Certainty Read Online Free PDF Page B

same. One morning in August, a strange and terrible bomb had fallen on Japan. What kind of bomb? he had wondered, but no one knew. Only that behind it, a lasting emptiness remained. The guns and bayonets, the soldiers in their brown uniforms, the cities, had turned to air.
    They sat in the crater, back-to-back, and listened to a round of gunfire. The sound was close, behind the hill, but not enough to worry. Sitting like this, the heaviness of her head against his own would tilt his forward. Matthew pulled his knees up to his chest and clasped his arms around them. In the hollow of his back, Ani’s shoulder blades felt like two small wings.
    Inside the crater, no wind blew. Outside, on solid ground, there were strips of shade and light, but in here the light turned strange, almost liquid. There were no plants, nothing that grew. The bottom of the crater curved up like a boat, a hollow in which he and Ani could rest. In here, he, too, became something else, his body so insubstantial it seemed a memory of itself. Only by removing himself completely from the crater, by climbing carefully back over the lip, could he become whole once more.
    He watched a gust of wind stir the branches of the trees. Leaves and flowers spun slowly down, twisting in slow and intricate spirals.
    Unlike Ani, who tried to remember everything, Matthew had kept only a handful of memories from before the war. These stood out from his thoughts, shining like coins in a bowl of water.
    When he told this to Ani, she asked, “What is the very first thing that you remember?”
    His mother washing him in a round tin bucket. This was long ago, when they had lived in a small house beside the rubber plantation. His mother would set the tub on the ground outside, and she would fill it with cool water. Then, kneeling in front of him, she would unwrap him from his clothes, lift him up and set him down in the tub. The cold water shocked his skin, and the surprise mingled with the yelling of the rubber tappers, the flash of bulbuls and kingfishers above him. In the background, he heard warning shouts, coconuts knock-knocking to the ground. With fingers spread wide, one of his mother’s hands spanned Matthew’s back. She poured water from a cup, and the liquid sheeted down his skin. If he lay flat, bending only his knees, he could rest his head on the bottom of the bucket. His mother’s voice blurred and became a metallic echo in the water. Matthew remembered watching their shadows on the ground, his flowing into his mother’s, then coming apart.
    “And what else?” Ani loosened her hair from its braid and it opened up in waves.
    His mother planting vegetables, in preparation for the war. The garden was hidden in a cleared area in the jungle. In the mornings, she would bundle him up and place him inside a large basket, along with a canteen of water. The basket was attached to one end of a pole. A second basket, filled with food, was attached to the other end. She then picked up the pole and, balancing it across her shoulders, began walking up the road. The fronds of the basket were itchy against his skin, and they smelled of wood husk. Matthew, lying back and looking at the sky, could see his mother pass in, then out, of sight.
    At some point, they would come to a bridge. He heard it long before he saw it, a roar in his ears that grew louder, so loud that it flooded his vision. His mother would adjust the pole along one shoulder, causing the basket to dip and sway. He would look out and see the river, a deep blue field. Fear made him lie still. If he fell, he would not be able reach out, open his arms and catch himself. From moment to moment, he swung like a pendulum, his body handed from the sky to the water and back again.
    Nearby to that garden in the jungle, he remembered, his father had buried sheets of rubber from the plantation, so that his fortune would not fall into Japanese hands.
    Ani’s memories had always been different. She had walked with her