Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  For Jimmy’s fourteenth birthday she presented him with a Timex watch complete with a gold band and with his name inscribed on the back – the same watch he bartered with the North Korean guard for the two planks that were to form my splints. Only, of course, that’s not what he’d told me at the time, claiming he’d bought it from a pawnbroker and that it meant little or nothing to him, which was quite untrue. It was the first gift he had ever received, and he must have greatly treasured it.

  There was only one small ritual between the two of them that left him somewhat bemused. At the commencement of every evening meal as she entered the dining room from the kitchen Frau Kraus required him to lift his stein and say, ‘Danke, meine saubere Frau.’ When Jimmy eventually learned the meaning of the phrase he laughingly pointed out that she was not his wife.

  ‘It a salute – you have to say it, uzzerwise yo’ beer it gonna turn sour, man,’ she replied, laughing.

  ‘Brother Fish, I ain’t to know it dat time, but mah beer it gonna turn sour soon ’nough and dis nigger he ’bout to fall upon hard, hard times,’ Jimmy said to me in the prison camp on the day he concluded the story of Frau Kraus and the gobbling spider.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Fish Man

  As I recall, I left off to talk about the early stages of Jimmy’s life at the point when he swapped the Timex watch Frau Kraus had given him for two planks to be used as a splint for my leg, torn from the stockade fence at the entrance of the cave. Shortly after the gruel of rice and millet arrived, Jimmy took his leave. ‘I gotta do da busi-ness, Brother Jacko,’ he said. ‘Ogoya busi-ness.’

  With my broken leg now in a splint, I tried all morning to get to my feet, and finally managed to do so by around noon. While not yet game to attempt to hobble a few steps around the crowded cave, it felt glorious to be vertical again. Viewing the world from a horizontal position, as I had done for two weeks, somehow made everything seem hopeless – now I felt the beginnings of hope returning.

  As soon as I stood, the shouts began. ‘Give us “In the Mood”, buddy.’ I had no idea how they’d picked me out from the crowd – after all, on the previous occasion I’d played lying on my back and I’m not exactly a big bloke. But they knew who I was and wanted more of the same, though I can’t say I was in much of a performance mood. The pain in my broken leg was pretty bad, and my jaw was still swollen with several teeth cracked or broken from the blow I had taken on the two separate occasions I’d copped the end of a nog rifle butt. Still and all, I’d certainly been in worse shape in the past few days and there were others here a lot worse off than me. I took out the harmonica and played the Glenn Miller classic, and followed this with ‘Harbor Lights’ . . .

  I saw the harbor lights,

  They only told me we were parting . . .

  All these years later I forget the lyrics . . . something, something, something . . . oh yes . . .

  . . . I long to hold you near and kiss you just once more,

  But you were on the ship and I was on the shore.

  I continued with ‘We’ll Meet Again’, ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’, ‘Stardust’ and, for the southerners, ‘Stars Fell on Alabama’. Then, because Jimmy wasn’t there to roll his eyes, I concluded with his all-time big hate singer, Nat King Cole, and his saccharine-sweet melody, ‘Too Young’ . . .

  They try to tell us we’re too young,

  Too young to really be in love.

  In my mind I could hear Jimmy raving, ‘Dat not a voice for a black guy, man! Dat a cockamamie white-man voice, dat a voice to shame a black man! Dat a faggot voice. Jesus done punish him special.’ Nevertheless it went down a treat, and throughout the various numbers there had been several dozen voices joining in, supplying the lyrics.

  But after about twenty minutes I had to stop. I was completely buggered, with the blood running from the corners of my mouth. The effect of the harmonica on the prisoners was the same as the previous time I’d played, with some openly weeping. It should be remembered these were just kids, some of them not yet twenty, and the tunes that brought with them memories of a happier time and place had been too much for them. But, all in all, the general mood in the cave seemed to have lifted a good deal and there was quite a lot of clapping and whistling. ‘What’s your name?’ someone shouted. Then another added, ‘Where you from?’

  ‘Jacko McKenzie, Queen Island,’ I said, not thinking.

  ‘Queen Island?’ someone close by said. ‘What state is that in?’

  ‘No, no, I’m Australian,’ I corrected. I was wearing my Yank parka, which approached my knees, and the boots Jimmy had saved for me, and they must have taken me for a Yank.

  Just then Jimmy arrived back. He must have been listening somewhere near the front of the cave and heard the questions, though he didn’t mention the Nat King Cole number at the end of the bracket. He came limping along, upright this time, walking with the aid of two sticks, using them to balance as he swung his broken leg forward. ‘Listen up!’ he said in his big voice. ‘Dis Brother Jacko from Down-under – dat da other side da fuckin’ world, man! It named Or-stralia. ’Case you cats don’t hear o’ dat place, it like da Wild West, only it bigger den Texas, almost bigger den da whole United States o’ America, man! It truly awesome! Yoh drive three, four days yoh don’t see nothin’, just dem kangaroos and dem wild men Aborigines, dey’s chasin’ yoh wid der deadly didgeridoo, dey catch yoh dey point da bone, dey ain’t touched yoh and yo’ a dead man.’

  In the process of giving Jimmy some of the facts about Australia I’d talked about the outback and the size of Australia. He’d interrupted me and asked if it was bigger than Texas and I’d replied, in land mass, it’s almost bigger than America, but with a predominance of desert. I told him about the Aborigines and the fact that they could kill a man by pointing the bone, and somewhere I must also have mentioned that they played the digeridoo. Now I was hearing his interpretation, although the Wild West analogy was entirely of his own invention.

  Jimmy continued, ‘The gooks, they done broke Brother Jacko’s jaw and his teeth. His leg, it broke real bad from a machine-gun bull-let, but he still done played dat harmonica for yoh’all.’ He paused. ‘Dis man we gotta pay a little respec’, you hear?’

  ‘Ferchrissake, Jimmy, take it easy, will ya?’ I pleaded, mortified at his outburst.

  Jimmy grinned and turned to look at me, and must then have seen the blood at the corners of my mouth. ‘No shit! Da blood it runnin’ from his mouth from playin’ dat fine music.’ He waited for his statement to sink in before adding in a melodramatic voice, ‘Brother Jacko he da man.’ He paused again, ‘Hey, yoh guys, what yoh say, eh? Put yo’ hands together for Brother Jacko!’

  Then followed a whole heap more applause and whistles, which only served to add to my acute embarrassment.

  Later I turned to him. ‘Mate, what was that all about? All that crap you went on about, there are blokes in here far worse off than me, than the both of us! My jaw ain’t broke, neither.’ He’d humiliated me in front of the wounded men in the cave and I wasn’t happy. All I’d done was give them a bit of a cheer-up session on the mouth organ and he’d turned it into a big deal, like I was a hero or something. ‘A man won’t be able to raise his head around here after what you said!’ I was hurting a fair bit from standing too long, and I guess I was pretty aggro because I turned on him again: ‘By the way, you ignorant bastard, a didgeridoo is a musical instrument, not a bloody weapon, and the Aboriginal people are not wild men.’

  Jimmy looked at me ingenuously, eyes wide. ‘Did-geri-doo, it do sound dangerous, Brother Jacko.’ Then, quick as lightning, he added, ‘But dat mah point exact! Yoh harmonica, dat ain’t no musical ins-stra-ment, dat our deadly weapon, dat our didgeridoo, man. I tol’ yoh, it what gonna get dem cats offa der ass!’ Jimmy, not in the least contrite, grinned and handed me one of the walking sticks. ‘Now you offa yoh ass, Brother Jacko.’

  What was the use? Getting cranky with a cove like Jimmy was pointless – once he got an i
dea into his head you couldn’t remove it with a meat cleaver. I accepted the walking stick reluctantly. I’d observed him coming towards me, moving steadily. It was something you could only do with two sticks, using them as short crutches. With one stick only, his means of locomotion had to be tackled differently – a method by no means as efficient.

  ‘You need both, Jimmy,’ I protested. ‘I saw you approaching, you were goin’ real good using both them sticks.’

  He gave me an indignant look, as if I’d insulted him. ‘Nah, one for me, one for yoh – we partners, man! Dat jes mah way o’ carryin’ yo’ stick.’

  Within a few days, Jimmy had begun to sort the cave out. The morning after he’d big-noted me I did a bit of a concert where quite a lot of those who were not severely wounded joined in. Jimmy stopped me in between brackets, and whispered, ‘Deys four grunts here dat could be a quartet. You call dem out, Brother Jacko.’

  ‘Shit no, Jimmy, you do it – they won’t take no notice of me, mate.’

  ‘Dat not true. Yoh da man!’

  I asked him to point the four men out and swallowed hard, then cleared my throat, pointing to the Yank nearest to us. ‘Excuse me, mate,’ I called.

  ‘Who, me, buddy?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, you sing real good, could you come over here please?’ I pointed to the other three and asked them to do the same.

  ‘Ever sung in a quartet?’ I asked. One of them said he had. ‘Choir?’ Two more had. ‘Harmonise?’ Again two. ‘Giddonya, I think we’ve got ourselves a barbershop quartet. Can we see you after?’ I looked at Jimmy, who nodded. ‘Perhaps we could have a bit of a private session?’ The men looked at each other, a bit querulous. ‘See how we go, eh?’ I said quickly, to prevent any of them from objecting. I then continued playing, with the newly found would-be quartet standing beside me soon catching on to the harmonies. Jimmy’s ear must have been pretty good because their voices blended well. By the end of the session I think they were quite pleased with themselves.

  In the next few days we formed a choir, just a very few volunteers at first but over the following week others joined in until it included almost all the men who weren’t too sick to participate. Jimmy became choirmaster and it was apparent that his training in the Colored Orphan Asylum choir hadn’t been wasted.

  ‘Now we got da basis, Brother Jacko. Now we got dem grunts offa der ass, now we gonna fix dis place, or we all gonna die.’

  He was referring to the fact that the smell inside the cave was overwhelming – a lot of it coming from the wounded, who couldn’t move and lay in their own excreta. It wouldn’t be too long before we were all down with dysentery, roundworm and all the other diseases that thrive in unsanitary conditions. Perhaps the only good thing about the freezing conditions was that the customary diseases would take longer to spread among us. Until I’d been given the splints I too had been guilty of shitting where I lay, though only the once, and I’d tried to scrape a bit of a hole in the thin layer of soil covering the cave floor to bury the mess I’d made. There were no facilities for washing, which meant the men were eating with their hands covered in their own excreta.

  Now Jimmy and I set about changing things. I only include myself because as a foreigner among the Yanks and the so-called ‘hero’, Jimmy insisted they listen to me. He was the boss and I pretty well did as I was told. It was also the first time I’d heard the expression ‘Talk soft and carry a big stick’, which was Jimmy’s advice to me. His sheer bulk and the walking stick he carried seemed to give him all the authority he needed and he never seemed to raise his voice.

  Only once did someone challenge him, and judging from his accent it was a southerner objecting to taking instructions from a black man. Jimmy had asked him to help move one of the wounded men and take him to the latrine, situated in a narrow offshoot at the back of the cave. ‘Hey, you tellin’ me what I gotta do, nigger?’ he asked. He wore a crew cut and was a mean-looking bugger. The men close by, including myself, waited. The southerner was a big bloke with a bandaged head but otherwise able-bodied, and it was for this reason Jimmy had asked him to help take one of the badly wounded to the latrine.

  ‘Whoa! What da matter, man? You cain’t help dis sick man?’ Jimmy pointed to his bandaged head. ‘Yo’ head – it’s bad, eh?’

  The southerner rose to his feet. ‘What did you say to me, nigger?’ He stood a good six feet and was broad across the shoulders. Jimmy was still the bigger man but, if it came to a fight, with one leg broken he clearly wouldn’t be a match for the southerner.

  Jimmy stood about a foot from the cave wall, and now he backed up slowly until he was hard against it. ‘I said, yo’ head – you sick bad? It a question, man!’

  ‘Fuck – what’s it to you, nigger?’ He suddenly lashed out, kicking Jimmy’s broken leg just below the knee. There was a gasp from those of us watching, and Jimmy’s face creased with excruciating pain. How he remained standing, I’ll never know. If it had happened to me I would have been on my back in the dirt writhing at the southerner’s feet. But then we saw that Jimmy held the other man by the throat – he must have anticipated the kick, and his arm had shot out to grab his assailant’s throat as his boot went into Jimmy’s knee. Jimmy’s eyes were still screwed tight as he grappled with the pain, but his fingers seemed to have entered the flesh of the other man’s neck as they tightened. The southerner, eyes rolling, sunk to his knees with both his hands tearing helplessly at Jimmy’s grip. Jimmy’s arm was fully extended, holding the other man sufficiently far from his body so that he couldn’t grab at his legs and pull him down. But the southerner hadn’t even thought to do this – he’d panicked, and all his strength was concentrated on getting Jimmy’s hand away from his throat. Finally Jimmy opened his eyes. The sudden pain seemed to have burst the blood vessels and his eyes looked like two burning coals. His face was completely blank and he stared straight ahead, as if he was unaware of the man on his knees in front of him. He simply squeezed until the southerner’s tongue protruded and his eyes began to pop. The white bloke was a strong man but he made absolutely no impression on Jimmy’s grip, although his nails had torn several scarlet furrows along the back of Jimmy’s hand.

  ‘Leave him, Jimmy! Let him go, you’ll kill him!’ I screamed. Either the pain or something even more primal within him had closed his senses down, and he continued to squeeze, grunting softly from the effort, unable to hear me. ‘Jimmy, stop!’ I yelled again, and at the same time I lashed out with my walking stick, striking at the huge hand that held the white guy’s throat. Jimmy must have felt the blow because he suddenly came to his senses and let go of the southerner, who collapsed unconscious on the floor like a rag doll.

  Jimmy stood with his back to the wall, chin raised, eyes looking upwards, panting, saying nothing. Then he looked down at the bloody hand I’d struck. He hadn’t even wrung it to ease the pain. He slowly worked his fingers until he reached his thumb, flicking it. ‘Well, dat one thing good – it don’t look purdy, but I ain’t broke no fingers,’ he said, still panting. The unconscious man at his feet was starting to come around, a sort of wheezing, hissing, coughing sound coming from his bruised throat. ‘Dat another thing good – I gone shut his big honky mouth.’ He looked up from the man on the ground and into my eyes and I could see he was back to being Jimmy again. ‘Thank you, Brother Jacko,’ he said quietly. He reached out to touch me and I could see his wounded hand was already beginning to balloon from where I’d struck him.

  Jimmy’s technique to get things going was simple enough – he never demanded help, he simply asked politely, and while sometimes the person requested to help would simply turn and shuffle away, slowly the idea of taking responsibility for our living conditions caught on. Using my watch and three others and several Zippo lighters offered to him for the purpose of bribing the guards, he swapped them for the two halves of a cut-down petrol drum, some fencing wire, a six-foot length and two three-foot lengths of timber prised from the stockade, several pieces of rag and two whisk brooms we
would use for cleaning and sweeping the cave. Using the wire to fashion handles for the drums, we hung one from the centre of the six-foot timber pole, and with a man taking either end we would gather loads of snow from outside and bring them into the cave to melt. The water was then used by the more or less able-bodied among us to do our ablutions and clean our wounds. Although the cave was designated a hospital by the enemy, there were no medics, no medicine and no attempt at treatment. It was left up to us, and we attended to the totally incapacitated the best we could, using strips from the shirts of the dead as bandages. We had no painkillers or even aspirin, so a more or less clean bandage was the best we could do. Finally we washed the filth from the walls and swept the cave floor every day.

  Dysentery was inevitable under the prevailing conditions and a lot of the men suffered from it, but it was roundworm we feared the most. Several of the prisoners who’d been captured much earlier than me had been infected. The worms could grow to be two or three inches long and about the diameter of a pencil. They were passed in the faeces, which was painful though bearable. But a part of the roundworm’s life cycle is spent in the bloodstream, during which time it penetrates the lungs, where it grows to maturity to be constantly coughed up by the prisoner – an excruciatingly painful process.

  The second half of the drum was used as a latrine, the two three-foot planks placed parallel across the top, ten inches separating them, to act as a crude toilet seat. Every morning the latrine drum would be taken out and the contents disposed of by emptying them into a hole made in the snow, where they would instantly freeze. The guards permitted the able-bodied wounded to go outside the cave to defecate provided they first removed their boots and socks and could be observed at all times. Watching a man trying to go to the toilet in the snow while at the same time hopping from one foot to the other caused the guards no end of mirth and became a daily comedy routine for them, not to be missed. Eventually it became too cold to expose our private parts to the elements, and everyone used the cut-down drum latrine within the cave. The prisoners taking turns to empty the contents every morning continued to supply the daily quota of mirth for the North Korean guards.