Текст книги "Certainty"

Автор книги: Madeleine Thien

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

On the hillside overlooking Sandakan, there had once been hundreds of crosses and markers to remember the dead. Later, these graves were cleared to make room for the new houses. People said that on the ocean floor there were Allied planes shot from the skies, lying side by side with Japanese battleships, the twisted metal still holding their crew. The sea would always keep them.

In the reopened school, she had learned how to chart the course of the rainy season. During the monsoons, the skies cloud over at a precise moment and the mangroves sink a little farther into the sea. The roads wash away. In the new Sandakan, steamers round the northern tip of Borneo, and new roads link the coast to the interior towns. Commercial flights land at the aerodrome, lifting off to Kota Kinabalu, to Singapore and Hong Kong. She would sit at her desk in the schoolroom, holding her worn textbooks for English and Mathematics, staring at the letters and numbers until her eyes grew tired and the meaning slid from her grasp. The words edged themselves into her thoughts, set their roots down inside her memory, trying to ease out the old words that still remained.

Well past midnight, she rose in the dark and dressed quickly, then walked down to the harbour, where she found Lohkman and his brother gathering nets into the boat.

They spoke for a few minutes about the night’s work, then they pushed the boat away from shore, climbing deftly in. Lohkman pulled the cord, the engine stuttered to life, and they slid over the glassy water. From the bay, she could see the town for what it was, a small opening in the jungle, the cloth of the Union Jack moving to and fro above the neat white buildings and the green padang. To her right, stilt houses crowded out from the land, a water village balanced on floating docks. On every side, the green repetition of the trees, the kendilong, closed in on them.

Lohkman came from a family of fishermen. During the war, his family’s boats had been confiscated and they had hidden in the jungle. When the war ended, only Lohkman, his brother, Tajuddin, and Tajuddin’s wife remained, and they had built a small dwelling in the water village.

Lohkman cut the engine and the boat drifted. His brother crouched at the stern of the boat, slowly murmuring a prayer. Tajuddin was in his thirties, and his hair, already white, stirred in the wind. Tajuddin extended his leg over the side, touched his bare foot to the water. “There is but one God,” he said, his voice dissipating on the wind. Still wearing his clothes, he let his body fall overboard.

The sound of the water opening eventually turned into a hush and then silence. Ani watched the hand that still held tight to the gunwale, the rest of the body invisible beneath the surface. Lohkman kept the boat steady. Underneath the water, Tajuddin was listening for the shoals of fish. Each species had a distinctive sound, and if he waited and listened, he could recognize them and follow the sound to where they lay. Years ago, he had taught Lohkman all he knew of fish-craft, about the wind and currents, how to handle the boat and make use of the many types of nets. Lohkman had told Ani that for six months he had studied the art of listening for the fish. At first, he could not distinguish them from the sound of the sea and the waves, but over time the skill had come to him.

They heard his brother before they saw him, a ripple of water, and then his face, silver hair falling across his eyes. He climbed up into the boat, ignoring Lohkman’s outstretched hand, started the engine, and steered the boat west.

At the appointed place, she gathered the jala, a circular net weighted with metal rings. Turning her body, Ani opened her arms and cast the net. It bloomed in the air, unfurling in the shape of a bell, falling smooth and flat. The swaying movements of her arms swept the fish into the folds. Lohkman’s brother had taught her how to throw the casting net when she was only thirteen. She had a talent for it, and a love of the water, and so, even though girls rarely went out with the men, he had given her a place on his boat. Two or three nights each week, depending on the season and the tides, they went out together.

Once, Lohkman had taken her underwater. He had shown her how to release the air from her lungs, a stream of bubbles trailing from their lips, their weight sinking them to the sea floor. Schools of fish brushed their bodies, circling them in a well of colour. Below, weeds unfurled to touch them. When they came up for air, he told her how to listen for the sound of the ikan selar kuning, with its deep-yellow stripe, which made a noise like the wind. He touched the small of her back, bringing her attention to the waving sea life, the colours so bright it sent a slow thrill along the length of her body.

Taking turns now, moving from one side of the boat to the other, they cast their nets out, speaking little. They poured their catch into the hold beneath the floorboards of the boat. Occasionally, Tajuddin would dive again, surfacing to direct the boat to a different location.

In the quiet, she thought of Matthew, of that morning, last month, when she came off the boat at dawn and saw him standing on the shoreline. His bicycle leaned against his hip, his eyes searching the returning boats, the crowd of people, finally coming to rest on her. Later, she learned that when he had asked for news of her, people told him to come here, saying that it would be easy to find her on Tajuddin’s boat, with its red phoenix painted on the hull. She was carrying her take-home bundle of fish and prawns, and she held the bundle in the crook of one arm, awkwardly, surprise holding her still. He had been a child when she last saw him. Changed, she thought, yet utterly familiar. She stood on the sand, the tide running over her feet, and another lifetime flooded her memory.

Later that day, in the evening, they had walked along Leila Road, and then into the rubber plantation that had once been owned by Matthew’s father and now belonged to his uncle. It was why he had returned to Sandakan, Matthew said, to help his uncle manage the plantation. In four months, he would leave for Australia to begin university. The end of the war was still so vivid to them both, the day on which the Australian soldiers arrived, when the Japanese surrendered the town. She remembered that night, on the shore, when Matthew had described to her the burning cigarettes, his father running blindly, then pushed to his knees and shot. His face had seemed to her like a mask then, vacant, frightening to see. She had feared that if she reached out to touch him, he would splinter in her hands. And then, suddenly, he had disappeared from her life. Two days after his father’s murder, Matthew and his mother had fled Sandakan. They had taken the first steamer they could arrange passage on.

She told him about the orphanage, where her life had faded into a kind of stillness, an endless grieving, with all those that she loved disappeared. “There was a story that I told myself,” she said. “In my imagination, you had found a way into Sandakan, the way it once was. When the adults around me spoke of an afterlife, of wandering souls, this was the place I imagined. Not something in the future, but something known from before. A place that I, myself, had once seen.”

Behind them, the sun set, illuminating the ridges of the hills, trailing darkness behind it. The plantation lamps were lit, row by row, and she felt as if she were walking the corridors of an infinite house.

He described Tawau to her, his mother’s extended family, and the stilt house where they lived for three years. Then, the year he turned twelve, his mother had remarried, and the photographs of his father, the letters and writing pens, had been put into boxes and packed away. His mother, he said, needed to go on with her life, to leave the stigma of her first marriage behind. “But sometimes, at night,” Matthew said, “even now, my mother leaves the back door propped open with a stone. After the war, everything was left unfinished. We never found my father’s body and she never had the chance to bury him. He’s gone, of course. She knows this. And yet some part of her still believes he’ll come back again.”

He said that he remembered watching Ani sing the Kimigayo, the way she once traded stolen cigarettes for food. He could describe the sarong that she wore, the long braid of her hair. He remembered her when she had lived through the worst of her solitude.

They had walked between the rows of trees, stopping every now and then to catch their breath, to look up through the high leaves and thereby slow the passing of time. They talked about Mas and Halim, about the fishing boats and the peaceful routine of each day. In Sandakan, she had seen new buildings rise from the ground – the hospital and Magistrate’s Court, the administration offices – all the while unable to forget what had lain there before, the rubble and waste, and even further back, like something imagined, the old town.

In the plantation, that first kiss had surprised them both. She remembered the rush in her body, a trembling that grew, second by second, causing a pain that she didn’t recognize. The kiss lengthened, drew itself out, began again, the pain beginning to diminish, replaced by some greater feeling, hope, release.

Now, coming back to the shore, the sun was already free from the horizon. The engine hummed, and the boat sped through the water, carried by the tide. Tajuddin was murmuring a prayer, eyes half-closed, giving thanks for their nets full of scabbard fish, of mackerel and prawns. She listened to the noise of the hull, low and rumbling, like a ghost voice that could not speak above the water. From the shore, she could see the day boats heading out. A fleet of five buatan barat, painted a brilliant red, their sails taut against the wind. When Lohkman slid the boat against the sand, she looked immediately towards the road, searching for a glimpse of Matthew. “Dear Ani,” Lohkman said, as he helped her ashore. “Be careful.”

She took his hand gratefully, jumping into the shallow water.

On Jalan Satu, Matthew was waiting for her, his bicycle leaning against the fence. When she came up to him, he put away the magazine he had been reading and they began to walk together, past the stores and restaurants where the long shutters were being lifted off in preparation for the day ahead. Eventually, Matthew climbed onto his bicycle, beginning to pedal, and when he had picked up enough speed, she hopped lightly onto the back carrier. She crossed her ankles, and placed one hand on Matthew’s hip to steady herself. As they rose higher, the trees parted, and Ani could see the calmness of the bay, a silver mirror on which the clouds rested. Above them, the low moon was still visible, though pale as smoke.

Ani described the night fishing to him, and the baskets of fish and prawns that Lohkman would take to market this morning. He laughed at her description of the envious gazes that had followed them as they unloaded their catch. How the other fishermen had hurried to decorate their boats with garlands of flowers, knowing that a well-kept vessel would appease the spirits. “And it encourages the fish, too,” she said, “because if they must be caught, they’d prefer to be caught by something beautiful.”

As he pedalled, Matthew told her he had been awake for hours, had accompanied the rubber tappers through the plantation, helping to collect tins of syrup. In a few hours, when the syrup had thickened, he would return to help wash the latex and roll it into sheets, which they would hang to dry, smoking the rubber over a wood fire.

When they reached Halim’s house, he coasted towards the front door, and she slid off the back of the bicycle. It was a weekday morning, and the house was quiet, everyone had left to begin their day. Inside, Ani lit the charcoal brazier and set a pot of water to boil. Matthew had brought her a paper bag full of warm bread and pastries from the market, and he took one out, placing it in her hand. “Eat a little something first,” he said.

He took over the coffee-making, and after she had eaten, she carried the rest of the boiling water into the mandi. She filled the basin, adding a little hot water, and began by washing the saltwater from her hair. She could hear Matthew in the kitchen, taking the bundle of fish and prawns from her basket and setting them in the cool box. When her hair was clean, she twisted the length of it, then coiled it over her shoulder. She found a square of soap and began to wash herself.

He stood on the other side of the door, talking about acquaintances he had met, about his stepfather’s sons, who might come up to visit from Tawau. They were interested in helping out on the rubber plantation. “Barely ten, and they want to be landowners already.”

She tied a clean sarong around her waist and pulled on a cotton shirt. When she came out, he smiled to see her, and she went to him immediately.

“Ani,” he said. “You look happier than I’ve ever seen you.”

They came together, as they had often during the last month, their hands moving over each other’s body. She unbuttoned his shirt, and he slipped his hand beneath the edge of her sarong, moving it across her stomach, cradling her hips. She felt her body relaxing, warmth spilling through her limbs. They did not rush as they had the first time, returning again to the plantation, barely concealed by the trees. There was no hurry now, no fear that the other might vanish. In her bedroom at the back of the house, she helped him undress, then she undid her own sarong. They lay in bed together, their movements slowing, kissing, then holding back.

Outside, they could hear people walking on the gravel road, trucks passing, a bicycle bell. Nothing had prepared her for love, the physical ache that overwhelmed her body, that diminished the world around her to sense, to touch. He was so close, moving on top of her, she had to fight to hold the sound in. She trapped her breath against his skin.

For a long time, he rested his head in the curve of her neck. Their breathing ran together, the slow, even comfort of it. Last night, he said, he couldn’t sleep, thinking of all that he still wanted to tell her, about Tawau and of the terrible days after his father was killed, how he and his mother seemed invisible to all who knew them. Yet now that it was daylight, he found that words were useless to describe what had happened. She was already half dreaming by then, and the sound of his voice travelled in her thoughts, as if they were her own. He said that sometimes when he walked on Leila Road, he became confused, and he did not know where he was in time. “The houses, the buildings, everything is different,” he said, “but the way the sun sets over the hill, the way it reflects off the sea, reminds me of being a child again. It reminds me of things I thought I had put away long ago.”

She slept the rest of the morning, opening her eyes briefly when Matthew rose to return to the plantation. “Don’t wake up,” he whispered. When she dreamed, there were no faces, no people. Just lightness flooding her, lifting her away from the earth. She felt her mother’s arms, felt the blanket of her mother’s hair around her.

Around noon, she woke to the sound of voices. Someone had wheeled the neighbourhood radio out. She could hear the footsteps of children running towards the sound. When she stood up and looked through the curtains, she saw them standing pressed together, transfixed by the voice, their mouths open as if to taste the words. The dial was fixed to Radio Sabah in Jesselton. When the announcer introduced a song, “Goodnight Irene,” the children scuffed their bare feet in the dust, bringing up small clouds, the particles expanding as the first chords began. The hottest part of the day was just beginning. Someone brought out an umbrella, and the children gathered together under it, grateful for the shade.

Late in the afternoon, the rains came, and thunder broke in the sky. The two boys ran inside, soaking wet. Then, when they saw their father in his study, they hurriedly opened their schoolbooks. Ani and Mas sat together at the kitchen table, listening to the wind rattling the roof and the doors. Trees swooped and whistled, setting loose a downpouring of leaves.

“Wonderful,” Mas said, smiling. “We haven’t had a storm like this in months.”

They unrolled several yards of fabric and laid the cloth across the kitchen table. Mas had an old shirt of Halim’s, and she undid the seams, laying the pieces one on top of the other as she pulled them loose. Ani heated the iron. They worked slowly, Mas, seated at the treadle machine, keeping up a low, running monologue as she pulled threads. Ani smiled at Mas’s laughing indignation at the latest teaching methods of the new Form One teacher: “All those children do,” she said, “is sit in the grass and sing songs.” She spat a piece of thread emphatically into her hand. “As if singing nursery rhymes will turn them magically into doctors.”

When all the pieces lay neatly before her, Mas stood up to stretch her legs. The storm had begun to ease off, and she wandered into the sitting room and began to turn the dial of the radio. After a moment, music came through, the reception occasionally disturbed by faint crackling. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” she said, when she returned to the kitchen. She spoke in English, wanting to keep the conversation private from the two boys. “We received a letter from my cousin Bashir. He is the eldest in your mother’s family, and he lives in Tarakan.”

Ani set the iron aside, listening.

“He says that if you can make the journey to Tarakan, he would like to see you. In two months, he is going into the hospital for treatment, and he thinks you should come before then.” She sat down at the machine. “Will you go to see him?”

“I will.”

“And then, afterwards? Will you stay in Tarakan, or will you come back here?”

Ani hesitated, unsure how to read Mas’s question. “I’ll come back.”

Mas nodded. She nudged the hand crank and fixed the needle into place. But after laying down a few threads, she stopped again. “When I finished teaching my lessons this morning, Matthew Lim’s uncle came to see me. He said that his nephew was accepted at the University of Melbourne.” Mas paused, as if still in wonder at what came next. “It seems that Matthew is thinking about turning this opportunity down.”

“Yes,” Ani said. She felt a warmth in her cheeks as she went to sit at the low stool by Mas’s knee. “He told me.”

Mas reached out, smoothing Ani’s hair. “I couldn’t help but remember you, after the war. Thin as a sheet of paper, and so still, so quiet. I think of you as my own sister, my own child.”

“I’ve never felt so at peace here, Mas.”

“So it is you, as well, who wants to remain.”

Mas looked at the two boys in the sitting room, holding their pencils, beginning to write. She said that, during the war, Halim had been forced into a work camp, and she had been left alone with the children. It was the jungle that had kept them safe. Nothing was what it appeared to be in the light, or in the darkness. There was even food to be found, if you knew where to look. So many people disappeared. A life had been worth no more than a bird feather, that’s what she told herself, when first her eldest child, and then her youngest, died. When the war ended, she felt as if she had awoken from a deep sleep to find herself one of the lucky ones. She had survived, but at what cost? One part of her would always be buried with her children, no matter how many days accumulated, no matter how much distance she put between them. “Your life is changing, Ani,” she said. “There is only one thing that I learned from that time. Try to decide what you want, now, before you are forced to choose.”

Ani thought of her parents, her father walking each day to the airfield. “And if there is no right choice?”

But Mas went on as if she had not heard. “Before choice is taken from your hands,” she said, turning away. “By then, it will always be too late.”

When evening came, Ani walked down to the harbour. She was early, and she watched the last of the lift-net boats coming in. Twenty to thirty feet out, they let their sails fall slack, and their momentum carried them to shore.

It was busy tonight, the dealers and fishermen still bargaining over the last of the day’s catch. Women sat with their children, mending nets, or packing up what had not been sold. On the beach, a group of fishermen lay one beside the other, their feet resting against their boat. They used sand and water and the rough, callused soles of their feet to scrub the hull. Every now and then, a burst of laughter would erupt, and the sand would go flying.

Tajuddin came and sat beside her. He was chewing betel nut and repairing one of a half-dozen metal rings he had set in his lap. “ Selamat petang, Ani,” he said, and she returned the greeting. He told her that he had caught four handsome dorab that afternoon, and he believed that the seas would be bountiful tonight.

After a pause, he said, “Are you well, Ani?”

“Yes, datuk.”

He nodded, unconvinced, then returned his focus to the metal rings.

On the shore, Ani could see the high pyramid of fish, glistening with a sheen of water. Women and children gathered around, and the fishermen talked excitedly, gesturing as they spoke.

When Lohkman arrived, the two men went to see the catch. Ani watched their progress along the sand. They stopped every few steps to be greeted by other fishermen, to examine a newly mended net, or admire a neighbour’s boat. With the wind moving against her face, she did not think about Matthew, or Tarakan, she let all feelings subside. She saw their boat waiting on the beach, the glow of the bird on the prow and the warmth of the orange hull. People gathered to carry a lift-net to its storage quarters. They came in a long line, spaced ten to fifteen feet apart, moving along the water’s edge like a ribbon, each carrying a part of the rolled-up net. Children ducked between them, calling to each other as the men passed. The line moved past her, a slow and joyous procession, beads of water on the lines shimmering in the light.

The child that she remembered, the child walking along the ghost road, no longer hid from her. She could reach her hand across the barrier of time and grab hold. She could save her, finally. Don’t be afraid, she thought. We are here, we have made it to the other side.

She saw the shoreline crowded with people, the bright colours of their sarongs, and then the sea, which she imagined hung like a curtain at the edge of the world.

In the days that followed, Matthew told her that he had made his decision. He did not want to leave Sandakan. “And Australia?” she asked him. He said there was enough work on the plantation, and perhaps, later on, he could take a teaching position at the mission school. What he desired most of all was a life with her, a life free from uncertainty.

She pictured their lives unfolding like the casting of a net, when the lines left your hands, you knew where the entirety would fall.

Then one evening, walking in town together, they were approached by a young man she recognized from her years at the mission school. He wore a white shirt and slacks and carried a satchel over his shoulder. After he had confirmed Matthew’s name, he said, “I remember your father.” At first, the young man’s voice was measured and calm. He told them that he still had the papers, signed by Matthew’s father, that had been issued when his family’s crops were confiscated during the war. Then his voice began to rise, and people passing by on the street stopped, curious, looking from one to the other. The young man took another step forward. “My mother and sisters died of starvation,” he said, his voice shaking. “My father died a broken man.” He gazed into Matthew’s face, as if he could see through to the centre of him, to the man he would inevitably become. “You have no right to live amongst us.” The young man leaned forward, his body tensed, rigid. Then he turned abruptly and walked away.

Matthew remained where he was, his arms loose at his sides. When the shock on his face faded, it was replaced by something else, grief, anger, hardening his expression. Eventually, the crowd retreated. The street flowed around them once more. Ani took his hand, cold to her touch, and pulled him along with her, away from Jalan Satu, towards the harbour. The heat bore down on them. Frogs chorused in the grass, a singing that filled her ears. She slipped her sandals off and walked into the water, Matthew following behind, and the tide slipped past them. She saw the boy that she remembered, a boy who loved his father. She recognized the heaviness of this devotion.

After the war, she told him, there had been trials. But Mas and Halim both said that these had brought no relief. A handful of Japanese soldiers had been sentenced, but the ones who had given the orders were never tried, and they received no punishment. “There was no one to hold responsible,” she said. “No one to go to for justice. He carries those papers with your father’s name because it is all he has, it is the only answer given to him.”

“My father lived here from the time he was ten years old, but when he died, no one came to see us. No one grieved him. They looked away when they saw my mother. We were nothing to them.”

He said that in Tawau, those memories had begun to fade. He did not know how such a thing was possible, but the past had become like a book submerged in the water, the ink running across the lines, all the detail lost.

She looked at him, bewildered. “You must have known that forgetting could not last. Not in this place.”

Matthew continued as if he had not heard her. “I can’t help but think about him. I wish to go back and save him somehow. He was an educated man, a good man. In the end, his desires were so ordinary, to protect us, to keep us safe, but he paid for this desire with his life. If I had to face what he did, would I not do the same? If it were you and I, Ani, if it were our children, there would be no choice.”

The next day, Matthew did not come to meet her at the shore. She walked up the hill, searching for him, at each bend of the road hoping he would appear. When she came in sight of Halim’s house, Matthew was there, sitting on the front step, but he did not turn as she approached. She sat down beside him. On the road, a line of schoolchildren walked side by side; a truck came behind them, and the children scattered like a flock of birds taking flight, jubilant and laughing.

He told her that he had woken suddenly in the night, had put on his clothes and let himself out of his uncle’s house on the hillside. The humid air had enclosed him in warmth. He remembered looking up at the sky and thinking how beautiful the moon was, simple and round, as it sank towards the horizon. He had followed it, walking towards his father’s former plantation. Once there, he saw that the kerosene lamps were lit, the flames floating in the dark. As he walked, he counted the trees aloud, turning at the thirtieth row, coming to a standstill at the thirtieth tree.

He knelt down, listening to the sound of night insects, of birds that he couldn’t identify. Owls, babblers, even in his childhood he had not been able to distinguish them. He began to push the dirt away, seeing the child that he was kneeling there, scrabbling at the ground. “I thought he must have known everything. He sent me on this errand because he knew his fate and he wanted to keep me away. I did what he had asked, only by then it no longer mattered. But still I went into the plantation.”

He dug at the ground for a long time, at first calm, but then, finding nothing, panic overwhelmed him. The lights blurred, he was sweating and could not see, but still he continued, with no idea of time or reason. Eventually, exhausted, he dropped into sleep. Some time later, one of the tappers must have found him and sent for his uncle. They were all gathered there at the thirtieth tree, labourers, family, and the boy that only Matthew could see, standing in the shadows. When his uncle asked what had happened, Matthew could only point at the boy. He wanted to go to him, pick him up, but he could not move. His uncle tried to put a coat around his shoulders, but Matthew pushed him away. When his uncle approached him again, Matthew lashed out. Then a terrible numbness took hold of his body and his legs gave out from under him, and the men carried him back to the house.

“They tried to keep me from leaving,” he said, looking at Ani now, “but I told them that I needed to sort out my thoughts, I needed to see you.” He paused for a moment. “Sometimes, in my dreams, I am almost able to reach him. I am telling him how to escape, how to leave Sandakan, I am almost holding him, but then he turns away.”

Later, lying together, his skin was damp and feverish, and he put his arms around himself as if he were cold. He said there was a story she told him once, long ago, about a man who harvested gold from the fields. All these years he had tried to recall it, but somehow it had become confused in his mind. Did she still remember? he asked.

She said yes, and as she told him, his breathing grew steady, lengthening out. In her story, the man walks towards the house standing alone in the middle of the field. The woman, old and stooped, promises him a gift more valuable than money. He will no longer be without land. For all eternity, he will not be at the mercy of the world.

That afternoon, while Matthew slept, his uncle came to the house. He was a tall, imposing man dressed in a jacket and tie. Ani had spoken to him before only in passing, but when Mas opened the door, it did not surprise her to see him, awkward and dignified on the front steps. Mas invited him in. They went together to the sitting room.