Certainty

by Madeleine Thien

  She nods slightly when he introduces himself. “I’m family,” she says. “Al is my brother. I only arrived last night.”

  “There’s a private room in this ward. A place to rest and be alone, if you need it. He’s stable now.”

  “It’s okay. I just want to be near.”

  He returns the chart to its holding place. Through the windows behind her, he can see down to the bay where the water gleams. The fierce light of the sun comes in, shining off the glass walls of the ward. They listen to the heart-rate monitor, the slow measured blips of electronic sound. Alistair, his face partly obscured by an oxygen mask, is still.

  “Are you the doctor that got him into Kafka?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Kafka. Al phoned up one night and said, when I came, I should bring along some books. He says Kafka had tuberculosis.” She reaches towards the windowsill, holds up a tattered paperback. “So I went to the library and found this.”

  “Oh, yes,” Ansel says, and then nods. “I think it was me.”

  “He was always a big reader, even when we were kids. I used to tease him about it. He was my older brother, and I thought he was showing off.” Her voice sounds exhausted, but she continues speaking, filling the silence between them. “Always with his nose in a book and it didn’t matter what, novels, comic books, even the magazines our mother kept around the apartment when she was still there. Al was full of surprises. Not everyone would want to be sent off with Kafka.”

  “I don’t think that I would.”

  She smiles briefly before glancing away. “What would you have instead? A piece of music, maybe.”

  “No.” He gathers his thoughts. “Someone beside me. No radio, no television. Just the sound of the world going by.”

  She puts the book down. Dr. Singh, the attending physician, appears in the doorway. His eyes skim the folder in his hand and then he steps into the room. Al’s sister stands up. He can see the resemblance between siblings, the way Al might have looked before terminal illness set in. Her eyes are red from weeping.

  Ansel listens while Singh speaks. He is kind when he details the prognosis, but he holds nothing back. When Singh leaves, Al’s sister comes to stand beside Ansel. The light falls against her hair, casting her face in shadow. They watch Singh through the plate-glass walls, the multiple reflections of his white coat.

  “If there’s other family to contact, we should do it soon.”

  “No, I’m the last.”

  The room floats in silence, and then she says, “I’d been trying to get Al to come to Victoria, to stay with me and my kids. A few years ago, I almost had him convinced, but then he got the diagnosis, the HIV. He changed his mind.” She pauses after each sentence, as if to gather strength for the next. “We’ve always been close. Things never came easy for him, he was sixteen when he left home. He was reckless with himself. I knew I couldn’t save him if he didn’t want to be saved. And even then,” she crosses her arms in front of herself, “sometimes one thing doesn’t go right, and then another, and then it all snowballs. But he put all the blame on his own shoulders, he tried to be the one to carry the weight, and it hurt him in the end.

  “Some things I only realize in hindsight. How someone caught me at a time I didn’t even realize I was slipping. And then, those times when I failed to reach out. Failed to see that someone I cared for was losing their footing.”

  “But you’re here now,” Ansel says. “When he wakes up, you’ll be here.”

  Outside, in the hallway, time continues. They can hear the voices of nurses, of visitors in a nearby room. An elderly man is wheeled out on a gurney, his wife holding his hand as he glides past.

  Ansel says, “Would you tell him I’ll come back this evening?”

  “I will.”

  “Do you need anything?”

  He cannot read her expression. She seems lost in her own thoughts, trying to turn over a line, a word, that she cannot quite comprehend. What was it Alistair had said, so many months ago? No more questions, no more doubts.

  “I’m fine,” she says. “I am.”

  Behind the words, he sees loss as if it were a tremor of light around her. Ansel walks towards the doorway, is about to leave the room when she returns to the window. Her back is to him, dark hair against her shoulders, and she gazes out over the shining city.

  At home, after nightfall, the house is unbearably quiet. In the kitchen, he switches the radio on, listens as a physicist describes the latest images transmitted back by the Hubble Telescope. Ansel has seen them on the Internet: a nebula six light-years wide, impossibly strange and glorious. The shape, with its swirling tentacles of dust clouds, is somehow familiar. To him, it resembles a deep-sea creature let loose in space. Or one could imagine it minuscule, a dot in a Petri dish, now magnified large.

  He tries to imagine Gail in the kitchen, preparing a meal as the radio plays. She stands with one hand resting on the counter, her eyes closed, listening intently.

  On that night when she returned from Amsterdam, he had been waiting for her at the airport, watching the unending line of travellers emerging through the double doors, pushing their baggage ahead of them as they crushed into the waiting crowd.

  For a long time she did not see him. At last Ansel reached her. “There you are,” she said.

  “Here I am.”

  The crowd parted around them as if they were an island in a flowing river.

  In the car on the way home, she had asked him to detour towards the peninsula, to the cliffs on the west side where the city ended and the ocean began. It was a clear night, and sitting on the hood of the car she had pointed out the glow of a lighthouse on the tip of the northern bank. The air smelled of brine and the cold.

  She seemed exhausted from the flight, distracted, and yet she had not wanted to go home. They talked at first about Harry Jaarsma, then she told him about travelling north to the province of Friesland, about someone she had met there, a man named Sipke Vermeulen. She said that he had known her father. “There was a place we visited,” she said. “To arrive there, we drove across a piece of land that, fifty years ago, lay beneath the sea. Maybe one day, we can go back together and I’ll be able to show you.”

  Neither of them had wanted to leave, and so they had remained there, despite the lateness of the hour, wrapped in their winter coats. She told him about William Sullivan’s diary. Something about it had moved her, the numbers now transformed into sentences. She said that Kathleen had wanted to open a window from her father’s life onto her own.

  “Remember when we were kids,” she said, “and the world consisted of the streets we knew, the streets we’d walked on. I always wanted to keep going, to roam as far as I could and make everything a part of me.”

  For a moment, he cannot move. His grief takes hold again, the pain worse than it has been in many months. He goes upstairs to their bedroom. Gail’s clothes lie neatly folded on the bed, on the floor, and he gathers them into plastic bags. Each one is familiar, it has a scent and a memory. He lays her sweaters in a box, covers them with her winter coat. When the last piece of clothing is put away, he feels a spreading numbness, a distant calm. He sits down on the bed, then lies back.

  The skylight above frames the evening sky. He remembers how, when he was a child, he and his sister would climb onto the roof of the garage. They would stretch out on the warm tiles, gazing up at the heavens. His sister told him to hold still. Could he see the clouds moving? He must have been only six or seven years old, and he remembers, even now, how the ground seemed to lose its substance. He felt the Earth making its rotation and he saw himself as a tiny thing, a breath, carried along with it. When he sat up, the sky retreated, giving way to the tips of the highest trees. Giving way to the house, the familiar details.

  Now, he feels that same vertigo, a sense that he is falling. He gets to his feet, imagining her near. Love, this heaviness, this weight, holds him steady.

  The rain begins, but Matthew remains outside for a little while lo
nger. In the park, there are boys playing soccer, a blur of green and red jerseys looping across the grass. They clap their hands, calling to one another, put on a burst of speed to keep the ball in play. He sees a young man coming towards him. He wears a suit and an overcoat, as if he has just come from work, and he makes his way across the wet grass to a child who stands waiting, knapsack over one shoulder. Together they watch the game. The father stands awkwardly, trying to shield them both from the rain with a folded newspaper. The child looks straight ahead, but slowly, imperceptibly, he shifts his body sideways so that he is resting against his father’s legs.

  He tries to remember himself at that age, so small and serious. He sees the mission school as it was in the late 1930s, atap roofs in Sandakan town, the little boats anchored in the harbour. When he went back for the last time, people still could not talk about the war. If he mentioned it, they would shake their heads, their eyes would grow distant. “Terrible times,” they said. Opening and closing the memory in the same breath. “But it was long ago, wasn’t it? Those days are behind us.”

  “Yes,” he had said, nodding, agreeing.

  Days later, when the plane touched down in Jakarta, he’d felt as if he had awoken in a country that had no markers, no guides. There, with Ani, the past was no longer just a memory, a fog, it had the face and shape of a boy. Wideh had stood with his hand resting on his mother’s knee, the gesture reminding Matthew of one he himself had made long ago. He saw in Wideh’s face the resemblance to both Ani and himself, a gathering together of what had once been lost.

  His son had been shy at first, gazing at the grass by Matthew’s feet. But when Wideh lifted his face and pointed out the kites above them, some part of him seemed to unfold, delight emanating from him. Between mother and child, another language existed. He could not bring himself to disturb Wideh’s happiness, he could not let the truth be spoken, tell him that his father had returned only to disappear and leave them again. He saw that this part of his life must always remain broken.

  He went home to Canada. When he opened the door of the house, all the lights were off. Upstairs, in the doorway to her bedroom, he listened to the even sigh of his daughter’s breath, and then he found Clara, already asleep, the lamp still on, a book open on the pillow beside her. When she woke, he would find the way to tell her. She would not look away, she would know what the future could be.

  He had remembered this last night, when Ansel came to the house and they’d sat together on the front porch, in the unusually mild night. As Clara had requested, Ansel had brought with him a copy of Gail’s documentary, which had just been finished. Clara set the CD into the player and then there was the sound of an airplane lifting off. Newsreels announced the start of the war. Harry Jaarsma, the cryptographer, was introduced, and then Sullivan’s two children.

  It was a little more than a year ago now, Matthew remembered, that he had walked with his daughter near this field. Gail had just returned from the Netherlands. He thought she looked well and told her so.

  At first, she had seemed anxious, unable to settle. It reminded Matthew of when she was a child, the bursts of energy that left both him and Clara amazed. Gail would race around the house like a being possessed, then collapse on the living room floor, gazing up, dreaming. He asked about her work in Amsterdam, and as she spoke she seemed to calm, telling him about William Sullivan and the diary he had kept some fifty years ago during the war. How, when she read the pages, her own emotions had unsettled her, the intensity of them, the compassion she felt for all that he had set aside.

  After so many years, Matthew thought, silence had become a habit for him, a way of being in the world. As his daughter spoke, fragments drifted through his mind. His mother’s hand gripping his, as they ran into the jungle. The sound of a bicycle skimming along a dirt road. How he had loved his father all his life without ever truly knowing him.

  He said to Gail that sometimes the past could not be made right, not every experience could be made to fit. “I left Sandakan believing that I had to push pieces of my life away. I thought the worst thing would be to lose a sense of balance, to fall. This is how it seemed to me. But I was wrong to hold back.” He hesitated, but something in her expression pushed him to continue. “I never told you how your mother saved me.”

  “But I knew,” she had said. In her bearing, in her words, there was an understanding, a recognition that shook him to the core, that now, sitting here, makes him weep. “All along, I knew.”

  Beside the soccer field, parents stand beneath coloured umbrellas, sipping their coffee, their chatter soothing to him. He could be in Tawau or Sandakan, a bystander on the padang, a child at the edge of the field.

  The first maps, he knows, were drawn in the dirt, a picture of a place set tenuously down. He can close his eyes and see the road leading to Mile 8, curving down to the sea. A boy’s hand tracing a circle on the ground, the soil warm against his fingers. He had once gone back to find it, the place between the rows of trees, but what he had tried to keep safe was lost. His childhood, a time before the war. A glass jar that moves from his father’s hand to his, a continuous question that asks, how am I to live now, when all is said and done and grief must finally be set aside. Ani in a park on the other side of the world, the words his father could not say, the remembered voice of his daughter. So many things, he thinks, that we carry all our lives, in the hope that what we know will finally redeem us, that we will find something that abides, even now, in the indefinite, the uncertain, hereafter.

  NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  While many books were an immense help to me in the course of my research, I would like to acknowledge, in particular, Erna Paris’s Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History (Toronto: Knopf, 2000); Maslyn Williams’s Five Journeys from Jakarta: Inside Sukarno’s Indonesia (New York: William Morrow, 1965); Thomas Dormandy’s The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis (New York: New York University Press, 1999); K.G. Tregonning’s North Borneo (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1960); Stephen Budiansky’s Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II (New York: Touchstone, 2002); Thomas Looker’s The Sound and the Story: NPR and the Art of Radio. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995); Russell Miller’s Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History (New York: Grove Press, 1997); Raymond Firth’s Malay Fishermen: Their Peasant Economy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975); and Gavan Daws and Marty Fujita’s Archipelago: The Islands of Indonesia (University of California Press, 1999). I would also like to acknowledge two documentaries, Karen Levine’s “Hana’s Suitcase” and Jane Lewis’s “My Father’s Story,” both of which originally aired on CBC Radio and served as the inspiration for Gail’s radio project. Karen Levine’s book, Hana’s Suitcase, based on her radio documentary, is published in Canada by Second Story Press.

  I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the BC Arts Council.

  In Sandakan, Tawau, Singapore, and Melbourne, I was able to interview many people who shared their stories with me. I thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your generosity and trust. To my parents, and to my extended family in Canada, Malaysia, Australia, China, the United States and the Netherlands, all my gratitude and love.

  Although aspects of this novel – the Japanese Occupation of British North Borneo, the Sandakan Death Marches, and the events leading to the fall of Sukarno in Indonesia in 1965 – are based on the historical record, the characters in this novel are fictional creations. The geography of Sandakan town has been slightly altered for the sake of simplicity.

  William Sullivan’s diary is inspired by the story of Donald Hill, an RAF pilot stationed in Hong Kong who was taken prisoner by the Japanese Army in 1941. For those wishing to know more, the story is beautifully told by Andro Linklater in his book The Code of Love (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000).

  For their unwavering support, I am deeply grateful to Asya Muchnick at Little, Brown, and to Marilyn Biderman, Anita Chong, and all those at McClelland & Stewart
with whom I have had the pleasure to work. My heartfelt thanks to Alex Schultz for his fine work copyediting this novel. To my editor, Ellen Seligman: I am fortunate indeed, and so grateful to her for sharing this journey with me. My thanks for her faith in this book, and for her wisdom and guidance in helping me to get the words right.

  Jane Eaton Hamilton, Joy Masuhara, and Steven Dang generously shared their insights and answered my many and diffuse questions, as did Jeroen Kemperman at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. My thanks and great admiration to Don Mowatt, for opening my eyes to the world of radio. To Amanda Okopski and Dean Bakopoulos, my dear ones, unstinting in their love, generous in their joy, I am blessed by our friendship. And to Willem, my anchor and my love.

  To Carol Hudgins, Cynthia Leung, and to my mother, Matilda Thien: no words can express how I miss you.

  The epigraph from The Needs of Strangers by Michael Ignatieff, copyright © 1985 by Michael Ignatieff. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The quotation about the origins of empathy is from Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (London: Oxford University Press, 1976).

  Gail’s description of radio signals is paraphrased from Thomas Looker’s The Sound and the Story: NPR and the Art of Radio (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995).

  The newspaper quotation on page 117 is from the article “Shortest time interval measured.” BBC News, February 25, 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/ nature/3486160.stm.

  The words heard on the radio on page 256 and spoken by the man on the street on page 266 are from Maslyn Williams’s Five Journeys from Jakarta: Inside Sukarno’s Indonesia. Copyright © 1966 by Maslyn Williams. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers/William Morrow.

  The quotation on page 290 is from Siegfried Sassoon’s poem “Memory.”

  About the Author