Текст книги "Certainty"

Автор книги: Madeleine Thien

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

His father does not answer at once. “My wife is with her brother,” he says finally. “I do not know where my son is.”

Time passes, and his father holds the lieutenant’s gaze.

The lieutenant looks towards the hut. He walks to the doorway, steps in, and disappears.

“Please,” his father says. “Take this money.”

The lieutenant re-emerges. He approaches Matthew’s father, taking the jar thoughtfully in his hands. His eyes drift over the trees. Matthew’s legs, frozen in a kneeling position, begin to tingle, and a wave of sickness causes him to bow his head, eyes watering. The lieutenant taps his cigarette and the ashes fall to the ground. “From what I hear, all of Tokyo is burning. There isn’t a building standing. It’s tragic, but this is the nature of war, and you and I, we are both on the losing side.” He pauses, looks down at the jar in his hand. “Maybe you don’t believe it, but I pity you. I’m offering you a choice. Come with us now. Let’s not do this here in the open.”

His father’s voice is low. “Everyone knows what happened here, this will not change the things that matter –”

The other soldier, standing by the door of the hut, has come forward. With a heavy movement, he swings his rifle into Matthew’s father’s back. His father is taken by surprise. He cries out in pain, falling forward on his hands and knees.

The lieutenant says something to the soldier, but Matthew cannot understand the words. His father crawls forward a little, then stumbles to his feet.

“I have done everything you asked. I’m begging you. I have a family –”

“I cannot help you any more.”

His father lurches forward and begins to run blindly towards the road. The soldier catches him easily and he swings his rifle up, where it remains for a second before he brings it forcefully down. His father crumples. His arms reach up to shield his head and Matthew can no longer see his face.

The lieutenant’s left hand, holding his cigarette, draws a line in the dark, and stops. The soldier sets his rifle casually on the ground. In his hand there is now a pistol. He puts the pistol against Matthew’s father’s head. His father starts to say something, three or four words, but Matthew hears only “ Tolong, tolong. Please,” before the first shot is fired. His father’s body shudders and falls forward. He hits the ground chest-first, both arms outstretched, the hands open. Matthew scrabbles at the grass as if he might crawl towards his father, but his fingers close around air. The world empties before the second and third shots. While the sounds are still audible, the first soldier drops his left hand and lets his cigarette fall to the dirt.

The other man is picking up his rifle. They are speaking to one another in low voices, and then his father is lifted off the ground, swung and tossed into the back of the truck. The two men climb into the cab, the lieutenant carrying the jar of money. The engine starts, the headlights sweep the road. The truck reverses, bearing down on Matthew, the lights freezing him. The gears sound and the truck begins to roll forward. The truck turns down the road and drives away.

Matthew lies in the dark, unmoving. The sound of his breathing lifts away from him. The truck’s wheels have raised a cloud of dust and he can taste the road in his mouth, in the back of his throat.

His legs ache with the effort, but he pushes himself to standing. In the dark, he fumbles for the bag and pulls it over his shoulder. Then, turning, he walks slowly in the direction of the plantation.

All his thoughts are clear. He goes first to the storehouse where sheets of rubber hang to dry, and there he finds a small shovel. Then he goes back and begins to count out the rows. His eyes have now adjusted to the darkness. In front of the thirtieth tree of the thirtieth row, Matthew sets down the sack. There are notches in the wood, thin diagonal lines where the rubber has been tapped. All around him, he hears the itching sound of cicadas, a bird, unidentifiable night sounds.

In his mind, his father says again, Make sure no one sees you. Matthew stares into the darkness, then kneels on the ground. He traces an outline in the dirt, making a circle, then he begins to dig with the shovel. His father comes towards him. Please, he says to Matthew, go quickly. This is the place where he will plant the money. It will be like the seeds that his father warned him not to swallow, a strange plant growing from an unexpected place. After a few minutes, Matthew has made a small opening in the ground. Not enough. It has to be so deep that he can stand in it, with only his fingertips brushing the air.

His father gets to his feet. Take the money, he tells the men. He gestures towards Matthew, and Matthew steps out from his hiding place and onto the road. He goes to stand beside his father. His father places his hand on Matthew’s shoulder.

Minutes pass, perhaps hours. The plantation falls away, and he returns to the house on Jalan Campbell. High on a shelf, there is a wooden box whose contents he cannot see. All he hears is the scratch of a record, then a woman’s voice. Through a doorway, he glimpses his parents standing together, his mother holding a jacket open, his father sliding his arms into the sleeves. She runs her hands across his back. He turns to face her. Matthew climbs down into the hole that he has made. There are places so narrow that he has to use his body to widen the opening. When he is standing at the bottom, he reaches his hands up and turns his face towards the fresh air. The dirt surrounding him radiates heat, and he realizes that his entire body is sweating, he can feel the drops running from his hair, down his face and neck. Gripping the surface, he braces his knees against the walls of the hole and forces himself out. He feels no pain and no fatigue. His arms lift him out of the ground and he does not feel the effort.

Lying on his stomach, he lowers the sack as far as he can, then lets it go, hearing it strike at the bottom of the hole. The glass jar does not seem to break. Slowly, he replaces the dirt until the hole is completely filled. He packs the earth down carefully, using his hands and feet to remove any signs of disturbance.

As he does this, he listens for men or trucks, but even the cicadas have stopped their singing and the air is still. Again and again, his thoughts return to the burning embers, the rifle on the ground and the pistol in the soldier’s hand, but he pushes these images away. He has swallowed something wrong. Inside his skin, something that he cannot contain is pulsing and breathing, but there is no way to let it out.

Walking back, he sees a dull light flickering inside the hut and realizes that his mother has returned before him. He lingers outside, staring at the faint candlelight. Dirt is caked to his skin, and he stands in the grass, crumbling the pieces off with his hands. He has lost his shirt, but he does not remember how or when. There are no sounds of planes or gunfire; the night is extraordinarily calm, peaceful. Matthew gathers himself together and walks forward. Alongside the hut, he sees, as if from another time, the bicycle wheel and the stick lying beside it. He pushes open the door.

On the table, a low candle wavers. He stands motionless, looking into the shadows. The hut is empty.

There are two plates of food, rice and meat. The food smells so fragrant, so good, a dizziness comes over him, but he cannot bring himself to eat. One of the settings, he realizes, is meant for his father. A third dish, his mother’s, is sitting empty but unwashed on the other side of the table. His mother has been here, but now she has gone, and this realization makes him pause, eyes stinging. Did the Japanese soldiers return? But there is nothing out of place in the hut.

Shaking, Matthew walks to the other side of the table. Beside his parents’ bed, the metal tub has been filled with water; it is a still lake in the half-darkened room. He touches the surface, the water is warm. He can smell his mother’s soap, the small perfumed square that she keeps wrapped in paper. When he has taken off his clothes, he climbs into the bath. The panic begins to subside, and he slides down until only his mouth and nose remain above the surface, the dirt from the plantation dissolving off his skin. He keeps his eyes open as the room moves in waves above him.

Go now. Quickly. The soldiers in the truck drive away, and their lights sweep across his father, who stands on the steps watching them leave.

Matthew closes his eyes. His father falls backward. His legs dangle loosely from the soldiers’ arms.

Much later, a caravan of vehicles passes by on the road outside. The walls shake, and small ripples start to form in the water, expanding out, moving against his body. Matthew climbs out of the tub, dries his body with a sarong, and sits on his bed. He is waiting for his mother; she is getting ready for Sunday mass in a time before the war. She has a pearl necklace that rests in a cushioned box. When she puts it on, she turns first one way and then another, admiring the play of light along its length. In St. Michael’s Church, she sits on the bench beside him, and he leans his face against her body, the fabric of her dress shifting against his cheek.

Ani says, The boy buried his treasure in a hidden place. In this place, all the trees were silver, and fruit fell from the trees and lined the ground. For months and months, the boy cared for his secret. He nourished the soil and watered the dirt. One day, the first leaves appeared. The stems grew strong and the leaves became bountiful.

This is the treasure that allows the boy to return to the other side. For when he opens the leaves, pieces of gold fall into his hands. He has been trapped here for many, many years. As many years as it takes for a boy to grow into an old man.

He falls asleep to the sound of more trucks on the road, and he returns to the bridge his mother carried him over, the basket that rocked him back and forth, the sound of rushing water taking hold of him. This memory floods his vision. He opens his mouth and finds he can breathe it in, finds that the water miraculously pours out of his body, out of his skin.

Sometime in the middle of the night, he wakes hearing the door opening. His mother is there beside him, her hand smoothing his hair, smoothing the sarong that covers his body. She says that she has been down to the harbour. She has seen the Australian soldiers arrive in Sandakan. He looks up at her face, so beautiful to him, and he does not know if she is crying out of joy or sadness. She tells him that she has searched all night for his father. “I wasn’t here,” she says, her voice catching, tearing. She repeats the words, trying again. He tries to speak but no sounds come. She cups her hand against his head, as if to hold his thoughts, as if to stop them from sliding loose, and eventually sleep takes over once more.

He wakes expecting to see his father. Matthew opens his eyes, already picturing a day like every other: the radio in the room, the wire reaching up, his father concentrating on the sound. Instead, the room is still. He realizes that he has slept far longer than usual; the sun has risen, and he can see the light filtering in through the slats of the hut.

On the far side of the room, his mother is brushing her hair. It falls past her shoulders, down her back, and she gathers it up in her hands, slowly twisting it into a complicated knot. Her arms are too thin, too fragile. She is not yet aware of him. She faces the wall, as if imagining a mirror there, and brushes the stray hairs back from her face.

His mother turns and crosses the room. He tries to tell her that the one they love is not dead, that he is only hidden away, safe. Her eyes are dark and swollen. When she puts her fingertips to his cheek, her hands are trembling. She tells him that all the Japanese have gone away, they have given up Sandakan. Under cover of night, they abandoned the town and then disappeared. “Rest now,” she says, putting her lips to his hair, holding on to him. Without realizing it, she repeats his father’s words. “Everything will turn out for the best.”

Because he cannot bear to see her sadness, he closes his eyes, tries to find sleep again.

He lies still, the sarong covering his body. His heart is beating fast, and his mouth tastes of a bitter, metallic dust. When the war is truly over, he imagines that the cities will be empty places, that all the trees and shops and houses will be tidied away, swept clean like the bowl of a crater. Sleep comes, and in his dream, which is bright with colour and very clear, people move through the open space, a film of dust clinging to their bodies. The cities are like Sandakan. He walks the abandoned streets, remembering where each building stood, the tin maker, the eyeglass shop, everybody remembers, but no buildings will grow there again.

When he steps outside in the afternoon, the sky is white. His mother remains inside, and he closes the door behind him. When he kneels on the ground, brushing his hand over the loose dirt, he finds no cigarette ends, no boot marks, no stray bullets.

He begins to walk downhill, towards the harbour. There are people gathered beside their huts, listening to a radio that cuts in and out with static. Some have almost no clothes, they sit in the shade of the trees, or pace the grass. Two small boys hurry past him, almost running.

His father says, You must pay attention. Always pay attention.

Up in the sky, an airplane is coming nearer. Matthew watches small pebbles shiver across the ground. The plane descends through the clouds. The two boys are calling to each other. The younger one starts to scream. The plane is too close, flying so low, the trees in its path are bending away. Out of the belly of the plane, something falls. Matthew does not flinch or try to escape. He says, I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention. I can’t remember what day this is. A parachute opens, he watches the cloth open and snap. It passes by him, carrying a box, sailing down to earth. The box hits a tree, the parachute buckles, the lines fall down, and the silk blooms down around the tree, as if to protect it. A woman runs towards the box, dragging a child behind her.

He can feel his thoughts dissolving to liquid. Is it the heat? Which day was yesterday? Part of him tries to focus that picture in his mind, a hand opening to reveal a pistol. He sits down in the dust. At the tree, the woman with the small girl is lifting out cans of food. She is putting something into her pocket. Matthew watches her, and in his mind he hears gunshots. One shot, a pause, and then another. But the woman does not fall down. She laughs and smiles and pulls a blanket out of the box. Nobody reacts to the gunfire. But Matthew has thrown his body onto the road. He lies there, his hands gripping the dirt.

Some time later, a man lifts him up off the ground, and Matthew feels as if the weight of his own body has been left behind on the road. The soldier wears a brimmed, floppy hat and he has light-coloured eyes and he asks Matthew if he has eaten. The soldier tells him, in broken Malay, that the war is finished now, that he has nothing to be afraid of any more.

3. A New Geometry

Each morning, Ansel commutes to work on his bicycle. Today, the rain is steady, clinging to the buildings, tipping down the leaves of the trees. In Vancouver, there are many varieties of rain, but the most common, he believes, is the kind that tries to convince you it isn’t there, the kind that is so thin it makes the windshield wipers squeak. He has walked for hours in this kind of rain, without an umbrella, and still emerged reasonably dry.

After years of leaving umbrellas in assorted places – buses, of course, but also elevators, take-out coffee windows, public washrooms – Gail had given up carrying them. She wore jackets with hoods, and kept her distance from small gadgets: mobile phones, Palm Pilots, USB keys. “Give me things that announce their presence,” she said. “Did you know we used to have the world’s largest hockey stick in Vancouver? It came with its own puck.” In the evenings they used to walk along False Creek, and sometimes the rain would condense over the water, fog lifting into the dark.

By 8:00 a.m., when Ansel arrives at the clinic, there are already people leaning against the entrance, waiting to be let in. He opens the door for them despite foreseeing the grumbles of the reception staff, not quite ready for the morning intake. The patients quietly descend the stairs. This morning, there’s a family with three young daughters, two yawning med students, and a middle-aged woman. The woman is pale and trembling, and Ansel stays beside her and she uses his arm as a bannister. “It’s the arthritis,” she says, not looking at him.

“Just a few more steps now.”

He takes them to the waiting room, shows the girls where the crayons and drawing paper are, then goes on to his office. He flicks the light switches as he walks, and the fluorescent lights buzz on around him, throwing down a blue shadow before settling into a wavering glow. At the end of the corridor, Ansel unlocks his office door, hangs his jacket and helmet on the coat stand, and sits down at his desk. He has a few minutes before the first patient, not quite enough time to deal with the stack of referrals, emails and lab results left over from the day before.

In Ansel’s basement office, there are three high windows, just inches above the ground outside. They frame blades of grass, dandelions in the summer, a few small stones. The light falls in three rectangular shafts along his desk. The offices have always reminded him of a warren, the hallways that merge together, leading towards a tunnel that connects to Vancouver General Hospital. He has worked here, at the provincial tuberculosis clinic, for almost five years as a clinician and researcher, and each day has a familiar routine. The first half-dozen appointments of the morning, along with files and chest X-rays, are waiting in his in-tray. There’s a photocopied abstract on the relationship between AIDS and syphilis, and, underneath, two faxes. One is from his father, about an upcoming medical conference in Chicago. The other is from the hospital in Prince George, where Gail, ill, had gone the day before she died. The hospital writes that they have concluded their review of the case and now consider the file closed. A pain branches out from behind his eyes, a dull pulsing, and he stares at the page for a moment, until the lines begin to run together. Ansel pushes the correspondence aside and opens his Thermos of coffee.

His work is a comfort to him. Even as a child, he never considered a career outside of medicine. Both of his parents were doctors, his father a heart surgeon, and his mother a GP. Night after night, his father came home at dawn, an overcoat on top of his rumpled greens. If the surgery had gone well, his father would put a record on, Ella Fitzgerald or Muddy Waters, the music rising like smoke through the house. From bed, Ansel could hear the murmur of his parents’ conversation, his father’s low voice taking pleasure in relaying the details of the surgery. Even before Ansel learned to read, his mother had taught him how to use a stethoscope, how to listen for opacities, crackles and echoes in the lungs, how to track the beating of a heart. By the time he turned four, he had practised on both his parents, as well as his older sister. He remembers warming the diaphragm between his hands then setting it against their skin, astonished each time by the familiar sound, the reliable lub dub of their hearts.

It was Ansel and not his sister, Lydia, who got to go on rounds with their father. While Lydia played guitar in her bedroom, Ansel would concentrate on his father’s rumbling voice relating Mrs. B.’s myocardial infarction followed by congestive failure and arrhythmia, elaborating on her EKG and digitalis treatment. “Are you following this, Ansel?” To which all the residents and interns would laugh. When he was twelve, he read his father’s copy of The Microbe Hunters, then he saved his allowance for a year and bought a microscope. That year, he made a list of his top one hundred scientists. The obvious ones, Galileo, Einstein, Newton. And then, depending on the month, or what he was reading, Tesla, Koch, Curie, Salk, Leeuwenhoek, Darwin and Wallace. And always Louis Pasteur.

“Ah,” his father had said once, examining the names. “The beer makers are fond of him.”

Lydia shook her head. “What is it with men and lists?”

For a time, Ansel had strayed towards cardiology, interning for half a year at St. Paul’s Hospital. In surgery, he waited while people slid away from him into the wash of anesthesia, their presence literally fading from the room. Dr. Biring, his mentor, would sing while he worked, rock ballads, folk songs, anything. The words, Biring said, were like a ladder he could climb down, and thus descend into his memory. Sometimes, in the operating room, humming along with Biring, Ansel was surprised to look up and see the patient’s face, framed by a green plastic cap. Their minds had been disconnected from the organs that he worked on. Retractors held the chest wall back, exposing the heart; every few seconds, the heart pumped out of the skin. There were tiny cameras that he could swim through a person’s body, a tool to magnify his own sight, a device to reach where his hands couldn’t.

From surgery, he went to a one-month placement in the Burn Unit. This was where he had met Gail, almost ten years ago. She was working as a reporter then, covering a crash that had happened at the airport, a Cessna that had stalled in mid-air.

He had to come out of the hospital every hour just to breathe, to escape the pain, the bodies, rotated, covered in Silvadene. It was the middle of the night, and Gail was rooted outside, along with the other journalists, waiting for a break in the story. By 4:00 a.m., she was the only one left, still sipping her coffee. “You don’t have to stay here all night, do you?”

“No.” She had smiled, embarrassed. “You must think I’m eager or something.”

“If you leave me a number, I can call you if there’s more to report.”

“Actually, I don’t have an apartment yet. I just got back to Vancouver a few days ago.”

He asked where she had been, and Gail said, “In the Arctic Circle, but only for a month. I was living in Prague before that.” When he asked what she did there, she told him, “This and that. I make radio features, soundscapes. I’m not the sharpest interviewer, but I like to listen.”

After morning sign-in, they ate breakfast in the cafeteria. Her eyes kept wandering over to a group of doctors in wrinkled greens, surgical masks dangling from their necks and covers on their shoes. She was twenty-nine, dressed in jeans and a cotton T-shirt. She leaned towards him, long dark hair falling forward, a triangle of buttered toast dangling from her fingertips, and asked him what kind of medicine he hoped to practise. He told her that, initially, he had wanted to be a surgeon.

She paused, studying him. “You don’t seem the type,” she said at last. “I picture the surgeon as someone who parachutes in, gets the job done, then waves airily as he goes home to bed. You strike me as a more long-haul kind of person.”

He laughed and cut a piece of jam from its packet. “I haven’t decided what I want to be yet. I guess I’m leaning towards internal medicine.”

He had his bicycle there, but she loaded it into the back of her van and drove him home. At his front door, she said, “You can see the hospital from your house.”

Ansel looked behind him. The Centennial Pavilion, built in the shape of a star, little windows in neat rows like a line of type, hovered over them. When he turned back, he saw that her eyes were ringed and dark. “Where are you staying?” he said.

“In my van until I find a place.”

He fumbled for the right words. “You’re welcome, if you want, to stay here.”

She laughed, suddenly hugging him. “Thanks. Maybe when we get to know each other a bit better.”

In the examining room, the family is seated, waiting for him. Two of the girls are working on crayon drawings, and the third, the youngest one, has drawn a picture of an imposing man in a white coat, stethoscope around his neck. The man has dark hair, like Ansel, and his expression is moody, sober. The figure reminds Ansel of the way he had once pictured his own father, larger than life, replete with answers.

As he enters, the family gathers around him. He seats the girls, one, two, three, on the examining table, and motions the parents to take the chairs. “Dr. Ressing,” the father says immediately, “we were on an airplane. Somebody from the health region called us. They said we had to get tested right away, the entire family.”

He tells them how a young woman on their flight had contracted tuberculosis on her travels. “You’re being screened as a preventative measure. Most people’s defences are strong enough to prevent the TB from causing disease. We’ll do a skin test on each of you, and then in three days we need you to come back for the second part of the procedure.” He tests them one at a time, starting with the father.

The youngest girl is crying and whispering, “No needles, please, no needles,” over and over, and by the time Ansel has sat down beside her, she has buried her head against her mother’s stomach. He takes her right arm and rubs a bit of alcohol on it. The mother is clucking at her, saying something in Pakistani, then smiling indulgently. She holds the girl’s arm steady, and Ansel inserts the point. The girl screams pitifully, pressing her body into her mother’s side. The fluid pools below the surface of her skin.

“That’s it.”

The girl blinks, cautiously eyeing her wound, then gazes up at him, tear trails on her cheeks. Startling everyone, she lifts her arm and grabs hold of his stethoscope. He is yanked forward.

Her parents exclaim in surprise, shaking their heads, apologizing, but Ansel doesn’t move. He is nose to nose with the little girl. “Will you let me have your drawing?” he asks, pointing at the sheet of paper in her hand. She agrees to the trade.

He fits the earpieces on her ears, pushes his lab coat aside and sets the stethoscope against his chest.

After that first meeting in the hospital, he had sought her out, calling the telephone number she had given him, the number at her parents’ house. On his days off, he accompanied Gail as she travelled the city, interviewing people for her work at CBC-Radio. She had begun working on a piece about memorials. She had been introduced to a thirty-year-old man whose fiancée had died eight years ago. In the first year after her death, he had poured his grief and loss into his garden. As the years passed, the garden had become a memorial to her, and a permanent part of his life. “This is the blue season,” he told them. He wore a microphone affixed to a coat hanger that Gail had widened, then placed around his neck. The contraption rested firmly on his chest. A trick she had learned, she told him, from a producer in Prague, in the hope that the microphone would be forgotten by the speaker. It would became a part of his or her own body.

Ansel, who knew nothing about plants, looked around. Blue flowers, blue blossoms in all shapes and sizes. Delphiniums, bellflowers. There was a ghostly sadness to it. Latin names spilled off the tongue of the young man.

Gail was wearing a blue skirt and top, and she merged seamlessly into the palette of the garden. Her hair hung loose, reaching the small of her back, and a woven hat shaded her face from the sun. She held the young man’s gaze as he spoke, adjusting the recording levels with her right hand. A thin line of wire ran between them, from the microphone to the recorder, and then to the headphones that Gail wore. Watching her, it had seemed to Ansel as if he stood at the edge of a doorway. The world that she inhabited was full of stories, of questions. That expression, her face relaxed, yet held in concentration as she listened, is the one that remains with him now.

“This one is my favourite, and the one I’ve grown the most,” the young man told Gail. The flower was sky blue with a creamy yellow eye. He extended his hand as if presenting something. “A large slope of them, beginning somehow at waist level, trembling in the wind, would be quite a statement.”

The next day, she visited a woman who balanced stones, one on top of the other, in her garden, an imitation of the inukshuk scattered on the shores of English Bay. The Inuit word inukshuk, Gail told Ansel over dinner, means “likeness of a person.” The direction of a leg or an arm may be used for navigation, or might signal the presence of fish in a nearby lake. The middle-aged woman, an immigrant from Scotland, had lost her twin sister to cancer. She said that she balanced the stones on hot summer days when she and her four children sat in the backyard. They had seen these structures while walking around Stanley Park, and the image had stayed in their minds.

While Ansel sat in the living room copying out his rotation notes, Gail played him parts of the interview. She told him that Inuit tradition forbids the destruction of an inukshuk. The woman said, “I suppose the wind and rain will take them down one day. But there’s a tradition that says dismantling them would be a desecration. And I understand that.” She paused and then said, barely audibly, “Yes, a desecration. I saw it that way. Even though I knew, my sister knew, it would happen one day.”

Gail was sitting cross-legged on the floor. “I have all these outtakes,” she told him. “These reels and reels. Just tapes of people talking, but I can’t throw them away. Sometimes, people remember things they haven’t thought about in years, a private memory, a story. You know that feeling when you’re moving house, going through boxes, and you find something unexpected? That’s what I feel is happening to them. Inside their minds, they open the box, and there it is right in front of them, almost as if they’re seeing it for the first time.”