Six months ago, his daughter died suddenly in her sleep. She was away working in the north of the province. It was Matthew who received the phone call, who was the one to tell his wife. He knows that all one’s grief cannot stop the present, cannot change the way a life unfolds.

Now, when he walks through this neighbourhood, he 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

When 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 before, they had tapped the trees, one slash across the bark, a cigarette tin to catch the latex. Now, the latex was to be collected and brought to the storehouse where it would be laid out, then rolled flat. Afterwards, the sheets would be separated and hung to dry in a big closet.

Matthew heard the sound of a vehicle on the road outside. His father quickly replaced the radio in its hiding place in the floor, then pushed a cabinet over top. The door opened and shut, letting in a stream of light, and his father was gone. The hut finally stirred.

There was no ubi kayu to eat, no morning meal. Matthew saw two cigarettes on the table. His mother said, distractedly, “I’m going to visit your uncle this afternoon. Promise me you won’t go to Leila Road today.” She turned for a moment to glance towards the door.

“Yes, mother,” he said. Quickly, he rolled the cigarettes into his hand and dropped them into his pocket.

Outside, walking along the road, he found Ani sitting on the ground, waiting for him.

She smiled when she saw him, getting to her feet. He followed her gaze down the hillside. The sun had left an orange shadow on the water, but up here the fog still clung to the ground, and the air was cool and misty.

Slowly, they began to walk uphill, keeping close to Leila Road, but staying hidden by a line of tall trees. Above them, the blossoms of yellow flowers opened like tiny birds. Their centres, a blush of red, reminded him of a bag of circassian beans he had once owned. His father had watched him scattering them across the table. “Don’t put those in your mouth,” he had warned Matthew. “Before you know it, a suga tree will take root in your body.” Now, Matthew reached his hand up, pressed his fingers against the back of his head, feeling for any sign of unusual growth. “Can a seed grow from the top of your head, if you’d swallowed it first?”

“No,” she said, thinking, “or else everybody would have done it by now.”

“If you could, what seeds would you eat?”

She thought for a second, and then said, “Bananas.”

“Good choice.” They walked from tree to tree. Above their heads, the branches disappeared into mist. Higher still, the branches re-emerged, floating in the sky.

“What about you?”

“Chickens.”

“A chicken tree?” She laughed. When she did, the mist seemed to break apart, separating like heavy milk on a cup of coffee. “Well, maybe we can find some eggs today.”

Ani was ten years old, five months older than Matthew, but already she was several inches taller. She wore a pale sarong, fastened by a square knot. The colour had faded from sun and dirt, so now the fabric was a colour he couldn’t name. A noon sky on a hot day, a fading white. Her hair was gathered in a long braid that swung against her back. Some days, when they were both too hungry to walk, they would hide themselves in one of the craters left behind by British bombs at the top of the hill. They would warm their feet in the shafts of sunlight that fell between the leaves, but still he found himself shivering, even on the hottest days.

She told him once about a game played in town on the padang, the green pitch, with wooden sticks and heavy balls. The field no longer existed, but in a time that Ani could still remember, ladies once stood on the lawns, drinking tea from delicate cups. The cups had handles like a child’s ear. “You were there,” she told him, trying to prod his memories. “I saw you walking with your mother.”