Ani looked at him, and he felt that she could see into the core of his memories, to the emotions that overwhelmed him, even now.
“Perhaps you are asking too much of a picture.”
He shook his head. “The picture shows us that this suffering is made by people, and because it is made by us, it is not inevitable. That was the reason I wanted to be a photographer.” Carefully, he mixed a stop bath and poured it into the spout. His hands trembled and the liquid spilled. “There is something that I’ve always remembered. The war photographer George Rodger’s response to Bergen-Belsen. He was one of the first to enter the camp after Liberation. He said that he walked through the camp, saw thousands of bodies and was horrified. He wanted people to confront what had happened, he wanted to compose photographs that could never be forgotten, and so he arranged the bodies, moved arms and legs. Afterwards, he swore he would never take another war picture as long as he lived.”
“And then, what happens when people know?”
He met her gaze, unable to answer.
She told him, then, that she had found her father’s body on the airfield in Sandakan, and she had been unable to carry him home, to bury him. She remembered that when the Allies finally arrived in Sandakan, in September 1945, they found people whose homes were gone, whose crops had failed, and who, even though the war was over, would still die of starvation and disease. What good did it do, after all, to remember, she said, to hold on to the past, if the most crucial events in life could not be changed? What good did memory do if one could never make amends?
She turned away from him, towards the sink, taking the chemicals she had mixed and adding them to the tank. “There was a time when I tried to imagine that things could arrange themselves in a different order,” she said, “because I couldn’t bear the thought that the past was irrevocable.” She paused, looking down at the liquid. “Are there days you wish you could erase from your life?”
It took him only a moment to answer. “I would forget that day in Algeria, if I could.”
She nodded. “If it were possible, perhaps I would do it, too. Not only my memories of the war, but the things that I regret. But how much would be enough?” she said. “Would I recognize the point at which I had gone too far, when I was changing so much that I was losing more than I imagined possible?”
They went to the Pondok Restaurant, the kedai kopi across the street. The road was crowded with people, motorbikes weaving between cars. The betjak drivers gathered at the far end of Jalan Kamboja. They lined up behind one another, carrying their own tin plates and bowls, wiping their faces clean with handkerchiefs as they waited their turn at the food stalls. Ani told him about the forests outside of Sandakan, how some of the trees were as high as 150 feet. When you looked up at the canopy, the outstretched branches did not overlap, they formed an intricate pattern of dark and light, of leaves and air. Those trees, she told him, were the height of an eighteen-storey building. Wideh had calculated it for her one evening, an exercise in mathematics.
She smiled. “I must have been seven years old. My father took me to the forest, because the largest trees were flowering and this happened only once every ten years. I had never seen it before. When the flowers fall, they fall in such great quantity that they cover everything on the ground. They pile up in the same way that snow piles up in cold places.” Ani had walked through the petals. She remembered the feel of them covering her feet, shifting smoothly around her legs. “My father told me that there were insects who laid their eggs in the buds. After the flowers had fallen to the ground, the newborns emerged, covered with pollen, and then they flew away to other flowers in other trees. He said that the insects are so tiny that for them the air feels very thick. Flying for them is like swimming in water for us.”
Sipke told her about his father’s farm. At dawn each morning, he had walked across the open pastures where no trees grew that tall, the way Ani described them. He remembered the horizon, trees and barns miniature against the sky. The heavens were a dome. He described the heat of a cow’s nose against his skin. They were curious animals; they would walk across the field to greet a visitor. He showed her photographs, glimmering canals, the geometric lines of a football game, the coastline of the North Sea. There was a game he had played with his brothers, polsstokspringen, in which they used a pole to leap across the canals. He remembered running across the grass, planting the pole in the water and using it to propel his body through the air. At the height of the arc, he would press his body forward, urging the pole to begin its descent, and then at the perfect moment, leap off to the other side. She laughed when he told her about the wooden shoes he’d had as a boy, made of willow, how he had worn a hole in them from all his days walking in the fields.
Ani asked him, “What kind of future do you see, Sipke?”
Perhaps, somewhere in his body, he knew the direction of his life had changed. There was only one answer he could give her. “Your son growing up. You and I in the world beside one another.”
“Yes,” she said, and her voice was just a whisper to him. “I imagine that, too.”
Outside of Sipke’s house, the lines of the canal have blurred into the night. His words are suddenly gone, and some feeling, distant and almost forgotten, is hovering on the edges of his consciousness. The room seems very dim, and his knees ache more than usual. He gets up to turn on the lamp and the room immediately brightens. “Do you mind if I stop and make a pot of coffee?”
“No,” Gail says. “Let me help.”
She fills the percolator, and Sipke rummages in the fridge for some bread and cheese. He can hear frogs croaking in the canal, the faraway hush of cars. For a moment, he cannot remember how they arrived here, from which direction they came. He feels as if they are adrift in another time, another country.
“If it’s difficult to talk about . . . ,” she says.
Sipke looks at her standing at the counter, and her expression, so patient and watchful, reminds him of Wideh, the way he sat with his mother in the garden near the end of her life. Wideh would beguile with her stories. He would remain beside her, counting the birds at the feeder, the boaters drifting by along the canals, watching his mother’s face as she slept, as day by day the world grew quiet.
“I love to say her name,” he tells Gail. “After she died, our friends told me that I had to go on, that I couldn’t remain in the past. But when I think of Ani, so much of myself, my own life, comes back to me.”
They stand together, sipping their coffee, and he remembers how Ani would come home from the market, her bicycle laden with groceries. Her skin smelled both sweet and cold. He used to wake in the night, open his eyes to find how she had wrapped herself around his body, as if to follow him into the world of his dreaming.
People hold other lives inside them, this is what Sipke believes. When Ani died, her friends and loved ones had gathered together, and in the stories they told, he had felt her presence again, more palpably than in his own familiar memories.
The three years in Jakarta will always remain another life inside him, untouched by future events. In the streets of the city, he had felt himself to be a foreigner, a stranger, but with Ani, in her apartment, they had created a kind of sanctuary for themselves. One part of his life had come to an end, and another, richer, more surprising, opened before him. “Are you married?” he says, meeting Gail’s eyes.
She says no, but she tells him she has been with Ansel for almost a decade.