The Persimmon Tree

by Bryce Courtenay

  I was beginning to fear that my war experiences were turning me into a man without compassion. For month after month we hunted enemy patrols; it was dark, dispassionate and remorseless work and my conscience played no part in the proceedings. Killing became routine, payback was my excuse if I needed one. We knew that if we were captured alive we would be tortured and then executed in a ruthless manner by the enemy.

  We were patrolling in the mountains to the south-west of Rabaul where the Japanese were contained. We’d been making contact with the villages in the heart of the jungle to re-establish the Australian presence on the island, and were close to the end of our field trip. We’d been fortunate not to meet any Japanese patrols and I was looking forward to returning to our base near Wide Bay on the Gazelle Peninsula, a hot shower, a square meal and a decent sleep. We’d stopped in a clearing outside a village and as was customary, Ellison, my sergeant, entered to check it out. We were having our evening meal — bully beef and cold boiled yam — when he returned with a local in tow who now stood in the shadows of the tall trees.

  ‘One fella boy long hia, hem like lookim yu. This fella hemi say hem nao savvy you long time befo.’ What Ellison was saying was that he’d brought along a villager who claimed he knew me. I called for the man to step out of the dark. He emerged hesitantly and I was overjoyed to see it was Peter Paul, one of the crewmen off the mission schooner. We shook hands in the native manner, holding hands as he told me the joyous news.

  ‘Daddy belong yu stap long village closeap long hia. Emi sick tumas and mifella wait long time for yufella long army for come back long hia. Man Japon closup spoilem hem finish but mifella takim out long town back long place blo mifella.’ (‘Your dad is in a village close to here. The Japanese tortured him and left him for dead, but we took him from Rabaul to my village to recover.’)

  We left at first light and six hours later, just after 1300 hours, we arrived at a typical Melanesian village set in a clearing. These places always reminded me of what a hopeless battle man fought against nature. The giant trees towering impossibly high formed a wall that was seemingly impenetrable, yet the sunlight glared down on the clearing to bring growth to small subsistence gardens on which the villagers depended. The huts, built on piles roughly three feet from the bare earth, were arranged in an irregular triangle. I watched as a ubiquitous black sow snuffled under one of the thatched huts; the tips of her pink teats where her piglets had been suckling were the only clean parts of her hairy, black, mud-encrusted body. Seven piglets quarrelled and squealed around her. Village curs with their ribs showing and their tails between their skinny back legs sniffed lethargically at the things all dogs seem to check out with their noses, while others lay in the shade cast by a banana tree, panting with their tongues lolling, sides heaving in the torpid heat. Chickens did what chickens do, scratching and bathing in the dust, fussing as they sorted out the pecking order amongst themselves and shying away with an exclamatory squawk as the barnyard ranking adjusted itself. In the early afternoon the day had grown weary.

  The village was exactly where we shouldn’t have been — deep inside Japanese-held territory. It occurred to me that I’d accepted Peter Paul’s information at face value and on the basis of trust earned in years past. This was a very naïve and careless assumption, and just the kind of thing Intelligence training taught one never to do. There was always the possibility that we were being led into a Japanese ambush. We approached very carefully so that the sleeping dogs failed to bark and raise the alarm.

  And then I saw him. Or at least I saw a white man dozing under a paw-paw tree, seated in a crude bamboo chair. He was very thin and as brown as a nut, grey-bearded with his hair down to his shoulders. He wore a once red, faded to pink, cotton shirt with the sleeves ripped out and open at the front to reveal his scrawny chest and stomach. Below the waist he wore a lap-lap, the local name for a cotton sarong.

  My ten warriors moved so silently that we soon fronted him, with me standing in my customary position at the far left of the line. It was at this stage that two of the mangy mongrels decided to bark and the sleeping man woke up with a start. I still wasn’t certain that this skin-and-bone individual with a beard, matted hair and deep, bruised eye sockets in his skull was indeed my father.

  Bare-breasted women started to come in from the gardens with small naked children clinging to their thighs. The man rubbed his eyes, not sure he wasn’t dreaming, confronted suddenly by natives in dark-green uniforms; their shirts saturated from sweat seemed to make them look even darker. Curiously, he didn’t seem afraid. Instead he gave out a soft sigh of resignation as if he was trying to gather his thoughts sufficiently to make sense of the scene that confronted him in the harsh afternoon sunlight. He slowly pushed himself up from the chair and it was then that I saw the deep purple scar that ran from the centre of his chest and in a soft curve down to his stomach. Perhaps it had been made by a bayonet, or more likely an officer’s sword. I could feel myself growing furious. This quiet, intellectual man of God, who’d stayed behind because he believed he understood the enemy’s culture and would be able to reason with them, had been brutally assaulted, left to die, a lump of meat rotting in the tropical sun. At that moment I was willing to accept that he’d lost his senses, that my father — because I now knew it was him — had gone mad. That he’d become insane with the disappointment that the human intellect and peace and goodwill to all men couldn’t be sustained. That barbarism and rapacity prevailed as the stronger force in the affairs of mankind.

  His eyes travelled slowly across the faces of my Tolai soldiers and eventually reached me at the end of the line. I was wearing a slouch hat with the brim down so that my face was in shadow and now, very close to tears, I removed it.

  ‘Nick?’ he asked, uncertain, not believing. Then, ‘Nick, lad — it’s you?’

  I moved towards him, blinded by the tears streaming down my cheeks. ‘Dad — Dad, I’ve found you. I’ve bloody found you!’ He stretched out a trembling hand and I steadied him gently on his feet. He placed his arms about me and rested his head on my shoulder and we both wept, his tall, skinny frame pressing against me, his frail chest heaving. It was the first time my father had ever embraced me. It was also one of the most cherished moments of my life, as I realised how very much I loved him.

  My Tolai were laughing and crying at the same time, overjoyed for me. I guess the reactions to a happy ending are universal. Finally, sniffing then knuckling the tears from his eyes, my father drew back and attempted to smile. I noticed that several of his teeth had been knocked out and his nose had been broken and had mended with a bump in the centre. He’d been a good-looking bloke in his time, but now it was hard to see. ‘What is the date, Nick?’ was his first question.

  ‘It’s the 19th of February 1945,’ I replied.

  ‘Ah! The anniversary of the Peace of Westminster, 1674, when the English took possession of New York from the Dutch. My war is also finally over, how very appropriate.’ There was bugger all wrong with the old man’s mind. ‘Dear boy, I do hope you’ve remembered to bring along something for me to read?’

  I grinned. I happened to be carrying a copy of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ which I’d found in a second-hand bookshop in Brisbane. ‘Hmm, how about my diary?’ I teased. Unslinging my pack, I placed it on the ground in front of me and rummaging through it I produced the book containing the masterful poem. Then I handed him his spectacles. He had been notorious for losing or neglecting to bring his reading spectacles on the various occasions he’d travelled to Brisbane to attend a synod meeting, and so he’d taken to keeping a pair at the bank. Almost as a talisman I’d retrieved them from the bank manager and had packed them in my bag.

  He hugged the book to his emaciated chest. ‘Food, food, food at last!’ he exclaimed, then spontaneously quoted:

  ‘I have heard the key

  Turn in the door once and turn once only

  We think of the key
, each in his prison

  Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

  Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours

  Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus.’

  Then, still not looking at the small book, he said, ‘Thomas Stearns Eliot. How very apt. Thank you, my dear boy.’ I guess some people are never going to change.

  We carried the Reverend John Duncan on a litter back to Wide Bay, a task that took several days. Moving with ten Tolai warriors over enemy territory is a fast, silent process, but carrying a litter is a slow and sometimes noisy one as we moved through patches of dense scrub. During the time it took to get out of reach of the Japanese patrols I was in a constant state of panic. To lose my father now that I’d found him was unimaginable.

  But we made it, late on the fifth day. I had sent Sergeant Ellison ahead with a note torn from my diary, requesting a launch to take my father to Cape Gloucester Airfield for evacuation to Brisbane. For the first time I went public with the search to find my dad. In the note I related the story of his torture at the hands of the Japanese, their attempt to kill him by disembowelment, leaving his body lying in the mission compound for Peter Paul to find and take to his village, and finally my discovery of him. I certainly lacked the authority to get him quickly to Brisbane, but I asked that the contents of the note be transmitted to Colonel Woon on Cape Gloucester. The 1st Division marines had departed in March ’44, but his Intelligence Unit had remained behind to work with the US Army and latterly the Australian Army. The unit had moved from Milne Bay to be closer to the Australian base. I knew that he’d do everything he could to authorise the evacuation and would try to get a launch to Wide Bay.

  On the track an hour out from Wide Bay we found Sergeant Ellison waiting for us. ‘Mifella come back for lookim yu bakagen. Olgeta long ples blong yumi hemi lookout long yufella and daddy blong yu. Mifella go lookim olgeta nao for tellim em yufella close up come.’ (‘I’ve told them you are coming with your father and they’re looking forward to your arrival. I must go back and tell them you will be there in one hour.’)

  We arrived at Wide Bay to find the whole base lined up to welcome us with Colonel Woon, Belgiovani and Lee Roy Yamamoto (Da Nip widda Chip) standing three paces forward in the middle of the welcoming line of Australians. Colonel Woon was in the centre and above his head, secured to two poles held aloft by the radio operators on either side, was a large white canvas banner that read:

  Popgun Pete

  Arrives with

  Pop!

  The three Americans stood to attention and saluted me as I arrived, Sergeant Belgiovani using his left hand to do so. It was good to see that the Brute from Brooklyn was as inept as ever. (Whaddya mean I cain’t salute wid da left hand? Da udder one was holding da goddamn banner!) Then Major Peter McVitty from ANGAU called for three cheers from the Australians.

  The launch that had brought Colonel Woon, Beljo and Yamamato stood ready to take my father. After he’d had a shower, I’d roughly trimmed his hair using a large pair of scissors, leaving his beard intact for more competent hands than mine, and finally I’d clad him in a pair of jungle greens that hung from his emaciated frame like the drapes of a theatre curtain. From Cape Gloucester Airfield, in a series of air hops, he finally arrived in Brisbane. There he was hospitalised and visited (God knows how she managed it) by Marg Hamilton, who subsequently also organised a travel pass for him to Perth, where he could recuperate at the Archbishop’s palace.

  The next few months went by in what had become routine jungle work — if it can be said that there is such a thing. The jungle never disappoints in the process of making things difficult. Thankfully, the Japanese became even less interested in venturing out of their fortress, Rabaul.

  The Australian High Command drew up plans to invade the capital, Rabaul. But when they were submitted to General MacArthur he quickly scuppered them, denying them the necessary landing craft and air support. The head of the Australian Armed Forces, General Blamey — fat, loathsome and deeply unpopular with his men — who had helped to devise the plans for the invasion, went into a sulk and was heard in Canberra to have ‘spat the dummy’.

  MacArthur refused to budge, allowing the surrounded Japanese simply to wither on the vine. He hadn’t forgotten his earlier costly victory at Buna on mainland New Guinea, and wasn’t going to repeat that experience.

  Just as well. The planned Australian invasion was based on the fact that there were twenty thousand Japanese troops in Rabaul. When Japan surrendered, this calculation of the enemy’s strength proved to be wildly inaccurate. In fact, there were one hundred thousand Japanese. Their front-line troops might have been weakened from sickness and starvation, but Rabaul was the main garrison and the troops there were reasonably well fed and in good health. If we’d invaded it would have been an absolute bloodbath. For all his manifest faults, there ought to be a shrine to MacArthur in Australia for saving our soldiers’ lives by vetoing the unnecessary actions proposed by the pompous and vainglorious Blamey and his cohorts, and denying them the ordnance to invade.

  Late in July 1945 Major Peter McVitty called all the coastwatchers together and said he’d received a somewhat puzzling and elliptical signal discouraging any unnecessary offensive activity over the next fortnight.

  We were as stunned as the Japanese to hear the announcement that America had dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, followed shortly after by another on Nagasaki. Then came the surrender on the 15th of August 1945.

  I felt greatly honoured to be invited, along with all the other coastwatchers, to be present in Rabaul on the 6th of September when the Australian Lieutenant General Vernon Sturdee (thank Christ it wasn’t Blamey!) formally accepted the surrender of the Japanese forces in the region from Lieutenant General Imamura on board the British aircraft carrier Glory. It was all over bar the victory marches, the ticker-tape parades and the joyous dancing and cheering in the streets of our cities and towns.

  It was the start of the salvage company Judge, Popkin & Duncan Pty Ltd, Island Trading and Salvage Merchants. It was also time to find Anna.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ‘Inside is your butterfly handkerchief

  and also eighty persimmon seeds.

  You must sow five immediately,

  because I am five years behind now.

  Then, you must sow one seed each year on my birthday.

  You must promise me, Nicholas.’

  Anna Til

  Beautiful Bay, Port Vila,

  New Hebrides, 1950

  WITH THE WAR OVER I had one final task ahead of me, and that was to find Anna. While I counted myself extraordinarily fortunate with the women who had graced my young life, the most special of them being Marg Hamilton, I had never forgotten Anna. I would be fibbing if I said that every day I read the letter she’d sent to me from Tjilatjap via Colonel Woon, but I certainly did so at least once a week. My fear, of course, was that she’d perished at the hands of the Japanese.

  In any eastern or western society Anna would have been seen as a beautiful young woman and my hope was that this factor had saved her life. The stories of the Japanese use of comfort women were beginning to circulate in the first weeks after the Japanese surrender, told by Dutch refugees coming to Australia from Java. It wasn’t difficult to speculate that Anna may have been forced to act in that capacity. I wasn’t at all sure how I would react to this possibility. My hope was that it wouldn’t matter — that she’d still love me and I would feel the same about her. I certainly wasn’t concerned about her virginity, but rather about how she may have been affected, and how she might regard me.

  There was a constant niggling thought that I’d only known her for a few weeks and that people change, particularly under difficult circumstances. I knew I’d changed, changed enormously. I’d grown up to discover that within me there was a killer and a lover. I hated this dichotomy but was forced to ac
cept that Nick Duncan was no longer the ingenuous butterfly collector to whom Anna had professed her love.

  If I had changed, then how much more would she have changed? I even asked myself the question: Why don’t you just remember her fondly as a teenage fling, your first love, one that was never consummated? Remember Anna as a beautiful girl you met when you were both young and innocent and the world was a different place, before hate and violence and killing had become the paramount occupation of most of the so-called civilised world?

  Lying in a sleeping bag in the jungle, I would think: How could I possibly expect to resume our relationship from the time of her tearful farewell when she stood on the deck of the Witvogel, clutching the little box containing the Clipper butterfly?

  After hours of silent argument, I’d all but convince myself that it was pointless trying to find her. When this happened, I’d pat the breast pocket of my jungle greens where the butterfly handkerchief she’d embroidered for me rested in a flat oilskin wallet I’d devised so that the thin cotton material didn’t disintegrate and stain from the sweat of a jungle patrol.

  The handkerchief had been my talisman throughout the periods of active combat. It was with me at Bloody Ridge, at Mount Austen where I’d killed the sniper and captured Gojo Mura, and at the subsequent ambushes of Japanese patrols in New Britain. It had been in my breast pocket when I’d found my father. I would often take it out in the dark and run my fingers gently across the butterfly embroidery and then I’d hear myself saying, ‘Don’t give up, Anna, I’m coming to get you. Nick’s coming, darling.’

  I’d never addressed Anna as ‘darling’. It was a word I’d not had occasion to use and one I would not have fully understood at the time. Marg Hamilton had been the one to first introduce me to its intimate as well as its casual, throwaway meaning. But in my mind messages to Anna I found myself attaching ‘darling’ as an adjunct, almost as a prerequisite to the development of our invisible and imaginary relationship. It was as if the ambiguity of the word more deeply enhanced and established what now seemed, after so much time, a tenuous ‘ships passing in the night’ relationship. Thus the little cotton butterfly handkerchief served as a constant reminder that continued to stoke the embers of my memory of Anna and kept the flickering flame alive.