Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing – on top of everything else, Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan had lived as a gypsy. We were spellbound.

  ‘I spent eighteen months in my amah’s zu ji, which means the village where ancestors were born, before my father arrived to fetch me. It was immediately obvious that his health was failing and that he was physically exhausted. Moreover, he arrived virtually empty-handed with only a small suitcase that contained a precious icon and a few personal belongings. As he had received almost no salary since the collapse of the White Army, we found ourselves in a most impecunious situation.’

  She looked up and saw Jimmy’s bemused face. ‘We were stony-broke,’ she explained. ‘My mother’s jewellery was all we had – several rings, pearl earrings, a string of pearls and a diamond bracelet, which Ah Lai had placed in a small leather drawstring pouch and kept concealed during our journey from Vladivostok . . .’ she hesitated momentarily, ‘. . . within her woman’s private part, in case we were robbed by bandits. These few trinkets and, of course, the icon of Christ on a donkey entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday were all we possessed.’

  I hated loose ends in a story and couldn’t help myself. ‘What about the estate, you know, the fish factory?’ I asked. ‘That must have been worth something.’

  ‘Two of my father’s brothers died in the war and the third was killed when the local fishermen stormed the processing plant after the communists took over. It is now run as a commune, but curiously it wasn’t the last time the family would have a direct connection with it – although that comes much later in my story.’

  She pushed the remaining strawberries aside, leaving three uneaten in the bowl. ‘My father and I moved into a single room in Harbin, sharing washing and cooking facilities with twenty other families. Water was obtained from a hand pump in the filthy courtyard of the building. My father tried to gain work as an engineer, but with a bad leg and rapidly deteriorating health there was little he could find to do. Refugees are a desperate lot and not given to charity, and no one remembered or cared that he had kept the port open and running for almost two years allowing a great many of them to escape from Russia. Finally he experienced what later I would realise was a mental breakdown, and suffered from a deep depression that made it impossible for him to leave his bed. He talked almost daily of suicide, and I was beside myself with worry.

  ‘Selling my mother’s jewellery, together with what possessions my father had managed to bring with him, brought very little. Harbin had become the major destination for the fleeing White Russians and it was awash with jewellery going for a song. Buyers from Europe were converging on the city to snap up pieces worth fifty times what they paid for them. No group of refugees was ever worse equipped to make a living, or could have chosen a more inappropriate place in which to make it. Most had never worked – certainly none of the women and very few of the men, other than in the military, and even this had not been taken too seriously, or the rabble that formed the communists could never have won. Work was what a peasant was born and ordained by God himself to do.’

  ‘Sound like dem Russians, dey don’t have no niggers,’ Jimmy said. ‘In America dat time it da same.’

  ‘Well, yes, I imagine that was true, certainly before the Civil War,’ she said, putting Jimmy’s somewhat sweeping statement into some sort of perspective. Then she looked at us. ‘You will tell me if I’m becoming tedious, won’t you?’

  ‘Nicole ma’am, dis a great story,’ Jimmy said, while I nodded my agreement. We were beginning to see a Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan emerging we could never have even remotely imagined.

  ‘At that time in Russia it was believed that peasants were not only a lower form of human being but also a different species. The theory was often postulated among the aristocracy that these creatures had developed alongside modern man but with a smaller brain and a much higher threshold for pain, so that they were natural beasts of burden somewhat like an ox in human form. It was commonly thought that when an infant was born with the Siberian winter approaching it was the practice for a peasant family to fatten it up then kill it and pickle it to avoid starvation in the harsh winter months that lay ahead. One such case was reported in a Moscow newspaper in 1906, the year I was born. It was immediately accepted by many of the petty bourgeoisie and the nobility as a universal practice among the Siberian peasants. So it was hardly surprising that after 300 years of being used and treated as one might an animal, the Russian peasants finally rose up against their oppressors. But then again there is a paradox – it was the working classes in the cities that were the first to embrace communism, followed by the miners and finally the long-suffering Russian peasants.

  ‘The only talents most of the fleeing White Russian aristocrats and petty bourgeoisie possessed were for dancing and carousing, while a few like me could play the piano or some other musical instrument prettily, if not truly well. They had never cooked nor cleaned, neither could they perform such mundane tasks as knitting or sewing. They were cultured and sophisticated, but few were truly educated beyond the nicety of manners and affectation. Such refined characteristics were of no possible use to them in a cesspit like Harbin. So they did the only thing they could do – they opened nightclubs, or supper clubs, until Harbin was known to be the nightclub capital of the world, and home to the most beautiful and readily available Russian women in the Orient. Nightclubs invariably lead to other kinds of nocturnal activity, and women who had been born in palaces suddenly found themselves living in whorehouses.’

  Once again Jimmy and I looked up in surprise – ‘whorehouse’ was not the kind of word we expected from the lips of Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan. She must have sensed our surprise because she shrugged, and added, ‘Survival, as you both clearly know, is our most powerful instinct, although at the time I was quite unprepared for what it might take to survive the environment I now found myself in.

  ‘I was fifteen years old, and even taking into account the time I’d spent in Ah Lai’s village, I had led, until now, a sheltered existence. With my father unable to rise from his bed, I had to find myself a job or else we were simply going to starve. We had sold all my mother’s jewellery and retained only the icon, which was said to have been in our family for well over 200 years and which I was determined under any circumstances to keep. By retaining the icon it was as if I retained a small piece of God in my life, and as long as I hung onto it we wouldn’t go under.’

  She glanced suddenly at her wristwatch. ‘Goodness gracious! It’s a quarter to three!’ she exclaimed. ‘We have a bus to catch!’

  Her reminder of the time was so abrupt and unexpected that it took a few moments for me to adjust to where we were. I glanced around to see that the dining room was deserted. With the exception of our table, all the tables had been laid for dinner and the staff had long since departed, apart from the head waiter, who stood leaning against the cashier’s counter at the far end of the room. I glanced at him and he gave me a somewhat despairing smile. Jimmy paid the bill and left a generous tip, but the head waiter was hard put to even rub his hands together as he wished us good day and, no doubt, a silent ‘good riddance’.

  Of course, Jimmy and I desperately wanted to hear the rest of Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan’s story. But the three o’clock bus to Launceston Airport was usually crowded and, running late as we now were, we’d be lucky to get a seat so that she could continue her tale. Furthermore, the Douglas DC3 to the island was a noisy aeroplane, and there wasn’t going to be an opportunity to talk any further until perhaps some time after our arrival.

  It had been the most amazing of days. Frustrating, in the sense that we still didn’t know Jimmy’s fate, but exhilarating in another sense – if Jimmy was allowed to stay we might have the money to start a half-decent fishing operation, rather than the prospect of living on the smell of an oily rag for the next ten years. The day’s revelations were also worrying, in that the partnership on offer held a distinct possibility of creating dissension among the three of us. Finally, what Nicole
Lenoir- Jourdan had so far told us about her past convinced me that we might be dealing with someone so completely different from the woman I thought I knew that this too might have unexpected consequences. The day had been a seminal one, to say the very least.

  As it turned out the plane was as crowded as the bus from Launceston, and we had three separate seats. Mine was on the opposite aisle and two rows behind Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan while Jimmy was well back near the tail. From where I sat I could look at her without her noticing. I was also fortunate that I was seated beside a travelling salesman who was preoccupied for most of the way studying a brochure filled with plumbing fixtures. Had I copped the company of an islander I would have been forced to conduct a conversation, halfway shouting against the noise of the engines, and I was much too overwrought and emotionally exhausted for the usual small talk.

  This is probably going to sound peculiar, but I had known Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan from the age of eight and I was now twenty-seven – that’s almost twenty years, and I had never truly looked at her. As a small child my eyes had always been downcast when she talked to me and her physical presence had simply overpowered me, and the fear she’d engendered then had left a permanent imprint on my brain. While I now considered her a friend, a subliminal reserve persisted that until now had blinded me from seeing her in any other context but as someone who had always seemed my superior. Not, I hasten to say, in a sycophantic way, but as a teacher and mentor.

  Now I looked at her carefully – really looked for the first time. Her face was in profile and in repose. She was by her own admission a woman close to fifty, as slim as a rake, with her natural blonde hair beginning to turn grey. I felt a physical shock as I realised she was still a highly attractive woman and must have once been very beautiful. She used very little make-up – a lick of red lipstick and perhaps mascara. Her hair was cut, not overskilfully, in a bob, while her skin remained clear and firm and, unlike Gloria, who couldn’t go anywhere without creating a dust storm around her head, she didn’t use face powder. Her eyes, which I couldn’t really see, I knew to be a clear deep blue – the colour of sea water looking up to the surface when, as a diver, you are about fifteen feet down with the sunlight reflecting back from a clear sandy bottom below you. I now realised I’d never summed up enough courage to truly look, to observe what lay behind them.

  The next question I asked myself was obvious, though I confess it had never occurred to me until this moment. Why had a beautiful and intelligent woman like her never married? Was it because no man on the island, with the exception of the Reverend Daintree, had been her intellectual match? But then, why had she chosen the island in the first place? Now, it seemed, she was a woman of some means. Why then had she hidden herself on a place she sometimes, in exasperation, referred to as ‘This godforsaken island!’?

  I’m ashamed to say I even wondered if she might be hiding from someone or something. I told myself it stood to reason that with the kind of looks she must have had twenty or so years ago and with money as well, something funny must be going on. I mean, what the hell was she doing arriving on Queen Island during the Great Depression when poverty and alcohol had reduced the people on the island to little more than gibbering savages?

  Then, of course, my imagination began to work overtime. Maybe there was something dark and ugly in her past that caused her to run away and hide – what better place to choose than Queen Island? One negative thought invariably leads to another, and I grew concerned once again about going into partnership with Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan – if that really was her name. What could Jimmy and I possibly be getting ourselves into? She appeared to be telling us the story of her life, but what if it wasn’t true, a total fabrication? I believed the part where she said she’d lived in China. Darkest China was darkest Africa – plus cunning, greed and pitiless evil thrown in. It was Ming the Merciless with fingernails six inches long, inscrutable and cruel, Ming and her, together in a wicked partnership. Maybe the Russian part was also partially true. She’d said the Russian women were beautiful, that they had no means of support. Isn’t that a way of saying they were desperate and would do anything to survive? After all, some say a woman’s pussy is her last true asset. Maybe she’d been in the white slave trade where she hooked her victims on opium? She spoke Chinese and Russian, didn’t she? She’d told us about beautiful aristocratic women finding themselves in whorehouses. Maybe she put them there – a notorious madam grown filthy rich on the carnal desires of licentious men . . .

  But then, as usually happens, a gust of further absurdity, the thought of a sixteen-year-old brothelkeeper, let in a blast of clarity and commonsense. I gave myself a severe mental backhand. I’d fought the Chinese – there was nothing mysterious about them, nothing inscrutable. My mind flashed back to the bloke who had rolled me a cigarette then died in front of my eyes, and the soldier who’d held me in his arms and sung ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’. There was plenty of mercy, and no Mings with six-inch talons. Only brave young blokes who’d chewed their nails down to the quick and hoped just to get through the day alive. I’d turned Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan into the Wicked Witch of the East.

  I looked out of the plane window to cool my thoughts. We were over Bass Strait and it was just after eight o’clock, with the last rays of the sun disappearing behind a dark, flat line of cloud edged with a fiery rim of gold that gave the impression of melting the darkness immediately above it. With the drone of the twin engines I suddenly felt very melancholy, as if I was suspended in time and space, a passing-away of something old, the beginning of something else. Is this extraordinary day the end of my old life, and tomorrow the beginning of a new path where Jacko would become Jack and I might finally grow up?

  Jacko – it was a nickname that carried a lightness about it. It was insubstantial in sound, a bit of a joke really, the name of the monkey at the end of the organ-grinder’s chain. Jack McKenzie had a resonance, like a hammer striking bright steel. Maybe Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan was the only one who’d recognised this all along. I turned away from the window and looked to where she sat. She appeared to be asleep. I tried to imagine a girl of sixteen trying to start her life all over again with a bedridden father in a dark, stinking little room in a strange and wicked city teeming with desperate and uncaring people.

  When we got back to the island Gloria gave us a message from the co-op that there was a week’s work available as crew on a trawler going out at dawn, which would be out to sea until late the following Sunday. Of course we jumped at the chance of some extra money.

  Cray fishing is hard yakka and Jimmy and I were often separated and too busy to talk. Nevertheless, we discussed Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan’s story at every opportunity. At one stage Jimmy said to me, ‘Da only count I knows ’bout is Count Basie. What sort’a count dis cat, her father, man?’

  ‘Like she said, he was an aristocrat.’

  ‘Dat like da queen?’

  ‘Yeah, kinda – it’s an inherited title like the English have, you know, like a lord.’

  ‘So now she like, what?’

  ‘A countess, I reckon.’

  ‘Dat good. She ain’t Nicole ma’am no more – she now da countess,’ Jimmy declared emphatically.

  I looked at him. ‘You’ll have to tell her that, mate. I’m certainly not game.’

  ‘Sure, I do it,’ Jimmy said confidently. ‘It ain’t no good hidin’ yo’ light under no bushel.’ All the reading Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan, shortly to be addressed as ‘Countess’, was giving Jimmy was beginning to affect him.

  We spent a large part of the week discussing her offer of a partnership and what it might mean. I pointed out to Jimmy that it could lead to dissension between us, that Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan was stubborn as a mule and liked to get her own way. We argued to and fro, pros and cons, until on the last day at sea Jimmy said, ‘Brother Fish, we done beat da North Koreans, we done beat da Chinese, we done beat da army, maybe we even gonna beat da Aus-tra-lian Government. How come we not gonna beat da countess iffen she make t
rouble?’

  ‘She’s a woman,’ I answered. ‘We’ve never beaten a woman.’

  Jimmy laughed. ‘Dis ain’t no wo-man, Brother Fish. Dis one tough she-devil – she tougher den any drill sergeant an’ we gonna need her real bad. We don’t know nothin’ ’bout nothin’ export, we ain’t got no boat, no bread – only hope.’ He thought for a moment. ‘As a matter o’ fac’, we don’t know nothin’ ’bout sweet fuck-all, ’cept survivin’.’ He grinned. ‘But dat ain’t a bad start. I say we go, man.’ From the look on my face he must have seen that I still wasn’t entirely convinced. ‘She da peace policeman . . .’

  ‘Justice of the peace.’

  ‘She know how to ne-go-shee-ate, she can talk sweet, she know also when to bend, but mostly she a tough cat – she don’t take no bullshit from no one, man!’ He paused. ‘Dat good – we gonna need dat, Brother Fish.’