Certainty

7. The Island

YSBRECHTUM, THE NETHERLANDS

When Gail Lim arrived in the Netherlands, Sipke Vermeulen was seventy-four years old, and Canada was the country of the pilot who fell from the sky over Ysbrechtum in 1940. That night, almost sixty years ago, the parachute had come down like a balloon returning from the heavens. Sipke had heard the explosion, turned his face towards the glint of fire, and run out into the grass with his three brothers. They were older, and they ran ahead of him, their eyes focused on the sky. Above the farmhouse, the parachute floated out from beneath the clouds, it looked like a part of the moon torn away. He watched the figure cradled in the harness, the slender lines of the body growing ever clearer. When the parachute collapsed into the ground, the folds fluttered in the breeze. Sipke’s brothers pushed their way through the buttresses of silk.

They hid the Canadian pilot in their barn. When the Germans came, his father described the explosion and the ball of light, and then the parachute that had appeared in the flames. The Germans asked where the parachute had landed, and his father made a drawing. He told them that the remains had been carried off by the wind, west towards the sea.

Sipke was twelve years old. Three times each day, he brought food and drink to the injured pilot, and then sat with him. The pilot taught him his first English word, which was thirsty. In time, with the covert assistance of the village doctor, the pilot’s broken bones mended. One day, the pilot disappeared, having been taken in the night by Resistance workers who had come up from the south.

When the war ended, Sipke was seventeen years old. Each of his three brothers had married, moving out of his parents’ farmhouse and into homes of their own, but Sipke had a longing to see the world. He studied languages, English, French and German at the university in Groningen, and after he had finished his schooling, he went to London. There, in the evenings, he wandered the museums, which were free and warm. In one, there was an exhibition of Robert Capa’s photographs. He saw the famous Spanish Civil War soldier, arms flung out in the moment of death; across the room, in the grainy photos of the D-Day landing at Normandy, Allied soldiers, munitions on their backs, laboured through the water. Night after night, he returned to this gallery, he sat on a bench and stared at the images for hours at a time. Walking home under the street lamps, through the crowds of people, he came to believe that only in stillness, only if he were able to step outside of time, could he begin to make sense of the world.

For half a year, he worked as a window washer, saving enough money to buy a Leica. He travelled across England, then Europe, honing his skills, improving his English. In Berlin, he photographed gaunt, skeletal men, German pows, walking home to their villages from labour camps in the Soviet Union. The pictures sold to a Dutch magazine, and he told the photo editor that he was willing to travel, ready to go anywhere. Shortly after, he was offered a job as a war photographer. A split-second decision, one that he did not hesitate over, and his life changed. Sipke sent a letter home, telling his mother that he was leaving for Indochina. She called the boarding house where he was staying, and tried, across the crackling lines, to persuade him to come home. How could he explain it? He needed to see things for himself, to know what he was capable of.

Later on, others told him that he had a gift; he was able to catch and distinguish the defining moment. When he was working, he had the sensation of walking into a deep tunnel, the edges of his body dissolving into the scene around him. Yet he was capable – he does not know how or why – of pulling something tangible from the deep. His photographs were picked up by Elsevier, Life and Réalités. He tried to follow Robert Capa’s famous dictum: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” It was the golden age of photojournalism, and the magazines and newspapers were hungry for images. In Indochina and afterwards, in Algeria, South Africa and Indonesia, he ceased to feel hunger or fear. He felt that his life was precariously balanced, and all he did to prevent his fall was click the shutter, this sound more real to him than his own heartbeat. For twelve years, he travelled from assignment to assignment, living without a fixed address. In Algeria, he photographed the mutilated bodies of men and women who had been tortured and killed, by guerillas, by the FLN or colon vigilante units. He photographed two small children, crawling through the bombed wreckage of their home; and then, that same day, in a neighbouring village, an entire family who had been murdered, in retaliation, by a mob. He felt as if a part of his mind was decaying, he was ashamed of the pictures that he took, and he was confused by their beauty. A dead child abandoned in a field, his face unmarked, the light on his skin. Tiny flowers rising between his fingers.

Nothing made sense, and he tried to separate himself from his emotions, focusing on the sights of his camera to dull the turmoil, the sickness. The only possible negotiation is war, François Mitterrand’s famous line, rang in his ears, and he knew he was witnessing the destruction of the middle ground. By the time he left Algeria, the estimated casualties stood between three hundred thousand and a million. Everywhere he went, he held his camera to his eyes and saw only the dead.

His first memory of beauty was when the Canadian pilot had fallen into the fields, wrapped in his silk parachute, and since that day, he had tried to recapture what he felt, staring up at the sky. I am watching you, he had thought, running across the grass. You must be alive, because I am watching you.

Exhausted, he accepted an assignment from Elsevier to travel to Indonesia and shoot a photo essay: Borobudur, dancers in Bali, Khrushchev’s visit to the capital. It was 1963. One morning, walking through a slum in Jakarta, he gave a few cents to a fortune teller who offered to read his future. She warned him that his gift would disappear. “Not this year or the next,” she said. “But somehow you will lose your talents. You will receive something of great value in return.”

Sipke tells all this to Gail as he drives her from Amsterdam towards the north, to his home in Ysbrechtum, in Friesland. Gail Lim is a young woman, perhaps in her late thirties. The first thing he noticed about her, at her friend Harry Jaarsma’s apartment, was her smile, which seemed to travel across the room and push him lightly in the chest. She had opened the door, her eyes brightening immediately. They went out to his car, and she carried only a small, old-fashioned suitcase and a canvas bag over her shoulder.

Driving, now, he talks about the three thousand kilometres of fortifications that surround the country, protecting it from the sea. They pass the gleaming propellers of the new windmills, the neat rows of poplars lined up like sentries to buffer the wind. When they cross the Afsluitdijk, and the North Sea opens to the west, she says that the landscape is hypnotic. Their car runs down the highway as if they are moving across the beautiful flatness of the ocean itself. “This is a country so small,” he tells her, “that on a map it must write its name upon the sea.” She is a good listener, she allows him to talk, to ramble, until he runs out of words. An hour and a half, and the highway has already carried them far north, to fields and shining canals. “When I was a boy,” Sipke says, “I would ride my bicycle on the farm roads. I would open my arms and use my coat as a sail to catch the wind.”

He asks about her schedule, and Gail tells him that she is not due to fly home to Vancouver until Thursday. She has arranged for a rental car and will drive herself back to Amsterdam. He counts the days in his head. “Three days to see this part of the country,” he says.

He reaches into his shirt pocket and takes out a small black-and-white photograph showing Ani and Wideh, standing at the train station in Heerenveen, on the day that Wideh left home to begin university.

“My wife and son,” Sipke says. For the last thirty years he has thought of Wideh as his own child, and the word comes out before he realizes his mistake.

Gail does not seem to notice. She takes the photo from him, and her expression as she studies it is intent.

She is waiting for him to continue, Sipke knows, but he keeps driving, unable to speak. The realization takes root in his mind: she has not come because of Wideh. It was Ani she asked about over the phone, Ani whose story she wishes to hear. The photograph remains in her hands.

On the side of the highway, they pass an abandoned farmhouse with the words, painted in blue across the wooden slats, “Too much ocean.”

His wife was fifty-seven years old when she died of ovarian cancer. At first, the disease had seemed under control, and then, when illness came, it was so sudden. She had told him that she wished to be buried under a tree, and so he scattered her ashes around the willow in their backyard. Wideh had come home and stayed for half a year. Then the boy, now a man, had left again. He had Sipke’s restlessness in him, and the world was calling.

Before she died, the radiation had weakened Ani, causing her hands to tremble; she could not hold a pen or write a sentence. In her patched white housecoat, she would sit beside him at the kitchen table. She dictated her letters to him, and Sipke wrote them out in his own neat script. He and Ani had moved easily between Dutch, English and Indonesian; they had many languages within their reach. When they were younger, the exchange of words, of ideas, was important. But later, less so. He believes that the human body has some other means of communicating, some way that is yet to be categorized by science, or by language itself. Two people can swim in the same memories, the same dreams; that is how it had become for him and Ani.

He had written down her words on paper: letters to Wideh, to the Dertiks and Frank Postma, to friends in Sandakan and Jakarta.

When Ani died, his world had come to an end. In the days that followed, he sat in his living room, staring out at the canal, the great willows, and felt as if he, too, were passing into a kind of darkness. Outside, the days and nights went on, school children went by on their bicycles, but he chose to stand still. He did not want time to pull him away from the centre of his life. Wideh called every night, and sometimes, across the long-distance lines, they simply sat together, without needing to speak. He was comforted by his son’s presence. He would fall asleep with the phone cupped to his ear.

One day, he took up Ani’s correspondence again. It was like reaching for air. There were one or two people who did not know, would have no way of knowing, that she had died. From Sandakan, her friends Mas and Halim still sent the occasional letter. In his grief, he had not written them. She was not dead to him. He could not live with such a reality. Instead of writing of Ani’s illness, he had simply continued Ani’s letters as if she were still pacing behind him, dictating the words. To Sipke, the letters, her continued existence, seemed one of the few things in his life that was right.

Two nights ago, when the telephone rang and the young woman, Gail Lim, had said her name, he had felt as if decades of his life had collapsed, returned him to that time long ago in Jakarta. Now that Matthew’s daughter is here, he has made a promise to himself, he will try to tell her all that he knows is true.

Standing in Jaarsma’s apartment, her luggage beside her, Gail experiences an unexpected wave of feeling when Sipke Vermeulen takes her hand and says his name. She senses that she is not a stranger to him, but someone known.

Now, in the car, she glances at Sipke, who talks continuously, filling the air with a stream of words. His hair is almost completely white, grand and windswept, and he keeps his scarf on against the chill. The expression on his face is open and kind. He tells her that, next year, he will celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday.

An hour and a half later, Sipke turns down a country road and they pull alongside a house with a high, red roof, surrounded by farmland. To their right, a tidy lawn opens onto a garden. In the cold, the branches of the trees appear crystallized.

“This is our house,” Sipke says.

He looks as if he wants to say something more, but then he takes her suitcase from the car and together they go up the front walk, where he stands briefly, searching for his keys. When he finds them, he unlocks the door, pushing it open.

They pass through a foyer and then into a sitting room where the walls are covered with photographs. This house does not feel like a place of absence, as Gail realizes she had come to expect. There are pictures of canals, a field of devastatingly green maize, a windmill that appears to be floating on the water. Among the landscapes are pictures of a woman and a child. Ani Vermeulen, she knows, and their son, Wideh. “These are your photographs,” Gail says quietly, more to herself than to Sipke.

“Yes. They go back many years.”

She returns to the front door, slips her shoes off, and re-enters. Slowly, she walks along the wall. For a long time, her gaze lingers on the boy, Wideh, captured from childhood to adulthood. She is absorbed by his face, the serious eyes. In one photo, he gazes at a heron facing him, the two standing opposite one another in the grass. Her eyes fall on a portrait of Ani Vermeulen; she is in a café somewhere, not in Holland, perhaps in Asia, light filtering in through horizontal blinds. She appears to be in her twenties, and she is turning her face away as she laughs. Light and shadow play across the picture, across her face, and the portrait is so tender that Gail feels as if she is trespassing into a territory that is both private and revered.

Sipke comes to stand beside her. He indicates a photo, and Gail recognizes a much older Ani, sitting on the grass with her son. “Before, when Ani was here, we kept the walls bare, because she always liked to have a sense of openness, of space. But afterwards, after she died,” he stops, his hands clasped together. “I wanted the house to mirror what was in my thoughts.” He looks past her, towards the photos, then meets her gaze again. “It was seven years ago that she passed away. In 1992.”

When Gail looks into his eyes, she feels as if no time has passed for him. A breath of grief moves through her.

Sipke picks up her suitcase, and she follows him into a bedroom at the back of the house with a view of the farmland. They admire the landscape together. The sun, bright and full, is just beginning to slip below the horizon. “I will leave you to rest,” he says. “We will have dinner at seven?”

She nods, takes his hand, and thanks him.

On the bookshelf in her room is a clear jar, filled with shining marbles. There are kites suspended from the ceiling, and as she walks they brush delicately against the top of her head. The hideaway of a young boy. Wideh’s room.

She lies down on the bed, on top of the covers, fatigued by the long drive north. From her bag, she removes the copy of Sullivan’s diary, stares at the lines for a time. Somewhere in the house, a television or radio comes on, and she can hear the smooth tones of a woman’s voice. Gail closes her eyes, and in her memory the light of a television screen flickers in a dark room. Her father sleeps in an armchair, she has found him there, and the room is quiet but for the sound of his breathing. Outside the window, the branches of the tall trees are outlined in morning light. She can see the clouds moving steadily across the sky, and she cannot shake the sensation that they are adrift on a boat at sea.

She turns onto her back, rests the pages against her chest.

When she opens her eyes, she sees a photograph on the bedside table. In it, Ani Vermeulen is much older, and her hair is tinged with grey. Her eyes, dark and shimmering, are focused on something, someone, that Gail cannot see. Her expression is that of a person catching sight of herself in a mirror, half surprised, half relieved to see the face in front of her.

Over a dinner of potatoes and kale, Sipke watches her eyes as they move from photograph to photograph. He tells her that he had arrived in Jakarta in 1963, on assignment for a Dutch magazine.

Gail is sitting across the table from him. Her dark hair is pulled back, gathered at the nape of her neck, and her face, trusting, is pale in the candlelight. She asks, “Why photography?”

He sets down his fork and takes a sip of wine, thinking. “I started taking pictures when I was very young. I felt, then, that a photograph could change the way events transpired. The photograph is revealing, it triggers something that you know, a truth that you haven’t yet found a way to express. I saw what was happening around me, and I wanted to change it.” He stops and says, only now remembering, “That was a question that Ani asked me, too. You see, after I arrived in Jakarta, I gave up war photography. I went into portraiture, for a time. That’s how I first met her.”

“Was Ani a photographer, too, then?”

He shakes his head. “She worked in the studio because it was a living.”

Outside, the wind picks up, and a sound, like low whistling, moves between the trees. Gail looks towards the window, as if to catch the movement with her eyes before it disappears. “My father knew her once. I think it was when they were children, during the war.”

For a moment, he remains silent, unsure how to answer. “Perhaps I should start at the beginning of what I know,” he says. “I should start with Ani’s life in Jakarta.”

She nods, gratefully. “Have you ever met my parents, Sipke?”

“No, I have not.” He looks up at the wall, at a photo of Wideh taken when he was just eleven years old. He is sitting at a table, oblivious to the camera, moving his hands across the map laid open before him, one elbow leaning on North America, one hand curved around the islands of Indonesia. “But you are right. Ani knew your father. She knew of you, too, once, a long time ago.”

As twilight fades behind them, Sipke tells Gail that he has not been back in Jakarta for almost forty years. In the letters from Wideh, from Ani’s friends Saskia and Siem Dertik, he hears of a place that is at once foreign and familiar. Street names, coffee shops, places he thought were lodged forever in his memory, the sharpness of his recollection has been ground down by the passing of time. But the important places, Jalan Kamboja, the photography studio and Ani’s apartment above, all of these remain distinct, as if he could turn a corner and find himself there again.

When he arrived in Jakarta, he was thirty-five years old. The war of independence between Indonesia and the Netherlands had ended more than ten years before, but the hostilities had not ceased. Still the paint could be seen on the occasional bank or business, Dutch Get Out, Indos Go Home.

One day, while photographing along one of the main canals, he happened by a photography studio on a busy street. There was a sign in the window, Te koop, and without thinking, he pushed open the door and walked inside. The owner, Frank Postma, was Dutch, and the language fell reassuringly on Sipke’s ears. He told Sipke the asking price, barely six hundred Dutch guilders, for the studio and the small apartment beside it. It wasn’t the money, Postma had said, showing him the well-kept studio, and then the darkroom. He wanted to return to Amsterdam, to live once more in the city of his birth. The living space, though small, looked comfortable. Gesturing towards the ceiling, Postma said that a young woman and her son lived in the apartment upstairs. For the last six years, she had worked for him, developing negatives, and she was helpful and skilled. Sipke had left, walking for hours along the canals. He stayed awake most of the night, and in the morning he returned and told Frank Postma that he would buy the studio.

He went into portraiture, keeping Ani on as his assistant. In the darkroom, working with his back to her, he was so absorbed in his own thoughts that he sometimes forgot she was there. He thought that the sound of running tap water, of the pouring of chemicals, came from his own hand. She was a young mother, with beautiful, curious eyes and a gift for languages. Malay was her mother tongue, and she had learned English in school. The scattering of Dutch spoken in the portrait studio, and on the street, had proved no obstacle to her. Ani was reserved and thoughtful, but sometimes, in the evenings, he heard the sound of her laughter drifting through the ceiling. Her son, Wideh, was nine years old, polite, fiercely protective of his mother.

On the other side of the world, it was winter in the Netherlands. His mother wrote long, poetic letters describing their lives, and the lives of his brothers’ families. The canals had frozen, she said, and the Elfstedentocht, a skating race on the canals of Friesland, was taking place for the first time since 1956. Outside, the children tied their skates, their houtjes, to the soles of their shoes, just as Sipke himself had done when he was young. If he closed his eyes, did he still see the wide sky, the tumult of clouds? He reread the letter again and again, as if through it he could enter the life he had once known.

He had moved into the ground-floor apartment, and each night, beneath the mosquito net, Sipke fell asleep to the whirr of the fan, his sleep heavy and dreamless. Elsevier offered him an assignment that would bring him back to Europe, to photograph life alongside the newly constructed Berlin Wall, but he felt indecisive, as if he were in some kind of stupor. He could not bring himself to venture out of Jakarta. He applied for a residence permit and was granted a one-year stay.

In Freedom Square, electricity was skimmed away from the houses and shops and directed to Sukarno’s monument. As electricity faltered across the rest of Jakarta, the monument shone in the night, luminous. At the very top of the column was an effigy of the president. According to rumours, Sukarno’s fortune teller had told him that he would die when his statue was set on top of the column, and so he had decreed it would not be finished until his death.

During the day, while Wideh was at school, Ani took care of appointments and bookkeeping. Each morning, the boy kissed his mother goodbye and fell in line behind the other children, with their satchels and neatly combed hair, walking to the nearby primary school. When school let out, he sat with Ani at a desk in the studio, the radio a whisper behind them. Wideh explained to her very seriously whatever he had learned that day, the nature of clouds or the cycle of rainfall. When Sipke addressed him, the boy said, in Dutch, “ Praat u tegen mij?” Are you talking to me?

In the darkroom, she was always an arm’s length away. Under the pale glow of the lamps, occupied by work, they found it easy to speak about personal things. Early on, he asked her what kind of man Wideh’s father had been.

“A good man,” she had said. “We were both young, and we had known each other since we were children. It was natural to fall in love.”

“Does he live in Indonesia now?”

She said that she did not know where he was. “I left before Wideh was born and came here on my own. He never knew the real reason why I had left Sandakan. Afterwards, I no longer knew how to change what had happened. It is better this way.”

“A mistake?” he asked gently.

She shook her head. After a moment, she said, “I think, in some ways, we will always be attached.”

A year passed, and Sipke renewed his residence permit. They began to take their meals together. At night, while Wideh worked through his multiplication tables, they sat in Ani’s apartment. There, on the second floor, they seemed to step away from the city below. She told him that both her parents had died during the war and that a part of herself still lived and breathed in Sandakan. “It must be difficult for you,” she said, “living in Jakarta. Being so far away from your family.”

He nodded. “My brothers still live in the village where I grew up. I suppose I’ve always been the restless one, the person who longs to go away, to see the world.”

“Yet you stay here, in Jakarta.”

“How can I explain it? Sometimes I feel as if time has stopped. As if I’ve stepped back from my life, because I don’t know where I’m going.”

“There’s danger in thinking like that.”

“What kind of danger?”

“Because time continues,” she said. “Because this moment, this place, is real.”

When the studio was busy, they would work into the evenings, after Wideh had gone to sleep. They unwound the film in the dark, the can opener, reel and tank laid in a tidy row between them. Once, she told him about a journey she had made when she was a child, from Kalimantan to British North Borneo. How her father traded with different peoples along the way, providing rattan and jungle produce, bird’s nests, and so on. He knew the names of different trees and flowers, of birds and insects. “He was a merchant, just as his father was. My grandfather used to sell skins to the British and Dutch who came to Borneo. They wanted everything. Beetles. Many kinds of butterflies. Frogs, civets, birds of paradise. He had this great store of knowledge. When he died, I was only ten years old, and he had taught me only a small part of what he knew.” She held the reel in her hands, turning it thoughtfully. “I told Wideh about his own father not long ago. It’s a difficult thing for a child to understand, and yet he seems to accept it. He has not asked about it since.”

“I was in Jesselton once,” Sipke said. “In North Borneo. I was waiting for a boat that would take me to Phnom Penh.”

“Yes, Jesselton is the capital now.”

He turned and brought the developing lights up.

“What is it that drew you to it?” she asked. “Going to distant places. Photographing wars. I suppose many people find it exciting.”

“Some people, yes. Excitement, adrenaline. Maybe, once, I felt the same.”

He poured the developer into the tank and covered it. They did not speak for several minutes, and then he said, “There is a very famous picture of a man walking towards a house with kerosene and a torch. The house is barred, and there’s a family inside. You can’t see them in the photograph. It’s a dirt road, and there is a mob behind him.”

“The man has a cut above his eye.”

He nodded, surprised. “Where did you see it?”

“It was in the newspapers. I still remember the expression on the man’s face.”

“The mob thought the father was a collaborator, so they set fire to the house and waited for the family to come out.”

Ani had been removing a roll of film, and now her hands stilled over the canister, her body tensing. For a moment, he did not want to continue, felt that he would hurt her somehow. He said, “It was in Algiers. There were other photographs. Of the man who tried to escape from the house, and of his family.”

She said nothing.

Sipke continued, trying to explain himself to her. “The mob surrounded them. I was down on the ground and I begged, in French, in English, for the men to back off, not to go further. And then when it became clear that this family would be killed and nothing I said could stop it, I picked up my camera and I photographed it. I thought, I can’t look away now. I don’t have the right to turn away.

“Afterwards, no one wanted to publish what I had seen. I had failed to compose a picture, something whole that could make sense of the pieces. The pictures were senseless, gruesome. A bloodstained hand, a face. But the man with the kerosene and torch became famous. That photograph is different, it’s alive. It’s the last good photograph I have taken, but I can’t bear to look at it. I keep asking myself, what happens when the context is lost and only the image remains? People look at that picture now, in magazines and books, and they speculate about it. They don’t know what happened before or after. All they see is this one moment, disconnected from the past or the future. It feeds their imagination, but it doesn’t give them knowledge.”

Ani looked at him, and he felt that she could see into the core of his memories, to the emotions that overwhelmed him, even now.

“Perhaps you are asking too much of a picture.”

He shook his head. “The picture shows us that this suffering is made by people, and because it is made by us, it is not inevitable. That was the reason I wanted to be a photographer.” Carefully, he mixed a stop bath and poured it into the spout. His hands trembled and the liquid spilled. “There is something that I’ve always remembered. The war photographer George Rodger’s response to Bergen-Belsen. He was one of the first to enter the camp after Liberation. He said that he walked through the camp, saw thousands of bodies and was horrified. He wanted people to confront what had happened, he wanted to compose photographs that could never be forgotten, and so he arranged the bodies, moved arms and legs. Afterwards, he swore he would never take another war picture as long as he lived.”

“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.

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.”

In the empty restaurant, Sipke closed his eyes and was back in Algiers, crawling on his hands and knees towards the man, the stranger. He had wanted the camera to speak for him, to make something out of this suffering that, in the end, could never be forgotten. But the photograph was only a shadow, a question waiting for a response, for someone else to take it in his hands and recognize all that it wished to say, all that it had failed to express. He wanted to call her down, to throw stones at the window, break the glass and tell her that for the rest of his life he would love her. He said her name over and over, but only the noise of the city answered.

He asked Ani if he could take a portrait of her, and she agreed. They went into the studio, which was almost empty now, ready for the new proprietor. Rain cascaded against the exterior walls. Ani wore a blue batik kain and kebaya, and the silk of the material was flecked with gold. Her hair was tied back, swept cleanly off her face so that it was her eyes that arrested you. He set his camera on the tripod, and framed her face in his view. They did not say anything to each other, and it came to him that their affair, what they had been to one another, had been redefined, had become another relationship entirely. A photographer and his subject, separate people in parallel worlds, and at the end of it all, no way that he knew to bring them together.

He laid all their papers on a table in the studio: visa documents, departure permits, plane tickets. “I would find some way to stay if you asked me to.”

She took his hand, looking into his face, her body still. “I can’t,” she said. “That is the one thing I could never do.” The space between them grew, expanding out, until she seemed as insubstantial, as ghostly as the dust in the light. She stepped away, releasing his hand so gently that he almost missed the moment when it slipped from his.

At the airport, the departure lounge was chaotic. Thousands of Indonesians, of expatriates, eager to leave the country. He was moved forward by the crowd, through the terminal, onto the tarmac, which blurred in the heat. He boarded the plane, carrying almost nothing, no extra clothes, no keepsakes. Only his cameras.

The airplane gathered speed on the runway. Alongside it, a hundred yards back, ran a dirt road lined by small huts. People were visible, crouched on the ground at makeshift kitchens, outdoor fires, their laundry drying under the hot sun, chickens scrabbling beneath papaya trees. The plane lifted into the air, and the thatched roofs gave way to the harbour, to the city and red-tiled houses, and then the swirling patterns of rice fields. “Peace go with you, Sipke,” she had said when he left her, the traditional Indonesian words of parting. Peace remain. Below, he saw the tiny shadow of the plane growing smaller, until at the coastline it disappeared and all he could see was the reflection of the sun on the ocean. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, a surface of clouds was all that remained, what was below had disappeared.

Early the next morning, Sipke and Gail drive south, out of the province of Friesland. The snow has stopped falling, but the ground is covered, a field of white. Through the mist, a pale, diffuse light falls to the ground, reminding her of a Rembrandt landscape. She looks for the horizon, trying to make out the dividing line between land and air, but one seems to run into the other, the snow having erased all distinction. Far away, on a lake that is not visible to her, there is a single boat sailing.

“This province we are entering, Flevoland,” Sipke tells her, “was created in the 1930s, when a dike was built connecting North Holland to the province of Friesland, cutting the Southern Sea off from the North Sea, and thus from the Atlantic Ocean. When the water was pumped out, a new province was born.

“This road that we are driving on now,” he says, one hand gesturing out the window, “was once the bottom of the sea floor. We have a famous saying here, God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland.

“The island of Schokland stayed where it was, but all around it, the water disappeared. One morning, it woke up to find itself a part of the continent again. An island sitting on a sea of land.”

She peers out the window, and the flat fields rolling by are suddenly strange, miraculous.

Last night, she had remained awake, sifting through Wideh Vermeulen’s photographs. One of the tear sheets was as recent as this year, a photo essay documenting the graves that had finally been opened in Jakarta and in villages across Indonesia. In the text that Wideh had written, accompanying the images, she read that even now, there is no agreement about what happened in 1965, who initiated the coup that took Sukarno from power, that placed Suharto in his stead. And there is no agreement over the number of people who died in the aftermath, a few hundred thousand, perhaps up to a million dead in the Communist purges. The facts of what happened have been covered in silence, lost in the passage of time.

The photographs are familiar to her somehow. Such images have become too common, the bones in sunlight, the people standing near. In one photo, a woman in her sixties kneels in the dirt before an open grave. In her hand, she holds a small square photo of a young man. The woman looks over the scene as if all the memories of her life are colliding in this moment, nightmare and hope and wish. In the caption at the bottom, her words are translated. For thirty-five years, she says, I did not know where he lay. Now I know, and all my hopes are here, they will not wake again.

Gail had fallen asleep with the box still open on the bed. In her mind, she had returned to Sipke’s kitchen table, smoothed her hands across the photographs. In some ways, this story that he told her felt like one she had always known, as if it had been told to her while she slept, and on waking, she had confused it with her dreams.

They drive on in silence, turning up a country lane that begins to rise above the surrounding landscape. He tells her that they are now driving onto the island.

Remembering something that Ed Carney told her once, she says, “Did you know that the Dutch are statistically the tallest people on earth?”

Sipke laughs. “People say that we long for the vertical because our country is so flat. So we make narrow staircases and tall houses. Even our ambulances are too short for us now. People’s feet protrude out the back doors. Really, though, our height has nothing to do with psychology and everything to do with dairy consumption. Milk, cheese and yogourt.”

He guides the car into a parking lot, then they step out into the snowy landscape. Sipke opens the trunk and removes a small knapsack.

They walk together through a village of half a dozen houses surrounding a church. All the buildings had been abandoned, Sipke tells her, decades before, when the water level around the island had grown too high. Gail tightens her scarf around her neck. The sound of the wind rushing across the fields is high-pitched and ghostly.

“When the sea was pumped out, many objects came to the surface. Bones from the graveyards, centuries old, would rise up as the water receded and float past their wheelbarrows. They found shipwrecks from the middle ages, as old as the twelfth century. In the 1960s, they uncovered Allied planes shot down during the war. The remains inside were perfectly preserved, because of the peat.” Sipke takes Gail’s arm in his and guides her along a tree-lined walkway. “Even now,” he says, smiling, “this is Wideh’s favourite place.”

In front of them, the island comes to an end. The edge is bordered by assorted wooden pilings, and a cliff falls in a sheer drop of ten metres.

“We are standing on what used to be the harbour of Schokland.” Sipke taps his foot against the wood, which has now been supported by stones set in concrete. “This is the old pier.”

He tells her that, since the time of Van Ruisdael and Vermeer, people have speculated about the nature of the light here, in the Netherlands. How it inspired the greatest painters of the age, and taught a new way of looking, of truly seeing, the land and sky. He says that when the dike was built and the sea pumped out, people wondered how the change in the landscape would affect the light. The sea, they said, had been a vast mirror, and perhaps, in draining the water, they had changed the sky irrevocably.

Sipke opens a blanket and they sit down together, dangling their legs off the pier. From his knapsack, he takes out a stainless steel Thermos and two cups and proceeds to serve the coffee. In the distance, below them, there are herds of sheep walking on the snow, gathering in groups. He says that there are plans to flood the land around Schokland, to keep the island visible above the surrounding fields, so that it does not subside, as time and nature would insist.

On the snow, a single heron has come to rest, its slender legs, poised and graceful, almost invisible to her. Far away, the land is divided into squares and rectangles, and steep roofs angle towards the sky. Here, amidst the dependable geometry of this northern landscape, she feels relief, a calmness taking root in her body. Gail wraps her hands around the cup, grateful for the warmth. She thinks of Wideh, somewhere in Jakarta now. About Ansel. She imagines him standing beside her.

Sipke gazes out at the horizon, his white hair beating in the wind. She tells him that she fell asleep last night remembering words from Bertrand Russell. Philosophy, Russell had said, was a means to teach one how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation.

“To live like this,” Sipke says, “means we give up hope of an answer. We respect what is mysterious, while all the while we seek to unravel it.”

She asks him the question that has followed her here, that remains with her still. “Do you think it’s possible to know another person? In the end, when everything is put to rest, is it really possible?”

“By know, what do you mean?”

“To understand.”

“Understand, yes. But to know another person.” He pauses. “Think of knowing like beauty. The lines that we see are clear, we can trace them, study them in minute detail. But the depth that emerges is still mysterious. How to explain why it reverberates in our minds? When we know another person, I think it is just as mysterious. Knowing another is a kind of belief, an act of faith.”

Later, she asks him what it was like to return to the Netherlands after so many years away. He tells her how he had gone back to the old farmhouse in Ysbrechtum where he grew up, the same one in which he is living now. He says that people recognized him in the street, they saw his father in his eyes, in the shape of his face. They stopped and shook his hand. “Aren’t you the son of Willem Vermeulen?” “Aren’t you Ankie’s youngest?” “Come, my child,” they said, even though Sipke was almost forty years old. “Let’s have a drink together.”

There had been an influx of Indonesians into the country. Even in Ysbrechtum, he said, a tiny village, he thought he saw Ani out of the corner of his eye, a young woman, wearing a sarong underneath a wool sweater, despite the wind and cold.

He says that he remembers waking at night, imagining the tickle of the mosquito net against his skin. The loss came to him again. This ache that people told him would subside. In the farmhouse, he set up a darkroom, and he developed the rolls of film he had brought back from Jakarta. Two children washing themselves at the water pipe, running towards him, their mother out of focus in the background. The young girl with the watchful eyes. A single portrait of Ani.

His older brother Wim had taken him to the bar, where they sat and drank glass after glass of Bols. Wim had told him, “Try to forget that place. This is where your life is now.”

“Sipke,” she says. “Tell me, did Wideh ever try to find my father?”

He turns, looking into her face, thinking back. At last, he says, “I thought, after Ani died, that he would. But I don’t believe he ever did. He put all his energy into his work, into his photographs. His love for his mother was so great, you know, I think he wasn’t ready to let anything interfere with the memories he had.”

Around them, the snow begins to fall again. Sipke and Gail gather their cups, pick up the blanket, and walk back through the abandoned village. She stops and runs her hands over an anchor, rusted and heavy, that lies on the ground.

“Your father arrived in Jakarta in September,” Sipke says. Beside him, Gail turns back to the edge of the island, to the boundaries that are now disappearing into the surrounding land.