Then he had taken her into the developing room and shown her, as if it were no more difficult than preparing a meal, how to measure the chemicals, remove the film, soak and rinse it, then hang the finished negatives to dry.
In the corner of the studio now, Wideh raises his arms above him, turning his hands from side to side, delighting in the movement. While she works, Ani talks to herself and to him, walking herself through the steps. Start the timer, pour the developer, tap the container lightly on the counter. Agitate the contents and never lose track of the time.
She is at home in this studio, protected for a brief while from her memories, from the chaos and uncertainty of Jakarta. Studying the row of negatives, she follows the trajectory of the photographer’s gaze. She travels beside him as he feels his way through the scene like a child in a darkened room.
At midnight, long after Wideh has fallen asleep, she is finally finished. The negatives are pinned on a line, and she dries each carefully with a small sponge. Picking up a magnifying glass, Ani examines the work. There are pictures of Indies families posed in front of their former plantations, the men dressed in Western slacks and shirts, the women in kain and kebaya. She cannot read their faces, they have taken care to cloak their emotions. But in one, there is a boy caught unaware. He stands at a gate that is closed to him, his entire body yearning towards the house.
She knows that these photographs, once printed, will be carefully wrapped, then tucked within soft materials and laid inside a piece of luggage. She has been doing the very same for Saskia. In some distant country, taken out and looked at again, these photographs will become the shadow that follows them, the past that never changes, that never disappears. When all other memories fade, these, at least, will not be lost.
When she left Sandakan, she brought almost nothing. Arriving in Tarakan, Ani had been two months pregnant. Bashir, her mother’s oldest brother, was dying, and all the other family had scattered during the war years. If that is what you want, he had told her, go to Jakarta. He gave her the money and family keepsakes that remained. All our young people now, he said, are taking their dreams to the city. He brought her to the local magistrate, signing a declaration that her parents had been born here, in the former Dutch East Indies. When she left Tarakan, she had in her possession documents attesting to her Indonesian citizenship. She had, in some way, come home at last.
Ani lifts her son from the cushions and he wakes up, momentarily, reaching out to touch her face with one small hand. Then, sighing, his eyelids flutter, blink, and slowly close again.
With his body warm against hers, she leaves the studio, locking the door behind her. She climbs up the stairs to the apartment where they live. Inside, by the light of the street lamps, she lays him down and tucks the mosquito net around the edges of his cot.
Ani stretches out on the divan in the corner of the room, and eventually, as her mind lets go of the day, the street outside grows quiet, the traffic begins to lessen, and the neon lights of the Pondok Restaurant flicker and turn out. Surrounded by darkness, she sees him standing at the harbour, coming to meet her finally. In the face that she remembers so well, the glimmer of recognition, of understanding.
The next night, over dinner, Siem says that he has bought tickets for everyone to see the Shanghai Acrobats that evening. This is his family’s last night in Jakarta, and though the tickets cost six hundred rupiahs apiece, a week’s salary, Siem waves it off, grinning like a small boy. He says that they should not spend their last night morose, washing dishes, cleaning the house. It has become evident, he says, with a flourish of his hands, that there is too little magic in the world.
The night air is still warm when they near the theatre. Cars and scooters blur past them, and the blinking colours leave an image in Ani’s eyes even after she looks away. At an intersection, the traffic lights are not working, and a large crowd gathers around them on the curb. When an opening comes, they move in unison, flooding into the street, bringing the vehicles to a standstill.
Ani and Saskia are walking arm in arm, and the children are clutching Siem’s hands. On the front of a boarded-up building, someone has painted, Dutch Get Out, Indos Go Home. They both see it at the same time, and Saskia says, “We’re going, we’re going,” so quietly that Ani just catches the words.
Up ahead, she can make out the form of a young girl who appears to hover above the crowd. She is sitting on the handlebars of a bicycle. The girl floats towards them, one hand on the crossbar to hold herself steady. Behind her, a young man pedals the bicycle at a leisurely speed, and they move across the pavement in perfect balance. Watching them, Ani’s own body seems to lift. She sees Leila Road in the early morning, her bicycle slipping downhill, the sea opening before her.
Inside the performance hall, they are swept along by the rush of people, and the theatre is a commotion of voices. In her seat, Saskia frowns, worrying aloud over the last bits of packing still to be done. Siem puts his hand on her knee and says, “Forget tomorrow.”
When the lights go down, Wideh leans forward on Ani’s lap, gripping her hand in his. He points towards the stage.
The spotlight opens on a young man standing alone on a high platform. There is no music or sound of any sort. He has his eyes closed, as if deep in concentration, and while he stands there, alone and waiting, a hush falls over the theatre. His chest rises and falls, the seconds pass by. To Ani, it feels as if the audience waits in anticipation of the moment when he will open his eyes, step forward, and fall, which he does, as if releasing his spirit. He arches his back and dives into the empty space below. He is rushing towards the earth, but he doesn’t flinch. A few people in the auditorium gasp, and the sound travels up along Ani’s spine. At the last moment, an invisible wire catches him and he collapses his body into a ball and tumbles up again through the air.
In front of Ani’s eyes, the lights seem to wane and blur. The boy’s body, slender, he is only a child, passes across the stage.
When the war was finished, she and Matthew had gone down to the harbour, standing together on the docks. They were nine and ten years old. Still wearing their clothes, they swam out, leaving the few lights of Sandakan behind them. In the water, invisible to the eye, were shipwrecks and unexploded bombs; there were Japanese and American planes lying on the ocean floor. For a long time, she and Matthew floated on their backs staring up into the dark. Were the stars travelling away from them, Ani had wanted to know, or were they coming steadily nearer? He said that the stars were leaving; they were ships carrying people who had left the Earth a long time ago, not knowing that the heavens themselves were a vast desert. Now, it was only the ships that flew on, after the people had grown too old. She remembered Matthew saying that his father, too, had gone away, that he had been killed even though the war was over. The soldiers had lifted his father up and thrown him into the bed of a truck. If you had seen them from a distance, he said, from their movements, so casual, so indifferent, you would not have guessed that they were carrying a body.
Offstage, musicians begin to play, and three slender girls emerge into the lights. Their dance is slow and meticulous, a hand gesturing, wrists turning in delicate circles. Their bodies twist and open, legs extended in arabesques.
One steps up onto a platform, and then without hesitation the second climbs onto her shoulders. Finally, the last girl begins her ascent. At the summit, she sets her hand, palm to palm, on the hand of the girl below. Slowly, she lifts her legs up, balanced by the strength of one arm. She unfolds her body as if her limbs are as weightless as the flame of a candle.