Certainty

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.

Standing there, he has a memory of Ani as she was when they were children, and the image of her is startlingly vivid. “Even in the heat they wore gloves,” she says, describing the British women leaving Sandakan, the steamboat that vanished into the blue of the sea. He is sitting with her on the fringe of the jungle, not wanting to move. His eyes are closed so everything else will fall away and her voice will become the entire world.

He lifts his daughter out of the crib and sits down on the carpeted floor. He rocks the child in his arms. Matthew sees that she is struggling to wake herself, so he whispers to her to give her something to hold on to, a voice to follow out of her own consciousness. Eventually, she opens her eyes, blinking, but she does not seem surprised to find him there. He continues to hold her, saying whatever comes to mind. That her mother will be here soon, that it is morning now, and this day will progress in its usual way. Breakfast, and afterwards they will go to the park. Perhaps, later on, a ride in the car through the city.

And miraculously, his daughter seems to be listening. After a few moments, her breathing calms. Her eyes are still wet with tears, but she is looking through them, focused now on his face. The words keep coming, about lunch and dinner, about a warm bath when the sun goes down. He tells her how his mother used to bathe him outside, under the orange lamp of the sun. How he could hear the songs of kingfishers in the trees and imagined that they were laughing at him, the naked boy playing in a round tub of water. They threw seeds and nuts down at him, and then they spread their wings and lifted up into the white sky.

She does not fall asleep again, and he keeps on talking until Clara wakes and finds them there.

That night, he dreams of a road that leads away from Sandakan harbour, and then of a tunnel under the ground. He sees his father, weeping, thrown from a boat into the sea. Matthew dives in after him. He finds that he can breathe easily, air flows into and out of his lungs. As he descends, the water grows bright, as if lit from a source far below. For a long time he swims in this place, looking neither forward nor back, carried safely, effortlessly, by a current within the sea. By the time he realizes that his lungs are empty, it is too late, his thoughts are already torn, losing substance. The surface is no longer visible.

In January 1945, when the British bombs exploded on Sandakan, all the people ran to the hillside.

Matthew had been asleep in his bed in the house on Jalan Campbell. The noise of the planes stunned him awake, and then he was half-carried, half-dragged, across the floor, down the stairs and out of the house. Panic seized his chest, a pebble in his lungs. His mother was holding jewellery in her hands, gold chains tangled together. A wedding photograph. He heard voices, someone screaming, sirens, and then the first bomb fell, the explosion deafening him. The air began to burn. His mother grabbed him, he did not know where his father was, and they began to run uphill, through the thick smoke, ash raining on their skin, away from Leila Road and into the jungle. He stumbled over a body, its eyes open, heard a man crying. In the sky, flares exploded, opening windows of light on them, exposing the bellies of planes falling on Sandakan. A stickiness ran from his ears, staining his fingers dark when he touched the place. He saw the necklaces snap, coming out of his mother’s hands, and then the bombs dropping, slow and heavy, as if they might be carried past by the wind. The town exploded in a wash of flames.

More people ran up the hill, and around him the jungle seemed to move and shift. Pictures ran through his mind, an egg, a bag of marbles. He wanted to close his eyes, float his body up to where it could not be harmed. His mother tried to cover him, pushing his face against the bark of a tree. Everything smelled of flowers, a sweet, cloying perfume filling his lungs. A plane seemed to stall above them, and in place of its engine he heard the sound of a whistle. The fall began and he counted the seconds, the noise so piercing he could not hear himself speak the last number before the explosion. A tree cracked, swaying towards them. They became nothing. The whistles did not stop. A flare lit up the dead around him, burning pictures in his eyes. The pebble of fear in his chest exploded, and the fragments flooded his body.

After the planes left, they did not move. The town glimmered, a red haze that burned continuously as he fell in and out of sleep. Morning came and he breathed only smoke. On Jalan Campbell, they found his father standing in rubble where the front wall of their house lay crumpled. There was blood on his clothes. He, too, had slept in the jungle. He said that these bombs were meant to save them, to strike the Japanese, to ease the Allied entry into Sandakan and the liberation of the town.

Every night for three weeks, the bombs came and they ran into the dark. But after the planes turned back, no Allied soldiers came.

In the jungle and on the hillside, people built temporary shelters, crowding themselves together. This was where Ani lived with her father. There was no food, and each day she scavenged for jungle fern and sweet potatoes. The dead were buried everywhere.

Matthew and Ani walked through what remained of Sandakan town, through the rubble and glass, through wood heaved at odd angles as if the entire street were still in the act of collapsing. In all this, they found porcelain bowls, undamaged. A half-dozen pairs of spectacles, a rattan chair. He thought he saw people suspended, the shape of a hand. Touch them, and they crumbled to dirt. On Jalan Campbell, where his house once stood, and Jalan Satu, where Ani and her father had lived, nothing but beams, twisted and black, remained.

Matthew and his parents found their way to an abandoned hut at the edge of their former plantation. Before the war, he remembered, his father had taken him to watch the tapping of the rubber trees; at night, lamps ringed with oil were used to ward away the moths. The aisles had been hallways of light, tunnels that led to mysterious destinations. Now, with the shortage in kerosene, the lamps remained unlit. When he looked out at the darkness, his chest seemed to fill with water, submerging his lungs. Each night he woke to the sound of army trucks rumbling past. He knew that the Japanese police, the kempeitai, came after curfew, sweeping the huts for guerillas and taking away any person, any family, they suspected. In his dreams, the road became a part of his body, gravel crumbling through his bloodstream, catching in his throat. He was afraid of the unlit plantation, of the decaying huts farther down the hillside. The dwellings were not safe. At any moment, a person could be pulled from his home, away from his family, and executed in the glare of a torch.

Sometimes, in the night, Matthew saw his father rise from bed, sleepless, a shadow among shadows in the room. Outside, there were gunshots, voices shouting. The war, his father once said, would be no more than a drop of rain on their long lives. If they were smart, if they were careful, they could compromise in order to survive. His father made promises that he could not keep. He said the war would pass, and life as they remembered it would return, as inevitably as one season followed another.

He and Ani now stood on Leila Road, a path that led along the coast, through the ruined town, and up to the top of the hill. When the ridge turned east, they could see the bay stretching out before them, the chalk hills of Berhala Island glowing red against the sparkling water. Farther up along the road, there was a marker for Mile 8, where the prisoner-of-war camps and airfield had been built. The ghost road, people had begun to call it, the point at which the path became grown over and impassable, finally giving way to jungle.

Some days, walking here, they would see Japanese soldiers, and they would run to the side of the road, drop their eyes and bow at the waist. Panic gripped his body, holding him still. He would stare at the black millipedes, the shiny backs of the beetles climbing over his feet. He saw the darkened skin of the soldiers’ hands, the rifles swinging casually against their legs.

Ani would sing the Kimigayo, her voice lingering over the long notes. He heard a strange and unfamiliar sadness in her voice. “ Koke no musu made.” “ And for the eternity that it takes for small stones to grow into a great rock and become covered with moss.” The soldiers sang along with her. They showed her photographs of their loved ones, their mothers, gazing into the flash of the camera. Ani’s face was still and expressionless. They rewarded her with handkerchiefs filled with balls of rice, or sometimes an egg.

What if they were seen? But Ani had no choice. The schools had been closed long ago, her parents were gone, and she had only herself to depend on.

Afterwards, Ani would divide the reward into equal halves. They did not linger over the food. The eggs swelled her cheeks into a wide smile, and she would lie back on the dirt, letting the sun warm her skin, savouring that brief moment when the pain of hunger retreated.

Once, angry, not knowing if what they were doing was right, he had refused the egg she offered him.

She did not answer for a long time. “Your family isn’t starving,” she said, her voice low as if afraid to injure him. “Not like the others.”

At Ani’s words, he wanted to lie on the grass, close his eyes, and give his shame up and everything with it. He saw his father rising in the morning, reaching his arms into the sky. This was the best time of the day, when the house was still and he saw his father at peace, unhurried, alone in the half-light.

In the years before the war reached Sandakan, his parents had planted the seeds for a garden, hidden in the jungle. They grew padi, eggplant and yams, enough to feed themselves through the coming turmoil. But they had been unlucky. Two years ago, an informer had gone to the Japanese and the garden was discovered. One morning, soldiers had burst into the house. He remembered his father, still wearing his housecoat, the first blow knocking him to the floor. The soldiers said that it was treason to withhold supplies from the occupying force. They went through the rooms, calmly shattering the glass cabinets, opening his father’s desk, spilling papers on the ground. He thought his father had been shot, the way the rifle was pointed, how the bayonet wavered beside his head as he lay on the floor. His mother’s screaming had faded to nothing, colour had drained from the world. Only later, when the gun was lowered, did Matthew’s senses return, piece by piece, sound by sound.

In the days that followed, it seemed they had been fortunate. His father began to spend time at the Japanese offices. Sometimes he came home with an extra ration of rice, eggs or a tin of milk. In the mornings, he walked away from the house, his head held high, towards town.

He and Ani walked farther uphill. Below, the debris of the town shone, bleached by the sun, the odd post or beam still standing above the wreckage. Even now, in the chaos of the flattened buildings, the grid of streets was still visible.

“Who told you the war was over?” he said suddenly.

“Lohkman’s brother heard it on the radio. The Emperor himself, he said the war is over.” She paused, looking out at the sea. “But that was more than a month ago, near the beginning of August.”

They walked in silence, bare feet crackling the leaves on the ground.

She gestured towards the harbour. She told him that when the British came back, there would be tables full of food, of English cakes and tea. Boats would arrive again, from Australia and Singapore.

Today, no soldiers appeared on the road. When Ani and Matthew reached the crater, their hands were empty. Ani slid down the crater wall, and he followed behind her. Inside, protected, he thought of them as goldfish, resting in the centre of the bowl. The edges of the trees were sharp against the light.

The Japanese would soon give up Sandakan. Even his mother, who always kept her words to herself, had said the same. One morning in August, a strange and terrible bomb had fallen on Japan. What kind of bomb? he had wondered, but no one knew. Only that behind it, a lasting emptiness remained. The guns and bayonets, the soldiers in their brown uniforms, the cities, had turned to air.

They sat in the crater, back-to-back, and listened to a round of gunfire. The sound was close, behind the hill, but not enough to worry. Sitting like this, the heaviness of her head against his own would tilt his forward. Matthew pulled his knees up to his chest and clasped his arms around them. In the hollow of his back, Ani’s shoulder blades felt like two small wings.

Inside the crater, no wind blew. Outside, on solid ground, there were strips of shade and light, but in here the light turned strange, almost liquid. There were no plants, nothing that grew. The bottom of the crater curved up like a boat, a hollow in which he and Ani could rest. In here, he, too, became something else, his body so insubstantial it seemed a memory of itself. Only by removing himself completely from the crater, by climbing carefully back over the lip, could he become whole once more.

He watched a gust of wind stir the branches of the trees. Leaves and flowers spun slowly down, twisting in slow and intricate spirals.

Unlike Ani, who tried to remember everything, Matthew had kept only a handful of memories from before the war. These stood out from his thoughts, shining like coins in a bowl of water.

When he told this to Ani, she asked, “What is the very first thing that you remember?”

His mother washing him in a round tin bucket. This was long ago, when they had lived in a small house beside the rubber plantation. His mother would set the tub on the ground outside, and she would fill it with cool water. Then, kneeling in front of him, she would unwrap him from his clothes, lift him up and set him down in the tub. The cold water shocked his skin, and the surprise mingled with the yelling of the rubber tappers, the flash of bulbuls and kingfishers above him. In the background, he heard warning shouts, coconuts knock-knocking to the ground. With fingers spread wide, one of his mother’s hands spanned Matthew’s back. She poured water from a cup, and the liquid sheeted down his skin. If he lay flat, bending only his knees, he could rest his head on the bottom of the bucket. His mother’s voice blurred and became a metallic echo in the water. Matthew remembered watching their shadows on the ground, his flowing into his mother’s, then coming apart.

“And what else?” Ani loosened her hair from its braid and it opened up in waves.

His mother planting vegetables, in preparation for the war. The garden was hidden in a cleared area in the jungle. In the mornings, she would bundle him up and place him inside a large basket, along with a canteen of water. The basket was attached to one end of a pole. A second basket, filled with food, was attached to the other end. She then picked up the pole and, balancing it across her shoulders, began walking up the road. The fronds of the basket were itchy against his skin, and they smelled of wood husk. Matthew, lying back and looking at the sky, could see his mother pass in, then out, of sight.

At some point, they would come to a bridge. He heard it long before he saw it, a roar in his ears that grew louder, so loud that it flooded his vision. His mother would adjust the pole along one shoulder, causing the basket to dip and sway. He would look out and see the river, a deep blue field. Fear made him lie still. If he fell, he would not be able reach out, open his arms and catch himself. From moment to moment, he swung like a pendulum, his body handed from the sky to the water and back again.

Nearby to that garden in the jungle, he remembered, his father had buried sheets of rubber from the plantation, so that his fortune would not fall into Japanese hands.

Ani’s memories had always been different. She had walked with her parents from the Dutch East Indies over the hills into Tawau, then north across the spine of the island and into Sandakan. She remembered passing the volcanoes of Semporna, the smooth cones that encircled the city.

“It took a whole season,” she told him now, lying back in the crater. “I was too small to walk the entire way, so sometimes my mother tied me to her back and carried me. The cloth was bound so tight, I felt as if I was a part of her body.” She closed her eyes as she spoke. “We had no map. My father knew his way along the jungle tracks. Some days we went by river and some days through the jungle.”

Near the start of the war, her mother had given birth to a baby girl. It had been during the rainy season in Sandakan, and the baby was very small. Sometimes the baby would cry, but her cry was muffled, as if she had a painful throat. Later, when she cried, no sound came out at all. The baby died in her mother’s arms, but even then the baby could not let go. She tried to pull her mother after her, into the place where she was going. “Because my sister was so small,” Ani said, “and she was frightened of going alone.”

Her mother’s body had become feverish. When she held her mother’s hand, Ani could feel the pulse beating fast, as if she were running away. The indent of Ani’s fingers remained, the skin like a piece of fruit left too long in the field. “Saira,” her father said, repeating the name, calling her back. “This is your home.” Night after night, Ani and her father stayed beside her, listening as her breathing slowed and slowed, slipping free. She died while they slept, and by morning her body was already cool.

The Japanese ordered her father to work on the airfield at Mile 8. The workers had no tools, no changkul or axes or machetes. Sometimes, when her father returned to the house on Jalan Satu, so weary he could not lift his arms, he would nudge a small potato from his pocket and lay it in her hands.

Each day, she walked along the fringe of the jungle looking for fern tips, swamp cabbage and yams. Perhaps, she said, she could learn to live off the air, the way the plants transformed sunshine into food. It was true. Sometimes, when she lay down in the hot grass, the sun soaking into all of her limbs, she felt a round and perfect fullness settling in her body. “We used to roast wild boar outside over coals,” she said. “The meat was so soft it melted on your tongue, it slid like sugar into your stomach. At night now, I have dreams about it.”

Before she died, her mother had told her that she might find other family in Tarakan, in the Dutch East Indies, after the war. She asked Ani to promise her that she would go back one day, if she could. There were uncles, aunts and crowds of cousins. Ani said that she imagined a row of houses, each one opening to welcome her, each face a reminder of her mother’s. When the war was truly over here in Sandakan, she would keep her promise and travel back to her family; she would walk back over the ridges of Borneo and into the Dutch East Indies, high above the little islands and the glowing blue sea. In the hills, she remembered, there were wildflowers. There were flowers whose cups were the length of a child’s body. One could sleep inside, she thought, if the rains came. Folded up in a smell.

He said they could go together. The town of Sandakan was gone, but he still remembered where all the buildings once stood, the Sandakan Hotel, the eyeglass shop, the clattering racket of the tin makers and the cloth banners that beat in the wind. The Japanese soldiers had stolen everything, and then the British planes had set it all on fire. Thick black smoke had overrun the sky. All their possessions, his father’s books, Matthew’s bag of red circassian beans, no longer part of the world.

When two elephants fight, what does it have to do with us? This is what the men in town had said before the war, when Britain and Japan seemed far away.

The ground was rubble, strange twisted shapes. If you touched them, pieces came off in your hands. Once, he and Ani had come across a coconut plantation that no longer bore fruit, and he asked her now if she remembered where it stood. The trees, thin and silvery, had been sawed off at the top so that nothing grew from the crown. A pale forest with no canopy, hundreds of slender lines, as if they had been surprised and then somehow ambushed.

“Near to the ghost road,” she said. “But nobody goes there at night.”

Matthew had heard rumours about this place, Mile 8, the prisoner-of-war camps. There, prisoners were cursed to walk forever. They said only, jalan jalan, carrying other soldiers on their backs. Men lay in the mud and begged for food, but they disappeared when you reached out to help them. Ani said that if you walked there, you might cross the line unknowingly and find yourself unable to return to the place of the living.

“Do you think it hurts?”

“No,” she said. “It happens too fast.” Her eyes were closed, and when she spoke again, her voice was clear, as if bracing itself. “I think people don’t realize they’re dying, they feel no pain. It comes too quickly, when their thoughts are turned the other way.”

He moved his fingers along the ground, tracing a series of lines in the dirt. Sometimes his thoughts felt like a moving stream, a flickering light. He missed his shoes. He remembered the feel of them, how they rubbed against his heels, reminding him all the time of their presence. He and Ani were sitting up on the edge of the crater now, in the shade of candlenut trees. Ani placed her hands one over the other, making the shadow of a swan on the ground. She set the swan down on his knee. When it touched his skin, the hands flew apart, the illusion vanished. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, so softly that the words seemed a part of his own thoughts. “We’ll always take care of each other, no matter where we go.”

She laid her head against his shoulder, and he closed his eyes for a time.

Ani had told Matthew how, three days after her father disappeared, she had walked the Leila Road to Mile 8. It was early in the morning, still dark; only the rubber tappers had started the day. The night before, rumours of mass killings had spread to the huts. She had followed the rumours there, to the airfield, where she saw pieces of clothing, stained, and then she recognized her father’s body. Bullets had opened his chest. She stood a few feet away, unable to move closer, to touch him. The nightjars and the cicadas crowded her ears with their sound. She cried without hearing herself; for how long, she didn’t know. By the time she looked up, the sky had grown pale. She had to leave. The road that she walked on led past the prisoner-of-war camps. Someone in the dark reached through the fence, took hold of her hand. Tolong, he said. Help me. He pressed money into her palm, a few words in broken Malay, a name. He wanted her to take a message to someone who lived on the hillside. She could smell him, the prisoner, blood and sweat and urine.

Ani grasped the money in her hand and turned, running, her bare feet sinking into the mud. She expected to hear a voice, a gunshot, but nothing followed after her. The road curved down along the hill, and, in the dawn light, the sea was a burning blue. It reminded her of the chrome on a car she had seen once. Before. Long ago. When cars had first appeared in Sandakan, rolling off the steamers.

She saw the mangrove trees, vividly green, curving away from the shore. Her thoughts spun loose. There was no way for her to bury her father. Before, a gravestone would be made and there would be ceremonies, the same as they had carried out for her mother, the doors of the house kept open for three nights to mark the passing of her mother’s soul into the land of the dead. In the dark, she and her father had stayed awake, naming the birds by their sounds, each nudging the other if one of them began to drift to sleep. “She has a great distance to travel,” her father had said. “Much farther than when we walked from Tarakan. In the afterlife, she lives in a village just like the one she was born in. She will cook and clean and help with the planting. But it is like our world turned upside-down. Plenty of food and happiness, and no one knows suffering. But sometimes souls get lost and are unable to find their way. That’s why we must stay awake and make sure that she is sent away properly. It is our most important task.”

Her father had been lying on the airfield for three days. Too late, already, to help him; his soul had departed, though he did not know the way. Ani imagined that the line of dead was long, a single-file line, and he could follow the trail that had been left by others. That, in itself, was a blessing.

On the road, the money clutched in her hand, she could see the islands off the coast, round turtle backs floating on the sea. Beside her, bellflowers hung suspended upside down. She imagined holding a gun in her arms, she saw a lost child, a dead girl, standing where she stood, feet sinking in the mud. The sun was rising. She looked through the sights, her hand poised in the instant before firing. Their spirits were so far from home, the landscape was so changed, so ruined, they would never find their way back.

Ani left that girl standing there, the air still shattering around her. She walked in the direction of the mud huts, keeping to the right of the path, in case a soldier came suddenly onto the road before her.

There are mornings when Matthew wakes and he forgets that he is old. He thinks that he is seven, perhaps ten years old, but then it is like being on a hilltop in the fog. He cannot see five feet ahead or five feet back.

When he thinks of those years, there is a particular place that he sees, Leila Road, before it was paved and renamed, before the new developments began to crowd the hillside. It was a dirt track in the 1940s, and he had walked it many times, sometimes alone, sometimes with Ani. He remembers something that she told him once. They had been playing main lering, a game with a stick and a hoop. “If you dream about a hoop, it means that you have come to the end of your troubles and that only abundant happiness will follow.”

Almost sixty years have passed since then, and he lives here, in Canada, a country that considers itself young. Where he comes from was broken, reborn, North Borneo, now East Malaysia, reshaped and growing. He has seen the country recently in photographs, the glittering cities, the twin towers in Kuala Lumpur rising above the skyline, eighty-eight storeys high. In speeches reported by the international press, the prime minister of Malaysia speaks of a multimedia super corridor, a futuristic business centre in the heart of the nation, taking the place of the palm oil, rubber and coconut plantations that he remembers so well.

When the war finally ended in September of 1945, Matthew and his mother fled Sandakan alone, fearful in the night. In the decades that followed, he returned only twice, both times thinking that he could find a reason, a person who could bind him together, contain his memories, finally. The first time he returned, he was eighteen years old. The town had changed greatly, and he could not recognize the buildings. One day, he came to the end of Leila Road and stepped into the jungle. The trees closed behind him, and he felt a curtain come down between him and the life that he knew, the solid houses, the rubber plantation. All the yearning that he carried – for change, to be afraid no longer – began to quiet. He saw that the grief that overwhelmed him might be set aside. It was possible, if only he were strong enough. He could leave Sandakan, let Ani go, create for himself a different life, separate from the future he had once imagined.

Here, in Canada, the roads are clean and straight, and the landscape, familiar now, steadies him. His memory, which has weakened throughout the years, sometimes causes him to doubt himself. The dead slip through his hands, leaving only a wash of silence. “What are you thinking?” his wife will ask him, seeing that he is lost. He is trying to hold on to his father’s voice, the face of his child, the days that marked the end of the war. Even now, too late, he imagines finding the way out. In his nightmares, he tries to tell his father that another path exists, that the centre of his self, the goodness that makes him whole, once lost, can never be recovered. But the words that Matthew speaks carry no sound, they are a rustling on the air.

During those long hours when he cannot sleep, he tries to piece together every detail. He remembers a night when Japanese soldiers came to the hut, how he tried to make himself invisible. He pictures the basket in which his mother carried him, how he had swung, safe, above the rising water. The voices of the Japanese soldiers fell around him. “Are you hungry?” they asked him, teasingly. “ Makan makan?” His mother had warned him not speak, not to show any emotion. He could only nod his head, his body motionless before them. They could kick him aside or let him be.

The Japanese soldiers held a sheaf of forms, a list of the requisitions to be made. Not only crops and livestock, but also fishing boats and nets, the means to earn a living. His father signed page after page while the soldiers nodded, smiling. They said that they were anxious to involve the local population, they declared that Japan would be a guiding hand, a light, for Asia. His father accepted the reward, pieces of meat or dried fish, tins of vegetables, cigarettes.

When the soldiers left the hut, his father’s face was calm. Ink smudges marked his fingers and the edge of his right hand. At dinner, he took almost nothing for himself, only a bit of millet or an extra ball of rice. As Matthew and his mother ate, he studied them, watching closely, as if he took comfort in their movements, as if the familiarity of their presence could convince him that nothing had been lost.

Only once did Matthew hear his mother’s despair. She begged his father to come to his senses. She said that they would find a way to make do, somehow. We can go to Tawau. We can stay with my family. Matthew’s father had wept. The war is everywhere. She said that when the British returned, there would be no safe place for him. His father had closed his eyes, blocking her out. People are calling you a collaborator, she said. A murderer.

Lying on his cot, watching, Matthew had felt his body cramp with fear and hunger. To drown out the words, he thought of food, meat cooked in sugar, and it started a rumbling of pain so clean he no longer heard silence or sound. He knew that only his father’s actions protected them. Rumours, descriptions from nearby towns had trickled in. Sook ching, the killings were called, a cleansing. Entire households, villages, destroyed. Day and night, these killings entered his dreams.

Before the war, when men from the British North Borneo Company had roamed the streets, and the red flag with the Union Jack and the lion had fluttered above the harbour, his father had worked beside those British men. On Friday evenings, they would drink cognac on the padang, laughing easily in English and Malay. Matthew still remembers the postcards addressed to his father that lined the shelves of the old house, showing photographs or paintings of distant cities, London, Singapore, Berlin. When his father was Matthew’s age, he had travelled alone, by ship, from China to Malaya, and onwards to North Borneo. He said that when Matthew was older, they would travel together back to his village in China. They would pack their trunks with gifts, and no one would recognize the frightened boy who had been sent away some twenty years before. He had changed, his father said, remade himself. He had become a man who could be at home in any place in the world.

When the British surrender began, his father had gone methodically through the drawers, discarding the remnants of their previous lives, evidence of his work for the British North Borneo Company. When he came to the postcards, he ripped them up; at first, one at a time, then in handfuls, the pieces scattering on the carpet. His face was expressionless. Only after he left the house did Matthew’s mother kneel down, sweeping the pieces up with her hands, leaving no evidence.

The face that Matthew remembers now, more than fifty years later, is indistinct. He sees his father as if through a layer of dust, a tall man walking, his back held straight, towards the road. When he turns to look at Matthew, his eyes are empty, the light hollowed out. He tells Matthew that it is too late, that understanding cannot save him, the home, the town that lies in ruins. Go back the way you came, he says. You cannot know, cannot imagine, all that has led up to this moment.

The last time they climbed up this far, to the end of Leila Road, they had heard rifle shots shattering the air. He and Ani had run into the jungle, crouching together in the mud. More shots were fired, and then they heard a troop of men approaching. Soon, a group of prisoners appeared on the road, half naked, dirt clinging to their skin, their bodies cavernous. They walked on legs that were like cherry stems, threatening to break. Japanese soldiers surrounded the prisoners, a fence of brown uniforms, of guns and bayonets. Some of the men were ill; it was clear they would not survive much longer. They stumbled uphill, away from Sandakan and the camp, following the road to where it ended, becoming only mud and jungle. They continued, into the trees.

Matthew closed his eyes. Eventually, he felt Ani taking hold of his hand, pulling him up. The road was deserted once more, and she led him to a small river where they could wash the mud from their clothes. She had walked in wearing her sarong, hiding her face under the water, and he could not see her expression. He had watched her hair rising to the surface, floating like a sheet of silk.

Later, they heard that the British and Australian prisoners had been sent on a long march through the jungle to Ranau, a town more than 250 kilometres away. Those who could not walk had been killed, at the outset or during the journey, and their bodies left unburied.

Now, from the crater where they sat, he and Ani could see smoke, thick and dark, rising from the airfield and the prisoner-of-war camps. Flames suddenly became visible, flickering above the trees. Without speaking, they got to their feet, hearing a truck, an engine idling somewhere nearby. Half-running, half-walking, they went back along Leila Road in the direction of Ani’s hut.

It was on the hillside, one in a row of similar structures, built from discarded wood and topped with a tin roof, now rusted. Inside, it was empty except for a few items of clothing folded neatly on the ground. Everything else had been sold or traded. They lay back on the mud floor, flies hovering around them, but he was too tired to brush them away. Rain began, millions of tiny hammers on the roof.

“I brought these for you.” He reached into his pocket and retrieved the two slightly crushed cigarettes. He knew they could be used to buy food on the black market, that cigarettes had become more valuable than the Japanese imperial money that everyone carried.

She smiled, holding them up, turning them round and round, then she laid them on her stomach. He saw the first tear trickle out of one of her eyes, slide into her hair, and disappear.

For a moment he was stunned silent. Then he said, hesitantly, “When the British return, the shops will open again, and we’ll go down to the market to buy rice, and also flowers to decorate the table.”

Ani nodded, listening, and he went on. He said that the mission school would reopen, and they would each be assigned their own desk, with its sliding drawer for pencils and paper and textbooks wrapped in brown paper. At lunchtime, they would play football on the padang. The field would be watered each evening so that, under the noon sun, the grass was a brilliant green.

He remembered the ringing of the St. Michael’s Church bell on Sundays, how all the men stood together in their crisp, white shirts, and the women, in their sarongs and brightly coloured dresses, laughed together under the shade of the trees.

He and Ani lay in silence, and he reached out and held her hand. When sleep began to brush at the edges of his thoughts, he heard her voice beside him. “Once,” she said, “a long time ago, there was a man who was very poor and desperate. His wife had died, and then each of his children.” For many years, he had wandered the island, but the land was not plentiful as it once had been, and all the plantations were owned by only a handful of wealthy men. One night, as he slept beneath the open sky, he was surprised by thieves, and these men took from him all that he had. Even this was not enough to appease their anger, and the men beat him and threw his body into a canal and ran away into the night.

Matthew nodded and sighed; in his mind, he cradled the bleeding man and wiped the blood from his wounds.

Ani spoke quietly, her voice a whisper, leading him through the story. When the man opened his eyes, she said, it was daylight. He crawled out of the canal and found himself in the centre of a vast padi field that had not yet been planted. In all his years of wandering, he had never come across a field like this; from east to west, from north to south, he knew, the land was jealously guarded. In the distance was a simple house, and the man began to walk in that direction, hoping to be granted work that would see him through the coming season. His knock at the door was answered by an old woman. When the man offered his labour, she asked if he would take one-fifth of the crop in lieu of payment, and the man joyfully accepted.

The man laboured in the padi fields, trying to remember all the skills he had learned. Month after month, he poured his knowledge into the field. The soil was rich and fertile, and the rains arrived and watered his crop. When it neared the time for harvest, he opened one pod but found it was empty. Each night he opened another, and each night he found it empty.

This was where Matthew began to drift to sleep, breathing in the dry muddy smell of the hut, Ani’s calm, low voice blanketing him. The afternoon rainfall began to ease. He thought he lived inside a cupboard, then, some place warm and safe that housed only he and Ani.

“Every day, the old woman asked him, ‘When shall we harvest?’ And he said, ‘Tomorrow.’ The man was so ashamed that he decided he had to run away.

“On the day he was to leave, he decided to look one last time. When he opened a pod, he saw that it was filled with gold. He opened another and another, and each pod spilled tiny pieces of gold into his open hand.”

The first time he stepped onto an airplane, it was 1953. He was eighteen years old and he was heartbroken. From the air, he had gazed down at Sandakan, the tidy rooftops, the vast plantations and, surrounding everything, jungle. In the years after the war, people in North Borneo had grieved their dead, laying stones and burning incense, tending the graves of their loved ones. But a collaborator is someone forever apart. His father had no grave in Sandakan, and his spirit floated untended, unmourned, except in Matthew’s thoughts, and in those of his mother. As the airplane rose higher, the thread that connected Matthew to the town grew taut, stretching, until it finally gave way. When the plane turned towards Australia, he looked down and saw the island of Borneo, so grand and beautiful in his imagination, diminish to a speck on the wide sea.

That memory merges into another, of his daughter, standing in the departure lounge of the Vancouver airport. He watches as his daughter embraces his wife. They are at ease with one another, they have always been, their attachment visible for all to see. She is twenty-four years old, full of hopes, expectations, on her way to study in Europe. This is her first journey away from them.

The fluorescent lights press against his eyes. He is brought back by his daughter’s touch. She has turned towards him, and in Matthew’s arms now she is slender and fragile. She has Clara’s face, open and generous, always perceptive. The airport, brightly lit, full of noise and chaos, falls away from them. For a moment, he is a child again, sitting on his father’s shoulders, far above the ground. This is a time before the war, the leaves in the rubber plantation are a canopy high above them, and he listens to the sound of his father’s footsteps. But the lamps go out and he is alone in the trees. The question haunts him still: To what lengths would he go to keep his child safe? How much of himself would he sacrifice? When she was young, Gail had followed him everywhere. All these years, he has tried to understand how their relationship changed. He has failed her in some way, he thinks, closed himself off in order to protect her, to protect them both. Whenever she asked about his childhood, about her grandparents and the life he lived in East Malaysia, he smiled, looked away, or brushed her questions aside. In this new country, he told himself, there would be no need to reach back into the past for consolation. He has long accepted that some questions will find no meaningful answers, some stories cannot bear repeating.

Don’t leave, he wants to say, holding her. How can I help you to understand?

Instead, he keeps his peace. And his daughter, so full of life, so young, kisses him gently on the cheek. Then she turns and walks away, disappearing through the gate.

Inside the hut, the absence of noise wakes him. Matthew sits up, cross-legged, waiting patiently to get his bearings. Outside, the rain has stopped, and the doorway is edged in faint light. Ani is still asleep, her mouth slightly open. A jade pendant, once worn by her mother, lies beside her on a square of cloth.

He touches her shoulder to say goodbye. One of her hands clutches the fabric of her sarong. She does not stir.

Outside the hut, he sees the last of the sunset, a sliver of turquoise light against the curve of the hill. He follows the road, where the thin trunks of the rubber trees leave a shadow, barely perceptible. At the side of the track, almost hidden by the grass, he notices a bicycle wheel lying abandoned and he goes to examine it. Lifting the wheel in his hands, he remembers a game of main lering played on Jalan Campbell on a hot, dusty day, how the rains started and the wheel was forgotten. Someone found fruit on the ground, a fresh coconut, and the children broke the shell open and shared the liquid between them.

There were other games, too. Congkak, played on a wooden board pitted with eight holes. Its bottom curved like a boat, one end rising up in the shape of a magical bird. To play, they’d used shells, seeds or stones, whatever was at hand. The loser would have to place the congkak board on his head and walk up the road and back again, the other children laughing alongside him.

Matthew finds a branch at the side of the road and sets the wheel upright, then pauses, listening. It is a busy time of evening, yet the road is empty. Where are the trucks, the labourers returning from the plantations, people hurrying home before curfew?

He puts the wheel in motion, using the branch to keep it steady. As he quickens his pace, the sky changes to red, to purple. The colours appear so solid, he feels that he could reach up and pull the sky down, settle it over him like a vast curtain.

Eventually he comes to a place where the trees part, and he has a clear view down to the harbour. Below, smoke is rising from the Japanese administration buildings, the wind carrying it towards the water, where it hangs, suspended, in the twilight. There is a bonfire, soldiers gathered around. Fragments, pieces of paper, float in the air above them.

Even after the heavy rain, the road is dusty once more. He continues walking, and the bicycle wheel rolls quietly beside him.

The hut comes into sight, his father standing in the doorway. Matthew is suddenly aware of the dust on his skin, the layer of dirt on his clothes. He hesitates, not wanting to disturb his father’s thoughts, not wanting to be seen, and the wheel, steadied by his hand, glides to a standstill beside him.

His father is looking in the other direction, down the road. Then he turns, sees Matthew, and motions him forward with his hand. “Come, Matthew,” he says. “There is something I need you to do.”

Matthew lays the bicycle wheel against the side of the hut, then follows his father inside. His mother is nowhere to be seen; she must still be visiting her brother on the far side of the plantation. His father pushes the cabinet aside and brings out the radio, but he doesn’t switch it on. Instead, while Matthew watches, his father kneels down again. When he straightens, he is holding a large glass jar filled with coins and bills.

“Look at me.” His father’s eyes are clear, his shoulders relaxed. “This is British currency,” he says, placing one hand lightly on Matthew’s arm. “This will be valuable again after the war is over. Do you understand?”

Matthew nods.

“I want you to go into the plantation. You must be very careful and you must make sure that no one sees you. No one at all. Not the Japanese, not the workers, nor any children hanging about.” His father puts his cigarette to his lips, draws, then exhales, studying Matthew. “Count out the rows. At the thirtieth row, go to the thirtieth tree. I want you to bury this jar in that exact place. Do you understand?”

“Yes, father.”

“Good.” His father stands up. He puts the jar into an old rice sack. “Take it now. Make sure that you are not seen.”

Matthew nods, his stomach tightening.

“Now,” his father repeats, his voice firm. “Go quickly.”

Matthew takes hold of the sack. He is surprised by its weight, but he swings it carefully over his shoulder.

“When you return,” his father says, almost as an afterthought, “stay inside the hut. Keep the door closed and wait for your mother. Everything will turn out for the best.”

The last of the day’s light is gone, but already he can see the moon, low in the sky. Matthew shifts the weight on his shoulders. He walks forward a few steps, then glances back. His father is outside, leaning against the hut, head bowed, and he reaches into his shirt pocket, withdrawing a handkerchief. He wipes his face and hands, then straightens his body and steps slowly, resolutely, away from the wall.

Matthew begins to run. When he reaches the edge of the plantation, he is breathing fast. Behind him, a truck rumbles along the road, and when he stops and turns he sees that the truck has come to rest in front of the hut and two Japanese soldiers are climbing out. His father goes to meet them. Matthew stands motionless. The leaves of the rubber trees shift in the wind and a light breeze cools his sweating body. He lowers his arm, lets the sack rest on the ground. The sounds twist around him, a bird or an animal crying, and from somewhere nearby, the acrid smell of smoke.

In the distance, he sees three distinct flares as cigarettes are lit; the embers are visible, though small as fireflies. Beside him, the plantation seems immense, unfathomable without the light from the kerosene lamps. He has never gone into it alone, and never when the lamps were unlit.

He walks into the plantation and the light of the moon dims. Beneath the canopy of trees, the darkness seems to press against his eyes, a blindfold, a weight. He walks on and on, touching each tree as he passes it. Something on the ground catches his feet, and he stumbles forward. There is a smell of vomit, of decay. When he puts his hands down, trying to steady himself, they are in water, something wet. His heart collapses inside his chest. He has lost count. Terrified of making a mistake, he retraces his steps. He finds his way back to the road, beyond the trees where the moon is once again visible.

Far away, the three embers glimmer in the dark. His legs, trembling, give way and he crouches on the ground. His entire body is shaking now, and he wishes that his mother would return, that she would light the last candle-end. A tiny flame glowing inside the hut to bring him home.

He does not want to disappoint his father, but he cannot step back into the trees. Breathing heavily, he lifts the sack onto his shoulder and stands. He walks in the direction of the hut.

As he draws near, he begins to hear their voices, softer than usual. A few seconds later, he is close enough to make out their words, but he stays hidden in the dense brush beside the road. They are speaking in broken Malay, sometimes changing to Japanese. He stops and kneels on the ground, almost behind the hut, hugging the sack to his chest.

The Japanese lieutenant is standing beside his father. Matthew recognizes him immediately, a man taller than all the rest, who, when he comes to the hut, brings meat and cigarettes. The lieutenant is speaking. He says that Australian soldiers have landed in the west of Borneo.

In his hands, his father is holding another jar, also filled with money.

“It’s over,” the lieutenant continues. “I don’t have a choice any more.”

His father’s voice is quiet, strained. “And the others who worked with me. I went into town. The offices are abandoned.”

“The others?” The lieutenant pauses, exhales a plume of smoke. He says, angrily, “What do you think happened to the others?”

The second Japanese soldier walks a few paces back, glancing into the open door of the hut. Matthew quiets his breathing, wills his body to become a part of the darkness. The moon traces the faintest light on the ground.

His father turns to face the soldier. “Come,” he says, his voice almost a whisper. “Take this money.”

The soldier laughs. “You see, we know you. That’s just what I expected you to say.”

“I thought you would have tried to leave Sandakan.” The lieutenant’s voice is casual. “I thought you understood; the most dangerous time is when war is over.” He drops his cigarette-end on the ground and puts it out with his boot. Reaching into his pocket, he takes out a box, opens it, and offers it to Matthew’s father. Two more cigarettes are lit.

The ember of his father’s cigarette wavers in the air, and for a moment his father gazes into the trees as if searching for something, an opening, a way to escape. His eyes rest on the patch of ground directly in front of Matthew. His father lifts his eyes, and Matthew knows that he has been seen. He wants to stand up and go to him. He begins to push himself up from the ground, but the expression on his father’s face, surprise, but something more, grief, incomprehension, stops him. His father closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, they seem to burrow into Matthew’s body, holding him still. The lieutenant says quietly, “Where are your wife and son?”

His father does not answer at once. “My wife is with her brother,” he says finally. “I do not know where my son is.”

Time passes, and his father holds the lieutenant’s gaze.

The lieutenant looks towards the hut. He walks to the doorway, steps in, and disappears.

“Please,” his father says. “Take this money.”

The lieutenant re-emerges. He approaches Matthew’s father, taking the jar thoughtfully in his hands. His eyes drift over the trees. Matthew’s legs, frozen in a kneeling position, begin to tingle, and a wave of sickness causes him to bow his head, eyes watering. The lieutenant taps his cigarette and the ashes fall to the ground. “From what I hear, all of Tokyo is burning. There isn’t a building standing. It’s tragic, but this is the nature of war, and you and I, we are both on the losing side.” He pauses, looks down at the jar in his hand. “Maybe you don’t believe it, but I pity you. I’m offering you a choice. Come with us now. Let’s not do this here in the open.”

His father’s voice is low. “Everyone knows what happened here, this will not change the things that matter –”

The other soldier, standing by the door of the hut, has come forward. With a heavy movement, he swings his rifle into Matthew’s father’s back. His father is taken by surprise. He cries out in pain, falling forward on his hands and knees.

The lieutenant says something to the soldier, but Matthew cannot understand the words. His father crawls forward a little, then stumbles to his feet.

“I have done everything you asked. I’m begging you. I have a family –”

“I cannot help you any more.”

His father lurches forward and begins to run blindly towards the road. The soldier catches him easily and he swings his rifle up, where it remains for a second before he brings it forcefully down. His father crumples. His arms reach up to shield his head and Matthew can no longer see his face.

The lieutenant’s left hand, holding his cigarette, draws a line in the dark, and stops. The soldier sets his rifle casually on the ground. In his hand there is now a pistol. He puts the pistol against Matthew’s father’s head. His father starts to say something, three or four words, but Matthew hears only “ Tolong, tolong. Please,” before the first shot is fired. His father’s body shudders and falls forward. He hits the ground chest-first, both arms outstretched, the hands open. Matthew scrabbles at the grass as if he might crawl towards his father, but his fingers close around air. The world empties before the second and third shots. While the sounds are still audible, the first soldier drops his left hand and lets his cigarette fall to the dirt.

The other man is picking up his rifle. They are speaking to one another in low voices, and then his father is lifted off the ground, swung and tossed into the back of the truck. The two men climb into the cab, the lieutenant carrying the jar of money. The engine starts, the headlights sweep the road. The truck reverses, bearing down on Matthew, the lights freezing him. The gears sound and the truck begins to roll forward. The truck turns down the road and drives away.

Matthew lies in the dark, unmoving. The sound of his breathing lifts away from him. The truck’s wheels have raised a cloud of dust and he can taste the road in his mouth, in the back of his throat.

His legs ache with the effort, but he pushes himself to standing. In the dark, he fumbles for the bag and pulls it over his shoulder. Then, turning, he walks slowly in the direction of the plantation.

All his thoughts are clear. He goes first to the storehouse where sheets of rubber hang to dry, and there he finds a small shovel. Then he goes back and begins to count out the rows. His eyes have now adjusted to the darkness. In front of the thirtieth tree of the thirtieth row, Matthew sets down the sack. There are notches in the wood, thin diagonal lines where the rubber has been tapped. All around him, he hears the itching sound of cicadas, a bird, unidentifiable night sounds.

In his mind, his father says again, Make sure no one sees you. Matthew stares into the darkness, then kneels on the ground. He traces an outline in the dirt, making a circle, then he begins to dig with the shovel. His father comes towards him. Please, he says to Matthew, go quickly. This is the place where he will plant the money. It will be like the seeds that his father warned him not to swallow, a strange plant growing from an unexpected place. After a few minutes, Matthew has made a small opening in the ground. Not enough. It has to be so deep that he can stand in it, with only his fingertips brushing the air.

His father gets to his feet. Take the money, he tells the men. He gestures towards Matthew, and Matthew steps out from his hiding place and onto the road. He goes to stand beside his father. His father places his hand on Matthew’s shoulder.

Minutes pass, perhaps hours. The plantation falls away, and he returns to the house on Jalan Campbell. High on a shelf, there is a wooden box whose contents he cannot see. All he hears is the scratch of a record, then a woman’s voice. Through a doorway, he glimpses his parents standing together, his mother holding a jacket open, his father sliding his arms into the sleeves. She runs her hands across his back. He turns to face her. Matthew climbs down into the hole that he has made. There are places so narrow that he has to use his body to widen the opening. When he is standing at the bottom, he reaches his hands up and turns his face towards the fresh air. The dirt surrounding him radiates heat, and he realizes that his entire body is sweating, he can feel the drops running from his hair, down his face and neck. Gripping the surface, he braces his knees against the walls of the hole and forces himself out. He feels no pain and no fatigue. His arms lift him out of the ground and he does not feel the effort.

Lying on his stomach, he lowers the sack as far as he can, then lets it go, hearing it strike at the bottom of the hole. The glass jar does not seem to break. Slowly, he replaces the dirt until the hole is completely filled. He packs the earth down carefully, using his hands and feet to remove any signs of disturbance.

As he does this, he listens for men or trucks, but even the cicadas have stopped their singing and the air is still. Again and again, his thoughts return to the burning embers, the rifle on the ground and the pistol in the soldier’s hand, but he pushes these images away. He has swallowed something wrong. Inside his skin, something that he cannot contain is pulsing and breathing, but there is no way to let it out.

Walking back, he sees a dull light flickering inside the hut and realizes that his mother has returned before him. He lingers outside, staring at the faint candlelight. Dirt is caked to his skin, and he stands in the grass, crumbling the pieces off with his hands. He has lost his shirt, but he does not remember how or when. There are no sounds of planes or gunfire; the night is extraordinarily calm, peaceful. Matthew gathers himself together and walks forward. Alongside the hut, he sees, as if from another time, the bicycle wheel and the stick lying beside it. He pushes open the door.

On the table, a low candle wavers. He stands motionless, looking into the shadows. The hut is empty.

There are two plates of food, rice and meat. The food smells so fragrant, so good, a dizziness comes over him, but he cannot bring himself to eat. One of the settings, he realizes, is meant for his father. A third dish, his mother’s, is sitting empty but unwashed on the other side of the table. His mother has been here, but now she has gone, and this realization makes him pause, eyes stinging. Did the Japanese soldiers return? But there is nothing out of place in the hut.

Shaking, Matthew walks to the other side of the table. Beside his parents’ bed, the metal tub has been filled with water; it is a still lake in the half-darkened room. He touches the surface, the water is warm. He can smell his mother’s soap, the small perfumed square that she keeps wrapped in paper. When he has taken off his clothes, he climbs into the bath. The panic begins to subside, and he slides down until only his mouth and nose remain above the surface, the dirt from the plantation dissolving off his skin. He keeps his eyes open as the room moves in waves above him.

Go now. Quickly. The soldiers in the truck drive away, and their lights sweep across his father, who stands on the steps watching them leave.

Matthew closes his eyes. His father falls backward. His legs dangle loosely from the soldiers’ arms.

Much later, a caravan of vehicles passes by on the road outside. The walls shake, and small ripples start to form in the water, expanding out, moving against his body. Matthew climbs out of the tub, dries his body with a sarong, and sits on his bed. He is waiting for his mother; she is getting ready for Sunday mass in a time before the war. She has a pearl necklace that rests in a cushioned box. When she puts it on, she turns first one way and then another, admiring the play of light along its length. In St. Michael’s Church, she sits on the bench beside him, and he leans his face against her body, the fabric of her dress shifting against his cheek.

Ani says, The boy buried his treasure in a hidden place. In this place, all the trees were silver, and fruit fell from the trees and lined the ground. For months and months, the boy cared for his secret. He nourished the soil and watered the dirt. One day, the first leaves appeared. The stems grew strong and the leaves became bountiful.

This is the treasure that allows the boy to return to the other side. For when he opens the leaves, pieces of gold fall into his hands. He has been trapped here for many, many years. As many years as it takes for a boy to grow into an old man.

He falls asleep to the sound of more trucks on the road, and he returns to the bridge his mother carried him over, the basket that rocked him back and forth, the sound of rushing water taking hold of him. This memory floods his vision. He opens his mouth and finds he can breathe it in, finds that the water miraculously pours out of his body, out of his skin.

Sometime in the middle of the night, he wakes hearing the door opening. His mother is there beside him, her hand smoothing his hair, smoothing the sarong that covers his body. She says that she has been down to the harbour. She has seen the Australian soldiers arrive in Sandakan. He looks up at her face, so beautiful to him, and he does not know if she is crying out of joy or sadness. She tells him that she has searched all night for his father. “I wasn’t here,” she says, her voice catching, tearing. She repeats the words, trying again. He tries to speak but no sounds come. She cups her hand against his head, as if to hold his thoughts, as if to stop them from sliding loose, and eventually sleep takes over once more.

He wakes expecting to see his father. Matthew opens his eyes, already picturing a day like every other: the radio in the room, the wire reaching up, his father concentrating on the sound. Instead, the room is still. He realizes that he has slept far longer than usual; the sun has risen, and he can see the light filtering in through the slats of the hut.

On the far side of the room, his mother is brushing her hair. It falls past her shoulders, down her back, and she gathers it up in her hands, slowly twisting it into a complicated knot. Her arms are too thin, too fragile. She is not yet aware of him. She faces the wall, as if imagining a mirror there, and brushes the stray hairs back from her face.

His mother turns and crosses the room. He tries to tell her that the one they love is not dead, that he is only hidden away, safe. Her eyes are dark and swollen. When she puts her fingertips to his cheek, her hands are trembling. She tells him that all the Japanese have gone away, they have given up Sandakan. Under cover of night, they abandoned the town and then disappeared. “Rest now,” she says, putting her lips to his hair, holding on to him. Without realizing it, she repeats his father’s words. “Everything will turn out for the best.”

Because he cannot bear to see her sadness, he closes his eyes, tries to find sleep again.

He lies still, the sarong covering his body. His heart is beating fast, and his mouth tastes of a bitter, metallic dust. When the war is truly over, he imagines that the cities will be empty places, that all the trees and shops and houses will be tidied away, swept clean like the bowl of a crater. Sleep comes, and in his dream, which is bright with colour and very clear, people move through the open space, a film of dust clinging to their bodies. The cities are like Sandakan. He walks the abandoned streets, remembering where each building stood, the tin maker, the eyeglass shop, everybody remembers, but no buildings will grow there again.

When he steps outside in the afternoon, the sky is white. His mother remains inside, and he closes the door behind him. When he kneels on the ground, brushing his hand over the loose dirt, he finds no cigarette ends, no boot marks, no stray bullets.

He begins to walk downhill, towards the harbour. There are people gathered beside their huts, listening to a radio that cuts in and out with static. Some have almost no clothes, they sit in the shade of the trees, or pace the grass. Two small boys hurry past him, almost running.

His father says, You must pay attention. Always pay attention.

Up in the sky, an airplane is coming nearer. Matthew watches small pebbles shiver across the ground. The plane descends through the clouds. The two boys are calling to each other. The younger one starts to scream. The plane is too close, flying so low, the trees in its path are bending away. Out of the belly of the plane, something falls. Matthew does not flinch or try to escape. He says, I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention. I can’t remember what day this is. A parachute opens, he watches the cloth open and snap. It passes by him, carrying a box, sailing down to earth. The box hits a tree, the parachute buckles, the lines fall down, and the silk blooms down around the tree, as if to protect it. A woman runs towards the box, dragging a child behind her.

He can feel his thoughts dissolving to liquid. Is it the heat? Which day was yesterday? Part of him tries to focus that picture in his mind, a hand opening to reveal a pistol. He sits down in the dust. At the tree, the woman with the small girl is lifting out cans of food. She is putting something into her pocket. Matthew watches her, and in his mind he hears gunshots. One shot, a pause, and then another. But the woman does not fall down. She laughs and smiles and pulls a blanket out of the box. Nobody reacts to the gunfire. But Matthew has thrown his body onto the road. He lies there, his hands gripping the dirt.

Some time later, a man lifts him up off the ground, and Matthew feels as if the weight of his own body has been left behind on the road. The soldier wears a brimmed, floppy hat and he has light-coloured eyes and he asks Matthew if he has eaten. The soldier tells him, in broken Malay, that the war is finished now, that he has nothing to be afraid of any more.