The Persimmon Tree

by Bryce Courtenay

  I took both her hands in mine, our faces close. ‘No, listen, Anna, it’s a good idea. I’ve been down to the harbour today. It’s going to be difficult to get a working passage to Australia or home. Papua is expecting the Japanese to invade at any moment. It’s a mad panic down at the docks, the cost of a deck space is now twenty-five pounds.’

  ‘I will ask my father, he will lend —’

  ‘No, no, I don’t want that!’ I cried in alarm, not wishing under any circumstances to be in the Dutchman’s debt. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that he was to be my future father-in-law. On the last occasion we’d been together he’d threatened to shoot me. ‘It’s a good boat and rigged for the open sea.’ I smiled. ‘I’ll enjoy the adventure.’

  ‘What favour? If you sail Vleermuis, already that is doing mijn papa a favour.’

  ‘No, this is different, when I get back to Australia I want to change the name of the boat.’

  ‘You don’t like Vleermuis? In English it hard to say, ja?’

  ‘Yes, true, but that’s not it. I want to call her Madam Butterfly. It’s your boat and it will be a sort of… like a promise between us.’

  ‘Oh, Nicholas!’ She pulled her hands from mine and clapped them happily. ‘Mr Butterfly and Madam Butterfly.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, a little embarrassed, suddenly conscious that to anyone else it might sound pretty corny, but nonetheless still liking the idea a whole lot.

  ‘Wonderful! It is beautiful idea. We will do it, ja.’ She suddenly gave a little squeal. ‘It is a sign, that butterfly I caught!’

  ‘The Clipper?’

  ‘Ja, Nicholas, it’s so beautiful! When I am catching it you say to me, “See, the wings they look like a sailing boat.” It is a sign! A good sign!’ she repeated emphatically.

  ‘Your father may not like the name change,’ I ventured.

  Anna pouted prettily. ‘So? Now it is mijn boat. He cannot say.’

  ‘We’ll do it when we get back to Australia and the boat is registered in your name. You can mention it to your father then.’

  The Dutchman came to the restaurant the next day and expressed his delight, and even if he didn’t offer his apologies for the insulting manner in which he’d propositioned me in his home, his manner indicated that he wanted things to remain cordial between us. His voice had recovered and was at its booming best so that the whole bar could hear him. ‘After the war, when Anna is older, by me, I am happy she is with you, Nick. You will marry, ja!’ It wasn’t a question and he stuck out his huge paw. ‘Ja, also mijn boat, Vleermuis, now it is hers.’ He laughed. ‘A goed marriage present, ja, I think so!’

  ‘Madam Butterfly,’ I said under my breath, both your daughter and your boat.

  I resigned from my afternoon job at De Kost Kamer and went to live on the Vleermuis as it needed a fair bit of maintenance. The gaff-rigged cutter hadn’t been out sailing for nearly five months and I spent the next few days doing all I could to be sure she was seaworthy. The bilge pump wasn’t working properly and I spent a fair bit of time getting it right. Anna spent as long as she could working beside me. The Dutchman was right, she certainly knew her way around a boat and didn’t mind getting her hands dirty painting or using a caulking iron and pitch.

  The Japanese invaded Sumatra on the 14th and the following day Singapore fell. I should have scarpered there and then, but there is a passage in the Bible my father quoted to me when I was fourteen and going through puberty. It was, I suppose, as close as he could get to the standard lecture one receives at this time of one’s young life in regard to the birds and the bees. It’s in Proverbs 30 and is known as the Sayings of Agur. ‘There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.’ Thoroughly mystified at the time he’d sonorously recited Agur’s confession to me, I now finally understood what he’d been getting at. Anna was due to leave on the Dutch passenger steamer Witvogel sailing on the evening of the 26th of February and I wanted to be with her every possible minute until that time. She begged me to go when news of Singapore came through, but I refused and declared I would sail out on the evening tide of the day after they’d sailed, catching the offshore wind. I guess I should have left sooner, but there you go, ‘the way of a man with a maid’.

  By this time the locals were plundering the European shops and the Dutch were afraid to enter them. The Javanese shopkeepers and market people were charging extortionate prices for anything they were prepared to part with. Anna had brought whatever was left in the family pantry to the boat. There wasn’t a great deal — several bottles of sauces, a small bag of sugar, coffee, some dried fish — but certainly, with the other provisions, there was sufficient to last the two and a bit weeks it should, with any luck, take me to sail to Australia.

  My additional rations consisted of four-dozen cans of tinned fish, mostly mackerel, which is an oily fish and not much to my liking; a dozen tins of canned vegetables, mostly peas and carrots, neither a favourite of mine but beggars can’t be choosers; a ten-kilo sack of rice (approximately twenty-two pounds); a canteen of tea; a jar of salt; and a small bag of curry powder. The last two items were a timely reminder of how bad things were in Batavia towards the end.

  Curry powder may seem like a strange thing to single out for mention. I do so only to illustrate how in the last few days prior to our departure the local population had most certainly turned on the departing Dutch. Anna had given me everything she could from her larder but curiously they’d run out of salt, the most common commodity of all. I needed to get a tin of caulking pitch and some oakum, both easy enough to obtain even in these scarce times as it was always plentiful in the market. So I took the opportunity to get sufficient salt for the galley at the same time. Having purchased the pitch and a roll of oakum, I found a woman selling spices and attempted to buy a large screwtop jar of salt, offering her a generous denomination in the local Dutch currency. This she’d promptly refused. Then I proffered an Australian pound, an absurdly large amount for the jar of salt. This too was unsmilingly and with a sullen shake of her head rejected. I turned to go, resigned to a long voyage without salt, when she grabbed my arm, pointed to the silver signet ring on my finger, then reached down and held up the jar.

  I’d won the ring of almost knuckleduster proportions at a game of poker in a pub in Port Moresby and it had no sentimental value. I would have given it to Anna but the motif was a human skull and so it would have been entirely inappropriate. I twisted it from my finger, handing it to the spice seller. She placed it between her teeth, tasting to see if it was genuine and, seemingly satisfied, handed over the jar of salt and then, with the mere flicker of a smile, tossed the small bag of curry powder in for good measure, curry having less value in local cooking than any other spice.

  The 26th of February finally arrived, the day Anna and her family were due to depart on the evening tide. In the few weeks I’d known Anna, a great deal had changed for the Dutch in Java. Singapore, thought to be the one impregnable fortress, the place where the myopic Japanese moving down through Malaya on their absurd bicycles were certain to be halted by the mighty British, had fallen with hardly a whimper.

  The Japanese had already reached the islands of Bali and Ambon and landed on Sumatra. The next step was Java, in particular the port city of Batavia with its huge, safe harbour, and Surabaya for its magnificent naval facilities. Suddenly the Dutch in the East Indies, who’d assumed they had ample time to get out, were thrown into a blind panic. The Japanese were moving into the Pacific like an invasion of angry wasps and the Dutch forces and colonial citizens they were protecting had been caught with their proverbial pants down. The Javanese soldiers, many in sympathy with the Japanese, had no stomach for a fight and were deserting in large numbers, hastily discarding their boots, webbing and rifles and escaping into the j
ungle. Almost every afternoon now there were Jap air raids on the ships in harbour, their oil tanks on fire.

  The carefully planned colonial exodus with the wharves piled high with wooden packing cases, many made out of finely worked teak planks intended for later use as wall panelling, was suddenly thrown into hopeless disarray. The white colonials scurried like ants aboard any ship available. Dirty tramp steamers accustomed to carrying bulk cargo were selling deck space at Queen Mary cabin prices and the space in the hold that would normally have housed their possessions was given over to accommodating people at an only slightly less exorbitant cost. Left behind on the loading docks were all their neatly packed and sorted crates for the locals to carry off.

  The Dutchman and his family had their passage previously booked but instead of occupying two cabins they now shared one with another family of four, in all eight people, one of them being Anna’s stepmother in her wheelchair. Piet Van Heerden was not a happy man and I begged him to let me take them all to Australia in the Vleermuis. But he was one of the few passengers to get his packing cases loaded and he was adamant that they were staying put, whatever the inconvenience. I asked again if Anna could come with me and I thought he was going to have an apoplectic stroke on the spot. ‘It is too dangerous!’ he’d yelled — so much for his previous reassurances that my sailing to Australia would be duck soup, nothing to worry about.

  Anna and I had said our tearful farewells during the day and then again on the crowded deck. When the ship’s horn sounded and I had to go ashore she was crying and clutching the specimen box containing her butterfly. ‘Nicholas, I love you!’ she shouted almost hysterically above the noise of the passengers.

  ‘I’ll see you in three weeks, maybe a month, in Broome. Wait for me!’ We kissed one final time, Anna clinging to me. Then she drew away and quickly handed me a square of white cloth. ‘I’m sorry I did not have paper to wrap it, Nicholas. Please look, I have embroidered it myself.’ She smiled through her tears. ‘I have also one the same. You must keep it till when we meet again.’ I unfolded the handkerchief and in the corner she had embroidered the beautiful Clipper, her personal butterfly.

  I was completely choked. I had no idea I could love someone as much as I did this lovely creature. ‘I will keep it always,’ I stammered, barely able to hold back my tears. A final urgent blast from the ship’s horn and I had to rush to get to the gangplank in time. As the steamer pulled away from the docks I lost sight of her but found myself foolishly waving the embroidered square, unexpected tears running down my cheeks. Women, I had discovered, were simply marvellous creatures.

  Once back at the cutter alone I began to realise I had been a bit of a fool. No, more than a bit. Quite clearly I was a fool, a thoroughly frightened fool! It had been foolish to come to Java in the first instance. Foolish to hunt for a Magpie Crow, a rare species of butterfly that only I cared about. I reminded myself again what a stupid name it was for a butterfly! There were butterflies with names such as Dragontail, Jezebel, Peacock, Red Lacewing, and I had become obsessed with a black-and-white butterfly called a Magpie Crow! But I’d met Anna and fallen in love and now, still a fool, but the luckiest fool in the world, I was still a long way from home.

  With everything changing as quickly as it had with the Japanese I now realised that the odds were heavily stacked against me. I’d volunteered to undertake an absurd sailing adventure with a battered school atlas as my only chart. I was sailing a 29-foot cutter I knew nothing about, on a voyage across the Indian Ocean in the middle of the monsoon season when the weather could dish up a cyclone that might last a week or more. The Japanese navy was suddenly everywhere and their aircraft owned the skies from Singapore to the Indonesian Archipelago, and God knows how far their dominance extended into the Indian Ocean. If I wasn’t spotted and run down by a Japanese ship or shot out of the water by a Zero I could go down in a storm at sea. It was little wonder that the Dutchman had gone apeshit when I’d suggested, once again, that Anna accompany me.

  I spent the following day making minor adjustments and waited until after dark when the land breeze carried me down the harbour and out to sea. From Batavia it is only about fifty nautical miles to Port Nicholas, the highest point on the island, where a left turn takes you into the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra. I fondly imagined I would enter the strait just before dawn. With a half-decent wind this wasn’t a big ask for a cutter such as the Vleermuis.

  However, I hadn’t reckoned on the time of the year. In late February there can be calm periods that can often last all day until the next weather comes through. While I made some little progress, the land breeze soon petered out and the yacht was becalmed. My hope was that by dawn I would encounter a wind front, even if only a breeze, anything to get me out of the sun. A storm at sea is the stuff of drama, but with no wind to propel it, a sailing boat becalmed in the tropics is an altogether horrible experience. The yacht lurches from side to side as it wallows in the swell. The deck becomes too hot to stand on and below decks the heat is so suffocating as to be unbearable. What’s more, there is nothing you can do to change the intolerable conditions. At least in a storm, even in a violent one, you’re moving, there is something happening; crisis with the fear it carries is always stimulating. Sitting helpless in the remorseless heat and without movement except for the incessant wallowing can drive a sane sailor crazy.

  Dawn came and with it no wind. I was a sitting duck for any Japanese aircraft or ship at sea that happened to spot me.

  Not long out to sea from Batavia I had noted that the head blocks controlling the straight top of the sail were sticking and would need to be repaired before I got to the Sunda Strait. With the violent lurching from side to side in the swell there was no way I could make the repairs at sea. I would need to moor somewhere so I could safely climb the mast and grease the blocks. If I didn’t get them working smoothly they could jam completely under load, preventing me from shortening sail in a blow, thus all but deliberately inviting a fatal result in heavy weather.

  Mercifully, by late afternoon a light sea breeze sprang up and I used it to get ashore. As far as I could make out going by the battered school atlas, if it was vaguely accurate I was moored slightly east of Bantem Bay.

  This was the night of the 28th and, as it happened, my eighteenth birthday. It was the one birthday I had told myself I would really celebrate. I’d promised myself I was going to get myself gloriously pissed, absolutely blotto, smashed, blind, motherless, completely stonkered! Finally I was old enough to join the army.

  What a joke! Now there was the distinct possibility that I could be celebrating my last birthday on earth while sitting in a mosquito-infested mangrove swamp. Even worse, I could be taken prisoner of war by the Japanese before I’d pulled on my first pair of army boots or once again kissed my darling Anna. The thought that she’d never know what had happened to me brought a fearful lump to my throat as I wallowed in self-pity.

  I opened a tin of mackerel, mixed it with a handful of rice left over from breakfast and then sat with my legs dangling over the back of the boat, eating the cold concoction and feeling, I admit, lonely, homesick and decidedly sorry for myself. Too weary to go through the rigmarole of boiling water for a cup of tea, I toasted myself with a glass of water, drank half of it and used the remainder to clean my teeth. After dousing myself in citronella mosquito repellent I crawled into my bunk. I managed to sing, decidedly off-key, almost all of the words to ‘Happy Birthday’ and can remember reaching the penultimate line of ‘Happy birthday, dear Nick’ when I must have fallen asleep, to be wakened later by the guns of a naval battle.

  With the first salvo in the sea battle waking me I’d come up from below and sat on deck listening to the booming gunfire and watching the flashes of the big guns like distant lightning on the horizon far out to sea. The sea battle came from the direction of the Sunda Strait and my heart sank knowing that I might have left my escape from the Dutch East Indies too lat
e.

  The sound of the big guns continued until shortly before daylight, and although greasing the head blocks, making one or two other repairs and mending a small rip in the flax sails wasn’t going to take long, I now couldn’t risk sailing in daylight. I could well sail right into the area where the naval battle had taken place and besides, the air over the strait would be alive with Jap Zeros.

  Rather than remain on deck all day, I decided I’d take the first couple of hours of morning sunlight to hunt for butterflies and make the repairs in the afternoon. It couldn’t do any harm and it would take my mind off the problems that undoubtedly lay ahead for me and, as well, remind me of the morning with my darling Anna on our single butterfly excursion, an occasion we’d never managed to repeat.

  It was March the 1st and there’s always something hopeful about the first day of a new month. Anna had presented me with a single egg, a real find, and I’d eaten it for breakfast, after which I packed my day knapsack with my binoculars and collector’s field paraphernalia, filled the canvas-covered metal water bottle my father had given me for my fourteenth birthday, slung its strap around my neck and under my right arm so it rested on my hip, grabbed my butterfly net and slid over the side of the boat into the four feet or so of muddy stream and picked my way across a dozen yards of mangrove growth to firmer ground. From there I climbed up the small hill and into the coconut plantation to wait for the sun to rise.

  I told myself it was extremely unlikely — I had one chance in God knows how many thousand that I’d happen upon a Magpie Crow. But then again, hope springs eternal. I was on the right island at the correct time of the year, not too long after the pupae had hatched; maybe, perhaps, who knows, it was worth a try, wasn’t it? My luck had changed meeting Anna, so why not with the ever-elusive trophy butterfly?