The Persimmon Tree (28 page)

At noon the captain announced over the ship’s loudspeaker that they’d developed engine trouble and the ship’s engineers were trying to rectify the problem. For the next three hours they heard constant hammering and eventually the shaft began to turn. Then to everyone’s dismay the ship began to turn in a wide arc to the north-east. The captain came on the loudspeaker once again and announced that they were returning to Java, to the port of Tjilatjap, where repairs would take place. He left the worst for last — that the ship’s speed, normally around eight knots, was severely reduced and it would take several days to get back to the coast and sail upriver to the port. He assured the passengers that the Japanese had not yet invaded and that hopefully the
Witvogel
would be on its way again and well out to sea before they did arrive.

It was also my birthday, and Anna told me how she had searched the ship for an empty corner and finally found it in one of the women’s lavatories that was closed for repairs. She sat on the toilet seat and cried her heart out. ‘Oh, Nicholas, I missed you so much! You were somewhere out there, close. I could feel it in my heart!’ she told me, tears running down her cheeks when she was recounting her story. She was stuck on a broken-down ship that was wallowing in the tropical heat, knowing I couldn’t be very far away, having left Batavia only a day earlier.

Finally she’d left the disused toilet and made her way on deck, where she found a chalked corridor that led to half a metre or so of railing that didn’t trespass onto someone’s square. Looking across the horizon towards where she thought the Sunda Strait might be, she shouted at the horizon, ‘Happy birthday, Nicholas! I love you!’, not caring about the startled looks of passengers in the adjacent squares.

And so began what Anna thought at the time were the worst four days of her life. At first the intruders, as she thought of the four members of the de Klerk family, made sly remarks amongst themselves about the drunken Piet Van Heerden. But seeing how pathetic and helpless he’d become, they were soon bawling insults openly at him. This, in turn, caused her stepmother to bare her teeth and scream back at them like a fishwife. The cabin had become a battleground. Every waking hour, internecine warfare raged between the two families, with the fetid air often blue with invective.

There was no space to move in the cabin and Anna spent most of her time standing or seated in the passageway, out of earshot of the caterwauling women and the self-important and hectoring bank clerk. He was a small man with black wavy hair that glistened with pomade; combed backward from his brow and flattened over his skull, it more closely resembled a nasty-looking toupee than it did his own God-given hair. Anna instinctively knew de Klerk was the kind of snivelling rodent who would slink away and hide rather than face up to a confrontation.

Not that Piet Van Heerden was interested in putting him in his place. After the incident with the first mate, and realising their fate was no longer in his hands, he’d taken seriously to the brandy bottle and lay all day in the top bunk in an alcohol-induced stupor. On several occasions, too drunk to go to the toilet or to ask for the brandy bottle he’d taken to using, he’d ended up pissing while still wearing his pants, groping at his fly to remove his penis and sending an arc of piss splashing against the cabin ceiling directly above him for it to return in a shower over his bunk, face, chest and already-stained trousers. This to the outraged howls from the de Klerks and silent disgust of Anna, who found herself forced to try to clean him up, though she avoided touching his penis, which he’d tucked back into his trousers, leaving a wet stain at the front. Despite all her efforts, the sharp tang of urine was soon added to the smell of stale grog, sweat and vomit in the overcrowded cabin.

The communal toilets were soon blocked and the ship below-decks smelled of seasickness and shit. They had to queue for two hours to receive a single small meal a day from the ship’s kitchen. This consisted mostly of a handful of rice, tinned vegetables and a few stingy bits of pink bully beef coated in watery, grey gravy.

The water in the cabin had been cut off and Anna had to wait for an hour to clean her teeth in the women’s communal bathroom, where the tap handles for the showers had been removed and she was obliged to share a basin of water with
Kleine
Kiki. Having washed as best they might, the little maid would return to the cabin with a wet towel to dutifully wipe her mistress down. Anna did the same for her drunken, mumbling and often pathetically weeping father.

The journey to the coast took four days and nights of sweltering heat. The ship’s fans were no longer working, adding to the misery on board. It was rumoured that three elderly passengers had died of heat exhaustion.

When at last the
Witvogel
reached the mouth of the long, winding river that led to the port of Tjilatjap, some eleven kilometres inland, the despondent mood on board changed despite the fear of the sudden appearance of the Japanese. At least the passengers would be able to go ashore. They speculated that they’d be able to purchase food to bring back on board, as well as have a good wash, a general clean-up and get their laundry done.

In the shared cabin there was a general mood of renewed hope for the first time since they had left Batavia. The de Klerks, pusillanimous male and three females, and the Van Heerdens, drunken and self-pitying male and three females, ceased their bickering for the duration of the journey upriver. The three de Klerk women commenced brushing, rouging, powdering and lipsticking, a process that took all their attention as they primped and tarted themselves up for the visit ashore.

Katerina, with the help of Anna and
Kleine
Kiki, attempted to do the same. Anna even dug up a chocolate-brown linen suit from the trunk for her stepmother to wear. To this she added white gloves and a small brown straw hat sporting the grandiose tail feather of a golden pheasant. Finally, standing back — or as far back as she could in the crowded cabin — she pronounced her stepmother the prettiest of all the women. Which, it should be said, was not a major achievement and earned sour looks from the three other adult women.

Only Piet Van Heerden, who had somehow sobered up sufficiently to be aware of the events around him, seemed indifferent to the prospect of going ashore. Handing Anna a fat roll of high-denomination guilder notes, he instructed her to purchase as much brandy or Scotch whiskey or both as she and
Kleine
Kiki could carry and load into the canvas bag that hung from the back of Katerina’s wheelchair.

‘Find a Chink, you hear? A Chinaman always has contraband and black-market goods. Don’t pay him what he asks, but pay what you have to.’ His bloodshot eyes looked directly at her, imploring. ‘Please,
lieveling
, don’t come back empty-handed.’ Anna noted for the first time that his huge hands shook uncontrollably.

‘Papa, you must stop drinking like this!’ she begged, as she had done every day since they’d come on board.

‘
Ja, ja
, soon, when we get to New Zealand.’ She noted for the first time the coin-sized patches of grey that had appeared amongst the ginger growth on his unshaven face. ‘Don’t forget, all the bottles you can carry,
mijn lieveling
!’

The
Witvogel
struggled up the turgid river, passing two ships that had attempted to carry escaping Dutch citizens to safety but had run aground, the rusty vessels now stranded on the brown mudflats. When at last the ship reached Tjilatjap at about three in the afternoon, the port was littered with sunken and abandoned ships. From its initial appearance, it seemed an unpropitious place to make any kind of repairs. An hour later, at about four o’clock on the afternoon of the 4th of March, the dirty, hungry and generally exhausted passengers from the
Witvogel
were allowed to go ashore.

The local population seemed less hostile than they’d been in the capital. The Javanese are natural traders and the unexpected arrival of a ship was an opportunity, perhaps their last, to charge exorbitant prices for goods and services to passengers who, they soon discovered, were desperate for any tinned fish, meat, vegetables, coffee, tea and condensed milk — in fact anything edible that wouldn’t spoil. Fruit-sellers, especially those with fruit that might keep for a few days, such as oranges and mangoes, were asking and getting unheard-of prices, and the locals were soon scurrying back to outlying orchards to replenish supplies. People swarmed to local native restaurants and the marketplace; the three hotels in the river-port town were overrun with passengers wanting to eat and bathe or take a shower. The owners promptly trebled their room and dining prices and then closed their doors for fear of being overwhelmed.

The local Javanese, many of whom had appropriated the homes of the Dutch who had earlier left the town, were charging twenty guilders for a twenty-minute use of the washhouse. Many passengers, desperate for a wash, simply stripped and jumped into the river, unabashedly shedding their clothes down to their underpants or, in the case of the females, bloomers and bras, soaping themselves willy-nilly, their hands within their undies to get to their private parts. Smaller kids, male and female, ran joyfully into the water in the nude.

The Muslim locals were scandalised. While they were happy to capitalise on the misfortunes of the fleeing Dutch and take the exorbitant profits on offer, the public display of raw flesh by Dutch women confirmed their view of the perfidy of the infidel. These pink-skinned females, who had maintained their superiority and dominated their lives for many generations, confirmed the local mullah’s assertion that they were as vile as pig meat and lower than village dogs. ‘
Haram!
Unclean!’

Anna left her stepmother in the care of
Kleine
Kiki at what was obviously once the private home of a Dutch family but was now occupied by an unsmiling native woman and her family who demanded twenty guilders for a small bar of soap and an hour’s use of the outside washhouse. She paid the sum happily, leaving
Kleine
Kiki with more than sufficient money to go shopping afterwards for any supplies she might be fortunate enough to find, arranging to meet them in the town’s square at eight o’clock that night. She departed to the sound of Katerina screaming at
Kleine
Kiki for not rinsing her hair correctly.
One day
Kleine
Kiki will have had enough and she’ll walk out
,
Anna thought to herself. Then she’d gone looking for Piet Van Heerden’s proverbial Chinaman.

She found him after approaching the third Chinese merchant in the town. His name was Lo Wok and he claimed to possess four bottles of Scotch whiskey and three of Australian brandy, stock that had obviously once been the possession of a departed Dutch shopkeeper. Speaking in the local language, Anna enquired the price. His eyes narrowed and he demanded two hundred guilders, an outrageous sum that was ten times the usual value of the Scotch and brandy. Anna threw back her head and laughed. ‘You insult me and my family by thinking of us as fools,’ she declared, and named a price a quarter of what he suggested, knowing it was still an extortionate amount to pay.

Lo Wok wrung his hands. ‘These are hard times. I too have a family I must feed.’ He shook his head vigorously, naming a sum two-thirds of the original. Anna clicked her tongue several times, shaking her head in denial. ‘I respect your worthy lineage, Lo Wok. Your esteemed ancestors are watching and what would they think of your lack of commonsense?’ she chided him gently.

Lo Wok smiled, happy that this young girl standing in front of him was not going to be a pushover. All Chinese love the process of striking a bargain. ‘
Ahee!
The Japanese are coming, they do not like the Chinese, I will not be allowed to run a shop, they will persecute me, anything could happen, there are hard times ahead,’ he whined, looping the sentences together.

‘Ha, precisely! Hard times! For you and for me, Lo Wok! So, it is time you showed some commonsense. The Japanese drink sake and if they want your Scotch and brandy they will not pay for it, they will simply confiscate it. The Muslims do not drink. The Dutch, those who can afford to drink Scotch and brandy, have all fled this town. I am your last customer and it is your good fortune that I am here at all. Now, tell me, Lo Wok, to whom do you intend to sell this Scotch and brandy for fifty-five guilders?’ Anna said, slightly upping her previous offer to him.

‘It is not enough. I have ten children and an extravagant wife. We must escape.’

Anna observed to herself that the Chinaman could not have been much more than in his mid-twenties. ‘And at sixteen years old I am already the mother of five.’ She shrugged. ‘See? I exaggerate as well and as pointlessly as you do, Lo Wok,’ Anna said, in this way telling the Chinese merchant that she knew he was lying while, at the same time, careful to ensure he didn’t lose face.

‘Sixty, I cannot accept less.’

Anna nodded though it was still three times above the usual retail price. ‘Let me see the merchandise,’ she asked.

Lo Wok left and shortly afterwards emerged with a wooden case containing the Scotch and brandy. She examined the sealed tops of each of the seven bottles to see that they hadn’t been broken. The red wax on one of them, a bottle of Scotch, had a slightly pinkish colour and as they were all the same brand Anna pushed her fingernail into the seal to discover that it was soft, the consistency of candle wax. In fact, it
was
candle wax. She twisted the seal and it came away immediately without resistance. Pulling the cork from the bottle she brought it to her nose and her nostrils were suddenly assailed by the sharp tang of stale urine.