Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  Adding to Frau Kraus’s peculiar plainness was the manner in which she wore her hair. It was a deep chestnut, with distinct white stripes running through it approximately the width of a pencil and evenly dispersed every four inches or so. The chestnut carried not a single white strand and the white not a wisp of chestnut. In effect, she had naturally striped hair. She wore it pulled back and up from her face and tied into a tight bun on top of her head. The evenly spaced stripes emanating from the centre of the bun wound around its burnished perimeter to disappear into its underside and then remerge as legs. This gave the appearance of a very large and dangerous looking spider clamped to the top of her head. Small children, seeing her for the first time, would often cry out or draw back clutching at their mother’s skirt.

  Six days a week Frau Kraus wore shapeless floral dresses of the same design with the hemline down to her ankles, then an identical all-black version for Sunday church services. Her Sabbath attire was set off by a small straw hat, also black, which covered her spider bun and was decorated with two artificial cherries with two additional stems sticking up where cherries had once been attached. The small hat made the spider-like effect even more pronounced – the hat now became the giant insect’s body with the two cherries acting as its protruding eyes and the empty stems as antennae. She always wore men’s boots, a good pair for church and a not-so-good pair for work. Her black church boots were carefully polished and when not in use stored in muslin bags, while her heavy industrial steel-capped work boots were kept at the kitchen door and forbidden entry to the house. While indoors, she wore two sheepskin pads about twelve inches in diameter, woolly side to the floor and with two elastic bands sewn into the flip side of the pads into which she would fit her rather large flat feet. With a feather duster in hand she would then move about the house much as a figure skater might do on a winter pond, the polishing footwear designed to keep the wooden floors throughout the house gleaming, and the duster to swipe at any speck of dust that might be seen on the furniture. If Otto was indoors she would put the first movement of a Wagner symphony, his favourite, on the gramophone to conceal her heavy panting as she worked up a sweat at polishing. She would polish as if her life depended on it and would only rest when her legs couldn’t continue and she was forced to catch her breath by bending over with her hands on her knees.

  At home Frau Kraus wore a heavily starched white cotton apron that crackled when she bent over. She couldn’t tolerate the presence of even the tiniest speck of dirt and would change her apron the moment a small spot appeared on its snowy surface. At any given time two large iron buckets in the washhouse adjacent to her kitchen carried a dozen discarded aprons soaking in bleach ready to be consigned to the belly of her Maytag. All that she found good in America (which admittedly wasn’t much) was summed up by this wonderful washing machine prepared to work around the clock to indulge her obsession with cleanliness. While the remainder of her family’s washing was strung out on an extensive three-strand washing line every Monday morning, on the remaining days of the week, with the exception of the Sabbath, the line was crowded with aprons.

  It would never have occurred to Frau Kraus to ask herself if she was happy. Her work precluded such an unnecessary state of being. Cleaning was her happiness, America her cross to bear. Her house with its heavy Germanic furniture was immaculate. Work was what life was composed of and there wasn’t much she could do about it. She prepared four meals three times each day, kept a well-stocked kitchen garden going, a dozen chickens for eggs, a neat pond for an equal number of ducks and geese fattened for Christmas sale to German families who’d place their orders in January, as well as a turkey run that supplied three dozen plump birds of a specific weight to a Lower Manhattan restaurant for Thanksgiving. Finally, she had a small orchid house where she raised a dozen or so orchids ready for sale to a Brooklyn florist. She deliberately kept her farmyard endeavour small, knowing that if she expanded with more ducks, turkeys, eggs and orchids, Otto would demand the rewards. The money she made went on brooms, buckets and mops and every manner of cleaning aid that soaked, scrubbed, wiped, polished, waxed, brushed or bleached.

  All her livestock was contained within a small, neat field adjacent to the house, which was ploughed in early spring and sown with rye grass and clover. It contained a small barn that acted as a milking shed, hayloft and winter shelter for the resident Jersey cow she milked daily for household milk and to make freshly churned butter, and a nanny goat she kept for cheese. Neither the cow nor the goat enjoyed a name and if a child should ask, Frau Kraus would point to one and then the other and pronounce, ‘This ist Cow; this ist Goat.’ Her work routine entailed at least a dozen changes of apron during the day and a final change just moments before she sat down to supper.

  Washed and wearing a fresh shirt, denim overalls and slippers, Otto, at the head of the dining-room table, and the boys, seated on either side, sat waiting silently for Frau Kraus to join them. The food – meat, potatoes and vegetables from her garden piled high on their plates – would have been placed on the table moments before they entered the dining room and Frau Kraus would have returned to the kitchen. A stein of lager beer sat to the side of each plate. The men would wait until she emerged again from the kitchen when Otto, together with the boys, would look up and raise their beer steins as she reached her chair at the opposite end of the table, and Otto would say, ‘Danke, meine saubere Frau. ’

  It was a toast that contained not the slightest element of gratitude, nor, for that matter, did it seem intended as a compliment. ‘Thank you, my clean wife’ were simply the words that, over the years, had come to mean the evening meal was about to commence. Frau Kraus would answer with an impatient grunt all but lost in the crackling sound of her starched apron as, stiff-backed, she seated herself at the opposite end of the table. Otto, having taken a sip from his stein and placed it down with a loud smack of his lips, now proceeded to deliver a mumbling thanks to God in his native tongue for what they were about to receive.

  The meal would be consumed almost entirely in silence, with perhaps an occasional remark about the market price of tomatoes or some incident that had occurred on the farm. The boys never inquired after their mother’s welfare, and the first part of the proceedings would ritually be brought to an end when Otto, having completed his meal, placed his used knife and fork on the tablecloth, and reaching for a slice of bread used it to mop up what gravy remained on his plate. As in all things he was thorough, using the bread to polish the plate until not the tiniest smear of gravy remained. The twins, who had completed their dinner first, waited for the moment when Otto placed the last of the gravy-soaked bread in his mouth, licked his fat fingers and reached for his napkin to wipe his moustache. Without looking at their mother they would recite, ‘Danke, Frau Kraus. ’

  ‘Bitte,’ Frau Kraus would reply tonelessly, not glancing up. The boys’ cursory ‘thank you’ for the meal was intended simply as her cue to fetch the strudel and cream, a dessert that never varied and that was already waiting in plates resting on a tray on the kitchen table. Clearing their dinner plates, including her own, regardless of whether she’d completed her meal, she’d leave and return with the dessert, her starched apron now replaced by a small pinafore embroidered with pink roses. If any of the men ever noticed this small ceremonial apron change they saw no reason to comment. Several years back she had delivered the strudel wearing a pinafore onto which she had embroidered ‘Today is my birthday’, which had gone unnoticed.

  With dessert completed Otto would wipe his waxed moustache, which was the signal for Frau Kraus to rise and fetch her husband’s pipe and tobacco. After this she’d remove two Dresden china cups and saucers and a matching sugar bowl from the sideboard and place them down at her end of the table, then return to the kitchen to retrieve the enamel coffee pot from where it sat brewing at the back of the stove.

  Seated once again, she’d pour thick black coffee into one delicate porcelain cup, add three teaspoons of sugar and stir, some
how managing to avoid touching the sides of the cup. She’d then pour the second cup, this time not adding sugar. Leaving the first cup where it was, she’d rise from the table and take up the unsugared coffee and walk towards the kitchen door, where she’d pause momentarily and say what would often be the only consecutive words spoken by her during the entire meal: ‘That coffee will kill you, Otto. You should not drink it.’ Otto, holding his pipe in his mouth, would grunt his lack of concern and at the same time nod to the twins, granting them permission to leave the table. Frau Kraus then moved through to the kitchen and poured the cup of coffee she held down the sink, rinsed the cup thoroughly and switched off the light. Seated in the dark at the kitchen table, she waited.

  This small act of defiance, repeated every night over twenty years, was her single show of resistance. She’d long since ceased to feel any affection for the three men in her life. She hated their loud masticating noises; the careless and frenetic clatter of knife and fork stabbing at food on her willow-patterned plates; Otto’s crude and deliberate burp as he finished his beer; the way they all gnawed off the gluey nubs at the end of veal chops; Otto’s disgusting habit of polishing his plate clean with a slice of bread, then leaning back and patting his large belly before emitting a second satisfied burp; the cursory, pig-like grunts as she placed the strudel down beside each of them; and the fact that they invariably spilled custard or cream on her spotless tablecloth, not to mention the frequent gravy spots. Above all, she hated her husband’s smelly pipe, the tobacco crumbs he left on the tablecloth, the clouds of foul smoke that polluted the air as he stoked up and repeatedly lit it, and the dead matches thrown into his dessert plate.

  All of this deeply offended her sense of order. Why, she repeatedly asked herself, when they kept their farm so perfectly ordered, did they feel they could desecrate her home with their filthy habits? Her world of starched aprons and clean surfaces was as important to her as their neat rows of tomatoes and painted barns were to them. The twins were as bad as their father. It was he, Otto, who had taken her sons from her and by simply allowing them to emulate his behaviour had taught them to show no respect for their mother and to behave like pigs. It was of some consolation to her that they would eventually find wives and leave, but Otto was here to stay – she would have to endure him until he died.

  She was aware that in Otto’s mind his coffee cup left standing at her end of the table had become an all-but-meaningless protest. She would listen, waiting until she heard his chair scrape back, then imagine him standing, stretching, scratching his fat gut with the stem of his pipe, leaving a nicotine stain on his freshly laundered dungarees. She’d wait to hear the creak of a floorboard as his heavy footfall advanced towards the cup of coffee, which, every night over the past six months, she’d laced with a tiny dose of arsenic. Just sufficient to add to the slow build-up of poison in his system.

  The farm would be left to her. It was all settled. The twins were each to get fifty acres next door. She’d sell it for a good price – after all, it was a prize-winning farm. Then she’d return to her beloved Bavaria after the war, where Herr Hitler was doing so well, sending the enemy running for their lives across Europe like a pack of mongrel dogs and the British scuttling back across the Channel where the glorious Luftwaffe was bombing London in a blitzkrieg. As an all-conquering hero, Herr Hitler would return from his conquests to make the Fatherland into a paradise free of Jews and gypsies. She, who had accepted American citizenship only because Otto had demanded it, would be going home to a master race who had conquered the world. She would buy a farm in Bavaria and live happily ever after.

  She told herself it wouldn’t be murder. How could it be? She’d never offered him the coffee, never actually lifted it from the table and placed it in front of him. She’d clearly and repeatedly warned him against drinking it. He’d retrieved it in an act of self-will despite her urging him against doing so. Surely this was the gesture of a loving wife caring about the welfare of her husband. How could it be seen as otherwise? The twins would corroborate her concern for his heart, the coffee warning repeated in their presence every night since they’d been children. A slow smile would appear across the plain, scrubbed face as she waited in the kitchen. She had taken almost twenty years to gain the courage to put her plan into action. But she was right to do it. She’d suffered enough. She’d taken her time, thought a great deal about it, worked it all out, given him every chance. Even if they did a post-mortem, the arsenic could easily have been absorbed when he mixed it with bread, moulding the soft, dough-like substance with his fingers into pellets to attract rats and mice. Again, her sons could substantiate this.

  This then was the family with whom Jimmy would begin his working life.

  If I appear to know a great deal about the Kraus family, it is because Jimmy is a man who observes things very closely and has the ability to encapsulate any incident in his past into a complete and colourful story. In turn, I seem to have the capacity to recall seemingly disconnected incidents over the years and to piece them together to make a whole. Jimmy, in his usual way, will bring up an incident in his past and, like some sort of mental bowerbird, I will snatch it up to see where it fits in the overall narrative of his life prior to our friendship. With a bit of luck, eventually an entire episode, such as the one above, evolves into a cohesive whole. His ability to observe the smallest details and my skill in piecing them together were to make us a formidable combination in our business dealings with the Chinese.

  Otto Kraus was not a man to leave anything to chance, and he prepared for the likelihood of America entering the war as carefully as if he were planting a row of tomato plants. Completely devoid of imagination, he dealt with things as they were. He knew tomatoes would not be necessary for the war effort – moreover, the boys would be conscripted and he might be interned as an enemy alien. The farm could be shut down easily enough but would require a fair amount of everyday maintenance, which Frau Kraus would have to attend to. Over several weeks he kept an eye on her daily activities, and finally ended up with a list of the precise time she would spend doing the required chores.

  Washing, Cleaning, Aprons . . . 4 hrs

  Cooking . . . 1 hr

  Vegetables . . . 2 hrs

  Orchids . . . 1 hr

  Cow & stable . . . 1 hr

  Goat . . . nein

  Poultry . . . 1 hr

  Farm machinery oiling etc. . . . 1 hr

  Trip to town to sell produce . . . 4 hrs (average ¾ hr per day)

  Recreation . . . 15 mins

  Total per day . . . 12 hrs

  Sunday: Church . . . 4 hrs

  Various chores . . . 8 hrs.

  Of course, the list was written in German and so it had the absolute ring of precise instructions to be followed to the letter. By his calculations her obsessive preoccupation with cleaning and laundering her aprons took up nearly half a day, calculated on the basis of a twelve-hour day. This could be spent more profitably tending to her poultry, slaughtering and dressing ducks and turkeys, stuffing down pillows and grading eggs for the market. She would decrease her time spent in the vegetable garden and increase the number of ducks, turkeys and chickens, using the extra money she made from the sale of meat and eggs to live on, buy winter hay for the cow and do the necessary farm maintenance, painting, oiling machinery, etc. He calculated that the field containing the cow and goat would only need to be ploughed and sown with rye and clover every two years if she got rid of the goat, which ate a disproportionate amount of the available grazing. In addition the hothouse used to raise his tomato seedlings would be turned over to orchids, which she would propagate and sell. He would arrange for his bank account to be frozen for the duration of his internment but tell her this would undoubtedly be done by the authorities, and so she must learn to be entirely self-sufficient as there would be no additional money to hire help. None of this was discussed with Frau Kraus. Otto had never thought to ask her opinion and considered it best to have everything worked out before he
revealed his plans for her.

  It was around this time that a church elder alerted him to the possibility of obtaining an indentured orphan from the Colored Orphan Asylum. The idea that he could obtain a servant virtually for the cost of their food appealed to Otto greatly. He loved a bargain, and free labour until the coloured boy or girl was eighteen years old was not to be sneered at. The elder explained that the coloured children were already accustomed to work, and Otto felt that he’d soon enough train them in his particular ways. Wearing their Sunday best and armed with a letter of introduction from the Lutheran minister as well as half a dozen cases of tomatoes as a gift to the institution, Otto and the twins piled into the Dodge truck and turned up at Riverdale on visitor’s day.

  At first they thought a girl might be suitable to help Frau Kraus, but then Otto, in a rare moment of sensitivity, realised that she would not allow a Schwarze into her spotless home. There were also the twins to contend with – putting unnecessary temptation in their path wasn’t a sensible idea. Besides, they needed an outdoor nigger – which suggested a boy. Otto saw Jimmy, who, at eleven, was the size of a fifteen-year-old and seemed strong enough to be trained to do a great many of the maintenance tasks around the farm. Otto regarded the Schwarze boy as an intelligent addition to the livestock, so he figured no special accommodation would be needed – Jimmy would sleep in the animal barn, the cow and goat in the bottom and Jimmy in the hayloft.

  Jimmy recalled the day that the Kraus men arrived at Riverdale early in 1941. ‘“Komm, boy!” Mr Otto he say to me. “Stand! I look you.” Den he feel mah muscles. “Strong boy,” he says. “Ja, gut.” Den he say, “Teeths!” I don’t unnerstand what he say. “Open za teeths!” he say again.