Certainty Read Online Free PDF Page A

dead around him, burning pictures in his eyes. The pebble of fear in his chest exploded, and the fragments flooded his body.
    After the planes left, they did not move. The town glimmered, a red haze that burned continuously as he fell in and out of sleep. Morning came and he breathed only smoke. On Jalan Campbell, they found his father standing in rubble where the front wall of their house lay crumpled. There was blood on his clothes. He, too, had slept in the jungle. He said that these bombs were meant to save them, to strike the Japanese, to ease the Allied entry into Sandakan and the liberation of the town.
    Every night for three weeks, the bombs came and they ran into the dark. But after the planes turned back, no Allied soldiers came.
    In the jungle and on the hillside, people built temporary shelters, crowding themselves together. This was where Ani lived with her father. There was no food, and each day she scavenged for jungle fern and sweet potatoes. The dead were buried everywhere.
    Matthew and Ani walked through what remained of Sandakan town, through the rubble and glass, through wood heaved at odd angles as if the entire street were still in the act of collapsing. In all this, they found porcelain bowls, undamaged. A half-dozen pairs of spectacles, a rattan chair. He thought he saw people suspended, the shape of a hand. Touch them, and they crumbled to dirt. On Jalan Campbell, where his house once stood, and Jalan Satu, where Ani and her father had lived, nothing but beams, twisted and black, remained.
    Matthew and his parents found their way to an abandoned hut at the edge of their former plantation. Before the war, he remembered, his father had taken him to watch the tapping of the rubber trees; at night, lamps ringed with oil were used to ward away the moths. The aisles had been hallways of light, tunnels that led to mysterious destinations. Now, with the shortage in kerosene, the lamps remained unlit. When he looked out at the darkness, his chest seemed to fill with water, submerging his lungs. Each night he woke to the sound of army trucks rumbling past. He knew that the Japanese police, the
kempeitai
, came after curfew, sweeping the huts for guerillas and taking away any person, any family, they suspected. In his dreams, the road became a part of his body, gravel crumbling through his bloodstream, catching in his throat. He was afraid of the unlit plantation, of the decaying huts farther down the hillside. The dwellings were not safe. At any moment, a person could be pulled from his home, away from his family, and executed in the glare of a torch.
    Sometimes, in the night, Matthew saw his father rise from bed, sleepless, a shadow among shadows in the room. Outside, there were gunshots, voices shouting. The war, his father once said, would be no more than a drop of rain on their long lives. If they were smart, if they were careful, they could compromise in order to survive. His father made promises that he could not keep. He said the war would pass, and life as they remembered it would return, as inevitably as one season followed another.
    He and Ani now stood on Leila Road, a path that led along the coast, through the ruined town, and up to the top of the hill. When the ridge turned east, they could see the bay stretching out before them, the chalk hills of Berhala Island glowing red against the sparkling water. Farther up along the road, there was a marker for Mile 8, where the prisoner-of-war camps and airfield had been built. The ghost road, people had begun to call it, the point at which the path became grown over and impassable, finally giving way to jungle.
    Some days, walking here, they would see Japanese soldiers, and they would run to the side of the road, drop their eyes and bow at the waist. Panic gripped his body, holding him still. He would stare at the black millipedes, the shiny backs of the beetles climbing over his feet. He saw the darkened skin of the soldiers’ hands, the rifles swinging