Certainty

by Madeleine Thien

  “I never thought I’d enjoy this on the banjo.” Glyn is standing apart from the group, leaning her back against the house.

  Scott turns to her. “You’d be surprised how many people say that. The weird thing is, Dad didn’t even pick it up until he was in his fifties. It’s not something from his childhood, or from his lost country roots. It’s a new thing for him.”

  Ansel leans over the railing. From here, he can see his own house, where he has left the bedroom light on accidentally. In his red wine haze, it makes him think that someone is waiting up for him. That someone is reading in bed, and when he comes home, he will lift the open book off her chest and set it on the table. When he turns around, he sees that Matthew has already gone upstairs to rest. Clara and Mrs. Cho are having a conversation that moves from Cantonese into English and back again. Glyn, Ed and Scott have gone back to talking about the mind. Ed is saying, “At some point, when they’ve figured everything out, the new kind of human being may have to live without mystery. And I wonder where that will lead us.”

  Glyn twirls the glass in her hand, then shakes out the last few drops of wine into the air. “That seems to be something that all the scientists can agree on. That the mind was never made to understand itself. Its first job was to collect information from the senses, find some way to unify that knowledge so that the body could escape danger.”

  Ed shakes his head. “If I could live my life again, I’m not sure what I would do. The world is endlessly fascinating. When you get to my age, that’s the main reason for hanging on. Just to find out a little bit more.”

  “You could join me in radio. The medium of the imagination.”

  Ed looks at Ansel. “What about you, doctor? If you could start over again, what would you choose?”

  He thinks for a short while but comes to no conclusions. There are too many doors and not enough time to open them. He shakes his head. “I’ve no idea. Some mysteries, I think, were never meant to be solved.”

  The three of them laugh. Ed plays a decisive chord on the banjo, and the notes hang on the air for a long time before they are carried away down the block, slowly fading. There’s a moment when the sound will dissolve past the range of what Ansel is capable of hearing. One moment of separation. He closes his eyes and waits.

  That night, after the dishes are done and the house is still, Clara goes into her sewing room. Above her, the skylight frames a handful of stars, a square of night.

  On her cutting table, the newspaper is open to an article about the origins of empathy. She read the story this morning, and its contents have remained in her mind, a background to her thoughts. All acts of empathy, of compassion, the article says, arise out of needs of the individual, and, as such, no act is selfless. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism,” says one scientist, “because we are born selfish.” Carefully, she clips this article and lays it on the table in front of her. So many things that we do, she thinks, so much in the name of those we love. In her own life, Clara has witnessed acts of selflessness, of empathy, whose motivations she does not doubt. She knows that a single act, a choice, can transform all that came before. Long ago, when she was young, she risked her future on this belief.

  Clara stands at the cutting table, smoothing the paper pattern that she drew earlier in the day. She pins the pieces down, examining the weave of the cloth as she works. If she concentrates, she will be able to finish this gown before morning.

  Across the hall, she can hear floorboards creaking, and she pictures her husband rising from bed, standing at the curtains, gazing out at this starlit night. When she first met him more than forty years ago, they had been drawn to one another because of their differences. On the surface, they had been north and south, light and dark. Back then, he had carried a hollow within himself, a grief that he could not share. To each other, they had seemed the way out, the path that leads along the river, finally opening on to the sea.

  Nearby is the house where her daughter lived. Gail was a runner, and each day she would pass by Clara’s window. She would detour through the alley, into the garden, blowing a playful kiss to her mother as she passed. Clara would watch the easy movement of her daughter’s body until it disappeared around the corner.

  She picks up the chalk, traces the pieces with a steady hand. The halogen lamp flickers and steadies itself again. In the alley, a stray cat walking between the houses sets the security lights off one by one. Lately, the strangest thought has settled in her mind. If she repeats her own actions on the morning that Gail died, she can pass between days, the way a pin passes through this piece of paper, leaving only the faintest trace. Time will bend backwards on itself and Clara will look out the window, see her daughter returning from her run. The way her dark hair sticks to her face, the same determined expression. Prince George, the hotel room, the suitcase of clothes all disintegrating. As clean as the opening of a seam.

  She sits down at her sewing machine, replaces the bobbin and threads the needle. She has done this same work almost all her life. Her hands take over when her thoughts retreat.

  In the bedroom, Matthew wakes hearing music, a song played on a phonograph, the rustle and scratch of air on the recording. When he opens his eyes, the dream and the music evaporate. The windows are open, and a cool breeze drifts through the room, holding the curtains aloft. Moonlight gleams off the roofs of the houses, and the leaves shift in the trees. He pushes the covers aside and sits up.

  When he first arrived in Vancouver, Matthew felt free in this city. The buildings showed no wear, they seemed untouched by the passage of time. Indeed, it seemed as if once they reached a certain age, old buildings came down and new ones replaced them. The mountains, near and distant, the ocean, all these things changed from day to day, never quite the same. During the winters, it rained almost all the time, sheets of water like a brush coating everything, dimming the sounds to a quiet murmur.

  When Matthew and his daughter walked together, along Keefer, then Pender, she used to whisper the street names under her breath. Matthew would tell her stories about his childhood before the war, about Sandakan, until he realized that she remembered so much. She wanted to hear everything, to know how the story continued. His words ran dry. She was half his height then; the crown of her head reached his waist. He remembers carrying his daughter, her hands clasped around his neck, feeling as if he held a treasure in his arms. He held her so tightly, careful of each step he made.

  Six months ago, his daughter died suddenly in her sleep. She was away working in the north of the province. It was Matthew who received the phone call, who was the one to tell his wife. He knows that all one’s grief cannot stop the present, cannot change the way a life unfolds.

  Now, when he walks through this neighbourhood, he loses track of the streets. In his mind, he hears his daughter singing the names to herself, Keefer, Pender, Adanac, but his sense of direction has become confused. When he looks around, nothing he sees is familiar. He has lived here for most of his life, but if he picked up a pencil, out of the small islands of memory he could draw the streets of his childhood, the town of Sandakan, Leila Road winding up into the hillside. In the months since his daughter died, things once lost have grown clearer, a flight that takes him from Vancouver to Sandakan, from Sandakan to Jakarta. He remembers how, from the air, the red roofs of the town had disappeared, given way to unbroken jungle, on a journey that began a lifetime ago, and that continues still.

  Lately, Matthew’s knees have begun to give. A twinge of pain in the ligament, and then an ache centred in the bone. His wife had tenderly rubbed the curve of his knee with her hands. “No more marathons,” she had said, a teasing smile lighting her eyes. “Don’t despair. You’re only sixty-six, and age is a state of mind.”

  She had learned to alter her pace, move patiently beside his slow shuffle. An old man takes an eternity to walk to the corner store. Their conversations became elongated, paced out from here to there, drawing to a close when they came in sight of the house. All thes
e years, Clara has made most of his clothes. He finds pieces around the house, sleeves opened up on her table, starched collars like overgrown butterflies, one pant leg creased over a chair.

  Outside, the stars are shining. Matthew stands at his window, lifts his arms above his head, bends at the waist, feels his body return to him. He remembers the gentleness of his mother’s hand in his hair, how when she stepped back from him, the imprint remained, a weight, a memory against his skin.

  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.