“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.
“To live like this,” Sipke says, “means we give up hope of an answer. We respect what is mysterious, while all the while we seek to unravel it.”
She asks him the question that has followed her here, that remains with her still. “Do you think it’s possible to know another person? In the end, when everything is put to rest, is it really possible?”
“By know, what do you mean?”
“To understand.”
“Understand, yes. But to know another person.” He pauses. “Think of knowing like beauty. The lines that we see are clear, we can trace them, study them in minute detail. But the depth that emerges is still mysterious. How to explain why it reverberates in our minds? When we know another person, I think it is just as mysterious. Knowing another is a kind of belief, an act of faith.”
Later, she asks him what it was like to return to the Netherlands after so many years away. He tells her how he had gone back to the old farmhouse in Ysbrechtum where he grew up, the same one in which he is living now. He says that people recognized him in the street, they saw his father in his eyes, in the shape of his face. They stopped and shook his hand. “Aren’t you the son of Willem Vermeulen?” “Aren’t you Ankie’s youngest?” “Come, my child,” they said, even though Sipke was almost forty years old. “Let’s have a drink together.”
There had been an influx of Indonesians into the country. Even in Ysbrechtum, he said, a tiny village, he thought he saw Ani out of the corner of his eye, a young woman, wearing a sarong underneath a wool sweater, despite the wind and cold.
He says that he remembers waking at night, imagining the tickle of the mosquito net against his skin. The loss came to him again. This ache that people told him would subside. In the farmhouse, he set up a darkroom, and he developed the rolls of film he had brought back from Jakarta. Two children washing themselves at the water pipe, running towards him, their mother out of focus in the background. The young girl with the watchful eyes. A single portrait of Ani.