Certainty (18 page)

By spring, she was living in Prague, in a tiny two-room flat, working afternoons in a haberdashery. Her roommate, Glyn Madden, was a radio producer. At thirty-six, divorced and at loose ends, Glyn had sold her house in Wales and gone off in search of adventure, which, they both agreed, had proven to be more elusive than it first seemed. They traded books between them, drove across the border to Germany in search of English-language novels, came home with strange, tattered copies of Karl May westerns. They walked at dusk, joyous, alive, up to the Prague Castle. The apartment they shared was in Na Kampa, and at night they sat at the window, staring down at the miniature heads gathered around the café tables. They took turns changing the records on Glyn’s turntable:
Abbey Road
, Joni Mitchell, REM.

Each month, her mother sent her a small package of famous B.C. smoked salmon and a long, descriptive letter, filled with stories. Gail’s father, she wrote at one point, had started a community garden in Strathcona. Every Sunday, children clustered around him, each one wearing tiny rubber boots, holding tight to a miniature spade. Business in the restaurant was steady, she said, and her father had decided to come on as a part owner.
He is well, though he misses you. We both do.
Gail went home only once each year, at Christmas time. It was the most she could afford, and she did not want to rely on her parents for money. “Too stubborn,” her mother would say, holding her at the airport when she left. “Too independent.” But the words, Gail thought, were filled with pride, too, that they had raised her to be so free, so fearless in the world.

In Prague one morning, Glyn had woken her at 4:00 a.m., holding a cassette recorder and a microphone. “Join me,” she had said, her voice low and robotic, leaning over Gail’s bed, eyes shining in the darkness.

“What is this?
Star Wars
?
Spaceballs
?”

“Let’s go. We’re late.”

They loaded their bicycles into Glyn’s van, then drove two hours east. Through the countryside, a Thermos of coffee between them, they watched the sun rise over the fading hills. In Brno, thousands of runners were gathered for a marathon. Glyn wired her to a cassette recorder, placed a microphone in her hand and headphones over her ears. The starting gun went off, and Gail, flustered, immediately dropped the recorder on the ground. On the tape, afterwards, she could hear Glyn laughing. But when she replaced the headphones, Gail heard details that she had never heard in life. Whispered conversations, the rhythm of hundreds of shoes striking cobblestone.

She hurriedly unlocked her bicycle and began pedalling after the runners. On the tape, later on, she heard the bicycle bell ringing ever so slightly as the wheels rattled over the stones. She heard runners drinking as they went, dropping the plastic cups on the road, and the light jaggedness, like cut glass, of their breathing.

That was the moment of revelation. Her degree fell by the wayside, and Glyn found her a job at Radio Netherlands, which had a small outpost there in Prague. They worked side by side each afternoon, pulling tape. Switching from grease pencil to razor blade, the reel of tape sliding back and forth, her right foot maneuvering the pedals. A swift diagonal cut, then a thumbprint of splicing tape to bind the pieces together. She laid the outtakes over her right shoulder, and then her left, in a carefully ordered fringe. Afterwards, they would eat dinner in the studio, potato dumplings soaked in gravy, washed down by bitter black coffee. Among her reels of tape, she has a recording Glyn made in 1989, in Wenceslas Square, when hundreds of thousands of people, laughing and crying, jingled their keys in unison to symbolize the fall of the Soviet regime and the opening of the door to democracy.

Somewhere in that decade, she had fallen in love with a print journalist, a goat herder and an art collector. The print journalist had been the last, while Gail was in the Arctic. That was much later, after Glyn had moved to London and Gail was on assignment for Deutsche Welle’s English radio service, recording a feature about the beluga whales trapped in the ice-jammed waters of the Chukchi Peninsula, near the Bering Strait. The three thousand whales were slowly suffocating. Chukchi fishermen set out each morning, axes on their backs, attempting to open patches of ice. Up above, Russian helicopters circled like clumsy birds. They poured fish down from the sky.

For three weeks, Gail did not see her own body naked in its entirety; she was a walking bundle of fur and fleece. Swaddled, she carried her portable
DAT
recorder in an insulated bag. When she held her microphone out over the water, she could hear the whales themselves; they formed an endless line as they took turns breathing, one by one, at the air holes. A whistle of sound, a breath like water being swallowed. Sometimes, the whales allowed a seal to push into line, rising up, finding oxygen. She could not distinguish the sky from the ice, the snow from horizon.

The Chukchi gathered at her microphone to tell their stories. Before the waters were divided up, they said, before lines were drawn in the sea by Washington and Moscow, they used to cross the Bering Strait in skin boats. Once upon a time, their people lived nomadic lives; back then, the herds of reindeer had been thirty thousand strong. When she looked up from her recorder, Gail saw a group of young boys pirouetting their bicycles on the snow, their shadows, thin and graceful, reaching into the distance.

Eventually, a Soviet icebreaker arrived to clear a path for the whales. The icebreaker played Beethoven, and it thundered from the speakers. The whales, entranced, followed the Ninth Symphony back to open water.

Afterwards, Gail caught a flight to Fairbanks, and then on to Vancouver. Home to the house on Keefer Street, the wild, luxuriant garden that her father kept, the trellises bursting with roses, perfuming the air. She had been living in Europe for almost a decade. When they sat down to dinner, she felt as if she and her parents were travelling across a vast field, coming to meet one another. Her father, who had worked all his life in a restaurant, set down dish after dish, and each one was her favourite. They were so tentative with one another, as if circling in a room where the lights have gone out, trying to find their way by intuition, by memory alone.

After dinner, washing up in the kitchen, she had seen a letter lying on the countertop. The envelope was addressed to her father, and the stamps, she was surprised to see, were from the Netherlands. “What’s this?” she had asked, picking the letter up.

He had taken the envelope from her, turning towards her mother. His expression is vivid in her mind, even now, and the way her mother had looked at him, the lightest touch against his arm. “Someone I knew once, in Sandakan,” her father had said, seeming to search for the words. “She died recently. Her husband wrote to tell us.”

“During the war,” her mother said, “they were children together.” Her father clutched the envelope in his hand, lost, unsure where to set it down.

Gail had busied herself with the dishes. When she turned back, the envelope had disappeared, and her father was hanging the dish cloth to dry, smoothing the creases away with his hands.

Standing up from her desk, she turns the lights off and climbs the stairs to their bedroom. Ansel has left the reading light on for her, and he is fast asleep. She slips into bed beside him. For a long time, she gazes up through the skylight at the stars. She connects the invisible lines between them, Lyra, Cassiopeia, Perseus, as she used to do when she was a child.

Beside her, Ansel sighs in his sleep, he rests his body against hers. Her feelings have not changed, though she no longer knows how to make them palpable, certain. Gail thinks of something he told her long ago, how the pattern of the wave is one of the most common in nature. Sound, light, X-rays. The revelatory pictures of an
MRI
scan, a machine that throws light on the shadows of the mind. And what does it see? The work of thousands of synapses. The chemical traces of memory and love. If it could peer into Gail’s mind in a moment when she thinks of Ansel, how many patterns would it see awakened? The incoming tide, wave after wave of memory. The accelerated heartbeat, the charge Gail feels in his presence, none of this has changed. But for him? If she could see into the darkness, would she find in him what she hopes for? An echo of her own desire, as strong and sure as it was in the beginning, before something between them faltered and lost hope.

The next morning, after Ansel has left for the clinic, Gail finds the Bering Strait recording on a reel labelled
Whales, Ode to Joy, 1990
. She unwinds a foot of tape, blows the dust off, and has a memory of walking out across the shelves of ice. She remembers being taken, by snowmobile, to the Strait, seeing open water, still and crystalline, a mirror at the edge of the frozen tundra.

Two years ago, she had given up the security of her job as a producer. After another round of funding cuts at the
CBC
, she had been anxious. She wanted to make radio herself, to create features and documentaries on subjects that aroused her curiosity, that moved her. To make ends meet as a freelancer, she pitched her ideas to public radio stations around the world, calling up old contacts at Deutsche Welle or the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. She had a way of making every vacation into a work project. While other people carried cameras or mobile phones, she was never without a microphone and recorder.

As she sits down to work, a group of school children come laughing down the sidewalk, two by two, holding hands. Their teacher points out a blue jay, and the children erupt in yelling and finger pointing: “I see! I see!” or, heartache in their voices, “I
don’t
see! I
don’t
see!” An older woman shuffles past, pushing her groceries in a supermarket shopping cart. Viewed from her desk, her fingers poised over the keyboard, the scene seems to hang, suspended, before Gail’s eyes.

5 9 24 8 26 9
. She clicks an icon and an audio file flickers open across the screen. The interview that she plays was recorded in Prince George several months ago, on the verandah of Kathleen Sullivan’s home. They had driven from the airport, through a landscape of open fields, along a single highway unrolling like a river. Kathleen had leaned forward as she spoke, strands of auburn hair slipping loose from a low ponytail, each sentence clear and insistent.

“Even now,” she says, her voice coming through the speakers in Gail’s office, “I remember the way the diary smelled and the sound it made when my father opened it. The book literally creaked. He had found it laid away in a drawer, and he wanted to decode it for us. He set a notepad on the table in front of him, then he picked up a pencil and started to copy down the numbers.” Kathleen tells how, when she had first become fascinated by the diary, she had been ten years old. She had believed in the possibility of a perfect answer to the mystery of her father. Rain was the result of condensation in the atmosphere; the sun was an exploding star. There was a solution to her father, too, a cause and an effect.

She describes watching her father write out a row of numbers. Underneath this row, he wrote a line of letters. More letters, chaotic on the surface. It went on this way for some time while the television murmured in the living room, where her older brother was watching a soccer game. Kathleen had turned to watch it, the Vancouver Whitecaps, the rain of white jerseys, a soccer ball drummed across the pitch. Her father put his pencil down, stared at the numbers as if willing them to form a meaning. He erased what he had written and began again. He ran his hand across his face, shook his head. Kathleen remembered looking at his terribly scarred hand, a strange hollow in the index finger where he told her a bullet had passed too close. Her father became confused as he worked backwards through the code. Still, he went on staring at the numbers as if, given enough time, the method of decryption would magically present itself.

Kathleen sat at his feet. Eventually, she felt them shift, opened her eyes to see them walking away, the diary abandoned on the table.

On the tape, Gail’s voice: “And if the code is broken. Can you put into words the thing that you hope to find?”

There is a long pause, the muted sound of a truck passing on the back roads. Then, silence. “He drank,” she says finally. “He drank himself into oblivion. In his worst moments, he couldn’t even recognize us. There was so much violence in our lives. In the end, it was his drinking that drove my brother away, that broke my family apart. I need to know what happened to my father in those camps, what he lived through. And if it isn’t in the diary, then where did he keep those thoughts? What did he do with all those memories?”

The sound waves roll across her computer screen. Gail edits in a fragment of Jaarsma’s interview.

“Cryptography,” he says, “holds a particular danger of its own. People expect to find patterns. You are handed a code, someone says, ‘Break this,’ and then it becomes like a game, a chase. It can drive you mad. Once you begin to doubt your skill, once you begin to lose faith, to wonder if the code is indeed a code, if it contains any meaning at all, it throws your life into disorder. What if, in the end, this book is no more and no less than a book of numbers? What if the surface is all there is?” He pauses and then says, “I think codebreaking is part of a very human desire, the desire for revelation, for meaning. To have every secret, every private thought, laid bare, regardless of what that might cost us.”

In front of her, the recording has come to an end, and the sound waves disappear from the screen.

The phone rings, and Gail blinks, coming back to her surroundings. When she picks up, she hears her father’s voice, already speaking, halfway through a sentence.

She takes the phone and walks out of her office, into the living room, where the windows are open. A sudden breeze shivers the newspapers across the coffee table. Her father is talking about arranging a vacation, two weeks along the coast of British Columbia, north to Haida Gwaii, the Queen Charlotte Islands. “And with our anniversary coming up,” he is saying, “it could be a nice present. But will she like it? Perhaps it’s too extravagant?”