The Persimmon Tree Read online

  I was up well before seven when Anna tapped on my door. She wore a pair of faded khaki shorts that came down to her knees, a white shirt and the same sandals she’d worn the previous night. In the morning sunlight she appeared even more beautiful. I was suddenly overcome by shyness. It was as if daylight brought quite another person to my door and I panicked that we would have to start all over again and I didn’t know where to make a beginning. So, with my usual tact I said, ‘Sandals?’ looking directly at her feet.

  She looked at the boots I was wearing, then turned and pointed to her bicycle. Tied to the back carry-tray were a pair of Wellington boots. ‘Ja, I have brought. Good morning, Nicholas,’ she said, smiling, and then promptly kissed me on the cheek. I had no need to apologise for my abrupt manner, she could see all she needed to know from my grin.

  The dokar, a small two-passenger cart pulled by a tiny Timor pony, which I’d hired for the morning, was waiting to take us to a marsh some distance out of the city on the edge of a rainforest. I’d visited the site previously and knew I was unlikely to find the Magpie Crow of the Danaidae family of butterflies there, but other species had been plentiful and we would catch them together. Anna was more beautiful than any butterfly I could ever collect. I didn’t for one moment stop to think that, at best, I would know her and love her for no more than a few weeks and then I would lose her. I was in love and a few weeks seemed as if an eternity of being in love lay ahead of me.

  Anna had brought breakfast — small bread rolls, cheese, hard-boiled eggs and a thermos of coffee — and we sat in the cool of a large banyan tree as we ate. She poured me a cup of coffee. ‘Ja, so Nicholas, I have confession,’ she said, not looking up from the cup she handed me.

  My heart skipped a beat. In my experience confessions seldom brought good news. ‘Confession? You didn’t clean your teeth this morning?’ I chaffed.

  ‘Of course,’ she looked up, appealing to me. ‘I have told my papa that I came to see you last night.’

  I didn’t know quite how I was expected to react. Piet Van Heerden obviously hadn’t stopped her coming, or if he had, she’d disobeyed him. All I could think about was that Anna was with me and that’s all that mattered. ‘Was he angry?’

  ‘Ja, a little bit, but I said he is drunk last night.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘How can I ask him, he knows I cannot.’

  ‘And this morning he allowed you to come?’

  ‘Ja, I am sixteen,’ she said simply. ‘He wants you should come tonight. He wants to talk to you. It is important, I think.’

  ‘Important? Do you know why? What he wants to talk about?’

  ‘Ja, maybe, but I cannot say. He will tell you.’ She appealed to me with her eyes. ‘You will come tonight, Nicholas?’

  I sensed Anna wasn’t going to tell me more and I didn’t want to spoil the day by persisting. ‘Only if you do the cooking.’ I laughed.

  Anna clapped her hands. ‘I will make you a nice peaches pie, but they are only from a tin.’

  We spent the morning netting a variety of butterflies, nothing special, but Anna seemed interested in them all, big and small, plain and fancy, and also happy when I released them. It was almost the time the pony-cart driver had been asked to return when she netted a Clipper, a large and gorgeous butterfly and not one that is easy to find, its wing pattern resembling an old sailing ship in full sail, hence the name.

  ‘You beauty!’ I yelled. ‘Congratulations!’ The Clipper, also found in New Guinea, is a truly beautiful large butterfly. I took the net from her. ‘Would you like to keep it?’ I pointed out its likeness to a sailing ship and told her its name.

  ‘Oh, yes, Nicholas, I will keep it always.’

  ‘I’ll prepare it and mount it for you. I’ll bring it tonight.’

  ‘Mr Butterfly, I like you very much,’ she said and gave me an unexpected kiss. Not on the lips but much closer to them than the one last night and less of a peck. Another inch and I know I would have been reduced to a gibbering fool. As it was, I had to wait a few moments for my hands to stop shaking so that I could prepare the glass jar to contain the beautiful butterfly. This I did by placing a thick layer of tissue paper on the bottom that was impregnated with ethyl acetate. I then carefully removed the gorgeous specimen from the net and placed it in the jar to allow the fumes to kill it without a struggle, the humane way to do it and also to prevent damage to its wings.

  We finished the rest of the strudel Anna had brought the evening before and the dokar arrived shortly afterwards to take us back to the city.

  Anna had told me that her father would not be at De Kost Kamer for lunch and that I should come to dinner at around seven o’clock. It was a nice evening and I decided I’d walk to her home, taking with me in a small canvas bag the specimen I had mounted. The Clipper is a lovely butterfly and mounted in the small teak display box with a glass cover I must say it did look splendid.

  A gardener was waiting at the gate to let me in when I arrived. Walking down the oak-lined avenue in the fading light I could see that a section of the house was covered by a brilliant scarlet bougainvillea. I passed through the walled rose garden and was about to knock on the impressive front door when it swung open. ‘You are welcome, Nick!’ Piet Van Heerden boomed. ‘Welcome to Grootehuis. Welcome to the big house,’ he translated. Moments later Anna appeared, wearing a sarong kebaya and an apron embroidered with tulips, wiping her hands as she walked towards me smiling. ‘Anna already you know,’ the Dutchman said. Then turning suddenly he swept his daughter into a great bear hug. ‘Ja! This is Anna. Ja blood, to mix in marriage, is no goed, ja!’ he joked.

  ‘Papa, nee!’ she protested, laughing and slapping at his broad back.

  ‘Not so bad, ja,’ the Dutchman said, releasing Anna. It wasn’t hard to see he adored her.

  We walked through a small hallway into a very large room, huge dark beams crossing the ceiling where five elaborate brass candelabra, now converted to electricity, hung. All were lit, giving the impression of a small ballroom, for the room was empty of any furniture and where once there were pictures, possibly family portraits, there remained only white squares against the yellowing walls. The wide teak floorboards reflecting the light from the highly polished wood looked as if they carried the weight of generations of waxing. In the very centre of the room was a wheelchair in which sat a stern-faced woman who looked to be in her late thirties. Anna had told me when we’d been hunting butterflies that her stepmother had fallen off a horse while competing at a local gymkhana and had broken her back, then added, touching her head, ‘Also, not always she is good in the kop,’ then she touched her heart, ‘Also sometimes her heart is getting very angry, maybe sad also, ja.’ Anna’s stepmother wore her hair parted at the centre and pulled back into a bun, giving her a severity that belied her still-firm features. It was a face grown bitter and frustrated long before its time.

  The woman stabbed a finger at Anna. ‘Marriage!’ she shouted, ‘Hoerkind! Whore child!’

  ‘This is Katerina, my stepmother,’ Anna said gently. ‘You must excuse. Today she is not feeling so well.’

  ‘Marriage!’ the woman shouted again, this time pointing at the Dutchman.

  From the scornful look on his wife’s face, she’d obviously overheard the conversation in the hallway and ‘marriage’ was probably not the word she would have chosen to describe the liaison that had produced the beautiful Anna, and to confirm this she shouted, ‘Hoer! Whore!’

  ‘Kom, Katerina, wij gaan nu eten,’ Piet Van Heerden said evenly, advancing towards the wheelchair.

  ‘Whore!’ his wife cried again, throwing up her hands. ‘Whore! Whore! Whore!’ Whereupon she spun the wheelchair around and, propelling it with considerable speed, sped through a door at the opposite end of the large room.

  ‘I will take later her food,’ Anna said, attempting to hide her sudden tears at the use of the ugly word and her dismay at her stepmother’
s behaviour in front of me.

  We ate at the kitchen table sitting on a long wooden bench, the table, bench and an ancient rumbling Kelvinator fridge the only loose furniture in the room apart from a few necessary pots and pans and kitchen utensils that hung above the stove. The kitchen was another big room with a wood-fired stove from which Anna produced food, assisted by a diminutive thirteen-year-old Javanese kitchen maid named Kleine Kiki, Little Kiki, who Anna had previously told me was an orphan they’d adopted and who would be leaving Java with them. ‘Mijn stepmother she likes only Kiki,’ she’d explained.

  Dinner was a spicy Javanese rice and fish dish that was delicious, if a little too hot for a constitution still not fully accustomed to the more spicy local diet. The peach pie served with tinned cream was delicious.

  At the conclusion of the meal Little Kiki cleared the table silently, having to kneel on the bench to reach the rice dish in the centre. She took the dishes into the scullery to wash up. Piet Van Heerden rose, scratching his massive belly, then lumbered like a huge bear over to the fridge. He opened it and withdrew two large bottles of lager. Anna fetched two rather battered pewter mugs from a cupboard and a bottle opener, apologising that the beer steins were already packed. Opening both bottles, the Dutchman placed one in front of me. ‘Ja, now we drink, eh, Nick?’ he announced. I enjoyed a beer or two from time to time, a glass or two that is, but the bottles held at least two mugfuls and the over-large pewters at least two glasses. From the Dutchman’s known consumption, a single bottle wasn’t going to be the end of it. My sobriety was in question and two pewter mugs of lager was definitely my limit. If I attempted to keep up with my host, I’d soon enough end up under the table.

  We filled the mugs, each from his own bottle. ‘Australian and Dutch, they like to drink beer, ja!’ Anna’s old man pronounced in a jovial voice.

  ‘I doubt I’ll get through this bottle, sir,’ I grinned. ‘I’m not much of a drinker.’

  ‘Nick, we drink, it is goed, vun bottle piftt! It is not enough, you are young man, strong, ja,’ he announced, overriding my protest. Holding up his pewter mug, he waited until it was clinked by my own. ‘Cheers!’ he said in English.

  ‘Cheers,’ I replied, knowing that in the beer stakes the next hour was going to be a tricky one for me.

  We both drank, the Dutchman taking a deep swig as opposed to my moderate sip, then withdrawing and smacking his lips. ‘Goed! Now we talk, hey, Nick?’ he said.

  I grinned, not knowing quite how to respond. Anna had said he wanted to talk to me, but I had no idea what about. She had placed a plate of food on a tray and had left the kitchen to take her stepmother’s supper to her room or wherever she had fled in the wheelchair. I was alone with the Dutchman, his overbearing presence and the prospect of a night of drinking ahead inwardly disconcerting me. Two days ago I might have managed — then the arrogant Dutchman had meant almost nothing to me — but now there was Anna and I wanted badly to impress her old man. But he had me trapped with a gigantic bottle of lager on the table in front of me. My manhood was to be judged on my ability to hold my alcohol. I wonder if he knows I collect butterflies? The subject had never arisen in the afternoon bar, the Dutchman’s loquacious diatribes essentially involved his loss of a privileged lifestyle he never once questioned as anything but his absolute birthright. Ours was essentially a one-way conversation, perhaps the single exception being when I’d foolishly mentioned having done some ocean sailing. In this regard he’d grilled me closely and incessantly, the final result being the previous evening’s drunken visit to inspect his yacht.

  ‘Nick, how you get back to Australia?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘I have a working passage on the tramp steamer I arrived on,’ I replied, then added, ‘It’s due into port at the end of February.’ This wasn’t strictly true. I’d worked my way over two months previously and the Greek captain had more or less promised that if he should need extra crew on his next trip, if there was one, he’d be happy to consider me. No firm promise had been made and as he said, he might not even turn up. I had begun to worry about this last possibility. With the Japs on the doorstep the Dutch people in Batavia were growing more panicky by the day. On January the 9th Japanese aircraft had bombed the harbour in a surprise attack and had continued to do so regularly since then. Several merchantmen now rested on the bottom of the harbour, their superstructures reaching out like arms from a watery grave. A large merchantman on her side almost blocked the entrance to the harbour. I doubted very much that my Greek master would return to Batavia.

  ‘Maybe you take instead Vleermuis?’ Van Heerden said, looking directly at me.

  ‘What, sail her back?’ I replied, astonished at the idea.

  He shrugged. ‘Ja, why not, hey?’

  I laughed. ‘I’ve never sailed that far.’

  ‘Not so far, down the archipelago, zen soon vooosh, New Guinea.’

  ‘What about the Japanese?’

  ‘Ach, no, man! They will not come. Before Singapore you will see they will stop.’

  I hesitated. ‘I don’t know about that, sir. There’s plenty of speculation, people, yourself, deciding to get away.’

  ‘Ja, maybe they come. But by that time already you are long time in Australia.’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. It comes as a bit of… well, a bit of a surprise.’ I glanced at him. ‘This isn’t meant to be a joke, is it? You don’t even know how well I can sail.’

  Piet Van Heerden spread his hands. ‘I know. Some people always they try to bullshit. You, I think you can sail Vleermuis,’ he said, flattering me.

  ‘Thank you, sir, but I haven’t even taken her out.’

  ‘Ja, this is a problem.’ On a previous occasion at the bar he’d lamented that in the emergency the Dutch navy had forbidden pleasure craft on the congested harbour, nor were they allowed out to sea if they intended coming back. ‘I will take a chance you can do it,’ the Dutchman said generously.

  I laughed despite myself. ‘I would have thought it was me who was taking the chance, sir.’

  ‘Ja, but you are getting maybe Vleermuis.’

  I straightened up with a jerk. ‘You’re kidding, sir. Are you giving me your boat?’

  ‘Ja, and also no.’ He pursed his lips, making several tiny popping sounds. ‘We are making, how you say… ?’

  ‘A proposition?’

  ‘Ja, a proposition.’

  I frowned. ‘What sort of a proposition, sir?’

  He pointed to my pewter mug. ‘Drink, Nick, za beer, it gets otherwise hot.’

  I took a sip. What the hell was going on? A proposition. A sudden wild thought crossed my mind. If he’d let Anna come I’d agree to anything he wanted. I remained silent, pretty sure this wasn’t the sort of proposition he had in mind.

  ‘Money? You have some money, Nick?’

  It was my turn to grin. ‘To buy the Vleermuis?’ I shook my head slowly. ‘Not that kind of money, sir.’ What on earth was he going on about? He’d already told me he couldn’t take the gaff-rigged cutter with him. It was worthless left on the mooring. Did he take me for some sort of fool?

  ‘How much?’ he demanded.

  It was a bloody rude question. If it hadn’t been for Anna I think I might have got up there and then and left. I didn’t owe the bastard anything. ‘As a matter of fact, ten pounds,’ I said, an edge of resentment to my voice. The Dutchman was embarrassing me, forcing the information from me. But for a few Dutch guilders it was all the money I possessed in the world. It was my way out of Java should I not get a job on a ship. For me it was a considerable amount, two months’ wages as a dispatch clerk at W.R. Carpenter and a small win at poker. I wasn’t about to hand it over to him.

  ‘Give to me,’ he demanded, stretching out his enormous hand, a smug look on his fat, perspiring face.

  ‘Hey, wait a minute, sir. May I ask what this is all about? You told me yourself
you couldn’t take the boat with you. Now you want me to sail it to Australia and you want to make me a proposition that begins with me giving you ten pounds for the privilege. Why would I do that?’

  ‘Ja, I am glad to see you are not a fool, Nick. It is a goed question. For the papers zat ten pounds. If you have the papers then you will own Vleermuis.’

  ‘Is that all, sir? You said a proposition?’

  ‘You think ten pounds is too much, Nick?’

  ‘No, sir, it is a ridiculous price. Providing, of course, that I get Vleermuis back to Australia without running into the Japanese navy or a reconnoitring Zero or two.’

  ‘Ach, there is plenty of time, you will see.’

  ‘Sure, they bomb the harbour every few days.’ The Dutchman did not react to my aside, so I continued. ‘So, that’s it? Ten pounds and I get the Vleermuis?’ I asked suspiciously, for once not addressing him as ‘sir’. I was once warned never to do business with a Dutchman if I hoped to keep the shirt on my back.

  Piet Van Heerden smiled and spread his arms. ‘Ja, okay, maybe never, also maybe one day, who knows, eh? After za war Anna comes to Australia. Then she give you ten pounds and you give her za papers for Vleermuis, ja?’

  ‘Anna?’

  ‘Ja, always, one day she has Vleermuis.’ He shrugged, giving me an unctuous smile. ‘But now we are leaving and I cannot give her mijn beautiful boat.’

  ‘Sir, with the greatest respect, that sounds like bullshit. Isn’t it just another way to get your boat back after the war?’

  He laughed, lifting his pewter as if to salute me. ‘Goed! Ja, that is goed, Nick! Ha! Ha! Ja, nee, no, you are wrong! Anna, also… she loves this boat, already she can sail Vleermuis by herself, she is goed, better even zan me, ja.’

  ‘Okay, then give it to Anna now. Sign it over to her and let her sail it with me to Australia?’

  ‘Ja, papa, let me go with Nicholas. It will be a big adventure. We are going to Australia, we will meet you and Katerina and Kleine Kiki again there,’ she said ingenuously. Neither of us had noticed her return to the kitchen, or how long she had been present and what part of our conversation she might have overheard.