Gail smiles, leaning out the window now, and she pictures her parents walking hand-in-hand in the hush of the rainforest. Outside, fall leaves scatter on the wind. “I think it’s a lovely idea.”
“It’s our fortieth wedding anniversary,” he says, in wonder at the thought.
His voice sounds grainy, worn at the edges, and she asks him if he slept well last night. Her father makes a noise that means, Not to worry. But when she presses him, he says that he slept for an hour or two, then watched
The King and I
on television.
Night after night during her childhood, her father, the insomniac, would pace the house, haunting it like a restless spirit. Before leaving for school each morning, Gail would see the remnants of his night. An empty teapot on the counter, the sleeve of a record on the floor. In university, her father had studied history. Occasionally, a book, Gibbon or Toynbee, the pages dog-eared, would lie open on his chest.
Sometimes, the insomnia slid into depression. Then, for a week, he would not step out of his room. She remembers her mother standing at the doorway, leaning her ear against the door, as if listening for the sound of his breathing.
What do you dream about? Gail had asked him once. My childhood, he said, after a pause. What was your childhood like? Her father had smiled fondly at her before turning away. “Like every childhood. Mine was no different.” Ever the curious daughter, she would take his hand. “Tell me one thing about it. Anything.”
He told her how to tap a rubber tree, how to hold a cigarette tin against the trunk and catch the precious liquid. How to carve an orange into a lantern, or a radish into the petals of a rose.
She once kept a list of his eccentricities. Her father was afraid of the dark. He could not eat certain foods: sweet potato, cassava and tapioca, which he called
ubi kayu
. Every weekday morning, before leaving for his job at the restaurant, he would stretch his arms and back, a kind of calisthenics that he said they had learned in school, when he was a boy. He had a fascination with Japan, a quick temper, and a disconcerting knowledge of British Columbian history. The First Nations, he once told her, have an archaeological history here that can be traced back ten thousand years. “Imagine that,” he would say, shaking his head, peering down at Gail as if he could read the span of years in his daughter’s face. He said that he tried to picture what first contact was like, when the Haida stumbled across the ship of Juan Perez, when they saw the white sails open and fluttering in the wind.
On the phone now, he is still talking about
The King and I
, describing how he first saw the film in Melbourne, in 1958. “All the boys I knew, they wanted to grow up to be Yul Brynner,” he says, laughing. Once, he had woken to the sight of his roommate practising his ballroom dancing, twirling an imaginary partner.
“And who did you imagine
you
might dance with?” Gail asks teasingly.
“I always danced with same person. In Sandakan, when I was young. But she died a long time ago. I thought I might see her again, but it was impossible.” She hears him shifting the phone to his other ear. “Don’t forget,” he says. “I want to surprise your mother. It’s been so long since we took a trip together.” When she puts down the phone, something in her mind seems to stop and catch, a word, a name, hovers on the edge of her memory.
The phone rings again, but she doesn’t pick it up. On the answering machine, Ansel’s voice. “It’s me.” A pause, and then he says, “Are you there? I didn’t want to wake you this morning before I left. Are you there, Gail? Anyway, that’s all right. It was nothing important. You looked so peaceful this morning. That’s all.” Something in his voice causes her to sit down, exhausted, unsure. “I love you.”
The message light on the machine begins to glow. She thinks of her mother, sitting at the kitchen table, polishing the glass beads of the chandelier, a task she did when Gail’s father was ill, when he slipped into a depression and she could not pull him back. Long ago, when she was a child, Gail would fall asleep in her mother’s lap, face pressed against the fabric of her dress. The familiar smell of soap and sweetness. Across the room, her father sat for hours in his armchair, his cup of tea gone cold, and it seemed to Gail that he had disappeared, cut himself loose from his body. Her mother would lift Gail from her lap, rise from her chair. She would place her hands on his shoulders, rubbing his neck and back. Touch calling another person back to this world, warmth flowing from one body into another.
A few months ago, she had helped her mother clean and organize her workroom. While her mother went to the kitchen to prepare lunch, Gail had got started, wiping the bookshelf. It was crammed with sewing manuals, but there were also cookbooks, magazines and novels: Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, coated in a thin layer of dust. Gail had sat cross-legged on the floor, turning the worn pages. She was replacing the books on the shelf when she saw a handful of envelopes that must have fallen on the carpet. She recognized one of them immediately. It was addressed to her father, and the Dutch stamps, now yellowed and dry, curled up at the edges. She had slid the letter out, a single page, fragile and creased.
I am heartbroken to write that Ani passed away on November 29, 1992, at home, of cancer. Wideh has returned from Jakarta, and he is here now. He was with his mother at the end.
Before her death, Ani requested that I write to you, and she provided me with your last known address. I hope that this letter reaches you.
I am very sorry to have to write to you with this news.
The name at the bottom of the page was Sipke Vermeulen.
She goes back to her office. At her desk, she scans the list of sound files, trying to focus on her work. She chooses one and hits Play. The recording that emerges from the computer is her own voice, the interview with Jaarsma about cryptography and the Vigenère Square. “The ciphers leave a shadow,” Jaarsma says, in response to her question. “However faint, you cannot erase that. This is the narrow, almost invisible opening for the codebreaker. At Bletchley Park, during the Second World War, cryptographers often recognized a pattern they had seen weeks, even months ago. They would walk across the room, fish out the correct fragment from a stack of paper. As if it were all a dream. It was the subconscious memory of a pattern.”
In radio, in the countless scripts that she has written, Gail works with the belief that histories touch. Follow the undercurrent and you will arrive at the meeting place. So she weaves together interviews, narration, music and sound in the hope that stories will not be lost in the chaos of never touching one another, never overlapping in any true way. Each element a strand, and the story itself a work of design. Out of the disparate pieces, let something pure, something true, emerge. Let it remain there, visible.
And in this documentary, where is the truth in the story of William Sullivan?
Gail runs her pen along the script, making notes in the margin.
Years ago, in Prague, she had interviewed a woman whose teenaged son had drowned in the Vltava River, a tragic accident. In the midst of recalling that day, the woman had looked up at Gail, suddenly angry, asking why she dared to ask these questions, what right she had. Gail had opened the recorder, removed the cassette tape. She had placed it carefully in the older woman’s hand. “If only you could understand,” the woman had said, clutching the tape. “The words that I put in the world can never be taken back.”
She remembered the woman’s frantic gestures, the ribbon pulled out of the cassette, spooling onto the ground.
She opens a browser on her computer and begins to book her flight to Amsterdam. Dates, flights, times: the numbers swim before her eyes. When she has an itinerary ready, she prints it up, and emails a copy to Jaarsma.
Outside, a woman calls out, then a screen door opens and slowly closes, the hinges creaking. She types Sipke Vermeulen’s name into the computer and watches the results scroll down the screen. The Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam. World Press Photo. She follows a link, and a series of black-and-white photographs open up before her. The caption underneath reads,
Algiers, 1959. The Algerian War.
For a long time she studies the photos. In one, a child plays on an abandoned tank, he hangs upside down, suspended from the barrel of the gun.
She opens one image after another, seeing images from the Netherlands, Germany, Indonesia, and it becomes clear that Sipke Vermeulen is a Dutch photojournalist, a war photographer.
Gail closes the browser, picks up the printed itinerary from her desk, and walks out of her office. She climbs the stairs to their attic bedroom. Standing at the window, she can see a dozen tai chi practitioners gathered in the nearby schoolyard, moving, out-of-phase, in a lengthening ballet. Elderly men and women flick their heels, stretch their arms away from their bodies, turn with a strange and gorgeous precision. Movement after movement unfolding, an outgoing tide, spreading towards the edges.
Many times in her childhood, she had woken to the sound of her father’s nightmares. A screaming in the dark, lights coming on in the house. She would creep to their bedroom door, holding on to the sound of her mother’s voice comforting him. Once, unable to go back to sleep, she had found her way, in the dark, to the living room. There, she lay on the carpet, her arms open, as if to gather up the air, to hold the weight of the room. From where she lay, she reached out and turned on the antique radio. The panel glowed and, after a few seconds, music, something jazzy, began to drift through the speakers. Eyes closed, she pressed her hand to the wooden cabinet, drew the vibrations through her fingertips, all the way to her heart.
When dawn came, she went to her parents’ bedroom, inched the door open, stood at the border of their room as they slept. She gazed at them with a boldness that she would not otherwise dare. Asleep, it was as if they had gone away together, leaving the worries of their life behind. She imagined casting a spell over them. When they woke, they would find themselves in a place where no secrets existed, where all the sorrows of the past had been laid to rest. What sorrows? She did not know. She knew so little about their lives. Privacy, her parents believed, was sacred.
For as long as she can remember, she had wanted to save them. She imagined her parents turning to her, seeing her finally, and the past would fall away. That is what she had hoped for when she was a child. To say the right thing, to pull off a feat of such perfection, they could be distracted, if only for a time.
From the window, she can see the myriad cracks in the sidewalk, the antique waste bins. A few blocks over, the sound of Chinatown like a swirling body of water. Here, in the oldest neighbourhood in the city, the trees are surprisingly young. They are planted each in a square of soil, a gesture towards the future. In the playground at Strathcona Elementary, children run in looping paths. They dribble balls on the basketball court, run three steps for a lay-up. For a fleeting moment, as she watches, their bodies hover motionless in the air.
The clouds open in a rainstorm, a kind of sheeting monsoon that rarely appears in Vancouver. In the bedroom, Gail listens to it clattering on the house, onto the glass skylight. Downstairs, Ansel is making dinner, a casserole of leeks, tofu and potatoes, spiced with curry. She gets up and goes downstairs, where she uncorks a bottle of red wine, drinks one glass and then another too quickly. The alcohol warms her, and she remains by Ansel as he assembles dinner, leaning her head into the hollow between his shoulder blades. A familiar gesture. He slides the casserole in the oven, and together they go into the living room. It is dimly lit, and on the couch he gathers Gail into his arms.
There is a recklessness to the way they undress one another. Perhaps such release is a gift; perhaps it is only the wine passing through her bloodstream. He kisses her mouth, along her neck, and it is a kind of betrayal, the way her body responds to him. But she does not want to stop it, stop the momentum that accumulates between them, she cannot imagine how such a thing, something so treasured, could come to an end.
Later, when they are lying together on the couch, she tells him that she has booked her flight to Amsterdam, and that she will remain there for six days. She will finally be able to move ahead on this project.
The silence lingers between them.
“I need this time away,” she says.
“From us.”
Long ago, any sign of pain in him would cause her deep anxiety, because it hinted of a future of possible loss, more loss than she could imagine. But now, seeing his expression, she feels confused.
“Gail?” he says, her name a question. “Just come home.”
My love
, she thinks, and the words are true.
He kisses her, and she knows, somehow, that he is asking for help, for an end to the sadness they are causing one another. Asking because, after all these years together, it is the only thing that might save them. Together they stand up, they find their clothes and pull them on. Then they go into the kitchen, leaning on one another.
Harry Jaarsma’s home in Amsterdam is a three-storey brick rowhouse, tall and narrow. Inside, the staircase to his office is so steep that, climbing up, Gail feels a sensation of vertigo, the walls pitching towards her. She grips the bannister, takes a deep breath, and climbs the last few steps. She and Jaarsma emerge into an open space, glass walled and high-ceilinged. The room is a container of light.
“My thinking space,” Jaarsma says. He is a few feet ahead of her, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt bearing a diagram of a caffeine molecule.
She had arrived last night. “Lovely,” he had said, on seeing her at the airport. “But careworn.” They had taken the train from the airport into central Amsterdam, then walked through the cold, winding streets to Jaarsma’s home. Past the train station, where thousands of bicycles leaned together in the night, continuing across the canals that ring the city, rippling away from the centre. Her breath trailed behind her, a white fog in the darkness. They passed brick facades, topped with delicate gables. Almost twenty years have passed since she studied in the Netherlands, but the sound of the Dutch language now fell reassuringly on her ears. He set her luggage in the spare room, and, over the course of a few hours, they had moved from coffee to beer to Beerenburg, a sweet liquor distilled from juniper berries, which had dulled her senses and caused her to fall asleep on the couch, but not before she and Jaarsma had managed to talk enough politics, art and science to make up for years apart. “Having children,” he had proclaimed, at the end of the night, before nodding off on the carpet, “is an essentially hopeful act. But I, Harry Jaarsma, have always been an essentially hopeless man. And I will never, never, be persuaded otherwise. Bring on the worst. I am ready.”