw that the kerosene lamps were lit, the flames floating in the dark. As he walked, he counted the trees aloud, turning at the thirtieth row, coming to a standstill at the thirtieth tree.

He knelt down, listening to the sound of night insects, of birds that he couldn’t identify. Owls, babblers, even in his childhood he had not been able to distinguish them. He began to push the dirt away, seeing the child that he was kneeling there, scrabbling at the ground. “I thought he must have known everything. He sent me on this errand because he knew his fate and he wanted to keep me away. I did what he had asked, only by then it no longer mattered. But still I went into the plantation.”

He dug at the ground for a long time, at first calm, but then, finding nothing, panic overwhelmed him. The lights blurred, he was sweating and could not see, but still he continued, with no idea of time or reason. Eventually, exhausted, he dropped into sleep. Some time later, one of the tappers must have found him and sent for his uncle. They were all gathered there at the thirtieth tree, labourers, family, and the boy that only Matthew could see, standing in the shadows. When his uncle asked what had happened, Matthew could only point at the boy. He wanted to go to him, pick him up, but he could not move. His uncle tried to put a coat around his shoulders, but Matthew pushed him away. When his uncle approached him again, Matthew lashed out. Then a terrible numbness took hold of his body and his legs gave out from under him, and the men carried him back to the house.

“They tried to keep me from leaving,” he said, looking at Ani now, “but I told them that I needed to sort out my thoughts, I needed to see you.” He paused for a moment. “Sometimes, in my dreams, I am almost able to reach him. I am telling him how to escape, how to leave Sandakan, I am almost holding him, but then he turns away.”

Later, lying together, his skin was damp and feverish, and he put his arms around himself as if he were cold. He said there was a story she told him once, long ago, about a man who harvested gold from the fields. All these years he had tried to recall it, but somehow it had become confused in his mind. Did she still remember? he asked.

She said yes, and as she told him, his breathing grew steady, lengthening out. In her story, the man walks towards the house standing alone in the middle of the field. The woman, old and stooped, promises him a gift more valuable than money. He will no longer be without land. For all eternity, he will not be at the mercy of the world.

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.

The night air is still warm when they near the theatre. Cars and scooters blur past them, and the blinking colours leave an image in Ani’s eyes even after she looks away. At an intersection, the traffic lights are not working, and a large crowd gathers around them on the curb. When an opening comes, they move in unison, flooding into the street, bringing the vehicles to a standstill.

Ani and Saskia are walking arm in arm, and the children are clutching Siem’s hands. On the front of a boarded-up building, someone has painted, Dutch Get Out, Indos Go Home. They both see it at the same time, and Saskia says, “We’re going, we’re going,” so quietly that Ani just catches the words.

Up ahead, she can make out the form of a young girl who appears to hover above the crowd. She is sitting on the handlebars of a bicycle. The girl floats towards them, one hand on the crossbar to hold herself steady. Behind her, a young man pedals the bicycle at a leisurely speed, and they move across the pavement in perfect balance. Watching them, Ani’s own body seems to lift. She sees Leila Road in the early morning, her bicycle slipping downhill, the sea opening before her.

Inside the performance hall, they are swept along by the rush of people, and the theatre is a commotion of voices. In her seat, Saskia frowns, worrying aloud over the last bits of packing still to be done. Siem puts his hand on her knee and says, “Forget tomorrow.”

When the lights go down, Wideh leans forward on Ani’s lap, gripping her hand in his. He points towards the stage.

The spotlight opens on a young man standing alone on a high platform. There is no music or sound of any sort. He has his eyes closed, as if deep in concentration, and while he stands there, alone and waiting, a hush falls over the theatre. His chest rises and falls, the seconds pass by. To Ani, it feels as if the audience waits in anticipation of the moment when he will open his eyes, step forward, and fall, which he does, as if releasing his spirit. He arches his back and dives into the empty space below. He is rushing towards the earth, but he doesn’t flinch. A few people in the auditorium gasp, and the sound travels up along Ani’s spine. At the last moment, an invisible wire catches him and he collapses his body into a ball and tumbles up again through the air.

In front of Ani’s eyes, the lights seem to wane and blur. The boy’s body, slender, he is only a child, passes across the stage.

When the war was finished, she and Matthew had gone down to the harbour, standing together on the docks. They were nine and ten years old. Still wearing their clothes, they swam out, leaving the few lights of Sandakan behind them. In the water, invisible to the eye, were shipwrecks and unexploded bombs; there were Japanese and American planes lying on the ocean floor. For a long time, she and Matthew floated on their backs staring up into the dark. Were the stars travelling away from them, Ani had wanted to know, or were they coming steadily nearer? He said that the stars were leaving; they were ships carrying people who had left the Earth a long time ago, not knowing that the heavens themselves were a vast desert. Now, it was only the ships that flew on, after the people had grown too old. She remembered Matthew saying that his father, too, had gone away, that he had been killed even though the war was over. The soldiers had lifted his father up and thrown him into the bed of a truck. If you had seen them from a distance, he said, from their movements, so casual, so indifferent, you would not have guessed that they were carrying a body.

Offstage, musicians begin to play, and three slender girls emerge into the lights. Their dance is slow and meticulous, a hand gesturing, wrists turning in delicate circles. Their bodies twist and open, legs extended in arabesques.

One steps up onto a platform, and then without hesitation the second climbs onto her shoulders. Finally, the last girl begins her ascent. At the summit, she sets her hand, palm to palm, on the hand of the girl below. Slowly, she lifts her legs up, balanced by the strength of one arm. She unfolds her body as if her limbs are as weightless as the flame of a candle.

Beside her, Wideh sighs deeply, clasps his hands together, looks out at the stage as if caught in his own dream. One day, she will find the words to explain her life to him. How, in the dark, in Sandakan, planes lifted off from the aerodrome, sending back a murmuring of lights. She had said goodbye to Mas and Halim, to Lohkman, then she had boarded the steamer and travelled across the sea. The note she had written to Matthew was safely in Mas’s hands. Her love for him had not changed, she had written; for both of them, another kind of future must be made to exist. Could she explain it to Wideh like this, make him understand why she had made this choice, why she has kept the secret from his father all these years. When the time comes, she will find a way to tell him the truth.

In her mind, she sees the kerosene lamps, the still plantation. The air is filled with the sound of nocturnal birds and cicadas, the sound of a small boy counting aloud, the thirtieth row, the thirtieth tree. When he finds the place that he is looking for, he begins to remove the earth. He works desperately, steadily, and the shadows of the trees fall around him like the lines of an imaginary house. How far must he travel? At what point will the treasure that he carries be safe?

Onstage, the first two girls hold their position while the third arches her back and swings her legs until she is upside down. She tilts her face up and gazes calmly at the audience. For several seconds they remain motionless, and then the girl at the very bottom begins to walk from one side of the stage to the other. Their bodies tremble with exertion, and the girls sway back and forth.

On her lap, Wideh strains forward towards the stage. He is under the spell of the acrobats, the man who dove through the air, unafraid; and now this small girl who blooms like a flower atop the human ladder.

Beside her, Saskia takes Ani’s hand, holding on as if she, too, can anchor her own body there, in the theatre.

The next morning, at the harbour, everything happens quickly. Siem and Saskia carry the luggage, while Ani gathers the children to her. Together, they make their way towards the registration desks.

The sun is starting to rise now, colouring the edges of the horizon. Ani kneels on the ground beside Wideh and Tash, and the crowd passes around them. Dutch soldiers are trying to organize the emigrants. They hurry people towards the gangway, and the crying and laughing rises in pitch and volume. She does not want to say goodbye, but Saskia whispers in her ear the old saying: “All things change and we change with them.” For a long time they stand holding one another.

By dawn, the great ship in the Jakarta harbour is boarded and sunrise floods over the sea, the water a deep and brilliant orange. The crowd on the dock has thinned now. As the horn sounds, some wave handkerchiefs, others lift both arms in the air, as if they, too, are floating on the water. Among the hundreds of people leaning over the ship’s rail, Ani cannot find the Dertiks. It is Wideh who sees them first: Tash, perched on Siem’s shoulders, and Saskia pressed close to them. They have almost disappeared into the multitude. The ship begins to move away from the harbour. She holds Wideh close to her as she watches the disappearing form.