“In Jakarta, everything in my life changed. There was something about the way we were together that was, that felt, essential.” He stops, searching for the words.
“Necessary,” she says. Her face is turned away from him, and he cannot see her expression.
“Yes,” he says, nodding. He follows her gaze towards the darkened fields. “Yes, like that.”
He had been in Jakarta for over two years, he tells Gail, and Ani and Wideh had become the centrepoint of his life. He would make dinner each night while Ani helped her son with his studies. In the evenings they walked to Freedom Square, or to the nearby park to watch the kite flyers, to be a part of the crowd. Business in the portrait studio was steady, and for a while he had felt as if he could stay there forever, that the peace in his life and in this country would hold. But by 1965 the political and economic situation in Indonesia had grown precarious. A quarter of the population in Jakarta were squatters, more coming in each day from the surrounding countryside. There were guerillas in the villages and a rising dissatisfaction. The papers hinted that President Sukarno was terminally ill. In private conversations, people wondered how much longer before the government splintered. How strong was the army. To Sipke, it seemed that only Wideh remained untouched by the turmoil. The boy spent hours gazing at maps, leafing through the heavy atlas that Ani had given him for his birthday. At night, lit by the glow of a kerosene lamp, he played marbles by himself, rolling them across the tiled floor.
He remembers the three of them sitting in the upstairs apartment, all the lights off, windows flung wide to let in the breeze. Ani’s apartment was only one room, divided by curtains into a sleeping area and a kitchen. Her bed was a thin mattress that during the day she kept behind the divan. Outside, pedicabs jostled in the road.
One night, as he stood gazing out at the traffic, Sipke listened to the sound of Wideh whispering a story in Indonesian, a traditional folk tale, to his mother. “In the beginning of the world,” he said, “there was the sea and the sky, and a single bird who had nowhere to rest. He flew from east to west, searching for a breeze to hold him aloft. One night, exhausted, falling through the clouds, he came up with a plan. And when morning came, he provoked a terrible quarrel between the sea and the sky.”
Wideh was lying on his side as he spoke, on his cot in the far side of the room. Ani sat next him, the mosquito net sheltering them both. The child seemed utterly contented. Sipke was reminded of something Ani had told him once, about the crater in Sandakan where she would go. How, when she was a child, this scar in the earth had been a place of safety.
“I don’t know what the quarrel was, but the sea was very angry. She raged and paced and shouted curses at the sky. Waves touched the clouds, and when they fell, they crashed into the sea like drums.
“The sky, too, raged and wept. Night after night, he threw boulders down upon the sea. For months on end, the sea and the sky stormed, and at the end of it all, when the quiet came, many islands were standing on the water. The bird flew from one to the next, very satisfied with his cleverness.”
When Wideh fell asleep, Ani got up carefully. She lit a kerosene lamp and they sat beside one another at the window, whispering so as not to disturb the child. She asked him, “What stories do you remember, Sipke?”
“Stories,” he said, almost as a question.
“When your mother sat at your bedside, and you could hear the wind on the farmhouse windows . . .”
He smiled. “There is something that I remember. Nooit vergeet je de taal waarin je moeder van je hield. Translated it means, Never do you forget the language in which your mother loved you.”
As he spoke, Sipke felt he could see her thoughts lifting away from them, trace their trajectory across the night sky. To where? he wondered. To North Borneo, to Sandakan. “Frisian words, Frisian phrases,” he said, continuing. “I remember waking up each morning, opening the curtains, and seeing my father in the fields. My mother going out to meet him. It isn’t the country that I miss, but the person I was then. I used to be afraid to go home and find that everything had changed, that I no longer belonged there.”
She nodded. “Every year that goes by makes it more difficult to return.”
Outside, vendors called their wares, pushing carts and trolleys around the potholes, through the crowds of people idling on the sidewalk.
They sat in silence for a few moments, and then he said, “If things keep going as they are, I may be forced to leave Indonesia. My papers may be revoked. I haven’t made any plans, but I’ve been thinking –”
“Do you really believe it will come to that?”
“Those are the rumours.”
“But only rumours.”
“Ani,” he said, “would you consider leaving Jakarta?”
She lifted her eyes, and he could sense her surprise, her confusion.
“Come with me,” he said. “I’ll arrange everything.”
“It’s the other side of the world, Sipke.”
“Come with me.”
He had the sense she could see something that he did not. “We could,” she said, finally. “Perhaps it could be possible.”
That night, they fell asleep together, Ani gathered in his arms.
In the morning, they woke to the sound of rifles. People fighting or celebrating, it was hard to tell which. They did not go downstairs or open the studio. On the radio, a commentator described how, here in Jakarta, rioters had set fire to the British embassy in protest over the proclamation of the new Malaysia. This was konfrontasi, the commentator said, and Indonesia must stand firm against the threat of British imperialism.
Outside, demonstrators gathered, a sea of black caps, of pitjis, growing in number as the morning wore on. Banners printed with slogans, In the name of Allah Ever Onward No Retreat. Wideh, a sarong tied around his waist, gazed down at the crowds, his bare shoulders, slender and fragile, leaning dangerously out the window. He had been examining one of Sipke’s cameras and now he held it to his eye. He moved slowly, framing shot after shot, practising without ever touching the shutter release.
On the radio, one official after another denounced the presence of British and Australian troops in North Borneo. Malaysia, they said, was a threat to Indonesian independence, an incitement to war. Sipke switched off the set. The floor seemed to tremble as the angry crowd marched, chanting. An effigy of the prime minister of Malaysia was set alight, and the smell of burning cut through the air. He and Ani moved as if in a dream, washing the dishes, cleaning the floors. Outside, they heard what sounded like firecrackers or gunshots.
At noon, when they sat down to a meal of rice and curry, Wideh still wore the camera around his neck. While they ate, Sipke began to talk about setting the light metre, adjusting the depth of field, the basics of composition. “The first pictures I took,” he told Wideh, in broken Indonesian, “were landscapes, because I was too shy to speak to anyone. Later on, an older photographer gave me advice. He said that if I was patient, if I waited, then people would forget the camera. Another part of them would drift up into view.”
Wideh surprised him by saying that he had been studying Sipke’s contact sheets. “What I wish for,” he said, politely, in English, “is to have a roll of film of my own.”
Sipke reached into his pocket, and placed a small plastic canister on the table between them. Wideh was ten years old. Below, the noise of the protests grew in volume, waves of sound cascading along the narrow streets. Wideh took the canister in his hand, the way Sipke and his brothers used to hold precious stones, newborn birds, or treasures unearthed from the depths of the canals.
That night, Sipke sat up with Ani beside the radio. The light from the street lamps wavered, occasionally cutting out. “The West can help us,” a speaker said. He sounded like an older man, perhaps one who had fought in the wars of the last two decades. “But they must let us find our own way; and the best it can do is to set examples and help us to reach up to them. It should not be concerned whether our director of agriculture or education or health is a Communist or a Nationalist: that is our affair. If you honestly want to help us, you must not ask questions. You must not demand that we love you. You must earn our respect and then learn to return it.”