The Persimmon Tree (37 page)

She returned to the kitchen, shocked at what she’d just shouted. For the first time in many days she was alone with her father. It was readily apparent he was suffering from a great deal more than a bad hangover, for his entire body trembled. He had become a large, dangerous, incoherent bear that was rapidly getting beyond her control. Anna knew she would have to give him the half-bottle of Scotch, then after that the one remaining bottle. The frustrated giant had located the dishtowel bag and was frantically tearing at the contents, pulling them out onto the kitchen floor. ‘Papa, it is not in there! If you go to the bedroom and lie down I will bring you the bottle,’ Anna said, again close to tears, but determined not to cry.

‘The
fokin’
Scotch!
Waar? Waar?
You slut!
Waar
is
mijn
bottle?’ he roared furiously. He turned suddenly to face his daughter. ‘Bedroom? You want a bedroom? You whore!’ Then he pointed an accusing finger at Anna. ‘You are not — you are not –’ he stammered, ‘com — ing — to New — Zealand, you hear? Slut! Slut! Whore!’

Anna walked over to the wheelchair and withdrew the half-full bottle from the canvas bag that hung from the back. She had made no attempt to hide it and it had been within his reach all the while. But in his confused mind, Piet Van Heerden hadn’t remembered this obvious compartment. Anna held up the bottle and started to move towards the main bedroom with her shambling papa following, his bare feet dragging, a trembling arm stretched out in anticipation, smacking his dry lips.

Anna stopped at the bed. Two large down pillows, without slips, were arranged neatly against the bedhead, a final sad and tidy touch, perhaps from the lieutenant’s wife. ‘Sit!’ she commanded, stepping quickly aside as he lunged at the bottle in her hand. The effort to grab the Scotch bottle caused him to lose his balance and careen sideways, then crash face down onto the bed. ‘Sit, Papa!’ Anna commanded, not knowing where the strength and resolve within her voice was coming from.

Piet Van Heerden, using his arms against the sagging mattress, somehow managed to push himself up and roll onto his back with his head supported by one of the large pillows. ‘Slut! Scotch!’ he bellowed.

Anna removed the cork and handed the bottle to him. He grabbed it in both trembling hands and brought it to his mouth, so intent on swallowing that Scotch spilled from his juddering, anxious lips. He started to cough violently, spraying whiskey over the mattress, his bloodshot eyes bulging almost out of their sockets. Anna grabbed him behind his neck and forced him to lean forward, thumping his back while he clung frantically to the bottle. Finally his coughing fit ceased and he lay, his head against the large down pillow, sucking at the whiskey bottle like an infant, reaching for the personal oblivion it would bring him.

Despite everything, Anna loved her papa, but she was too young to understand what was going on in his mind. His was the tenth generation of his family in this hitherto halcyon land. He was not a Dutchman; his heart and mind and every fibre of his body proclaimed him as indigenous to Java. Now he was being thrown out of the land he loved as if he were a piece of garbage, even worse, a piece of shit, a dog turd.

Anna despised his weakness. He was the one who had always voiced an opinion on everything, loudly proclaiming right from wrong, the local expert on just about everything, especially regional politics. Yet he had collapsed like a house of cards when resolve truly mattered. A small example of this was that they could have escaped from Java and gone to Australia, as most of the wealthy had done, weeks earlier by flying boat, but his fear of flying had stopped this happening. He could have elected to fly his family to safety, but had been too selfish to contemplate such a solution. His needs were paramount and always had been. Anna now realised that her stepmother had seen the same weakness in him much earlier. The words
Kleine
Kiki said Katerina had shouted at the old oil jetty prior to her suicide, admonishing her young husband when, so long ago, she’d been determined to take the jump on her horse that had crippled her, must have sprung from only one of a thousand such put-downs she’d endured from him.

There had been too much unearned importance allotted to him all his life. The Van Heerden prestige had been a frame of reference he’d always worn as if he rightfully belonged to a higher order. His character had been weakened by privilege. When a portion of courage and determination was required he’d always gone missing so that now, when he was forced to face the total destruction of everything he had been brought up to believe in, he was incapable of grasping the prevailing tenor of the times. Now it was Anna’s job to rescue what might still be contained within the epidermis that seemed to have become the outer shell encasing the hollow substance of her father.

At almost seventeen years of age, Anna could not have described her father’s character or the influences that shaped it. All she knew was that her precious papa, the man she had always tried so hard to please, was falling apart. She had always seen him as her protector, especially against the vicious tongue of her stepmother, but now he was unable to cope with the crisis they all faced, drowning his fear and apprehension in a bottle.

Having settled her drunken papa, and hoping that half a bottle of Scotch would keep him quiet until the morning, Anna knew not only that they faced an uncertain future, but also that her problems with her father were immediate. She sat at the kitchen table and admitted to herself that she was unlikely to find outside help. Furthermore, if her father desired to drink himself to certain death — as seemed increasingly probable — there were no more supplies of Scotch, brandy or any other alcohol available that she knew of in Tjilatjap. Or, at least, no more that Lo Wok knew about, or the rapacious Chinaman would have procured it and Budi would have alerted her to the fact that the Chinaman was ready to open negotiations, though this time Lo Wok would have the upper hand, knowing that she had little choice but to pay what he asked. She could ask the Chinaman to scrounge around, to see what he could find in Dutch homes that had been appropriated by the Muslim population. After all, open bottles of liquor were not the kind of baggage departing colonials would bother to take with them.

Ratih had left a pot for boiling water and another containing rice and heavily spiced fish on the table and all Anna had to do was light a fire in the stove, already set, to heat it up. But although she had not eaten all day, she lacked the energy to cook. She reached for one of the two spoons the cook had left and ate absent-mindedly from the cold pot. Having eaten a few mouthfuls of the richly spiced fish and rice she tried to think what she might do. Rising from the table she gathered up the contents of the dishtowel bag her father had spilled on the floor, including the locked safety deposit box. She placed the box on the table before restoring the remaining contents to the bag.

She decided to more carefully explore the house and back garden. To her surprise the backyard was extensive and stretched down to the bank of the river. It had been carefully tilled and a crop of potatoes was being grown in the raised rows of soil. Pulling up a plant, she saw that the small white tubers were just beginning to form and were not yet sufficiently mature. She came across a small vegetable patch with a tomato vine with several ripe fruit, six plump cabbages, the outside leaves badly eaten but with the centres well formed, and a patch of mint. She opened the door to the outside dunny which, while dusty with a spider web in one corner, seemed clean enough, although a strong disinfectant down the hole would not go amiss. She made a mental note to add this to her shopping list. At the rear of the house was the only non-functional aspect of the backyard — against the back wall stood several flowering red hibiscus bushes.

Returning to the inside of the house, Anna sat on a cheap batik-covered couch and attempted to think of some way to solve what was obviously becoming her major preoccupation. She was aware that the Japanese were due to arrive at any moment, but so great had her concern for her father become that she’d pushed this frightening prospect to the back of her mind.

She had once read a story about a hopeless alcoholic in one of the backwater Pacific ports who had been discovered unconscious under a pier by a native dockworker. The native had carried him to his canoe and taken him to his distant island home. Here the native islander (Anna couldn’t remember his name) tended to the drunk, feeding him and nursing him back to health. During his long rehabilitation the other villagers seemed to pay the white man great obeisance and brought him the best of what they had to eat. After a period when he had endured the shakes and cried out as he experienced the delirium tremens, having been plied with good food, drunk nothing but clean water and received tender care, the once-skinny drunk was restored to shining good health. He declared that he felt wonderful and as healthy as a newborn babe.

One day he turned to his native friend, thanking him for his solicitous care and suggesting that it might be time to return to the main island, to the port where his compassionate friend had rescued him. He promised that he would never again touch a drop of grog and that he would somehow find a way to reward him.

‘Oh, no,’ said his dark friend, shaking his head, ‘the village people are already rewarded by your presence. Now we plan a great feast in your honour.’

‘That is very kind of you,’ the white man replied. ‘But after that, I would be most obliged if you would kindly take me back to the port, to my own people.’

‘Ah, I do not think so,’ said his native friend, smiling benignly. ‘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!’

It was a story Anna enjoyed, because the writer had told it so cleverly. It wasn’t until the final sentence that you discovered that the kind and caring native had rescued the white man in order to eat him. But now she recalled the story with the idea that, if she could isolate her father completely, keep him from any possibility of obtaining alcohol, she might be able to bring him back from the brink of almost certain destruction.

Even though there would be no alcohol available for purchase in the town, she reasoned that those Dutch who had been left behind would almost certainly have whiskey, gin and brandy left over from better times. Piet Van Heerden was a rich man and also possessed the cunning of an alcoholic, so this notion would not escape him. The tin box on the kitchen table would almost certainly contain money and once these desperate colonials with half and full bottles in their cupboards discovered her father’s need they would make the Chinaman’s efforts at bargaining seem like schoolground play.

Mevrouw
Swanepoel and her obedient Hans were by no means unique. Desperate times breed desperate people. Despite her misery Anna smiled inwardly, thinking that if the Jack Sprat duo had got even a sniff of her papa’s need for the dwindling supplies of alcohol, Hans would have found a horse cart and driver and would be knocking on the doors of the stay-behind Dutch clutching a bundle of guilder notes, the money they’d earned from the manufacture of their dishtowel bags, and buying whatever bottle supplies were available. In her mind she could hear him now: ‘
One-third, half, full bottle, the best prices offered for your leftover brandy, gin, schnapps and whiskey! Hurry! This offer will not last!
’

Anna waited until she heard her father snoring in the bedroom, then she entered the room and crept to his bedside. The Scotch bottle lay empty beside him on the mattress, and a few dregs had spilled, leaving a small brown stain on the ticking. She removed the bottle, placing it on the floor. Then she lifted his shoulders from the cushion with her right hand and with her left delicately removed from around his neck the chain from which hung the key that she presumed would open the tin box. She allowed his head to sink gently back onto the pillow, where, to her relief, moments later he resumed snoring. She was breathing heavily, not only from holding up his enormous frame with one hand placed in the small of his back, but also from the rush of adrenalin caused by a fear that he might suddenly awaken and discover her theft.

She returned to the kitchen and inserted the key in the lock on the tin box: she had been correct, it opened with a single turn. Anna lifted the lid, to be confounded by the contents. The box contained five-hundred-guilder notes in six ten-centimetre stacks, each note worth about fifty pounds sterling, more than the average Javanese family earned in a year. Like most of the older Dutch colonial families in the Spice Islands the Van Heerden family had never outwardly boasted of its enormous wealth, and while they had maintained a big house, an out-of-town estate, several
copra
plantations and
godowns
along the docks, this had always been done unostentatiously as befitted one of the oldest white dynasties on the island.

Piet Van Heerden, the only direct descendant of the clan, was no different. Bombastic and superior in nature, he’d nevertheless taken great care to play down the extent of his true wealth. Although not exactly a tightwad, nevertheless, like many rich men, he knew the value of a guilder and was slow to part with his money.

Anna had never experienced the extremes of great wealth, and thought that perhaps her stepmother, conscious of her husband having spawned a bastard child, had seen to this. She had not been spoiled or given anything more than any of her schoolmates would have taken for granted. Katerina’s personal collection of jewellery, while valuable, didn’t testify to more than the expected indulgences of a woman who was the matriarch of a moderately wealthy family.