Every night for three weeks, the bombs came and they ran into the dark. But after the planes turned back, no Allied soldiers came.
In the jungle and on the hillside, people built temporary shelters, crowding themselves together. This was where Ani lived with her father. There was no food, and each day she scavenged for jungle fern and sweet potatoes. The dead were buried everywhere.
Matthew and Ani walked through what remained of Sandakan town, through the rubble and glass, through wood heaved at odd angles as if the entire street were still in the act of collapsing. In all this, they found porcelain bowls, undamaged. A half-dozen pairs of spectacles, a rattan chair. He thought he saw people suspended, the shape of a hand. Touch them, and they crumbled to dirt. On Jalan Campbell, where his house once stood, and Jalan Satu, where Ani and her father had lived, nothing but beams, twisted and black, remained.
Matthew and his parents found their way to an abandoned hut at the edge of their former plantation. Before the war, he remembered, his father had taken him to watch the tapping of the rubber trees; at night, lamps ringed with oil were used to ward away the moths. The aisles had been hallways of light, tunnels that led to mysterious destinations. Now, with the shortage in kerosene, the lamps remained unlit. When he looked out at the darkness, his chest seemed to fill with water, submerging his lungs. Each night he woke to the sound of army trucks rumbling past. He knew that the Japanese police, the
kempeitai
, came after curfew, sweeping the huts for guerillas and taking away any person, any family, they suspected. In his dreams, the road became a part of his body, gravel crumbling through his bloodstream, catching in his throat. He was afraid of the unlit plantation, of the decaying huts farther down the hillside. The dwellings were not safe. At any moment, a person could be pulled from his home, away from his family, and executed in the glare of a torch.
Sometimes, in the night, Matthew saw his father rise from bed, sleepless, a shadow among shadows in the room. Outside, there were gunshots, voices shouting. The war, his father once said, would be no more than a drop of rain on their long lives. If they were smart, if they were careful, they could compromise in order to survive. His father made promises that he could not keep. He said the war would pass, and life as they remembered it would return, as inevitably as one season followed another.
He and Ani now stood on Leila Road, a path that led along the coast, through the ruined town, and up to the top of the hill. When the ridge turned east, they could see the bay stretching out before them, the chalk hills of Berhala Island glowing red against the sparkling water. Farther up along the road, there was a marker for Mile 8, where the prisoner-of-war camps and airfield had been built. The ghost road, people had begun to call it, the point at which the path became grown over and impassable, finally giving way to jungle.
Some days, walking here, they would see Japanese soldiers, and they would run to the side of the road, drop their eyes and bow at the waist. Panic gripped his body, holding him still. He would stare at the black millipedes, the shiny backs of the beetles climbing over his feet. He saw the darkened skin of the soldiers’ hands, the rifles swinging casually against their legs.
Ani would sing the
Kimigayo
, her voice lingering over the long notes. He heard a strange and unfamiliar sadness in her voice. “
Koke no musu made.
” “
And for the eternity that it takes for small stones to grow into a great rock and become covered with moss.
” The soldiers sang along with her. They showed her photographs of their loved ones, their mothers, gazing into the flash of the camera. Ani’s face was still and expressionless. They rewarded her with handkerchiefs filled with balls of rice, or sometimes an egg.
What if they were seen? But Ani had no choice. The schools had been closed long ago, her parents were gone, and she had only herself to depend on.
Afterwards, Ani would divide the reward into equal halves. They did not linger over the food. The eggs swelled her cheeks into a wide smile, and she would lie back on the dirt, letting the sun warm her skin, savouring that brief moment when the pain of hunger retreated.
Once, angry, not knowing if what they were doing was right, he had refused the egg she offered him.
She did not answer for a long time. “Your family isn’t starving,” she said, her voice low as if afraid to injure him. “Not like the others.”
At Ani’s words, he wanted to lie on the grass, close his eyes, and give his shame up and everything with it. He saw his father rising in the morning, reaching his arms into the sky. This was the best time of the day, when the house was still and he saw his father at peace, unhurried, alone in the half-light.
In the years before the war reached Sandakan, his parents had planted the seeds for a garden, hidden in the jungle. They grew
padi
, eggplant and yams, enough to feed themselves through the coming turmoil. But they had been unlucky. Two years ago, an informer had gone to the Japanese and the garden was discovered. One morning, soldiers had burst into the house. He remembered his father, still wearing his housecoat, the first blow knocking him to the floor. The soldiers said that it was treason to withhold supplies from the occupying force. They went through the rooms, calmly shattering the glass cabinets, opening his father’s desk, spilling papers on the ground. He thought his father had been shot, the way the rifle was pointed, how the bayonet wavered beside his head as he lay on the floor. His mother’s screaming had faded to nothing, colour had drained from the world. Only later, when the gun was lowered, did Matthew’s senses return, piece by piece, sound by sound.
In the days that followed, it seemed they had been fortunate. His father began to spend time at the Japanese offices. Sometimes he came home with an extra ration of rice, eggs or a tin of milk. In the mornings, he walked away from the house, his head held high, towards town.
He and Ani walked farther uphill. Below, the debris of the town shone, bleached by the sun, the odd post or beam still standing above the wreckage. Even now, in the chaos of the flattened buildings, the grid of streets was still visible.
“Who told you the war was over?” he said suddenly.
“Lohkman’s brother heard it on the radio. The Emperor himself, he said the war is over.” She paused, looking out at the sea. “But that was more than a month ago, near the beginning of August.”
They walked in silence, bare feet crackling the leaves on the ground.
She gestured towards the harbour. She told him that when the British came back, there would be tables full of food, of English cakes and tea. Boats would arrive again, from Australia and Singapore.
Today, no soldiers appeared on the road. When Ani and Matthew reached the crater, their hands were empty. Ani slid down the crater wall, and he followed behind her. Inside, protected, he thought of them as goldfish, resting in the centre of the bowl. The edges of the trees were sharp against the light.
The Japanese would soon give up Sandakan. Even his mother, who always kept her words to herself, had said the same. One morning in August, a strange and terrible bomb had fallen on Japan. What kind of bomb? he had wondered, but no one knew. Only that behind it, a lasting emptiness remained. The guns and bayonets, the soldiers in their brown uniforms, the cities, had turned to air.
They sat in the crater, back-to-back, and listened to a round of gunfire. The sound was close, behind the hill, but not enough to worry. Sitting like this, the heaviness of her head against his own would tilt his forward. Matthew pulled his knees up to his chest and clasped his arms around them. In the hollow of his back, Ani’s shoulder blades felt like two small wings.
Inside the crater, no wind blew. Outside, on solid ground, there were strips of shade and light, but in here the light turned strange, almost liquid. There were no plants, nothing that grew. The bottom of the crater curved up like a boat, a hollow in which he and Ani could rest. In here, he, too, became something else, his body so insubstantial it seemed a memory of itself. Only by removing himself completely from the crater, by climbing carefully back over the lip, could he become whole once more.
He watched a gust of wind stir the branches of the trees. Leaves and flowers spun slowly down, twisting in slow and intricate spirals.
Unlike Ani, who tried to remember everything, Matthew had kept only a handful of memories from before the war. These stood out from his thoughts, shining like coins in a bowl of water.
When he told this to Ani, she asked, “What is the very first thing that you remember?”
His mother washing him in a round tin bucket. This was long ago, when they had lived in a small house beside the rubber plantation. His mother would set the tub on the ground outside, and she would fill it with cool water. Then, kneeling in front of him, she would unwrap him from his clothes, lift him up and set him down in the tub. The cold water shocked his skin, and the surprise mingled with the yelling of the rubber tappers, the flash of bulbuls and kingfishers above him. In the background, he heard warning shouts, coconuts knock-knocking to the ground. With fingers spread wide, one of his mother’s hands spanned Matthew’s back. She poured water from a cup, and the liquid sheeted down his skin. If he lay flat, bending only his knees, he could rest his head on the bottom of the bucket. His mother’s voice blurred and became a metallic echo in the water. Matthew remembered watching their shadows on the ground, his flowing into his mother’s, then coming apart.
“And what else?” Ani loosened her hair from its braid and it opened up in waves.
His mother planting vegetables, in preparation for the war. The garden was hidden in a cleared area in the jungle. In the mornings, she would bundle him up and place him inside a large basket, along with a canteen of water. The basket was attached to one end of a pole. A second basket, filled with food, was attached to the other end. She then picked up the pole and, balancing it across her shoulders, began walking up the road. The fronds of the basket were itchy against his skin, and they smelled of wood husk. Matthew, lying back and looking at the sky, could see his mother pass in, then out, of sight.
At some point, they would come to a bridge. He heard it long before he saw it, a roar in his ears that grew louder, so loud that it flooded his vision. His mother would adjust the pole along one shoulder, causing the basket to dip and sway. He would look out and see the river, a deep blue field. Fear made him lie still. If he fell, he would not be able reach out, open his arms and catch himself. From moment to moment, he swung like a pendulum, his body handed from the sky to the water and back again.
Nearby to that garden in the jungle, he remembered, his father had buried sheets of rubber from the plantation, so that his fortune would not fall into Japanese hands.
Ani’s memories had always been different. She had walked with her parents from the Dutch East Indies over the hills into Tawau, then north across the spine of the island and into Sandakan. She remembered passing the volcanoes of Semporna, the smooth cones that encircled the city.
“It took a whole season,” she told him now, lying back in the crater. “I was too small to walk the entire way, so sometimes my mother tied me to her back and carried me. The cloth was bound so tight, I felt as if I was a part of her body.” She closed her eyes as she spoke. “We had no map. My father knew his way along the jungle tracks. Some days we went by river and some days through the jungle.”
Near the start of the war, her mother had given birth to a baby girl. It had been during the rainy season in Sandakan, and the baby was very small. Sometimes the baby would cry, but her cry was muffled, as if she had a painful throat. Later, when she cried, no sound came out at all. The baby died in her mother’s arms, but even then the baby could not let go. She tried to pull her mother after her, into the place where she was going. “Because my sister was so small,” Ani said, “and she was frightened of going alone.”
Her mother’s body had become feverish. When she held her mother’s hand, Ani could feel the pulse beating fast, as if she were running away. The indent of Ani’s fingers remained, the skin like a piece of fruit left too long in the field. “Saira,” her father said, repeating the name, calling her back. “This is your home.” Night after night, Ani and her father stayed beside her, listening as her breathing slowed and slowed, slipping free. She died while they slept, and by morning her body was already cool.
The Japanese ordered her father to work on the airfield at Mile 8. The workers had no tools, no
changkul
or axes or machetes. Sometimes, when her father returned to the house on Jalan Satu, so weary he could not lift his arms, he would nudge a small potato from his pocket and lay it in her hands.
Each day, she walked along the fringe of the jungle looking for fern tips, swamp cabbage and yams. Perhaps, she said, she could learn to live off the air, the way the plants transformed sunshine into food. It was true. Sometimes, when she lay down in the hot grass, the sun soaking into all of her limbs, she felt a round and perfect fullness settling in her body. “We used to roast wild boar outside over coals,” she said. “The meat was so soft it melted on your tongue, it slid like sugar into your stomach. At night now, I have dreams about it.”
Before she died, her mother had told her that she might find other family in Tarakan, in the Dutch East Indies, after the war. She asked Ani to promise her that she would go back one day, if she could. There were uncles, aunts and crowds of cousins. Ani said that she imagined a row of houses, each one opening to welcome her, each face a reminder of her mother’s. When the war was truly over here in Sandakan, she would keep her promise and travel back to her family; she would walk back over the ridges of Borneo and into the Dutch East Indies, high above the little islands and the glowing blue sea. In the hills, she remembered, there were wildflowers. There were flowers whose cups were the length of a child’s body. One could sleep inside, she thought, if the rains came. Folded up in a smell.