For three years, the men in the camp were starved and brutalized, treated as less than animals, but he had continued the journal, as if through it he could maintain some part of his dignity. In entry after entry, he imagines the days to come. “When I see you next,” he writes, addressing Kathleen’s mother. “After the war is finished.”
When the camp was liberated in August 1945, he had been twenty-five years old. Gail had learned that the physicians and psychologists of the time had all agreed: the war was finished, these men who had survived should go on with their lives in the best way possible. They should not burden their families with the misery of what they had endured. So he had gone on, honourably discharged from the army, and he had kept his silence.
Earlier, she had telephoned the number for Sipke Vermeulen. The voice of an elderly man had answered, his words clear and lightly accented. When she said her name, a silence followed, and she feared the conversation had come to an end, that Sipke Vermeulen would put down the phone, without her understanding the reason why. But then time had begun again. He had repeated her name, in surprise, in recognition.
Arrangements were made. Sipke Vermeulen had told her he would come down to Amsterdam in two days’ time, and then they would travel up north together to his home in rural Friesland.
Jaarsma had been standing in the window, watching the moonrise, the gleam of light clouding the city. He had poured two glasses of wine and ordered dinner from the neighbourhood Indonesian restaurant, sticks of satay, babi pangang, a container of rice. When he looked at her, his face held a question. She told him about the letter that she had found years ago. She wondered if it was possible to know a person truly. And if we did, would we know what we had, would we recognize it?
At one point in the evening, Jaarsma had put his fingers to the window, indicating the light. He told her that people believe that the moon changes in size as it moves across the sky, becoming larger and fuller as it nears the horizon. But the size of the moon, he said, remains constant no matter where it is, and the idea of a larger moon is an optical illusion. We could measure it, he said, with a paper clip, shaped into a caliper. He still remembered the day his father, an astronomer, told him this fact.
“And what did you feel,” Gail had asked him, “when you learned it was only an illusion?”
At first, disbelief. He had been standing beside his father, the moon, low and immense, before them. “It was so large,” he said, “I felt we could get in the car, drive across the city, reach out and hold it in our hands. Every night after that, I twisted a paperclip just as my father had taught me, proving over and over again that even the largest moon is no different in size from all the rest.” Was it our perception of the sky that was in error, he had wondered, or our perception of the moon relative to the buildings on the horizon? Did we compare the current moon to an inaccurate memory of a previous one? What was it, within our own minds, within the wires and creases of our visual cortex, our internal map of the world, that allowed this distortion to happen?
She had sat in silence, the wineglass in her hands, waiting for Jaarsma to continue.
“There is no definitive theory,” he said at last. “The question itself is thousands of years old, spanning from the time of the ancient Greeks. Maybe if we are lucky, within our own lifetime, we will find not only the right answer, but also the one that satisfies us.”
That night, she falls asleep, the lamp still burning, the transcribed pages of the diary laid out beside her.
7. The Island
YSBRECHTUM, THE NETHERLANDS
When Gail Lim arrived in the Netherlands, Sipke Vermeulen was seventy-four years old, and Canada was the country of the pilot who fell from the sky over Ysbrechtum in 1940. That night, almost sixty years ago, the parachute had come down like a balloon returning from the heavens. Sipke had heard the explosion, turned his face towards the glint of fire, and run out into the grass with his three brothers. They were older, and they ran ahead of him, their eyes focused on the sky. Above the farmhouse, the parachute floated out from beneath the clouds, it looked like a part of the moon torn away. He watched the figure cradled in the harness, the slender lines of the body growing ever clearer. When the parachute collapsed into the ground, the folds fluttered in the breeze. Sipke’s brothers pushed their way through the buttresses of silk.
They hid the Canadian pilot in their barn. When the Germans came, his father described the explosion and the ball of light, and then the parachute that had appeared in the flames. The Germans asked where the parachute had landed, and his father made a drawing. He told them that the remains had been carried off by the wind, west towards the sea.
Sipke was twelve years old. Three times each day, he brought food and drink to the injured pilot, and then sat with him. The pilot taught him his first English word, which was thirsty. In time, with the covert assistance of the village doctor, the pilot’s broken bones mended. One day, the pilot disappeared, having been taken in the night by Resistance workers who had come up from the south.
When the war ended, Sipke was seventeen years old. Each of his three brothers had married, moving out of his parents’ farmhouse and into homes of their own, but Sipke had a longing to see the world. He studied languages, English, French and German at the university in Groningen, and after he had finished his schooling, he went to London. There, in the evenings, he wandered the museums, which were free and warm. In one, there was an exhibition of Robert Capa’s photographs. He saw the famous Spanish Civil War soldier, arms flung out in the moment of death; across the room, in the grainy photos of the D-Day landing at Normandy, Allied soldiers, munitions on their backs, laboured through the water. Night after night, he returned to this gallery, he sat on a bench and stared at the images for hours at a time. Walking home under the street lamps, through the crowds of people, he came to believe that only in stillness, only if he were able to step outside of time, could he begin to make sense of the world.
For half a year, he worked as a window washer, saving enough money to buy a Leica. He travelled across England, then Europe, honing his skills, improving his English. In Berlin, he photographed gaunt, skeletal men, German pows, walking home to their villages from labour camps in the Soviet Union. The pictures sold to a Dutch magazine, and he told the photo editor that he was willing to travel, ready to go anywhere. Shortly after, he was offered a job as a war photographer. A split-second decision, one that he did not hesitate over, and his life changed. Sipke sent a letter home, telling his mother that he was leaving for Indochina. She called the boarding house where he was staying, and tried, across the crackling lines, to persuade him to come home. How could he explain it? He needed to see things for himself, to know what he was capable of.
Later on, others told him that he had a gift; he was able to catch and distinguish the defining moment. When he was working, he had the sensation of walking into a deep tunnel, the edges of his body dissolving into the scene around him. Yet he was capable – he does not know how or why – of pulling something tangible from the deep. His photographs were picked up by Elsevier, Life and Réalités. He tried to follow Robert Capa’s famous dictum: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” It was the golden age of photojournalism, and the magazines and newspapers were hungry for images. In Indochina and afterwards, in Algeria, South Africa and Indonesia, he ceased to feel hunger or fear. He felt that his life was precariously balanced, and all he did to prevent his fall was click the shutter, this sound more real to him than his own heartbeat. For twelve years, he travelled from assignment to assignment, living without a fixed address. In Algeria, he photographed the mutilated bodies of men and women who had been tortured and killed, by guerillas, by the FLN or colon vigilante units. He photographed two small children, crawling through the bombed wreckage of their home; and then, that same day, in a neighbouring village, an entire family who had been murdered, in retaliation, by a mob. He felt as if a part of his mind was decaying, he was ashamed of the pictures that he took, and he was confused by their beauty. A dead child abandoned in a field, his face unmarked, the light on his skin. Tiny flowers rising between his fingers.