When the lights go down, Wideh leans forward on Ani’s lap, gripping her hand in his. He points towards the stage.
The spotlight opens on a young man standing alone on a high platform. There is no music or sound of any sort. He has his eyes closed, as if deep in concentration, and while he stands there, alone and waiting, a hush falls over the theatre. His chest rises and falls, the seconds pass by. To Ani, it feels as if the audience waits in anticipation of the moment when he will open his eyes, step forward, and fall, which he does, as if releasing his spirit. He arches his back and dives into the empty space below. He is rushing towards the earth, but he doesn’t flinch. A few people in the auditorium gasp, and the sound travels up along Ani’s spine. At the last moment, an invisible wire catches him and he collapses his body into a ball and tumbles up again through the air.
In front of Ani’s eyes, the lights seem to wane and blur. The boy’s body, slender, he is only a child, passes across the stage.
When the war was finished, she and Matthew had gone down to the harbour, standing together on the docks. They were nine and ten years old. Still wearing their clothes, they swam out, leaving the few lights of Sandakan behind them. In the water, invisible to the eye, were shipwrecks and unexploded bombs; there were Japanese and American planes lying on the ocean floor. For a long time, she and Matthew floated on their backs staring up into the dark. Were the stars travelling away from them, Ani had wanted to know, or were they coming steadily nearer? He said that the stars were leaving; they were ships carrying people who had left the Earth a long time ago, not knowing that the heavens themselves were a vast desert. Now, it was only the ships that flew on, after the people had grown too old. She remembered Matthew saying that his father, too, had gone away, that he had been killed even though the war was over. The soldiers had lifted his father up and thrown him into the bed of a truck. If you had seen them from a distance, he said, from their movements, so casual, so indifferent, you would not have guessed that they were carrying a body.
Offstage, musicians begin to play, and three slender girls emerge into the lights. Their dance is slow and meticulous, a hand gesturing, wrists turning in delicate circles. Their bodies twist and open, legs extended in arabesques.
One steps up onto a platform, and then without hesitation the second climbs onto her shoulders. Finally, the last girl begins her ascent. At the summit, she sets her hand, palm to palm, on the hand of the girl below. Slowly, she lifts her legs up, balanced by the strength of one arm. She unfolds her body as if her limbs are as weightless as the flame of a candle.
Beside her, Wideh sighs deeply, clasps his hands together, looks out at the stage as if caught in his own dream. One day, she will find the words to explain her life to him. How, in the dark, in Sandakan, planes lifted off from the aerodrome, sending back a murmuring of lights. She had said goodbye to Mas and Halim, to Lohkman, then she had boarded the steamer and travelled across the sea. The note she had written to Matthew was safely in Mas’s hands. Her love for him had not changed, she had written; for both of them, another kind of future must be made to exist. Could she explain it to Wideh like this, make him understand why she had made this choice, why she has kept the secret from his father all these years. When the time comes, she will find a way to tell him the truth.
In her mind, she sees the kerosene lamps, the still plantation. The air is filled with the sound of nocturnal birds and cicadas, the sound of a small boy counting aloud, the thirtieth row, the thirtieth tree. When he finds the place that he is looking for, he begins to remove the earth. He works desperately, steadily, and the shadows of the trees fall around him like the lines of an imaginary house. How far must he travel? At what point will the treasure that he carries be safe?
Onstage, the first two girls hold their position while the third arches her back and swings her legs until she is upside down. She tilts her face up and gazes calmly at the audience. For several seconds they remain motionless, and then the girl at the very bottom begins to walk from one side of the stage to the other. Their bodies tremble with exertion, and the girls sway back and forth.
On her lap, Wideh strains forward towards the stage. He is under the spell of the acrobats, the man who dove through the air, unafraid; and now this small girl who blooms like a flower atop the human ladder.
Beside her, Saskia takes Ani’s hand, holding on as if she, too, can anchor her own body there, in the theatre.
The next morning, at the harbour, everything happens quickly. Siem and Saskia carry the luggage, while Ani gathers the children to her. Together, they make their way towards the registration desks.
The sun is starting to rise now, colouring the edges of the horizon. Ani kneels on the ground beside Wideh and Tash, and the crowd passes around them. Dutch soldiers are trying to organize the emigrants. They hurry people towards the gangway, and the crying and laughing rises in pitch and volume. She does not want to say goodbye, but Saskia whispers in her ear the old saying: “All things change and we change with them.” For a long time they stand holding one another.
By dawn, the great ship in the Jakarta harbour is boarded and sunrise floods over the sea, the water a deep and brilliant orange. The crowd on the dock has thinned now. As the horn sounds, some wave handkerchiefs, others lift both arms in the air, as if they, too, are floating on the water. Among the hundreds of people leaning over the ship’s rail, Ani cannot find the Dertiks. It is Wideh who sees them first: Tash, perched on Siem’s shoulders, and Saskia pressed close to them. They have almost disappeared into the multitude. The ship begins to move away from the harbour. She holds Wideh close to her as she watches the disappearing form.
6. The Garden of Numbers
VANCOUVER, CANADA
On the morning of her thirty-ninth birthday, Gail wakes up to the warmth of the light through the attic windows. Ansel is lying on his side, one hand on the curve of her waist. In Gail’s vision, without her glasses or contact lenses, he is blurred and indistinct, like someone in the farthest reaches of a swimming pool. From their bed under the steep roof, she can see the change from night to day, evening stars, rainfall tapping insistently on the glass. Some mornings, Gail wakes up to the sound of their elderly neighbour across the street, Mrs. Cho, who trims her yard with a pair of children’s scissors.
When Ansel wakes, they climb out from under the covers and dress in comfortable clothes. She takes a comb and does her best to calm Ansel’s hair, which is tossed like grass on a wind farm. He makes the bed and picks her pyjamas off the floor. By the time they have stepped outside, they have spoken only a few sentences, yet she feels a tentative peace. They move as if in memory of a different day, of countless similar mornings.
They used to have a running joke, she and Ansel. When people asked how long they had been together, they’d say the first number that came into their heads. “Twenty-five years?” Ansel would respond, turning to Gail, eyebrows raised. “Or is it more?” Forty years, perhaps. What, in their minds, seems a lifetime, a history together. She remembers this joke with pleasure, because it returns her to a time when their relationship was carefree, when it harboured neither suspicion nor fear. For almost a month now, she has known about Ansel’s affair with a woman named Mariana. It remains as a space between them, around which they carefully move.
They walk to the New Town Bakery, where they choose their breakfast from the display case and the high stacks of bamboo steamers. Then they continue, under the Georgia Viaduct, towards False Creek. It is early Sunday morning, and the city still drowses. Ansel counts two or three sails unfurled on the windless bay.