Certainty

4. Aloft

Clara sits beneath the skylight of her sewing room, a square of light falling through the window, marking a border around her. It is early morning, still but for the occasional birdsong, and an animal, a squirrel, she thinks, scurrying across the roof. The day is open in front of her, a pocket of space to fill. She will finish her sewing this morning, and then, later on, she will gather flowers from the garden and take them to the cemetery for her daughter.

She runs her hand across the newspaper, blinking the sleep from her eyes. The article she is reading tells how scientists in Austria have measured the shortest interval of time ever observed, one hundred attoseconds, or a quintillionth of a second. To imagine how long this is, the article says, if 100 attoseconds is stretched so long it lasts one second, one second would last 300 million years on the same scale. Time, Clara believes, is the great mystery. Since Einstein, physicists have argued that time is merely a convention, that only the speed of light is constant everywhere in the universe. If one travelled fast enough, time would bend, and one person’s past could theoretically become another person’s future.

In her workroom, a dozen costumes hang from a clothes rail. The show, a children’s production of The Nutcracker, is scheduled for September, completely out of season, but the children from the dance school don’t seem to mind. Over the last few weeks, they have trooped in for their fittings, girls in frothy tutus skipping down the hallway, the Snow Queen waiting, aloof, hands on her hips, in a sequined dress. Clara is putting the finishing touches on a giant head for King Rat. On her table is a stack of pipe cleaners which she plans to shape into whiskers.

From her window, she can see Matthew standing in the garden. He looks up at the August sky, the low sweep of clouds, then lowers his head, surveying the last of the summer flowers. Because of the arthritis in his knees, her husband walks slowly, with the aid of a cane. She is tempted to put down her coffee, to join him outside, but work cannot wait. The garden has always been Matthew’s domain. There, he loses track of himself and the hours. He can coax the most stubborn flowers into bloom.

In another hour or so, he will come back inside the house. Each morning is the same. They will put the kettle on for tea, prepare a light breakfast. Every act, every routine, helps, the way sitting in a car travelling along the highway can seem a comfort, a motion to fall back on, to keep their thoughts contained as they move into another place.

She had grown up in her father’s restaurant in Kowloon, and the Hong Kong that Clara remembers is cramped and vibrant, a city heated by the press of bodies. On Reclamation Street, where they lived, the buildings, crowded shoulder to shoulder, seemed to jostle for space. Laundry shook in the wind, people overflowed onto balconies, onto the sidewalks.

After school, during the dinner hour, she would work the floor of the restaurant, greeting customers as they stepped through the shuttered doors: elderly men, newspapers tucked under their arms, young women in shifts and trousers towing a line of children. In the kitchen, behind glass, cooks appeared and disappeared in the steamy air. “Ching Yun,” her father would say proudly, calling her by her Chinese name. “Hurry and bring this gentleman a glass of tea.” Always, she had felt at ease in the ebb and flow of the restaurant, chopsticks clicking against porcelain bowls, the clatter of her father’s abacus. She balanced a half-dozen plates in her arms, listening sympathetically when a customer complained about the state of the world, his children or simply the weather. Leftover food she carried to the back door, where the very old and the very young would congregate, carrying tin plates.

Behind the kitchen, faded linoleum stairs led up to their living space. She and her four younger sisters lived in one room, one on top of the other, sharing their clothes, their hairbrushes and slippers. Her sisters spent their days working in the restaurant, but Clara, as the eldest, had been enrolled at St. Mary’s School. In the evenings, while her sisters finished their chores, she sat at the dining table, writing essays or laboratory notes, or helping her mother with the sewing. She worked quickly, impatient to join her father in the sitting room, where each night he would open a novel and step away from the world. She gathered what lay discarded at his feet, reading, in English or Chinese, Father Goriot, A Tale of Two Cities, Journey to the West. Hours later, while the rest of the household slept, she remained awake, reading by candlelight. Her sisters sighed in their sleep, breathed in unison, while she, turning pages, shuddered or wept or shook with laughter.

In Journey to the West, the young monk Xuanzang is called by the Bodhisattva on a pilgrimage to India. He is joined on his travels by three disciples who have each been given the task of accompanying him in order to atone for past mistakes. To make amends. The stories that make up Journey to the West are enshrined in countless Chinese operas. On Sundays, she and her father would take the bus to the theatre, a converted temple, where they bought their tickets from an old whiskered man who slept in the booth with one eye open. Like a dolphin, her father said once, awake just enough to stay afloat. In the open auditorium that day, Clara made her way to the front, past the grandmothers seated on stools, drinking tea, littering the ground with sunflower seeds. She stood so close to the stage that the sound of the gongs exploded in her ears, tingling up her spine; she could see the stitching of the Monkey King’s yellow robes as he somersaulted across the stage. All the while, her father, beside her, followed the undercurrent of the story. The quest for enlightenment, the spiritual journey that remained at the core.

She was twelve years old the day, the moment, the city became altered for her. When she herself suddenly became clear.

The evening of the accident, her father had the radio on. From where she stood, sweeping the entrance to the restaurant, she heard the first chiming notes, a clang of cymbals. Inside the restaurant, an elderly man, his voice scratchy with age, began to sing. The diners clapped, calling encouragement, joining their voices with his.

It was twilight. She stood outside listening, the broom in her hand. A crowd of people had gathered on the sidewalk, looking up at the apartment building across the street. When she craned her neck back and lifted her eyes, she saw a boy pacing back and forth on the flat roof. A flash of colour slid across the sky, a kite high above him. The wind picked it up and twisted it round, a dragon with a long and flickering tail, spiralling.

She saw the edge of the roof, the boy walking without seeing it. Her throat caught.

It happened in the space of a second. The boy, head tilted up, watched the progress of his kite. He stepped backwards into air. Someone beside her screamed, and then she heard only silence. For a moment as he fell, his body unfurled, hands darting out, legs kicking away.

The crowd surged forward, and she began to run, reaching her arms out as if she could catch him. A few steps away, in front of her, the boy hit the sidewalk.

Voices cried out, a screaming that rose in volume, the sound travelling over her. The side of his head was badly crushed, his legs twisted grotesquely beneath him. The boy’s eyes were open, but she did not think he could see. People moved towards him, stopping when they saw blood staining the ground.

Seconds passed. Around her, nobody moved.

The air was thick. She had to push against it, fighting the sickness that rose in her chest. She forced herself to go and kneel beside him. Gently, she placed one hand on his forehead, and then carefully she took his hand.

Behind her, someone asked, “Is he still breathing?”

Clara nodded but she didn’t look up. “Call an ambulance.”

Footsteps hurried away. She heard a girl sobbing, calling for her parents, but nobody answered. The parents were not there, someone said, they had gone this morning to Hong Kong Island. At the sound of the girl’s voice, something changed in the boy’s expression, and Clara knew that he was looking at her, seeing her face. He was younger than she, perhaps ten years old. She held his hand tighter. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. His hair was matted and glistening, the blood still running out. She told him that this was only the beginning of a long walk, an important journey. He blinked up at her, seeming to understand, seeming to trust her. She said that she would stay with him for as long as she could.

The noise of the siren came to her then, a sound enveloping her like heat. The medics, a blur of white, surged forward. She saw them remove the boy’s hand from hers, and then someone placed their hands on her shoulders, pulling her gradually away.

When the ambulance had disappeared, she found herself alone, the bystanders gaping at the pool of blood, her stained clothes. She saw her father, the panicked expression on his face, as he made his way to where she stood. She began to walk in the direction that the ambulance had gone, but her father reached out, caught her hand, held her still.

Two nights later, he sat with her in a corner of the restaurant. He told her that the boy, in the presence of his parents and his sister, had died a few hours ago.

She nodded but said nothing.

“What are you thinking, Ching Yun?”

Around them, chairs scraped, voices rose and fell. “We all stood and watched it happen,” she said, at last. “If I had thought to call out to him, I could have stopped it. If I had only tried to reach him.”

He stared at her for a moment, saying nothing. Then he said that what she believed was false. The boy had been too far up, he had been lost in a world of his own.

She shook her head and pushed her chair back, standing up. Her father let her go. She went outside into the cool evening air. On the sidewalk, she smelled tobacco smoke and looked up to see the mechanics next door sitting on crates, cigarettes pinched between their lips. Fluorescent signs arced over the street, glowing bridges of colour. From the dwellings above, raucous laughter tumbled down. She heard the clatter of mahjong tiles, a chorus of radios.

She kept walking, across the street, up the stairs of the apartment building, until, finally, she reached the rooftop. This morning, she had learned from the boy’s sister that this had been his favourite place. He always wanted to be alone, his sister said, flying his kites, and when he was older, he wanted to find work on the merchant ships, to travel from port to port, seeing the world.

Below, the ground was neon, an electric river. In the distance, Kowloon Harbour was a series of tiny lights surrounded by a flood of dark, a breath away from Hong Kong Island. In her mind, she could fill in the emptiness, temples clouded by the smoke of burning joss sticks, streets reaching up like ladders, composed entirely of stone steps. At the summit, she imagined children setting their kites aloft.

Farther away were countries she had never set foot in, but which filtered through her imagination. Britain and China, India and America. For the first time in her life, she wanted to be anywhere but where she stood. She wanted to come to all things with the clarity in which she had seen the boy, and in which she had been seen by him.

When Clara was nineteen years old, her father took her aside to that same table. He set an envelope in front of her, the letter that she had been waiting for, an answer from the University of Melbourne. Her hands shook as she read the lines, then handed the sheet of paper back to him. Her father leapt to his feet, shouting the news to everyone in the restaurant. The cooks came out from behind the glass, her mother and sisters rushed to embrace her.

On that day, she gave herself an English name, as many young women were choosing to do, on their departure from Hong Kong. Leung Ching Yun, Clearest Spring, the name of her childhood slipped away from her, into the past. She wrote her new name out in the letter she sent to the University of Melbourne. Clara Leung.

As a young woman, when describing Matthew to friends, she would often speak of fate, of how she and Matthew had crossed paths on the narrow, snow-covered walkways of the university, of their chance meetings as they hurried from one class to another. They had the same group of friends, expatriate Asians in Melbourne, from as far away as Malaya, North Borneo, Thailand and Hong Kong.

She and Matthew had stood out from the group – the men mostly enrolled in science programs, the women taking classes at the secretarial college. She studied literature, hoping one day to be a schoolteacher. Matthew had started a degree in civil engineering, but a year shy of completion, he had given in to his longing and transferred to the history department.

She can still see him as he was then, a young man of twenty-three, his hair carefully combed, his expression serious. The first time Matthew came to the boarding house where she lived, he carried a bouquet of flowers in each hand. I couldn’t decide, he had told her, his eyes pensive. I couldn’t choose. He was wearing his usual clothes, slacks, a white shirt and a sports jacket. They spent the day in the kitchen, trying to recreate the dishes of their childhoods: laksas, dumplings, fragrant breads. Eleanor Henley, Clara’s landlady, was in charge of the turntable. She played Elvis and Slim Dusty, “A Pub with No Beer.” Eleanor watching Clara and Matthew with a knowing, motherly smile.

Standing over the stove, he asked about her family, about Kowloon. Clara described the restaurant, the crowded rooms where she and her sisters had amused themselves, dressing up in their parents’ finery. Each week, her mother would light sticks of incense and pour wine into tiny porcelain cups. She held whispered conversations with the ancestors, urging them to drink freely, to live well.

From the time of her adolescence, she told Matthew, she had known she would leave Hong Kong, she would go into the world beyond. Too many books, her mother had said, chiding her, too many idle dreams. And yet her parents had not tried to dissuade her.

At one point, when Eleanor turned her back, he whispered in her ear. Would she follow him anywhere, to Malaya, to Britain, to Canada? He looked at her as if afraid she might vanish from the room, vanish into thin air.

“Just ask,” she said, teasing. “Ask and you’ll know.”

The night she saw her first snowfall, they were sitting together in a restaurant, winter coats buttoned up against the chill. She and Matthew watched the twirl of snowflakes through the plate glass windows, sparks of white carried sideways by the wind. He began to tell Clara about his father. During the war, he said, his father had worked for the Japanese occupation forces, and in September of 1945 he had been murdered by the men he worked with. Hidden in the trees, he had seen his father’s death, watched as the body was thrown inside a truck, and the truck driven away. He spoke quickly, as if fearing the words themselves could cut him, as if he were hurrying along a narrow ledge.

The blurred lights of the passing cars slipped across their table. “And afterwards,” she said, softly. “How did you go on?”

“We left Sandakan, my mother and I. We took the steamer to Tawau, in the south. It was sudden. There was no time even to find his body, to bury it properly. Later on, in Tawau, my mother remarried. Her new husband had children of his own. She went on.” There was fatigue in his voice, but no anger.

“Sandakan was all that I had known. Everything I loved was there. The year I turned eighteen, I went back by myself. But people remembered my father. They knew what he had done during the war. They remembered things I hadn’t known at the time. I came to see that there was no place for me there, that what I wanted had disappeared long ago.”

His words trailed off, and he looked up at her, his eyes blank, as if he had lost his place. There was a cup of coffee on the table in front of him and he reached for it, holding it in his hands.

“So you left Sandakan,” she said, wanting to help him, to prod him forward. “And you came here.”

In his eyes, she saw uncertainty, and then a decision slowly taking shape. She waited, saying nothing.

“There was someone I had known there from that earlier time. A girl, Ani. Her parents had died during the war, but she still lived there, in Sandakan. We saw each other again.”

His voice changed when he spoke her name, a detachment that Clara heard as something more. For a time, he said, he had believed he would remain there, with her. But this was not to be. Instead, he left, coming here, to Melbourne. “That was five years ago.” His voice was distant, as if a lifetime lay between the heartbreak he had experienced and the man he was now. “After a while, I wrote to her, but there was no response. It was as if she had disappeared.” Finally, from his uncle in Sandakan, he learned that she was living in Jakarta. She had a child now.

His hands lay on the table, and he pressed them together, as if to contain some other question, to hold his memories still.

“There are things in my life that I hoped would turn out differently. Things that I thought I was capable of changing. But isn’t it this way for everyone?” He met her eyes. “The war was a rift, a scar. Going back only opened up the memory, but there was no solace. I only saw the terrible waste of it, the things I couldn’t change.” He said that when they graduated the following spring, he would not return to North Borneo. Australia was closed to Asian immigrants, but he had decided to apply to Canada. After graduation, would she marry him? Would she go with him to Canada?

She was twenty-one years old, and in her mind the choice was clear; she must commit herself, or pass by this opening forever. “Yes,” she said, believing herself strong enough, in love enough, to ground him and keep him safe. Around them, the restaurant dimmed and flickered, the passing cars, the snow. His childhood in Sandakan twisted like a wire in his body, but when she took his hand, it was a gesture that held a promise. I will take a share of your grief. If you trust me, I will carry it within my own heart.

In the cemetery, the leaves shimmer in the noon heat. On the far side of the grounds, an interment is taking place. A gathering of people, a gathering of flowers. A bulldozer sits a few metres away, waiting to compact the earth.

When she arrives at the marker, Ansel is there before her. He is leaning against the stone, his hands in his pockets. He talks to Gail, to himself. This conversation that never ceases.

She shows him the book she has brought with her, Journey to the West, the pages yellowed and brittle. For a little while, they reminisce about childhood belongings, and as they talk he turns the pages, studying the rows of Chinese characters. “It’s a puzzle,” he says. “Like standing on the lawn in front of someone’s house and wondering what it’s like inside.”

She is reminded of their first conversation after Gail died, when he came to her, distraught, saying that Gail had telephoned him, that he should have gone to her in Prince George. She thought then, as she does now, that the deepest pain comes from knowing that you are powerless, incapable of protecting the ones you love. A sudden death leaves so few answers. She and Matthew and Ansel are clutching at air, they are suspended in time. Her daughter was in the midst of life, she had so much more to ask, to say. Clara thinks of Ansel as a son. One day, he will meet someone else, he will fall in love and marry, it is inevitable. And what of her daughter? Gail will fade into the past, a memory, a ghost in his mind. There is no other way. One cannot live in the past.

He begins to walk among the headstones, stepping into a garden planted nearby, giving her some time alone.

From the bag she has brought with her, Clara takes out a small stack of paper squares, each one decorated at the centre with a piece of gold foil. These joss sheets are part of an old Chinese ritual, one her parents practised, and their parents before them. When she was a child, she would watch the women gathered together, their hands deftly rolling each sheet into a cylinder, puffing it out slightly with a breath of air, then tucking the ends together. These paper objects, shaped like small boats, represent pieces of gold and silver, precious ingots once used in Old China. One or two women, the most skilled, created more complex objects, a two-dimensional dress, a house, a wristwatch, even shoes, folded to lie flat. When the women set the offerings alight, the rising smoke would carry their gifts into the afterlife, where their ancestors, penniless, would gather them up and use these riches to pay their way through the land of the dead.

The ritual occupies her hands as she releases her mind, sets it down beside the idea of her daughter. The remembrance of her presence in the room, her heart beating quietly and in its own solitude – the physical form of the girl that she misses.

Occasionally, Matthew accompanies her here. He tends the flowers that he planted, in defiance of cemetery regulations. Now stonecrop and aster form a border around the marker, a brush of mauve and blue. Unlike Clara, her husband finds no comfort in being here. Since Gail’s death, his whole body has begun to curve forward, his gait has slowed to a shuffle. In six months, he has aged a decade. She knows that he is still looking for some other form of consolation. All his life, he has struggled to accept what cannot be changed, to hold fast to a core truth within himself. Judgment, goodness. The thread that would bind the two, and show him the way forward.

When they married in 1960, the wedding was lavish, a banquet thrown by her father in a fine hotel in Hong Kong. Clara’s parents gave them an antique wedding chest, made from rosewood, carved with a scene of ladies seated under cherry blossoms. Matthew’s mother had sent them a gift of money and a letter saying that she could not come, that her husband had been ill and she had to remain in Tawau to look after work in the plantation.

At night, when everyone had gone to sleep, Clara remained awake beside the rosewood chest, running her hands along the grooves in the wood. Her feelings for Matthew seemed to her like a fever, a lightness in her body. A lifetime, she had told herself. In front of us stretches a lifetime.

While they waited for their application to be assessed by the Canadian embassy, they lived with her parents, Matthew helping her father in the restaurant while Clara worked as a teacher’s assistant in the school where she herself had once studied. Two years later, their immigration papers were finally approved. That night, they had closed the door to their bedroom, lain down beside one another. “I was afraid to get my hopes up,” he said. Weeks later, in the lounge at Kai Tek airport, her parents and sisters gathered around and embraced her. She remembers, still, the scent of their hair, their perfume. To them, Melbourne had seemed the end of the world. Canada was unimaginable.

The morning she and Matthew arrived in Vancouver, the sky was overcast, the light diffused. Their plane descended towards the coastline, lowering through the clouds. The Pacific Ocean gave way to little islands, ribbons of land before the continent appeared before them. Clara was eight weeks pregnant and she had named her baby already – Gail, a gale wind, a strong wind – certain that she was carrying a daughter. She stared out the window, amazed at the blanket of trees, the city perched on the shelf of land.

They found an apartment near Main Street, a tiny one-bedroom overlooking East Broadway. While they waited for their furniture to arrive by steamer from Hong Kong, they slept on a thin piece of foam. Matthew would put his ear to her stomach, listening for movements of their child. He touched her stomach as if it were a precious glass, fragile and mysterious.

At first, the change in their lives, the adventure, carried them through the months. They used all their savings for the down payment on a home, a two-storey on Keefer Street. She felt as if they were adding details to a picture, bringing home a chesterfield one day, a second-hand coffee table the next. They measured the windows for curtains, which she sewed and embroidered by hand. At the second-hand shops downtown, she bought books and lined the shelves with them, adding them to the ones they had brought with them from Melbourne and Hong Kong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Look at me,” she said.

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

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