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.