Certainty

by Madeleine Thien

  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.

  Gail had fallen asleep with the box still open on the bed. In her mind, she had returned to Sipke’s kitchen table, smoothed her hands across the photographs. In some ways, this story that he told her felt like one she had always known, as if it had been told to her while she slept, and on waking, she had confused it with her dreams.

  They drive on in silence, turning up a country lane that begins to rise above the surrounding landscape. He tells her that they are now driving onto the island.

  Remembering something that Ed Carney told her once, she says, “Did you know that the Dutch are statistically the tallest people on earth?”

  Sipke laughs. “People say that we long for the vertical because our country is so flat. So we make narrow staircases and tall houses. Even our ambulances are too short for us now. People’s feet protrude out the back doors. Really, though, our height has nothing to do with psychology and everything to do with dairy consumption. Milk, cheese and yogourt.”

  He guides the car into a parking lot, then they step out into the snowy landscape. Sipke opens the trunk and removes a small knapsack.

  They walk together through a village of half a dozen houses surrounding a church. All the buildings had been abandoned, Sipke tells her, decades before, when the water level around the island had grown too high. Gail tightens her scarf around her neck. The sound of the wind rushing across the fields is high-pitched and ghostly.

  “When the sea was pumped out, many objects came to the surface. Bones from the graveyards, centuries old, would rise up as the water receded and float past their wheelbarrows. They found shipwrecks from the middle ages, as old as the twelfth century. In the 1960s, they uncovered Allied planes shot down during the war. The remains inside were perfectly preserved, because of the peat.” Sipke takes Gail’s arm in his and guides her along a tree-lined walkway. “Even now,” he says, smiling, “this is Wideh’s favourite place.”

  In front of them, the island comes to an end. The edge is bordered by assorted wooden pilings, and a cliff falls in a sheer drop of ten metres.

  “We are standing on what used to be the harbour of Schokland.” Sipke taps his foot against the wood, which has now been supported by stones set in concrete. “This is the old pier.”

  He tells her that, since the time of Van Ruisdael and Vermeer, people have speculated about the nature of the light here, in the Netherlands. How it inspired the greatest painters of the age, and taught a new way of looking, of truly seeing, the land and sky. He says that when the dike was built and the sea pumped out, people wondered how the change in the landscape would affect the light. The sea, they said, had been a vast mirror, and perhaps, in draining the water, they had changed the sky irrevocably.

  Sipke opens a blanket and they sit down together, dangling their legs off the pier. From his knapsack, he takes out a stainless steel Thermos and two cups and proceeds to serve the coffee. In the distance, below them, there are herds of sheep walking on the snow, gathering in groups. He says that there are plans to flood the land around Schokland, to keep the island visible above the surrounding fields, so that it does not subside, as time and nature would insist.

  On the snow, a single heron has come to rest, its slender legs, poised and graceful, almost invisible to her. Far away, the land is divided into squares and rectangles, and steep roofs ang
le towards the sky. Here, amidst the dependable geometry of this northern landscape, she feels relief, a calmness taking root in her body. Gail wraps her hands around the cup, grateful for the warmth. She thinks of Wideh, somewhere in Jakarta now. About Ansel. She imagines him standing beside her.

  Sipke gazes out at the horizon, his white hair beating in the wind. She tells him that she fell asleep last night remembering words from Bertrand Russell. Philosophy, Russell had said, was a means to teach one how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation.

  “To live like this,” Sipke says, “means we give up hope of an answer. We respect what is mysterious, while all the while we seek to unravel it.”

  She asks him the question that has followed her here, that remains with her still. “Do you think it’s possible to know another person? In the end, when everything is put to rest, is it really possible?”

  “By know, what do you mean?”

  “To understand.”

  “Understand, yes. But to know another person.” He pauses. “Think of knowing like beauty. The lines that we see are clear, we can trace them, study them in minute detail. But the depth that emerges is still mysterious. How to explain why it reverberates in our minds? When we know another person, I think it is just as mysterious. Knowing another is a kind of belief, an act of faith.”

  Later, she asks him what it was like to return to the Netherlands after so many years away. He tells her how he had gone back to the old farmhouse in Ysbrechtum where he grew up, the same one in which he is living now. He says that people recognized him in the street, they saw his father in his eyes, in the shape of his face. They stopped and shook his hand. “Aren’t you the son of Willem Vermeulen?” “Aren’t you Ankie’s youngest?” “Come, my child,” they said, even though Sipke was almost forty years old. “Let’s have a drink together.”

  There had been an influx of Indonesians into the country. Even in Ysbrechtum, he said, a tiny village, he thought he saw Ani out of the corner of his eye, a young woman, wearing a sarong underneath a wool sweater, despite the wind and cold.

  He says that he remembers waking at night, imagining the tickle of the mosquito net against his skin. The loss came to him again. This ache that people told him would subside. In the farmhouse, he set up a darkroom, and he developed the rolls of film he had brought back from Jakarta. Two children washing themselves at the water pipe, running towards him, their mother out of focus in the background. The young girl with the watchful eyes. A single portrait of Ani.

  His older brother Wim had taken him to the bar, where they sat and drank glass after glass of Bols. Wim had told him, “Try to forget that place. This is where your life is now.”

  “Sipke,” she says. “Tell me, did Wideh ever try to find my father?”

  He turns, looking into her face, thinking back. At last, he says, “I thought, after Ani died, that he would. But I don’t believe he ever did. He put all his energy into his work, into his photographs. His love for his mother was so great, you know, I think he wasn’t ready to let anything interfere with the memories he had.”

  Around them, the snow begins to fall again. Sipke and Gail gather their cups, pick up the blanket, and walk back through the abandoned village. She stops and runs her hands over an anchor, rusted and heavy, that lies on the ground.

  “Your father arrived in Jakarta in September,” Sipke says. Beside him, Gail turns back to the edge of the island, to the boundaries that are now disappearing into the surrounding land.

  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.