The night air is still warm when they near the theatre. Cars and scooters blur past them, and the blinking colours leave an image in Ani’s eyes even after she looks away. At an intersection, the traffic lights are not working, and a large crowd gathers around them on the curb. When an opening comes, they move in unison, flooding into the street, bringing the vehicles to a standstill.
Ani and Saskia are walking arm in arm, and the children are clutching Siem’s hands. On the front of a boarded-up building, someone has painted,
Dutch Get Out, Indos Go Home
. They both see it at the same time, and Saskia says, “We’re going, we’re going,” so quietly that Ani just catches the words.
Up ahead, she can make out the form of a young girl who appears to hover above the crowd. She is sitting on the handlebars of a bicycle. The girl floats towards them, one hand on the crossbar to hold herself steady. Behind her, a young man pedals the bicycle at a leisurely speed, and they move across the pavement in perfect balance. Watching them, Ani’s own body seems to lift. She sees Leila Road in the early morning, her bicycle slipping downhill, the sea opening before her.
Inside the performance hall, they are swept along by the rush of people, and the theatre is a commotion of voices. In her seat, Saskia frowns, worrying aloud over the last bits of packing still to be done. Siem puts his hand on her knee and says, “Forget tomorrow.”
When the lights go down, Wideh leans forward on Ani’s lap, gripping her hand in his. He points towards the stage.
The spotlight opens on a young man standing alone on a high platform. There is no music or sound of any sort. He has his eyes closed, as if deep in concentration, and while he stands there, alone and waiting, a hush falls over the theatre. His chest rises and falls, the seconds pass by. To Ani, it feels as if the audience waits in anticipation of the moment when he will open his eyes, step forward, and fall, which he does, as if releasing his spirit. He arches his back and dives into the empty space below. He is rushing towards the earth, but he doesn’t flinch. A few people in the auditorium gasp, and the sound travels up along Ani’s spine. At the last moment, an invisible wire catches him and he collapses his body into a ball and tumbles up again through the air.
In front of Ani’s eyes, the lights seem to wane and blur. The boy’s body, slender, he is only a child, passes across the stage.
When the war was finished, she and Matthew had gone down to the harbour, standing together on the docks. They were nine and ten years old. Still wearing their clothes, they swam out, leaving the few lights of Sandakan behind them. In the water, invisible to the eye, were shipwrecks and unexploded bombs; there were Japanese and American planes lying on the ocean floor. For a long time, she and Matthew floated on their backs staring up into the dark. Were the stars travelling away from them, Ani had wanted to know, or were they coming steadily nearer? He said that the stars were leaving; they were ships carrying people who had left the Earth a long time ago, not knowing that the heavens themselves were a vast desert. Now, it was only the ships that flew on, after the people had grown too old. She remembered Matthew saying that his father, too, had gone away, that he had been killed even though the war was over. The soldiers had lifted his father up and thrown him into the bed of a truck. If you had seen them from a distance, he said, from their movements, so casual, so indifferent, you would not have guessed that they were carrying a body.
Offstage, musicians begin to play, and three slender girls emerge into the lights. Their dance is slow and meticulous, a hand gesturing, wrists turning in delicate circles. Their bodies twist and open, legs extended in arabesques.
One steps up onto a platform, and then without hesitation the second climbs onto her shoulders. Finally, the last girl begins her ascent. At the summit, she sets her hand, palm to palm, on the hand of the girl below. Slowly, she lifts her legs up, balanced by the strength of one arm. She unfolds her body as if her limbs are as weightless as the flame of a candle.
Beside her, Wideh sighs deeply, clasps his hands together, looks out at the stage as if caught in his own dream. One day, she will find the words to explain her life to him. How, in the dark, in Sandakan, planes lifted off from the aerodrome, sending back a murmuring of lights. She had said goodbye to Mas and Halim, to Lohkman, then she had boarded the steamer and travelled across the sea. The note she had written to Matthew was safely in Mas’s hands. Her love for him had not changed, she had written; for both of them, another kind of future must be made to exist. Could she explain it to Wideh like this, make him understand why she had made this choice, why she has kept the secret from his father all these years. When the time comes, she will find a way to tell him the truth.
In her mind, she sees the kerosene lamps, the still plantation. The air is filled with the sound of nocturnal birds and cicadas, the sound of a small boy counting aloud, the thirtieth row, the thirtieth tree. When he finds the place that he is looking for, he begins to remove the earth. He works desperately, steadily, and the shadows of the trees fall around him like the lines of an imaginary house. How far must he travel? At what point will the treasure that he carries be safe?
Onstage, the first two girls hold their position while the third arches her back and swings her legs until she is upside down. She tilts her face up and gazes calmly at the audience. For several seconds they remain motionless, and then the girl at the very bottom begins to walk from one side of the stage to the other. Their bodies tremble with exertion, and the girls sway back and forth.
On her lap, Wideh strains forward towards the stage. He is under the spell of the acrobats, the man who dove through the air, unafraid; and now this small girl who blooms like a flower atop the human ladder.
Beside her, Saskia takes Ani’s hand, holding on as if she, too, can anchor her own body there, in the theatre.
The next morning, at the harbour, everything happens quickly. Siem and Saskia carry the luggage, while Ani gathers the children to her. Together, they make their way towards the registration desks.
The sun is starting to rise now, colouring the edges of the horizon. Ani kneels on the ground beside Wideh and Tash, and the crowd passes around them. Dutch soldiers are trying to organize the emigrants. They hurry people towards the gangway, and the crying and laughing rises in pitch and volume. She does not want to say goodbye, but Saskia whispers in her ear the old saying: “All things change and we change with them.” For a long time they stand holding one another.
By dawn, the great ship in the Jakarta harbour is boarded and sunrise floods over the sea, the water a deep and brilliant orange. The crowd on the dock has thinned now. As the horn sounds, some wave handkerchiefs, others lift both arms in the air, as if they, too, are floating on the water. Among the hundreds of people leaning over the ship’s rail, Ani cannot find the Dertiks. It is Wideh who sees them first: Tash, perched on Siem’s shoulders, and Saskia pressed close to them. They have almost disappeared into the multitude. The ship begins to move away from the harbour. She holds Wideh close to her as she watches the disappearing form.
The Garden of Numbers
VANCOUVER, CANADA
O
n the morning of her thirty-ninth birthday, Gail wakes up to the warmth of the light through the attic windows. Ansel is lying on his side, one hand on the curve of her waist. In Gail’s vision, without her glasses or contact lenses, he is blurred and indistinct, like someone in the farthest reaches of a swimming pool. From their bed under the steep roof, she can see the change from night to day, evening stars, rainfall tapping insistently on the glass. Some mornings, Gail wakes up to the sound of their elderly neighbour across the street, Mrs. Cho, who trims her yard with a pair of children’s scissors.
When Ansel wakes, they climb out from under the covers and dress in comfortable clothes. She takes a comb and does her best to calm Ansel’s hair, which is tossed like grass on a wind farm. He makes the bed and picks her pyjamas off the floor. By the time they have stepped outside, they have spoken only a few sentences, yet she feels a tentative peace. They move as if in memory of a different day, of countless similar mornings.
They used to have a running joke, she and Ansel. When people asked how long they had been together, they’d say the first number that came into their heads. “Twenty-five years?” Ansel would respond, turning to Gail, eyebrows raised. “Or is it more?” Forty years, perhaps. What, in their minds, seems a lifetime, a history together. She remembers this joke with pleasure, because it returns her to a time when their relationship was carefree, when it harboured neither suspicion nor fear. For almost a month now, she has known about Ansel’s affair with a woman named Mariana. It remains as a space between them, around which they carefully move.
They walk to the New Town Bakery, where they choose their breakfast from the display case and the high stacks of bamboo steamers. Then they continue, under the Georgia Viaduct, towards False Creek. It is early Sunday morning, and the city still drowses. Ansel counts two or three sails unfurled on the windless bay.
Tonight, her parents and a few close friends will come over for dinner. Her parents had wanted to host the party, but she had put them off. Knowing them, such a party would involve a ten-course dinner, towering cake and enough sparklers to light the neighbourhood. Even at the best of times, she has never felt comfortable as the centre of attention. Perhaps, she had thought, handling it herself would keep things low-key, and take the pressure off the occasion.
They are sitting on a wooden bench, facing the creek. Ansel tells her to be alert for seagulls. Just the other day, he says, he saw one swoop towards the bus shelter and seize a sandwich straight from the hand of a young woman. A freak occurrence, Gail says, but she clutches her breakfast tighter and scans the skies warily for belligerent birds.
In the last few weeks, he has been solicitous, grieving; he watches Gail as if she might disappear. At first, she had imagined packing a suitcase, walking away. A thought that, for just an instant, sent a rush of weightlessness through her heart. She has never been one for dramatic entries or exits. People fall in and out of love, relationships change, she accepts this fact as truth. But the intensity, the depth of her feelings for Ansel has always frightened her. Once, long ago, he asked her to marry him, but she had pushed them both away from that possibility. She did not want to get married, she wanted a different kind of relationship. Each day choosing to be with one another. Each day deciding.
She remembers the first time she met Ansel. His white coat was too big for him, it drooped over his shoulders. She had been working for
CBC
-Radio, covering the crash of a six-seater Cessna, the pilot killed instantly, his son in critical condition. They had sat on the bench outside the hospital, looking up at the night sky, the hint of starlight. For a long time, they talked about nothing in particular, and then, finally, about the pilot who had been killed and his son who was slowly, but certainly, dying. “Hour by hour,” Ansel had said. “And all we can do is try to make sure that he feels no pain.” They had both been drawn out of their own private thoughts, out of their loneliness. This is what love was to Gail then, a line, a thread that she could follow, eyes closed, leading her out from the solitude of her mind. No secrets or revelation, just one person on Earth who could anchor her.
“Are you happy, Ans?” she asks him now, surprising even herself by the fearlessness of her question.
He looks at her searchingly.
“I just wonder if we ended up where we thought we’d be. I’m almost forty, and I don’t know where the time went.”
“Yes,” he says, without hesitation. “I’m happy.” He looks as if he wants to say something more. Then, stopping himself, he asks, “Are you?”
Gail nods, but it takes her aback that it is she who cannot give a straightforward answer. She closes her eyes, feels an ache in her chest, a physical pain that pulses slowly. Day by day, she thinks, the distance between them is growing, carrying them out of reach of each other.
Instead of speaking, she takes his hand, holding it carefully between her own.
That night, while she is setting the table for dinner, the phone rings, and a moment later Ansel appears beside her holding the cordless. “For you,” he says. “Harry Jaarsma, calling from Amsterdam.”
She glances at the clock. It is four in the morning in the Netherlands. She can see him in his apartment, the heavy brocade curtains, high stacks of paper obscuring the carpet. “Jaarsma,” she says, taking the phone from Ansel, watching his back as he disappears from the room. “How
are
you?”
He says, without greeting or introduction, “I have good news.”
“Don’t tell me –”
“It’s true,” Jaarsma says, unable to contain his joy. “Never underestimate the power of patience.”
She says the only words that come to her mind. “You broke it.”
“Indeed.”
Gail sits down. Behind her, there is a low hum in the living room, the sound of the party, Ansel laughing with her mother, Ed Carney and Glyn playing a duet on the piano. Gail’s father is standing by the window, looking into the room as if he is outside it. She puts a hand against her eyes, trying to concentrate on Jaarsma’s voice as he tells her how he had woken in the night and an idea had come to him. He had leapt out of bed, turned on his computer and typed what he guessed to be the key phrase. “I sat back and waited. Then, right in front of my eyes, the numbers began to fade away. Letters, words, entire sentences. I felt as if William Sullivan’s ghost had arrived in my office and was rudely typing upon my keyboard.” He laughs. “I must enter the remaining the numbers, but I wanted to share the good news.”
In her mind, Gail can see the first line of the diary:
5 9 24 8 26 9
. Numbers fill thirty single-spaced pages, without any visible order or pattern. She has repeated the line to herself for months,
5 9 24 8 26 9
, as she falls to sleep at night. She has awoken with it on the tip of her tongue.
She remembers how Jaarsma had been as excited as she was at the prospect of unlocking the secrets of Sullivan’s journal. They had met in the Netherlands some fifteen years ago, through mutual friends now only vaguely remembered. Gail had been studying in Leiden, and during their first meeting they had found themselves arguing on the same side in a heated discussion about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, about science, ethics and history. Part way through the night, he had turned to her, eyes glassy from the beer, and said, “We think so much alike. Let’s not ruin it by falling in love.” They had raised their glasses to a long and enduring friendship.
Almost immediately, Jaarsma, whose specialty was chaos theory, had worked out the structure of the code, a version of the Vigenère Square. But rather than using the letters of the alphabet, Sullivan had used the numbers 1 through 26. The Vigenère Square, Jaarsma had explained to her, combines twenty-six different cipher, or code, alphabets. So far, so good: since the mid-nineteenth century, a means had existed to unlock it. But the final level of encryption, the key word that would allow the codebreaker to determine which of the twenty-six cipher alphabets was in use at any given time, had so far eluded him. A key word of
blue
, for instance, would alert the codebreaker to use the cipher alphabets
b
,
l
,
u
and
e
. The key used by Sullivan was not a simple word, and the longer the key, the more difficult it was to break the code. Perhaps the key was a list, a song, an entire book. It could be virtually anything.
Two months ago, Jaarsma had called her, exhausted, saying that the effort was futile. “My computer runs for hours at a time,” he had said, “but it is lacking in that most human of traits: intuition.” He told her that he had ceased to function properly, was unable to eat or sleep. He carried the diary everywhere, studying it on the train, in his laboratory, at the dinner table. His colleagues were unforgiving. The journal was occupying him to distraction. Jaarsma and Gail had mutually decided to put the project on hold. The phone call this evening is the first time Gail has heard from him since then.
“What
was
the key phrase?” she asks him now, straining to hear through the noise of the room.
“It was their names. His son, his wife and himself. Just their full names spelled out. Nothing more.” After a pause, he says, “I haven’t read all the way through to the end, but I think the contents will surprise you. Her father was not the man I expected to find.” He adds, “Is that enough to persuade you to visit me in Amsterdam?”
“I hardly need to be persuaded.”
He laughs. “I’ll have the champagne ready. Congratulations on your birthday, by the way.”
The dinner progresses around her, laughter and conversation, and much clinking of glasses. Her thoughts drift in and out of the present. Over dessert, Ansel looks across the table at her, as if to say,
What is it? What’s wrong?
She feels, for a brief moment, a wave of claustrophobia, and she stands up and begins clearing away the dishes.
Glyn rises to help her, and the two go into the kitchen, plates and coffee cups balanced precariously. When the dishes are safely stowed in the sink, Glyn leans against the counter, her expression concerned. “Thinking about work?” she asks.
Gail does not answer right away. She reaches up to the cupboard, brings down the bottle of port, and then enough glasses for everyone. As she opens the bottle and begins pouring, she tells Glyn about Jaarsma’s phone call. Glyn is editing the documentary, a co-production for
CBC
-Radio and Radio Netherlands, but so far she has stayed in the background, allowing Gail time to research and gather tape. “When this project is finished,” Gail says, “I think I’ll take some time off. Sit back for a while. I’m a bit run down, is all.”
They touch glasses, Glyn’s infectious smile warming the room. “For years we’ve been planning to celebrate New Year’s on the Gulf Islands,” she says. “Why not this year? Rent a little house on the Pacific, do the Polar Bear Swim. Ansel must have vacation time coming up?”
“Yes,” Gail says, sipping her port. “I think he does.”
“You’re exhausted. The curse of the freelancer.” She reaches her fingers out, brushes a strand of hair from Gail’s forehead. “Remember Prague? We sat under the stars together, knowing we were at the start of something, some grand adventure. Were we right or wrong, back then? You and I, what a pair of romantics.”
That night, after everyone has gone, Gail leaves Ansel in the living room and goes into her office, shutting the door behind her. The curtains are open, and outside the street lamps glow, laying circles of light on the empty road.
She is surrounded by equipment worthy of a museum. Reel-to-reels, cassette recorders, record players. Lately, she has been working with Mini Discs and digital editing programs, but she cannot bring herself to dispose of the old tape, the old equipment. “They still work,” she says to amused colleagues. “They still do what we asked of them.”
She collects tape the way others collect records or rare books, safeguarding them with a feeling of reverence. She has fragments spliced together, dozens of conversations gathered on a single reel. Soundscapes, features, interviews. On days when her mind wanders, she randomly loads a reel onto the player, puts the earphones on, listens. For Gail, the devotion lies in more than the words spoken. It is the words spoken at a specific moment in time, in a particular place. A child singing in the background, a pause in the telling, an old woman wetting her lips, smoothing her dress. A man who forgets the presence of the microphone, who begins a conversation with himself. “And after that, nothing was ever the same. I wanted to go back, I needed to see him, but I couldn’t.”
Before going to bed, Ansel knocks on the door of her office, pushes it open. “It’s your birthday,” he says, casually. “Surely you can take the night off.”
She saves the document she is working on, then turns to face him. “Jaarsma broke the code,” she says. “That’s what he called to say.”
His eyes light up, happy for her.
“I’ve decided to go to Amsterdam. I set aside part of the funding for this, the plane ticket and travel, hoping everything would turn out.”
She can see him wanting to say something, to argue against her going. Her response begins to take shape in her mind,
I have to do this. I need to be away.
But he does not fight her. Instead, from where he stands, he wishes her good night, then closes the door softly behind him.
Alone again, she opens files, then closes them once more. She thinks of another love affair two decades before, the feel of another man’s hands on her body, the pull of desire. All this, a lifetime ago. At twenty-one, Gail had begun graduate work in the Netherlands. There, not even halfway through her M.A. in history, she took a leave from the University of Leiden, gave up her apartment, and travelled east. She was restless, tired of reading about
realpolitik
, about her thesis topic, Japanese militarism in the 1930s, anxious to make something concrete of her life. And she was in love. A floundering, impossible affair. The man, a professor of languages, was handsome, brilliant and married. So she cut her ties and applied for a visa to the Eastern Bloc.