On the other side of the world, it was winter in the Netherlands. His mother wrote long, poetic letters describing their lives, and the lives of his brothers’ families. The canals had frozen, she said, and the Elfstedentocht, a skating race on the canals of Friesland, was taking place for the first time since 1956. Outside, the children tied their skates, their houtjes, to the soles of their shoes, just as Sipke himself had done when he was young. If he closed his eyes, did he still see the wide sky, the tumult of clouds? He reread the letter again and again, as if through it he could enter the life he had once known.
He had moved into the ground-floor apartment, and each night, beneath the mosquito net, Sipke fell asleep to the whirr of the fan, his sleep heavy and dreamless. Elsevier offered him an assignment that would bring him back to Europe, to photograph life alongside the newly constructed Berlin Wall, but he felt indecisive, as if he were in some kind of stupor. He could not bring himself to venture out of Jakarta. He applied for a residence permit and was granted a one-year stay.
In Freedom Square, electricity was skimmed away from the houses and shops and directed to Sukarno’s monument. As electricity faltered across the rest of Jakarta, the monument shone in the night, luminous. At the very top of the column was an effigy of the president. According to rumours, Sukarno’s fortune teller had told him that he would die when his statue was set on top of the column, and so he had decreed it would not be finished until his death.
During the day, while Wideh was at school, Ani took care of appointments and bookkeeping. Each morning, the boy kissed his mother goodbye and fell in line behind the other children, with their satchels and neatly combed hair, walking to the nearby primary school. When school let out, he sat with Ani at a desk in the studio, the radio a whisper behind them. Wideh explained to her very seriously whatever he had learned that day, the nature of clouds or the cycle of rainfall. When Sipke addressed him, the boy said, in Dutch, “ Praat u tegen mij?” Are you talking to me?
In the darkroom, she was always an arm’s length away. Under the pale glow of the lamps, occupied by work, they found it easy to speak about personal things. Early on, he asked her what kind of man Wideh’s father had been.
“A good man,” she had said. “We were both young, and we had known each other since we were children. It was natural to fall in love.”
“Does he live in Indonesia now?”
She said that she did not know where he was. “I left before Wideh was born and came here on my own. He never knew the real reason why I had left Sandakan. Afterwards, I no longer knew how to change what had happened. It is better this way.”
“A mistake?” he asked gently.
She shook her head. After a moment, she said, “I think, in some ways, we will always be attached.”
A year passed, and Sipke renewed his residence permit. They began to take their meals together. At night, while Wideh worked through his multiplication tables, they sat in Ani’s apartment. There, on the second floor, they seemed to step away from the city below. She told him that both her parents had died during the war and that a part of herself still lived and breathed in Sandakan. “It must be difficult for you,” she said, “living in Jakarta. Being so far away from your family.”
He nodded. “My brothers still live in the village where I grew up. I suppose I’ve always been the restless one, the person who longs to go away, to see the world.”
“Yet you stay here, in Jakarta.”
“How can I explain it? Sometimes I feel as if time has stopped. As if I’ve stepped back from my life, because I don’t know where I’m going.”
“There’s danger in thinking like that.”
“What kind of danger?”
“Because time continues,” she said. “Because this moment, this place, is real.”
When the studio was busy, they would work into the evenings, after Wideh had gone to sleep. They unwound the film in the dark, the can opener, reel and tank laid in a tidy row between them. Once, she told him about a journey she had made when she was a child, from Kalimantan to British North Borneo. How her father traded with different peoples along the way, providing rattan and jungle produce, bird’s nests, and so on. He knew the names of different trees and flowers, of birds and insects. “He was a merchant, just as his father was. My grandfather used to sell skins to the British and Dutch who came to Borneo. They wanted everything. Beetles. Many kinds of butterflies. Frogs, civets, birds of paradise. He had this great store of knowledge. When he died, I was only ten years old, and he had taught me only a small part of what he knew.” She held the reel in her hands, turning it thoughtfully. “I told Wideh about his own father not long ago. It’s a difficult thing for a child to understand, and yet he seems to accept it. He has not asked about it since.”
“I was in Jesselton once,” Sipke said. “In North Borneo. I was waiting for a boat that would take me to Phnom Penh.”
“Yes, Jesselton is the capital now.”
He turned and brought the developing lights up.
“What is it that drew you to it?” she asked. “Going to distant places. Photographing wars. I suppose many people find it exciting.”
“Some people, yes. Excitement, adrenaline. Maybe, once, I felt the same.”
He poured the developer into the tank and covered it. They did not speak for several minutes, and then he said, “There is a very famous picture of a man walking towards a house with kerosene and a torch. The house is barred, and there’s a family inside. You can’t see them in the photograph. It’s a dirt road, and there is a mob behind him.”
“The man has a cut above his eye.”
He nodded, surprised. “Where did you see it?”
“It was in the newspapers. I still remember the expression on the man’s face.”
“The mob thought the father was a collaborator, so they set fire to the house and waited for the family to come out.”
Ani had been removing a roll of film, and now her hands stilled over the canister, her body tensing. For a moment, he did not want to continue, felt that he would hurt her somehow. He said, “It was in Algiers. There were other photographs. Of the man who tried to escape from the house, and of his family.”
She said nothing.
Sipke continued, trying to explain himself to her. “The mob surrounded them. I was down on the ground and I begged, in French, in English, for the men to back off, not to go further. And then when it became clear that this family would be killed and nothing I said could stop it, I picked up my camera and I photographed it. I thought, I can’t look away now. I don’t have the right to turn away.
“Afterwards, no one wanted to publish what I had seen. I had failed to compose a picture, something whole that could make sense of the pieces. The pictures were senseless, gruesome. A bloodstained hand, a face. But the man with the kerosene and torch became famous. That photograph is different, it’s alive. It’s the last good photograph I have taken, but I can’t bear to look at it. I keep asking myself, what happens when the context is lost and only the image remains? People look at that picture now, in magazines and books, and they speculate about it. They don’t know what happened before or after. All they see is this one moment, disconnected from the past or the future. It feeds their imagination, but it doesn’t give them knowledge.”