The Persimmon Tree (45 page)

‘No,’ Anna said without raising her voice. She was aware that his concern was probably well-founded. Lo Wok’s presence placed them in a perilous situation. She knew that it was foolish, even weak, to have agreed to hide him in the cellar. The first rule of survival is to avoid unnecessary danger. Her action in concealing him was asking for trouble, even courting disaster. Her first loyalty was to her family and not a Chinaman to whom she owed nothing, who’d filled a whisky bottle with piss. She could tell him to go, throw him onto the street to be killed. She would tell Ratih her father had demanded it. Ratih would understand. Absolute obedience to the head male in the family was the Javanese way. The cook would eventually convince herself that she’d tried to save Lo Wok, that Anna had also tried and that the father was the villain.

‘He’s in the cellar? I will personally throw the yellow bastard out! I don’t want a
foking
Chink in my house, you hear!’ Piet Van Heerden brought his fist down onto the table so hard that coffee spilled from the mug.

‘It is not your decision, Father. Nor is it your house.’ Anna felt the strength of her refusal, the heavy lumping of stubbornness within her. The time had arrived to assert herself. ‘He stays. That is the end of it.’

‘The end of it! We’ll be the
foking
end of it, you hear? You’re mad, I knew it! You’re possessed!
Abangan!
Witch! Heathen! Saving a Chinaman and risking our lives? A white man’s life! A white man’s life for a Chinaman, ferchrissakes! A lying, cheating, rotten, stinking Chink!’

‘Father, you may leave my house any time you like, but he’s staying,’ Anna said quietly.

‘What? Are you fucking him? Is that it? My daughter is fucking a
foking
Chink!’

Anna rose, then placing the two envelopes in front of him said, ‘Here, take these and stick them up your arse. I’m told it makes the next-best pouch!’ She knew she had gone too far and moved beyond her father’s reach, ready to run if she needed to.

Realising what she’d just said, Piet Van Heerden’s expression suffused with renewed anger, then his face grew apoplectic with rage, his pale blue eyes bulging, his ears scarlet. He was trying to speak, his cheeks puffed out like a toad’s, but no sound would come, strangled by the agitation and fury contained within him. He rose from the table, taking a step towards Anna, his fist drawn back ready to strike her, to break her jaw, cheekbone, nose, destroy her pretty face, her beauty, smash it to pulp.

Anna knew instinctively that the next few moments were critical to her life. Strength, seemingly from nowhere, rose within her and she stood her ground. It was a feeling well beyond the desire to survive; it was a thing of the will, of muscle and sinew and sharp white teeth. The next few moments would decide the remainder of her life. Her eyes, which never left his, held steady. Despite the knowledge that he might kill her, she was not afraid. She would not run. Nothing in this world would make her run.

She saw a look of fear, a flicker of uncertainty, enter her father’s eyes, then immediately change to confusion and, as quickly, to defeat. It was as if the heat was sucked out of him and he seemed to grow smaller in front of her eyes. His fist opened and his arm fell to his side, his cheeks returned to normal and he ran his tongue across his lips as if afraid and preparing for what might happen next. Finally he dropped his eyes and took a step backwards, collapsing heavily into the chair, where he sat chin-cupped and silent. Then looking up, he pushed the tin, with the key still in the lock, across the table so it was close to where she stood and followed this with the two envelopes. ‘You must do as you wish, Anna. From now on you are in charge.’ He sighed and looked up at her, his eyes rheumy, close to tears. ‘I am afraid, Anna. I don’t want to die,’ he said in a small voice.

Anna felt deeply saddened, her sorrow a deep pit plummeting so far within her that it seemed endless. Her past had withered to be insignificant, almost meaningless. Nothing had prepared her for this. She knew that she now controlled him as he had once controlled her. But previously she had thought herself controlled by his happiness, whereas her present control was born out of her sorrow. The sadness she had felt the previous evening, when she’d realised that if he could save his life by betraying her own, he would do so, was not nearly as overpowering as the sadness she was experiencing now. That he believed her contaminated half-caste blood was of a lesser human value than the pure Aryan blood that coursed through his own veins was not difficult to comprehend when viewed against the background of his life. But she had endured a mangled, misunderstood childhood that now amounted to nothing. She had defeated her father. She knew now that henceforth her fate was dependent on her own efforts. She was abandoned by him.

While she had in every possible sense been in control, in charge, from the moment they’d left Batavia, first as a servant to her father’s drunkenness and then nursing him through his horrific withdrawal, she had hitherto seen herself as a dutiful daughter ministering to a deeply depressed and sick parent. Now she knew there was nothing left, no filial duty and no past or present affection to ameliorate the task of survival that lay ahead. His act of relinquishing control contained no love, no loyalty, no feeling other than his own self-pity and fear of dying.

If blood may be said to be thicker than water, then Anna knew that the blood she shared with her father had been almost completely diluted. She had known that she had to look after him, care for him as long as they were together. A terrible sadness rose in her as she realised she would not now sacrifice her life for him as she might once have done, that the emotional cord that binds a daughter to her father had been forever cut. Anna was utterly and completely alone, although it never occurred to her to dwell morbidly on her predicament. She had a natural revulsion for her father’s self-pity, unconsciously seeing it as a weakness she found she despised.

In fact, Anna now accepted that her young years were over and with this knowledge she shook her head with a wry, inward grin. She had a tin box full of money she couldn’t spend, twelve diamonds about to go into hiding in a very private place, a depressed, helpless and fearful giant Dutchman on her hands and a terrified Chinaman locked in her cellar. Outside the bloodthirsty
kempeitai
ranged everywhere: ruthless killers who would most certainly cut her throat if they were to hear about the money, slit her open if they knew about the diamonds, or summarily execute her for hiding the Chinaman. Other than this, she was now in complete control of everything. That is, if nothing may be said to be everything.

‘I will protect you, Father,’ she said. ‘We will try to get through this. One day you will be in New Zealand.’ At these comforting but somewhat futile words, Piet Van Heerden began to cry softly.
God! What a weak, gormless, lump of lard he is
, Anna thought to herself. She felt a growing sympathy for her dead stepmother. ‘A strong woman may be difficult to endure, but a weak man is beyond tolerating,’ Til had once said to her. But the more prosaic matters of everyday life intruded into her mind and she said, ‘Father, I think you should go to your room and rest. I have several things to do, but first, will you help me to move the stove away from the trapdoor? I have a mattress arriving this afternoon.’

Together they moved the cast-iron stove; it was no easy task but Piet Van Heerden, despite everything, was still a strong man. ‘I will need you later to help with its return; now go to your room and rest,’ she said brusquely. Her father immediately turned and left the kitchen, going directly to his bedroom like an obedient child.

Anna was suddenly overcome with her vulnerability. If there was an unexpected knock on the door by the Japanese police she would be caught on every front. She decided to put the tin box back in the recess under the outside toilet until she could think of a better plan, for it now appeared to her to be an obvious place of concealment. She reasoned that if it had occurred to her as a safe hiding place, an experienced thief or a Japanese policeman accustomed to making searches would think it an obvious one. She withdrew a wad of banknotes and the stick of red wax, locked the tin and, covering it with a dishtowel as she had done before, went outside and placed it in the recess under the wooden seat of the outside lavatory. She would give the wad she’d taken from the tin box to Ratih for safekeeping. It would be a returned favour for hiding Lo Wok. If she was killed or taken into a concentration camp she would instruct her to use it for Budi’s education at the university in the capital. There was also sufficient to build a house and to purchase a
kampong
restaurant. Anna knew this single bundle of five-hundred-guilder notes was more than the cook and her lieutenant would earn in their lifetimes. She would ask Ratih if she could find a way to break a single five-hundred-guilder note into smaller denominations for her to use for current expenses. If she couldn’t help, then Til, she felt sure, would find a way.

This left the diamonds and the gold watch. She wasn’t too concerned about her grandfather’s fob watch. It was the kind of thing the
kempeitai
would expect to find in a Dutch refugee family, a last heirloom only to be sold in an absolute emergency. She knew where the diamonds were supposed to be deposited but had no idea how she might go about doing this. It was then that she remembered the bullet casing that had landed at her feet when it had been ejected from Lieutenant Mori’s revolver on the day the platoon of weary Japanese cyclists had arrived.

Anna retrieved the small brass casing from the shoulder bag and studied it. It was no longer than the top joint of her forefinger though somewhat wider. She shook the twelve diamonds into it and they fitted almost to the rim. If she sealed the aperture with sealing wax they would be safe in their human pouch and not difficult to retrieve, she concluded. She first sterilised the casing in boiling water, cooled it down, placed the diamonds within it and sealed the top with the melted scarlet wax. When it had cooled sufficiently she filed the rough edges around the lip with a nailfile. Somewhat nervously she inserted it. It slipped in easily enough and, if initially a little uncomfortable, after an hour she realised she hadn’t thought about it for a good ten minutes. She then decided to remove it and after washing it placed the sealed casing in her bag knowing that given a few moments, if it were necessary to conceal the diamonds she could quickly insert it again.

Anna then cooked some rice and dried salted fish for Lo Wok. She lifted the trapdoor and called so as not to alarm him. Then she took the hot meal down to him together with a mug of green tea which she’d purchased for herself at the markets.

Lo Wok dropped to his knees, his head touching the cement floor as if he were a Muslim in prayer, then he looked up. ‘You have saved my life once again, Missy Anna. Your honourable father does not want me here. I give you ten thousand thanks.’

The row between herself and her father had been in the Dutch language and Anna had stupidly concluded that Lo Wok wouldn’t have understood. But, of course, most of the Chinese merchants spoke Dutch as well as Javanese. ‘I’m sorry you had to overhear it, Lo Wok,’ Anna said, placing the enamel plate of hot food on the chair.

‘You are a very strong woman, Missy Anna. I will never forget you.’ He looked up and without smiling said, ‘I ask most humble forgiveness for the piss in the Scotch bottle.’

Anna laughed, pointing to the chamber-pot. ‘I think you still win. It is me who must now empty it out. There is no need to thank me, Lo Wok. We are both far from over this calamity.’

‘But you have acted with great honour, that is the first step,’ the Chinaman said. He was beginning to sound like Til.

‘It is Ratih and her family, young Budi, who have acted with honour, not me.’

‘Were the gods to grant me a son like Budi, I would be content and burn incense at the temple one year.’

‘If the gods grant you your life, Lo Wok, would that not be contentment enough?’

‘
Ahee!
Missy Anna. With the Chinese it is always family and the good rice, a son,
that
is life.’

‘Will your wife and daughter be safe where they are?’

‘They have gold and money. They can buy their survival in the mountains. I have heard the Javanese there are not so bad. They can be bribed.’ He hesitated and Anna realised he wanted to say more.

‘What is it, Lo Wok?’

‘Missy Anna, I have some books, Chinese books. If the Japan soldier police have not burned them, can Budi give them to Til to bring?’

‘No!’ Anna cried. ‘There will be eyes and spies everywhere! The
kempeitai
will have issued orders to the locals to find you, to find all the Chinese. Budi
must
not go to the Chinese quarter or anywhere near your shop! If he is caught they will torture him to find out where you are!’

Lo Wok looked distraught, hanging his head. ‘I am ashamed, I did not think. You are a very wise woman, Missy Anna.’

‘That is enough compliments for one day, Lo Wok. Now eat your food. I must go upstairs. Til should arrive soon,’ she added with a grin, ‘bringing your one-year-guarantee mattress!’ She pointed to the window. ‘I shall come three times a day to see you and bring you food and tea, also water to wash and to drink. In the morning leave your plate and the chamber-pot on that little shelf, there is a dishtowel to cover it.’