Certainty

8. Certainty

YSBRECHTUM

1992

She and Sipke walk arm in arm along a country road. The clouds above, stretched fine, gather the light and spill it down. They are alone but for the occasional bicycle trundling past, a car that speeds by, giving them a wide berth. The road becomes a gravel track, continuing through a farmer’s field where, from time to time, a sleeping sheep lies across the path, and she and Sipke must detour around it.

When Ani grows tired, they stop and sit in the grass, eating the chocolate that Sipke now knows to carry with him. In the distance, she can see a wind turbine, sleek and white, propellers cutting through the air.

When she left Jakarta almost thirty years ago, this place had been mysterious to her. Standing in the open fields, the late autumn chill in the air, she could see in every direction, a storm or sunshine moving in, a distant wash of rain. Sipke had continued to work as a photographer, and for a time they lived in the nearby city of Groningen, coming to Ysbrechtum only a decade ago. The community here, rural and tight-knit, had been welcoming, not unkind, but she has always felt an outsider. To ease her loneliness, they had travelled frequently, going often to The Hague, where Siem, Saskia, and Tash Dertik had made their home, to Maastricht, then across the border into France. Indonesia was a world away, an item on the newscast, a photograph. But in her mind, it joined all things, a background to all that she saw.

Sipke touches her cheek. “You were far away.”

“I was thinking about this field, the first time we walked here together. About Jakarta.”

A cool breeze skims across the grass and the sheep nearby turn their faces away, hunching their ruffled shoulders. Some of the sheep are marked by a cheerful red or blue circle, as if a child had come through this field with a paintbrush. Sipke moves so that he is sitting close beside her and she leans back, her head against his chest.

He says, “I always thought we would go back, eventually.”

It was true. They had put it off time and again, saving the journey for a future date.

“It was me. I hesitated for too long.”

He shakes his head, as if to say, No, us.

“I woke up one day,” she says, “and realized the moment had passed, I no longer needed to return.”

In the last month, Wideh has come home from his travels. He is Sipke of an earlier time, a restless spirit. For years he has lived from assignment to assignment, but here, in Ysbrechtum, he seems content to lay his camera aside. Dark haired, slim, and tall, he has a confidence that moves Ani, a face that is open to the world. Even as an adult, becoming set in his ways, he surprises her still.

This morning, after breakfast, he had laid out a dozen photographs on the kitchen table, a series on Borobudur in Indonesia. When Sipke had visited the temple in 1963, Borobudur, more than a thousand years old, had been in near ruins. Back then, people would bring small tools to the site, and when they left they carried the relics and carvings away in their arms. He told her that the monument, with its Hindu and Buddhist elements, is now fully restored, rising up, offering its peaks and domes to the sky. On the day he went, the grounds were almost deserted. He had followed the walkway that spiralled up through the terraces, the bas-relief sculptures decorating the walls illustrating a journey, an ascent, away from the world of suffering. She sifted through the photographs. I thought of you, he said, turning to Ani. His dark eyes imploring her, to get well again, not to leave him. He told her how the stupas, shaped like bells, surrounded him, each one containing a statue, a boddhisatva. He had watched the sunrise, not wanting to lift the camera, to place it between himself and what he saw. The valley around him was a startling colour, a golden inlay on the deep green fields. “How peaceful it was,” he said. “The silence seemed to move like a being across the valley. I thought you would have felt at home there, just as I did.”

“Yes,” she had said, watching his face, so known to her, the grief concealed. “When I put your photos down, I can close my eyes and see the place, as if I were standing in Indonesia again.”

The wind picks up, cutting a swath in the grass. Light edges the high, cumulus clouds, throwing them into relief. She thinks of a kite in the air, of a September day in Jakarta. When Matthew arrived, he had sent a note from the hotel where he was staying, and they arranged to meet in the park on Jalan Kamboja, alongside the canal.

The night before, she had lain awake. On the table were a half-dozen letters addressed to Sipke, begun but left unfinished. He had been gone for almost a month, and without him the days had an air of unreality. She wanted to write to him, to tell him something concrete, but she could not find a way to express the rush of feelings that she herself did not fully understand. Sipke had sent her a photograph, one of the last he had taken before he left for the Netherlands. In the picture, Wideh, lying on his stomach on the floor, was setting up a game of marbles. The glass beads shimmered, and her son’s face was half in darkness. It was his father’s face that she saw, clearer than any recollection.

In the park the next day, Matthew walked towards her. She saw the curve of his shoulders, the set of his mouth, all intimately known to her, as if she had conjured the young man she once knew. He wore glasses, wire-rimmed, silver. He took her hand, holding on to it for a moment. There were dark shadows below his eyes, a weariness.

They found shade on a bench beneath a cassia, with its thousands of shifting leaves. Kites of every shape and hue swam in the air above them.

At first, their conversation rambled, a skittish bird moving from branch to branch, unsure. He told her he had flown to Tawau, staying there for a few days with his mother and her family, then continuing to Sandakan where his uncle still lived. There had been a film crew in the town, making a movie. Within days, the prisoner-of-war camps had been reconstructed, in the same place where once they had stood before.

He spoke in Malay, the language of their childhood. “I had not seen the town in more than a decade. Since before I left for Australia.

“There,” he said, after a moment, “even the trees were different. Every day, I went past a golf course. At twilight, hundreds of kangaroos would gather together. They sat like statues in the grass.” He said that the realization of growing older had come upon him suddenly. The speed at which the years had gone by. He took a breath. “In Melbourne, I thought of you. I thought of you often.”

To Ani, the girl that she had been, turning away from him, was both near and blurred. She wanted to find the words that would call her into being, some thread that would connect her back to that time. She began to speak about the day, twelve years before, when they had walked together on the beach, the tide washing out. He listened, his face open towards her, vulnerable. She told him that she had held the truth from him, that at the time she believed there had been no other choice to make. When she spoke Wideh’s name, he looked down. There was exhaustion in his face, but not surprise.

“And so you left Sandakan,” he said. “All these years, that was the reason.”

She nodded, remembering how she had stood on the steamboat, watching as the harbour she had known all her life slid away from her. “When I went to my mother’s family in Tarakan, my uncle helped me. Wideh was born here in Jakarta. Afterwards, I wanted to write to you. I wanted to make it right. This dishonesty. But I was not brave enough. I feared what the words might do. When Wideh asked about his father, I told him that I was the one who had left. That I had come to Jakarta on my own. I said that I believed you had remained in Australia.”

From somewhere in the distance, she heard the din of Jalan Kamboja, a clattering of sound. She saw betjaks weaving between the trucks, crowds of people slipping through.

His voice, when he began to speak, was tentative. He told her that he could not pinpoint the moment when he had begun to understand. Information had reached him slowly. That she lived in Jakarta. That she had a child. Then, a year ago, when he learned that the child had been born in 1954, it was as if some part of him had come awake. He could not explain why he had not seen it before. Perhaps he had suspected all along, perhaps he had pushed the knowledge away, he no longer knew.

An older man carrying a birdcage passed them, the bamboo cage covered by a dark cloth. They could hear the bird, the claws against the fabric, the trilling of its voice.

He went on, telling her about Clara, the woman he had met while studying in Australia. “We married,” he said, “two years ago. We have a child now, a daughter, Gail. It was Clara who said that I should come, travel to Jakarta, find what I had to know.”

He said, “I would have given up Australia. I would not have abandoned you.”

“Yes,” she said. “And so I was the one to leave.” Around her, the park seemed to fade out of focus, the shapes, indistinct, weaving together. “Last month, when your letter arrived . . .”

“I needed to make sure. I needed to know, once and for all.”

For a time, they sat in silence, and she felt as if they were floating on the surface of the sea and the current alone pushed them on.

“Ani,” he said. “Have you told him that I’m here?”

“No. I wanted to see you first. To know what you wished.”

“I would like to see him.”

“You’ll be surprised by Wideh,” she said. “How tall he is, how gentle. Even when he was a small child, he was older than his years, already curious about the world.” She looked out across the grass, to where the park ended, giving way to a series of low buildings. “In another hour, he’ll walk through this park on his way home from school.”

“Wideh,” he said. “I remember. Your father’s name.”

Waves of heat hovered above the ground. They crossed the grass, to where the canal shone, reflecting the afternoon light. He began to tell her of the last few days in Sandakan. The film crew had hauled in lumber from the mills north of the harbour, he said, and transported it up Leila Road. The prisoner-of-war camps had seemed to him more familiar than the town itself. On the film set, men, looking emaciated and haggard, had wandered through the barracks. Beside them, Japanese actors practised their lines, rifles set with bayonets dangling casually from their shoulders. Curiosity had brought people from as far away as Semporna and Tawau to watch; they sat on blankets around the periphery. When the cameras rolled, a hush fell over the clearing. Every gesture was mapped out beforehand, and each phrase laboured over. The actors’ words, spoken so intently, fell like needles into the quiet.

In one scene, he told her, a prisoner was separated from the others. He was beaten, and then a soldier standing behind him placed his pistol against the man’s head. The man struggled, but he was forced to his knees. The soldier fired, and the man’s body jerked, then slumped into the dust. His head was twisted to the right, ear to the ground, eyes still open. When the filming stopped, he relaxed his body and turned over, staring for a moment up at the heavens above. Then he pushed himself to standing and wiped the dust from his clothes. Immediately, the blood in his hair and on the ground was cleaned away.

The scene was repeated many times, the cameras moving towards the man and then away. Sitting in the crowd, surrounded by people who dared not breathe, Matthew had closed his eyes against the scene. He felt as if a stone at the bottom of his life had rolled loose, as if the contents of his memory could no longer be contained. They spilled into the air around him, vivid and uncontrolled. Why was this happening, he had wondered, when he had tried so hard, given up so much, to leave it behind?

Ani could see the drift of smoke rising from the ruins of the camp. In a crater, two children sat back-to-back, the bowl of the sky above them. They had believed in a world reborn, that the life they remembered would come into existence again. It had not and yet the days had gone on for them both. Now, when she looked at him, she could imagine the way in which his face would age, filling out, the lines radiating from his eyes. Strands of white were already visible in his dark hair.

He said he had stood on the hillside, asking himself how it was possible to continue. At what point would he finally step forward, would he make, decisively, the shape of his life? When would the war be over for him? Sometimes, he said, one had to let go of the living just as surely as one grieved the dead. Some things, lost long ago, could not be returned.

Across the street from the park, children began to emerge from the school, their jubilant voices filling the air. They scattered in every direction. She could sense Matthew following her gaze.

Wideh walked into the park head down, absorbed in his own thoughts. He stopped at the canal, where a newspaper had been left on the steps leading down to the water. He was no more than a hundred yards away, but he did not notice them. Putting his satchel down, he opened the paper, then he removed a sheet and began to fold it, deftly constructing a paper boat. He made one after another, lining the finished pieces up on the steps, a fleet at rest.

Eventually, he looked up and saw them and he began to run towards the place where they were sitting. When he reached Ani and Matthew, he held back, suddenly shy. “Have you come to watch the kite-flying?”

She smiled, embracing him. “No, it was only a happy accident.”

He leaned his forehead against hers.

“Wideh,” she said. “There is someone here I would like you to meet.”

She was about to say something more when Matthew reached out tentatively, placing one hand on Wideh’s shoulder. When he spoke, his voice was casual, but she saw in his eyes what the effort cost him. He told Wideh that he had known Ani once, long ago, in the years before she had come to Jakarta.

Wideh turned to Matthew, looking curiously into his face. “In Sandakan?”

“Yes, but I no longer live there.”

Wideh set his satchel on the embankment where Ani and Matthew were sitting. He fiddled with the buckle, all the while looking down at the grass.

“Do you fly kites, Wideh?”

He shook his head. “But I’m going to build one some time. A swallow. The pattern isn’t complicated, not like some of the others.” He motioned towards an older man in a quilted jacket standing nearby. His three kites, attached to one another in a triangle, were painted to resemble birds. They spun and fell sharply, their tails tracing patterns in the sky. The man stepped sideways and they plummeted to the ground, somersaulting over the grass before lifting up once more.

Wideh turned back to Matthew. “What is it like in Sandakan?”

“Nowadays, it’s peaceful. Not as vibrant as Jakarta, but the harbour is very busy; ships come in from many places. When I was small, I used to imagine the town was a child, standing with his back to the jungle, and his face to the sea.”

“As if to set foot in the water and sail away,” said Wideh.

“A swimming city!”

Ani laughed. “You never told me.”

“I still remember walking down to the harbour in the early morning,” Matthew said. “Seeing you there on Tajuddin’s boat.”

“She hardly speaks about it,” Wideh said, his voice filled with wonder.

“It was so long ago.”

“Everyone knew her. In Sandakan, Tajuddin’s boat was famous.”

Matthew and Wideh continued to talk, about kite-flying, then distant cities, and Ani did not interrupt them. She listened to their voices, this knitting together, felt as if she were balanced within, a soul sheltered between the past and the present.

A civilian regiment, recognizable by their khaki shirts and trousers, swept onto the road, stopping traffic. They moved in unison, chanting slogans whose words she could not make out. Beside them, the canal was busy with people bathing and swimming, the womens’ clothing blurring in kaleidoscopic patterns.

“One day, I’ll go to Sandakan,” Wideh said. “I’ll put flowers on the graves of my grandparents. Ibu told me both my grandfathers died there, and also my grandmother.”

“And if there are no graves?”

“Then the sea.”

Matthew nodded. “I, too, was glad to go back. If only to say goodbye.”

They sat together as the sun faded behind the trees, lowering through the branches. The kites drifted to the ground, a swirl of colour, and children ran to gather them up.

When they parted, he left as if he would be seeing them again, shaking Wideh’s hand, then putting his lips to the boy’s hair. She knew that what she and Matthew had shared in childhood had carried them safely through, a net where all other lines had been torn away. All these years, the net had held. His eyes rested on Ani’s face. They said goodbye to one another, and then he stepped away from them. She saw what he had given her, the one thing her parents had been unable to do, prepare her for this parting, this letting go.

A betjak came along and he climbed in. She watched the vehicle pull out onto the busy street, watched for as long as she could, until it was one among so many others. Wideh took her arm and pulled her lightly, and together they walked along the crowded road, eventually crossing back into the park, towards Jalan Kamboja.

In the late afternoon, Wideh sleeps on a blanket in the grass, a magazine open on his chest. The fuchsia shrubs, planted in a border along the canal, reach out luxuriantly. Low against the sky, a flock of avocet, or kluut, veer and dip in unison. They are familiar to Ani now, these elegant northern birds, the kluut with their black-tipped wings; the heron that stand in the fields, watchful.

The birds tip towards the east, their movement coinciding with the appearance of Frank Postma, who steps with a flourish into the garden, his daughter, Ingrid, close behind him. Ani walks across the grass to meet them, and he puts his hands on her shoulders, kissing her on both cheeks. Ingrid presents the box of pastries that she says they bought in the Indonesian market in The Hague. Spekkoek, Frank announces, klepon and ongol-ongol. Only the best. Ingrid nods. “A veritable dessert buffet.” At these words, Wideh gets to his feet.

Frank asks to see Wideh’s photographs, and, after some prodding, Wideh brings out an envelope of prints taken during a recent trip to Southeast Asia. In one, the harbour at Sunda Kelapa, a study of the myriad lines of rigging that criss-cross the sky. In another, a stand of trees half concealed by fog, the trunks, otherworldly, crooked and gnarled. “Mount Kinabalu,” he says. “A cloud forest in North Borneo. In the high altitude, the clouds deposit drops of water on the trees, and this provides what little moisture they need.” He selects a print and shows it to Frank. “Here’s a pitcher plant, one of the carnivorous plants of the region.”

For a moment, Ani believes it is her father speaking. In her memory, they are walking single-file through the jungle, Ani between her parents, their voices layering into the canopy above her.

Sipke appears, bringing beer and wine and a half-dozen glasses. In the last few months, his hair has begun to grey, a brush of white at the edges. Ani pours the drinks and Sipke stands with one hand on the small of her back, listening as Wideh describes Jakarta, the neighbourhoods bulldozed or rezoned, made over into something entirely different. Walking on Jalan Kamboja, he had searched among the remaining businesses, finding an elderly woman who remembered the street the way it was in the early 1960s, the Pondok Restaurant, the Dutch portrait studio. “They went away with their little boy,” she had told him. “I’m not sure where they’ve gotten to now.”

“Up to no good, of course,” Frank says. He lifts his glass, takes a sip of beer. “I remember it all so clearly. Now, when I look at these young kids, going off with their cameras to Bosnia, to Croatia, I want to pack my bags and follow them. Being a photographer is what I’ve always done. I’m not equipped for any other life.”

“That time is gone,” Ingrid says, reaching out to touch her father’s shoulder. “You’ll have to content yourself with dusty old Holland. What was that line again?” She looks up at the cloudless sky, remembering. “‘O starshine on the fields of long ago.’”

Sipke finishes the words. “‘Bring me the darkness and the nightingale . . . and the faces of my friends.’”

Twilight comes, and the frogs are a chorus on the banks. Joos, their neighbour and Sipke’s boyhood friend, shows up with box wine. Quantity, Joos says, is the order of the night. Beside him, Sipke frowns at the seal. While the glasses are being refilled, Ingrid stands up and finds Wideh’s guitar leaning against the wall. She sets it on her lap, her fingers moving lightly over the strings, and the notes disperse, weaving together the space around them. Their voices rise, enclosing her, Frank’s erudite and Joos’s bombastic. Her heart eases to see Sipke and Wideh relaxed and laughing. It does not feel as if it is she who is leaving. Rather, the world is withdrawing from her, stepping back; it is taking its leave.

There is a child in the canal, barely visible. In the dim light, Ani can see her floating on her back, her hair in pigtails, her arms flung wide. Around her, tall fronds reach above the water, interrupting the reflection of the evening sky. Slowly, the girl drifts past. Then, as if aware of someone watching, she turns onto her stomach, swimming, her shoulders appearing then submerging, her pale feet taking turns to break the surface.

When Ani looks up, she sees Sipke, and the tenderness in his expression returns her to a morning almost thirty years ago. She and Wideh are in the airport in Amsterdam, their one trunk on the ground. She sees the mass of people, the high wavering lights, and then Sipke coming towards them.

Together they leave the airport. Outside, they find that a light snow is falling. Sipke has borrowed his brother’s car, and they drive under a series of concrete bridges, into the open. The colours transfix her, muted shades of green and brown, ice beneath a pearl-white sky. Everywhere, the land is unfamiliar, unimagined, canals slipping across the fields. For a moment, the future comes to her, as vivid and clear as a memory unfolding. The highway rises onto a plateau, the land falls away. The North Sea opens before her, wind rippling the water.