Certainty by Madeleine Thien Read Free Book Online Page B

would each be assigned their own desk, with its sliding drawer for pencils and paper and textbooks wrapped in brown paper. At lunchtime, they would play football on the
padang
. The field would be watered each evening so that, under the noon sun, the grass was a brilliant green.
    He remembered the ringing of the St. Michael’s Church bell on Sundays, how all the men stood together in their crisp, white shirts, and the women, in their sarongs and brightly coloured dresses, laughed together under the shade of the trees.
    He and Ani lay in silence, and he reached out and held her hand. When sleep began to brush at the edges of his thoughts, he heard her voice beside him. “Once,” she said, “a long time ago, there was a man who was very poor and desperate. His wife had died, and then each of his children.” For many years, he had wandered the island, but the land was not plentiful as it once had been, and all the plantations were owned by only a handful of wealthy men. One night, as he slept beneath the open sky, he was surprised by thieves, and these men took from him all that he had. Even this was not enough to appease their anger, and the men beat him and threw his body into a canal and ran away into the night.
    Matthew nodded and sighed; in his mind, he cradled the bleeding man and wiped the blood from his wounds.
    Ani spoke quietly, her voice a whisper, leading him through the story. When the man opened his eyes, she said, it was daylight. He crawled out of the canal and found himself in the centre of a vast
padi
field that had not yet been planted. In all his years of wandering, he had never come across a field like this; from east to west, from north to south, he knew, the land was jealously guarded. In the distance was a simple house, and the man began to walk in that direction, hoping to be granted work that would see him through the coming season. His knock at the door was answered by an old woman. When the man offered his labour, she asked if he would take one-fifth of the crop in lieu of payment, and the man joyfully accepted.
    The man laboured in the
padi
fields, trying to remember all the skills he had learned. Month after month, he poured his knowledge into the field. The soil was rich and fertile, and the rains arrived and watered his crop. When it neared the time for harvest, he opened one pod but found it was empty. Each night he opened another, and each night he found it empty.
    This was where Matthew began to drift to sleep, breathing in the dry muddy smell of the hut, Ani’s calm, low voice blanketing him. The afternoon rainfall began to ease. He thought he lived inside a cupboard, then, some place warm and safe that housed only he and Ani.
    “Every day, the old woman asked him, ‘When shall we harvest?’ And he said, ‘Tomorrow.’ The man was so ashamed that he decided he had to run away.
    “On the day he was to leave, he decided to look one last time. When he opened a pod, he saw that it was filled with gold. He opened another and another, and each pod spilled tiny pieces of gold into his open hand.”
    The first time he stepped onto an airplane, it was 1953. He was eighteen years old and he was heartbroken. From the air, he had gazed down at Sandakan, the tidy rooftops, the vast plantations and, surrounding everything, jungle. In the years after the war, people in North Borneo had grieved their dead, laying stones and burning incense, tending the graves of their loved ones. But a collaborator is someone forever apart. His father had no grave in Sandakan, and his spirit floated untended, unmourned, except in Matthew’s thoughts, and in those of his mother. As the airplane rose higher, the thread that connected Matthew to the town grew taut, stretching, until it finally gave way. When the plane turned towards Australia, he looked down and saw the island of Borneo, so grand and beautiful in his imagination, diminish to a speck on the wide sea.
    That memory merges into another, of his daughter,