In the park the next day, Matthew walked towards her. She saw the curve of his shoulders, the set of his mouth, all intimately known to her, as if she had conjured the young man she once knew. He wore glasses, wire-rimmed, silver. He took her hand, holding on to it for a moment. There were dark shadows below his eyes, a weariness.
They found shade on a bench beneath a cassia, with its thousands of shifting leaves. Kites of every shape and hue swam in the air above them.
At first, their conversation rambled, a skittish bird moving from branch to branch, unsure. He told her he had flown to Tawau, staying there for a few days with his mother and her family, then continuing to Sandakan where his uncle still lived. There had been a film crew in the town, making a movie. Within days, the prisoner-of-war camps had been reconstructed, in the same place where once they had stood before.
He spoke in Malay, the language of their childhood. “I had not seen the town in more than a decade. Since before I left for Australia.
“There,” he said, after a moment, “even the trees were different. Every day, I went past a golf course. At twilight, hundreds of kangaroos would gather together. They sat like statues in the grass.” He said that the realization of growing older had come upon him suddenly. The speed at which the years had gone by. He took a breath. “In Melbourne, I thought of you. I thought of you often.”
To Ani, the girl that she had been, turning away from him, was both near and blurred. She wanted to find the words that would call her into being, some thread that would connect her back to that time. She began to speak about the day, twelve years before, when they had walked together on the beach, the tide washing out. He listened, his face open towards her, vulnerable. She told him that she had held the truth from him, that at the time she believed there had been no other choice to make. When she spoke Wideh’s name, he looked down. There was exhaustion in his face, but not surprise.
“And so you left Sandakan,” he said. “All these years, that was the reason.”
She nodded, remembering how she had stood on the steamboat, watching as the harbour she had known all her life slid away from her. “When I went to my mother’s family in Tarakan, my uncle helped me. Wideh was born here in Jakarta. Afterwards, I wanted to write to you. I wanted to make it right. This dishonesty. But I was not brave enough. I feared what the words might do. When Wideh asked about his father, I told him that I was the one who had left. That I had come to Jakarta on my own. I said that I believed you had remained in Australia.”
From somewhere in the distance, she heard the din of Jalan Kamboja, a clattering of sound. She saw betjaks weaving between the trucks, crowds of people slipping through.
His voice, when he began to speak, was tentative. He told her that he could not pinpoint the moment when he had begun to understand. Information had reached him slowly. That she lived in Jakarta. That she had a child. Then, a year ago, when he learned that the child had been born in 1954, it was as if some part of him had come awake. He could not explain why he had not seen it before. Perhaps he had suspected all along, perhaps he had pushed the knowledge away, he no longer knew.
An older man carrying a birdcage passed them, the bamboo cage covered by a dark cloth. They could hear the bird, the claws against the fabric, the trilling of its voice.
He went on, telling her about Clara, the woman he had met while studying in Australia. “We married,” he said, “two years ago. We have a child now, a daughter, Gail. It was Clara who said that I should come, travel to Jakarta, find what I had to know.”
He said, “I would have given up Australia. I would not have abandoned you.”
“Yes,” she said. “And so I was the one to leave.” Around her, the park seemed to fade out of focus, the shapes, indistinct, weaving together. “Last month, when your letter arrived . . .”
“I needed to make sure. I needed to know, once and for all.”
For a time, they sat in silence, and she felt as if they were floating on the surface of the sea and the current alone pushed them on.
“Ani,” he said. “Have you told him that I’m here?”
“No. I wanted to see you first. To know what you wished.”
“I would like to see him.”
“You’ll be surprised by Wideh,” she said. “How tall he is, how gentle. Even when he was a small child, he was older than his years, already curious about the world.” She looked out across the grass, to where the park ended, giving way to a series of low buildings. “In another hour, he’ll walk through this park on his way home from school.”
“Wideh,” he said. “I remember. Your father’s name.”
Waves of heat hovered above the ground. They crossed the grass, to where the canal shone, reflecting the afternoon light. He began to tell her of the last few days in Sandakan. The film crew had hauled in lumber from the mills north of the harbour, he said, and transported it up Leila Road. The prisoner-of-war camps had seemed to him more familiar than the town itself. On the film set, men, looking emaciated and haggard, had wandered through the barracks. Beside them, Japanese actors practised their lines, rifles set with bayonets dangling casually from their shoulders. Curiosity had brought people from as far away as Semporna and Tawau to watch; they sat on blankets around the periphery. When the cameras rolled, a hush fell over the clearing. Every gesture was mapped out beforehand, and each phrase laboured over. The actors’ words, spoken so intently, fell like needles into the quiet.
In one scene, he told her, a prisoner was separated from the others. He was beaten, and then a soldier standing behind him placed his pistol against the man’s head. The man struggled, but he was forced to his knees. The soldier fired, and the man’s body jerked, then slumped into the dust. His head was twisted to the right, ear to the ground, eyes still open. When the filming stopped, he relaxed his body and turned over, staring for a moment up at the heavens above. Then he pushed himself to standing and wiped the dust from his clothes. Immediately, the blood in his hair and on the ground was cleaned away.
The scene was repeated many times, the cameras moving towards the man and then away. Sitting in the crowd, surrounded by people who dared not breathe, Matthew had closed his eyes against the scene. He felt as if a stone at the bottom of his life had rolled loose, as if the contents of his memory could no longer be contained. They spilled into the air around him, vivid and uncontrolled. Why was this happening, he had wondered, when he had tried so hard, given up so much, to leave it behind?
Ani could see the drift of smoke rising from the ruins of the camp. In a crater, two children sat back-to-back, the bowl of the sky above them. They had believed in a world reborn, that the life they remembered would come into existence again. It had not and yet the days had gone on for them both. Now, when she looked at him, she could imagine the way in which his face would age, filling out, the lines radiating from his eyes. Strands of white were already visible in his dark hair.
He said he had stood on the hillside, asking himself how it was possible to continue. At what point would he finally step forward, would he make, decisively, the shape of his life? When would the war be over for him? Sometimes, he said, one had to let go of the living just as surely as one grieved the dead. Some things, lost long ago, could not be returned.