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.”