Certainty (15 page)

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.