Certainty

by Madeleine Thien

  She could find no work as a schoolteacher and so started her own business as a seamstress. All through Chinatown, she posted handwritten signs, and there was steady work mending shirts and coats, the occasional wedding gown. Together, she and Matthew painted the walls of her workroom, built cabinets for notions and patterns. A year passed. Still Matthew was out of work. To meet their mortgage payments, he took a job in a restaurant. Eventually, he apprenticed as a cook.

  After Gail was born, he began to withdraw into himself, sleeping less or not at all. Day by day, he faltered. Clara could not put her finger on the event that caused this change in him. Perhaps it was only the winter. It rained and rained, flooding the streets, and the city seemed to melt away, leaving a poverty around them that they had not expected. Two blocks down, people lived in cardboard boxes. There were prostitutes in the back alleys, needles hidden in the grass. On overcast days, the mountains and water disappeared, indistinguishable behind the mist. Clara and Matthew wrapped themselves up in sweaters found at the Salvation Army, unable to adjust to the cold and damp. He could not sleep, and began to disappear from the house at night. When he came home, exhausted, ill, he said that he wanted to return to Australia, to Malaysia, that he had underestimated how different this country would be. He had been mistaken, he said, to believe he could start over, leave Sandakan and all that happened there behind.

  His father lived on in his mind, a presence that shaped his thoughts. The way, when he rose from bed in the morning, his confidence seemed to make the house full. In the darkness, his father would walk the aisles of the rubber plantation, he and the workers wearing headlamps or carrying torches, a stream of light illuminating the track ahead of them. How beautiful their home had been, on Jalan Campbell. There had been cabinets full of glass figurines and trinkets, pottery from China, painted fans. He remembered his parents dancing, the phonograph on the high shelf, music like a tent around them. Now Matthew was twenty-eight years old, the same age his father had been when he died. He said that he was losing his bearings, he did not know how to see into the future, how to become the man he wished to be.

  At night, she listened to his dreams, and in the day, when he stared listlessly at the newspaper, she ran her hands over his back, searching for the knots of tension, easing them with her fingers. In the dining room was a chandelier, laden with crystal beads. She had found it, abandoned, in the attic of the house. Each week, while Gail, only a year old, slept in a sling against her body, she unhooked the pieces and, one by one, cleaned them to a shine. She focused her thoughts on the task, imagining the moment when she reassembled the chandelier. A hundred lights burning. Darkness receding like fog on the water.

  It was Clara who encouraged him to write to his mother in Tawau, to his uncle who still lived in Sandakan. It was she who took those letters to the post office and sent them away, thinking that it was the disconnection, the act of immigration, that was breaking her husband apart.

  But when the letters came back, the unexpected happened. Whatever had been supporting her husband seemed to collapse. He came apart like a string unravelling. She did not know, then, what it was that she had set into motion.

  The grounds are busy today, and Clara cannot help but watch the other people gathered here, some in groups, talking together, others crouched on the ground, alone, their faces hidden. Here, she stands among the other bereaved, outside of time, in a landscape devoted only to memory.

  Nearby is a tall metal container, one of many that the cemetery distributes through the grounds. The bottom is lined with ashes, remnants of previous offerings. She lights the first folded sheet, and a thin strand of smoke rises into the air, then she touches the sheet to another, and then another. Inside the container, the flames flicker and twist. When all of the pieces are burning, she picks up the book again and begins to remove the pages. The air around her is warm and heavy. The pages turn to fire, to ashes, a transmutation that she cannot see, the book becoming filaments in the air. In the afterlife that she imagines, the pieces fall around Gail, so numerous they cover her like a blanket, a protection against the cold.

  “Zuang Zi dreamed that he was a butterfly,” her father used to say, beginning the famous story. “When he awoke, he wondered whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly. Or if, perhaps, he was a butterfly dreaming that he was a man.” This life is illusory, her father said. It has the quality, the importance, of a dream.

  She had argued with him, remembering the boy as he lay on the sidewalk, the kite lifting away from him. In life, she said, one feels both exultation and suffering. The emotions, intense though fragmentary, are real. They exist. Her father had nodded, taken aback by her insistence. He said there were consequences to one’s actions. She must choose for herself what to put into this world.

  All those years ago, Matthew had written to Sandakan, and from his uncle he had learned Ani’s whereabouts. He had written to her, and, eventually, a letter came back from Jakarta. He laid it on the table between them, overwhelmed, unable to hide his distress. So much had been left unfinished. He told her there were things he needed to know.

  She had felt as if a part of herself were dying, coming to an end.

  He said that he had a nightmare in which he was an old man. He walked in the dirt but left no marks. He went into the water thinking it could hold him up, but the water just passed through him.

  She wondered if was possible to cross back in time, cross borders and nations, begin again, if this was what he needed. The thought had come to her suddenly: If you go, you will not return. She believes in the present moment, that a decision made now can shift the balance, that every act realigns the past. Imagine it this way, she had told Matthew. It is like walking across a vast field as the sun rises, burns, and slowly falls. The shadows around us change depending on which direction we walk, what steps we choose to take.

  “Look at me,” she said.

  He met her eyes, and she did not allow herself to falter.

  She told him to leave, to travel to Jakarta, to find what he needed to know. Come back, she said, only if you intend to stay.

  5

  The Bird Feather

  JAKARTA

  1957

  In the heat of the afternoon, Ani’s son sleeps peacefully in her arms. Through the half-shuttered windows, she can hear the sound of the city drifting by, bicycle bells, the nervous rattling of mopeds and bemos. The vendors call out their wares, singing the words above the traffic. On Ani’s stomach, Wideh’s breaths are deep and easy. He presses his mouth against her chin, opens and closes his lips as if he is chewing, dreaming once more about food. She loops her arms around his warm and sweating body, keeps time by the rhythm of his breathing.

  In the kitchen, she can hear the muted brushing of Saskia’s slippers on the tiled floor as she sets a pot of water to boil. Saskia’s daughter, Tash, is whispering, I’m hungry, Ibu, as she rummages in the cupboard for cookies. Ani closes her eyes and the apartment falls away, her few belongings, a divan, cot and a small charcoal brazier, the thin blue curtain that divides the room.

  Four years ago, she had left Sandakan, boarding the steamer for Tarakan. There, she had met her mother’s eldest brother, Bashir, who was ill, and from there she had gone to Ujung Padang, then Pontianak, continuing on to Jakarta. It was on the boat from Pontianak that she had met Saskia, born in the same year as Ani. Saskia and her family had welcomed her into their lives, helping her to find her place here. In this city of three million people, she feels as if she has disappeared, slipped into the outline she has made for herself: a twenty-two-year-old woman, known as a widow, alone in the world except for her small son.

  A canal runs along the far side of Jalan Kamboja. Lying on the divan, she can hear the watery murmur of people bathing, the high, laughing voices of women and children. They sit on the stone steps, or crouch low, scrubbing their clothes. She imagines the colours of their sarongs turning bright when they emerge from the canal, the children holding their noses and submerging their
faces as they balance in precarious handstands. They take turns leaping into the warm water.

  Tomorrow morning, she will go to Saskia’s house in Kebajoran and they will run through the list one last time, complete all the necessary preparations for Saskia’s departure at the end of the week. The notice had come just forty-eight hours ago, with the news that her family had secured a place on the next boat leaving for Holland. Since early January, more than ten thousand Dutch and Indonesians have been repatriated, families starting over in another country, now that the Dutch East Indies have ceased to exist.

  “From the time I was a little girl,” Saskia had said, “I thought I would always live here, that I would be buried beside my parents, and that I would live for eternity with the spirits from ages past.”

  “You might come back one day. Nobody knows what the future brings.”

  “ Tempo dulu. Those times are gone now.”

  “If it were possible, would you change something in your life?”

  “It’s like a Dutch sentence, twists and turns and finally, at the very end, the verb that you’ve been waiting for. You can’t really say anything about the sentence until it’s finished.” She laughed. “Quite a trick, if you ask me.”

  Over the past few days, Ani has helped fill her trunk with woolen sweaters and socks, with neatly packaged spices, heirlooms and photographs. Weary, they collapsed in Saskia’s sitting room, household goods scattered around them, their children circling on tiptoe.

  Saskia’s husband, Siem Dertik, teaches engineering at the technical school in Jakarta. He reminds Ani of her father, and this resemblance both pains and steadies her. Their family is a mirror of Ani’s own, the mother and father whom Ani carries in her memory, the little girl who was once so treasured.

  Siem is patient and endlessly curious. Like Ani’s father, he takes pleasure in knowing the names of things, in explaining their origin. He reads books in Indonesian, Dutch, French and English, the languages of his mixed background. In the evenings, while the children listen raptly, he tells them about space in the universe, how it stretches, collapses and folds. He writes equations for the way objects fall through space, following the trajectory of force and gravity. The trajectory of the object, he explains, can be plotted, point by point, a graph revealing the past, the present and the anticipated future.

  Once, in the kitchen, she had seen Wideh standing beside Siem, imitating the movements of his hands as he prepared the evening meal. Wearing identical slippers, he imitated Siem’s walk, a quick shuffle, as he moved in the small room.

  Here, in Jakarta, nothing holds to a steady state. Electricity and water can’t be depended upon, and the military parades in Freedom Square now spill onto the streets, taking over the roads. Only in Wideh can she recognize the passing time. Ani puts her nose to his hair, she smells the sweetness of his skin, talc and sweat. When she looks at him, she is moved by his resemblance to his father, the high cheekbones, the searching eyes. He is an echo of the boy she knew long ago. She wraps one of her hands around his, and it reminds her of Chinese boxes, one disappearing completely within the other. Ibu, he says, half waking, and Ani whispers his name, Wideh. He sighs, gazing at her for a moment, then returns to his dreams.

  There was a time when she could find her way in Sandakan without seeing the landmarks, the sea or even the horizon. This was 1953, and in the mornings, at first light, she folded her sarong between her legs, climbed onto her bicycle, pedalled hard until gravity pulled her down the slope of the hill. In the fog, nothing was visible. People on the road could hear her coming. They ran from her, the baskets on their backs toppling, root vegetables spilling onto the ground as she sped past, missing them by inches. Murderous child! She only heard murder – before she left them behind.

  The bicycle, an Australian-made Malvern Star, was painted blue, and the frame felt almost weightless. When she leaned her body forward, the wheels seemed to lift off the ground. She skittered over the rocks, the pedals throwing her feet off, and then steadied again. The road curved downhill, towards the market and the sea. Ani steered with her hips. Beware, beware, and children ran. She was more than Ani, then. She was unpredictable, a piece of light streaking across the ground.

  The market gardeners laid their offerings on straw mats. A yellow pyramid of bananas, hillocks of red and green chili peppers, everything neat as the stones in a congkak game. Under a pink umbrella, her neighbour Eika crouched on the ground, chattering about the ginger bulbs and lemongrass. Beside her, watermelons and spiny jackfruit, Hooi-joo smoking, exhaling with her face lifted towards the sky. They took turns jingling their pockets, shouting out, “Sister, sister, take a look here.”

  This morning, the market was full of old women. The older they were, the more they pushed. But Ani would have none of it. She shoved right back, sticking her elbow into someone’s arm, then propelling herself forward. “You’ll make a fine old maid,” someone snapped, and Ani turned her body, shoved the woman aside. Eika pressed something into her hand, a paper bag filled with seeds. “Take this to Lohkman for me?” she asked, blushing when she said his name. Ani took it from her hand, smiling, and then she was carried past by the crowd. At the fish market, Lohkman was bargaining with a dealer, both men seated cross-legged on a tarpaulin. “At thirty, I won’t give,” he said.

  “Give me your basement price then.”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “Lohkman, my friend, speak decently. A little lower perhaps?”

  He ignored the dealer, turning to Ani. Kelah and black pomfret, lines of shiny blue wandering beneath the fishes’ skin, were stacked neatly at his feet. “Will you have coffee tonight?” she asked him.

  He faked a yawn, stretched his arms into the sky. “Not with the money they’re offering me.”

  She laughed and handed him the paper bag from Eika. “From an admirer.”

  “Not another one.”

  “Are we fishing tonight?”

  Lohkman nodded. “My brother says the sea is too choppy for dorab. We can use the casting nets.” As she turned to go, he said, “Don’t be late, Ani. If you are, I’ll make you swim for the boat.”

  The dealer, half teasing, laid his head-cloth on top of the fish, put his head on it and pretended to go to sleep. “Should I bid?” he said, in a tragic voice. “I don’t know. The seller ignores me.”

  Riding home, loaded down with vegetables, was when she felt the worth of her Malvern Star and its never-before-seen-in-Sandakan metal carrier. She balanced on the pedals, the bicycle shifting side to side with her weight. Ani passed women who walked tilted over, bamboo poles heavy across their backs. When she looked over her shoulder, they were only shadows on the ground, swaying with the trees. From the ridge, she could see Sandakan harbour, a stroke of blue beneath the mist. The town was two straight lines of atap roofs and a swirl of people.

  In the last year, concrete and glass had come to Sandakan. There were new British administration buildings south of the market, and the padang was busy again with picnics and cricket games. Each night, families spread woven mats on the grass. They turned their faces towards the west, hushed in reverence as the sun fell behind the hills.

  In her room, there is a calendar on the wall, and each morning she tears off the previous day and unveils the new one. She has the sense that the days are precise and ordered, free from overlap or confusion. Her life now with Mas’s family, in the house on the hillside with a view of Sandakan town, is more than she dared to imagine. But even now she wonders what it would be like to leave here, finally, to travel to Tarakan, and keep the promise she made to her mother so many years ago.

  In what remained of the buildings taken over by the Japanese during the war, the British had set up temporary offices and also an orphanage. Ani had stayed there for a month until Mas, a cousin to Ani’s mother, had found her. Before the war, Halim and Mas’s had been a family of six, now they were four. All of the children had been boys. The eldest had died early on. But if the war had ended sooner, Mas once sai
d, a few weeks or a month, perhaps her youngest might have survived. She said this and half-smiled, her eyes pained, knowing that it was not useful to wish for a different present.

  Ani had been ten years old when she came to live with them, a small, thin girl, and Halim used to joke that even her shadow was malnourished. It traipsed behind her, finally disappearing when she dove into the water to swim with Lohkman and her friends. One morning, she had woken to the call of the muezzin, a sound she had not heard since before the war. The lone voice travelled across the hillside, calling the faithful to prayer, his words lingering above the houses. She had lain awake remembering the long journey she made with her parents from the Dutch East Indies to Sandakan. They had walked barefoot along a mud track, where the flowers were taller than she was. She remembered her father’s hand against the back of her head, the sound of her mother’s feet always behind her. They ate mangoes from the nearby trees. In her memories, she fell asleep eating, the sweetness coating her tongue and lips, her limbs exhausted, warm air settling down on her.

  Mas believes in spirits. They live in shapes and in the air; sometimes they are the souls of those who have not yet found their way to the land of the dead. Without them, she says, the world would be too bleak. But for Ani it is different. She knows that her parents are gone, that they do not remain in the air around her, they are not embodied by the sunlight or the curve of the Earth. She doesn’t dare say it aloud, and yet Mas knows.