She had felt as if a part of herself were dying, coming to an end.
He said that he had a nightmare in which he was an old man. He walked in the dirt but left no marks. He went into the water thinking it could hold him up, but the water just passed through him.
She wondered if was possible to cross back in time, cross borders and nations, begin again, if this was what he needed. The thought had come to her suddenly: If you go, you will not return. She believes in the present moment, that a decision made now can shift the balance, that every act realigns the past. Imagine it this way, she had told Matthew. It is like walking across a vast field as the sun rises, burns, and slowly falls. The shadows around us change depending on which direction we walk, what steps we choose to take.
“Look at me,” she said.
He met her eyes, and she did not allow herself to falter.
She told him to leave, to travel to Jakarta, to find what he needed to know. Come back, she said, only if you intend to stay.
5. The Bird Feather
JAKARTA
1957
In the heat of the afternoon, Ani’s son sleeps peacefully in her arms. Through the half-shuttered windows, she can hear the sound of the city drifting by, bicycle bells, the nervous rattling of mopeds and bemos. The vendors call out their wares, singing the words above the traffic. On Ani’s stomach, Wideh’s breaths are deep and easy. He presses his mouth against her chin, opens and closes his lips as if he is chewing, dreaming once more about food. She loops her arms around his warm and sweating body, keeps time by the rhythm of his breathing.
In the kitchen, she can hear the muted brushing of Saskia’s slippers on the tiled floor as she sets a pot of water to boil. Saskia’s daughter, Tash, is whispering, I’m hungry, Ibu, as she rummages in the cupboard for cookies. Ani closes her eyes and the apartment falls away, her few belongings, a divan, cot and a small charcoal brazier, the thin blue curtain that divides the room.
Four years ago, she had left Sandakan, boarding the steamer for Tarakan. There, she had met her mother’s eldest brother, Bashir, who was ill, and from there she had gone to Ujung Padang, then Pontianak, continuing on to Jakarta. It was on the boat from Pontianak that she had met Saskia, born in the same year as Ani. Saskia and her family had welcomed her into their lives, helping her to find her place here. In this city of three million people, she feels as if she has disappeared, slipped into the outline she has made for herself: a twenty-two-year-old woman, known as a widow, alone in the world except for her small son.
A canal runs along the far side of Jalan Kamboja. Lying on the divan, she can hear the watery murmur of people bathing, the high, laughing voices of women and children. They sit on the stone steps, or crouch low, scrubbing their clothes. She imagines the colours of their sarongs turning bright when they emerge from the canal, the children holding their noses and submerging their faces as they balance in precarious handstands. They take turns leaping into the warm water.
Tomorrow morning, she will go to Saskia’s house in Kebajoran and they will run through the list one last time, complete all the necessary preparations for Saskia’s departure at the end of the week. The notice had come just forty-eight hours ago, with the news that her family had secured a place on the next boat leaving for Holland. Since early January, more than ten thousand Dutch and Indonesians have been repatriated, families starting over in another country, now that the Dutch East Indies have ceased to exist.
“From the time I was a little girl,” Saskia had said, “I thought I would always live here, that I would be buried beside my parents, and that I would live for eternity with the spirits from ages past.”
“You might come back one day. Nobody knows what the future brings.”
“ Tempo dulu. Those times are gone now.”
“If it were possible, would you change something in your life?”
“It’s like a Dutch sentence, twists and turns and finally, at the very end, the verb that you’ve been waiting for. You can’t really say anything about the sentence until it’s finished.” She laughed. “Quite a trick, if you ask me.”
Over the past few days, Ani has helped fill her trunk with woolen sweaters and socks, with neatly packaged spices, heirlooms and photographs. Weary, they collapsed in Saskia’s sitting room, household goods scattered around them, their children circling on tiptoe.
Saskia’s husband, Siem Dertik, teaches engineering at the technical school in Jakarta. He reminds Ani of her father, and this resemblance both pains and steadies her. Their family is a mirror of Ani’s own, the mother and father whom Ani carries in her memory, the little girl who was once so treasured.
Siem is patient and endlessly curious. Like Ani’s father, he takes pleasure in knowing the names of things, in explaining their origin. He reads books in Indonesian, Dutch, French and English, the languages of his mixed background. In the evenings, while the children listen raptly, he tells them about space in the universe, how it stretches, collapses and folds. He writes equations for the way objects fall through space, following the trajectory of force and gravity. The trajectory of the object, he explains, can be plotted, point by point, a graph revealing the past, the present and the anticipated future.
Once, in the kitchen, she had seen Wideh standing beside Siem, imitating the movements of his hands as he prepared the evening meal. Wearing identical slippers, he imitated Siem’s walk, a quick shuffle, as he moved in the small room.
Here, in Jakarta, nothing holds to a steady state. Electricity and water can’t be depended upon, and the military parades in Freedom Square now spill onto the streets, taking over the roads. Only in Wideh can she recognize the passing time. Ani puts her nose to his hair, she smells the sweetness of his skin, talc and sweat. When she looks at him, she is moved by his resemblance to his father, the high cheekbones, the searching eyes. He is an echo of the boy she knew long ago. She wraps one of her hands around his, and it reminds her of Chinese boxes, one disappearing completely within the other. Ibu, he says, half waking, and Ani whispers his name, Wideh. He sighs, gazing at her for a moment, then returns to his dreams.
There was a time when she could find her way in Sandakan without seeing the landmarks, the sea or even the horizon. This was 1953, and in the mornings, at first light, she folded her sarong between her legs, climbed onto her bicycle, pedalled hard until gravity pulled her down the slope of the hill. In the fog, nothing was visible. People on the road could hear her coming. They ran from her, the baskets on their backs toppling, root vegetables spilling onto the ground as she sped past, missing them by inches. Murderous child! She only heard murder – before she left them behind.
The bicycle, an Australian-made Malvern Star, was painted blue, and the frame felt almost weightless. When she leaned her body forward, the wheels seemed to lift off the ground. She skittered over the rocks, the pedals throwing her feet off, and then steadied again. The road curved downhill, towards the market and the sea. Ani steered with her hips. Beware, beware, and children ran. She was more than Ani, then. She was unpredictable, a piece of light streaking across the ground.
The market gardeners laid their offerings on straw mats. A yellow pyramid of bananas, hillocks of red and green chili peppers, everything neat as the stones in a congkak game. Under a pink umbrella, her neighbour Eika crouched on the ground, chattering about the ginger bulbs and lemongrass. Beside her, watermelons and spiny jackfruit, Hooi-joo smoking, exhaling with her face lifted towards the sky. They took turns jingling their pockets, shouting out, “Sister, sister, take a look here.”