Certainty by Madeleine Thien Read Free Book Online

the landscape, familiar now, steadies him. His memory, which has weakened throughout the years, sometimes causes him to doubt himself. The dead slip through his hands, leaving only a wash of silence. “What are you thinking?” his wife will ask him, seeing that he is lost. He is trying to hold on to his father’s voice, the face of his child, the days that marked the end of the war. Even now, too late, he imagines finding the way out. In his nightmares, he tries to tell his father that another path exists, that the centre of his self, the goodness that makes him whole, once lost, can never be recovered. But the words that Matthew speaks carry no sound, they are a rustling on the air.
    During those long hours when he cannot sleep, he tries to piece together every detail. He remembers a night when Japanese soldiers came to the hut, how he tried to make himself invisible. He pictures the basket in which his mother carried him, how he had swung, safe, above the rising water. The voices of the Japanese soldiers fell around him. “Are you hungry?” they asked him, teasingly. “
Makan makan
?” His mother had warned him not speak, not to show any emotion. He could only nod his head, his body motionless before them. They could kick him aside or let him be.
    The Japanese soldiers held a sheaf of forms, a list of the requisitions to be made. Not only crops and livestock, but also fishing boats and nets, the means to earn a living. His father signed page after page while the soldiers nodded, smiling. They said that they were anxious to involve the local population, they declared that Japan would be a guiding hand, a light, for Asia. His father accepted the reward, pieces of meat or dried fish, tins of vegetables, cigarettes.
    When the soldiers left the hut, his father’s face was calm. Ink smudges marked his fingers and the edge of his right hand. At dinner, he took almost nothing for himself, only a bit of millet or an extra ball of rice. As Matthew and his mother ate, he studied them, watching closely, as if he took comfort in their movements, as if the familiarity of their presence could convince him that nothing had been lost.
    Only once did Matthew hear his mother’s despair. She begged his father to come to his senses. She said that they would find a way to make do, somehow.
We can go to Tawau. We can stay with my family.
Matthew’s father had wept.
The war is everywhere.
She said that when the British returned, there would be no safe place for him. His father had closed his eyes, blocking her out. People are calling you a collaborator, she said. A murderer.
    Lying on his cot, watching, Matthew had felt his body cramp with fear and hunger. To drown out the words, he thought of food, meat cooked in sugar, and it started a rumbling of pain so clean he no longer heard silence or sound. He knew that only his father’s actions protected them. Rumours, descriptions from nearby towns had trickled in.
Sook ching
, the killings were called, a cleansing. Entire households, villages, destroyed. Day and night, these killings entered his dreams.
    Before the war, when men from the British North Borneo Company had roamed the streets, and the red flag with the Union Jack and the lion had fluttered above the harbour, his father had worked beside those British men. On Friday evenings, they would drink cognac on the
padang
, laughing easily in English and Malay. Matthew still remembers the postcards addressed to his father that lined the shelves of the old house, showing photographs or paintings of distant cities, London, Singapore, Berlin. When his father was Matthew’s age, he had travelled alone, by ship, from China to Malaya, and onwards to North Borneo. He said that when Matthew was older, they would travel together back to his village in China. They would pack their trunks with gifts, and no one would recognize the frightened boy who had been sent away some twenty years before. He had changed, his father said, remade himself. He had