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.
Later, they heard that the British and Australian prisoners had been sent on a long march through the jungle to Ranau, a town more than 250 kilometres away. Those who could not walk had been killed, at the outset or during the journey, and their bodies left unburied.
Now, from the crater where they sat, he and Ani could see smoke, thick and dark, rising from the airfield and the prisoner-of-war camps. Flames suddenly became visible, flickering above the trees. Without speaking, they got to their feet, hearing a truck, an engine idling somewhere nearby. Half-running, half-walking, they went back along Leila Road in the direction of Ani’s hut.
It was on the hillside, one in a row of similar structures, built from discarded wood and topped with a tin roof, now rusted. Inside, it was empty except for a few items of clothing folded neatly on the ground. Everything else had been sold or traded. They lay back on the mud floor, flies hovering around them, but he was too tired to brush them away. Rain began, millions of tiny hammers on the roof.
“I brought these for you.” He reached into his pocket and retrieved the two slightly crushed cigarettes. He knew they could be used to buy food on the black market, that cigarettes had become more valuable than the Japanese imperial money that everyone carried.
She smiled, holding them up, turning them round and round, then she laid them on her stomach. He saw the first tear trickle out of one of her eyes, slide into her hair, and disappear.
For a moment he was stunned silent. Then he said, hesitantly, “When the British return, the shops will open again, and we’ll go down to the market to buy rice, and also flowers to decorate the table.”
Ani nodded, listening, and he went on. He said that the mission school would reopen, and they would each be assigned their own desk, with its sliding drawer for pencils and paper and textbooks wrapped in brown paper. At lunchtime, they would play football on the padang. The field would be watered each evening so that, under the noon sun, the grass was a brilliant green.
He remembered the ringing of the St. Michael’s Church bell on Sundays, how all the men stood together in their crisp, white shirts, and the women, in their sarongs and brightly coloured dresses, laughed together under the shade of the trees.
He and Ani lay in silence, and he reached out and held her hand. When sleep began to brush at the edges of his thoughts, he heard her voice beside him. “Once,” she said, “a long time ago, there was a man who was very poor and desperate. His wife had died, and then each of his children.” For many years, he had wandered the island, but the land was not plentiful as it once had been, and all the plantations were owned by only a handful of wealthy men. One night, as he slept beneath the open sky, he was surprised by thieves, and these men took from him all that he had. Even this was not enough to appease their anger, and the men beat him and threw his body into a canal and ran away into the night.