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.