The child that she remembered, the child walking along the ghost road, no longer hid from her. She could reach her hand across the barrier of time and grab hold. She could save her, finally. Don’t be afraid, she thought. We are here, we have made it to the other side.
She saw the shoreline crowded with people, the bright colours of their sarongs, and then the sea, which she imagined hung like a curtain at the edge of the world.
In the days that followed, Matthew told her that he had made his decision. He did not want to leave Sandakan. “And Australia?” she asked him. He said there was enough work on the plantation, and perhaps, later on, he could take a teaching position at the mission school. What he desired most of all was a life with her, a life free from uncertainty.
She pictured their lives unfolding like the casting of a net, when the lines left your hands, you knew where the entirety would fall.
Then one evening, walking in town together, they were approached by a young man she recognized from her years at the mission school. He wore a white shirt and slacks and carried a satchel over his shoulder. After he had confirmed Matthew’s name, he said, “I remember your father.” At first, the young man’s voice was measured and calm. He told them that he still had the papers, signed by Matthew’s father, that had been issued when his family’s crops were confiscated during the war. Then his voice began to rise, and people passing by on the street stopped, curious, looking from one to the other. The young man took another step forward. “My mother and sisters died of starvation,” he said, his voice shaking. “My father died a broken man.” He gazed into Matthew’s face, as if he could see through to the centre of him, to the man he would inevitably become. “You have no right to live amongst us.” The young man leaned forward, his body tensed, rigid. Then he turned abruptly and walked away.
Matthew remained where he was, his arms loose at his sides. When the shock on his face faded, it was replaced by something else, grief, anger, hardening his expression. Eventually, the crowd retreated. The street flowed around them once more. Ani took his hand, cold to her touch, and pulled him along with her, away from Jalan Satu, towards the harbour. The heat bore down on them. Frogs chorused in the grass, a singing that filled her ears. She slipped her sandals off and walked into the water, Matthew following behind, and the tide slipped past them. She saw the boy that she remembered, a boy who loved his father. She recognized the heaviness of this devotion.
After the war, she told him, there had been trials. But Mas and Halim both said that these had brought no relief. A handful of Japanese soldiers had been sentenced, but the ones who had given the orders were never tried, and they received no punishment. “There was no one to hold responsible,” she said. “No one to go to for justice. He carries those papers with your father’s name because it is all he has, it is the only answer given to him.”
“My father lived here from the time he was ten years old, but when he died, no one came to see us. No one grieved him. They looked away when they saw my mother. We were nothing to them.”
He said that in Tawau, those memories had begun to fade. He did not know how such a thing was possible, but the past had become like a book submerged in the water, the ink running across the lines, all the detail lost.
She looked at him, bewildered. “You must have known that forgetting could not last. Not in this place.”
Matthew continued as if he had not heard her. “I can’t help but think about him. I wish to go back and save him somehow. He was an educated man, a good man. In the end, his desires were so ordinary, to protect us, to keep us safe, but he paid for this desire with his life. If I had to face what he did, would I not do the same? If it were you and I, Ani, if it were our children, there would be no choice.”
The next day, Matthew did not come to meet her at the shore. She walked up the hill, searching for him, at each bend of the road hoping he would appear. When she came in sight of Halim’s house, Matthew was there, sitting on the front step, but he did not turn as she approached. She sat down beside him. On the road, a line of schoolchildren walked side by side; a truck came behind them, and the children scattered like a flock of birds taking flight, jubilant and laughing.
He told her that he had woken suddenly in the night, had put on his clothes and let himself out of his uncle’s house on the hillside. The humid air had enclosed him in warmth. He remembered looking up at the sky and thinking how beautiful the moon was, simple and round, as it sank towards the horizon. He had followed it, walking towards his father’s former plantation. Once there, he saw that the kerosene lamps were lit, the flames floating in the dark. As he walked, he counted the trees aloud, turning at the thirtieth row, coming to a standstill at the thirtieth tree.
He knelt down, listening to the sound of night insects, of birds that he couldn’t identify. Owls, babblers, even in his childhood he had not been able to distinguish them. He began to push the dirt away, seeing the child that he was kneeling there, scrabbling at the ground. “I thought he must have known everything. He sent me on this errand because he knew his fate and he wanted to keep me away. I did what he had asked, only by then it no longer mattered. But still I went into the plantation.”
He dug at the ground for a long time, at first calm, but then, finding nothing, panic overwhelmed him. The lights blurred, he was sweating and could not see, but still he continued, with no idea of time or reason. Eventually, exhausted, he dropped into sleep. Some time later, one of the tappers must have found him and sent for his uncle. They were all gathered there at the thirtieth tree, labourers, family, and the boy that only Matthew could see, standing in the shadows. When his uncle asked what had happened, Matthew could only point at the boy. He wanted to go to him, pick him up, but he could not move. His uncle tried to put a coat around his shoulders, but Matthew pushed him away. When his uncle approached him again, Matthew lashed out. Then a terrible numbness took hold of his body and his legs gave out from under him, and the men carried him back to the house.
“They tried to keep me from leaving,” he said, looking at Ani now, “but I told them that I needed to sort out my thoughts, I needed to see you.” He paused for a moment. “Sometimes, in my dreams, I am almost able to reach him. I am telling him how to escape, how to leave Sandakan, I am almost holding him, but then he turns away.”
Later, lying together, his skin was damp and feverish, and he put his arms around himself as if he were cold. He said there was a story she told him once, long ago, about a man who harvested gold from the fields. All these years he had tried to recall it, but somehow it had become confused in his mind. Did she still remember? he asked.
She said yes, and as she told him, his breathing grew steady, lengthening out. In her story, the man walks towards the house standing alone in the middle of the field. The woman, old and stooped, promises him a gift more valuable than money. He will no longer be without land. For all eternity, he will not be at the mercy of the world.