Read Certainty for Free Online Page B

nudging the other if one of them began to drift to sleep. “She has a great distance to travel,” her father had said. “Much farther than when we walked from Tarakan. In the afterlife, she lives in a village just like the one she was born in. She will cook and clean and help with the planting. But it is like our world turned upside-down. Plenty of food and happiness, and no one knows suffering. But sometimes souls get lost and are unable to find their way. That’s why we must stay awake and make sure that she is sent away properly. It is our most important task.”
    Her father had been lying on the airfield for three days. Too late, already, to help him; his soul had departed, though he did not know the way. Ani imagined that the line of dead was long, a single-file line, and he could follow the trail that had been left by others. That, in itself, was a blessing.
    On the road, the money clutched in her hand, she could see the islands off the coast, round turtle backs floating on the sea. Beside her, bellflowers hung suspended upside down. She imagined holding a gun in her arms, she saw a lost child, a dead girl, standing where she stood, feet sinking in the mud. The sun was rising. She looked through the sights, her hand poised in the instant before firing. Their spirits were so far from home, the landscape was so changed, so ruined, they would never find their way back.
    Ani left that girl standing there, the air still shattering around her. She walked in the direction of the mud huts, keeping to the right of the path, in case a soldier came suddenly onto the road before her.
    There are mornings when Matthew wakes and he forgets that he is old. He thinks that he is seven, perhaps ten years old, but then it is like being on a hilltop in the fog. He cannot see five feet ahead or five feet back.
    When he thinks of those years, there is a particular place that he sees, Leila Road, before it was paved and renamed, before the new developments began to crowd the hillside. It was a dirt track in the 1940s, and he had walked it many times, sometimes alone, sometimes with Ani. He remembers something that she told him once. They had been playing
main lering
, a game with a stick and a hoop. “If you dream about a hoop, it means that you have come to the end of your troubles and that only abundant happiness will follow.”
    Almost sixty years have passed since then, and he lives here, in Canada, a country that considers itself young. Where he comes from was broken, reborn, North Borneo, now East Malaysia, reshaped and growing. He has seen the country recently in photographs, the glittering cities, the twin towers in Kuala Lumpur rising above the skyline, eighty-eight storeys high. In speeches reported by the international press, the prime minister of Malaysia speaks of a multimedia super corridor, a futuristic business centre in the heart of the nation, taking the place of the palm oil, rubber and coconut plantations that he remembers so well.
    When the war finally ended in September of 1945, Matthew and his mother fled Sandakan alone, fearful in the night. In the decades that followed, he returned only twice, both times thinking that he could find a reason, a person who could bind him together, contain his memories, finally. The first time he returned, he was eighteen years old. The town had changed greatly, and he could not recognize the buildings. One day, he came to the end of Leila Road and stepped into the jungle. The trees closed behind him, and he felt a curtain come down between him and the life that he knew, the solid houses, the rubber plantation. All the yearning that he carried – for change, to be afraid no longer – began to quiet. He saw that the grief that overwhelmed him might be set aside. It was possible, if only he were strong enough. He could leave Sandakan, let Ani go, create for himself a different life, separate from the future he had once imagined.
    Here, in Canada, the roads are clean and straight, and