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.
A few months ago, she had helped her mother clean and organize her workroom. While her mother went to the kitchen to prepare lunch, Gail had got started, wiping the bookshelf. It was crammed with sewing manuals, but there were also cookbooks, magazines and novels: Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, coated in a thin layer of dust. Gail had sat cross-legged on the floor, turning the worn pages. She was replacing the books on the shelf when she saw a handful of envelopes that must have fallen on the carpet. She recognized one of them immediately. It was addressed to her father, and the Dutch stamps, now yellowed and dry, curled up at the edges. She had slid the letter out, a single page, fragile and creased.
I am heartbroken to write that Ani passed away on November 29, 1992, at home, of cancer. Wideh has returned from Jakarta, and he is here now. He was with his mother at the end.
Before her death, Ani requested that I write to you, and she provided me with your last known address. I hope that this letter reaches you.
I am very sorry to have to write to you with this news.
The name at the bottom of the page was Sipke Vermeulen.
She goes back to her office. At her desk, she scans the list of sound files, trying to focus on her work. She chooses one and hits Play. The recording that emerges from the computer is her own voice, the interview with Jaarsma about cryptography and the Vigenère Square. “The ciphers leave a shadow,” Jaarsma says, in response to her question. “However faint, you cannot erase that. This is the narrow, almost invisible opening for the codebreaker. At Bletchley Park, during the Second World War, cryptographers often recognized a pattern they had seen weeks, even months ago. They would walk across the room, fish out the correct fragment from a stack of paper. As if it were all a dream. It was the subconscious memory of a pattern.”
In radio, in the countless scripts that she has written, Gail works with the belief that histories touch. Follow the undercurrent and you will arrive at the meeting place. So she weaves together interviews, narration, music and sound in the hope that stories will not be lost in the chaos of never touching one another, never overlapping in any true way. Each element a strand, and the story itself a work of design. Out of the disparate pieces, let something pure, something true, emerge. Let it remain there, visible.
And in this documentary, where is the truth in the story of William Sullivan?
Gail runs her pen along the script, making notes in the margin.
Years ago, in Prague, she had interviewed a woman whose teenaged son had drowned in the Vltava River, a tragic accident. In the midst of recalling that day, the woman had looked up at Gail, suddenly angry, asking why she dared to ask these questions, what right she had. Gail had opened the recorder, removed the cassette tape. She had placed it carefully in the older woman’s hand. “If only you could understand,” the woman had said, clutching the tape. “The words that I put in the world can never be taken back.”