Certainty

by Madeleine Thien

  “There,” he said, after a moment, “even the trees were different. Every day, I went past a golf course. At twilight, hundreds of kangaroos would gather together. They sat like statues in the grass.” He said that the realization of growing older had come upon him suddenly. The speed at which the years had gone by. He took a breath. “In Melbourne, I thought of you. I thought of you often.”

  To Ani, the girl that she had been, turning away from him, was both near and blurred. She wanted to find the words that would call her into being, some thread that would connect her back to that time. She began to speak about the day, twelve years before, when they had walked together on the beach, the tide washing out. He listened, his face open towards her, vulnerable. She told him that she had held the truth from him, that at the time she believed there had been no other choice to make. When she spoke Wideh’s name, he looked down. There was exhaustion in his face, but not surprise.

  “And so you left Sandakan,” he said. “All these years, that was the reason.”

  She nodded, remembering how she had stood on the steamboat, watching as the harbour she had known all her life slid away from her. “When I went to my mother’s family in Tarakan, my uncle helped me. Wideh was born here in Jakarta. Afterwards, I wanted to write to you. I wanted to make it right. This dishonesty. But I was not brave enough. I feared what the words might do. When Wideh asked about his father, I told him that I was the one who had left. That I had come to Jakarta on my own. I said that I believed you had remained in Australia.”

  From somewhere in the distance, she heard the din of Jalan Kamboja, a clattering of sound. She saw betjaks weaving between the trucks, crowds of people slipping through.

  His voice, when he began to speak, was tentative. He told her that he could not pinpoint the moment when he had begun to understand. Information had reached him slowly. That she lived in Jakarta. That she had a child. Then, a year ago, when he learned that the child had been born in 1954, it was as if some part of him had come awake. He could not explain why he had not seen it before. Perhaps he had suspected all along, perhaps he had pushed the knowledge away, he no longer knew.

  An older man carrying a birdcage passed them, the bamboo cage covered by a dark cloth. They could hear the bird, the claws against the fabric, the trilling of its voice.

  He went on, telling her about Clara, the woman he had met while studying in Australia. “We married,” he said, “two years ago. We have a child now, a daughter, Gail. It was Clara who said that I should come, travel to Jakarta, find what I had to know.”

  He said, “I would have given up Australia. I would not have abandoned you.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And so I was the one to leave.” Around her, the park seemed to fade out of focus, the shapes, indistinct, weaving together. “Last month, when your letter arrived . . .”

  “I needed to make sure. I needed to know, once and for all.”

  For a time, they sat in silence, and she felt as if they were floating on the surface of the sea and the current alone pushed them on.

  “Ani,” he said. “Have you told him that I’m here?”

  “No. I wanted to see you first. To know what you wished.”

  “I would like to see him.”

  “You’ll be surprised by Wideh,” she said. “How tall he is, how gentle. Even when he was a small child, he was older than his years, already curious about the world.” She looked out across the grass, to where the park ended, giving way to a series of low buildings. “In another hour, he’ll walk through this park on his way home from school.”

  “Wideh,” he said. “I remember. Your father’s name.”

  Waves of heat hovered above the ground. They crossed the grass, to where the canal shone, reflecting the afternoon light. He began to tell her of the last few days in Sandakan. The film crew had hauled in lumber from the mills north of the harbour, he said, and transported it up Leila Road. The prisoner-of-war camps had seemed to him more familiar than the town itself. On the film set, men, looking emaciated and haggard, had wandered through the barracks. Beside them, Japanese actors practised their lines, rifles set with bayonets dangling casually from their shoulders. Curiosity had brought people from as far away as Semporna and Tawau to watch; they sat on blankets around the periphery. When the cameras rolled, a hush fell over the clearing. Every gesture was mapped out beforehand, and each phrase laboured over. The actors’ words, spoken so intently, fell like needles into the quiet.

  In one scene, he told her, a prisoner was separated from the others. He was beaten, and then a soldier standing behind him placed his pistol against the man’s head. The man struggled, but he was forced to his knees. The soldier fired, and the man’s body jerked, then slumped into the dust. His head was twisted to the right, ear to the ground, eyes still open. When the filming stopped, he relaxed his body and turned over, staring for a moment up at the heavens above. Then he pushed himself to standing and wiped the dust from his clothes. Immediately, the blood in his hair and on the ground was cleaned away.

  The scene was repeated many times, the cameras moving towards the man and then away. Sitting in the crowd, surrounded by people who dared not breathe, Matthew had closed his eyes against the scene. He felt as if a stone at the bottom of his life had rolled loose, as if the contents of his memory could no longer be contained. They spilled into the air around him, vivid and uncontrolled. Why was this happening, he had wondered, when he had tried so hard, given up so much, to leave it behind?

  Ani could see the drift of smoke rising from the ruins of the camp. In a crater, two children sat back-to-back, the bowl of the sky above them. They had believed in a world reborn, that the life they remembered would come into existence again. It had not and yet the days had gone on for them both. Now, when she looked at him, she could imagine the way in which his face would age, filling out, the lines radiating from his eyes. Strands of white were already visible in his dark hair.

  He said he had stood on the hillside, asking himself how it was possible to continue. At what point would he finally step forward, would he make, decisively, the shape of his life? When would the war be over for him? Sometimes, he said, one had to let go of the living just as surely as one grieved the dead. Some things, lost long ago, could not be returned.

  Across the street from the park, children began to emerge from the school, their jubilant voices filling the air. They scattered in every direction. She could sense Matthew following her gaze.

  Wideh walked into the park head down, absorbed in his own thoughts. He stopped at the canal, where a newspaper had been left on the steps leading down to the water. He was no more than a hundred yards away, but he did not notice them. Putting his satchel down, he opened the paper, then he removed a sheet and began to fold it, deftly constructing a paper boat. He made one after another, lining the finished pieces up on the steps, a fleet at rest.

  Eventually, he looked up and saw them and he began to run towards the place where they were sitting. When he reached Ani and Matthew, he held back, suddenly shy. “Have you come to watch the kite-flying?”

  She smiled, embracing him. “No, it was only a happy accident.”

  He leaned his forehead against hers.

  “Wideh,” she said. “There is someone here I would like you to meet.”

  She was about to say something more when Matthew reached out tentatively, placing one hand on Wideh’s shoulder. When he spoke, his voice was casual, but she saw in his eyes what the effort cost him. He told Wideh that he had known Ani once, long ago, in the years before she had come to Jakarta.

  Wideh turned to Matthew, looking curiously into his face. “In Sandakan?”

  “Yes, but I no longer live there.”

  Wideh set his satchel on the embankment where Ani and Matthew were sitting. He fiddled with the buckle, all the while looking down at the grass.

  “Do you fly kites, Wideh?”

  He shook his head. “But I’m going to build one some time. A swallow. The pattern isn’t compli
cated, not like some of the others.” He motioned towards an older man in a quilted jacket standing nearby. His three kites, attached to one another in a triangle, were painted to resemble birds. They spun and fell sharply, their tails tracing patterns in the sky. The man stepped sideways and they plummeted to the ground, somersaulting over the grass before lifting up once more.

  Wideh turned back to Matthew. “What is it like in Sandakan?”

  “Nowadays, it’s peaceful. Not as vibrant as Jakarta, but the harbour is very busy; ships come in from many places. When I was small, I used to imagine the town was a child, standing with his back to the jungle, and his face to the sea.”

  “As if to set foot in the water and sail away,” said Wideh.

  “A swimming city!”

  Ani laughed. “You never told me.”

  “I still remember walking down to the harbour in the early morning,” Matthew said. “Seeing you there on Tajuddin’s boat.”

  “She hardly speaks about it,” Wideh said, his voice filled with wonder.

  “It was so long ago.”

  “Everyone knew her. In Sandakan, Tajuddin’s boat was famous.”

  Matthew and Wideh continued to talk, about kite-flying, then distant cities, and Ani did not interrupt them. She listened to their voices, this knitting together, felt as if she were balanced within, a soul sheltered between the past and the present.

  A civilian regiment, recognizable by their khaki shirts and trousers, swept onto the road, stopping traffic. They moved in unison, chanting slogans whose words she could not make out. Beside them, the canal was busy with people bathing and swimming, the womens’ clothing blurring in kaleidoscopic patterns.

  “One day, I’ll go to Sandakan,” Wideh said. “I’ll put flowers on the graves of my grandparents. Ibu told me both my grandfathers died there, and also my grandmother.”

  “And if there are no graves?”

  “Then the sea.”

  Matthew nodded. “I, too, was glad to go back. If only to say goodbye.”

  They sat together as the sun faded behind the trees, lowering through the branches. The kites drifted to the ground, a swirl of colour, and children ran to gather them up.

  When they parted, he left as if he would be seeing them again, shaking Wideh’s hand, then putting his lips to the boy’s hair. She knew that what she and Matthew had shared in childhood had carried them safely through, a net where all other lines had been torn away. All these years, the net had held. His eyes rested on Ani’s face. They said goodbye to one another, and then he stepped away from them. She saw what he had given her, the one thing her parents had been unable to do, prepare her for this parting, this letting go.

  A betjak came along and he climbed in. She watched the vehicle pull out onto the busy street, watched for as long as she could, until it was one among so many others. Wideh took her arm and pulled her lightly, and together they walked along the crowded road, eventually crossing back into the park, towards Jalan Kamboja.

  In the late afternoon, Wideh sleeps on a blanket in the grass, a magazine open on his chest. The fuchsia shrubs, planted in a border along the canal, reach out luxuriantly. Low against the sky, a flock of avocet, or kluut, veer and dip in unison. They are familiar to Ani now, these elegant northern birds, the kluut with their black-tipped wings; the heron that stand in the fields, watchful.

  The birds tip towards the east, their movement coinciding with the appearance of Frank Postma, who steps with a flourish into the garden, his daughter, Ingrid, close behind him. Ani walks across the grass to meet them, and he puts his hands on her shoulders, kissing her on both cheeks. Ingrid presents the box of pastries that she says they bought in the Indonesian market in The Hague. Spekkoek, Frank announces, klepon and ongol-ongol. Only the best. Ingrid nods. “A veritable dessert buffet.” At these words, Wideh gets to his feet.

  Frank asks to see Wideh’s photographs, and, after some prodding, Wideh brings out an envelope of prints taken during a recent trip to Southeast Asia. In one, the harbour at Sunda Kelapa, a study of the myriad lines of rigging that criss-cross the sky. In another, a stand of trees half concealed by fog, the trunks, otherworldly, crooked and gnarled. “Mount Kinabalu,” he says. “A cloud forest in North Borneo. In the high altitude, the clouds deposit drops of water on the trees, and this provides what little moisture they need.” He selects a print and shows it to Frank. “Here’s a pitcher plant, one of the carnivorous plants of the region.”

  For a moment, Ani believes it is her father speaking. In her memory, they are walking single-file through the jungle, Ani between her parents, their voices layering into the canopy above her.

  Sipke appears, bringing beer and wine and a half-dozen glasses. In the last few months, his hair has begun to grey, a brush of white at the edges. Ani pours the drinks and Sipke stands with one hand on the small of her back, listening as Wideh describes Jakarta, the neighbourhoods bulldozed or rezoned, made over into something entirely different. Walking on Jalan Kamboja, he had searched among the remaining businesses, finding an elderly woman who remembered the street the way it was in the early 1960s, the Pondok Restaurant, the Dutch portrait studio. “They went away with their little boy,” she had told him. “I’m not sure where they’ve gotten to now.”

  “Up to no good, of course,” Frank says. He lifts his glass, takes a sip of beer. “I remember it all so clearly. Now, when I look at these young kids, going off with their cameras to Bosnia, to Croatia, I want to pack my bags and follow them. Being a photographer is what I’ve always done. I’m not equipped for any other life.”

  “That time is gone,” Ingrid says, reaching out to touch her father’s shoulder. “You’ll have to content yourself with dusty old Holland. What was that line again?” She looks up at the cloudless sky, remembering. “‘O starshine on the fields of long ago.’”

  Sipke finishes the words. “‘Bring me the darkness and the nightingale . . . and the faces of my friends.’”

  Twilight comes, and the frogs are a chorus on the banks. Joos, their neighbour and Sipke’s boyhood friend, shows up with box wine. Quantity, Joos says, is the order of the night. Beside him, Sipke frowns at the seal. While the glasses are being refilled, Ingrid stands up and finds Wideh’s guitar leaning against the wall. She sets it on her lap, her fingers moving lightly over the strings, and the notes disperse, weaving together the space around them. Their voices rise, enclosing her, Frank’s erudite and Joos’s bombastic. Her heart eases to see Sipke and Wideh relaxed and laughing. It does not feel as if it is she who is leaving. Rather, the world is withdrawing from her, stepping back; it is taking its leave.

  There is a child in the canal, barely visible. In the dim light, Ani can see her floating on her back, her hair in pigtails, her arms flung wide. Around her, tall fronds reach above the water, interrupting the reflection of the evening sky. Slowly, the girl drifts past. Then, as if aware of someone watching, she turns onto her stomach, swimming, her shoulders appearing then submerging, her pale feet taking turns to break the surface.

  When Ani looks up, she sees Sipke, and the tenderness in his expression returns her to a morning almost thirty years ago. She and Wideh are in the airport in Amsterdam, their one trunk on the ground. She sees the mass of people, the high wavering lights, and then Sipke coming towards them.

  Together they leave the airport. Outside, they find that a light snow is falling. Sipke has borrowed his brother’s car, and they drive under a series of concrete bridges, into the open. The colours transfix her, muted shades of green and brown, ice beneath a pearl-white sky. Everywhere, the land is unfamiliar, unimagined, canals slipping across the fields. For a moment, the future comes to her, as vivid and clear as a memory unfolding. The highway rises onto a plateau, the land falls away. The North Sea opens before her, wind rippling the water.

  9

  The Glass Jar

  January

  It had been one of those rare winter days, almost a year ago now, Ansel recalls, when the chill of the season seeme
d, for a few hours, a thing of the past. He had just arrived home from work, and Gail was sitting on the front porch. She had earphones on and she was listening to music. This is the way he remembers it. Gail in jeans and a cardigan, watching the life of the street go by.

  What are you listening to? he asked. She told him to guess, and then, smiling, she took both of his hands, doing a jive. Somebody across the street whistled long and low. Car doors slammed, talk radio spilled out a nearby window. She was all energy, all heat. They were dancing on their handkerchief of lawn, and he felt as if something he had lost was, for a moment, within reach again. Later, her feet on his lap as she read the newspaper. This is good, she had said. Her voice was hopeful. This is right.

  Overhead, the fluorescent lights in the hospital corridor waver. Ansel takes the stairs up, emerging on the fifth floor, into the quiet of the ICU. He stops at the nurses’ station to take his bearings. The phone rings, the head nurse turns his face away, speaking in a low voice, and Ansel continues along the corridor.

  At the far end of the ward, he can see Alistair in the last bed. A nurse is checking his IV lines. Alistair’s eyes are closed, and he gives the impression not of sleeping but of being deeply absorbed, preoccupied by his own thoughts. Ansel scans the monitor, then picks up the chart from the foot of the bed. He runs a finger over the lines as he reads, and the movement reminds him of his own father, of how once, when he was a child, he had stood at his father’s side in this same ICU. They had walked from bed to bed and his father had told him to be very still, that he should not be there, but he wanted Ansel to see how things were. The hush and gravity of the ward made Ansel want to run outside, swing a bat, stomp up and down on the pavement. His anxiety must have shown. His father bent down, hands on Ansel’s shoulders, holding his gaze. “Sooner or later,” he said, gently, “we all end up in the care of another.”

  Ansel hears the sound of a chair scraping. He had not seen her, a woman near his own age, so close to the curtains that her outline seems to disappear into the folds.