Certainty Read Online Free PDF

casually against their legs.
    Ani would sing the
Kimigayo
, her voice lingering over the long notes. He heard a strange and unfamiliar sadness in her voice. “
Koke no musu made.
” “
And for the eternity that it takes for small stones to grow into a great rock and become covered with moss.
” The soldiers sang along with her. They showed her photographs of their loved ones, their mothers, gazing into the flash of the camera. Ani’s face was still and expressionless. They rewarded her with handkerchiefs filled with balls of rice, or sometimes an egg.
    What if they were seen? But Ani had no choice. The schools had been closed long ago, her parents were gone, and she had only herself to depend on.
    Afterwards, Ani would divide the reward into equal halves. They did not linger over the food. The eggs swelled her cheeks into a wide smile, and she would lie back on the dirt, letting the sun warm her skin, savouring that brief moment when the pain of hunger retreated.
    Once, angry, not knowing if what they were doing was right, he had refused the egg she offered him.
    She did not answer for a long time. “Your family isn’t starving,” she said, her voice low as if afraid to injure him. “Not like the others.”
    At Ani’s words, he wanted to lie on the grass, close his eyes, and give his shame up and everything with it. He saw his father rising in the morning, reaching his arms into the sky. This was the best time of the day, when the house was still and he saw his father at peace, unhurried, alone in the half-light.
    In the years before the war reached Sandakan, his parents had planted the seeds for a garden, hidden in the jungle. They grew
padi
, eggplant and yams, enough to feed themselves through the coming turmoil. But they had been unlucky. Two years ago, an informer had gone to the Japanese and the garden was discovered. One morning, soldiers had burst into the house. He remembered his father, still wearing his housecoat, the first blow knocking him to the floor. The soldiers said that it was treason to withhold supplies from the occupying force. They went through the rooms, calmly shattering the glass cabinets, opening his father’s desk, spilling papers on the ground. He thought his father had been shot, the way the rifle was pointed, how the bayonet wavered beside his head as he lay on the floor. His mother’s screaming had faded to nothing, colour had drained from the world. Only later, when the gun was lowered, did Matthew’s senses return, piece by piece, sound by sound.
    In the days that followed, it seemed they had been fortunate. His father began to spend time at the Japanese offices. Sometimes he came home with an extra ration of rice, eggs or a tin of milk. In the mornings, he walked away from the house, his head held high, towards town.
    He and Ani walked farther uphill. Below, the debris of the town shone, bleached by the sun, the odd post or beam still standing above the wreckage. Even now, in the chaos of the flattened buildings, the grid of streets was still visible.
    “Who told you the war was over?” he said suddenly.
    “Lohkman’s brother heard it on the radio. The Emperor himself, he said the war is over.” She paused, looking out at the sea. “But that was more than a month ago, near the beginning of August.”
    They walked in silence, bare feet crackling the leaves on the ground.
    She gestured towards the harbour. She told him that when the British came back, there would be tables full of food, of English cakes and tea. Boats would arrive again, from Australia and Singapore.
    Today, no soldiers appeared on the road. When Ani and Matthew reached the crater, their hands were empty. Ani slid down the crater wall, and he followed behind her. Inside, protected, he thought of them as goldfish, resting in the centre of the bowl. The edges of the trees were sharp against the light.
    The Japanese would soon give up Sandakan. Even his mother, who always kept her words to herself, had said the