She remembered being underwater with Lohkman. How the glare of the world had disappeared, softened by the water. She had taken a breath, then dived straight down, exhaling, air escaping from her lips. Her body had sunk towards the sea floor, moving among the crevices of rock and the waving vegetation. There was a puffer fish that Lohkman had captured in his hands, rolling it through the water like a child’s toy. He wanted her to listen for the shoals of fish, to learn this talent that he himself had acquired. But all she heard was a dull roar, every sound blurred and inseparable. She wondered if her child would soon be able to hear her voice through the echo chamber of her body, if it would be able to distinguish it from all the others – just as in dreams she heard her own mother, one voice rising from the din, calling to her across the divide, telling her to let go, to stop searching backwards. You cannot save us, she said. You cannot change our fate. The past is done.
Outside, the light, the brightness of the sky, caused her to stumble, and she grabbed hold of a railing for support. An elderly man, standing on the steps, offered his umbrella to shade her from the sun, but she shook her head, recovering. She went slowly out into the road and turned in the direction of home.
So she was the one who began it, who turned their conversation in another direction. On a beach west of town, they walked together along the empty sand. In the distance, she could see the red hills of Berhala Island, the currents sweeping past, the tide curling against the shore. She said that now, after all these years, she was finally ready to leave Sandakan, to go to her mother’s family.
His face, when he looked at her, shook her resolve. She saw his confusion giving way to fear. “When did you decide? Why have you decided this now?”
The words caught in her throat, but she forced herself to speak them aloud. “If things were different, if there was nothing to hold you here in Sandakan, what would you do?”
He refused to answer, but she would not relent. He shook his head. “Nothing has changed for me.”
“But Australia.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
The tide was going out, and it left a smooth plain of sand at their feet. This was the future, she said. He would stay in Sandakan, on the plantation, and they would never be free. Perhaps they could go to Australia together, find the way to begin a different life. But the love that she felt for him could not be separated from the childhood they shared; it could not admit forgetting. The words seemed to come from far away. “I won’t let this happen to us,” she said.
He took her hand, trying to draw her towards him, but she pulled back. “What is happening, Ani?” He asked if she truly meant to leave, to not return.
She felt cold, a chill radiating through her limbs. “I didn’t realize it for so long. I thought as you did. But what we wanted is not possible.” She struggled to keep her voice steady, but tears stung her eyes. “Our parents would not wish us to be bound by the past.”
“I know you, Ani. Something has changed you.”
She shut her ears to the disbelief in his voice, to her own grief. She told him that they were alike, two pieces of the same puzzle, but in the end, if you laid them down beside each other, you’d see an empty space, the jagged edges. And in this space, she knew there was no oxygen, no relief. It was a place they had made together when they were children. They had filled it with all the things they wanted to forget, a landscape of craters and bodies. She said that their feelings for one another had blinded them to the truth, what lay between them was too far-reaching, too vast. They could not hold it or push it down.
Some part of her was spinning loose, split open. She got to her feet and began to walk away from him.
He followed her, calling her name, and finally she turned and shouted at him to leave her, to let her alone. At the sudden noise, birds lifted up around them, fluttering up into the trees. He stared after her, shocked. But she continued along the beach to the harbour, where the last of the night boats were heading away from the shore.
As she walked, the water ran across her feet, and she imagined the tide sliding under her, pulling her away from Sandakan, this life and the pain that she kept adding to, as if she could bear any sacrifice, any tragedy, as if the war had made her strong enough to survive all that the future necessitated. She listened for Matthew’s footsteps coming across the wet sand, coming to join her, but all she heard was the tide and the trees, the nightjars and insects.
These years in Jakarta have not changed the longing she feels. Sometimes, now, falling asleep, she imagines a different ending. One in which she stands up from the sand and she tells him the truth. Everything that she set in motion that night, the words that can never be taken back, comes to rest. Life moves in reverse. She tells him that she will go to Tarakan, she will wait for him to return from Australia. When we find one another again, we will know how to continue.
Tonight, after a light supper of rice and vegetables, Ani changes her son into his pyjamas, and they go downstairs to begin her shift in the photo studio.
Across the street, the Pondok Restaurant is overflowing, and the reflections of the neon signs flash slowly against the walls of the studio. Holding Wideh’s hand, Ani unlocks the door, and they make their way through the foyer. The office is quiet. There are plastic covers on the telephone and typewriter to protect them from dust, and the curtains are tightly drawn. In the developing room, the day’s prints are hanging neatly along several lines, and a dozen film canisters sit waiting on the counter.
Ani makes a place for Wideh on the tiled floor, opening blankets and fluffing cushions, then she lays him down. He is three years old already, and he smiles up at her, repeating the word Ibu, “Mother,” playing with the sound until the word is lost amidst a jumble of different noises.
Each evening, she works here, in the darkroom, developing rolls of negatives. In the day, someone else will come and use the enlarger to transform these negatives into prints, but this first step is hers. In the dark, Ani takes the lid off the first canister, removes the film spool and cuts it free. Feeling for the guides, she loads the film onto the tank reel. Only when this is secure, and the lid is firmly in place, does she reach her hand out and switch on the developing lamp.
Ani has never taken a photograph. All she knows of the process is this one part, but she knows it well. When, at Saskia’s recommendation and with no experience, she had come to Frank Postma looking for work in the studio he owned, she had come halfheartedly, expecting little. Perhaps some evening shifts cleaning and tidying the office, she had suggested. But that was not what he wanted, he told her, first in fluent Malay, then switching to English, sometimes forgetting himself and lapsing into Dutch. “I need help,” he had said, waving his arms at the stacks of film. “And Saskia spoke so highly of you.”
He had served coffee, and, sitting in the studio, Ani told him that she had met Saskia and Siem Dertik in 1953, on the outer decks of the boat that had carried them to Jakarta. Ani had been on her way from Tarakan, where the last of her mother’s family remained. From there, she had felt the wish to be a part of something greater, to lose herself in the city, and so she had continued to Jakarta.
“People come here from all over the world,” he had said. “It’s a good place to begin again.” He set down his coffee and opened box after box of photographs. Pictures of Dutch families released from internment camps, Balinese dancers, canals shining like ribbons in the field. “Light on surface,” he had said. “Most of the time, to each other, all we are is light on surface.”