Certainty

by Madeleine Thien

  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 arr
ange 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.”

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bsp; 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.”