That afternoon, while Matthew slept, his uncle came to the house. He was a tall, imposing man dressed in a jacket and tie. Ani had spoken to him before only in passing, but when Mas opened the door, it did not surprise her to see him, awkward and dignified on the front steps. Mas invited him in. They went together to the sitting room.
“Matthew is resting, I hope.”
“Yes, datuk,” Ani said.
His uncle nodded. He and Mas talked of other things, of the primary school and the construction of a new gymnasium on the grounds.
Ani’s attention was distracted by the sounds drifting in from outside, the children running between the houses, their voices rising and falling with the momentum of their game.
At last, he turned to Ani, and what he had come to say was finally in the open. “Matthew should go to Tawau as soon as he is able. He does not belong in Sandakan.” He paused, looking at her. She thought she saw pity in his eyes, a feeling of compassion. “I have said all this to him already. I suspect he knows it is true.”
Her body tensed, and she kept her hands clasped in her lap.
Mas said softly but firmly, “They are adults now. We cannot make their choices for them.”
“They are acting like children,” he said. “And they must let go of it.”
In her confusion, his words seemed to lose their meaning. She reached for an answer that would not come. “He has only just returned here.”
“He is ill,” his uncle said. “And he need not be.” He began to describe Sydney and Melbourne, where young people from across Southeast Asia were being trained as doctors and engineers. When they returned home to their countries, they would bring with them a sea change.
She did not know how to respond to him, how to explain what he was asking of her. She said perhaps she could go with Matthew, they could travel to Australia together.
“No, Ani,” Mas said. “Immigration is strict. That is not possible.”
The silence seemed to stretch on for minutes until, finally, Matthew’s uncle stood, preparing to go.
“In the end, the decision belongs to you both,” he said. “But I am only thinking of Matthew’s future. All I ask is that you do the same.”
The next day, Ani went alone to the hospital clinic. An hour passed, and then another, as she sat in the waiting room. Beside her, a young woman drowsed, her baby sheltered in a sling tight against her chest, fast asleep. The doctor who eventually examined Ani, an elderly Chinese man, was hurried, preoccupied. He gave her the results of her test, saying that her baby was due in seven months. Then he smiled, congratulated her, and left the room to see his next patient. Ani sat in the room, unable, for a time, to stand and walk into the afternoon heat.
She remembered being underwater with Lohkman. How the glare of the world had disappeared, softened by the water. She had taken a breath, then dived straight down, exhaling, air escaping from her lips. Her body had sunk towards the sea floor, moving among the crevices of rock and the waving vegetation. There was a puffer fish that Lohkman had captured in his hands, rolling it through the water like a child’s toy. He wanted her to listen for the shoals of fish, to learn this talent that he himself had acquired. But all she heard was a dull roar, every sound blurred and inseparable. She wondered if her child would soon be able to hear her voice through the echo chamber of her body, if it would be able to distinguish it from all the others – just as in dreams she heard her own mother, one voice rising from the din, calling to her across the divide, telling her to let go, to stop searching backwards. You cannot save us, she said. You cannot change our fate. The past is done.
Outside, the light, the brightness of the sky, caused her to stumble, and she grabbed hold of a railing for support. An elderly man, standing on the steps, offered his umbrella to shade her from the sun, but she shook her head, recovering. She went slowly out into the road and turned in the direction of home.
So she was the one who began it, who turned their conversation in another direction. On a beach west of town, they walked together along the empty sand. In the distance, she could see the red hills of Berhala Island, the currents sweeping past, the tide curling against the shore. She said that now, after all these years, she was finally ready to leave Sandakan, to go to her mother’s family.
His face, when he looked at her, shook her resolve. She saw his confusion giving way to fear. “When did you decide? Why have you decided this now?”
The words caught in her throat, but she forced herself to speak them aloud. “If things were different, if there was nothing to hold you here in Sandakan, what would you do?”
He refused to answer, but she would not relent. He shook his head. “Nothing has changed for me.”
“But Australia.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
The tide was going out, and it left a smooth plain of sand at their feet. This was the future, she said. He would stay in Sandakan, on the plantation, and they would never be free. Perhaps they could go to Australia together, find the way to begin a different life. But the love that she felt for him could not be separated from the childhood they shared; it could not admit forgetting. The words seemed to come from far away. “I won’t let this happen to us,” she said.
He took her hand, trying to draw her towards him, but she pulled back. “What is happening, Ani?” He asked if she truly meant to leave, to not return.
She felt cold, a chill radiating through her limbs. “I didn’t realize it for so long. I thought as you did. But what we wanted is not possible.” She struggled to keep her voice steady, but tears stung her eyes. “Our parents would not wish us to be bound by the past.”
“I know you, Ani. Something has changed you.”
She shut her ears to the disbelief in his voice, to her own grief. She told him that they were alike, two pieces of the same puzzle, but in the end, if you laid them down beside each other, you’d see an empty space, the jagged edges. And in this space, she knew there was no oxygen, no relief. It was a place they had made together when they were children. They had filled it with all the things they wanted to forget, a landscape of craters and bodies. She said that their feelings for one another had blinded them to the truth, what lay between them was too far-reaching, too vast. They could not hold it or push it down.
Some part of her was spinning loose, split open. She got to her feet and began to walk away from him.
He followed her, calling her name, and finally she turned and shouted at him to leave her, to let her alone. At the sudden noise, birds lifted up around them, fluttering up into the trees. He stared after her, shocked. But she continued along the beach to the harbour, where the last of the night boats were heading away from the shore.
As she walked, the water ran across her feet, and she imagined the tide sliding under her, pulling her away from Sandakan, this life and the pain that she kept adding to, as if she could bear any sacrifice, any tragedy, as if the war had made her strong enough to survive all that the future necessitated. She listened for Matthew’s footsteps coming across the wet sand, coming to join her, but all she heard was the tide and the trees, the nightjars and insects.
These years in Jakarta have not changed the longing she feels. Sometimes, now, falling asleep, she imagines a different ending. One in which she stands up from the sand and she tells him the truth. Everything that she set in motion that night, the words that can never be taken back, comes to rest. Life moves in reverse. She tells him that she will go to Tarakan, she will wait for him to return from Australia. When we find one another again, we will know how to continue.