“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.”