The Persimmon Tree

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Tomorrow, when we all have to leave the ship,’ Anna said. ‘Mother Ratih will meet us and take you to her kampong. She lives quite close to the kitchen. But first thing in the morning you must help me to get mijn father dressed and in the wheelchair.’ Anna sighed. ‘It will not be an easy task, I assure you. Then you must go ashore and hire two dockworkers to carry the big trunk.’

  ‘And where will you go, Anna? What will happen to you? The Japanese will hurt you!’ Kleine Kiki’s expression was deeply concerned and her eyes were once again brimming.

  ‘I don’t know yet.’ Anna tried to smile. ‘But I do know it will be some place where there is no whiskey or brandy.’

  They had arrived back at the ship and Anna added another fifty cents to the driver’s fee. ‘For putting up with our tears,’ she said to him.

  ‘Ahee!’ he said, gratefully accepting the money. ‘It is a natural thing to cry if you are a woman. The prophet tells us that Allah gave men courage and women tears, the one to fight and the other to mourn for what men do to each other.’ He turned his becak to go, but then glanced back over his shoulder. ‘With the Japanese coming, I think there will be many more tears for women to shed.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘I did not bring you back to my island to fatten you up

  so that you could return to the white man’s world.

  We have made you nice and plump so we can eat you at our feast!’

  Unknown native

  IN ORDER TO CONTINUE to tell Anna’s story it is probably a good idea for me to outline the immediate future she and Piet Van Heerden and all the other Dutch nationals who had been unable to escape from Java and Sumatra were about to face. It was now the 6th of March 1942, two days before the Japanese arrived in the river town of Tjilatjap.

  Although the Dutch forces in the East Indies hadn’t yet surrendered to the Japanese, the gossip was that the Netherlands East Indies administration was about to capitulate and the Dutch army would tamely surrender. The Dutch army, which showed a great reluctance to fight, wore dark-green uniforms and became known as Pawpaws — green on the outside and yellow on the inside. In Tjilatjap, as in all the towns and two major cities on the island, the more important civil servants and the wealthy had departed and the town administration, now in the hands of jumped-up local clerks and municipal workers, was teetering on the brink of collapse.

  Every remaining Dutch family was suddenly having to learn new ways to survive on an island where they now met great antipathy from the Javanese population. No safe place existed for any Dutch citizen to go, nor was there any place where they could earn a living wage and they were heavily dependent on what money they had accumulated in a bank account.

  The great majority of the Witvogel’s passengers were middle-class and unaccustomed to the exiguous requirements of a refugee. They had been unable to sell their homes or properties and were ultimately forced to abandon them. Furthermore, the passage to attempted freedom had not been cheap, with the result that once they found themselves abandoned, very few had the financial means to survive for very long.

  The worm had finally turned and the locals could now openly show their antipathy towards their previous conquerors, the master race who, they maintained, had kept their people in servitude for a period of three centuries. The Japanese propaganda had been prodigious and, anyway, the locals were inclined to believe it, mistakenly anticipating that, as an Asian race, the soldiers of the Emperor would prove a more benign and sympathetic invader.

  And so, to return to Anna’s story…

  A most immediate problem for the passengers on the stricken ship proved to be the custom of taking a cabin trunk on board when embarking on an ocean voyage, even one as traumatic as the business of leaving your homeland forever. Many a square on deck or in the hold was dominated by one of these large objects, which were often plated with tin sheeting and fitted with heavy brass corner-brackets. Similarly, the passageways outside the cabins were lined with trunks too big to be contained within. One trunk or two large portmanteaus was the maximum luggage that had been allowed on board and most people had opted for the more commodious trunk, often procuring the biggest one they could find.

  Now, with the passengers becoming refugees, they were saddled with these great cumbersome boxes. They couldn’t store them in a godown on the docks, as they might have done in a time of peace, while they waited for another ship to take them off the island. The breakdown in authority and the imminent arrival of the Japanese almost certainly meant that the locals would take to looting, appropriating anything they could lay their hands on. Nor could they expect to manhandle these large objects on their own.

  That morning, the last day on board, chaos reigned. Passengers who had gone ashore the previous day and attempted to recruit dockworkers as porters had been largely unsuccessful. After one or two trunks had been transported the locals caught on to what was happening and withdrew their labour, knowing that the Dutch passengers would be helpless with these large and cumbersome trunks and they had only to wait for the rich pickings soon to become available.

  It was for this reason that the Witvogel’s passengers were now engaged in reducing their possessions so that a husband-and-wife team would be capable of carrying a trunk. People had spent most of the night packing and then repacking, discarding what they felt they couldn’t take into an uncertain future and keeping what they believed was absolutely essential to their physical and emotional wellbeing. These ‘keep or discard’ choices often proved curious, to say the least: for instance, a whalebone corset was kept and an extra pair of stout shoes was discarded. Frames were removed from photographs and thrown aside, photos from albums were arranged in various piles of importance, the least nostalgic cast aside while the important memories were rearranged in a single slim album or leafed into a family Bible. Mountains of dishtowels, crocheted doilies, antimacassars, embroidered table napkins and cloths and other niceties of homemaking were given up with a regretful cluck or sigh or even a tear, each object a tiny rip in the fabric of their lives. Soon the deck space, ship’s hold and cabins were littered with this detritus of their past as well as their present despair.

  This on-board mayhem was a situation where Anna was to learn a valuable lesson in survival. Like the owners of the ill-equipped, poorly maintained boats rusting for lack of maintenance or confined to coastal duties in every port in the Pacific that had scurried to Batavia to make a quick dollar, she was to learn that the advent of misfortune often favours the bold and that opportunities exist in the most unexpected circumstances.

  Identifying a need and then finding some way to serve it is the very essence of survival. Anna also observed that you may learn as well from your enemy as you can from someone you trust. Both lessons came via the redoubtable Mevrouw Swanepoel of the nascent moustache and dress-gobbling breasts and her Jack Sprat of a husband, Hans the Obedient.

  Anna first observed Hans scurrying down the passageway below decks shouting, ‘Five cents for dishtowels!’, repeating the call every few moments. He already carried a large number of these common squares of cotton cloth hugged to his chest. Anna knew enough about Mrs Fat and Mr Lean to know that Hans wasn’t simply using idle time to parade down the corridors collecting dishcloths. She followed him on deck to discover that a queue had already formed that stretched from the rescue square the couple occupied to the opposite side of the deck, filling all the chalked corridors in between.

  Mevrouw Swanepoel was seated behind a manual Singer sewing machine that was resting on the H.R. Swanepoel-initialled trunk, sewing for all she was worth. She was joining four dishtowels together to make one side of a giant knapsack and then four more to make the flip side, cheerfully calling ‘Nearly done!’ as she stitched the two sections together for a grateful customer. To this she added shoulder straps of white rope, no doubt purloined from some part of the ship by Hans. The whole became a bag of considerable volume that could be carried on
the back by a refugee. In the process she was making money hand over fist, unashamedly demanding five guilders for each of these hastily sewn sacks, items that in the market in Batavia would have cost no more than fifty cents and been made of a superior material. Opportunity, opportunity, opportunity! The dishtowel sacks were the answer to the prayers of many of the passengers and Jack Sprat’s wife had successfully identified the need and exploited it. A husband and wife carrying their belongings on their unaccustomed and reluctant backs was greatly preferable to lugging a clumsy tin or leather trunk around between them.

  Anna was forced to admire the gross woman for her initiative. To exploit the prevailing circumstances made perfect sense and it was a lesson she would remember at a later time. As Kleine Kiki had said to the woman hiring her bathhouse to them the previous day, ‘Yesterday is a distant land’! We adapt or we die — Mevrouw Swanepoel had seen the opportunity and grasped the moment to turn it to her advantage. Morals, if there were any under such circumstances, have little to do with the immediate business of survival.

  However, Anna couldn’t bring herself to stand in the queue and be forced to eat humble pie and ask the fat vrou to make her a bag, so she sent Kleine Kiki with ten dishtowels she purchased at the going price of five cents to the native market where a Javanese seamstress made up a bag, using the extra two towels to fashion a set of comfortable shoulder straps, whereupon the little maid paid the grateful woman fifty cents for her time and labour.

  I’ve seen one of these colourful dishtowel bags in the War Museum in Canberra. The exhibited one had been made up with towels of various stripes and patterns, with two towels in particular gaining my attention because one depicted a map of the Dutch East Indies that proclaimed the tricentenary of Dutch occupation and the other bore a picture of an unsmiling Queen Wilhelmina. One would have thought that whoever possessed this particular bag would have been a potential walking disaster in the prevailing anti-Dutch atmosphere. Anna claims that for her own bag she was careful to select dishtowels with floral designs that could be seen when the bag was on her back; one in particular was a single large sunflower.

  It was almost noon by the time Kleine Kiki returned and Anna packed what she believed she and her father would need once they were living ashore. Most of what the trunk contained had belonged to Katerina, who had had expensive taste in clothes, fondly believing that if other women admired her fashion sense it would distract their attention from her physical condition. She had also possessed some valuable jewellery, and though she had been wearing her wedding band and a large diamond engagement ring (the solitaire diamond had been useful in disconcerting the three sour-faced de Klerk women) when she’d plunged into the water, there remained a second diamond ring, a ruby ring as well as a large sapphire ring, the latter bought for her by Piet Van Heerden when they had been on a short holiday to Colombo. There was also a double strand of pearls with matching pendant pearl earrings, six heavy gold bracelets, and an antique Dutch brooch of a pewter clog with silver sails so that the traditional folk shoe was turned into a little boat. The brooch had belonged to Katerina’s mother and Anna had loved it as a child, but now she handed it to Kleine Kiki along with two of the six gold bracelets and the silver-backed hairbrush the little maid had used most of her life to brush her mistress’s hair. ‘Here, Kleine Kiki, when the time comes this will buy your wedding dowry. Keep the brush for your own hair and to remind yourself that you are no longer a servant.’

  Kleine Kiki immediately protested, not wanting to take Anna’s gift. ‘I’m not going to marry. After the war I’m going to look after you!’

  ‘Take them, darling. The brooch you can wear, it is not valuable; the bracelets you must keep in a safe place — they are much too big for your tiny wrists. Gold is always something you can turn into cash in an emergency. See, the brush is monogrammed with the initial “K”, now that stands for Kiki!’

  Anna kept the remainder of the jewellery and two pairs of Katerina’s sunglasses, knowing that the sunglasses would conceal her blue eyes when she was in public. She reminded herself that from now on she would always dress in traditional native costume, as she had often done at home in Batavia. She was exceptionally tall for a Javanese woman, yet small-boned.

  The only items Anna packed for herself and her father, other than personal clothes and two towels, were a dozen handkerchief-sized cotton squares, the Clipper butterfly in its teak box, her embroidery silks and needles, an album of family photographs and a long, narrow, locked black tin of the kind usually deposited in a bank vault. The key to open it, she reasoned, must be the one that hung on a chain around her father’s neck. Anna placed the tin in her dishtowel bag, knowing that it must contain items of value.

  She then selected two elegant silk outfits that had belonged to her stepmother, two pairs of kid gloves and a pair of white high-heeled shoes her stepmother had worn in the wheelchair simply for appearance, the soles still unscratched. While not fat, Katerina had nevertheless been a tall, big-boned Dutch woman and Mother Ratih was a small Javanese one, but Anna reasoned she might be able to have the two haute couture outfits altered and so she put these along with the other items into the shopping basket that contained Kleine Kiki’s few clothes and personal items. ‘For Mother Ratih from you,’ she instructed. The rest of her stepmother’s extensive wardrobe she left in the soon-to-be abandoned trunk.

  Getting Piet Van Heerden into the wheelchair proved easier than Anna had anticipated. He had woken early and found the last but one of the bottles of whiskey. He’d consumed half the bottle by mid-morning and had collapsed back into a drunken stupor, whereupon she had rescued the remaining half. Now, packed and ready to leave, Anna shook and slapped his cheeks until he came around sufficiently to demand his bottle. Anna held it up. ‘We are going ashore, Papa, and you may have it when we’ve left the ship,’ she said.

  ‘Gimme! Not going!’ he growled, his trembling hand stretching out to take the bottle.

  ‘Get into the wheelchair, Papa, or no more Scotch!’ Anna scolded. ‘Come, we’ll help you!’ To her surprise Piet Van Heerden made an effort to sit up, then he allowed himself to be helped into the wheelchair. With the dishtowel bag on her back and with Kleine Kiki carrying her basket, manoeuvring the wheelchair with the canvas bag hanging from its handles and loaded with the slumped and heavy form of Piet Van Heerden down the ship’s passageway between its many abandoned trunks proved a frightful task. By the time they reached the deck Anna was almost in tears. On deck they were met by a scene of complete chaos, with hundreds of people milling about, discarded trunks and personal belongings scattered everywhere so that there seemed no way they could reach the gangplank. Then, to her consternation, the first mate suddenly appeared and stood in front of them. Anna was exhausted and felt unable to cope with a confrontation and she simply burst into tears.

  ‘Stay there, Miss Van Heerden!’ the mate commanded. ‘Don’t move, I’ll get some help.’ Several minutes later he arrived back with two dark-skinned lascars, one of whom relieved Anna of her dishtowel bag, slinging it onto his back and then taking Kleine Kiki’s basket as well, while the other took the handles of the wheelchair. ‘Step aside! Step aside!’ the first mate called out as he preceded them, parting the milling throng until they reached the gangplank. ‘They can only take you as far as the dock, then they must come back,’ the first mate instructed.

  ‘Thank you, Mijnheer Van der Westhuisen,’ Anna said, forcing herself to look directly at the ship’s officer. ‘We are very grateful to you.’

  ‘Ach! Now we are all in the same boat,’ he quipped. ‘With the Japs coming any time now, who knows what will happen to us all, hey? Tonight I go ashore as helpless to save my own skin as anyone else.’ He pointed to Piet Van Heerden. ‘Good luck to you all!’

  ‘And you too, good luck,’ Anna said, thinking she almost meant it.

  Smiling, the first mate then said, ‘I suppose a little goodbye kiss would be out of the questio
n?’

  Anna stuck out her hand, forcing him to take it. ‘A handshake is all I can manage,’ she said crisply, not smiling. ‘Thank you again for your help.’ With this, she directed Kleine Kiki to follow the lascars down the gangplank to the dock below, walking behind her without looking back, her heartbeat steady as a metronome. Anna’s innate sense of power over men was back with her.

  Arriving on the dock Anna tipped the lascars a guilder each, then found that she and Kleine Kiki were being welcomed ashore by a smiling Ratih and Budi, the latter having taken a day off from Lo Wok’s store. Budi thanked Anna profusely for allowing him to return to school, which he said would take place the next term. When Anna said it was a pity he’d missed the first term he shrugged. ‘I will catch up easily.’

  Ratih nodded her head, confident in her son’s ability. ‘In school he was always in first place. He will soon catch up, you will see.’ Then she turned, waving to someone in the distance. ‘I have a becak for the bags,’ she announced.

  The becak driver moved through the throng ringing his bell furiously for people to part. To Anna’s surprise it was the same old man who had taken Kleine Kiki and her to the airport. There must have been hundreds of becaks in Tjilatjap and she wondered if getting the wise old man who had quoted the prophet’s saying about women and tears was a good omen. Unlike most Javanese, he hadn’t credited the arrival of the Japanese as liberators, but knew there were many more tears in store for the nation’s women. ‘This is my uncle, Til,’ Ratih said. ‘He will help us.’

  Anna smiled at the becak driver. ‘Ah! It is good, we meet again.’

  The old man smiled, immediately recognising Anna. ‘Airport. B-17 letter! Colombo!’ he said, laughing. Then he added, ‘Your tears were very good!’

  Anna threw back her head and laughed; the driver had overheard every tear-jerked word between herself and the colonel in the big American automobile. ‘That old one has ears like a jackass!’ Ratih laughed. ‘Some of the stories he brings back to the kampong, you wouldn’t believe it, you never heard such stuff before!’