Certainty Read Free Page B

loses track of the streets. In his mind, he hears his daughter singing the names to herself,
Keefer
,
Pender
,
Adanac
, but his sense of direction has become confused. When he looks around, nothing he sees is familiar. He has lived here for most of his life, but if he picked up a pencil, out of the small islands of memory he could draw the streets of his childhood, the town of Sandakan, Leila Road winding up into the hillside. In the months since his daughter died, things once lost have grown clearer, a flight that takes him from Vancouver to Sandakan, from Sandakan to Jakarta. He remembers how, from the air, the red roofs of the town had disappeared, given way to unbroken jungle, on a journey that began a lifetime ago, and that continues still.
    Lately, Matthew’s knees have begun to give. A twinge of pain in the ligament, and then an ache centred in the bone. His wife had tenderly rubbed the curve of his knee with her hands. “No more marathons,” she had said, a teasing smile lighting her eyes. “Don’t despair. You’re only sixty-six, and age is a state of mind.”
    She had learned to alter her pace, move patiently beside his slow shuffle. An old man takes an eternity to walk to the corner store. Their conversations became elongated, paced out from here to there, drawing to a close when they came in sight of the house. All these years, Clara has made most of his clothes. He finds pieces around the house, sleeves opened up on her table, starched collars like overgrown butterflies, one pant leg creased over a chair.
    Outside, the stars are shining. Matthew stands at his window, lifts his arms above his head, bends at the waist, feels his body return to him. He remembers the gentleness of his mother’s hand in his hair, how when she stepped back from him, the imprint remained, a weight, a memory against his skin.

2
    Pieces of Map
    SANDAKAN, BRITISH NORTH BORNEO
    September, 1945
    W hen he woke, it was still dark outside. Matthew slipped his foot out from under the sheet and prodded the ground with his toes. Nothing. Two nights ago, running out of the hut, he had lost his shoe. His left foot had lifted out of the grass, into the weightless air. The shoe had disappeared. They had looked for it in the morning, he and Ani, crawling in the grass, but they had found nothing.
Matamu, matamu
, he had whispered. His most important possession, disappeared. She had stood beside him, head tilted like a listening animal while the sun burned down on their necks. Then he and Ani sank back to the ground like fish lowering themselves under water. He had looked up and seen her black hair loose and blowing above the grass. Surely it would give them away. “Stolen,” he had whispered to her.
    She had nodded, sympathetic, still searching.
    Now, inside the hut, he sat up in the dark. A sharp pain rooted itself in his stomach, then flowed through his limbs. Before, when there were chickens, their bickering would wake him up. He would run through the crowd of them, all the way to the outhouse, and they would scatter before his feet, their red combs bobbing.
    He blinked, and objects slowly came into focus. The square radio, reaching up a long, thin wire; his father standing on the other side of the hut. As his father listened to the broadcast, he placed both hands on his hips, leaned sideways, then stretched his arms above his head. Matthew focused on his white shirt, a tilting light visible in the room.
    His father had been awake for hours. Already, while Matthew slept, he had walked through the aisles of the rubber plantation that had once belonged to their family and now lay under the control of the Japanese army. In the dark, the tappers had been crouched together, heads nearly touching as if they were playing marbles. It was so dark between the trees that only their exhalations, the occasional spitting of betel nut, gave them away. As the sun came up, the workers would set off across the plantation to collect the rubber. The night