Certainty (20 page)
Now, standing in the sunlit office, they are both fatigued and pale, nursing cups of steaming black coffee.
He goes to his desk, lifts up a stack of pages, and brings them to her. She recognizes the photocopied pages of the diary at once, and her heart begins to thrill in her chest. She sets her coffee down and starts to turn the pages, finding where the numbers end and the text begins:
20 December 1941
.
Hong Kong
. “You said that he surprised you,” she says.
He smiles, an expression both gentle and melancholy. “Read it and discover for yourself.”
She had wanted to believe that once the code was broken so much in William Sullivan’s life, in his children’s lives, would come clear, that a line could be drawn from beginning to end and a true narrative emerge. She sets the pages down, unable to begin, not wanting to finish. It isn’t disappointment she fears, but trespass. To awaken a memory that has no consolation. She remembers a conversation with her mother, from years ago. Gail had asked her mother to tell her about her first love, and her mother had smiled at the question. Your father, she had answered. Your father was my first love, and my first heartbreak.
When they have finished drinking their coffee, she opens her equipment bag and removes the Mini Disc recorder, microphone and cords. They set up a space by the windows, William Sullivan’s diary laid on a table between them. She tells him that she will read the pages this afternoon. Perhaps, for now, they can fill in a few missing pieces about codebreaking, and tomorrow they will talk specifically about the diary.
He nods, one hand brushing the tip of the microphone that she has affixed to him with her usual trick, the bent coat hanger around the neck. “How do I look?” he asks, smiling.
“Sharp. Very sharp.”
They settle into place and Gail listens, assessing the sound of the room. There are no refrigerators, no computer fans whirring. She readies her equipment, then does a sound check, adjusting the needle as Jaarsma rambles on about his hangover. In her earphones, his voice has a low, rich timbre, a melodious accent.
Guided by her questions, he begins to talk about the Vigenère Square, and then cryptography in general. She asks him to assess the personality of someone suited to the work of codebreaking.
He begins to describe the repetitive nature of the work, how codebreakers were recruited from mathematics departments, orchestral groups and crossword puzzle competitions. He beams. “Do you know football?”
Gail shakes her head.
“I’m reminded of a famous quote by Johann Cruyff. He said, ‘If I wanted you to understand, I would have explained it better.’ He was talking about football, but I think what he meant is to trust pure intuition. Follow something less explicit. It is perhaps very unscientific to say, but I think that to break a code you must inhabit the mind of the codemaker. To unravel the clues, you must, to some extent, place yourself within his consciousness.”
Outside, she can hear the whistle of a train passing, and they wait a few moments for the noise to subside. On the far side of the room, a blur of colour catches her attention.
“The print on your wall, Jaarsma. I feel like I should recognize it.”
He smiles, pushing his chair back, stands and walks to the other side of the room. Gail follows closely behind him, wondering whether to pause the tape. She lets the recording continue, taking care to ensure that the wires of the microphone stay clear. Framed beneath the glass, the pictures, six in total, are strange and wild. They hint of seahorse tails, the spiral of a winding nautilus, electric sparks.
“The Mandelbrot Set,” Jaarsma says, running his fingertips over one of the prints. “A collection of points derived from the quadratic equation z = z2 + c. The equation itself is very simple, but the Mandelbrot Set is one of the most complex objects in mathematics. See this boundary here,” he says, indicating a shape enclosed by a band of colour. “Any part of this edge, this cartoid, no matter where, no matter how small, will, if magnified, reveal new points. And these, if further magnified, will also reveal new points,
ad infinitum
.”
Gail moves closer to the wall, gazing at the pictures. Each successive print is a magnification of a detail of the last. The last frame is labelled as being a ratio of 1:1 million.
“The boundary encloses a finite area, but the boundary itself is infinite. No matter how much we increase the magnification, the same shapes appear and reappear in the border, though never quite the same. The image reveals a kind of symmetry, not of left and right, but of large scales and small ones.
“Imagine that we are standing here,” he says. Unexpectedly, he takes her hand, ever so gently, and places it on a corner of the print. “I can imagine what the rest of the picture is like because this is a fractal image, and it is self-similar. It repeats. But to imagine the entire picture is akin to standing on a street corner and trying to imagine what England looks like from an airplane, or from Mars. I can extrapolate, but what I see at this level may not conform to my expectations of what it will look like as we move in space and time.
“Do you know how birds fly in formation? As far as we know, they hold no picture in their minds of the V formation, let alone the vast pattern of migration. They are aware only of the other birds in their immediate proximity. And the same is true for me; I respond to what is immediately around me. But the pattern that I cannot see, that I have no knowledge of, exists. My mind, my brain, is not made to imagine distances of great magnitude. Or infinite time, eternity. We glimpse a part of the puzzle and intimate, however vaguely, an answer. But if I read a book about geography, or the history of the Earth, or the universe, for that matter, how does that change the way I place myself within this formation?”
She gazes at the boundary, the intricate details. “It changes nothing and everything.”
Jaarsma smiles, delighted. “Precisely.”
She turns off the recorder and removes her headphones. “If I wanted to find someone in the Netherlands,” she says, “how would I go about it?”
He is taken aback by the question. “The telephone book?” he says, finally, not sure if she is serious.
“There is someone I want to find.”
Jaarsma walks across the room to his computer. He opens a browser and enters a Dutch Internet address. When the page has opened, he looks up at her, fingers resting on the keyboard.
Gail retrieves her notebook from her bag and opens it to the last page, where she had written, this morning, the name that she cannot shake loose:
Sipke Vermeulen
. Jaarsma studies the page, then types in the words. Almost instantaneously, an address and phone number appear on the screen.
That night, Gail stays awake. Her suitcase is open, the contents still neatly packed. Jaarsma’s translation of the diary is open before her, twelve pages of single-spaced type. William Sullivan, she thinks, all his thoughts transcribed into numbers, multiplied and added to themselves, a testament to what a person might do to make all their words disappear.
She imagines him working with pencil in hand, copying the numbers onto a sheet of looseleaf. Over and over, he erases his numbers and begins again. How is it possible to forget pain, to be unable to recall something that was once so inescapable?
In the diary, there is no detailing of violence witnessed and endured, of friends executed, of resistance. That, in the end, is what Gail finds so startling. She knows, through her research, that in the Hong Kong camp, a third of the men died before the war ended. In the prisoner-of-war camp in Sandakan, only six of three thousand men lived to see liberation. William Sullivan kept the diary as proof of a different kind of existence, where part of him still saw the world as if he were free. He wrote about their rituals, what time they got up in the morning, the kind of trees that grew outside the camp, the food they ate, the girl smugglers who passed by outside. “Some are as young as ten years old. Their clothes hang together with invisible thread.” And another entry: “My most prized possession is a set of three tin dishes. They came to me through various hands, and they are useful for all sorts of things. Food, chiefly. But also to gather leaves for tea, to hold on to a bit of water. They are valuable also because, in a time of necessity, they can be traded for pills or medicine.” Through these sentences, these pages, he would make the world cohere.
For three years, the men in the camp were starved and brutalized, treated as less than animals, but he had continued the journal, as if through it he could maintain some part of his dignity. In entry after entry, he imagines the days to come. “When I see you next,” he writes, addressing Kathleen’s mother. “After the war is finished.”
When the camp was liberated in August 1945, he had been twenty-five years old. Gail had learned that the physicians and psychologists of the time had all agreed: the war was finished, these men who had survived should go on with their lives in the best way possible. They should not burden their families with the misery of what they had endured. So he had gone on, honourably discharged from the army, and he had kept his silence.
Earlier, she had telephoned the number for Sipke Vermeulen. The voice of an elderly man had answered, his words clear and lightly accented. When she said her name, a silence followed, and she feared the conversation had come to an end, that Sipke Vermeulen would put down the phone, without her understanding the reason why. But then time had begun again. He had repeated her name, in surprise, in recognition.
Arrangements were made. Sipke Vermeulen had told her he would come down to Amsterdam in two days’ time, and then they would travel up north together to his home in rural Friesland.
Jaarsma had been standing in the window, watching the moonrise, the gleam of light clouding the city. He had poured two glasses of wine and ordered dinner from the neighbourhood Indonesian restaurant, sticks of satay,
babi pangang
, a container of rice. When he looked at her, his face held a question. She told him about the letter that she had found years ago. She wondered if it was possible to know a person truly. And if we did, would we know what we had, would we recognize it?
At one point in the evening, Jaarsma had put his fingers to the window, indicating the light. He told her that people believe that the moon changes in size as it moves across the sky, becoming larger and fuller as it nears the horizon. But the size of the moon, he said, remains constant no matter where it is, and the idea of a larger moon is an optical illusion. We could measure it, he said, with a paper clip, shaped into a caliper. He still remembered the day his father, an astronomer, told him this fact.
“And what did you feel,” Gail had asked him, “when you learned it was only an illusion?”
At first, disbelief. He had been standing beside his father, the moon, low and immense, before them. “It was so large,” he said, “I felt we could get in the car, drive across the city, reach out and hold it in our hands. Every night after that, I twisted a paperclip just as my father had taught me, proving over and over again that even the largest moon is no different in size from all the rest.” Was it our perception of the sky that was in error, he had wondered, or our perception of the moon relative to the buildings on the horizon? Did we compare the current moon to an inaccurate memory of a previous one? What was it, within our own minds, within the wires and creases of our visual cortex, our internal map of the world, that allowed this distortion to happen?
She had sat in silence, the wineglass in her hands, waiting for Jaarsma to continue.
“There is no definitive theory,” he said at last. “The question itself is thousands of years old, spanning from the time of the ancient Greeks. Maybe if we are lucky, within our own lifetime, we will find not only the right answer, but also the one that satisfies us.”
That night, she falls asleep, the lamp still burning, the transcribed pages of the diary laid out beside her.
The Island
YSBRECHTUM, THE NETHERLANDS
W
hen Gail Lim arrived in the Netherlands, Sipke Vermeulen was seventy-four years old, and Canada was the country of the pilot who fell from the sky over Ysbrechtum in 1940. That night, almost sixty years ago, the parachute had come down like a balloon returning from the heavens. Sipke had heard the explosion, turned his face towards the glint of fire, and run out into the grass with his three brothers. They were older, and they ran ahead of him, their eyes focused on the sky. Above the farmhouse, the parachute floated out from beneath the clouds, it looked like a part of the moon torn away. He watched the figure cradled in the harness, the slender lines of the body growing ever clearer. When the parachute collapsed into the ground, the folds fluttered in the breeze. Sipke’s brothers pushed their way through the buttresses of silk.
They hid the Canadian pilot in their barn. When the Germans came, his father described the explosion and the ball of light, and then the parachute that had appeared in the flames. The Germans asked where the parachute had landed, and his father made a drawing. He told them that the remains had been carried off by the wind, west towards the sea.
Sipke was twelve years old. Three times each day, he brought food and drink to the injured pilot, and then sat with him. The pilot taught him his first English word, which was
thirsty
. In time, with the covert assistance of the village doctor, the pilot’s broken bones mended. One day, the pilot disappeared, having been taken in the night by Resistance workers who had come up from the south.
When the war ended, Sipke was seventeen years old. Each of his three brothers had married, moving out of his parents’ farmhouse and into homes of their own, but Sipke had a longing to see the world. He studied languages, English, French and German at the university in Groningen, and after he had finished his schooling, he went to London. There, in the evenings, he wandered the museums, which were free and warm. In one, there was an exhibition of Robert Capa’s photographs. He saw the famous Spanish Civil War soldier, arms flung out in the moment of death; across the room, in the grainy photos of the D-Day landing at Normandy, Allied soldiers, munitions on their backs, laboured through the water. Night after night, he returned to this gallery, he sat on a bench and stared at the images for hours at a time. Walking home under the street lamps, through the crowds of people, he came to believe that only in stillness, only if he were able to step outside of time, could he begin to make sense of the world.
For half a year, he worked as a window washer, saving enough money to buy a Leica. He travelled across England, then Europe, honing his skills, improving his English. In Berlin, he photographed gaunt, skeletal men, German
pow
s, walking home to their villages from labour camps in the Soviet Union. The pictures sold to a Dutch magazine, and he told the photo editor that he was willing to travel, ready to go anywhere. Shortly after, he was offered a job as a war photographer. A split-second decision, one that he did not hesitate over, and his life changed. Sipke sent a letter home, telling his mother that he was leaving for Indochina. She called the boarding house where he was staying, and tried, across the crackling lines, to persuade him to come home. How could he explain it? He needed to see things for himself, to know what he was capable of.
Later on, others told him that he had a gift; he was able to catch and distinguish the defining moment. When he was working, he had the sensation of walking into a deep tunnel, the edges of his body dissolving into the scene around him. Yet he was capable – he does not know how or why – of pulling something tangible from the deep. His photographs were picked up by
Elsevier
,
Life
and
Réalités
. He tried to follow Robert Capa’s famous dictum: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” It was the golden age of photojournalism, and the magazines and newspapers were hungry for images. In Indochina and afterwards, in Algeria, South Africa and Indonesia, he ceased to feel hunger or fear. He felt that his life was precariously balanced, and all he did to prevent his fall was click the shutter, this sound more real to him than his own heartbeat. For twelve years, he travelled from assignment to assignment, living without a fixed address. In Algeria, he photographed the mutilated bodies of men and women who had been tortured and killed, by guerillas, by the
FLN
or
colon vigilante
units. He photographed two small children, crawling through the bombed wreckage of their home; and then, that same day, in a neighbouring village, an entire family who had been murdered, in retaliation, by a mob. He felt as if a part of his mind was decaying, he was ashamed of the pictures that he took, and he was confused by their beauty. A dead child abandoned in a field, his face unmarked, the light on his skin. Tiny flowers rising between his fingers.
Nothing made sense, and he tried to separate himself from his emotions, focusing on the sights of his camera to dull the turmoil, the sickness.
The only possible negotiation is war
, François Mitterrand’s famous line, rang in his ears, and he knew he was witnessing the destruction of the middle ground. By the time he left Algeria, the estimated casualties stood between three hundred thousand and a million. Everywhere he went, he held his camera to his eyes and saw only the dead.
His first memory of beauty was when the Canadian pilot had fallen into the fields, wrapped in his silk parachute, and since that day, he had tried to recapture what he felt, staring up at the sky.
I am watching you
, he had thought, running across the grass.
You must be alive, because I am watching you.
Exhausted, he accepted an assignment from
Elsevier
to travel to Indonesia and shoot a photo essay: Borobudur, dancers in Bali, Khrushchev’s visit to the capital. It was 1963. One morning, walking through a slum in Jakarta, he gave a few cents to a fortune teller who offered to read his future. She warned him that his gift would disappear. “Not this year or the next,” she said. “But somehow you will lose your talents. You will receive something of great value in return.”
Sipke tells all this to Gail as he drives her from Amsterdam towards the north, to his home in Ysbrechtum, in Friesland. Gail Lim is a young woman, perhaps in her late thirties. The first thing he noticed about her, at her friend Harry Jaarsma’s apartment, was her smile, which seemed to travel across the room and push him lightly in the chest. She had opened the door, her eyes brightening immediately. They went out to his car, and she carried only a small, old-fashioned suitcase and a canvas bag over her shoulder.
Driving, now, he talks about the three thousand kilometres of fortifications that surround the country, protecting it from the sea. They pass the gleaming propellers of the new windmills, the neat rows of poplars lined up like sentries to buffer the wind. When they cross the Afsluitdijk, and the North Sea opens to the west, she says that the landscape is hypnotic. Their car runs down the highway as if they are moving across the beautiful flatness of the ocean itself. “This is a country so small,” he tells her, “that on a map it must write its name upon the sea.” She is a good listener, she allows him to talk, to ramble, until he runs out of words. An hour and a half, and the highway has already carried them far north, to fields and shining canals. “When I was a boy,” Sipke says, “I would ride my bicycle on the farm roads. I would open my arms and use my coat as a sail to catch the wind.”
He asks about her schedule, and Gail tells him that she is not due to fly home to Vancouver until Thursday. She has arranged for a rental car and will drive herself back to Amsterdam. He counts the days in his head. “Three days to see this part of the country,” he says.
He reaches into his shirt pocket and takes out a small black-and-white photograph showing Ani and Wideh, standing at the train station in Heerenveen, on the day that Wideh left home to begin university.
“My wife and son,” Sipke says. For the last thirty years he has thought of Wideh as his own child, and the word comes out before he realizes his mistake.
Gail does not seem to notice. She takes the photo from him, and her expression as she studies it is intent.
She is waiting for him to continue, Sipke knows, but he keeps driving, unable to speak. The realization takes root in his mind: she has not come because of Wideh. It was Ani she asked about over the phone, Ani whose story she wishes to hear. The photograph remains in her hands.
On the side of the highway, they pass an abandoned farmhouse with the words, painted in blue across the wooden slats, “Too much ocean.”
His wife was fifty-seven years old when she died of ovarian cancer. At first, the disease had seemed under control, and then, when illness came, it was so sudden. She had told him that she wished to be buried under a tree, and so he scattered her ashes around the willow in their backyard. Wideh had come home and stayed for half a year. Then the boy, now a man, had left again. He had Sipke’s restlessness in him, and the world was calling.
Before she died, the radiation had weakened Ani, causing her hands to tremble; she could not hold a pen or write a sentence. In her patched white housecoat, she would sit beside him at the kitchen table. She dictated her letters to him, and Sipke wrote them out in his own neat script. He and Ani had moved easily between Dutch, English and Indonesian; they had many languages within their reach. When they were younger, the exchange of words, of ideas, was important. But later, less so. He believes that the human body has some other means of communicating, some way that is yet to be categorized by science, or by language itself. Two people can swim in the same memories, the same dreams; that is how it had become for him and Ani.
He had written down her words on paper: letters to Wideh, to the Dertiks and Frank Postma, to friends in Sandakan and Jakarta.
When Ani died, his world had come to an end. In the days that followed, he sat in his living room, staring out at the canal, the great willows, and felt as if he, too, were passing into a kind of darkness. Outside, the days and nights went on, school children went by on their bicycles, but he chose to stand still. He did not want time to pull him away from the centre of his life. Wideh called every night, and sometimes, across the long-distance lines, they simply sat together, without needing to speak. He was comforted by his son’s presence. He would fall asleep with the phone cupped to his ear.
One day, he took up Ani’s correspondence again. It was like reaching for air. There were one or two people who did not know, would have no way of knowing, that she had died. From Sandakan, her friends Mas and Halim still sent the occasional letter. In his grief, he had not written them. She was not dead to him. He could not live with such a reality. Instead of writing of Ani’s illness, he had simply continued Ani’s letters as if she were still pacing behind him, dictating the words. To Sipke, the letters, her continued existence, seemed one of the few things in his life that was right.
Two nights ago, when the telephone rang and the young woman, Gail Lim, had said her name, he had felt as if decades of his life had collapsed, returned him to that time long ago in Jakarta. Now that Matthew’s daughter is here, he has made a promise to himself, he will try to tell her all that he knows is true.
Standing in Jaarsma’s apartment, her luggage beside her, Gail experiences an unexpected wave of feeling when Sipke Vermeulen takes her hand and says his name. She senses that she is not a stranger to him, but someone known.
Now, in the car, she glances at Sipke, who talks continuously, filling the air with a stream of words. His hair is almost completely white, grand and windswept, and he keeps his scarf on against the chill. The expression on his face is open and kind. He tells her that, next year, he will celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday.
An hour and a half later, Sipke turns down a country road and they pull alongside a house with a high, red roof, surrounded by farmland. To their right, a tidy lawn opens onto a garden. In the cold, the branches of the trees appear crystallized.
“This is our house,” Sipke says.
He looks as if he wants to say something more, but then he takes her suitcase from the car and together they go up the front walk, where he stands briefly, searching for his keys. When he finds them, he unlocks the door, pushing it open.
They pass through a foyer and then into a sitting room where the walls are covered with photographs. This house does not feel like a place of absence, as Gail realizes she had come to expect. There are pictures of canals, a field of devastatingly green maize, a windmill that appears to be floating on the water. Among the landscapes are pictures of a woman and a child. Ani Vermeulen, she knows, and their son, Wideh. “These are
your
photographs,” Gail says quietly, more to herself than to Sipke.
“Yes. They go back many years.”
She returns to the front door, slips her shoes off, and re-enters. Slowly, she walks along the wall. For a long time, her gaze lingers on the boy, Wideh, captured from childhood to adulthood. She is absorbed by his face, the serious eyes. In one photo, he gazes at a heron facing him, the two standing opposite one another in the grass. Her eyes fall on a portrait of Ani Vermeulen; she is in a café somewhere, not in Holland, perhaps in Asia, light filtering in through horizontal blinds. She appears to be in her twenties, and she is turning her face away as she laughs. Light and shadow play across the picture, across her face, and the portrait is so tender that Gail feels as if she is trespassing into a territory that is both private and revered.
Sipke comes to stand beside her. He indicates a photo, and Gail recognizes a much older Ani, sitting on the grass with her son. “Before, when Ani was here, we kept the walls bare, because she always liked to have a sense of openness, of space. But afterwards, after she died,” he stops, his hands clasped together. “I wanted the house to mirror what was in my thoughts.” He looks past her, towards the photos, then meets her gaze again. “It was seven years ago that she passed away. In 1992.”