He laid all their papers on a table in the studio: visa documents, departure permits, plane tickets. “I would find some way to stay if you asked me to.”
She took his hand, looking into his face, her body still. “I can’t,” she said. “That is the one thing I could never do.” The space between them grew, expanding out, until she seemed as insubstantial, as ghostly as the dust in the light. She stepped away, releasing his hand so gently that he almost missed the moment when it slipped from his.
At the airport, the departure lounge was chaotic. Thousands of Indonesians, of expatriates, eager to leave the country. He was moved forward by the crowd, through the terminal, onto the tarmac, which blurred in the heat. He boarded the plane, carrying almost nothing, no extra clothes, no keepsakes. Only his cameras.
The airplane gathered speed on the runway. Alongside it, a hundred yards back, ran a dirt road lined by small huts. People were visible, crouched on the ground at makeshift kitchens, outdoor fires, their laundry drying under the hot sun, chickens scrabbling beneath papaya trees. The plane lifted into the air, and the thatched roofs gave way to the harbour, to the city and red-tiled houses, and then the swirling patterns of rice fields. “Peace go with you, Sipke,” she had said when he left her, the traditional Indonesian words of parting. Peace remain. Below, he saw the tiny shadow of the plane growing smaller, until at the coastline it disappeared and all he could see was the reflection of the sun on the ocean. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, a surface of clouds was all that remained, what was below had disappeared.
Early the next morning, Sipke and Gail drive south, out of the province of Friesland. The snow has stopped falling, but the ground is covered, a field of white. Through the mist, a pale, diffuse light falls to the ground, reminding her of a Rembrandt landscape. She looks for the horizon, trying to make out the dividing line between land and air, but one seems to run into the other, the snow having erased all distinction. Far away, on a lake that is not visible to her, there is a single boat sailing.
“This province we are entering, Flevoland,” Sipke tells her, “was created in the 1930s, when a dike was built connecting North Holland to the province of Friesland, cutting the Southern Sea off from the North Sea, and thus from the Atlantic Ocean. When the water was pumped out, a new province was born.
“This road that we are driving on now,” he says, one hand gesturing out the window, “was once the bottom of the sea floor. We have a famous saying here, God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland.
“The island of Schokland stayed where it was, but all around it, the water disappeared. One morning, it woke up to find itself a part of the continent again. An island sitting on a sea of land.”
She peers out the window, and the flat fields rolling by are suddenly strange, miraculous.
Last night, she had remained awake, sifting through Wideh Vermeulen’s photographs. One of the tear sheets was as recent as this year, a photo essay documenting the graves that had finally been opened in Jakarta and in villages across Indonesia. In the text that Wideh had written, accompanying the images, she read that even now, there is no agreement about what happened in 1965, who initiated the coup that took Sukarno from power, that placed Suharto in his stead. And there is no agreement over the number of people who died in the aftermath, a few hundred thousand, perhaps up to a million dead in the Communist purges. The facts of what happened have been covered in silence, lost in the passage of time.
The photographs are familiar to her somehow. Such images have become too common, the bones in sunlight, the people standing near. In one photo, a woman in her sixties kneels in the dirt before an open grave. In her hand, she holds a small square photo of a young man. The woman looks over the scene as if all the memories of her life are colliding in this moment, nightmare and hope and wish. In the caption at the bottom, her words are translated. For thirty-five years, she says, I did not know where he lay. Now I know, and all my hopes are here, they will not wake again.
Gail had fallen asleep with the box still open on the bed. In her mind, she had returned to Sipke’s kitchen table, smoothed her hands across the photographs. In some ways, this story that he told her felt like one she had always known, as if it had been told to her while she slept, and on waking, she had confused it with her dreams.
They drive on in silence, turning up a country lane that begins to rise above the surrounding landscape. He tells her that they are now driving onto the island.
Remembering something that Ed Carney told her once, she says, “Did you know that the Dutch are statistically the tallest people on earth?”
Sipke laughs. “People say that we long for the vertical because our country is so flat. So we make narrow staircases and tall houses. Even our ambulances are too short for us now. People’s feet protrude out the back doors. Really, though, our height has nothing to do with psychology and everything to do with dairy consumption. Milk, cheese and yogourt.”
He guides the car into a parking lot, then they step out into the snowy landscape. Sipke opens the trunk and removes a small knapsack.
They walk together through a village of half a dozen houses surrounding a church. All the buildings had been abandoned, Sipke tells her, decades before, when the water level around the island had grown too high. Gail tightens her scarf around her neck. The sound of the wind rushing across the fields is high-pitched and ghostly.
“When the sea was pumped out, many objects came to the surface. Bones from the graveyards, centuries old, would rise up as the water receded and float past their wheelbarrows. They found shipwrecks from the middle ages, as old as the twelfth century. In the 1960s, they uncovered Allied planes shot down during the war. The remains inside were perfectly preserved, because of the peat.” Sipke takes Gail’s arm in his and guides her along a tree-lined walkway. “Even now,” he says, smiling, “this is Wideh’s favourite place.”
In front of them, the island comes to an end. The edge is bordered by assorted wooden pilings, and a cliff falls in a sheer drop of ten metres.
“We are standing on what used to be the harbour of Schokland.” Sipke taps his foot against the wood, which has now been supported by stones set in concrete. “This is the old pier.”
He tells her that, since the time of Van Ruisdael and Vermeer, people have speculated about the nature of the light here, in the Netherlands. How it inspired the greatest painters of the age, and taught a new way of looking, of truly seeing, the land and sky. He says that when the dike was built and the sea pumped out, people wondered how the change in the landscape would affect the light. The sea, they said, had been a vast mirror, and perhaps, in draining the water, they had changed the sky irrevocably.
Sipke opens a blanket and they sit down together, dangling their legs off the pier. From his knapsack, he takes out a stainless steel Thermos and two cups and proceeds to serve the coffee. In the distance, below them, there are herds of sheep walking on the snow, gathering in groups. He says that there are plans to flood the land around Schokland, to keep the island visible above the surrounding fields, so that it does not subside, as time and nature would insist.
On the snow, a single heron has come to rest, its slender legs, poised and graceful, almost invisible to her. Far away, the land is divided into squares and rectangles, and steep roofs angle towards the sky. Here, amidst the dependable geometry of this northern landscape, she feels relief, a calmness taking root in her body. Gail wraps her hands around the cup, grateful for the warmth. She thinks of Wideh, somewhere in Jakarta now. About Ansel. She imagines him standing beside her.
Sipke gazes out at the horizon, his white hair beating in the wind. She tells him that she fell asleep last night remembering words from Bertrand Russell. Philosophy, Russell had said, was a means to teach one how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation.