The Persimmon Tree

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Will you take refreshment, Colonel-san? May I pour tea?’ Anna asked, scoring a small silent victory by having him realise that he would need to remove his hands if he accepted.

  ‘No, later, after the massage,’ he replied, looking a little foolish, knowing it was a tradition that took place before anything else happened in the okiya.

  Anna reached for the bottle of massage oil Izumi-san had left for her. ‘Please, Takahashi-san, if you will turn and lie on your stomach?’ Anna asked in a soft, pleasant voice.

  The Japanese colonel rolled awkwardly onto his side, his hands remaining cupped over his groin until his back faced Anna. It was time, she decided, to once again follow Korin-san’s instructions. ‘Relax, Colonel-san, the sword is still in its scabbard but my hope is that it will soon be drawn,’ she said cheekily. She waited for his reaction and by way of reply received what she took to be a complicit grunt. Pouring a few drops of oil onto his back, she began to gently massage his shoulders, removing the tension. After a while she heard him groan, then sigh contentedly as he relaxed totally under her skilled hands.

  ‘You are good, Anna-san,’ he mumbled with his face buried in the bean pillow. ‘Very good.’

  ‘There is better to come, Colonel-san. Much better,’ she promised, her voice now light and in control. She continued to massage for half an hour, venturing during this time to again test Korin-san’s advice. ‘You have the shoulders and the back of a warrior; at another time you would have been a famous samurai, I think, Takahashi-san.’ Then she added for good measure, ‘You are already demonstrably the best there can be with the katana, the divine blade.’

  Anna could sense the erection grow beneath him. ‘I have always strived to succeed. My family is not descended from samurai, but how can that count for anything? That pervert Konoe comes from a noble family and he is afraid to wield the samurai sword.’

  ‘Ah, Colonel-san, I always hoped for a real man and not one who on the outside was powerful but on the inside a weakling who couldn’t get it up,’ Anna said, almost exactly duplicating Korin-san’s words.

  ‘I will not have that problem,’ the Japanese officer boasted, accepting the outrageous compliment seriously. It was just as the seventh okami-san had promised it would be. He is beginning to think with his penis, Anna thought to herself, and slapped him lightly on the shoulder. ‘It is time to turn onto your back now, Colonel-san,’ she instructed.

  ‘You know your job, alright!’ Takahashi said, all his inhibitions now gone. He turned and Anna observed his erection; it was no bigger than Konoe Akira’s but was larger than the pathetic appendage her late father had tragically possessed, although she had never seen it erect.

  ‘A most worthy sword!’ Anna giggled. She reached out and tap-danced with the tips of her fingers as she’d been instructed, moving lightly from its exposed head down to the scrotum, massaging his testicles softly and then all the way back again, light, then firm, then light again, teasing, with the ball of her forefinger stroking the pronounced veins that ran its length.

  ‘Careful! Oh, oh, oh! Oh, no!’ the Japanese officer groaned, losing control. Anna grabbed him firmly in her oiled left hand, stroking to maximise the coming ejaculation. His eyes were tightly closed as his premature orgasm finally arrived.

  ‘Directly under the sternum, push it in, it doesn’t have to go very deep.’ Anna, reaching for the shards of the butterfly ashtray, pushed them apart with her fingers and felt for the image of the butterfly’s thorax, the dagger-shaped centre section, the biggest part of all the pieces. Lifting it by the blunt end, she plunged the point of the needle-sharp crystal sliver directly under and upward, just below the kempeitai officer’s sternum.

  The Japanese commander’s eyes shot open in a momentary look of surprise that turned to sudden terror, exhibiting an emotion he had induced so often in others. ‘The victim cannot move as his heart has been shredded. The sudden drop in blood pressure, together with the shock, makes any attempt to retaliate impossible.’

  ‘That’s for Til, you cruel bastard!’ Anna screamed down at him, baring her teeth. Her hand, still holding the end of the crystal shard, started to bleed but she held it steady, keeping the point embedded in him, resisting the temptation to withdraw it and plunge it into him again and again in her insane fury. His body quivered in a shuddery paralysis and then he gave a soft grunt, the light departed from his eyes and she saw that he was dead. It happened just as Konoe Akira had told her it would when, during a late-night conversation, he’d explained the many methods in which the kempeitai are trained to kill. ‘It’s the best way with a short blade. You can also do it with a sharpened chopstick.’

  The heroin mixture still completely possessed Anna’s sensibilities; it would be four or five hours before she would need another glycerine suppository. She withdrew the crystal dagger and moved in a somnolent daze, her mind detached from her body, towards the bathroom, where she ran the tap and rinsed carefully, the blood from her fingers and the shard disappearing in a pink runnel down the plughole. The blood on her hand seemed to be a mixture of the dead Japanese commander’s and her own. Her palm was lacerated where the sharp edges of the crystal had cut into the skin as she’d gripped it. She saw that her cuts were superficial and of little importance. She was going to be dead soon enough anyway. This time there would be no requirement for her to heal so that she was allowed to achieve someone’s ideal of perfection.

  Anna felt no guilt. She had avenged Til’s death and the price, she knew, would be her own. She smiled softly; Til would be enjoying the seventy-two virgins Allah promised the enlightened. ‘Ahee! Anna, it is too much for an old man! As the Prophet says, an old man who takes a young wife is either a fool or a rich man!’ He would laugh and then add, ‘But up in paradise, he must also be a very strong one!’

  Anna covered the body of the Japanese colonel by drawing the futon completely over his head. Then she returned to the bathroom and, as there was no bathtub in the small private bathroom, she stood under the shower for a long time, washing her hair and allowing the hot water to heal and cleanse her. The soap stung her hand from the cuts, but the bleeding had ceased. It was only when she was towelling herself that she realised that she was still a virgin, that it would be as Takahashi had said — she would die a virgin. ‘Oh, Nicholas,’ she said aloud. ‘I am so sorry. I promised it would be you!’ Finally she changed into a sarong and blouse. If she was going to die, she didn’t want to do so wearing a kimono.

  It was then that Anna began to think more clearly. She searched the Japanese colonel’s tunic pockets and found a further half-dozen packets of glycerine suppositories and also a small silver case containing three ampoules of heroin and a syringe similar to the one Konoe Akira had carried. She removed the ampoules so it would appear Takahashi had taken heroin; deliberately but with regret she broke off the top of all of them. She drew the contents of one ampoule up into the syringe, then emptied the syringe and the other two ampoules into the bathroom basin and placed the emptied ampoules and syringe on the table beside the futon. She poured the cold green tea into both cups and emptied them, placing each on the table directly above a floor cushion. Then she placed the packets of suppositories in her shoulder bag, adding the pieces of the butterfly ashtray that were carefully wrapped in a cotton cloth, and the Clipper butterfly box. The silver cigarette case containing the persimmon seeds, together with her silver hairbrush and the morphine ampoules, were padded by her spare underwear. Finally she tucked the guilder notes back into her bra and inserted the wax-sealed revolver cartridge into its designated place.

  Anna returned to where the remainder of the dead colonel’s uniform lay, neatly folded, passing the leather couch where The Adventures of Don Quixote lay open and face down. (How many times had she been told as a child not to treat a book like this?) It was the book she had unsuccessfully tried to read to distract her from her craving. Anna had first studied it while at school and she’d rememb
ered being bored at the hero’s silly eccentricity. Now she wasn’t so sure — everything around her was consumed by a malignancy and had gone mad. Tilting at windmills seemed a brave and honourable metaphor for opposition to the world’s collective insanity.

  She found the keys to the study door and to the garden gate in one of Takahashi’s trouser pockets. Ready to leave, Anna looked around her, inspecting the study. To anyone entering, it would seem the Japanese colonel was asleep. They’d conclude he’d taken heroin and stayed awake most of the night, finally falling asleep. She knew that Izumi-san, warned by the seventh okami-san, would wait for his departure before coming into the room. Possibly it would be close to noon the following day before Izumi decided that something must be wrong. Then, when she finally entered, she’d find Anna missing and what appeared to be a sleeping Japanese officer under the futon. She would, of course, be forced to raise the alarm and would probably call Lieutenant Ito, causing even further delay before a search party got under way to recapture her. If Anna was lucky it could be nearly sixteen hours before anyone discovered her escape.

  Izumi-san had informed her previously that it was impossible to escape; that the gardens and the grounds were closely patrolled by the Japanese guards, and the walls, topped with barbed wire, were too high to climb. Anna accepted that she might eventually be caught. But it was not in her personality to allow events to overrun her by simply waiting for them to occur. If she was going to die it was far better to do so from a bullet fired from the rifle of a guard than be tortured to death by the kempeitai, no doubt with Lieutenant Ito in a supervisory role.

  Anna left, quietly unlocking and then relocking the study door to the garden and doing the same when she reached the gate. She was accustomed to big mansions set in large grounds: Grootehuis was not all that different from this one and she was aware that they all had elements in common — a large vegetable garden and a small orchard, which usually grew oranges, bananas, grapefruit, papaya, guava, quince and passionfruit. The vegetable garden always faced north and was tucked into a corner where it wouldn’t be seen. Furthermore, because vegetables and tropical fruit need full sun, the section of wall enclosing it was always lower, so that the shadow it threw wouldn’t be cast over the garden beds.

  It took almost an hour for Anna to find her bearings and to locate the orchard in the dark. Once or twice she was forced to hide, her heart pounding like a tom-tom when she heard the footsteps of a Japanese guard patrolling the grounds. On another occasion she almost stumbled into two guards who were sitting together on a garden seat having a quiet smoke. She finally found herself in the orchard. It was larger than usual, with mature fruit trees. The wall, as she’d hoped, had been lowered by about a metre but, like the rest, was topped with barbed wire. To her surprise, she found a very old quince tree abutting the wall, one slender branch reaching over the barbed wire. Why the Japanese hadn’t removed the tree was a mystery. Instead they’d simply trimmed the branches that overhung the wall. But the quince has a rapid and persistent growth, readily responding to heavy pruning. The new branch had grown in the interval since the property had been taken over by the Japanese for use as the Nest of the Swallows, and someone had neglected to remove it. In the moonlight it seemed strong enough to support her. That is, if she could find a way to avoid the barbed wire.

  Outside a small garden shed she found a neatly stacked set of boards about two metres long and five centimetres thick. These are commonly used in the wet season by gardeners in the tropics to create pathways through the mud, particularly in a vegetable garden, making it easier to move between the garden beds and preventing a wheelbarrow from becoming bogged in the heavy conditions.

  Anna removed one board and carried it over her shoulder to the quince tree. It was probably teak, for it was very heavy. Reaching the tree, she lifted the plank up into the branches with some difficulty, panting from the exertion, but she managed to wedge it over two lower branches. Then, in the bright moonlight she climbed to a branch above and, first resting to regain her breath, pulled the plank higher up the tree, in the process making what seemed to her a fearful racket. With her heart pounding, and breathing heavily again from the renewed exertion, she expected at any moment to hear shouts and footsteps as the Japanese guards ran towards the orchard. Perched even higher up the tree, she raised the plank again, gritting her teeth with the effort. Finally she managed to get it to the same level as the top of the barbed wire. She threaded it through the foliage until the front end rested on top of the wire, allowing a good section of the plank to extend beyond the heavy branch so that if it slipped it would still remain steady. She was vaguely aware that her right hand was bleeding again.

  Anna waited until she’d regained her breath from the tremendous effort before she began to crawl the two metres along the plank, stopping several times to adjust her weight as the board proved anything but steady, bouncing and wobbling on the springy wire. She arrived directly above the barbed wire, now held down firmly by the plank and her own weight. Rising carefully to her knees, she reached out for the overhanging branch and flung herself over the wall, gripping the slender branch with all her might. The branch dipped but didn’t break and Anna found herself suspended no more than a couple of metres above the ground on the far side of the wall. She released her hold and fell, landing on her feet; then, losing her balance, she sprawled onto the rough ground, landing hard on her bottom. The rush of adrenalin and the effects of the heroin and amphetamine mixture made her oblivious to her bleeding hand, and if she’d injured herself in the fall she wasn’t conscious of it. Anna leapt to her feet and ran for her life. The escape had taken her a little under two hours.

  It was a few minutes before midnight when an exhausted Anna arrived at Ratih’s kampong restaurant. The patrons had left and she could hear the clatter as the servants washed up the last of the dishes, pots and woks. Ratih could hardly believe her eyes when she saw her. ‘Anna, it is you!’ she cried, then ran towards her, holding her tight as Anna collapsed weeping into her arms.

  History tells us that the 14th of August in 1945 was the day the Japanese forces officially surrendered in Tokyo. In Java, a day ahead on the International Date Line, the capitulation occurred on the 15th. By midday the local Japanese in Tjilatjap had laid down their arms, opened the gates of the internment camp, those of the Nest of the Swallows and the soldiers’ brothel, and allowed the prisoners to walk free. The Japanese troops were ordered to return to their barracks to await the arrival of the Allies.

  The war was over. Anna had survived.

  The murder of Colonel Takahashi was never officially recognised. Allied records copied from the Japanese enquiry into his death simply stated that he died alone in the officers’ bordello, the Nest of the Swallows, on the 15th of August 1945. The report noted that he had taken heroin before stabbing himself under the sternum, a method familiar to the kempeitai.

  It was presumed that, upon hearing the Emperor’s surrender broadcast from Tokyo, he had committed suicide. The weapon used — ‘in all probability the short sword worn by Japanese officers with the katana’ — was never found and was likely to have been stolen. The Japanese record noted that his suicide was an honourable death and in the tradition of a defeated hero.

  A typewritten note from a British officer was appended to the short transcript. It noted that Colonel Takahashi had been promoted from the kempeitai and that, had he not taken his life, there was more than sufficient evidence to prosecute him for war crimes. The officer had added, in his own handwriting under the typewritten sheet, ‘A thoroughly nasty piece of work!’

  PART THREE

  ‘Remember, if you are moving in the jungle

  then you are vulnerable.

  The soldier who stays still gets the kill.’

  Sergeant Major Wainwright

  Weapons Instructor, Fraser Island, 1942

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘We’ve had the traditional sailor’s fare
well, Nick.

  Now I want the traditional woman’s farewell.

  I want to stand tearfully alone on a railway platform

  with a hiss of steam bursting from the engine’s wheels,

  waving the dearest man in my life goodbye,

  a small lace handkerchief crumpled in my trembling hand.’

  Chief Petty Officer Marg Hamilton

  On the way to Perth from Fremantle, 1942

  I CONFESS I WAS shattered when I heard the news that the Witvogel had not arrived in either Darwin or Broome. The thought that it may have been sunk by the Japanese, that Anna could be dead, left me depressed and terribly sad. To add to this I received a letter from my father. It had been handed to one of the refugees who was leaving New Britain, with the request that on arrival in Cairns the letter be sent to my godfather, the Archbishop of Perth.

  My dear Nick,

  My sincerest hope is that you will receive this letter. If ever there was a more inopportune time to go butterfly hunting in Java, then I can’t imagine when that might be. But then you were always a strong-minded child. With the great bastion of Singapore bound to hold the Japanese forces, the speed of their advance that caught us all napping in Malaya will soon be halted. Thank God for good old British foresight and initiative.

  With every tramp steamer docking in Rabaul I pray that you will be on board. Now that the Japanese invasion of both islands is thought to be a matter of days away, I pray instead that you take ship to Australia. My worst fear is that you are trapped in Java and taken prisoner. What a fearful mess we find ourselves in.