“During the war,” her mother said, “they were children together.” Her father clutched the envelope in his hand, lost, unsure where to set it down.
Gail had busied herself with the dishes. When she turned back, the envelope had disappeared, and her father was hanging the dish cloth to dry, smoothing the creases away with his hands.
Standing up from her desk, she turns the lights off and climbs the stairs to their bedroom. Ansel has left the reading light on for her, and he is fast asleep. She slips into bed beside him. For a long time, she gazes up through the skylight at the stars. She connects the invisible lines between them, Lyra, Cassiopeia, Perseus, as she used to do when she was a child.
Beside her, Ansel sighs in his sleep, he rests his body against hers. Her feelings have not changed, though she no longer knows how to make them palpable, certain. Gail thinks of something he told her long ago, how the pattern of the wave is one of the most common in nature. Sound, light, X-rays. The revelatory pictures of an MRI scan, a machine that throws light on the shadows of the mind. And what does it see? The work of thousands of synapses. The chemical traces of memory and love. If it could peer into Gail’s mind in a moment when she thinks of Ansel, how many patterns would it see awakened? The incoming tide, wave after wave of memory. The accelerated heartbeat, the charge Gail feels in his presence, none of this has changed. But for him? If she could see into the darkness, would she find in him what she hopes for? An echo of her own desire, as strong and sure as it was in the beginning, before something between them faltered and lost hope.
The next morning, after Ansel has left for the clinic, Gail finds the Bering Strait recording on a reel labelled Whales, Ode to Joy, 1990. She unwinds a foot of tape, blows the dust off, and has a memory of walking out across the shelves of ice. She remembers being taken, by snowmobile, to the Strait, seeing open water, still and crystalline, a mirror at the edge of the frozen tundra.
Two years ago, she had given up the security of her job as a producer. After another round of funding cuts at the CBC, she had been anxious. She wanted to make radio herself, to create features and documentaries on subjects that aroused her curiosity, that moved her. To make ends meet as a freelancer, she pitched her ideas to public radio stations around the world, calling up old contacts at Deutsche Welle or the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. She had a way of making every vacation into a work project. While other people carried cameras or mobile phones, she was never without a microphone and recorder.
As she sits down to work, a group of school children come laughing down the sidewalk, two by two, holding hands. Their teacher points out a blue jay, and the children erupt in yelling and finger pointing: “I see! I see!” or, heartache in their voices, “I don’t see! I don’t see!” An older woman shuffles past, pushing her groceries in a supermarket shopping cart. Viewed from her desk, her fingers poised over the keyboard, the scene seems to hang, suspended, before Gail’s eyes.
5 9 24 8 26 9. She clicks an icon and an audio file flickers open across the screen. The interview that she plays was recorded in Prince George several months ago, on the verandah of Kathleen Sullivan’s home. They had driven from the airport, through a landscape of open fields, along a single highway unrolling like a river. Kathleen had leaned forward as she spoke, strands of auburn hair slipping loose from a low ponytail, each sentence clear and insistent.
“Even now,” she says, her voice coming through the speakers in Gail’s office, “I remember the way the diary smelled and the sound it made when my father opened it. The book literally creaked. He had found it laid away in a drawer, and he wanted to decode it for us. He set a notepad on the table in front of him, then he picked up a pencil and started to copy down the numbers.” Kathleen tells how, when she had first become fascinated by the diary, she had been ten years old. She had believed in the possibility of a perfect answer to the mystery of her father. Rain was the result of condensation in the atmosphere; the sun was an exploding star. There was a solution to her father, too, a cause and an effect.
She describes watching her father write out a row of numbers. Underneath this row, he wrote a line of letters. More letters, chaotic on the surface. It went on this way for some time while the television murmured in the living room, where her older brother was watching a soccer game. Kathleen had turned to watch it, the Vancouver Whitecaps, the rain of white jerseys, a soccer ball drummed across the pitch. Her father put his pencil down, stared at the numbers as if willing them to form a meaning. He erased what he had written and began again. He ran his hand across his face, shook his head. Kathleen remembered looking at his terribly scarred hand, a strange hollow in the index finger where he told her a bullet had passed too close. Her father became confused as he worked backwards through the code. Still, he went on staring at the numbers as if, given enough time, the method of decryption would magically present itself.
Kathleen sat at his feet. Eventually, she felt them shift, opened her eyes to see them walking away, the diary abandoned on the table.
On the tape, Gail’s voice: “And if the code is broken. Can you put into words the thing that you hope to find?”
There is a long pause, the muted sound of a truck passing on the back roads. Then, silence. “He drank,” she says finally. “He drank himself into oblivion. In his worst moments, he couldn’t even recognize us. There was so much violence in our lives. In the end, it was his drinking that drove my brother away, that broke my family apart. I need to know what happened to my father in those camps, what he lived through. And if it isn’t in the diary, then where did he keep those thoughts? What did he do with all those memories?”
The sound waves roll across her computer screen. Gail edits in a fragment of Jaarsma’s interview.
“Cryptography,” he says, “holds a particular danger of its own. People expect to find patterns. You are handed a code, someone says, ‘Break this,’ and then it becomes like a game, a chase. It can drive you mad. Once you begin to doubt your skill, once you begin to lose faith, to wonder if the code is indeed a code, if it contains any meaning at all, it throws your life into disorder. What if, in the end, this book is no more and no less than a book of numbers? What if the surface is all there is?” He pauses and then says, “I think codebreaking is part of a very human desire, the desire for revelation, for meaning. To have every secret, every private thought, laid bare, regardless of what that might cost us.”
In front of her, the recording has come to an end, and the sound waves disappear from the screen.
The phone rings, and Gail blinks, coming back to her surroundings. When she picks up, she hears her father’s voice, already speaking, halfway through a sentence.
She takes the phone and walks out of her office, into the living room, where the windows are open. A sudden breeze shivers the newspapers across the coffee table. Her father is talking about arranging a vacation, two weeks along the coast of British Columbia, north to Haida Gwaii, the Queen Charlotte Islands. “And with our anniversary coming up,” he is saying, “it could be a nice present. But will she like it? Perhaps it’s too extravagant?”
Gail smiles, leaning out the window now, and she pictures her parents walking hand-in-hand in the hush of the rainforest. Outside, fall leaves scatter on the wind. “I think it’s a lovely idea.”
“It’s our fortieth wedding anniversary,” he says, in wonder at the thought.
His voice sounds grainy, worn at the edges, and she asks him if he slept well last night. Her father makes a noise that means, Not to worry. But when she presses him, he says that he slept for an hour or two, then watched The King and I on television.
Night after night during her childhood, her father, the insomniac, would pace the house, haunting it like a restless spirit. Before leaving for school each morning, Gail would see the remnants of his night. An empty teapot on the counter, the sleeve of a record on the floor. In university, her father had studied history. Occasionally, a book, Gibbon or Toynbee, the pages dog-eared, would lie open on his ch
est.
Sometimes, the insomnia slid into depression. Then, for a week, he would not step out of his room. She remembers her mother standing at the doorway, leaning her ear against the door, as if listening for the sound of his breathing.
What do you dream about? Gail had asked him once. My childhood, he said, after a pause. What was your childhood like? Her father had smiled fondly at her before turning away. “Like every childhood. Mine was no different.” Ever the curious daughter, she would take his hand. “Tell me one thing about it. Anything.”
He told her how to tap a rubber tree, how to hold a cigarette tin against the trunk and catch the precious liquid. How to carve an orange into a lantern, or a radish into the petals of a rose.
She once kept a list of his eccentricities. Her father was afraid of the dark. He could not eat certain foods: sweet potato, cassava and tapioca, which he called ubi kayu. Every weekday morning, before leaving for his job at the restaurant, he would stretch his arms and back, a kind of calisthenics that he said they had learned in school, when he was a boy. He had a fascination with Japan, a quick temper, and a disconcerting knowledge of British Columbian history. The First Nations, he once told her, have an archaeological history here that can be traced back ten thousand years. “Imagine that,” he would say, shaking his head, peering down at Gail as if he could read the span of years in his daughter’s face. He said that he tried to picture what first contact was like, when the Haida stumbled across the ship of Juan Perez, when they saw the white sails open and fluttering in the wind.
On the phone now, he is still talking about The King and I, describing how he first saw the film in Melbourne, in 1958. “All the boys I knew, they wanted to grow up to be Yul Brynner,” he says, laughing. Once, he had woken to the sight of his roommate practising his ballroom dancing, twirling an imaginary partner.
“And who did you imagine you might dance with?” Gail asks teasingly.
“I always danced with same person. In Sandakan, when I was young. But she died a long time ago. I thought I might see her again, but it was impossible.” She hears him shifting the phone to his other ear. “Don’t forget,” he says. “I want to surprise your mother. It’s been so long since we took a trip together.” When she puts down the phone, something in her mind seems to stop and catch, a word, a name, hovers on the edge of her memory.
The phone rings again, but she doesn’t pick it up. On the answering machine, Ansel’s voice. “It’s me.” A pause, and then he says, “Are you there? I didn’t want to wake you this morning before I left. Are you there, Gail? Anyway, that’s all right. It was nothing important. You looked so peaceful this morning. That’s all.” Something in his voice causes her to sit down, exhausted, unsure. “I love you.”
The message light on the machine begins to glow. She thinks of her mother, sitting at the kitchen table, polishing the glass beads of the chandelier, a task she did when Gail’s father was ill, when he slipped into a depression and she could not pull him back. Long ago, when she was a child, Gail would fall asleep in her mother’s lap, face pressed against the fabric of her dress. The familiar smell of soap and sweetness. Across the room, her father sat for hours in his armchair, his cup of tea gone cold, and it seemed to Gail that he had disappeared, cut himself loose from his body. Her mother would lift Gail from her lap, rise from her chair. She would place her hands on his shoulders, rubbing his neck and back. Touch calling another person back to this world, warmth flowing from one body into another.
A few months ago, she had helped her mother clean and organize her workroom. While her mother went to the kitchen to prepare lunch, Gail had got started, wiping the bookshelf. It was crammed with sewing manuals, but there were also cookbooks, magazines and novels: Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, coated in a thin layer of dust. Gail had sat cross-legged on the floor, turning the worn pages. She was replacing the books on the shelf when she saw a handful of envelopes that must have fallen on the carpet. She recognized one of them immediately. It was addressed to her father, and the Dutch stamps, now yellowed and dry, curled up at the edges. She had slid the letter out, a single page, fragile and creased.
I am heartbroken to write that Ani passed away on November 29, 1992, at home, of cancer. Wideh has returned from Jakarta, and he is here now. He was with his mother at the end.
Before her death, Ani requested that I write to you, and she provided me with your last known address. I hope that this letter reaches you.
I am very sorry to have to write to you with this news.
The name at the bottom of the page was Sipke Vermeulen.
She goes back to her office. At her desk, she scans the list of sound files, trying to focus on her work. She chooses one and hits Play. The recording that emerges from the computer is her own voice, the interview with Jaarsma about cryptography and the Vigenère Square. “The ciphers leave a shadow,” Jaarsma says, in response to her question. “However faint, you cannot erase that. This is the narrow, almost invisible opening for the codebreaker. At Bletchley Park, during the Second World War, cryptographers often recognized a pattern they had seen weeks, even months ago. They would walk across the room, fish out the correct fragment from a stack of paper. As if it were all a dream. It was the subconscious memory of a pattern.”
In radio, in the countless scripts that she has written, Gail works with the belief that histories touch. Follow the undercurrent and you will arrive at the meeting place. So she weaves together interviews, narration, music and sound in the hope that stories will not be lost in the chaos of never touching one another, never overlapping in any true way. Each element a strand, and the story itself a work of design. Out of the disparate pieces, let something pure, something true, emerge. Let it remain there, visible.
And in this documentary, where is the truth in the story of William Sullivan?
Gail runs her pen along the script, making notes in the margin.
Years ago, in Prague, she had interviewed a woman whose teenaged son had drowned in the Vltava River, a tragic accident. In the midst of recalling that day, the woman had looked up at Gail, suddenly angry, asking why she dared to ask these questions, what right she had. Gail had opened the recorder, removed the cassette tape. She had placed it carefully in the older woman’s hand. “If only you could understand,” the woman had said, clutching the tape. “The words that I put in the world can never be taken back.”
She remembered the woman’s frantic gestures, the ribbon pulled out of the cassette, spooling onto the ground.
She opens a browser on her computer and begins to book her flight to Amsterdam. Dates, flights, times: the numbers swim before her eyes. When she has an itinerary ready, she prints it up, and emails a copy to Jaarsma.
Outside, a woman calls out, then a screen door opens and slowly closes, the hinges creaking. She types Sipke Vermeulen’s name into the computer and watches the results scroll down the screen. The Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam. World Press Photo. She follows a link, and a series of black-and-white photographs open up before her. The caption underneath reads, Algiers, 1959. The Algerian War.
For a long time she studies the photos. In one, a child plays on an abandoned tank, he hangs upside down, suspended from the barrel of the gun.
She opens one image after another, seeing images from the Netherlands, Germany, Indonesia, and it becomes clear that Sipke Vermeulen is a Dutch photojournalist, a war photographer.
Gail closes the browser, picks up the printed itinerary from her desk, and walks out of her office. She climbs the stairs to their attic bedroom. Standing at the window, she can see a dozen tai chi practitioners gathered in the nearby schoolyard, moving, out-of-phase, in a lengthening ballet. Elderly men and women flick their heels, stretch their arms away from their bodies, turn with a strange and gorgeous precision. Movement after movement unfolding, an outgoing tide, spreading towards the edges.
Many times in her childhood, she had woken to the sound of her father’s nightmares. A screaming in the dark, lights coming on in
the house. She would creep to their bedroom door, holding on to the sound of her mother’s voice comforting him. Once, unable to go back to sleep, she had found her way, in the dark, to the living room. There, she lay on the carpet, her arms open, as if to gather up the air, to hold the weight of the room. From where she lay, she reached out and turned on the antique radio. The panel glowed and, after a few seconds, music, something jazzy, began to drift through the speakers. Eyes closed, she pressed her hand to the wooden cabinet, drew the vibrations through her fingertips, all the way to her heart.
When dawn came, she went to her parents’ bedroom, inched the door open, stood at the border of their room as they slept. She gazed at them with a boldness that she would not otherwise dare. Asleep, it was as if they had gone away together, leaving the worries of their life behind. She imagined casting a spell over them. When they woke, they would find themselves in a place where no secrets existed, where all the sorrows of the past had been laid to rest. What sorrows? She did not know. She knew so little about their lives. Privacy, her parents believed, was sacred.
For as long as she can remember, she had wanted to save them. She imagined her parents turning to her, seeing her finally, and the past would fall away. That is what she had hoped for when she was a child. To say the right thing, to pull off a feat of such perfection, they could be distracted, if only for a time.
From the window, she can see the myriad cracks in the sidewalk, the antique waste bins. A few blocks over, the sound of Chinatown like a swirling body of water. Here, in the oldest neighbourhood in the city, the trees are surprisingly young. They are planted each in a square of soil, a gesture towards the future. In the playground at Strathcona Elementary, children run in looping paths. They dribble balls on the basketball court, run three steps for a lay-up. For a fleeting moment, as she watches, their bodies hover motionless in the air.
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