When Ani grows tired, they stop and sit in the grass, eating the chocolate that Sipke now knows to carry with him. In the distance, she can see a wind turbine, sleek and white, propellers cutting through the air.

When she left Jakarta almost thirty years ago, this place had been mysterious to her. Standing in the open fields, the late autumn chill in the air, she could see in every direction, a storm or sunshine moving in, a distant wash of rain. Sipke had continued to work as a photographer, and for a time they lived in the nearby city of Groningen, coming to Ysbrechtum only a decade ago. The community here, rural and tight-knit, had been welcoming, not unkind, but she has always felt an outsider. To ease her loneliness, they had travelled frequently, going often to The Hague, where Siem, Saskia, and Tash Dertik had made their home, to Maastricht, then across the border into France. Indonesia was a world away, an item on the newscast, a photograph. But in her mind, it joined all things, a background to all that she saw.

Sipke touches her cheek. “You were far away.”

“I was thinking about this field, the first time we walked here together. About Jakarta.”

A cool breeze skims across the grass and the sheep nearby turn their faces away, hunching their ruffled shoulders. Some of the sheep are marked by a cheerful red or blue circle, as if a child had come through this field with a paintbrush. Sipke moves so that he is sitting close beside her and she leans back, her head against his chest.

He says, “I always thought we would go back, eventually.”

It was true. They had put it off time and again, saving the journey for a future date.

“It was me. I hesitated for too long.”

He shakes his head, as if to say, No, us.

“I woke up one day,” she says, “and realized the moment had passed, I no longer needed to return.”

In the last month, Wideh has come home from his travels. He is Sipke of an earlier time, a restless spirit. For years he has lived from assignment to assignment, but here, in Ysbrechtum, he seems content to lay his camera aside. Dark haired, slim, and tall, he has a confidence that moves Ani, a face that is open to the world. Even as an adult, becoming set in his ways, he surprises her still.

This morning, after breakfast, he had laid out a dozen photographs on the kitchen table, a series on Borobudur in Indonesia. When Sipke had visited the temple in 1963, Borobudur, more than a thousand years old, had been in near ruins. Back then, people would bring small tools to the site, and when they left they carried the relics and carvings away in their arms. He told her that the monument, with its Hindu and Buddhist elements, is now fully restored, rising up, offering its peaks and domes to the sky. On the day he went, the grounds were almost deserted. He had followed the walkway that spiralled up through the terraces, the bas-relief sculptures decorating the walls illustrating a journey, an ascent, away from the world of suffering. She sifted through the photographs. I thought of you, he said, turning to Ani. His dark eyes imploring her, to get well again, not to leave him. He told her how the stupas, shaped like bells, surrounded him, each one containing a statue, a boddhisatva. He had watched the sunrise, not wanting to lift the camera, to place it between himself and what he saw. The valley around him was a startling colour, a golden inlay on the deep green fields. “How peaceful it was,” he said. “The silence seemed to move like a being across the valley. I thought you would have felt at home there, just as I did.”

“Yes,” she had said, watching his face, so known to her, the grief concealed. “When I put your photos down, I can close my eyes and see the place, as if I were standing in Indonesia again.”

The wind picks up, cutting a swath in the grass. Light edges the high, cumulus clouds, throwing them into relief. She thinks of a kite in the air, of a September day in Jakarta. When Matthew arrived, he had sent a note from the hotel where he was staying, and they arranged to meet in the park on Jalan Kamboja, alongside the canal.

The night before, she had lain awake. On the table were a half-dozen letters addressed to Sipke, begun but left unfinished. He had been gone for almost a month, and without him the days had an air of unreality. She wanted to write to him, to tell him something concrete, but she could not find a way to express the rush of feelings that she herself did not fully understand. Sipke had sent her a photograph, one of the last he had taken before he left for the Netherlands. In the picture, Wideh, lying on his stomach on the floor, was setting up a game of marbles. The glass beads shimmered, and her son’s face was half in darkness. It was his father’s face that she saw, clearer than any recollection.

In the park the next day, Matthew walked towards her. She saw the curve of his shoulders, the set of his mouth, all intimately known to her, as if she had conjured the young man she once knew. He wore glasses, wire-rimmed, silver. He took her hand, holding on to it for a moment. There were dark shadows below his eyes, a weariness.

They found shade on a bench beneath a cassia, with its thousands of shifting leaves. Kites of every shape and hue swam in the air above them.

At first, their conversation rambled, a skittish bird moving from branch to branch, unsure. He told her he had flown to Tawau, staying there for a few days with his mother and her family, then continuing to Sandakan where his uncle still lived. There had been a film crew in the town, making a movie. Within days, the prisoner-of-war camps had been reconstructed, in the same place where once they had stood before.

He spoke in Malay, the language of their childhood. “I had not seen the town in more than a decade. Since before I left for Australia.

“There,” he said, after a moment, “even the trees were different. Every day, I went past a golf course. At twilight, hundreds of kangaroos would gather together. They sat like statues in the grass.” He said that the realization of growing older had come upon him suddenly. The speed at which the years had gone by. He took a breath. “In Melbourne, I thought of you. I thought of you often.”

To Ani, the girl that she had been, turning away from him, was both near and blurred. She wanted to find the words that would call her into being, some thread that would connect her back to that time. She began to speak about the day, twelve years before, when they had walked together on the beach, the tide washing out. He listened, his face open towards her, vulnerable. She told him that she had held the truth from him, that at the time she believed there had been no other choice to make. When she spoke Wideh’s name, he looked down. There was exhaustion in his face, but not surprise.

“And so you left Sandakan,” he said. “All these years, that was the reason.”

She nodded, remembering how she had stood on the steamboat, watching as the harbour she had known all her life slid away from her. “When I went to my mother’s family in Tarakan, my uncle helped me. Wideh was born here in Jakarta. Afterwards, I wanted to write to you. I wanted to make it right. This dishonesty. But I was not brave enough. I feared what the words might do. When Wideh asked about his father, I told him that I was the one who had left. That I had come to Jakarta on my own. I said that I believed you had remained in Australia.”

From somewhere in the distance, she heard the din of Jalan Kamboja, a clattering of sound. She saw betjaks weaving between the trucks, crowds of people slipping through.

His voice, when he began to speak, was tentative. He told her that he could not pinpoint the moment when he had begun to understand. Information had reached him slowly. That she lived in Jakarta. That she had a child. Then, a year ago, when he learned that the child had been born in 1954, it was as if some part of him had come awake. He could not explain why he had not seen it before. Perhaps he had suspected all along, perhaps he had pushed the knowledge away, he no longer knew.