The Persimmon Tree

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Come, Kleine Kiki,’ Anna said, taking the terribly distressed little maid into her arms once again, stroking her dark hair. ‘Come now, it’s nobody’s fault, you hear? She was a bitter, broken and frustrated woman and she decided she’d finally had enough.’ They were the kindest words she could think to say about her deceased stepmother.

  ‘I always did my best, Anna. Honest!’ Kleine Kiki cried. ‘Are you going to throw me out onto the street?’

  Despite herself, Anna laughed. ‘You are as much our family as I am, Kleine Kiki. Not that it’s much of a family, mind you. Wherever I go you can come also. We will be together until one day you meet a handsome boy with rich parents, then I shall be your bridesmaid.’

  ‘No, no, I will never leave you, Anna. I will be your maid always.’

  ‘I think, perhaps, my friend, hey? I don’t think I need a maid. We will be together, you and me, Kleine Kiki. We will take care of each other.’

  In the bunk above them Piet Van Heerden continued to snore.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘If you find this woman and she is floating in the river and you fish her out, you can see she is dead.

  Even some places the crabs have eaten her.

  Anyone can see! If I cook a chicken I can see if it is dead.

  I don’t need a certificate to say this chicken is dead!’

  Mother Ratih

  Kampong cook, Tjilatjap

  IT WAS CLOSE TO midnight when Anna managed to get Kleine Kiki to crawl into Katerina’s bunk. The little maid soon fell into an exhausted sleep. Anna then climbed to the top bunk and proceeded to slap and shake her papa until he came around sufficiently to help with the removal of his stained and stinking clothes. She placed a towel over his dirty underpants so that he could remove them himself. ‘Papa, take off your underpants,’ Anna shouted. He grunted, then managed to push them no further than his knees, from where she removed them. With the towel protecting his modesty, she then handed him a wet flannel so that he could attempt to wash himself around the crotch, turning away from him so that he could perform the task privately. He grunted again and she turned back to see that he was holding out the washcloth, which she gingerly accepted, dropping it to the floor as she had done with his underpants. She handed him a fresh pair, pulling them over his ankles and up to his knees so he could do the rest himself, then she removed the towel that covered his midriff and washed the rest of his body with the wet towel. He smelled vile, of stale urine and sick. But at least, she thought, his willingness to remove his own underpants and wash his private parts indicated that he still retained a little self-respect. Finally, and with a great deal of difficulty, Anna managed to dress him in a pair of long khaki pants and a white singlet she’d found in the trunk. Washed and in clean clothes, Piet Van Heerden collapsed back into his bunk. ‘In New Zealand — in New Zealand,’ he mumbled over and over, the words becoming a drunken mantra in his grog-addled mind. Anna climbed down from the bunk realising that in his present state of befuddlement, it would be pointless telling her father the news of Katerina’s death.

  While most people were ashore, the laundry had been cleaned and disinfected and the ship had taken on fresh water. Anna was too numb and distraught from the events of the evening to cry or even attempt to sleep. As a penance that she would have been unable to explain, even to herself, she took the disgusting bundle of her father’s accumulated soiled linen to the laundry. She could as easily have taken it ashore in the morning. Perhaps it was out of some innate sense of pride, some feeling that by handing the foul-smelling clothes to a local washerwoman and paying her extra, even double, to clean them would prove to be a further degradation of her family. A moment’s thought would have told her that there was no need to try to preserve the good standing of the family, and that there would be no further humiliation perpetrated by her drunken father that she hadn’t already endured over the past days.

  Despite the late hour all the tubs were being used by women who were seizing the time as an opportunity to do their laundry. They were, perhaps, too poor or mistrustful to place their clothes in the hands of a native woman. Her father’s clothes smelled to high heaven, a mixture of stale brandy, piss, vomit and on one pair of underpants the dried and crusted evidence where he’d shat. The women standing in the queue with Anna soon located the source of the smell pervading their nostrils. Disgusted, they sniffed pointedly, sighed and clucked their tongues, one of them demanding she go elsewhere. ‘Where?’ Anna snapped back at her. ‘This is the laundry, isn’t it? My father is sick.’

  ‘Ha, your father is a drunk!’ the woman exclaimed, loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘Those poor women who must share your cabin, it’s disgusting.’ The de Klerks had, unsurprisingly, been tattling to others.

  Anna held her place in the queue, enduring several more insults before she was able to appropriate a tub for sufficient time to hastily wash and rinse the soiled clothes. But she was now faced with a different problem. Every inch of drying space had been taken up in the laundry and when she had gone into the women’s bathroom thinking she might hang them in a disused shower recess, these too had been utilised by others.

  ‘For three guilders you can hang them on my deck railing,’ a woman’s voice behind her said. Then she added, ‘They will soon dry in the morning sun.’

  Anna turned to see the large, moustachioed woman who had chastised her for trespassing on her square of deck when she’d farewelled me. This time she was wearing a pink smock, although it had the same hemline disparity as her other dress.

  ‘Three guilders is a lot of money, mevrouw,’ Anna said, knowing it was daylight robbery. She’d been generous with Piet Van Heerden’s stash earlier when she’d been ashore, but this was different — this was blatant exploitation and pure greed.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ the woman sniffed. ‘It’s what we’re charging. We paid good money for our square! We’re entitled. You people with your fancy cabins think you’re superior,’ she declared self-righteously.

  ‘I will pay it,’ Anna said resignedly, knowing her father would soon enough need the fresh clothes.

  ‘Bring it up in the morning, ours is the railing where you stood saying goodbye to your boyfriend.’ Anna realised that the woman must have been watching her on the departure afternoon. She confirmed this by adding, ‘You will soon learn that men are not worth a woman’s tears.’

  ‘Except when they work hard for their money like your husband,’ Anna said, her voice tinged with irony, reminding the woman that she had not forgotten their unpleasant confrontation.

  ‘Ja, maybe,’ the woman said, ignoring Anna’s rebuttal and offering her further advice. ‘Give them half a chance and they’ll spend it on getting drunk and on whores, and the children wear rags and go barefoot!’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, mevrouw,’ Anna replied, turning away in an attempt to terminate the conversation.

  But the woman wouldn’t let her go. ‘You wouldn’t know, hey? Ha! And your father is now suddenly a teetotaller?’

  Anna turned to face her. ‘How dare you!’ she shouted angrily.

  The woman shrugged, her expression phlegmatic. ‘Everybody knows, my dear. Don’t waste your tears on a drunk. Take it from me, they will get you nowhere. Making excuses for them is a waste of time. Take my advice, walk out on the useless bastard and get on with your life.’ Then almost in the same breath her voice changed to a harder tone. ‘Three guilders, I must have it tonight or I will sell the railing space to someone else — there are plenty of takers, I assure you.’ Then her tone changed once again and she declared piously, ‘Laundry dried in God’s good sunlight is one of His real blessings.’

  Anna was too exhausted to follow her conversational pyrotechnics and handed her three single guilder notes. ‘Dank U, mevrouw,’ she said, thinking the misery of this day and night was never going to end.

  ‘Be there sharp, seven o’clock. Hans, mijn husband, and I a
re going ashore. Don’t be late! Bring your own pegs.’

  It was 2 a.m. when Anna finally returned to the cabin. Piet Van Heerden was perched on the edge of the top bunk, both hands gripping the edge to steady himself, his long legs dangling in the air, big feet almost reaching Kleine Kiki’s sleeping form on the bunk below. His chin rested on his chest so that all Anna could see was his hedgerow of fiercely tangled eyebrows and his shiny bald cranium. He looked up as Anna entered, his eyes bloodshot. A yellow stream of mucus had collected under his nose. ‘Piss bottle!’ he managed to say before his head sank back onto his chest with a grunt.

  Anna dumped the pile of wet washing she was carrying into the defunct cabin basin and grabbed one of the two empty brandy bottles kept for this purpose and reached up to hand it to him. He released his hand from the edge of the bunk in an attempt to take the bottle, which caused him to suddenly sway forward dangerously.

  ‘Careful, Papa!’ Anna called out. ‘Hold on!’ She rushed forward, dropping the bottle to the floor, and with both hands held him by the waist to steady him until he managed to regain his grip on the bunk’s edge.

  ‘Piss!’ he cried plaintively.

  She’d changed her father’s soiled trousers and underpants on several occasions over the past few days, always taking care to place a towel over his midriff so he could, if he was capable, remove his underpants himself and wash his own scrotum. If he wasn’t capable, she was forced to let his urine-soaked underpants dry on him until he was sober enough to remove them himself. Nevertheless, on several occasions when he’d been completely unable to manipulate his fingers, she’d been forced to tuck his penis back into his trousers and button up his fly. She was surprised then at the small size of his penis — not that she had any comparisons. Hitherto she’d never seen a male organ in the flesh, but her father was such a big man that she was surprised to see the little circumcised acorn peeping out of his unbuttoned fly. She’d even wondered to herself why men make such an enormous fuss over such a small and unattractive totem. But then, she remembered, judging from the feel when I had pressed against her body when we held each other and kissed, it was an organ that, when suitably aroused, was capable of surprising and spontaneous growth.

  Anna was past caring. The thought of another pair of piss-stained trousers to launder was simply too much to bear. She reached down and retrieved the bottle from the floor and placed it on the bunk beside him, then quickly undid his fly buttons and found his flaccid appendage. Pulling it out, she picked up the brandy bottle in one hand and with the other she inserted the purple-tipped penis into the neck of the bottle, grateful that its smallness meant she didn’t have to hold it in place while he emptied his bladder.

  Piet Van Heerden released his stream with a grateful sigh, filling half the large brandy bottle. Anna unplugged his penis, restoring his modesty but leaving his fly buttons undone in anticipation of a future emergency.

  With his bladder emptied her father seemed to recover somewhat, for he peered over the edge of the bunk to the one below. ‘Where’s your stepmother? Where’s Katerina?’ he asked lethargically, but then seemed to lose interest in his own question. ‘Did you find a Chinaman?’ he now enquired.

  Anna wasn’t sure which question to answer or whether to address either. ‘Papa, it is past two o’clock in the morning. Go to sleep. I will talk to you tomorrow.’ To her surprise Piet Van Heerden withdrew his legs back onto the bunk and lay down. ‘Mijn lieveling,’ he croaked, ‘in the morning we are going to New Zealand.’

  ‘Yes, Papa, now go to sleep,’ Anna said, though she knew she would find it impossible to sleep. In the morning she must force her father to eat something. He hadn’t eaten in two days, not a mouthful. She glanced over at Kleine Kiki, her small face innocent in slumber. Then she wearily changed into her pyjamas and forced herself to go through the motions of folding her clothes neatly. She switched off the cabin light and climbed into the bottom bunk that was the de Klerks’.

  Lying in the dark Anna felt utterly miserable and alone, but still was unable to cry. She was sticky from the tropical heat and itched under her arms and in her crotch. She reminded herself that she must stink and hadn’t bathed or even washed herself from the neck down for the past twenty-four hours. She wondered if she had come out in a heat rash. She’d earlier cleaned her teeth and washed her face in the women’s bathroom, but the impatient press of women behind her had made her afraid to complete any further ablutions.

  Anna now realised, and felt immediately guilty, that she hadn’t thought of her stepmother’s suicide since returning to the cabin, except fleetingly when her father had mentioned Katerina’s name. She was far more concerned about getting on deck by 7 a.m. to hang out his laundry, afraid she’d be late and the fat woman and her husband, Hans, would have departed. Anna tried to assuage her guilt by attempting to recreate in her mind Kleine Kiki’s telling of the bizarre and altogether ghastly incident at the old oil jetty. But all she could think of was the pheasant’s golden tail feather absurdly sticking out of a crack in the boards. The next thing she knew it was 7.15 a.m.

  Anna dressed in a blind panic, pulling on her knickers, jumping from one leg to another in her haste. Kleine Kiki was awake and dressed. ‘Come quickly, grab the washing,’ Anna shouted almost hysterically. The little maid moved over and took up the bundle of wet washing from the basin, holding it up to her chest, wide-eyed and confused. ‘Upstairs! Fat woman! No, wait, I’ll come!’ Anna shouted, slipping her cotton dress over her head. ‘Come quickly, Kleine Kiki!’ she said urgently, moving in her bare feet to the cabin door and sliding it open. Then exclaiming, ‘Pegs!’ she turned and rushed back, pushing past the little maid as she reached for the cotton bag containing the clothes pegs.

  They arrived to find the fat woman, who still hadn’t offered her name or surname, positively bristling. ‘You are late! We are late! Seven o’clock! I said, seven o’clock, you hear? You are lucky that I am a decent woman or we would be gone by now. Mijn husband Hans likes to get going before the heat is coming.’

  Anna glanced over to where Hans, the fat woman’s husband, stood nervously holding a basket and a folded paper parasol. The picture was the full comic skit of big woman and small downtrodden man. Anna had learned the nursery rhyme at school when she’d been young and taking her first English lessons. Now despite her embarrassment at being late and her private relief at finding the woman still waiting in her chalked square, the words leapt into her mind:

  Jack Sprat could eat no fat,

  His wife could eat no lean.

  And so, between the two of them,

  They licked the platter clean!

  ‘I am very sorry, mevrouw, I overslept,’ she apologised.

  ‘In your nice comfortable cabin without the sun in your eyes at six o’clock in the morning!’ She stabbed a fat finger at Kleine Kiki. ‘And who is this? You have your own maid already? My goodness, some people with their airs and graces think they are better than others!’

  ‘She is my little sister,’ Anna lied.

  ‘Umph! Maybe your father is not too particular, hey?’

  Anna had had enough. ‘Look, I’m sorry we’ve kept you. I’ve paid my three guilders. Can we hang out our washing or will I call Mijnheer Van der Westhuisen? He is a friend of mine.’ It was Anna’s second lie for the morning.

  The threat of the odious first mate seemed to work. The woman nodded. ‘We haven’t got all day. It is not me who was late.’

  ‘You may go at any time you wish, we know perfectly well how to hang out washing,’ Anna said tartly.

  ‘We must stay until it is done,’ the woman insisted.

  Anna looked about her. The chalked square was spotless and contained a single large tin trunk secured by a heavy brass padlock. Painted on its lid in large white letters was the name H.J. Swanepoel. They’d obviously locked away their worldly goods for the day. Anna pointed to the trunk. ‘It’s okay, we won’t s
teal it.’

  The Dutch woman sniffed. ‘Kom, Hans,’ she instructed. ‘Wij gaan nu!’ She turned to Anna. ‘We are coming in the afternoon back. The clothes, they must also be gone, you hear?’

  ‘Nee, Mevrouw Swanepoel, we too have to go ashore!’ Anna protested, knowing they would be at the police station at noon. ‘We may not be back in time.’

  The woman stuck out her palm. ‘One guilder!’

  Anna shook her head. ‘Only if we get back after you do.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Hans replied, nodding his head in agreement.

  His wife cast him a dirty look. ‘Kom,’ she huffed and moved off, leaving Jack Sprat to follow her with the basket and parasol.

  Anna and Kleine Kiki arrived back at the cabin to find Anna’s father seated on the edge of the bottom bunk. He’d somehow managed to climb down from the top one, the sleep having sobered him up sufficiently to make the attempt, although he’d bumped his nose and a trickle of blood, now stemmed, still glistened at the base of his nostrils. Several drops had landed on his knees and dried. He’d found the brandy bottle Anna had opened to give Kleine Kiki a nip and he was already bleary-eyed, hugging the bottle to his chest.

  Anna found a facecloth still damp from the night before and wiped his nose clean of blood and mucus. ‘Where’s everybody?’ Piet Van Heerden asked, looking around, his expression dazed.

  Anna placed the facecloth in the basin and came to sit beside him. ‘Papa, it is not good news. Katerina committed suicide yesterday.’

  He seemed to be thinking for several moments. ‘Then she is not coming to New Zealand?’ he asked in a querulous voice.