The Persimmon Tree

by Bryce Courtenay

  I admit, you were such a beautiful young man that I simply couldn’t resist the temptation — the joy of initially having you to myself for one night and thereafter for a short while.

  That I allowed myself such a glorious indulgence is one of the nicest things life has ever permitted me to enjoy. There are memories we all store in a special compartment in our hearts and this is one that is securely locked away for safekeeping. Some day, when I am an old woman, I will unlock it and recall the gorgeous young man that, as a young woman, I had the privilege to know and love.

  By now you will have guessed the tenor of this letter. It is to tell you that I have met someone else here in Melbourne and we will be spending Christmas together at his family’s cottage on the Mornington Peninsula where we hope to announce our engagement.

  By a curious circumstance, or perhaps not so curious, you know him: Commander Rob Rich. He speaks enormously well of you and shares my anxiety about your whereabouts and secondment. Thank God you are coming home.

  Rob and I met at Cerberus during the course I came over to do and, well, the rest you can guess — thirty-five-year-old bachelor meets twenty-six-year-old spinster…

  By the time I’d reached this part of Marg’s letter I could feel the tears running down my cheeks. I guess I was emotionally vulnerable due to the gut thing. No! That’s bullshit! I felt as if my heart had been ripped out and jumped on. I was utterly miserable. I had lost the last of the three anchors in my life, the tide was going out and I had become a boat without a rudder floating out to sea. (What a lousy metaphor!) I was also, I am ashamed to say, hurt and filled with self-pity and even, for a short while, angry. But deep down I knew I had no right to be any of these things, for Marg had unfailingly played with a straight bat. She’d always been honest with me and had given me more, much more, than ever she’d received from me, a gangling boy with too much testosterone and a longing for the comfort of her beautiful breasts. The heart is a lonely hunter and I had found the joy of a beautiful woman who took my loneliness and turned it into loving.

  I was flown out in a B-17 to Luganville and then to Brisbane — a short stop, where I went to the toilet and threw up (green slime). Then we went on to Melbourne where I arrived about eight o’clock at night and found, to my chagrin, that a marine ambulance waited on the tarmac to take me to Heidelberg Military Hospital. I’d left Fraser Island just four months previously, fitter than I’d been in my entire life. No way was some well-meaning bastard going to strap me into a stretcher on my return.

  ‘We have specific orders, sir,’ the marine NCO medic insisted.

  ‘Bugger the orders! I’m not lying down on that thing. I’m not dead yet!’ I said, damn near collapsing with a sudden gut spasm.

  ‘Please, sir?’ he urged.

  I turned to the other man. ‘Corporal, help me up to sit in the front. I’m an officer and this is also a specific order.’ It was intended to be a bellow but it came out somehow differently, more as a croak.

  The corporal, with a five o’clock shadow, who reminded me a bit of Belgiovani (though a slightly thinner version), and the medic lifted me into the front of the ambulance. I don’t remember a great deal about the trip to hospital. Somewhere close to our destination, or as we arrived, I must have collapsed, hitting my head against the dashboard, which resulted in a black eye the next day.

  It’s strange how, when you let things relax because you’re close to relinquishing responsibility for yourself, everything suddenly falls apart. I must have come to fairly quickly, because I still insisted I wouldn’t be strapped down. Wheeled into a hospital emergency department on a stretcher wasn’t quite how I had envisaged my triumphant return to my homeland. I was later told I walked into the hospital carrying my kitbag, shrugging off the help of the two medicos. A bloody stupid thing to do, but I don’t remember a thing.

  I knew that what lay ahead was something different; a new turn in my short life. My secondment to the Americans was coming to an end. I was home, wherever that was — initially it had to be a hospital bed in Victoria. While I had always thought of myself as a loner — but had never felt lonely — I was experiencing the most complete sense of being alone, and with it a loneliness such as I had never felt before or since.

  Apart from Marg Hamilton, there were two people I thought about every day of my life, Anna and my father, and I knew they might well be dead. I wondered how I could wangle a coastwatcher’s job in New Britain, where at least I’d be able to learn the truth about my father. In both cases, with Anna and the Reverend John Duncan, it was the not knowing that was the worst part. My father had always said ‘Superstition is what keeps humans ignorant’, but Gojo’s boot on the wing of the Clipper butterfly had really shaken me. The symbolism was so strong — the Imperial Japanese boot crushing the wings of Anna, the beautiful butterfly. I tried to tell myself that Gojo Mura was hardly a symbol of Imperial Japan. But you know how it is with an image; it gets stuck in your head and won’t go away.

  I’d often fantasise about sailing Madam Butterfly to Java after the war and finding Anna and bringing her home with me. She’d be skin and bone but I’d pack the yacht with good things to eat and by the time we got back to Australia Anna would be her old self again. Of course, in my fantasy I didn’t take into account what being crushed under the Imperial Japanese boot might have done to her head.

  Now that I had returned to Australia, it all became confusing. That’s the whole point about being in the forces. You don’t have to think about the next step, the next move. It’s ‘Bang!’ and you’re dead or broken. Or you wake up each morning and follow orders and the routine.

  I didn’t know quite what I was going to be asked to do, or what my next destination would be. I didn’t mind being the leader, providing there was a purpose, such as the little bloke and me escaping in Madam Butterfly from Java. My life had changed so completely that I’d forgotten in just a few months how to be a civilian. In fact, come to think about it, I’d had very little practice at leading a normal existence. As a teenage boy I’d either been institutionalised at boarding school or I’d been in the jungle hunting butterflies. I’d had a short stint of six months working in Moresby with W. R. Carpenter, but that was only to get enough money to go butterfly hunting in Java.

  I didn’t really know who Nick Duncan was. When I’d gone to Java it had been a bit of an adventure; the excuse was the search to find the Magpie Crow butterfly, an escapade straight out of Boys’ Own Annual. I’d also found Anna and that had been a wonderful bonus. The murder of the men on the beach was the first time I’d been tested and, alas, I’d been found wanting. Maybe that was a turning point? Sailing Madam Butterfly across the Indian Ocean with the little bloke in tow had allowed me to bury the incident, and the guilt. The entire time at sea my mind was occupied with the business of getting us back to the safety of Australia. But it had always been there: the feeling that I wasn’t the decent bloke, the intrepid young fellow I pretended to be; that the burial incident on the beach had shown me to be a coward.

  Marg Hamilton had led me gently and gloriously into manhood and had urged me not to become a coastwatcher. I might have listened to her pleas, but for my father’s foolish decision to remain behind in New Britain. At the time, that news seemed to open a way to make up for my failure at the beach. I would rescue him and prove to myself that I wasn’t who I hoped I wasn’t.

  Then came the secondment to the marines, and Bloody Ridge where I suppose I proved I wasn’t a coward. But, in turn, the fighting revealed a new aspect of my personality: the ability to kill calmly in the heat of battle and, while it was happening, to feel a peculiar exhilaration.

  Who the hell are you, Nick Duncan? This was becoming a recurring question I kept asking myself in hospital. I don’t suppose calm analysis and introspection is a good idea when you’re going through the shakes and sweats brought about by falciparum malaria. But there you go. I was feeling like shit, both outside as
well as within my heart and my head.

  I had been placed in a large malaria ward with twenty other officers, all from the army and air force. I don’t suppose too many navy blokes are exposed to the anopheles mosquito. In addition to malaria I was diagnosed with jaundice, which accounted for my constant feeling of nausea, the vomiting, headaches and a whole set of aches and pains. My skin had turned yellow and now the very idea of food was abhorrent.

  The doctor, a young lieutenant, was a cheerful bloke named Ross Hayes. Unlike most civilian medicos I’d met in the past, he didn’t adopt a superior ‘I know best’ manner and after we’d been introduced suggested I call him Ross. I responded with ‘Nick’s the name, doctor.’

  ‘Nick, you’re pretty damned unwell; not just falciparum malaria, which, under normal circumstances, would be enough to lay you low, but you also have a hepatic infection of some kind. Frankly, we’re seeing all sorts of bugs in blokes coming in from New Guinea, ones we’ve never encountered before. Tropical medicine is undergoing a fast learning curve. Your symptoms are fairly typical of jaundice. We’ll run some liver tests but if it’s viral, as usual we’ll have to hazard an educated guess and call it jaundice. You are going to feel pretty off-colour with the quinine drip for your malaria, and the only treatment for jaundice is lots of rest and avoidance of fatty foods.’ He paused. ‘Oh, and absolutely no alcohol for three months. That, I’m afraid, puts the kybosh on a Christmas beer or two. While I’m at it, you also have a nasty worm infection. We’ve found hookworm and threadworm, but fortunately we can clean them up fairly quickly.’ He pointed at my face. ‘And how did you get the black eye? It’s a beauty!’

  ‘Dizzy spell coming in from the airport. I must have knocked it.’

  He looked amused. ‘Very careless getting a black eye while strapped to a stretcher… Never heard of that particular injury before.’

  I laughed, well, sort of laughed, as I was too crook to make a good job of it. ‘I hit it on the dash of the ambulance coming here.’

  ‘Yes, I heard you weren’t very cooperative at the airport or when you walked into emergency. My boss, Dr Light, your admitting doctor, nearly had a conniption when you pulled your Owen gun from your kitbag and shouted “Anyone who puts me on a stretcher dies!” Fortunately there was no magazine in the weapon and, equally fortuitously, that was the moment you chose to black out.’

  ‘Oh, God! Can you bring him to the ward so that I can apologise to him?’

  ‘Don’t worry, he’s a digger from the Great War, served at Gallipoli, then later in France; it won’t go any further. By the way, what’s your unit? It’s not marked on your admitting papers.’

  ‘I’m just an unattached navy lieutenant at the moment, Ross,’ I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact.

  He laughed suddenly. ‘Bloody stupid of me. I should have realised you were with the funnies. Not too many naval lieutenants arrive here in patched-at-the-knees jungle greens and with the uppers coming away from their boots. I hope you don’t want your uniform or boots returned because they went into the incinerator. A rubber-glove job if ever there was one — never know what could be lurking in the seams.’

  ‘How long will I be here, Ross?’

  ‘How long is a piece of string? I can’t give you a time. It will be largely up to you, Nick. You look pretty strong and before the tropics got their claws into your body you must have been very fit, otherwise you would have been here weeks ago. I’m going to hit you with a heavy course of intravenous quinine and you’re going to feel pretty sick for a few days. I’ll try to judge the dose so you’ll be with us on Christmas Day. Thereafter you’ll need to recuperate for a month, perhaps a little more. You’re an officer and with a clearance from me, after two weeks you can technically sign yourself out, as long as you report for morning rounds.’ He paused and smiled ironically. ‘But for that to happen, you’d have to be superman.’

  You wouldn’t want to wish an intravenous course of quinine via a drip on your worst enemy. It’s a toss-up whether the cure is worse than the malaria. For five days I experienced an almost suicidal headache; I would undergo bouts of shivering interspersed with burning fever; the bed sheets were drenched with sweat and had to be changed several times a day. A constant and maddening ringing occurred in my ears, like the clanging of church bells right next door. I kept on drifting off and the subsequent dreams were snippets of everything: the sudden flight of a butterfly; the severed head of the sailor on the beach; the face of the young Japanese soldier I’d killed with a knife at Bloody Ridge; Gojo Mura’s boot on the Clipper butterfly; the look of surprise on the face of the sniper I’d taken out; my father reading in his study with his horn-rimmed glasses positioned on the end of his nose; Kevin crouched in the cabin of Madam Butterfly after the storm at sea. Perhaps most curiously, a Japanese woman beating me as a child and shouting that I was a non-person, an ‘it’. They went on and on, flashes that went past me almost too fast to see, a blink on a silver screen, while others were detailed. All of them were dreadfully stressful, so that I would often come out of these hallucinatory moments — dreams, imaginings, whatever — weeping softly.

  Five days passed including Christmas Day. I seem to remember hearing snatches of carols and once imagined a choir had entered the ward and a pretty nurse had kissed me on the forehead, but I couldn’t be sure. On Boxing Day morning I woke to find the nightmare was over. I felt weak but completely rational; the headache and the ringing in my ears had gone. It was like being born again, getting a brand-new start in life. I wondered if I’d been given something to make me feel so good. A nurse seeing me attempt to sit up came over to arrange my pillows and asked me how I was feeling.

  ‘Great!’ I said. ‘But you look tired, nurse.’

  She giggled. ‘Hangover. Our Christmas party after coming off afternoon shift, it lasted most of the night. Matron is going to be pleased you’ve come around. She was worried you wouldn’t be right for when your visitors come.’

  ‘Visitors? What visitors?’

  ‘I’m not allowed to say.’ She giggled again and despite her hangover she was pretty; nice pretty, like a friend’s sister.

  Moments later the matron came in, a little woman with sharp blue eyes, and wearing a smudge of red lipstick. Her greying hair was pulled sharply back into her white, starched triangular veil that looked rather too big for her head, like a huge gull’s wing fluttering on top of her body. ‘Good morning, Lieutenant, you’re only just in time,’ she said in a prim voice.

  ‘In time for what, matron?’

  ‘Why, General MacArthur, of course! Nurse Parkes — shirt, tie, jacket, brush and comb. Quickly, we haven’t got all day. I hope you weren’t amongst the nurses partying all night; the wards this morning are a disgrace.’

  For a moment I thought I was back hallucinating. ‘General MacArthur? The General MacArthur?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s only one,’ she said, impatiently looking around. ‘Where is that silly girl?’ Nurse Parkes arrived with what I took to be one of my white shirts, washed and ironed, a tie and my naval uniform cleaned and pressed. ‘Nurse Parkes, I said only the jacket! The patient won’t be needing his trousers,’ Matron snapped. ‘Lieutenant Duncan is not to leave his bed under any circumstances. Wash and dress him from the waist up, change his sheets and bring an extra pillow. We want him sitting to attention. Hurry up, girl! I don’t know what’s happened to you lot this morning. Cap? Cap? Where is our patient’s cap?’

  Ten minutes later I was dressed from the waist up, the bottom half hidden under a clean sheet, with my naval cap resting on the bed. The matron had gone walkabout while Nurse Parkes was getting me ready. ‘Bit of an old dragon, what?’ I said as soon as she’d departed.

  ‘The worst part of it all is that she’s my aunty,’ Nurse Parkes said sotto voce, glancing over her shoulder to make sure the matron hadn’t suddenly appeared behind her.

  ‘Every family has its crosses to
bear,’ I said, comforting her.

  ‘Oh, God, here they come. What’ll I do?’ Nurse Parkes said fearfully.

  ‘Hold my hand, I’m scared witless,’ I whispered in a pathetic way. She grinned and took my hand. ‘Look Florence Nightingale-ish,’ I whispered.

  ‘Stoppit! I’m petrified. You’ll make me laugh,’ she giggled.

  In fact, sitting rigidly to attention, I was fairly nervous when the famous general entered the ward, accompanied by the matron who seemed to come to no higher than his waist, Dr Light with grizzly ginger eyebrows and a weary expression, a dozen photographers all wearing hats, and an equal number of army top brass above the rank of major. Their combined footsteps on the polished cement floor made enough noise to wake the dead.

  As MacArthur approached he cocked his head towards the whispering aide beside him, nodded, then having been given my rank and name extended his hand, palm upwards, into which the aide, with a practised deftness, placed a medal at the exact moment the general reached my bedside. It was military precision of the highest order.

  I sat so rigid that if you’d slammed my torso with an axe handle it wouldn’t have budged. ‘Congratulations, Lieutenant Duncan, well done,’ the general said, and pinned the medal with an expertise that indicated he’d done it a thousand times before. I hadn’t ever thought about it, but I guess being a general and pinning medals is synonymous. General MacArthur saluted me, flashbulbs exploded, whereupon he turned abruptly on his heel and walked towards the doorway, followed by aides, sycophants and the press. His expression hadn’t changed a wink throughout the entire procedure that had taken no more than twenty seconds.

  Overwhelmed as I was, I heard myself mutter, ‘That bloke’s got about as much charm as a goanna in a chookhouse.’