He said they could go together. The town of Sandakan was gone, but he still remembered where all the buildings once stood, the Sandakan Hotel, the eyeglass shop, the clattering racket of the tin makers and the cloth banners that beat in the wind. The Japanese soldiers had stolen everything, and then the British planes had set it all on fire. Thick black smoke had overrun the sky. All their possessions, his father’s books, Matthew’s bag of red circassian beans, no longer part of the world.
When two elephants fight, what does it have to do with us? This is what the men in town had said before the war, when Britain and Japan seemed far away.
The ground was rubble, strange twisted shapes. If you touched them, pieces came off in your hands. Once, he and Ani had come across a coconut plantation that no longer bore fruit, and he asked her now if she remembered where it stood. The trees, thin and silvery, had been sawed off at the top so that nothing grew from the crown. A pale forest with no canopy, hundreds of slender lines, as if they had been surprised and then somehow ambushed.
“Near to the ghost road,” she said. “But nobody goes there at night.”
Matthew had heard rumours about this place, Mile 8, the prisoner-of-war camps. There, prisoners were cursed to walk forever. They said only,
jalan jalan
, carrying other soldiers on their backs. Men lay in the mud and begged for food, but they disappeared when you reached out to help them. Ani said that if you walked there, you might cross the line unknowingly and find yourself unable to return to the place of the living.
“Do you think it hurts?”
“No,” she said. “It happens too fast.” Her eyes were closed, and when she spoke again, her voice was clear, as if bracing itself. “I think people don’t realize they’re dying, they feel no pain. It comes too quickly, when their thoughts are turned the other way.”
He moved his fingers along the ground, tracing a series of lines in the dirt. Sometimes his thoughts felt like a moving stream, a flickering light. He missed his shoes. He remembered the feel of them, how they rubbed against his heels, reminding him all the time of their presence. He and Ani were sitting up on the edge of the crater now, in the shade of candlenut trees. Ani placed her hands one over the other, making the shadow of a swan on the ground. She set the swan down on his knee. When it touched his skin, the hands flew apart, the illusion vanished. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, so softly that the words seemed a part of his own thoughts. “We’ll always take care of each other, no matter where we go.”
She laid her head against his shoulder, and he closed his eyes for a time.
Ani had told Matthew how, three days after her father disappeared, she had walked the Leila Road to Mile 8. It was early in the morning, still dark; only the rubber tappers had started the day. The night before, rumours of mass killings had spread to the huts. She had followed the rumours there, to the airfield, where she saw pieces of clothing, stained, and then she recognized her father’s body. Bullets had opened his chest. She stood a few feet away, unable to move closer, to touch him. The nightjars and the cicadas crowded her ears with their sound. She cried without hearing herself; for how long, she didn’t know. By the time she looked up, the sky had grown pale. She had to leave. The road that she walked on led past the prisoner-of-war camps. Someone in the dark reached through the fence, took hold of her hand.
Tolong
, he said.
Help me.
He pressed money into her palm, a few words in broken Malay, a name. He wanted her to take a message to someone who lived on the hillside. She could smell him, the prisoner, blood and sweat and urine.
Ani grasped the money in her hand and turned, running, her bare feet sinking into the mud. She expected to hear a voice, a gunshot, but nothing followed after her. The road curved down along the hill, and, in the dawn light, the sea was a burning blue. It reminded her of the chrome on a car she had seen once. Before. Long ago. When cars had first appeared in Sandakan, rolling off the steamers.
She saw the mangrove trees, vividly green, curving away from the shore. Her thoughts spun loose. There was no way for her to bury her father. Before, a gravestone would be made and there would be ceremonies, the same as they had carried out for her mother, the doors of the house kept open for three nights to mark the passing of her mother’s soul into the land of the dead. In the dark, she and her father had stayed awake, naming the birds by their sounds, each nudging the other if one of them began to drift to sleep. “She has a great distance to travel,” her father had said. “Much farther than when we walked from Tarakan. In the afterlife, she lives in a village just like the one she was born in. She will cook and clean and help with the planting. But it is like our world turned upside-down. Plenty of food and happiness, and no one knows suffering. But sometimes souls get lost and are unable to find their way. That’s why we must stay awake and make sure that she is sent away properly. It is our most important task.”
Her father had been lying on the airfield for three days. Too late, already, to help him; his soul had departed, though he did not know the way. Ani imagined that the line of dead was long, a single-file line, and he could follow the trail that had been left by others. That, in itself, was a blessing.
On the road, the money clutched in her hand, she could see the islands off the coast, round turtle backs floating on the sea. Beside her, bellflowers hung suspended upside down. She imagined holding a gun in her arms, she saw a lost child, a dead girl, standing where she stood, feet sinking in the mud. The sun was rising. She looked through the sights, her hand poised in the instant before firing. Their spirits were so far from home, the landscape was so changed, so ruined, they would never find their way back.
Ani left that girl standing there, the air still shattering around her. She walked in the direction of the mud huts, keeping to the right of the path, in case a soldier came suddenly onto the road before her.
There are mornings when Matthew wakes and he forgets that he is old. He thinks that he is seven, perhaps ten years old, but then it is like being on a hilltop in the fog. He cannot see five feet ahead or five feet back.
When he thinks of those years, there is a particular place that he sees, Leila Road, before it was paved and renamed, before the new developments began to crowd the hillside. It was a dirt track in the 1940s, and he had walked it many times, sometimes alone, sometimes with Ani. He remembers something that she told him once. They had been playing
main lering
, a game with a stick and a hoop. “If you dream about a hoop, it means that you have come to the end of your troubles and that only abundant happiness will follow.”
Almost sixty years have passed since then, and he lives here, in Canada, a country that considers itself young. Where he comes from was broken, reborn, North Borneo, now East Malaysia, reshaped and growing. He has seen the country recently in photographs, the glittering cities, the twin towers in Kuala Lumpur rising above the skyline, eighty-eight storeys high. In speeches reported by the international press, the prime minister of Malaysia speaks of a multimedia super corridor, a futuristic business centre in the heart of the nation, taking the place of the palm oil, rubber and coconut plantations that he remembers so well.
When the war finally ended in September of 1945, Matthew and his mother fled Sandakan alone, fearful in the night. In the decades that followed, he returned only twice, both times thinking that he could find a reason, a person who could bind him together, contain his memories, finally. The first time he returned, he was eighteen years old. The town had changed greatly, and he could not recognize the buildings. One day, he came to the end of Leila Road and stepped into the jungle. The trees closed behind him, and he felt a curtain come down between him and the life that he knew, the solid houses, the rubber plantation. All the yearning that he carried – for change, to be afraid no longer – began to quiet. He saw that the grief that overwhelmed him might be set aside. It was possible, if only he were strong enough. He could leave Sandakan, let Ani go, create for himself a different life, separate from the future he had once imagined.
Here, in Canada, the roads are clean and straight, and the landscape, familiar now, steadies him. His memory, which has weakened throughout the years, sometimes causes him to doubt himself. The dead slip through his hands, leaving only a wash of silence. “What are you thinking?” his wife will ask him, seeing that he is lost. He is trying to hold on to his father’s voice, the face of his child, the days that marked the end of the war. Even now, too late, he imagines finding the way out. In his nightmares, he tries to tell his father that another path exists, that the centre of his self, the goodness that makes him whole, once lost, can never be recovered. But the words that Matthew speaks carry no sound, they are a rustling on the air.
During those long hours when he cannot sleep, he tries to piece together every detail. He remembers a night when Japanese soldiers came to the hut, how he tried to make himself invisible. He pictures the basket in which his mother carried him, how he had swung, safe, above the rising water. The voices of the Japanese soldiers fell around him. “Are you hungry?” they asked him, teasingly. “
Makan makan
?” His mother had warned him not speak, not to show any emotion. He could only nod his head, his body motionless before them. They could kick him aside or let him be.
The Japanese soldiers held a sheaf of forms, a list of the requisitions to be made. Not only crops and livestock, but also fishing boats and nets, the means to earn a living. His father signed page after page while the soldiers nodded, smiling. They said that they were anxious to involve the local population, they declared that Japan would be a guiding hand, a light, for Asia. His father accepted the reward, pieces of meat or dried fish, tins of vegetables, cigarettes.
When the soldiers left the hut, his father’s face was calm. Ink smudges marked his fingers and the edge of his right hand. At dinner, he took almost nothing for himself, only a bit of millet or an extra ball of rice. As Matthew and his mother ate, he studied them, watching closely, as if he took comfort in their movements, as if the familiarity of their presence could convince him that nothing had been lost.
Only once did Matthew hear his mother’s despair. She begged his father to come to his senses. She said that they would find a way to make do, somehow.
We can go to Tawau. We can stay with my family.
Matthew’s father had wept.
The war is everywhere.
She said that when the British returned, there would be no safe place for him. His father had closed his eyes, blocking her out. People are calling you a collaborator, she said. A murderer.
Lying on his cot, watching, Matthew had felt his body cramp with fear and hunger. To drown out the words, he thought of food, meat cooked in sugar, and it started a rumbling of pain so clean he no longer heard silence or sound. He knew that only his father’s actions protected them. Rumours, descriptions from nearby towns had trickled in.
Sook ching
, the killings were called, a cleansing. Entire households, villages, destroyed. Day and night, these killings entered his dreams.
Before the war, when men from the British North Borneo Company had roamed the streets, and the red flag with the Union Jack and the lion had fluttered above the harbour, his father had worked beside those British men. On Friday evenings, they would drink cognac on the
padang
, laughing easily in English and Malay. Matthew still remembers the postcards addressed to his father that lined the shelves of the old house, showing photographs or paintings of distant cities, London, Singapore, Berlin. When his father was Matthew’s age, he had travelled alone, by ship, from China to Malaya, and onwards to North Borneo. He said that when Matthew was older, they would travel together back to his village in China. They would pack their trunks with gifts, and no one would recognize the frightened boy who had been sent away some twenty years before. He had changed, his father said, remade himself. He had become a man who could be at home in any place in the world.
When the British surrender began, his father had gone methodically through the drawers, discarding the remnants of their previous lives, evidence of his work for the British North Borneo Company. When he came to the postcards, he ripped them up; at first, one at a time, then in handfuls, the pieces scattering on the carpet. His face was expressionless. Only after he left the house did Matthew’s mother kneel down, sweeping the pieces up with her hands, leaving no evidence.
The face that Matthew remembers now, more than fifty years later, is indistinct. He sees his father as if through a layer of dust, a tall man walking, his back held straight, towards the road. When he turns to look at Matthew, his eyes are empty, the light hollowed out. He tells Matthew that it is too late, that understanding cannot save him, the home, the town that lies in ruins.
Go back the way you came
, he says.
You cannot know, cannot imagine, all that has led up to this moment.
The last time they climbed up this far, to the end of Leila Road, they had heard rifle shots shattering the air. He and Ani had run into the jungle, crouching together in the mud. More shots were fired, and then they heard a troop of men approaching. Soon, a group of prisoners appeared on the road, half naked, dirt clinging to their skin, their bodies cavernous. They walked on legs that were like cherry stems, threatening to break. Japanese soldiers surrounded the prisoners, a fence of brown uniforms, of guns and bayonets. Some of the men were ill; it was clear they would not survive much longer. They stumbled uphill, away from Sandakan and the camp, following the road to where it ended, becoming only mud and jungle. They continued, into the trees.
Matthew closed his eyes. Eventually, he felt Ani taking hold of his hand, pulling him up. The road was deserted once more, and she led him to a small river where they could wash the mud from their clothes. She had walked in wearing her sarong, hiding her face under the water, and he could not see her expression. He had watched her hair rising to the surface, floating like a sheet of silk.