She describes watching her father write out a row of numbers. Underneath this row, he wrote a line of letters. More letters, chaotic on the surface. It went on this way for some time while the television murmured in the living room, where her older brother was watching a soccer game. Kathleen had turned to watch it, the Vancouver Whitecaps, the rain of white jerseys, a soccer ball drummed across the pitch. Her father put his pencil down, stared at the numbers as if willing them to form a meaning. He erased what he had written and began again. He ran his hand across his face, shook his head. Kathleen remembered looking at his terribly scarred hand, a strange hollow in the index finger where he told her a bullet had passed too close. Her father became confused as he worked backwards through the code. Still, he went on staring at the numbers as if, given enough time, the method of decryption would magically present itself.
Kathleen sat at his feet. Eventually, she felt them shift, opened her eyes to see them walking away, the diary abandoned on the table.
On the tape, Gail’s voice: “And if the code is broken. Can you put into words the thing that you hope to find?”
There is a long pause, the muted sound of a truck passing on the back roads. Then, silence. “He drank,” she says finally. “He drank himself into oblivion. In his worst moments, he couldn’t even recognize us. There was so much violence in our lives. In the end, it was his drinking that drove my brother away, that broke my family apart. I need to know what happened to my father in those camps, what he lived through. And if it isn’t in the diary, then where did he keep those thoughts? What did he do with all those memories?”
The sound waves roll across her computer screen. Gail edits in a fragment of Jaarsma’s interview.
“Cryptography,” he says, “holds a particular danger of its own. People expect to find patterns. You are handed a code, someone says, ‘Break this,’ and then it becomes like a game, a chase. It can drive you mad. Once you begin to doubt your skill, once you begin to lose faith, to wonder if the code is indeed a code, if it contains any meaning at all, it throws your life into disorder. What if, in the end, this book is no more and no less than a book of numbers? What if the surface is all there is?” He pauses and then says, “I think codebreaking is part of a very human desire, the desire for revelation, for meaning. To have every secret, every private thought, laid bare, regardless of what that might cost us.”
In front of her, the recording has come to an end, and the sound waves disappear from the screen.
The phone rings, and Gail blinks, coming back to her surroundings. When she picks up, she hears her father’s voice, already speaking, halfway through a sentence.
She takes the phone and walks out of her office, into the living room, where the windows are open. A sudden breeze shivers the newspapers across the coffee table. Her father is talking about arranging a vacation, two weeks along the coast of British Columbia, north to Haida Gwaii, the Queen Charlotte Islands. “And with our anniversary coming up,” he is saying, “it could be a nice present. But will she like it? Perhaps it’s too extravagant?”
Gail smiles, leaning out the window now, and she pictures her parents walking hand-in-hand in the hush of the rainforest. Outside, fall leaves scatter on the wind. “I think it’s a lovely idea.”
“It’s our fortieth wedding anniversary,” he says, in wonder at the thought.
His voice sounds grainy, worn at the edges, and she asks him if he slept well last night. Her father makes a noise that means, Not to worry. But when she presses him, he says that he slept for an hour or two, then watched The King and I on television.
Night after night during her childhood, her father, the insomniac, would pace the house, haunting it like a restless spirit. Before leaving for school each morning, Gail would see the remnants of his night. An empty teapot on the counter, the sleeve of a record on the floor. In university, her father had studied history. Occasionally, a book, Gibbon or Toynbee, the pages dog-eared, would lie open on his chest.
Sometimes, the insomnia slid into depression. Then, for a week, he would not step out of his room. She remembers her mother standing at the doorway, leaning her ear against the door, as if listening for the sound of his breathing.
What do you dream about? Gail had asked him once. My childhood, he said, after a pause. What was your childhood like? Her father had smiled fondly at her before turning away. “Like every childhood. Mine was no different.” Ever the curious daughter, she would take his hand. “Tell me one thing about it. Anything.”
He told her how to tap a rubber tree, how to hold a cigarette tin against the trunk and catch the precious liquid. How to carve an orange into a lantern, or a radish into the petals of a rose.
She once kept a list of his eccentricities. Her father was afraid of the dark. He could not eat certain foods: sweet potato, cassava and tapioca, which he called ubi kayu. Every weekday morning, before leaving for his job at the restaurant, he would stretch his arms and back, a kind of calisthenics that he said they had learned in school, when he was a boy. He had a fascination with Japan, a quick temper, and a disconcerting knowledge of British Columbian history. The First Nations, he once told her, have an archaeological history here that can be traced back ten thousand years. “Imagine that,” he would say, shaking his head, peering down at Gail as if he could read the span of years in his daughter’s face. He said that he tried to picture what first contact was like, when the Haida stumbled across the ship of Juan Perez, when they saw the white sails open and fluttering in the wind.
On the phone now, he is still talking about The King and I, describing how he first saw the film in Melbourne, in 1958. “All the boys I knew, they wanted to grow up to be Yul Brynner,” he says, laughing. Once, he had woken to the sight of his roommate practising his ballroom dancing, twirling an imaginary partner.
“And who did you imagine you might dance with?” Gail asks teasingly.
“I always danced with same person. In Sandakan, when I was young. But she died a long time ago. I thought I might see her again, but it was impossible.” She hears him shifting the phone to his other ear. “Don’t forget,” he says. “I want to surprise your mother. It’s been so long since we took a trip together.” When she puts down the phone, something in her mind seems to stop and catch, a word, a name, hovers on the edge of her memory.
The phone rings again, but she doesn’t pick it up. On the answering machine, Ansel’s voice. “It’s me.” A pause, and then he says, “Are you there? I didn’t want to wake you this morning before I left. Are you there, Gail? Anyway, that’s all right. It was nothing important. You looked so peaceful this morning. That’s all.” Something in his voice causes her to sit down, exhausted, unsure. “I love you.”
The message light on the machine begins to glow. She thinks of her mother, sitting at the kitchen table, polishing the glass beads of the chandelier, a task she did when Gail’s father was ill, when he slipped into a depression and she could not pull him back. Long ago, when she was a child, Gail would fall asleep in her mother’s lap, face pressed against the fabric of her dress. The familiar smell of soap and sweetness. Across the room, her father sat for hours in his armchair, his cup of tea gone cold, and it seemed to Gail that he had disappeared, cut himself loose from his body. Her mother would lift Gail from her lap, rise from her chair. She would place her hands on his shoulders, rubbing his neck and back. Touch calling another person back to this world, warmth flowing from one body into another.