Neither of them had wanted to leave, and so they had remained there, despite the lateness of the hour, wrapped in their winter coats. She told him about William Sullivan’s diary. Something about it had moved her, the numbers now transformed into sentences. She said that Kathleen had wanted to open a window from her father’s life onto her own.

“Remember when we were kids,” she said, “and the world consisted of the streets we knew, the streets we’d walked on. I always wanted to keep going, to roam as far as I could and make everything a part of me.”

For a moment, he cannot move. His grief takes hold again, the pain worse than it has been in many months. He goes upstairs to their bedroom. Gail’s clothes lie neatly folded on the bed, on the floor, and he gathers them into plastic bags. Each one is familiar, it has a scent and a memory. He lays her sweaters in a box, covers them with her winter coat. When the last piece of clothing is put away, he feels a spreading numbness, a distant calm. He sits down on the bed, then lies back.

The skylight above frames the evening sky. He remembers how, when he was a child, he and his sister would climb onto the roof of the garage. They would stretch out on the warm tiles, gazing up at the heavens. His sister told him to hold still. Could he see the clouds moving? He must have been only six or seven years old, and he remembers, even now, how the ground seemed to lose its substance. He felt the Earth making its rotation and he saw himself as a tiny thing, a breath, carried along with it. When he sat up, the sky retreated, giving way to the tips of the highest trees. Giving way to the house, the familiar details.

Now, he feels that same vertigo, a sense that he is falling. He gets to his feet, imagining her near. Love, this heaviness, this weight, holds him steady.

The rain begins, but Matthew remains outside for a little while longer. In the park, there are boys playing soccer, a blur of green and red jerseys looping across the grass. They clap their hands, calling to one another, put on a burst of speed to keep the ball in play. He sees a young man coming towards him. He wears a suit and an overcoat, as if he has just come from work, and he makes his way across the wet grass to a child who stands waiting, knapsack over one shoulder. Together they watch the game. The father stands awkwardly, trying to shield them both from the rain with a folded newspaper. The child looks straight ahead, but slowly, imperceptibly, he shifts his body sideways so that he is resting against his father’s legs.

He tries to remember himself at that age, so small and serious. He sees the mission school as it was in the late 1930s, atap roofs in Sandakan town, the little boats anchored in the harbour. When he went back for the last time, people still could not talk about the war. If he mentioned it, they would shake their heads, their eyes would grow distant. “Terrible times,” they said. Opening and closing the memory in the same breath. “But it was long ago, wasn’t it? Those days are behind us.”

“Yes,” he had said, nodding, agreeing.

Days later, when the plane touched down in Jakarta, he’d felt as if he had awoken in a country that had no markers, no guides. There, with Ani, the past was no longer just a memory, a fog, it had the face and shape of a boy. Wideh had stood with his hand resting on his mother’s knee, the gesture reminding Matthew of one he himself had made long ago. He saw in Wideh’s face the resemblance to both Ani and himself, a gathering together of what had once been lost.

His son had been shy at first, gazing at the grass by Matthew’s feet. But when Wideh lifted his face and pointed out the kites above them, some part of him seemed to unfold, delight emanating from him. Between mother and child, another language existed. He could not bring himself to disturb Wideh’s happiness, he could not let the truth be spoken, tell him that his father had returned only to disappear and leave them again. He saw that this part of his life must always remain broken.

He went home to Canada. When he opened the door of the house, all the lights were off. Upstairs, in the doorway to her bedroom, he listened to the even sigh of his daughter’s breath, and then he found Clara, already asleep, the lamp still on, a book open on the pillow beside her. When she woke, he would find the way to tell her. She would not look away, she would know what the future could be.

He had remembered this last night, when Ansel came to the house and they’d sat together on the front porch, in the unusually mild night. As Clara had requested, Ansel had brought with him a copy of Gail’s documentary, which had just been finished. Clara set the CD into the player and then there was the sound of an airplane lifting off. Newsreels announced the start of the war. Harry Jaarsma, the cryptographer, was introduced, and then Sullivan’s two children.

It was a little more than a year ago now, Matthew remembered, that he had walked with his daughter near this field. Gail had just returned from the Netherlands. He thought she looked well and told her so.

At first, she had seemed anxious, unable to settle. It reminded Matthew of when she was a child, the bursts of energy that left both him and Clara amazed. Gail would race around the house like a being possessed, then collapse on the living room floor, gazing up, dreaming. He asked about her work in Amsterdam, and as she spoke she seemed to calm, telling him about William Sullivan and the diary he had kept some fifty years ago during the war. How, when she read the pages, her own emotions had unsettled her, the intensity of them, the compassion she felt for all that he had set aside.

After so many years, Matthew thought, silence had become a habit for him, a way of being in the world. As his daughter spoke, fragments drifted through his mind. His mother’s hand gripping his, as they ran into the jungle. The sound of a bicycle skimming along a dirt road. How he had loved his father all his life without ever truly knowing him.

He said to Gail that sometimes the past could not be made right, not every experience could be made to fit. “I left Sandakan believing that I had to push pieces of my life away. I thought the worst thing would be to lose a sense of balance, to fall. This is how it seemed to me. But I was wrong to hold back.” He hesitated, but something in her expression pushed him to continue. “I never told you how your mother saved me.”

“But I knew,” she had said. In her bearing, in her words, there was an understanding, a recognition that shook him to the core, that now, sitting here, makes him weep. “All along, I knew.”

Beside the soccer field, parents stand beneath coloured umbrellas, sipping their coffee, their chatter soothing to him. He could be in Tawau or Sandakan, a bystander on the padang, a child at the edge of the field.

The first maps, he knows, were drawn in the dirt, a picture of a place set tenuously down. He can close his eyes and see the road leading to Mile 8, curving down to the sea. A boy’s hand tracing a circle on the ground, the soil warm against his fingers. He had once gone back to find it, the place between the rows of trees, but what he had tried to keep safe was lost. His childhood, a time before the war. A glass jar that moves from his father’s hand to his, a continuous question that asks, how am I to live now, when all is said and done and grief must finally be set aside. Ani in a park on the other side of the world, the words his father could not say, the remembered voice of his daughter. So many things, he thinks, that we carry all our lives, in the hope that what we know will finally redeem us, that we will find something that abides, even now, in the indefinite, the uncertain, hereafter.

NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

While many books were an immense help to me in the course of my research, I would like to acknowledge, in particular, Erna Paris’s Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History (Toronto: Knopf, 2000); Maslyn Williams’s Five Journeys from Jakarta: Inside Sukarno’s Indonesia (New York: William Morrow, 1965); Thomas Dormandy’s The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis (New York: New York University Press, 1999); K.G. Tregonning’s North Borneo (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1960); Stephen Budiansky’s Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II (New York: Touchstone, 2002); Thomas Looker’s The Sound and the Story: NPR and the Art of Radio. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995); Russell Miller’s Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History (New York: Grove Press, 1997); Raymond Firth’s Malay Fishermen: Their Peasant Economy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975); and Gavan Daws and Marty Fujita’s Archipelago: The Islands of Indonesia (University of California Press, 1999). I would also like to acknowledge two documentaries, Karen Levine’s “Hana’s Suitcase” and Jane Lewis’s “My Father’s Story,” both of which originally aired on CBC Radio and served as the inspiration for Gail’s radio project. Karen Levine’s book, Hana’s Suitcase, based on her radio documentary, is published in Canada by Second Story Press.