“This is our house,” Sipke says.
He looks as if he wants to say something more, but then he takes her suitcase from the car and together they go up the front walk, where he stands briefly, searching for his keys. When he finds them, he unlocks the door, pushing it open.
They pass through a foyer and then into a sitting room where the walls are covered with photographs. This house does not feel like a place of absence, as Gail realizes she had come to expect. There are pictures of canals, a field of devastatingly green maize, a windmill that appears to be floating on the water. Among the landscapes are pictures of a woman and a child. Ani Vermeulen, she knows, and their son, Wideh. “These are your photographs,” Gail says quietly, more to herself than to Sipke.
“Yes. They go back many years.”
She returns to the front door, slips her shoes off, and re-enters. Slowly, she walks along the wall. For a long time, her gaze lingers on the boy, Wideh, captured from childhood to adulthood. She is absorbed by his face, the serious eyes. In one photo, he gazes at a heron facing him, the two standing opposite one another in the grass. Her eyes fall on a portrait of Ani Vermeulen; she is in a café somewhere, not in Holland, perhaps in Asia, light filtering in through horizontal blinds. She appears to be in her twenties, and she is turning her face away as she laughs. Light and shadow play across the picture, across her face, and the portrait is so tender that Gail feels as if she is trespassing into a territory that is both private and revered.
Sipke comes to stand beside her. He indicates a photo, and Gail recognizes a much older Ani, sitting on the grass with her son. “Before, when Ani was here, we kept the walls bare, because she always liked to have a sense of openness, of space. But afterwards, after she died,” he stops, his hands clasped together. “I wanted the house to mirror what was in my thoughts.” He looks past her, towards the photos, then meets her gaze again. “It was seven years ago that she passed away. In 1992.”
When Gail looks into his eyes, she feels as if no time has passed for him. A breath of grief moves through her.
Sipke picks up her suitcase, and she follows him into a bedroom at the back of the house with a view of the farmland. They admire the landscape together. The sun, bright and full, is just beginning to slip below the horizon. “I will leave you to rest,” he says. “We will have dinner at seven?”
She nods, takes his hand, and thanks him.
On the bookshelf in her room is a clear jar, filled with shining marbles. There are kites suspended from the ceiling, and as she walks they brush delicately against the top of her head. The hideaway of a young boy. Wideh’s room.
She lies down on the bed, on top of the covers, fatigued by the long drive north. From her bag, she removes the copy of Sullivan’s diary, stares at the lines for a time. Somewhere in the house, a television or radio comes on, and she can hear the smooth tones of a woman’s voice. Gail closes her eyes, and in her memory the light of a television screen flickers in a dark room. Her father sleeps in an armchair, she has found him there, and the room is quiet but for the sound of his breathing. Outside the window, the branches of the tall trees are outlined in morning light. She can see the clouds moving steadily across the sky, and she cannot shake the sensation that they are adrift on a boat at sea.
She turns onto her back, rests the pages against her chest.
When she opens her eyes, she sees a photograph on the bedside table. In it, Ani Vermeulen is much older, and her hair is tinged with grey. Her eyes, dark and shimmering, are focused on something, someone, that Gail cannot see. Her expression is that of a person catching sight of herself in a mirror, half surprised, half relieved to see the face in front of her.
Over a dinner of potatoes and kale, Sipke watches her eyes as they move from photograph to photograph. He tells her that he had arrived in Jakarta in 1963, on assignment for a Dutch magazine.
Gail is sitting across the table from him. Her dark hair is pulled back, gathered at the nape of her neck, and her face, trusting, is pale in the candlelight. She asks, “Why photography?”
He sets down his fork and takes a sip of wine, thinking. “I started taking pictures when I was very young. I felt, then, that a photograph could change the way events transpired. The photograph is revealing, it triggers something that you know, a truth that you haven’t yet found a way to express. I saw what was happening around me, and I wanted to change it.” He stops and says, only now remembering, “That was a question that Ani asked me, too. You see, after I arrived in Jakarta, I gave up war photography. I went into portraiture, for a time. That’s how I first met her.”
“Was Ani a photographer, too, then?”
He shakes his head. “She worked in the studio because it was a living.”
Outside, the wind picks up, and a sound, like low whistling, moves between the trees. Gail looks towards the window, as if to catch the movement with her eyes before it disappears. “My father knew her once. I think it was when they were children, during the war.”
For a moment, he remains silent, unsure how to answer. “Perhaps I should start at the beginning of what I know,” he says. “I should start with Ani’s life in Jakarta.”
She nods, gratefully. “Have you ever met my parents, Sipke?”
“No, I have not.” He looks up at the wall, at a photo of Wideh taken when he was just eleven years old. He is sitting at a table, oblivious to the camera, moving his hands across the map laid open before him, one elbow leaning on North America, one hand curved around the islands of Indonesia. “But you are right. Ani knew your father. She knew of you, too, once, a long time ago.”
As twilight fades behind them, Sipke tells Gail that he has not been back in Jakarta for almost forty years. In the letters from Wideh, from Ani’s friends Saskia and Siem Dertik, he hears of a place that is at once foreign and familiar. Street names, coffee shops, places he thought were lodged forever in his memory, the sharpness of his recollection has been ground down by the passing of time. But the important places, Jalan Kamboja, the photography studio and Ani’s apartment above, all of these remain distinct, as if he could turn a corner and find himself there again.
When he arrived in Jakarta, he was thirty-five years old. The war of independence between Indonesia and the Netherlands had ended more than ten years before, but the hostilities had not ceased. Still the paint could be seen on the occasional bank or business, Dutch Get Out, Indos Go Home.
One day, while photographing along one of the main canals, he happened by a photography studio on a busy street. There was a sign in the window, Te koop, and without thinking, he pushed open the door and walked inside. The owner, Frank Postma, was Dutch, and the language fell reassuringly on Sipke’s ears. He told Sipke the asking price, barely six hundred Dutch guilders, for the studio and the small apartment beside it. It wasn’t the money, Postma had said, showing him the well-kept studio, and then the darkroom. He wanted to return to Amsterdam, to live once more in the city of his birth. The living space, though small, looked comfortable. Gesturing towards the ceiling, Postma said that a young woman and her son lived in the apartment upstairs. For the last six years, she had worked for him, developing negatives, and she was helpful and skilled. Sipke had left, walking for hours along the canals. He stayed awake most of the night, and in the morning he returned and told Frank Postma that he would buy the studio.
He went into portraiture, keeping Ani on as his assistant. In the darkroom, working with his back to her, he was so absorbed in his own thoughts that he sometimes forgot she was there. He thought that the sound of running tap water, of the pouring of chemicals, came from his own hand. She was a young mother, with beautiful, curious eyes and a gift for languages. Malay was her mother tongue, and she had learned English in school. The scattering of Dutch spoken in the portrait studio, and on the street, had proved no obstacle to her. Ani was reserved and thoughtful, but sometimes, in the evenings, he heard the sound of her laughter drifting through the ceiling. Her son, Wideh, was nine years old, polite, fiercely protective of his mother.