Текст книги "Certainty"

Автор книги: Madeleine Thien

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

2. Pieces of Map

SANDAKAN, BRITISH NORTH BORNEO

September, 1945

When he woke, it was still dark outside. Matthew slipped his foot out from under the sheet and prodded the ground with his toes. Nothing. Two nights ago, running out of the hut, he had lost his shoe. His left foot had lifted out of the grass, into the weightless air. The shoe had disappeared. They had looked for it in the morning, he and Ani, crawling in the grass, but they had found nothing. Matamu, matamu, he had whispered. His most important possession, disappeared. She had stood beside him, head tilted like a listening animal while the sun burned down on their necks. Then he and Ani sank back to the ground like fish lowering themselves under water. He had looked up and seen her black hair loose and blowing above the grass. Surely it would give them away. “Stolen,” he had whispered to her.

She had nodded, sympathetic, still searching.

Now, inside the hut, he sat up in the dark. A sharp pain rooted itself in his stomach, then flowed through his limbs. Before, when there were chickens, their bickering would wake him up. He would run through the crowd of them, all the way to the outhouse, and they would scatter before his feet, their red combs bobbing.

He blinked, and objects slowly came into focus. The square radio, reaching up a long, thin wire; his father standing on the other side of the hut. As his father listened to the broadcast, he placed both hands on his hips, leaned sideways, then stretched his arms above his head. Matthew focused on his white shirt, a tilting light visible in the room.

His father had been awake for hours. Already, while Matthew slept, he had walked through the aisles of the rubber plantation that had once belonged to their family and now lay under the control of the Japanese army. In the dark, the tappers had been crouched together, heads nearly touching as if they were playing marbles. It was so dark between the trees that only their exhalations, the occasional spitting of betel nut, gave them away. As the sun came up, the workers would set off across the plantation to collect the rubber. The night before, they had tapped the trees, one slash across the bark, a cigarette tin to catch the latex. Now, the latex was to be collected and brought to the storehouse where it would be laid out, then rolled flat. Afterwards, the sheets would be separated and hung to dry in a big closet.

Matthew heard the sound of a vehicle on the road outside. His father quickly replaced the radio in its hiding place in the floor, then pushed a cabinet over top. The door opened and shut, letting in a stream of light, and his father was gone. The hut finally stirred.

There was no ubi kayu to eat, no morning meal. Matthew saw two cigarettes on the table. His mother said, distractedly, “I’m going to visit your uncle this afternoon. Promise me you won’t go to Leila Road today.” She turned for a moment to glance towards the door.

“Yes, mother,” he said. Quickly, he rolled the cigarettes into his hand and dropped them into his pocket.

Outside, walking along the road, he found Ani sitting on the ground, waiting for him.

She smiled when she saw him, getting to her feet. He followed her gaze down the hillside. The sun had left an orange shadow on the water, but up here the fog still clung to the ground, and the air was cool and misty.

Slowly, they began to walk uphill, keeping close to Leila Road, but staying hidden by a line of tall trees. Above them, the blossoms of yellow flowers opened like tiny birds. Their centres, a blush of red, reminded him of a bag of circassian beans he had once owned. His father had watched him scattering them across the table. “Don’t put those in your mouth,” he had warned Matthew. “Before you know it, a suga tree will take root in your body.” Now, Matthew reached his hand up, pressed his fingers against the back of his head, feeling for any sign of unusual growth. “Can a seed grow from the top of your head, if you’d swallowed it first?”

“No,” she said, thinking, “or else everybody would have done it by now.”

“If you could, what seeds would you eat?”

She thought for a second, and then said, “Bananas.”

“Good choice.” They walked from tree to tree. Above their heads, the branches disappeared into mist. Higher still, the branches re-emerged, floating in the sky.

“What about you?”

“Chickens.”

“A chicken tree?” She laughed. When she did, the mist seemed to break apart, separating like heavy milk on a cup of coffee. “Well, maybe we can find some eggs today.”

Ani was ten years old, five months older than Matthew, but already she was several inches taller. She wore a pale sarong, fastened by a square knot. The colour had faded from sun and dirt, so now the fabric was a colour he couldn’t name. A noon sky on a hot day, a fading white. Her hair was gathered in a long braid that swung against her back. Some days, when they were both too hungry to walk, they would hide themselves in one of the craters left behind by British bombs at the top of the hill. They would warm their feet in the shafts of sunlight that fell between the leaves, but still he found himself shivering, even on the hottest days.

She told him once about a game played in town on the padang, the green pitch, with wooden sticks and heavy balls. The field no longer existed, but in a time that Ani could still remember, ladies once stood on the lawns, drinking tea from delicate cups. The cups had handles like a child’s ear. “You were there,” she told him, trying to prod his memories. “I saw you walking with your mother.”

He tried hard to remember it.

At the start of the war, the English women had gone away on a boat. Ani had stood on Jalan Satu, at the white fence beside the eyeglass shop. “You know the one?”

He nodded.

Waves of heat had moved on the water, blurring the women in their long dresses, who waved to their husbands from the steamboat. Even in the heat, they wore gloves. “They sounded like birds crying.” She had been seven years old when the war came to Sandakan. Before their surrender, the British had set the oil tanks and bridges on fire, black smoke rising in columns to the sky. “Remember? All the coins were thrown into the sea, and the tanks were still burning when the Japanese came. They were so angry, they opened fire on the air.”

Before the war, Matthew had lived in a fine house on Jalan Campbell, in the centre of Sandakan town. He remembered the tabletop radio, its big grill and squeaky knobs. There was a sofa made of soft material, shelves of Chinese books. His father’s business partners drank tea and then cognac in the dining room, speaking Hakka or English peppered with Malay. He and Ani had sat beside one another in St. Michael’s Church mission school, tracing the map of British North Borneo into their notebooks. He imagined he was looking down on Sandakan from above, at the town perched on the curve of the Sulu Sea, following the coast south to Tawau, where his mother was born, at the border between the British protectorate and the Dutch East Indies.

At the start of the occupation, three years ago, the Japanese had taken over the schools. He and Ani had learned to sing Japanese songs, and also the anthem, the Kimigayo. “ May the reign of the Emperor continue for a thousand, nay, eight thousand generations.” The schools had operated for almost a year before closing down again. Radios were made illegal, though his father kept one hidden away. In the dark, his father would push the cabinet aside, set up the wire, bring the floating voices into their small hut.

It was getting warmer.

Ani stood up, circling around to a bunga kubur tree whose blossoms were beginning to fall. The flowers were the size of his father’s open hand. She held one now, her hand gone, her wrist ending in a burst of petals. Ani walked along the row of trees, her arm outstretched, the flower held aloft. Around them, the mist was lifting. They were fully visible, no longer hidden from the road. He saw something in the leaves, a piece of clothing, bloodied, the shape of body.

“Ani,” he said, his voice more frightened than he intended.

She knelt down beside a sandalwood tree and placed the flower in the hollow between two roots. “Everyone says the fighting is done.” When she turned to face him, her eyes, so wistful, stilled his heart. “And I wanted to leave something for my parents, now that the war is over.”

One morning when he is twenty-eight years old, Matthew wakes in his home in Vancouver to the sound of a child crying. Beside him, his wife, Clara, is fast asleep. She shifts uneasily, turning her head, as if the crying of the child has entered her dreams.

He finds his slippers, then walks carefully across the room and out into the hallway, where, from the nursery doorway, he sees his tiny daughter sobbing. Her hands are confused in the blanket, twisting the fabric into a tangled knot. Her eyes are pressed tight, as if concentrating on a sound that only she can hear. She is almost a year old. “It’s okay,” he says. “It’s all right.” Her arms reach out to his voice. Only then does he step through the doorway and enter the room. At her crib, he places his hand on her head and finds that her soft, dark hair is damp with sweat.

He withdraws his hand, unsure what to do. It is Clara their daughter always turns to. Gail falls asleep gripping her mother’s body, her face barely visible, her body curled like a little animal against her mother’s chest.

Gail, he whispers, leaning over her, pushing the hair back from her face. Little Gail. He puts his hand against her forehead to comfort her, but she does not stop crying.

Standing there, he has a memory of Ani as she was when they were children, and the image of her is startlingly vivid. “Even in the heat they wore gloves,” she says, describing the British women leaving Sandakan, the steamboat that vanished into the blue of the sea. He is sitting with her on the fringe of the jungle, not wanting to move. His eyes are closed so everything else will fall away and her voice will become the entire world.

He lifts his daughter out of the crib and sits down on the carpeted floor. He rocks the child in his arms. Matthew sees that she is struggling to wake herself, so he whispers to her to give her something to hold on to, a voice to follow out of her own consciousness. Eventually, she opens her eyes, blinking, but she does not seem surprised to find him there. He continues to hold her, saying whatever comes to mind. That her mother will be here soon, that it is morning now, and this day will progress in its usual way. Breakfast, and afterwards they will go to the park. Perhaps, later on, a ride in the car through the city.

And miraculously, his daughter seems to be listening. After a few moments, her breathing calms. Her eyes are still wet with tears, but she is looking through them, focused now on his face. The words keep coming, about lunch and dinner, about a warm bath when the sun goes down. He tells her how his mother used to bathe him outside, under the orange lamp of the sun. How he could hear the songs of kingfishers in the trees and imagined that they were laughing at him, the naked boy playing in a round tub of water. They threw seeds and nuts down at him, and then they spread their wings and lifted up into the white sky.

She does not fall asleep again, and he keeps on talking until Clara wakes and finds them there.

That night, he dreams of a road that leads away from Sandakan harbour, and then of a tunnel under the ground. He sees his father, weeping, thrown from a boat into the sea. Matthew dives in after him. He finds that he can breathe easily, air flows into and out of his lungs. As he descends, the water grows bright, as if lit from a source far below. For a long time he swims in this place, looking neither forward nor back, carried safely, effortlessly, by a current within the sea. By the time he realizes that his lungs are empty, it is too late, his thoughts are already torn, losing substance. The surface is no longer visible.

In January 1945, when the British bombs exploded on Sandakan, all the people ran to the hillside.

Matthew had been asleep in his bed in the house on Jalan Campbell. The noise of the planes stunned him awake, and then he was half-carried, half-dragged, across the floor, down the stairs and out of the house. Panic seized his chest, a pebble in his lungs. His mother was holding jewellery in her hands, gold chains tangled together. A wedding photograph. He heard voices, someone screaming, sirens, and then the first bomb fell, the explosion deafening him. The air began to burn. His mother grabbed him, he did not know where his father was, and they began to run uphill, through the thick smoke, ash raining on their skin, away from Leila Road and into the jungle. He stumbled over a body, its eyes open, heard a man crying. In the sky, flares exploded, opening windows of light on them, exposing the bellies of planes falling on Sandakan. A stickiness ran from his ears, staining his fingers dark when he touched the place. He saw the necklaces snap, coming out of his mother’s hands, and then the bombs dropping, slow and heavy, as if they might be carried past by the wind. The town exploded in a wash of flames.

More people ran up the hill, and around him the jungle seemed to move and shift. Pictures ran through his mind, an egg, a bag of marbles. He wanted to close his eyes, float his body up to where it could not be harmed. His mother tried to cover him, pushing his face against the bark of a tree. Everything smelled of flowers, a sweet, cloying perfume filling his lungs. A plane seemed to stall above them, and in place of its engine he heard the sound of a whistle. The fall began and he counted the seconds, the noise so piercing he could not hear himself speak the last number before the explosion. A tree cracked, swaying towards them. They became nothing. The whistles did not stop. A flare lit up the dead around him, burning pictures in his eyes. The pebble of fear in his chest exploded, and the fragments flooded his body.

After the planes left, they did not move. The town glimmered, a red haze that burned continuously as he fell in and out of sleep. Morning came and he breathed only smoke. On Jalan Campbell, they found his father standing in rubble where the front wall of their house lay crumpled. There was blood on his clothes. He, too, had slept in the jungle. He said that these bombs were meant to save them, to strike the Japanese, to ease the Allied entry into Sandakan and the liberation of the town.

Every night for three weeks, the bombs came and they ran into the dark. But after the planes turned back, no Allied soldiers came.

In the jungle and on the hillside, people built temporary shelters, crowding themselves together. This was where Ani lived with her father. There was no food, and each day she scavenged for jungle fern and sweet potatoes. The dead were buried everywhere.

Matthew and Ani walked through what remained of Sandakan town, through the rubble and glass, through wood heaved at odd angles as if the entire street were still in the act of collapsing. In all this, they found porcelain bowls, undamaged. A half-dozen pairs of spectacles, a rattan chair. He thought he saw people suspended, the shape of a hand. Touch them, and they crumbled to dirt. On Jalan Campbell, where his house once stood, and Jalan Satu, where Ani and her father had lived, nothing but beams, twisted and black, remained.

Matthew and his parents found their way to an abandoned hut at the edge of their former plantation. Before the war, he remembered, his father had taken him to watch the tapping of the rubber trees; at night, lamps ringed with oil were used to ward away the moths. The aisles had been hallways of light, tunnels that led to mysterious destinations. Now, with the shortage in kerosene, the lamps remained unlit. When he looked out at the darkness, his chest seemed to fill with water, submerging his lungs. Each night he woke to the sound of army trucks rumbling past. He knew that the Japanese police, the kempeitai, came after curfew, sweeping the huts for guerillas and taking away any person, any family, they suspected. In his dreams, the road became a part of his body, gravel crumbling through his bloodstream, catching in his throat. He was afraid of the unlit plantation, of the decaying huts farther down the hillside. The dwellings were not safe. At any moment, a person could be pulled from his home, away from his family, and executed in the glare of a torch.

Sometimes, in the night, Matthew saw his father rise from bed, sleepless, a shadow among shadows in the room. Outside, there were gunshots, voices shouting. The war, his father once said, would be no more than a drop of rain on their long lives. If they were smart, if they were careful, they could compromise in order to survive. His father made promises that he could not keep. He said the war would pass, and life as they remembered it would return, as inevitably as one season followed another.

He and Ani now stood on Leila Road, a path that led along the coast, through the ruined town, and up to the top of the hill. When the ridge turned east, they could see the bay stretching out before them, the chalk hills of Berhala Island glowing red against the sparkling water. Farther up along the road, there was a marker for Mile 8, where the prisoner-of-war camps and airfield had been built. The ghost road, people had begun to call it, the point at which the path became grown over and impassable, finally giving way to jungle.

Some days, walking here, they would see Japanese soldiers, and they would run to the side of the road, drop their eyes and bow at the waist. Panic gripped his body, holding him still. He would stare at the black millipedes, the shiny backs of the beetles climbing over his feet. He saw the darkened skin of the soldiers’ hands, the rifles swinging casually against their legs.

Ani would sing the Kimigayo, her voice lingering over the long notes. He heard a strange and unfamiliar sadness in her voice. “ Koke no musu made.” “ And for the eternity that it takes for small stones to grow into a great rock and become covered with moss.” The soldiers sang along with her. They showed her photographs of their loved ones, their mothers, gazing into the flash of the camera. Ani’s face was still and expressionless. They rewarded her with handkerchiefs filled with balls of rice, or sometimes an egg.

What if they were seen? But Ani had no choice. The schools had been closed long ago, her parents were gone, and she had only herself to depend on.

Afterwards, Ani would divide the reward into equal halves. They did not linger over the food. The eggs swelled her cheeks into a wide smile, and she would lie back on the dirt, letting the sun warm her skin, savouring that brief moment when the pain of hunger retreated.

Once, angry, not knowing if what they were doing was right, he had refused the egg she offered him.

She did not answer for a long time. “Your family isn’t starving,” she said, her voice low as if afraid to injure him. “Not like the others.”

At Ani’s words, he wanted to lie on the grass, close his eyes, and give his shame up and everything with it. He saw his father rising in the morning, reaching his arms into the sky. This was the best time of the day, when the house was still and he saw his father at peace, unhurried, alone in the half-light.

In the years before the war reached Sandakan, his parents had planted the seeds for a garden, hidden in the jungle. They grew padi, eggplant and yams, enough to feed themselves through the coming turmoil. But they had been unlucky. Two years ago, an informer had gone to the Japanese and the garden was discovered. One morning, soldiers had burst into the house. He remembered his father, still wearing his housecoat, the first blow knocking him to the floor. The soldiers said that it was treason to withhold supplies from the occupying force. They went through the rooms, calmly shattering the glass cabinets, opening his father’s desk, spilling papers on the ground. He thought his father had been shot, the way the rifle was pointed, how the bayonet wavered beside his head as he lay on the floor. His mother’s screaming had faded to nothing, colour had drained from the world. Only later, when the gun was lowered, did Matthew’s senses return, piece by piece, sound by sound.

In the days that followed, it seemed they had been fortunate. His father began to spend time at the Japanese offices. Sometimes he came home with an extra ration of rice, eggs or a tin of milk. In the mornings, he walked away from the house, his head held high, towards town.

He and Ani walked farther uphill. Below, the debris of the town shone, bleached by the sun, the odd post or beam still standing above the wreckage. Even now, in the chaos of the flattened buildings, the grid of streets was still visible.

“Who told you the war was over?” he said suddenly.

“Lohkman’s brother heard it on the radio. The Emperor himself, he said the war is over.” She paused, looking out at the sea. “But that was more than a month ago, near the beginning of August.”

They walked in silence, bare feet crackling the leaves on the ground.

She gestured towards the harbour. She told him that when the British came back, there would be tables full of food, of English cakes and tea. Boats would arrive again, from Australia and Singapore.

Today, no soldiers appeared on the road. When Ani and Matthew reached the crater, their hands were empty. Ani slid down the crater wall, and he followed behind her. Inside, protected, he thought of them as goldfish, resting in the centre of the bowl. The edges of the trees were sharp against the light.

The Japanese would soon give up Sandakan. Even his mother, who always kept her words to herself, had said the same. One morning in August, a strange and terrible bomb had fallen on Japan. What kind of bomb? he had wondered, but no one knew. Only that behind it, a lasting emptiness remained. The guns and bayonets, the soldiers in their brown uniforms, the cities, had turned to air.

They sat in the crater, back-to-back, and listened to a round of gunfire. The sound was close, behind the hill, but not enough to worry. Sitting like this, the heaviness of her head against his own would tilt his forward. Matthew pulled his knees up to his chest and clasped his arms around them. In the hollow of his back, Ani’s shoulder blades felt like two small wings.

Inside the crater, no wind blew. Outside, on solid ground, there were strips of shade and light, but in here the light turned strange, almost liquid. There were no plants, nothing that grew. The bottom of the crater curved up like a boat, a hollow in which he and Ani could rest. In here, he, too, became something else, his body so insubstantial it seemed a memory of itself. Only by removing himself completely from the crater, by climbing carefully back over the lip, could he become whole once more.

He watched a gust of wind stir the branches of the trees. Leaves and flowers spun slowly down, twisting in slow and intricate spirals.

Unlike Ani, who tried to remember everything, Matthew had kept only a handful of memories from before the war. These stood out from his thoughts, shining like coins in a bowl of water.

When he told this to Ani, she asked, “What is the very first thing that you remember?”

His mother washing him in a round tin bucket. This was long ago, when they had lived in a small house beside the rubber plantation. His mother would set the tub on the ground outside, and she would fill it with cool water. Then, kneeling in front of him, she would unwrap him from his clothes, lift him up and set him down in the tub. The cold water shocked his skin, and the surprise mingled with the yelling of the rubber tappers, the flash of bulbuls and kingfishers above him. In the background, he heard warning shouts, coconuts knock-knocking to the ground. With fingers spread wide, one of his mother’s hands spanned Matthew’s back. She poured water from a cup, and the liquid sheeted down his skin. If he lay flat, bending only his knees, he could rest his head on the bottom of the bucket. His mother’s voice blurred and became a metallic echo in the water. Matthew remembered watching their shadows on the ground, his flowing into his mother’s, then coming apart.

“And what else?” Ani loosened her hair from its braid and it opened up in waves.

His mother planting vegetables, in preparation for the war. The garden was hidden in a cleared area in the jungle. In the mornings, she would bundle him up and place him inside a large basket, along with a canteen of water. The basket was attached to one end of a pole. A second basket, filled with food, was attached to the other end. She then picked up the pole and, balancing it across her shoulders, began walking up the road. The fronds of the basket were itchy against his skin, and they smelled of wood husk. Matthew, lying back and looking at the sky, could see his mother pass in, then out, of sight.

At some point, they would come to a bridge. He heard it long before he saw it, a roar in his ears that grew louder, so loud that it flooded his vision. His mother would adjust the pole along one shoulder, causing the basket to dip and sway. He would look out and see the river, a deep blue field. Fear made him lie still. If he fell, he would not be able reach out, open his arms and catch himself. From moment to moment, he swung like a pendulum, his body handed from the sky to the water and back again.

Nearby to that garden in the jungle, he remembered, his father had buried sheets of rubber from the plantation, so that his fortune would not fall into Japanese hands.

Ani’s memories had always been different. She had walked with her parents from the Dutch East Indies over the hills into Tawau, then north across the spine of the island and into Sandakan. She remembered passing the volcanoes of Semporna, the smooth cones that encircled the city.

“It took a whole season,” she told him now, lying back in the crater. “I was too small to walk the entire way, so sometimes my mother tied me to her back and carried me. The cloth was bound so tight, I felt as if I was a part of her body.” She closed her eyes as she spoke. “We had no map. My father knew his way along the jungle tracks. Some days we went by river and some days through the jungle.”

Near the start of the war, her mother had given birth to a baby girl. It had been during the rainy season in Sandakan, and the baby was very small. Sometimes the baby would cry, but her cry was muffled, as if she had a painful throat. Later, when she cried, no sound came out at all. The baby died in her mother’s arms, but even then the baby could not let go. She tried to pull her mother after her, into the place where she was going. “Because my sister was so small,” Ani said, “and she was frightened of going alone.”

Her mother’s body had become feverish. When she held her mother’s hand, Ani could feel the pulse beating fast, as if she were running away. The indent of Ani’s fingers remained, the skin like a piece of fruit left too long in the field. “Saira,” her father said, repeating the name, calling her back. “This is your home.” Night after night, Ani and her father stayed beside her, listening as her breathing slowed and slowed, slipping free. She died while they slept, and by morning her body was already cool.

The Japanese ordered her father to work on the airfield at Mile 8. The workers had no tools, no changkul or axes or machetes. Sometimes, when her father returned to the house on Jalan Satu, so weary he could not lift his arms, he would nudge a small potato from his pocket and lay it in her hands.

Each day, she walked along the fringe of the jungle looking for fern tips, swamp cabbage and yams. Perhaps, she said, she could learn to live off the air, the way the plants transformed sunshine into food. It was true. Sometimes, when she lay down in the hot grass, the sun soaking into all of her limbs, she felt a round and perfect fullness settling in her body. “We used to roast wild boar outside over coals,” she said. “The meat was so soft it melted on your tongue, it slid like sugar into your stomach. At night now, I have dreams about it.”

Before she died, her mother had told her that she might find other family in Tarakan, in the Dutch East Indies, after the war. She asked Ani to promise her that she would go back one day, if she could. There were uncles, aunts and crowds of cousins. Ani said that she imagined a row of houses, each one opening to welcome her, each face a reminder of her mother’s. When the war was truly over here in Sandakan, she would keep her promise and travel back to her family; she would walk back over the ridges of Borneo and into the Dutch East Indies, high above the little islands and the glowing blue sea. In the hills, she remembered, there were wildflowers. There were flowers whose cups were the length of a child’s body. One could sleep inside, she thought, if the rains came. Folded up in a smell.

He said they could go together. The town of Sandakan was gone, but he still remembered where all the buildings once stood, the Sandakan Hotel, the eyeglass shop, the clattering racket of the tin makers and the cloth banners that beat in the wind. The Japanese soldiers had stolen everything, and then the British planes had set it all on fire. Thick black smoke had overrun the sky. All their possessions, his father’s books, Matthew’s bag of red circassian beans, no longer part of the world.

When two elephants fight, what does it have to do with us? This is what the men in town had said before the war, when Britain and Japan seemed far away.

The ground was rubble, strange twisted shapes. If you touched them, pieces came off in your hands. Once, he and Ani had come across a coconut plantation that no longer bore fruit, and he asked her now if she remembered where it stood. The trees, thin and silvery, had been sawed off at the top so that nothing grew from the crown. A pale forest with no canopy, hundreds of slender lines, as if they had been surprised and then somehow ambushed.