Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  Those of the Chinese and Korean wounded who could walk were permitted to leave the cave whereas we were not, and Hok would disappear and later return and go and sit on our pallet and pull a blanket over his knees pretending to be cold. We soon learned that he was concealing food, in the form of hard, almost-tasteless biscuits, and an occasional cigarette under our blankets. We presumed he must have stolen these from somewhere by the care he took to conceal them. We’d touch him on the shoulder and thank him and he’d always reply, ‘Well, I’ll be fucked!’ Which, I’m ashamed to say given our miserable circumstances, was good for a bit of a laugh. Hok, mad as a March hare, was proving to be a good friend when we most needed one.

  We’d been in the cave for three days when, late in the afternoon of the third day, two North Korean officers entered and walked over to where we were sitting on our pallets. One of them pulled a Luger pistol from his holster and held it against Jimmy’s temple.

  ‘Whoa, man!’ Jimmy said, not moving.

  ‘He’s just trying to scare you, mate,’ I said unconvincingly.

  ‘He done succeeded, man,’ Jimmy said, his eyes grown wide and fearful.

  The next moment the second officer drew his pistol and I felt the end of its cold metal barrel on the centre of my forehead. All I could think was, What a bloody stupid way to die. Then they must have glanced at each other, because they pulled the triggers simultaneously. I don’t suppose you can have such a thing as a thunderous click but that’s what it sounded like to me. Despite the cold, I’d broken into a sweat.

  The two Koreans chortled, highly amused, slapping each other on the back, immensely pleased at this neat trick. Then the one with the Luger cleared his throat and, with the laughter gone from his eyes, reached into his quilted jacket pocket and took out a fully loaded magazine and slipped it into the pistol. Then he turned to look menacingly at us. Jesus! The first time was to put the wind up us. This time it’s for real! I thought. At that moment Hok arrived and launched himself at the two officers, his hands flapping every which way while he shouted furious abuse at them. The North Koreans turned and retreated hastily with Hok shooing them out of the cave as though they were a couple of trespassing chickens. With the two officers gone he turned to face us, his hands on his hips. ‘Well, I’ll be fucked!’ he said, with exactly the right intonation.

  A convoy with new trucks arrived at the caves around midnight on the fourth day and loaded up the Chinese soldiers and the two of us, and we left leaving a plainly distressed Hok behind. After the second day in the cave cracks had appeared in my plaster cast, and now as the truck bumped along the road, flickers of pain shot down my leg. My only hope was that it wasn’t the start of another infection and simply the effects of slow healing.

  Towards dawn we halted in what appeared to be a village, in the centre of which was a large shed about thirty foot long and ten foot wide. It had possibly once been a communal shed but was now converted into another farmhouse hospital, with the usual thatched roof and dirt floor. At the end furthermost from the door a small charcoal stove struggled unsuccessfully to heat the hut against the deepening winter. Against the wall on either side of it were the usual raised platforms running all the way along two-thirds of the hut and containing thirteen UN Command wounded and sick. This was a hospital not as big as the other, with no modern equipment and few, if any, drugs beyond the barest necessities, but with its own doctor.

  The wounded and sick, all of them American Caucasians, were in a pretty bad way. One had a leg missing, another’s kneecap had been sheared off by shrapnel, several, like us, wore plaster casts and two had arms missing. But it was the general condition they were in that was horrendous – wounds openly oozed pus, the plaster casts festered from within and gas gangrene was quietly rotting the stump of the soldier with the amputated leg. All of this emitting an odour that only those inured to living with it could endure. The Chinese doctor and the orderlies wore masks, but even they couldn’t tolerate staying in our presence too long. Both Jimmy and I vomited the first time we entered the hut, and a voice from one of the wounded men rang out, ‘Welcome to the stink pit, comrades!’

  Like the previous hospital, the hut was regarded as a human zoo, an irresistible attraction for the soldiers who occupied the village. They’d congregate outside until apparently someone gave them permission to enter, when they’d barge in, shouldering each other out of the way in their anxiety to be the first to gawk at us. Despite the condition of the wounded men it was deeply humiliating and unwelcome, but there was nothing we could do about it. Shouting at them didn’t work and was simply regarded as part of the performance. The intrusions would occur a dozen times a day and they made our lives even more miserable than they already were.

  After the second day Jimmy had had enough. ‘It Ogoya time, Brother Fish. Da gooks – dey gettin’ on mah nerves, man.’

  Jimmy’s counterattack was simple enough. As the Chinese soldiers barged through the door we would all lift and flap our blankets and the odour would greatly intensify, wafting directly into the faces of the oncoming soldiers. We had learned that Chinese foot soldiers have pretty strong stomachs, but this odoriferous welcome was to prove their nemesis. Expectant faces would suddenly contort into grimaces as their hands shot up to cover their noses and mouths. Those in the front would turn in an effort to get away, often knocking down the others coming in. The hut soon emptied and we’d hear our unwelcome visitors retching and vomiting outside. Even in these most miserable of circumstances this got a laugh from the men in the hut and Jimmy, in an attempt to emulate my accent, would exclaim, ‘Well, I’ll be fucked.’ He was once again in control.

  As with the previous situation in the North Korean cave, these were men who’d basically lost the plot – they were disillusioned and reduced to the status of animals, and most had given up hope of staying alive. Somehow Jimmy got them going again with the help of the harmonica. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that music isn’t a powerful medium – it’s perhaps the most powerful. When the human voice can no longer reach a man, a ballad or a tune from when his life was good can touch him and make him respond. If Jimmy was wrong about ‘The Fish Song’, he was dead right about the mouth organ and its latent power to change men’s attitudes.

  Staying clean was, of course, impossible, though an orderly would deliver a medium-sized enamel basin containing hot water to the hut every morning. It was first come, first served, with the fittest men always getting to use it and the sick almost never. After the first three people had used it the water was dirty and possibly even dangerous to use, as their infected parts had been cleansed in it. By the time it got to the last patient the bowl was almost empty, the remaining water black and foul. Jimmy organised that a different bloke got first go every morning so that each of us got to get a proper wash every two weeks or so. It may not sound like a big thing, but it was everything. Just knowing that your turn would eventually come around kept a man going. You’d feel the hot water splashing on your face and arms and know it was about as close to heaven as you could get under the circumstances.

  The weeks crawled by. Wade Fernance, the amputee, died, and Gary Reilly, in civilian life an Olympic horseman, lost his leg to gas gangrene, which had also been the ultimate cause of Wade’s death. Though we’d cleaned up the best we could, we all suffered from dysentery, and the latrine bucket in the corner added to the foul surroundings. This was also where the lice I talked about earlier established themselves under my plaster cast and behind my left knee – there seemed to be hundreds of them and they were driving me half-crazy with itch. I’d pull a thin twig from the thatched roof and push it down the back of my plaster in an attempt to scratch the bastards until the blood ran out at my ankle, but the irritation never seemed to stop and the scratching seemed only to stir them up further. But there wasn’t any point whingeing and there were lots worse off than me. This was also when Chuck Ward, the American B29 tail gunner I mentioned before, who’d walked for hours with frostbite after his plane was s
hot down, was brought in across the frozen landscape and where we heard his screaming coming at us from way out. Despite the best efforts of the Chinese doctor to save his feet, they were finally amputated. Another Yank died of blood poisoning and it seemed, even when the Chinese were trying, desperately short of medical supplies, they couldn’t keep us alive.

  Apart from the lice, the pain in my leg gradually ceased and Jimmy and I began to practise walking, him on his modified ‘Captain Hook’ crutch and me on the bamboo pair the Chinese had given me at the previous farmhouse hospital. The weeks turned into months, winter into summer and with it unbearable heat. After winter I thought I’d never find a summer too hot for me, but I was wrong. Dirt, sweat, suppurating wounds and open sores were a lousy combination and attracted flies in such numbers that their buzzing made it hard to hear what your neighbour was saying – not to mention the irritation they caused and the maggots from where they laid their eggs in your open flesh.

  The passing of time also brought healing, and prisoners seen to be mobile and not running a fever were considered by the Chinese to be healed. We knew our time was close when my plaster was finally removed and the bizarre scene with the lice escaping took place. The day to leave finally arrived and, with a warning to go easy on our newly healed legs and still needing the support of our crutches, we were lifted into a truck to make the journey to a POW camp. So far so good – Jimmy and I had survived. With the UN prisoner-exchange negotiations with the Chinese well under way we even began to feel a tad optimistic. I guess hope springs eternal in the human breast, but then, if something can go wrong it usually does. As things turned out we were far from being out of the woods.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Learning Good How to be Bad

  Victory over Japan was declared and, while all of America rejoiced, a dark cloud appeared in the hitherto clear blue skies of the relationship Jimmy and Frau Kraus enjoyed. While they said nothing to each other, each concerned with their own private fears, they knew it wouldn’t be long before the Kraus twins would be returning from the Pacific. In the two and a half years Jimmy and Frau Kraus had been left on the farm on their own they’d become a prosperous working partnership while, at the same time, becoming firm and loving friends.

  Their newfound prosperity had nothing to do with the didactic farm-maintenance plan laid out for Frau Kraus by her dead and long-forgotten husband. This had proved to be unworkable on every front with the exception of her vegetable garden, though that had never been his concern anyway. The Thanksgiving turkeys made barely enough to pay for the feed required for the poultry. Frau Kraus’s dressed-duck business all but disappeared when most of her ethnic German customers were sent to an internment camp. The eggs from her chickens brought in scarcely enough to buy bread and salt – with eight million men away in the armed forces the consumption of eggs had fallen and so had the price, while the price of grain to feed poultry and livestock had skyrocketed. Finally, the orchid market proved to require a horticultural expertise they had yet to perfect and the flower market much harder to enter than Otto Kraus had anticipated.

  Otto Kraus’s will, in the end, left nothing to his wife other than a caveat that required their twin sons, who inherited everything, including a surprisingly sizeable bank account, to provide for Frau Kraus until her death. Initially it had been hard to make ends meet, and the newly found wartime partnership was forced to rely on vegetables from the garden and eggs from the ducks with an occasional scrawny chicken killed when it stopped laying. Finally, in desperation, Frau Kraus and Jimmy had turned back to tomatoes, a decision that came about in a most fortuitous way.

  One of the great pleasures of their relationship was Jimmy reading the weekly newspaper to Frau Kraus after dinner at night. While Jimmy’s limited education meant he wasn’t a fluent reader, his slow and measured pace ideally suited her even slower comprehension of the English language. Each night of the week they would read most of the newspaper, and in particular the farm page, which contained snippets of interest to local farmers, orchardists and market gardeners. On one such occasion Jimmy read about M. Charles Byers, who ran a truck-repair business in West Virginia and, as a hobby, propagated tomatoes. He’d come up with what the newspaper described as a new variety of the traditional beefsteak tomato, not overpulpy and with a surprisingly sweet taste, weighing two and a half pounds and, better still, maturing in seventy-nine days. He’d named the cultivar ‘Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter’, and in the article offered to sell a packet of seed for one dollar plus ten cents postage to anyone in the United States.

  ‘Ma’am, we gotta get dis bif-steak tomato,’ Jimmy declared, ‘ ’cos da orchids dey ain’t doin’ no damn good. Folks gonna buy a tomato plant dat grow a two-and-a-half-pound tomato dat juicy an’ sweet, dat for sure,’ Jimmy declared.

  Frau Kraus needed no persuasion – in tomatoes, she trusted. ‘Ja, Jimmy – we send Mister Charlie Radiator schnell zat money!’ she exclaimed excitedly.

  Pretty soon the hothouse was filled with tomato plants in papier-mâché pots made by Frau Kraus from the newspaper off-cuts collected by Jimmy from the Messenger-Gazette in Somerset. The plants were raised to eight inches and attached to each pot using bright-red twine was a ticket that carried the words ‘Each Famous Mortgage Lifter Tomato Ways 2lbs’. Twice weekly the plants were taken in the Dodge truck to Somerville, where Jimmy despatched them by freight car on the Central Railroad of New Jersey to their agent, Solly Shakenovsky, at the New York markets. There they soon became the latest fad in suburban backyards and apartment balconies. A two-and-a-half-pound tomato grown by a housewife or her husband was something to boast about in any neighbourhood.

  Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter proved to be a robust plant that delivered the goods with a minimum of fuss. The label claimed a two-pound tomato but the half-dozen or so tomatoes the plant produced usually exceeded this claim, giving the domestic gardener additional pride in the fact that they’d personally exceeded the grower’s claim. Apart from seeing the potential of Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter as an individually sold plant for domestic gardens, this simple understatement of weight on the misspelled label was yet another indication of Jimmy’s instinctive ability to think outside the square.

  Purchased for the exorbitant amount of one dollar per pot, the beefsteak tomato brought in a clear profit of seventy-five cents per plant and it wasn’t long before they were earning several dozen times more than all Frau Kraus’s barnyard enterprises put together. As a further indication of Jimmy’s instinctive marketing nous, he was insistent that the plants be priced high to make them seem exotic and worthy of possessing. ‘Ma’am, when everybody got somethin’ it ain’t got no value to nobody.’ He laughed. ‘We done no damn good wid dem orchids cos dem other growers dey got da market first, but dem bif-steak tomatoes dey gonna be da orchids o’ da tomato fam-bly an’ dis time we gonna get dem first.’ Frau Kraus, even if she hadn’t understood Jimmy’s logic, agreed and it worked – the high price made the buyers see them as exotic and rare and they were often given as gifts.

  With the poultry no longer the source of the odd couple’s livelihood, the hens and ducks multiplied. As Thanksgiving approached, the turkeys didn’t have to look anxiously over their shoulders, Frau Kraus being much too busy making pots for her beefsteak tomatoes to find time to pluck and dress the turkey meat for her New York customers.

  For his birthday, Jimmy received a pair of hand-stitched western riding boots, a fine Stetson hat, a tooled leather belt with a fancy buckle that sported two large turquoise stones set into the silver surround, new blue jeans and a long-sleeved tartan wool shirt, all ordered by Frau Kraus from the Sears Roebuck catalogue. In addition she knitted him two pairs of bright-red woollen socks. These were the first new clothes Jimmy had ever owned, and he wore them when he drove Frau Kraus to church on Sunday. He’d wait under a large oak tree outside the Lutheran church and raise his Stetson to the members of the congregation, thinking himself the best-dressed dude in Somerset Co
unty. After the white folk had filed into church Jimmy would remove his Stetson and, along with the other coloured folk, enter and sit in the very last pew with the hat on his lap, his work-calloused thumb constantly running along the nap of its brim.

  Sundays were special – other than feeding the poultry and checking the heating in the hothouse in the winter, they observed the Lord’s Day by not working. They’d eat their main meal after returning from church. Frau Kraus would cook a chicken or a duck with vegetables and roast potatoes from the garden, leaving it to slow-roast in the oven while they attended the church service. At this weekly feast she’d wear her special ‘Thank you, Charlie’ apron, which featured a life-size embroidery of Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter and, emblazoned under it, ‘Danke, Charlie’. In the afternoon Frau Kraus would take a nap and Jimmy would retire to his room to practise his reading. As the only book in the house was the bible in the German language he used the Somerset Messenger-Gazette for this purpose, practising the more difficult words so when he read it a second time to Frau Kraus over the following week he would sound less hesitant. As they say in the classics, ‘All good things must eventually come to an end.’ The partnership consummated in the bathroom came to an abrupt end in Frau Kraus’s kitchen. With the surrender of Japan and the end of the war in the Pacific, the Kraus twins were among the first Pacific war troops to steam up New York Harbor at dawn on the 17th of October 1945. They were on board the light carrier USS Bataan, a part of the advance armada of nine ships, the greatest among them being the giant USS Enterprise, queen of the Nimitz navy.

  Naturally enough they hadn’t bothered to inform their mother of their homecoming. The Greyhound bus had dropped them at the farm gate the following morning at six-thirty a.m. and they’d walked down the neatly pruned elm-lined driveway and, as they’d always done, walked to the back of the house to enter through the laundry and into the kitchen. Their return home was to bring an abrupt end to the happiest days of Frau Kraus’s life in America.