The Persimmon Tree

by Bryce Courtenay

  I had barely spoken when a grey launch headed towards us and as it drew nearer I saw that two sailors were manning a machine-gun in the bow with two other machine-guns on both sides of the bridge. Kevin appeared carrying the Dutch flag and I lost no time hoisting it, whereupon we stood in the cockpit waving frantically to show we were friendly.

  ‘Fuckers ain’t gonna shoot, are they?’ Kevin, eyeing the machine-guns, said fearfully. ‘Them sailors… dey don’t look too friendly.’

  ‘Hope not, keep waving, you can’t shoot a man who’s waving at you. Smile, look happy, both hands in the air, show them we’re unarmed.’ I confess I was using a confident tone I didn’t feel.

  A sailor carrying a megaphone hailed us, ‘What vessel and where bound?’

  I cupped my hands to my mouth. ‘Vleermuis bound for Fremantle!’ Then added gratuitously, ‘Out of Batavia!’

  ‘Nationality? Are you Dutch?’ the megaphone asked.

  ‘Australian and American!’ I shouted in reply.

  ‘Welcome home, sailor… welcome to Australia, Yank! We’re coming aboard, please cooperate!’

  The launch drew aside as Kevin and I lowered the mainsail and a sailor from the naval launch threw us a rope, then a petty officer and an ordinary seaman jumped on board. ‘Jesus, look what the cat brought in!’ the petty officer exclaimed, stepping on board Madam Butterfly.

  The sailor looked around, then shook his head in wonderment. ‘You blokes come from Java in this ocean-going bathtub?’

  I grinned. ‘It’s a gaff-rigged cutter, solid teak, you couldn’t ask for better,’ then sticking my hand out to the petty officer, ‘Nick Duncan.’ I turned to the little bloke. ‘This is my offsider, Ordinary Seaman Kevin Judge, US Navy.’

  ‘Howdy,’ Kevin said, using a greeting I’d never heard him adopt before.

  ‘Gidday, I’m Kim… Kim Rabbits.’ He indicated the sailor beside him with a nod of his head. ‘Dave Tompkins.’

  ‘Pleased ta meetcha,’ Dave said. ‘You two blokes really sailed this old crate across the Indian Ocean? Fuckin’ astonishing if you ask me.’

  Kevin seemed pleased with Dave’s use of the expletive he himself so dearly loved. He grinned, then jabbed a thumb in my direction. ‘Him, he done it. I jes come along for the ride. Mostly I just shit myself. I want you to know I ain’t no fuckin’ hero.’

  Having introduced ourselves I suddenly realised how scruffy we must look to the two shaved, scrubbed and smartly turned-out naval men, their white canvas belts and polished brass and boots belonging to a world half-forgotten. Kevin was in grease-stained shorts and shirt and mine were not quite as stained but faded and only in a slightly better condition. We’d both not shaved for the duration, the little bloke’s scar now almost healed, though badly, a great broad crimson worm across his forehead. Kevin’s navy crew cut still retained a semblance of order while my hair, already in need of the clippers before I left Batavia, now fell in curls at the nape of my neck and almost to my shoulders, a sun-damaged straw-coloured mop that would wreck a horse comb. We’d both lost at least a stone in weight, our eyes were sunken and my skin burned a deep nut-brown, while the little bloke’s was veering more towards the lobster. All we had going for us was that we weren’t dirty, having stripped and washed every day of the voyage.

  ‘Got any papers?’ Rabbits asked me, his tone almost apologetic.

  I produced my passport and the papers for the Vleermuis (Madam Butterfly) and Kevin indicated his aluminium discs. Then he cleared his throat. ‘Wouldn’t have a smoke, buddy?’ he asked Tompkins.

  The sailor hesitated momentarily. ‘I can roll yer one, mate.’

  The little bloke glanced up at me, confused. ‘He’ll tailor-make you one, Kevin,’ I explained, and nodded at Dave Tompkins. ‘Make it big and fat, please. It’s been a long time between smokes.’ In truth it had not until that moment occurred to me that the little bloke, whose entire criminal career was based on nicking cigarettes, probably smoked like a chimney. He would have suffered horribly from withdrawal, but had never once expressed a craving for tobacco.

  Kevin watched fascinated as the sailor produced tobacco and papers and rolled a decent-sized fag. ‘Jesus, dis the wild west, man!’ Kevin laughed, gratefully accepting the neatly rolled homemade cigarette, turning it around in his fingers, then holding it up to examine it. Rabbits produced a box of matches and cupping his hands to protect the flame from the breeze allowed Kevin to light up.

  ‘We’ll have to tow you into Fremantle, it’ll be a bit choppy, but with the Durban Castle in the harbour and the WA boys from the sixth and seventh Divisions disembarked, the whole place has gone apeshit!’ Rabbits said.

  This was news to me. ‘But aren’t the sixth and seventh Divs supposed to be in the Middle East fighting against Hitler?’

  ‘No, mate, it’s in all the papers this morning. Curtin’s ordered them home to defend Australia against the Japs.’

  ‘That’s great news, looks like we’re going to need them.’

  ‘Yeah, mate, we’re with the Yanks now!’ Leading Seaman Tompkins growled. ‘Bloody good thing if you ask me, after what the Poms did to us in Singapore!’

  ‘Who’s Curtin and who’s da Poms?’ Kevin asked.

  ‘Curtin’s our Prime Minister and the Poms are the English,’ I said, having no time to explain properly.

  ‘Limeys?’ Kevin asked, his expression indicating distinct disapproval.

  ‘Yeah, we call them Poms or Pommies here,’ I said, then asked the two sailors, ‘When was this? When did you know the troops were coming back?’ thinking that was why the Catalina had been out, looking for the fleet.

  ‘That’s the whole point, mate, we didn’t. National secret. I reckon to keep the Japs from knowing the convoy’s whereabouts. Nobody here knew until a few hours before they arrived. One moment the harbour’s a sleepy pond and the next there’s the Durban Castle and a Dutch ship and we hear it on the wireless and everyone’s goin’ crazy, you can hardly see the water for the small craft.’ Then he spoke more slowly. ‘That’s why it’s a good idea to tow yez, we could easily lose you in the harbour traffic.’ He laughed. ‘Nobody’s takin’ no notice of the water police.’

  Kim Rabbits stayed on board with us until we reached Fremantle and I was to learn that the Dutch East Indies had surrendered while we’d been at sea.

  We were towed into the customs wharf, though not without ceremony. You’d have thought that after the Durban Castle we’d be very small fish, but waiting for us was a group of uniforms wearing expressionless faces, police masks, customs masks and navy masks, each, it seemed to me, practising their gravitas. I felt at once let down; after all, we’d completed an ocean-going journey not without distance and danger, and the odd welcome smile would not have gone astray. In their own understated way Rabbits and Tompkins had been generous in their admiration, but this mob in braid, blue and khaki, standing at semi-attention in their spit ’n’ polish boots, wore a collective downturned mouth that made me feel as though we’d done something criminal. I was also discovering that being towed into port was humiliating, a form of captivity and capitulation. Madam Butterfly looked disconsolate with her sails collapsed on deck, a pretty lady caught wearing dirty underwear.

  ‘Don’t like the look of dem fuckers,’ Kevin said out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Stay here, I’ll talk to them,’ I said, my voice rising just above the hollow throb of the launch engine and the swish of water from the bilge as the yacht was manoeuvred into the dockside. I stepped onto the steel ladder leading up to the wharf and had barely gained the top when a policeman stepped forward. ‘Identification, please,’ he demanded, omitting, no doubt due to my scruffy appearance, the appendage ‘sir’. I handed him my passport. He examined it, checking the photograph of a beardless me with short back and sides, then flicked through several pages and handed it to the customs officer. ‘Seems orright,’ he said, ad
ding, probably for the benefit of the others, ‘He’s Australian, Nicholas Duncan.’ He nodded with his chin towards Kevin, who was standing in the cockpit.

  ‘American! I’m an American!’ Kevin shouted up before I could reply, his voice tetchy.

  ‘Kevin Judge, he’s an American sailor off the USS Houston, sunk off Java on the twenty-eighth of February,’ I said, then added, though I don’t know quite why, ‘Wounded in battle.’

  A naval officer stepped forward. ‘The Houston went down the same night as the Perth.’ He turned to me. ‘You were there? The Perth? Crew?’ he asked.

  ‘No, sir.’ I pointed to Madam Butterfly. ‘I picked Seaman Judge up on an isolated beach the following morning; he was the sole survivor of a massacre by the local natives that killed nine Australians off the Perth. I’ve got their papers with me,’ I concluded.

  Well, that sure as hell put the cat among the pigeons, there was no more playing high and mighty and competing among the braid and brass to be officious. There was mumbling all round and then the policeman said it was best to come with him, that there was a boarding house opposite the station where we could stay, have a shower, shave and get into fresh clobber.

  Standing next to the policeman, I called down to the little bloke, ‘We have to go, mate, are you ready?’

  I hadn’t realised the effect the police uniform would have on him. ‘We under arrest?’ he asked somewhat tremulously. This clearly wasn’t the kind of welcome he’d anticipated.

  I grinned, attempting to put him at ease. ‘Nah, bacon and eggs.’ I turned to the cop. ‘Sausages?’

  The policeman grinned. ‘Yeah, I reckon a couple of snags are not beyond the station’s petty cash.’ Suddenly there were grins all round. I climbed down back on board to grab my knapsack with the papers of the murdered men from the Perth, Anna’s handkerchief and the oilskin package containing the Magpie Crow plus my spare shorts and shirt, clean but in poor repair and no longer streetworthy.

  With Kevin climbing the ladder ahead of me we returned to the wharf to find the naval Lieutenant Commander standing near the head of the ladder. He smiled and said, ‘Nick, my name is Rigby… Roger Rigby, I’m from Naval Intelligence. I’m afraid you’ll have to give me your passport and any personal papers, also the wallets or anything else you kept that belonged to the men from the Perth. Don’t worry, it’s just that we need to check one or two things, we’ll return your personal stuff as soon as we can. Oh, and by the way, well done and welcome home.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ I grinned. ‘It’s bloody nice to be home.’

  He pointed to the policeman. ‘Senior Sergeant Hamill is in charge, you’re a civilian matter for the time being, but I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘Sir, captain, can you tell me whether the Japanese are in total control of New Britain yet?’

  ‘Yes, there wasn’t much we could do to stop them.’

  ‘The expats? Did they get off the island?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t answer that, Nick. All I can say is that it was a nasty business. Why do you ask?’

  ‘My father, sir, he was a missionary on New Britain.’

  He sighed. ‘Wish I had more to tell you, we can only hope, son.’

  Before we left I sought the assurance of Lieutenant Commander Rigby that Madam Butterfly would be properly berthed. He called over to Petty Officer Rabbits and gave him the appropriate instructions. ‘She’ll be well cared for, Nick,’ he promised. ‘She’s a beauty.’

  Showered, shaved, clothed in army shorts and shirts and each issued with a pair of brown Dunlop tennis shoes at the police station, we were then fed handsomely with eggs, bacon, snags, chops, tomato and lashings of toast and tea at the café across the road. Then we were told that a room had been booked at Mrs Beswick’s boarding house for me and that the Yanks would be calling for the little bloke after we’d eaten. We were beginning to feel decidedly human but for the fact that two plain-clothes policemen never left our side and that my personal papers along with the wallets and passports of the dead men on the beach had not been returned to me. When I queried the non-return of my passport and other details one of them explained to me that I had an interview at noon with some government bigwig who was driving down from Perth. A little later the Americans, two white-capped and belted provost army personnel, arrived in a jeep to escort Kevin to the Americans. I must say it seemed strange parting from him. Sometimes a whole lifetime takes place in a few days and I couldn’t imagine life without the little bloke at my elbow. Of course, we promised to keep in touch. Kevin’s last words as he was being led away were,‘I owe you big time, Nick, don’t ever think I don’t know dat!’ Then as he was getting into the jeep he grinned, ‘I ain’t no fuckin’ hero, you unnerstan’, but you the biggest and I’m gonna tell ’em personal from K. Judge!’

  I wondered just how important the arrival of two scruffy kids who’d crossed the Indian Ocean in a sailboat might seem to the top military and naval brass, American or our own. Not very, I should think. But in this respect I was to be proved wrong. Shortly before noon, accompanied by my two plain-clothes minders, I was taken in a police car to a building several blocks back from the harbour side. I knew it was pointless asking the men, one on either side of me in the back seat, where we were going or who the bigwig coming from Perth might be. Even if they knew, which was unlikely, they’d been chosen because they understood that silence is far more threatening than chat or any answers they might supply. They both had identical army haircuts and Errol Flynn moustaches, wore similar-looking tweed sports jackets, mid-brown pants and nondescript ties knotted beyond their normal life expectancy that hung limp and worn, less a tie than the official requirement to have something attached to a buttoned collar. Their shirts were standard white. They were the kind of men who would be invisible in a crowd but who obeyed orders without thinking where they might lead.

  The building we drew up to sat right on the pavement, squat, blunt, three-storey, red brick, designed by a government architect seemingly at the height of the Great Depression, for it gave off a sense of ugliness and austerity that would cause anyone entering it to despair of a visit that might lead to a positive outcome. It was, in appearance, the kind of building where documents are stamped and licences issued for all the dull and ordinary pursuits in life. But miraculously, from a circle cut into the cement pavement not ten feet from the entrance, its perimeter fitted with heavy steel ribs and banded hoops that rose about five feet to protect its mottled trunk, grew a Western Australian flowering gum, ablaze with outrageous stems of pink blossom, each flamboyant stem humming with bees gathering nectar. I automatically scanned the blossoms for a butterfly, a Monarch perhaps, a peripatetic species that seems at home in almost any environment, but on this particular day only the bees were in possession, hogging the pollen.

  I was taken along a dark wood-panelled corridor and up a set of wooden steps to the first floor, where the downstairs linoleum floor had been replaced by dark-brown carpet, and then up another set of carpeted stairs and along a green-carpeted corridor, into a large office that contained a large old-fashioned desk and behind it a chair and another chair in front of it. A steel filing cabinet stood against the left-hand wall. The floor was polished wood and from the window behind the desk hung a lopsided Venetian blind, one end of which fell below the windowsill and the other rose above it to reveal a small triangle of light through the bottom pane of glass. The walls were newly painted and bare. I was told to sit on the chair facing the slightly bigger one at the opposite side of the desk, whereupon my two minders left the room, closing the door behind them.

  If the atmosphere in the room was intended to intimidate me it was succeeding very well. I began to feel vaguely guilty, though I wasn’t quite sure what it was I should feel guilty about. The trouble with finding yourself isolated in a room like this is that you immediately assume you’ve lost even before you’ve opened your mouth. I began to think what my interrog
ator might use against me. Was it the nine men I’d left unburied on the beach in Java? But surely they’d understand that I would have been deeply fearful that the murderers might return? I would explain that, to the best of my ability, I’d given them a Christian burial.

  Or did they think I might be a Japanese spy? It would be difficult to explain why I was in Java looking for a butterfly when any sensible person, knowing war in the Pacific was imminent, would have kept well away. But they could soon enough check on Kevin and they’d know he was fair dinkum.

  Maybe they thought I’d stolen Madam Butterfly, but her papers were in order; besides, in the context of the panicked evacuation of Batavia, even if I had, it could hardly be considered a war crime.

  I decided it must be the Japanese connection. My passport showed that I had been born in Japan and among my papers was a British embassy document to say that though I had resided in Tokyo until the age of eleven, I was entitled to Australian citizenship by virtue of my father’s nationality. It had never occurred to me to ask whether my birthplace entitled me to Japanese citizenship. The citizens of Nippon so deeply despised Westerners that I couldn’t imagine them granting me automatic citizenship by virtue of birth. As a child in the company of the adult Japanese I, or any other child of foreign blood, was never referred to by name, but simply and contemptuously as ‘It’.

  The door opened and turning around to see if it was my interrogator I was met by a thin woman in her fifties wheeling a tea trolley. Judging from her lined face she’d seen a fair bit of life, a working-class lady to the last sinew in her body. Her over-powdered face had no other make-up and the tiny vertical lines engraved around her mouth, some of them caked with talc, indicated she was a heavy smoker. She wore a black, somewhat down-at-the-heel shoe on her left foot and on her right a navy-blue felt bedroom slipper with the area around the big toe cut out. Her hair was covered with a hairnet and she wore a cotton uniform, dark green with large white buttons down the front.