Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  I was in dreadful pain, and to add to it something happened that I have never been able to explain. Completely out of the blue, without any thought on my part, I had a full-blown erection. This caused the two nurses to giggle, holding their hands up to their mouths, unable to restrain their mirth. I’d heard of dead men having an erection, and I wondered if this was a precursor to my own death. Then a diminutive Chinese cameraman appeared and began to set up a tripod onto which he placed an old-fashioned portrait camera complete with bellows. I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t hallucinating, what with the two nurses giggling and the dwarf camera operator fussing around, completely oblivious to my erection. It seemed more like something out of a pornographic version of a Charlie Chaplin comedy. The tiny cameraman poured flash powder into a holder, repeatedly baring his teeth in the manner of a chimpanzee, which he quite closely resembled. I think he was trying to tell me to smile. Then he held it aloft and disappeared beneath the black cloth behind the camera. He triggered the flash powder, which exploded in a great whoosh of smoke and set the roof thatch alight. Thankfully, it also caused my erection to subside.

  People came running from everywhere and the fire was somehow doused, though I was too preoccupied with my pain to take note quite how this was done. I guess the photograph, originally intended for the Daily Worker as propaganda to show how well UN prisoners were being treated, would have become a collector’s item, and there are probably faded prints of my ‘election’ still doing the rounds among junior medical staff somewhere in China.

  I was taken back to the room with the platform and left with the other wounded soldiers. The pain seemed to steady somewhat – by that, I mean it didn’t increase. Pain on a consistent level is bearable: even if severe, the mind somehow accommodates it so that it becomes possible to think of other things as well. None of my fellow patients spoke English and I felt terribly alone. The cave had been gruesome, but at least I’d been with people who spoke my language. The unfortunate erection was also preoccupying my thoughts. Sex is not a factor when men are starving and sick, and I hadn’t had the slightest inclination or even indication in the weeks I’d been a prisoner of war. Nor, for that matter, did I immediately after the photographic incident. But it must have triggered something because now my mind was longing for a woman’s arms to be around me. I’d had a few girlfriends on the island and tried to imagine them holding me, but I couldn’t quite visualise the process I so longed for. It was not a sexual thing – the arms I needed would be more a comfort and a reassurance, and they’d all been too young to meet this need. Then, ridiculously, my mind’s eye settled on the strongest female image it had ever encountered – Miss Pat Brand, the torch singer who had performed at Puckapunyal. My head filled with the lyrics and the tune she’d sung to us that night when I had fallen head over heels in love. I found my harmonica in the pocket of my parka and began to play.

  Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly,

  I gotta love one man till I die,

  Can’t help lovin’ dat man of mine.

  All I could manage was one verse before I started to weep, pain and loneliness overwhelming me so that I howled like a small child. I became aware of someone close by and through my ridiculous tears saw it was one of the Chinese wounded. He sat beside me as I tried to gain control, to get a hold of myself, but the tears wouldn’t stop and I continued to sob. Then I felt the soldier beside me reach out and take me in his arms and cradle my head against his breast. Then in perfect English, with an American accent, he began to sing.

  ‘I looked over Jordan, and what did I see?

  Comin’ for to carry me home.

  A band of angels comin’ after me,

  Comin’ for to carry me home.

  Swing low, sweet chariot,

  Comin’ for to carry me home.

  Swing low, sweet chariot,

  Comin’ for to carry me home.

  If you get there before I do,

  Comin’ for to carry me home,

  Tell all my friends I’m comin’ too,

  Comin’ for to carry me home.

  Swing low, sweet chariot . . .

  I’m sometimes up and sometimes down,

  Comin’ for to carry me home,

  But still my soul feels heavenly bound,

  Comin’ for to carry me home.

  Swing low, sweet chariot . . .

  The brightest day that I can say,

  Comin’ for to carry me home,

  When Jesus washed my sins away,

  Comin’ for to carry me home.

  Swing low, sweet chariot . . .’

  Apart from these perfectly accented lyrics he only had one other word in English – ‘Missionary’. He must have learned the words of the hymn by rote as a child from an American missionary. I sometimes play this beautiful Negro spiritual and it never fails to reduce me to tears as I recall the little bloke. He too had been wounded, but he’d reached out to me and held me in his arms, comforting me with the words in a song, the meaning of which he probably didn’t understand, but with a sense of compassion that transcended language and culture.

  Later I would reflect on the Chinese. First there had been the soldier who had slowly bled to death, who had rolled a cigarette and placed it in my mouth and then, rolling one for himself, died in front of my eyes, the half-smoked fag stuck to his bottom lip. Then this second wounded soldier, comforting me with his song. We would have our moments with the Chinese, but as far as I was concerned, these two soldiers went a long way to earning my admiration for a strangely complex and contradictory race of people.

  Despite the incident with the singing soldier that first night after my operation and long-hoped-for plaster cast, I was pretty bloody miserable. I felt sure that the medical attention I’d finally received was too little, too late, and I was almost certainly going to die. But by early morning I felt a little better and managed to fall asleep, and finally woke up in the late afternoon to find Jimmy lying beside me.

  ‘Jesus!’ was all I could manage to say.

  ‘No sir! Jesus, he got other eggs to fry! Dis James Pentecost Oldcorn at yo’ service, Brother Fish.’

  I let the ‘Brother Fish’ pass, thinking Jimmy had simply made a mistake. Then he explained that the Chinese officer who’d picked me out to have my leg set had returned the following day and demanded to hear the choir sing the North Korean folksong. Jimmy had called them together and they’d duly performed it for him. In contrast to ‘Inscrutable’, his North Korean cousin, he seemed delighted. The Chinese officer spoke halting but reasonable English. He explained that he knew the song, which, as it turned out, was in a dialect used by the people who lived on the Yalu River and was used by both nations, the river being the common border where the villagers on either side had mixed for countless generations.

  The song, he explained, was about a fisherman who had sailed too far down the river and found himself blown into the Gulf, where he was caught in a terrible storm and became lost at sea. After many days without sighting land, when he was about to perish from thirst, he heard a fish calling his mother’s name in the voice of his younger brother, who had drowned at sea as a young man. The fish drew alongside the boat and told him to hoist sail and follow it. It guided him back to the shore and up the river to his own village, where his mother lay dying of grief because she had only two sons and both had been lost to the merciless sea. The last two happy verses were about a great feast to celebrate his return and his mother’s recovery.

  ‘Dat gook officer, he say we all gonna go to a hospital, dey gonna fix mah leg, we all gonna get good treatment. He say when we sing dat fish song in der language it like a com-plee-ment to da Chinese People’s Revolution.’ He shrugged, ‘So yoh see, it a e-stab-lish fact – we owe our lives to you, Brother Fish.’

  ‘That’s complete bullshit,’ I replied. ‘And what’s going on? That’s the second time you’ve called me Brother Fish!’

  Jimmy laughed, ‘Dat yo’ name now, man! You da fish man!’

  Like
I said before, when Jimmy got a notion into his head it would take more than a tempest at sea to remove it. ‘Dat Chinee song, it da brother who become da fish dat show him da way home – it like a re-in-carn-nation, man! It da brother fish dat done da deed and save his life.’ He shook his head, obviously impressed at this remarkable juxtaposition of the word ‘brother’. ‘It simple, man, you dat brother fish.’ In Jimmy’s mind that was as good as a message from on high, and ever afterwards he referred to me as Brother Fish, a name I’ve now held for just on fifty years.

  Jimmy’s leg had originally been broken midway between his left ankle and knee. He’d been fortunate and there had been no complications such as the festering, swelling and high fever I’d copped, though, of course, he had to endure the torture of the rack when they straightened his leg to plaster it. Within a couple of days, with the help of a pair of Chinese crutches, which were much too small for him so that he appeared to move as if doubled up, he was hopping about. Whereas I was still much too weak to get to my feet.

  I was to learn that the Chinese have very little sense of privacy and they don’t feel shame over the same things as we do. There was no such thing as a bedpan in this hospital. With a plaster cast from ankle to waist, too weak to make my own way to the outside latrine, I was carried over to a four-gallon kerosene can with the top sawn off to perform my morning bowel and bladder movements. They hadn’t replaced my tattered army trousers and apart from the plaster cast I was bollocky naked from the waist down. It was normally okay, as my precious Yank parka covered my private parts, but in order to do my business this was lifted high above my waist to reveal my tackle.

  Latrine time became the signal for all ’n’ sundry to come running. My round blue eyes and red hair had already drawn a lot of attention, and the platform for the wounded never had as many visitors. People came from far and near to gawk at me and also the huge shape of Jimmy, who, while not much darker than some of the Chinese, differed in ethnic type in every other conceivable way. To the Chinese both of us were remarkable exhibits, and visiting the platform of wounded men must have been their equivalent of seeing two newly acquired, rare species at the zoo.

  But latrine time was the special show. Both men and women would jostle to get a good position beside the kerosene can, where they could reach in and pull at my bright-red pubic hair to see if it was real. They’d take a tug and everyone would let out a gasp as it stayed put. Quite why they imagined it might be fake or why I would want artificial pubic hair I can’t say. Under the circumstances it was hardly surprising that I was finding it difficult to have a bowel movement. The crowd would watch as I strained and some, in an effort to encourage me, would screw up their eyes, stretch their lips into a grimace and emit straining sounds on my behalf, while all showed genuine concern for my lack of action. Finally, on the fourth day their patience was rewarded. I expelled, with surprising force, a dozen or so small dry pellets that ricocheted and pinged around the can to prolonged applause. Several onlookers were so moved that they reached out to pat me on the shoulder.

  While Jimmy would ever after insist that my learning the folksong from Kim Sun and its subsequent performance in front of Ho Ling, the Chinese officer who transferred us to the farm hospital, was what saved the lives of the men in the North Korean cave, this was probably untrue. But, just as I like to believe that Kim Sun had cadged a lift on the bullock cart so that he could take care of me, so Jimmy is entitled to his fish story. And anyway, true or false, it made no difference – I was landed with the Brother Fish nickname for the duration.

  Much more likely to be the reason we were given medical treatment was that cease-fire talks had recommenced at around this time and the question of prisoner exchange had been placed on the agenda. Prisoners of war were now a valuable commodity, a bargaining tool, where the more you had the more persuasive you were likely to be. It suddenly became imperative to keep as many prisoners of war alive as possible, and the plaster casts Jimmy and I had received were strictly for cosmetic purposes and had nothing to do with duty of care, compassion or even folksongs.

  A week after I’d arrived at the farmhouse hospital, and only a day after I managed to get around on my Chinese crutches, we were declared fit to leave. As far as the Chinese farmhouse hospital system was concerned, provided you weren’t flat on your back you were ready to move. Convalescence wasn’t built into their system, which was true for their own men as well as for us.

  Late the following day, with darkness already settling over the landscape, a five-ton truck arrived and we were hastily loaded aboard to join a truckful of Chinese soldiers who shuffled to make sufficient room for us to sit. We hadn’t gone more than a couple of miles before we joined a convoy of about fifty trucks, tucking in close to the front. Upon our departure we’d been issued with a blanket, which did very little to keep out the biting cold, and I can remember grumbling to Jimmy that it wasn’t our wounds we needed to worry about because we’d eventually perish from the bloody cold. In fact, I should have been grateful – later we would learn that the previous winter several columns of UN Command prisoners had marched this same route for hundreds of miles with those unable to keep up shot on the spot. With our broken legs we’d have been shot before they lifted the starting gate.

  It was slow going over bad roads and there was little chance of sleep. Hours passed, and sometime in the early morning we heard warning shots from Chinese lookouts situated high on the surrounding hills. Shortly afterwards came the sound of aeroplane engines. The convoy stopped and we could hear whistles blowing as the soldiers in the remainder of the convoy and those in our truck hastily evacuated to take cover and we were left, sitting ducks, not sufficiently mobile to leave the truck on our own.

  ‘How ’bout dat?’ Jimmy sighed grimly. ‘We gonna get our ass kicked by da fuckin’ US Air Force.’

  Next thing the surrounding landscape was illuminated by parachute flares and the attack began. My mind went back to Bluey Walsh and the Chinese soldier who’d been burned by napalm and I’m still surprised I didn’t shit the kapok-quilted cotton trousers they’d given me in the hospital. I had been frightened, very frightened, before this, but now I was absolutely terrified. The vision of Bluey Walsh taking his last breath and the Chinese soldier sitting with his arms welded around his knees, his entire body crisped by napalm, filled my panicked mind. I prayed that whatever hit me was for keeps and that it wasn’t napalm. We could hear each plane as it came in low, its roar drowning everything out, the truck rattling on its chassis. They started at the back of the convoy, working methodically as a team. It was rockets, not napalm, destroying one vehicle after the other. It was precision work and in military terms good shooting and no doubt the pilots were experiencing a buzz, not aware that the only kill they would make in this early-morning raid was on their side. Then just three trucks from where we stood in the convoy they stopped and left, presumably because they’d run out of rockets.

  My body was filled with an overwhelming joy such as I’d never before experienced, and complete calm replaced the terror of a few moments before. ‘Well, I’ll be fucked!’ I remember saying, smiling at Jimmy, knowing we’d emerged unscathed.

  Jimmy hadn’t seen my reaction of a few moments before – the truck was still in half-darkness and I guess he had been pretty preoccupied with his own final thoughts. Hearing my calm voice and the familiar Australian expletive for surprise and wonder, he reached out and shook my hand. ‘Brother Fish, yoh da coolest cat dat I ever did know. Yoh still da man.’

  ‘I was shitting myself, Jimmy,’ I replied truthfully. But I could see he didn’t believe me.

  It was fast getting light when we moved off again. The bulk of the Chinese soldiers, now without trucks, marched behind us, and we soon turned onto a narrow track mostly hidden by snow to reach a complex of caves where we disembarked. I guess this wasn’t our intended destination and more like a transit station. The attack had delayed us nearly two hours as the soldiers had had to push the wrecks off the road bef
ore we finally got away. It was now daylight, and the Chinese did not run their convoys during the day lest they be even more exposed to being spotted and attacked from the air. The remaining trucks were driven into several of the bigger caves and we were taken into a smaller one occupied by fifteen wounded Chinese and North Korean soldiers. A Chinese officer spoke to the wounded men, presumably telling them not to harm us, because they moved over, leaving two straw pallets in the far corner for Jimmy and me to occupy. This surprised us, as the back of the cave, furthermost from the opening, was always the least cold. The officer had obviously elevated us in the pecking order.

  The men in the cave ignored our presence except for one little cove, who appeared to be suffering shell shock and seemed to be trying to tell us his name, jabbering away thirteen to the dozen and gesticulating madly, to the amusement of his wounded comrades. His name sounded like Hok, or something similar, but he spoke it so fast it could have been anything – Og, Sok, Nok, Tok – so we finally settled for Hok and left it at that. This seemed to please him and Hok became our mate. Then Jimmy, obviously impressed by my expletive immediately following the air attack, taught him to say, ‘Well, I’ll be fucked’, and once he’d mastered the expression Hok would rattle off something in Chinese and then end whatever it was he was saying with, ‘Well, I’ll be fucked!’