The Persimmon Tree

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Good evening, Corporal,’ Budi said, granting the policeman an immediate promotion. Ignoring the salutation, the cop took his time lowering the newspaper. No doubt he intended to make them feel ill at ease in his presence.

  ‘Yes, what do you want?’ he asked brusquely.

  ‘Sergeant Khamdani,’ Budi answered confidently. Anna was gaining an increasing admiration for the teenager.

  ‘He is off duty. You must deal with me,’ the policeman said self-importantly, his boots remaining on the desk.

  ‘A policeman with his dirty boots on the desk is not usually ready to conduct a murder investigation,’ Anna snapped, her voice somewhat imperious.

  ‘Murder? You wish to report a murder?’ the man said, hastily removing his feet from the desk.

  ‘Yes — or possibly a drowning,’ Anna replied.

  ‘A murder or a drowning, which is it?’ the policeman asked, somewhat regaining his composure. ‘Do you have the body?’

  ‘No,’ Anna said.

  The cop’s face brightened. ‘Ah, I see, a missing person. These days we have hundreds of missing persons.’ He laughed, enjoying himself. ‘Dutch missing persons running away from the Japanese! All the Europeans, they want now to be missing persons.’ He giggled. ‘We cannot take seriously a report on missing persons.’

  ‘A cripple in a wheelchair,’ Budi said. Then pointing he added, ‘We have the wheelchair. These boys found it on the old oil jetty.’

  Anna was growing impatient. ‘I want someone to investigate. My stepmother, a Dutch woman, who is a cripple, has disappeared and so has her maid. We have found her wheelchair on a jetty by the river. I am reporting it and wish a search to commence immediately.’

  The policeman seemed impervious to Anna’s strident demands, knowing she was a woman and mistaking her for a local Javanese. He shrugged. ‘It is night. Dark!’ he pointed out, as if she was patently stupid.

  ‘Her body may be in the river. Is there not a police boat with searchlights?’

  The policeman leaned forward, squinting slightly as he examined the station clock. Anna realised that he was short-sighted. ‘No, the engine is broken.’ He sat back again and spread his hands. ‘But the body, it is now one kilometre down the river.’ He pointed to the clock. ‘It is now ten o’clock, eight o’clock the tide goes out. The body is long gone, it will be tomorrow’s fish food.’

  ‘You must take down a statement from us,’ Anna insisted.

  The policeman leaned forward, squinting again, looking directly at her. ‘Why have you got blue eyes?’ he asked.

  ‘Because I am half Dutch and it is my stepmother who is missing and I wish to make a statement. These kids are potential witnesses, you must have their names on record — they found the wheelchair.’ She was still clutching Katerina’s hat. ‘And this hat, it was hers, my stepmother’s. It is evidence.’

  ‘That is a very long feather,’ the policeman said infuriatingly. ‘Very beautiful feather, what bird is that?’

  ‘Statement!’ Anna shouted.

  The police officer was suddenly bored. ‘Come back tomorrow,’ he said, picking up the newspaper, then leaning back in his chair and replacing his boots on the desk. ‘Go!’ he shouted from behind the newspaper, sending the street kids scurrying out of the little police post.

  Outside Budi tried to comfort Anna. ‘I will tell my mother, who will tell Sergeant Khamdani.’

  ‘Fish food!’ Anna exclaimed, still furious. ‘How dare he?’

  ‘We must pay these street kids,’ Budi reminded her. ‘It is four guilders and ten cents each.’

  Anna peeled off a twenty-guilder note, absent-mindedly handing it to Budi. ‘Tell them to keep the change,’ she said, not caring. ‘Ask them to come back tomorrow at twelve o’clock.’

  Budi looked doubtful. ‘I don’t think they will come, Miss.’ Then he added, ‘They are now very rich.’ The four kids thanked Anna and scampered off. She could hear their joyful shouts long after she could no longer see them.

  Anna took a ten-guilder note from Piet Van Heerden’s roll, which she casually observed had grown a fair bit thinner. It’s only going to go on Scotch and brandy, she decided. ‘Here, Budi,’ she said, handing the boy the note. ‘Lo Wok will be angry that you have spent so much time with me.’

  Budi seemed overwhelmed; it was more than his mother earned in two months while cooking twelve hours a day. He’d seen Anna’s generosity to the street kids but had realised that she had no alternative but to pay them. He knew he could have successfully bribed them with a lot less, maybe one guilder and fifty cents maximum for everything.

  ‘It is too much,’ he said to Anna, hanging his head.

  ‘No, no — you have earned it, every cent,’ Anna replied. ‘But now you must return to Lo Wok. You must tell him it is my fault you are late.’

  ‘Then let me first push this wheelchair to the boat, Miss.’

  ‘No, Budi, I need time to think. I can manage it. Can you ask Lo Wok to let you come to the police station at noon tomorrow?’

  ‘I will be there, my mother also,’ he assured her, reluctantly making his departure.

  Anna glanced at her watch, a gift from her papa on her fifteenth birthday. She remembered Katerina’s remark at breakfast when Anna was unable to stop glancing at her wrist, pleased as punch with her birthday gift. ‘It’s cheap rubbish, not even gold-plated!’ her stepmother had remarked.

  Anna began to push the wheelchair with the crate of grog in the direction of the ship, trying to make sense of what she knew. Kleine Kiki, Anna decided, had finally reached her breaking point. Anna was too confused in her own mind to know how she felt or, for that matter, if she felt anything at all. She’d always been dutiful to her stepmother while secretly hating her, and had often enough wished her dead. But wishing and actually doing are not the same thing. It was Kleine Kiki who, from childhood, had borne the real brunt of Katerina’s bitterness and resentment. The little maid was an orphan and had never received a salary; only her clothes and food were supplied. Anna, ashamed that she had never thought about it until that moment, realised that Kleine Kiki was utterly powerless and had nowhere to go. Today she’d handed her sufficient guilders to purchase tinned food on the black market. It was enough to keep the little maid going, if she was careful, for several months. Perhaps she’d seen her opportunity and taken it. Anna wasn’t sure that she blamed her. She was half Javanese herself and she’d often noted that the Dutch treated her mother’s people as if they didn’t quite exist on the same human plane. Somehow, in a subtle way — and this included even her — the dark-skinned population was regarded as a lower order, one with less intelligence and feelings, not capable of the same emotional reactions as the Dutch.

  The scenario for the murder seemed obvious to her. Kleine Kiki had ritually wheeled her stepmother around the Grootehuis estate every evening before drinks on the front lawn. Having been bathed and shampooed in the washroom of the Javanese woman’s recently appropriated home, and after being cooped up for nearly six days in their vile cabin, Katerina would have demanded an outing along the river. She hated crowds, thinking the people were staring at her. So despite its dreary godowns and unkempt riverbank with rusty winches, cables and machinery half-hidden amongst the coarse overgrown grass, she would have preferred the lonely towpath to the chatter of the town square. They would have eventually reached the jetty and, with nobody to observe them, Kleine Kiki, with a pocketful of money for the first time in her life, had tipped her mistress into the water.

  Anna asked herself why the little maid would not have simply pushed her stepmother into the river, chair and all, but then thought of the years of persecution the diminutive little girl had suffered at the hands of Katerina. Anna thought Kleine Kiki would have felt her chance had come at last and she would have actively and angrily pushed Katerina out of the chair. The street kids had been emphatic that they’d found the whe
elchair intact and abandoned on the jetty, the straw hat stuck between two boards, the golden pheasant tail feather announcing its presence. A girl who had just turned thirteen, she reasoned, would hardly be capable of a premeditated murder. It would have been a sudden, irresistible impulse. Katerina would have said something cruel and the little teenager, hardly aware of what she was about to do, would have given her a violent push, possibly grabbing her by both shoulders and shaking her violently, then catapulted her out of the chair and over the edge of the pier.

  Anna was amazed at her own dispassion and ability to think in a crisis, particularly this crisis. She readily admitted to herself that grieving for her stepmother was hypocritical nonsense. Yet nobody had the right, no matter what the circumstances, to take another life. As Anna pushed the wheelchair with its cargo of whiskey and brandy towards the Witvogel she tried to think how she would break the news of her stepmother’s death to her father. If he was drunk, as was almost certain, would he be capable of registering the news or even showing regret? She’d never quite understood the relationship between the two of them. She didn’t even know if they still made love, although they shared the same bed and he would dutifully, and even sometimes laughingly, carry Katerina into the bedroom. He must have carried her to the bathroom as well. It was, she decided, one of those inexplicable bitter–sweet relationships people endure rather than part from each other.

  Apart from her own illegitimate birth, she’d never heard a breath of scandal involving her father. And she was sure she would have done so if there had been any. Servants inevitably talked, the rumour mill in Batavia was widespread and ground exceedingly fine. A big city, as far as gossip and scandal were concerned Batavia was like a small village. If he’d visited a prostitute or kept a mistress, she believed the gossips within the kampong would have known soon enough. A wagging tongue was often the only revenge at a servant’s disposal.

  Besides, Anna recognised that Piet Van Heerden was not a circumspect man. He was clumsy both in appearance and by nature, a forthright, some said foolish, man. Anna knew that one way or another he would have inadvertently spilled the beans. He was sometimes shrewd, but it was not in his nature to do anything clandestine. Some said Piet Van Heerden was his own worst enemy and, to extend the metaphor, almost always ended up shooting himself in the foot.

  She’d reached the top of the gangplank to be met by the first mate, whose name she had since learned was Van der Westhuisen, Gert Van der Westhuisen. ‘Goed avend, mijnheer,’ she said politely, wishing him good evening. She’d learned, along with the other passengers, that the confrontation her father had had with him over the allocation and appropriation of their cabins the first evening they’d come on board was not an isolated incident. The first mate seemed to actively enjoy being disliked by the passengers and had been duly nicknamed ‘Hitler’s willing helper’. Now he planted himself directly in front of her at the top of the gangplank, his legs parted, intent on blocking her passage. ‘And what have we got here, Miss Van Heerden?’ he asked, looking into the crate. Then he added, ‘I say! You got a bargain!’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Anna asked.

  ‘In exchange for the old sow!’ His smile reminded Anna of a reptile. ‘Three bottles of Scotch, three of brandy, not bad, not bad at all!’

  ‘When you were born your mother must have thrown away her baby and kept the afterbirth!’ Anna spat. It was an insult she’d once heard when two labourers had been quarrelling in the godown at Grootehuis.

  Pushing downwards on the handles of the wheelchair, the wheels lifted and she manoeuvred it around his parted legs. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, her heart pumping furiously as she wheeled the chair past the left side of him, the back of her right hand inadvertently brushing against his blue serge trousers. Then she continued down the main chalked corridor towards the entrance to below-deck.

  ‘I could get you a cabin to yourself, Miss Van Heerden. All you’d have to do is be nice to all the ship’s officers!’ he called after her.

  Anna stopped and turned to face him. She was furious, and despite an inner voice cautioning her to ignore him, she sneered, ‘And you’d be my pimp, no doubt?’

  Anna reached their cabin door, hoping like hell that the de Klerks were still ashore. The captain had encouraged passengers to remain ashore as the repairs would take several days. He’d even promised they’d clean up the ship. The three de Klerk women had talked excitedly about finding a hotel. As Anna slid back the cabin door, to her utter amazement and confusion she was confronted by the distraught and tear-stained face of Kleine Kiki. The maid saw the wheelchair and burst into fresh tears and began to howl, clasping her hands to her chest as if in prayer. Anna wheeled the chair into the cabin, then moved past it to where Kleine Kiki sat on the bottom bunk. ‘What happened, Kleine Kiki?’ she demanded, standing over the diminutive servant. Anna was too wrung out and confused to show any emotion. On the top bunk her father snored.

  ‘She’s dead!’ Kleine Kiki howled.

  ‘Yes, I know she’s dead! How did she die? Did you push her?’

  Kleine Kiki shook her head furiously in denial, but could only manage fresh howls of despair.

  Anna realised that she was being too harsh and sat beside her and took her in her arms. ‘Come now, Kleine Kiki, tell me what happened. Tell Anna what happened, darling.’

  But Kleine Kiki, burying her head further into Anna’s bosom, continued to sob. Anna held her, stroking the back of her hair. ‘There, there, try to calm down. Tell me what happened. Slowly, there’s no hurry,’ she said soothingly. Kleine Kiki’s reactions were sufficient to convince Anna that she’d possibly made a wrong assumption.

  Kleine Kiki suddenly pulled her head away from Anna’s breast and looked directly up at her, choking back her grief. ‘She said she wanted to fly!’

  ‘Fly? She was a cripple!’ Anna exclaimed, almost laughing.

  ‘Just once! She said she wanted to fly just once,’ the little maid sobbed.

  Anna waited for Kleine Kiki to continue but the thirteen-year-old was silent, sniffing and sobbing intermittently. They were sitting on the bottom bunk and now Anna released her and, standing up, found a glass. She reached out and broke the seal and opened one of the bottles of brandy she’d pushed aboard. Then she splashed a thimbleful of the liquid into the bottom of the glass. ‘Here, drink this,’ she instructed, holding out the glass to Kleine Kiki. ‘All in one gulp.’

  The little maidservant took the glass in both hands and brought it obediently up to her lips, throwing back her head and swallowing. The shock of the fiery liquid hitting her throat suddenly widened her eyes, an expression of shock and repulsion on her small tear-stained face. Then she began to cough and splutter, dropping the glass to the cabin floor. Anna grabbed her and drew her into an embrace, patting her firmly on the back several times. After a while the little maid grew calmer and then, at last, was silent. Piet Van Heerden continued to snore in a drunken stupor on the top bunk.

  ‘Now,’ Anna said gently, ‘from the beginning, tell me everything. Everything that happened from the time I left you and my stepmother at that woman’s washhouse. She, my stepmother, was shouting at you about her hair, about not rinsing it properly. Start from there.’

  Kleine Kiki, benefiting from the effects of the brandy, sniffed and gathered herself together. She began slowly, concentrating, wanting to get it exactly right. ‘After I’d dressed Mevrouw Van Heerden she said we must go for a walk. I must push her along beside the river. She didn’t want to see any more people. She hated people, she said, and wasn’t going back to that stinking cabin and those vile de Klerk women.

  ‘“It’s only a few more days on the ocean and then they’ll be gone and we’ll have lots of fresh air in Australia,” I replied.

  ‘“He wants to go to New Zealand,” she said.

  ‘“New Zealand is also nice,” I replied.

  ‘“What would you know?” she scolded
me.’

  Kleine Kiki looked up at Anna. ‘Is New Zealand a nice place?’ she asked.

  ‘Very nice, they have lots of sheep,’ Anna answered.

  Kleine Kiki continued. ‘Then mevrouw was silent and we had reached the river. It smelled bad and the water was dirty, and one place we passed smelled of rotten eggs, but she said we must go on. Then she started to talk, but it was not to me, it was to Mijnheer Piet. “Piet, I can take this jump. It will win me the blue ribbon. I know I can!” Then her voice grew angry. “You have never believed in me, Piet Van Heerden! With this horse I can fly. You will see for yourself, I will fly over that jump and you can’t stop me! You always want to stop me because you know in your heart I am better than you!”’ Kleine Kiki drew breath. ‘Then she was silent for a long while and we reached the path leading to the jetty. Then she started to weep. I stopped pushing and put my hand on her shoulder. “What is it, mevrouw?” I asked. She shrugged my hand away. “Go away, you little shit! You think you can do anything just because you can walk!” she yelled.’

  Kleine Kiki paused, then went on. ‘We had reached the jetty and I pushed her onto it. “Leave me!” she shouted. “Wait for me here!” I stood and watched as she wheeled herself along the jetty. She stopped once and took off her hat. I started to walk towards her to take it from her. She must have heard my footsteps and she turned. “Stay away!” she shouted. Then she dropped the hat between two boards so the feather stuck up in the air. “Feathers can fly and so can I!” she yelled and scooted off in the wheelchair, stopping just short of the end of the jetty. It was a long pier and stretched out quite far into the river. Tall old tree trunks held it up at the end and it was a big drop to the water. “Be careful, mevrouw!” I shouted, because by now she was right up to the end, to the edge. I couldn’t help myself and I started to run towards her. Then, when I’d nearly reached her, she shouted out, “Look, Piet, I am flying!” and she pushed herself out of the chair and then spread her arms like wings and crashed into the water below.’ Kleine Kiki brought her hands up to cover her face, her brow touching her knees. ‘She only came up once,’ she sobbed in a small voice. After a while she looked up at Anna. ‘It’s not my fault, Anna. I can’t swim. I just ran back here.’