Certainty

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 begi

“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 di

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 tu

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 stu

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.