The Persimmon Tree (50 page)

‘You do not find this strange?’ Anna asked, confused and trying in her mind to decide what kind of man could become so obsessed with a single vase of flowers.

‘Oh, no! It is culture. It is Japanese. It is the power of perfection! I must learn and respect this honourable vase of flowers.’ At that moment the short stab of a car horn sounded. The Japanese woman visibly drew to attention. A frightened look crossed her face and then settled into one of concern. ‘He has come. I must go to the door!’ She turned and half-ran to the back door, then stopped. ‘
Ahee!
Your name, Miss?’

‘Anna. Anna Van Heerden.’

‘Anna,’ the woman said, repeating, ‘Anna, Anna.’

Anna had not introduced herself, waiting in the conventional Javanese way to have the older person make the first introduction and so signalling that they wished to know you. The locally born Japanese woman would have known this convention and, unsure of her master’s reception of the beautiful young woman, would have refrained from introducing herself other than to mention that she was the wife of the mayor. This apparent lack of good manners was seemingly intentional, lest her familiarity with Anna cause her master, the colonel, displeasure.

Anna had rehearsed in her mind how she would manage the introduction to the Japanese colonel. She would rise from her chair unhurriedly and smile in her most engaging manner, as any politely brought-up young girl would do if they found themselves suddenly in the presence of an older stranger.
Keep calm. Keep calm
, she constantly repeated to herself. But suddenly he was there, a tall, good-looking Japanese man in shiny jackboots and an immaculate uniform, moving with a pronounced limp. Anna jumped to her feet, her hands clasped behind her back in the manner of an errant schoolgirl suddenly caught out. ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed.

It was only at that moment that it occurred to her that they had no means of communicating. He undoubtedly spoke no Javanese, was unlikely to be conversant in Dutch, and she knew almost no Japanese. The
mama-san
would need to translate, which was precisely what Anna did not wish to happen, but then again, she would be a better option than her husband, the mayor. That is, of course, if wordlessly he didn’t have her arrested and handed to the
kempeitai.

Colonel Konoe smiled and motioned for her to resume her seat. ‘Anna, do you speak English, French or German?’ he asked in almost flawless English.

Anna backed into her chair, her legs unexpectedly meeting the cushioned seat so that she sat down with an undignified thump. ‘English, sir — and French a little, but only school French, no German,’ she said, recovering.

The Japanese officer seemed pleased. ‘English. Good. We shall speak to each other in English. I am Konoe Akira.’ He came to attention and bowed his head slightly, no more than a formal jerk, followed by a sharp grunt, ‘Ho!’ He’d placed his surname before his particular name in the Japanese way.

‘Anna Van Heerden. How do you do, sir?’

The Japanese colonel did not reply to her greeting but proceeded to seat himself opposite her, his body slightly twisted, awkward as he adjusted his bad leg. Finally settled, he leaned back against the large chair. He reached into the brass-buttoned breast pocket of his uniform and produced a slim silver cigarette case; withdrawing a cigarette he closed the case and tapped the end of the cigarette against the lid. He turned his head towards the door. ‘
Mama-san!
’ he called and then added something in Japanese.

Moments later the housekeeper appeared with a silver cigarette lighter and a glass ashtray. With her hands shaking slightly, she lit the colonel’s cigarette, then placed the ashtray in front of him. Anna noted that this was not a man accustomed to lighting his own cigarette, or perhaps not in the company of someone else. She wondered which of the two options it was, thinking there was a difference. The ashtray, she observed, was beautiful, and moulded into the bottom was a butterfly. Later she would tell me that this singular detail almost brought her undone. She also admitted it was at that moment she realised that so much had happened since we’d said a tearful farewell on the
Witvogel
that she wondered if I could possibly love the person she had become. She would later discover that the ashtray was French and signed by an artist named Lalique.

Colonel Konoe threw his head back and exhaled the cigarette smoke toward the verandah ceiling. ‘Van Heerden? You are Dutch?’ he asked at last.

‘Half, sir.
Mijn
father is Dutch and my mother, she is dead, was Javanese.’

He frowned. ‘Mixed colour? I do not approve of mixing races, the result is always inferior.’ He announced this calmly as though it was a commonly known and proven fact and smiled as if this was a perfectly normal thing to say. ‘But in your case I will make an exception. Ah, your eyes,’ he said admiringly.

Anna did not know how she should reply — angrily to the insult or smiling at the compliment — and so she remained silent.

He pointed to the vase of flowers. ‘Purity of selection is like those dahlias, one perfect colour.’

‘But there are two colours, sir.’

‘One!’ he said sharply. ‘Yellow. White is not a colour. It is simply there to highlight the perfection of the yellow.’

‘Ah, then you must approve of such as me? I am yellow highlighted by white.’ Anna held her breath, thinking she had gone too far. She smiled, though it was more an attempt at a quizzical grin, her beautiful violet eyes held wide.

Konoe Akira brought the cigarette to his lips, inhaled and then exhaled, and carefully placed it so that it balanced on the lip of the butterfly ashtray. ‘Not only a beautiful woman but also a clever one,’ he observed, bringing his hands together in a small token clap. But then he added, ‘You should be careful, you play dangerously, young woman’.

Anna was becoming confused, unable to define the Japanese officer in her mind. He was rapidly becoming an enigma. Was he a potentially cold-eyed killer and racist who liked to arrange flowers and sought in them perfection? Or a sophisticated, urbane, almost likeable cultured and aesthetic man? Or both? Could one person be both? She supposed this was possible, but knew she was out of her depth and also that she should remain silent. But his racial antipathy and singular scorn and dismissal of someone of mixed blood burned within her. She had always seen herself as different, but never as lesser, never as inferior.

She pointed at the vase. ‘Sir, you have chosen yellow as perfection, but the dahlia has many colours: pink, red, orange, magenta and, of course, yellow and white. Yet every colour is still a dahlia, still perfection. Is it not the same with the human race? We are still all dahlias but is it not our differences that are interesting?’ she added.

At that moment the housekeeper came through the door carrying a tray. She placed it down on a small wicker side table and carefully removed the vase, the teapot and untouched cup of tea that was before Anna. Then, using both hands, she placed a small, exquisite yellow porcelain bowl in front of Anna and another in front of the Japanese officer. Then came a larger rice dish, a chicken dish and one containing tempura vegetables. This dish was also of the same, almost opaque, porcelain, only this time it was white. The
mama-san
set down each dish in a tiny silent ceremony. Then she laid a pair of beautifully proportioned, highly burnished black chopsticks beside Anna, carefully separating them so they were slightly apart but still somehow together; a tiny aesthetic touch, two lovers temporarily separated after making love. She did the same with those she placed in front of the colonel. Her final touches were to add a white porcelain rice spoon beside the rice and a pale green pot containing tea accompanied by two small yellow porcelain oriental cups. She had, in just a few moments, created a setting which, while simple, when reflected in the polished glass surface of the table, was exquisite. In its own way it replicated the vase of dahlias, the yellow and white of the blossoms and finally the pale leaf-green of the teapot. Anna thought it near to being faultless.

Konoe Akira picked up a chopstick and balanced it in his hand. ‘In the heartwood of the sacred persimmon tree is ebony, the hardest, most beautiful of all woods. It is created by nature and will last longer than the
katana
, the layered and folded steel of the everlasting samurai sword.’ He dipped and lifted his palm in the air as if weighing the chopstick. ‘To the Japanese this is the symbol of life, a heartwood that will outlast everything man can make, a core within that, come what may, cannot be broken and represents our inner strength and divine spirit.’ He paused, looking at Anna, his expression serious. ‘Perhaps at another time you will permit me to recite the soldier’s poem about the persimmon tree by the most venerable Taneda Santoka,
haiku
master. He was the last Japanese priest–poet. He passed away just two years ago. I will try to translate it into English.’ He placed the chopstick down and indicated the food. ‘You are permitted to eat. Please, some chicken?’ He indicated the small squares of chicken on skewer sticks.

Immediately as the
mama-san
had placed the chicken dish down, Anna’s acute sense of smell picked up a sharp sourness to the sauce. It was not the tartness of a freshly squeezed lemon. Instead an altogether different astringency assailed her nostrils. It was sharp, perhaps too sharp for her taste, although she could detect the smell of the soy sauce that had been added to render it less sour. She had decided to start with the tempura; the light batter and the vegetable oil used for frying smelled simply wonderful. She wondered if the whiteness of the rice was meant to highlight the gold of the tempura, but left this observation unremarked. But now that the colonel had suggested she start with the chicken she felt compelled to obey him.

‘Thank you,
Colonel-san
,’ she said, borrowing the respectful nomenclature from the mayor’s wife as a change from her constantly repeated ‘sir’. She added a little rice to her bowl and then removed the chicken from the small wooden skewer with her chopstick, allowing it to fall into the rice. Then she picked up a single square of chicken and popped it into her mouth. It tasted horrible. At home she would have covered her mouth with a napkin and left the table to hurry somewhere private to spit it out. Now she swallowed it bravely, adding rice in an attempt to ameliorate the taste.

In the meantime the colonel had helped himself to the rice and vegetable tempura, silent as he attended to the food in front of him. Anna waited for him to reach for a chicken skewer. If he ate it with equanimity then she would accept that what pleased the Japanese palate was chicken that had been allowed to go slightly off. He poured himself green tea from the pot, the steam rising from the small tea bowl, and then took another piece of the tempura. Finally he reached for the chicken, removed the pieces from the skewer into his bowl and brought a single piece to his mouth. Anna observed his face contort and twist in dismay. Without ceremony he spat the contents of his mouth into his rice bowl, repeating the spitting process several times to remove the last of the contaminated chicken on his lips. ‘
Mama-san!
’ he yelled in a furious voice.

The Japanese housekeeper must have been standing attentively just beyond the door for she appeared almost immediately. Konoe Akira lifted the dish containing four more skewers and emptied the contents over her feet. His rebuke was in Japanese so that Anna could only observe her dismay and with it her changing facial expressions. At first she brought both hands up to her face, then she began to sob, stooping to brush some of the mess from her slippers. The Japanese colonel proceeded to empty the bowl of rice over her head, followed by what was left of the tempura. Now she cowered at his feet, gabbling words of apology, attempting to scrape together the debris on the floor with her hands. Then he reached over, took up the teapot and poured the hot green tea over her neck and back, scalding her. His face had grown apoplectic with rage as he continued to rebuke the hapless, howling woman in Japanese.

Anna jumped to her feet, the act of pouring the hot tea finally too much. ‘Stop, you cruel bastard!’ she screamed. ‘Stop at once! Let her alone, you piece of crippled shit!’ Anna knew instantly with these final five words she had lost her life, the sight of the blood-splashed jackboots, her own blood, flashing through her mind.

The Japanese colonel stopped abruptly and with a dismissive hand told the distraught and injured woman to leave. But by this time Anna was kneeling by her side, trying to comfort the crouched and weeping
mama-san
,
at the same time attempting to lift her to her feet. The Japanese officer rose from the chair and Anna, with her arms around the cowering housekeeper, glared up at him. ‘Fuck off, you bastard!’ she spat.

Konoe Akira stood over her and broke into a broad smile, then brought his hands together and clapped softly. ‘I knew it! I knew it the moment I saw you in the town square where you fainted. I knew you were the one. You will be perfect!’ He brought his heels together and jerked his head forward in the same semblance of a bow as previously, followed with a similar grunt of ‘Ho!’ Then, not as an invitation or as a request, but as a clearly issued order, he demanded, ‘Tomorrow at twelve o’clock you will be present for lunch. A thousand apologies, the food, it will be better than today. We will talk about dahlias and differences. I will tell the
kempeitai
I have found you. My staff sergeant will now drive you home.’