The Persimmon Tree (51 page)

Anna was, to say the least, surprised at his sudden and complete change of temper and his reaction to her vulgar language. She had deeply insulted him and yet seemingly he had been delighted. ‘Thank you, that is unnecessary. I have a
becak
waiting,’ she said quietly.

‘As you wish.’ With this Colonel Konoe turned. His back rigid, chin slightly jutted, he walked towards the door leading to the interior of the house, despite his pronounced limp every inch an officer of the Japanese Imperial Army.

Til was waiting outside the gate and looked overjoyed to see her. ‘Anna, are you okay? You have rice on your shoes!’

Anna grinned, then burst into sudden tears, then grinned again through tear-brightened eyes. ‘Til, I am here and still in one piece!’ she joked.

‘Allah be praised!’ he said, helping Anna into the
becak
. ‘Let us be gone, too many soldiers turned into gardeners or maybe the other way around. This place, it does not feel right, Anna.’

‘Til, I am starving and I have a sour taste in my mouth; take me to Ratih’s restaurant. I need fried rice and chicken, her special recipe.’

‘Konoe-san
, my face is brown and I do not wish it to be white

or my cheeks to be stained with blush and

my lips the colour of fresh cow’s liver.

My hair falls naturally to my shoulders,

I do not want to lift it to the sky or to decorate it with chopsticks.
’

Anna Van Heerden

ANNA RETURNED HOME TOTALLY
confused. As well, she was disconcerted that she was immediately forced to fib to Kiki, telling her she had been unsuccessful at finding a place out of town and requesting her to return the following day at the same time. Anna spoke to Kiki in the kitchen and failed to notice the polished and gleaming black stove. Later she made a mental note to apologise to her in the morning. The house was spotlessly clean and the laundry done. What the little rice cook had managed to do in less than four hours was remarkable; she’d even prepared their dinner — a stew she knew to be one of her father’s favourites.

Piet Van Heerden was his usual depressed self. Anna had managed to find a box of books in Dutch at the markets, but apart from lifting them out and sniffing at each rather than opening them, he’d returned them to the box where they remained untouched. She knew that by asserting her independence she had reduced him to someone of no consequence in her life, nevertheless she was unrepentant. If he asked again for the diamonds she would openly refuse to return them. They had been a gift and she had accepted them reluctantly, but now they were hers. If she had broken his spirit, then perhaps it had been too fragile in the first place. Anna resolved that there was little or nothing she could do to solve his morbidity or allay his fear of dying.

‘She cooks better than you. Lunch was a decent meal for a change,’ her father growled, not looking up.

‘That’s good. She has cooked your dinner, your favourite, meat stew with potatoes from the garden.’

‘Humph! It is not much to look forward to,’ he said self-pityingly.

‘And you’ll be glad to hear she’ll be back tomorrow,’ Anna said, trying to sound cheerful. ‘I have to return to see that Japanese colonel.’

Piet Van Heerden was silent, seemingly not responding to this news. When eventually he spoke he asked, ‘Did he take money?’

‘No, I didn’t offer him any.’

‘Did he fuck you?’

‘No!’ Anna cried, shocked but at the same time indignant. ‘He did
not
!’

The Dutchman rose from his chair, his rheumy blue eyes meeting hers directly. ‘Then he will tomorrow,’ he said in a flat, disinterested voice. Turning, he shuffled from the kitchen, his bladder alerting him to go to the lavatory.

Anna heard the screen door bang. Once again she felt completely alone and in her mind’s eye she saw the wash of blood that had given her life while it had taken her mother’s. Colonel Konoe was wrong. It was the white that had been stronger than the brown. She thought of the beautiful opaque butterfly etched into the base of his ashtray. What had happened to her? She was no longer the sweet sixteen-year-old who had fallen in love with a big bear of a boy who collected butterflies. She didn’t really know who she was. What had she become? What would happen to her? The last thing she had done before going to sleep each night since leaving Batavia was to kiss the glass lid of the box containing the Clipper butterfly and to wish me goodnight. ‘I love you, Nicholas’ were the final words she would utter before falling asleep. It was a love that remained innocent and pure. Now she had been reduced to using words, invective that except for one previous occasion had never crossed her lips, and even as silent, unspoken adjectives had never entered her head. Where had they come from? Was there a small dark room in the mind that contained foul language and was jerked open to release ugly words when under duress?

The Japanese officer clearly wanted her for something, some task, but what? He’d laughed when she had insulted him, even seeming pleased when she’d lost her temper. It was as if her foul language was connected with the task he had in mind. His mistress? Surely not. But this was the only thing that seemed plausible. This notion appalled Anna and she knew she would resist him. She knew nothing about making love, nothing about pleasing a man in that way. In fact, she knew very little about employing foul language for effect, if that was what he wanted. The sum of her experience of an aroused man was the hardness, the sudden swelling she’d felt when I’d pressed against her thighs while kissing her. But she didn’t know if she would have the courage to resist him and, by doing so, risk her own death and the possible torture that might occur before she was killed. She was terribly afraid but also knew she must never let him see her fear. She had observed how the
kempeitai
depended on fear as their strongest weapon. It seemed to be the Japanese way and there was no reason, despite his notion and desire for perfection, to think of Konoe Akira as being any different.

Anna had seen his reaction over the chicken pieces and the brutality he had shown to the mayor’s wife. Had he possessed a dagger or pistol at the time, she felt certain that at the height of his fury he would have used it on the housekeeper. He had also warned Anna on one occasion that she was courting danger when there had only been a little clever repartee between them, a metaphor concerning flowers. It was said without threat, but now she wasn’t so sure that the warning had been lighthearted.

How would he react when she refused to share his couch, to make love to him? If she told him she was a virgin, would this whet his appetite or would it restrain him? Would he take pride in peeling open the petals or leave the bud to open naturally? This was no simple man to be disarmed and turned away in a playful face-saving way, his pride intact. He was an enigma. Anna had never known a male like him — instantly brought to destructive fury, an east wind howling and out of control, then as quickly calm again. An urbane aesthete, a lover of beauty but anxious to tame it, control it, bring it to his own idea of perfection. Anna saw that there was tension in everything he did. The vase of dahlias was a perfect example of an attempt to restrain the underlying fury that roared within him. She was frightened, and it was a fear beyond anything she had previously faced for this was a fear where she was no longer in control. Is that what he would do with her? Pluck each leaf so as not to damage the slender stem, present the blossom rearranged precisely each morning in a polished clear-glass bowl? Manipulate, snip, reduce, so that she would become the white, the non-colour, to highlight the glorious yellow of his alter ego?

Kiki arrived the following morning and Anna praised her warmly for the black burnished stove so that she beamed with pleasure. Til arrived precisely on time, again far from happy. ‘That place, it is dangerous, Anna. I have been to the mosque and asked Allah to watch over you. You must be very careful.’

She thanked him and they set off, Anna telling him that the deal with the tin box remained the same as the previous day.

‘I have found a place to hide it that nobody can ever find except me,’ he boasted gently.

‘And if a motorcar hits you today and you go to paradise and are given your allotment of seventy-two virgins, what then?’ Anna asked, smiling.

Til stopped his
becak
in mid-pedal, shocked that he hadn’t thought of such a possibility. ‘
Ahee!
Anna, I did not think of this,’ he admitted, shamefaced.

‘The virgins or the box?’ Anna joked.

Til, for once, had no answer to the dilemma of the tin box and wrung his hands. ‘The Prophet says only one person can know a secret; if there are two, it is no longer a secret, it may as well be in all the newspapers.’

‘There were newspapers when the Prophet said that?’ Anna asked, still joking with the little
becak
owner.

‘What must I do?’ Til asked, frowning.

‘You must write a letter to Budi, then seal it and place it among your most private possessions. In it you must tell him the whereabouts, but don’t tell him it is the tin or what it contains, just that you have left him something useful and where to find it.’ It was the only idea Anna could think of at that moment.

Til remained silent; he’d dismounted and now looked down at the surface of the road, rubbing his big toe sideways, making circles in the dust. ‘Anna, I do not know how to write a letter,’ he said slowly.

Illiteracy was not unusual in Javanese men of Til’s age. Anna said quickly, ‘Turn back — there are shops not far from here, we can buy paper and a pencil and an envelope. Come, Til, quick, I mustn’t be late!’ Her haste and hubbub were more to cover the shamefaced admission of the wisest man she had ever known than because of the prospect that she might be late for the Japanese colonel. She had allowed more than sufficient time to reach the brewer’s mansion.

Til’s skinny brown legs quite possibly broke the world speed record for a
becak
with passenger. Arriving outside the first general merchant they came across, Anna handed Til some loose change to buy the writing materials. Using the broad saddle of the
becak
she wrote the letter, carefully describing the exact location of Budi’s so-called inheritance, which turned out to be a small cave behind a permanently flowing waterfall that Til was certain only he knew about. He’d buried the tin box in the cave and then covered the spot with a rock. Anna handed the sheet of paper to Til, who folded it carefully and placed it in the envelope on which Anna had written in capital letters ‘BUDI’. ‘I will guard this letter with my life, I swear it, Anna.
Ahee!
One day, when I have the time, I will learn to write and to read the Koran.’

‘If we ever get out of this mess, I will teach you how to read and write Javanese, but reading the Koran, that is different.’ Anna climbed back into the
becak
and they set off. Once again she pulled the brothel curtain down to conceal her presence. After a while Til called, ‘We are here, Anna.’

Anna parted the curtain and they passed the disinterested guards who were, quite possibly, the same two who had been on duty at the gate the previous day. All Japanese soldiers looked alike to Anna. The guards waved them on without stopping them. It occurred to her that they wouldn’t speak Javanese, so how would they decide who was to be allowed in and who not?

Within the gates the gardener soldiers seemed as happily busy as before, but now each one they passed bowed politely to her. They may well have been ruthless killers but at the heart of things they were still peasants, and the soil, even the fecund tropical soil, they instinctively understood and so they were cheerful.

Anna left Til with the same instructions to wait for her, then climbed the steps to the front door, pausing once again to pluck a frangipani blossom and arrange it behind her ear. She had come to no harm on the previous day and somehow the small, perfumed blossom now became a tiny, serendipitous protection, like always touching some pretty object for luck when passing by. The blossom had not been remarked on the previous day, but now she consciously noted that it was yellow and white, with the broader part of the petals white and narrowing down to a bright yellow centre.

Anna pressed the doorbell and soon heard the slap of slippers approaching. The door opened and the mayor’s wife, smiling, bowed deeply. ‘Welcome, Anna, I am to take you to the back, to the verandah again, those are the instructions of the
colonel-san
.’

Anna smiled, greeting her in turn. The housekeeper did not refer to the incident of the previous day as she led the way through the house to the back. She paused briefly before they passed through the door. ‘There is a surprise!’ she giggled, both hands to her mouth, then stood aside for Anna to pass onto the verandah.

All was as before, with the exception of the vase — now it was filled with dahlias of every colour, as carefully cut and arranged as the yellow and white blooms had been, not a leaf out of place. ‘Oh, my!’ Anna exclaimed.

The
mama-san
beamed. ‘
Konoe-san
went out into the garden early this morning, before he had even taken his tea, to cut them. I think he is pleased with your honourable presence,
Anna-san
.’ She bowed. ‘I will bring tea, Japanese tea,’ she said, turning towards the door.

‘
Mama-san
, tell me, how must I bow when the
colonel-san
comes?’

The housekeeper turned and demonstrated a low formal bow, her eyes downcast. ‘You are a woman, so your bow must be lower than his, if possible twice as low. It is the proper way,’ she said. ‘You must never look at him. It is immodest and unbecoming for a woman to do so. The honourable
Konoe-san
is of nobility, he may not reply when you bow. You are tall, he is also tall, you must be careful. How tall are you,
Anna-san
?’ she asked shyly.

‘Thank you,
Mama-san
, I will remember. How tall? Too tall!’ Anna laughed. ‘I am one hundred and seventy-three centimetres.’

The cheerful
mama-san
seemed to have completely recovered from the humiliation of the previous day. She then said, ‘Your waist, it is so slim. May I see?’

It seemed a surprising request but Anna turned so the little woman could place her hands about her waist, her fingers not quite meeting. ‘I never had a waist so slim, even when I was your age,
Anna-san
,’ she cried. ‘You are very beautiful.’