The Persimmon Tree (41 page)

Anna sighed, knowing she would do no such thing. ‘I will try, but the imam has commanded that all alcohol be abolished. Everyone is scared, Papa, this is now a Muslim country — we have to obey their rules.’ Anna wondered at her newfound capacity to turn into a consummate liar when it seemed necessary. ‘But if you will drink some soup, I promise I will do another search.’

‘Bring it,’ Piet Van Heerden said in a sulky voice. ‘I will try. I am not hungry.’

‘Papa, we have sealed the trapdoor so the Japanese won’t find you. Everything must come through this window. I will bring you food and water, a chamber-pot and a dish so you can wash. Please, Papa! I don’t want them to find you!’ Anna said in a pleading voice, hoping to convince her father.

Piet Van Heerden pushed his arm through the window, pleading. ‘
Lieveling
,
skatterbol
, you must find me some drink or your papa, who loves you, will die!’ he begged, his voice choking. Anna saw that his hand was shaking violently; it would be impossible for him to use a spoon. She would have to bring his soup in a mug and strain the liquid first.

Anna left and soon returned with an enamel mug of soup and the other things, placing the mug on the ledge below the window. ‘Papa, here is nice soup!’ she called. ‘You must drink it while it is hot.’

Her father must have been lying down because now he returned to the window, clutching the blanket around him. He managed to drink some of the soup, spilling some over the blanket. He returned the mug still half full. ‘I have had enough. Now go and find me a bottle, Anna! Anything! Pay what you must! In the tin there is money.’ He reached around his neck to discover the key was missing. ‘The key! Where is the
foking
key?’

Anna hesitated, not sure what to say. If she admitted to possessing the key to the tin box he might suspect she had read his will.

‘The key around your neck? I found it in your bed, the chain is broken. Is it for the tin box?’

‘
Ja
, go quickly,’ he pleaded. ‘Open it, there is money.’

‘Papa, it will not be possible to find alcohol,’ Anna replied as gently as she could.

‘Open the
foking
box!’ her father shouted. ‘Get the money and go! Pay anything, you hear? Anything! I
must
have a bottle!’ His mood suddenly changed and a whine came into his voice. ‘Please,
lieveling
— I am dying.’

Anna put the chamber-pot, a jug of water and a tin mug on the shelf, being careful to wait until her father’s hand was out of reach. ‘I am going now, Papa, try to sleep.’

‘Go! Hurry! I am desperate.’ His teeth were beginning to chatter and his body trembled despite the blanket that he had wrapped around him.

Anna has asked me not to write about the next few days in her father’s life; she describes them as a time of terror, exhaustion and panic. At times she was certain her father was not going to live and, in truth, he might well have died since thirty per cent of alcoholics who are denied access to alcohol, if not properly medicated, do not survive. Many are diabetics and others develop bronchial problems and pneumonia; others perish of dehydration and yet others die of heart attacks. They will undergo exaggerated degrees of spontaneous shaking, then perspire until their garments are completely soaked, then feel intensely cold. Nausea will occur frequently, heart palpitations, acute diarrhoea and bad headaches. Anna was not to know that though alcoholics may die from alcohol poisoning, liver or kidney malfunction, the cause of death is often something else they’ve neglected to attend to. Piet Van Heerden had come aboard the
Witvogel
in fairly good health, a well-cared-for alcoholic with no symptoms other than his addiction, and so was likely to survive the ordeal. But this state of good physical health would not have helped the experience of withdrawal. When alcohol is withdrawn from the system the alcoholic begins to experience sensory overload. Everything becomes hugely exaggerated, sometimes by a hundred times. The light from the small cellar window would have seemed to Piet Van Heerden as if he was standing in the centre of a brilliant spotlight with his eyes being forced to remain open. Anna’s footsteps on the kitchen floor would have sounded as if a herd of buffalo was above him. His trembling, even if slight, would have felt as if a goods train was passing over his body, ripping muscle and sinew to shreds, crushing his internal organs in the process. And then the hallucinations began.

The delirium tremens can take many fantastical forms. The sufferer may believe lice are crawling, centimetres thick, all over his body so he scratches frantically and screams out for help. He may have the same vivid experience with spiders or snakes, and no amount of reassurance will convince him that he is imagining this terrifying experience. He will also suffer insomnia and believe strange creatures are attacking him, devils with two heads, every type of horrible phantasmagoria. Piet Van Heerden would have lost all sense of time. He would have become consumed with fear, going into a full-blown panic attack, eyes bulging from his head, gasping for air, his body soaked with perspiration. This would happen over the next seventy hours — the begging, screaming, choking horror of it all — while once the withdrawal had started there was nothing Anna could have done.

On the morning of the fourth day a weak and exhausted Piet Van Heerden started to come out of withdrawal. Although Anna had placed fresh water on the shelf every hour, he had seldom reached for it. Now he was badly dehydrated but sufficiently conscious to start drinking water and then taking food. From the cellar the stink of vomit and shit reached her, but she persisted two more days before she opened the trapdoor and descended into the hell below.

The smell was overpowering; she had thought to wrap a handkerchief around her nose and face and then decided she couldn’t appear in front of her father masked. She struggled not to throw up and the sight of her father lying on the mattress in the semi-dark was appalling. He was covered in excrement, having smeared his arms, legs and face with his diarrhoea, possibly thinking that it might ward off the effect of the imagined lice that he thought crawled like a grey blanket over his flesh.

Gasping and weeping at the same time she helped him to sit up, the crusted shit covering her hands. ‘You are going to be well again, Papa,’ she said, squatting down in front of him.

Piet Van Heerden could barely whisper, but Anna heard him plainly enough. ‘I am going to kill you,
abangan,
she devil!’ He raised his hands and tried to grab her around the neck, but the effort was so slow that she easily enough moved away, jumping to her feet. He was too weak to hold his hands up and they fell limply on his lap. Anna realised that her giant papa would have lacked the strength to throttle her.

Over the three days of his acute withdrawal she had escaped the house whenever she had a reasonable excuse, buying more tin mugs, managing to find a large tin of disinfectant, getting his khaki shorts and singlets from the seamstress. She had also learned that the local Muslim clerics were enforcing their order that all alcohol found in appropriated infidel houses be destroyed immediately and the same had occurred to the three liquor shops in town. The Dutch stay-behinds were also ordered to get rid of any alcohol they had in their homes. Tjilatjap was as dry as the Sahara Desert and even the production of beer had ceased. Whatever stocks had existed had been poured down the sewerage system in one grand day of decontamination. It was to cause a hundred-metre island of foam where the sewage emptied out into the river.

On the day after the arrival of the Japanese, Budi had arrived at the house to say that the Dutch had surrendered and every citizen was to attend the official ceremony in the town square, despite the Mayor of the Crushed Hat’s directions to stay away. They hurried along with the rest of the townspeople to where Ratih, Kiki and the sergeant waited to meet them. Once again Til, who had gone ahead, had somehow contrived to find them space close to the front where they could witness the proceedings. Here they officially heard the news that the Dutch had surrendered to the Japanese.

Now, as they watched, a somewhat refreshed liberator hauled down the Japanese flag and once again hoisted the Dutch one to the jeers of the population, and then Lieutenant Mori read a long speech in Japanese that sounded as if it was not dissimilar to the one of the previous day. It was followed by his first edict. In the light of the usual behaviour of an invading army, it was a curious one. Translated by the Mayor of the Crushed Hat, Lieutenant Mori began reading from a book of instructions: ‘Edict Number One. In the name of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and in harmony with the goodwill of the Japanese Imperial Army, fraternisation between Javanese women and Japanese soldiers is strictly forbidden. All such incidents must be reported. If a soldier of the Japanese Imperial Army has raped or sexually abused a local woman, even a prostitute, he will be severely punished and in some cases may be executed. If the woman is proved to be the provocateur, she will be summarily shot.’

After all this, the Dutch flag was unceremoniously hauled down and thrown into the crowd, where it was set alight to much cheering. Then, in a re-enactment of the day before, the Japanese flag was hoisted accompanied by many cries of
banzai
and shouts of loyalty to the Emperor. The people happily waved their little paper flags and cheered as they had done previously. Anna learned later from Kiki that there had been a great deal of feasting that night to celebrate the official freedom from the Dutch and she and Ratih had been up until dawn cooking for happy people who wanted to be with others to celebrate.

If these excursions away from home seemed callous under the circumstances, Anna believed that she would go mad from her father’s despairing cries — cries of horror, abuse, fear, torment and sobbing that seemed to never cease. She herself could cry no more and as much as anything it was panic and despair and a sense of her own survival that drove her from the house. Throughout this long and traumatic vigil, when she often felt her father must surely die and she would be proclaimed his murderer, she told herself she must persevere, convincing herself that he would die anyway or be killed. For one so young it was an astonishingly brave decision and now, miraculously, it appeared to have worked. The worst was over.

Anna returned to the kitchen, leaving the trapdoor open, knowing her father was too weak to climb the wooden steps, though preferring that he should do so. It would be a lot easier to clean him in the bathroom than in the stinking little cellar. She took a basin and a large jug of hot water back down with her, as well as his new clothes, underpants and a pair of scissors. She cut the shit-stained singlet from him and commenced to wash his face, neck, arms and torso. She returned to the kitchen for more hot water, then cut away his trousers, leaving him wearing only his underpants, which were brown with dried excrement. ‘I must cut off your underpants, Papa. I will try not to look.’

‘No, let me turn my back,’ he moaned. He turned slowly, like an old man does, uncertain of his balance. She cut the garment at the back, pulling it where the shit had caused it to stick to the skin and hair on his bum. Then she cleaned his backside, rinsed the cloth and handed it to him. ‘Clean only your private parts, then cup them with your hands,’ Anna instructed, by now well past any sensitivities. Piet Van Heerden did as he was told, then turned, his huge hands cupping himself between the legs while Anna cleaned the inside of his thighs. She could only wipe him down rather than use soap as she intended to do when he was sufficiently strong to climb the steps and get to the bathroom. He still smelled to high heaven. She returned with another jug of hot water and washed his hair, making him somewhat less smelly. Then she made him step into the legs of his fresh underpants before hauling them up to his thighs, whereupon he turned his back on her and adjusted them properly.

She cleaned the stained mattress as best she could, wiping disinfectant over the surface, turning it over and covering it with a fresh sheet. When her father was lying down again she commenced to scrub the floor and shit-covered walls, constantly gagging during the whole process, her hands stinging and red raw from the strong disinfectant. The task took most of the afternoon and she made countless trips up the stairs to the kitchen for hot water.

Almost too tired to walk, Anna fed her father a bowl of broth, or at least all he could manage to keep down. ‘Drink water, Papa, all you can, and tomorrow you can come upstairs.’

‘What about the Japanese?’ he asked, surprisingly remembering her invented story.

‘They are not always around. Now that you are better, we will be careful and hide you if they come near.’

‘Where are our soldiers?’

‘The Netherlands has surrendered, Papa. The Japanese are in charge now.’

‘Oh?’ he said, looking bewildered. ‘The Queen? She has surrendered to those yellow bastards?’ There was no vehemence behind this statement, rather it sounded like a man declaring he had been abandoned and there was little point in carrying on.

‘No, Papa. She is in London. It happened some days ago in Batavia. I think it was her generals who didn’t want to fight, who surrendered. There was a ceremony here in the town square, and they burnt the Dutch flag.’ If there had ever been any fight in her father, Anna decided it was now gone.

‘Monkeys!’ he replied.

‘Papa, you must be very careful and
never
leave the house. You understand,
never
!’ Anna cautioned, hoping this would strike fear into her father’s breast.