Authors: Bryce Courtenay
At the time we set sail on that glorious moonlit night, I knew that Anna had been a comfort woman and mistress to Konoe Akira, for whom she had learned the art of
kinbaku
bondage from the two retired geishas. The remainder of Anna’s story, apart from her addiction to heroin, was unknown to me. It would be some considerable time before Anna trusted me sufficiently to confide in me.
I had invited her to come to Beautiful Bay, Port Vila, after meeting her again in Melbourne under what may seem less than fortuitous circumstances. She was the madam of a house of bondage called Madam Butterfly, in secret partnership with a lawyer named Stan McVitty and the wife of a senior police officer. McVitty was a partner in the law firm we used to help establish our war salvage business and owned the building and the majority share of Madam Butterfly, the remainder being split between Anna and the police officer’s wife. But to outsiders, Anna appeared to be the sole owner.
Janine de Saxe, a lawyer in the same firm who took care of our company’s legal affairs, came upon the contract between the three partners by chance. Aware that I had been seeking the whereabouts of Anna van Heerden, a.k.a. Madam Butterfly, since the termination of the war in the Pacific, she discreetly mentioned the coincidence of the name Anna and the sobriquet Madam Butterfly, but pointed out that the surnames were not the same.
Sufficiently intrigued by the two out of three matching factors, I caught a plane to Melbourne to discover it was indeed Anna van Heerden. She had been accepted as a refugee by Australia several months after the surrender of the Japanese and, having no documentation, she had acquired forged papers in the name of Anna Til. She later explained to me that the name Van Heerden carried too much baggage and she wanted a new identity. This was not entirely true, as I would later discover. As the killer of the Japanese commander, she was endeavouring to cover her tracks.
What can I say? These things don’t usually work out, but as I had done on the first occasion, I fell almost instantly in love with this now astonishingly sophisticated and beautiful woman, the new Anna. I was well aware that having anything further to do with her may have been inadvisable, but there you go; in the affairs of the heart there are few logical decisions. I was in love with the madam of a house of bondage who was a heroin addict. It probably doesn’t get more potentially calamitous than this.
When Anna eventually told me of her experiences as a prisoner of the Japanese she hadn’t broken down and wept as I might have expected. Nor did she seem in the least self-conscious about her new vocation. ‘Nicholas, bondage is all I know how to do, and fortunately it is something that is always needed by those who can afford to pay.’ She’d shrugged and added, making no apologies for her addiction, ‘Besides, heroin is expensive.’
‘But aren’t you afraid of getting caught? Isn’t what you’re doing illegal?’ I’d asked.
Anna had laughed. ‘Nicholas, if you ever have a problem with the law you must let me know. I can
rope
in at least two judges, half a dozen magistrates, a well-respected clergyman and God knows how many prominent lawyers and politicians, while a high-ranking police officer’s wife owns a share and several other officers are regular recipients of a brown envelope.’ She’d grinned mischievously. ‘So you can see, my profession
ties up
all the right people.’
During this time in Melbourne we had discussed her addiction and she’d admitted that she would like to give up –
become clean
is the expression – but claimed she had attempted to do so in the past and had always succumbed to the drug. At the time I was unaware of Anna’s formidable will, but as I grew to know her I realised how powerful the addiction must be to have so completely mastered her. I rather naïvely took her at her word and immediately set about learning all there was to know about withdrawal from heroin.
My advice was that
if
, and
only
if
, the addict wishes sincerely to kick the habit, it would take a period of up to three weeks for the acute craving to subside and then another unknown period to overcome the psychological addiction, although another three weeks would probably be sufficient. Six weeks in all. It was also highly desirable for the addict to be away from her normal environment and her usual supplier. It was explained to me that heroin addiction has a psychological component that is very difficult to overcome: the addict believes implicitly that after one more hit they will be able to give up permanently. This conviction is unshakeable and overrides both willpower and logic. This is why it is important for the addict to be away from their normal environment and out of reach of any regular substance supplier.
Anna finally agreed to come to Port Vila and attempt to get clean, although she stipulated that she could be away for no more than two weeks. My advice was that this would not be sufficient time to kick the habit and so I hatched a plan to kidnap her and to sail around the islands for six weeks, by which time she would likely be clean and sufficiently grateful to forgive me for taking her prisoner.
She arrived on the noon plane from Brisbane, having first flown up from Melbourne. I was delighted to see her, fearing she might have changed her mind. I’d been warned that this was likely and could occur even when she was on her way to the plane. As I drove her from the airport Anna had only just thanked me for inviting her to Beautiful Bay when she produced a small box tied with white ribbon from her handbag. ‘Inside are eighty persimmon seeds. I have no suitable land in Melbourne. Will you help me to find a place to sow the seeds? Only five seeds now, because I am five years behind. Then, even if I am not here, you must sow one seed each year on my birthday.’ She turned and gave me a stern look. ‘You must promise me, Nicholas.’
I smiled, taking the box and placing it in the pocket of my khaki shirt as I drove. ‘I promise, Anna, but why persimmon seeds?’
‘I will tell you some day, not now,’ she answered quietly.
After a light lunch at home I suggested Anna take an afternoon nap to recover from the eight-hour flight beginning early that morning in Melbourne. Then I proposed an evening sail, a picnic at sea on
Madam Butterfly
. The yacht had once belonged to her father, who had suggested I sail it from Java to Australia in 1943 to escape the Japanese, otherwise he would have been forced to leave it behind when he and his family fled the country. There was a tacit arrangement that it would be ours, Anna’s and mine, when we were reunited in Australia.
Anna was thrilled at the prospect of seeing the beautiful cutter she had sailed in her childhood and which was known as
Vleermuis
. I had renamed the yacht
Madam Butterfly
, the nickname I had given Anna at sixteen, so very long ago when we had been out hunting butterflies and life had been so simple. Ironically, Madam Butterfly, in a bizarre twist of fate, had transmogrified into Anna’s professional name and that of her nefarious house of bondage.
Anna, rested and smiling, had appeared at five o’clock wearing white shorts, a light blue shirt and, hanging from her shoulders, a white sweater, the arms of which were tied loosely below her neck. We’d talked at some length, over an afternoon tea of sponge cake cook had baked, about my need to live in the islands to run our shipping and war salvage business and she asked, ‘Is it to be forever? Will you not eventually return to Australia, Nicholas?’
‘There would have to be a damn good reason,’ I grinned, looking directly at her. ‘With the exception of boarding school in Brisbane, you will recall I was brought up first in Japan, then on the island of New Britain, the son of an Anglican missionary. I am more familiar with the jungle than Queen Street, Brisbane. I guess I’m an island person.’
Anna sniffed. ‘When there is no more scrap metal what will you do? This doesn’t seem a place where you can make
real
money.’
‘Ah, it depends on how much,’ my hand swept over Beautiful Bay, ‘and what you want in life.’
Anna’s English deteriorated and I could see she was upset. ‘Life?
Ja
,
I have already two lives, Nicholas. One is
goed
, when I was growing up in Batavia. Then come the Japanese . . .’ She didn’t complete the sentence, jumping to the next. ‘Now I am lucky so I have another life, another chance, I must be sure.’
‘You mean security? If we stay together, there is always going to be enough, Anna. After the war salvage scrap runs out, Joe Popkin, Kevin and myself are starting a small inter-island shipping line, people, parcels and produce.’ I laughed. ‘What Joe calls “freight and fright”! The leaky and unseaworthy vessels doing this now are always overloaded and carry twice the passengers they’re laughingly licensed to take on board. If a big storm happens out to sea it usually spells disaster. There’s a great need for a decent service and we already have a small fleet of vessels, and they’re a damn sight better than most of the leaky tubs sailing between the islands right now.’ I admit I said all this in an attempt to impress her, show her we were not sitting on our hands and were seriously planning for the future.
Anna seemed to deliberately ignore or dismiss what amounted to an informal proposal from me . . . well, a toe in the water anyway. Her speech was slowly reverting to normal. ‘Property? It is expensive here?’ she asked.
‘No, not really.’
‘And when Port Vila grows, will property values increase?’
‘Who knows? The natives are beginning to talk independence, though it’s years off yet, more a whisper than a demand. That is, if it
ever
happens. The various colonial powers are doing a pretty good job of keeping them in the dark.’
‘
Ja
, the Dutch also, but in the end it happened there.’
‘Yes, perhaps, maybe, who knows? The New Hebrides is a condominium, jointly ruled by the French and the British. This island is a bureaucratic nightmare; for a start, there are two sets of rules regarding property and that’s only the beginning of the complications.’
‘What about industry? Cheap labour? This is a tax haven?’
‘Nah, too far from anywhere, but you’re right, real-estate development is usually connected with industry and in terms of exports here on this island, as on most of the others, it’s coconuts and coconuts, coffee, cocoa and a bit of mining, with Nauru and its deposits of bird poo the exception. Although Port Vila as a tax haven has some small attraction to overseas buyers.’
‘
Ja
, Java is also an island. After three hundred years it was still coconuts and coconuts.’ Anna spread her hands. ‘Then independence came and we, the Dutch, had nothing, not even coconuts. But it was okay, the people were free.’
I chuckled. ‘Three hundred years is a pretty good innings, don’t you think?’
‘
Ja
, but most of the islands are still ruled by white men. They should also be free.’
‘There is some talk about New Guinea in the United Nations, but I don’t think it’s going to happen tomorrow.’
‘Do you think it will happen? Do you
want
it to happen, Nicholas?’
‘I must admit I haven’t given it a great deal of thought, but now that you mention it . . . yes, I think I do.’
‘So, to buy property in the islands, not such a good long-term prospect, eh, Nicholas?’
‘For investment purposes, I dare say, no,’ I grinned, ‘but as our own slice of paradise, a way of life,
definitel
y good.’
Anna cast me a scornful look immediately disguised as a smile. ‘
Tush!
Paradise? Paradise I know already! Java was paradise! The
only
paradise is security and money, Nicholas.’
‘Anna, where does all this come from? Property? Security? Money? You’re twenty-four years old, there’s lots of time for those later. I know things have been pretty tough, in fact ghastly for you, but don’t you deserve a little fun?’ I laughed. ‘We could take
Madam Butterfly
and sail around the world!’
Anna looked genuinely horrified. ‘No! I cannot! I must not! I must start now! Property, it is safe.’
‘C’mon, Anna, what do you
really
know about property? Safe as bricks, but also slow as bricks, crumbling as bricks. Real estate sits in one place slowly decaying, it just isn’t a good proposition.’
‘Like a yacht?’ Anna interjected, pointing at
Madam Butterfly
in the bay below. ‘My rich clients tell me to own a yacht is to make a hole in the water to throw money into. Ha, you are wrong, Nicholas! Future development!’
‘And you know this for sure?’ I asked.
‘Not me, my clients, they know. Only the very rich or influential come to enjoy my services at Madam Butterfly. They talk and I listen. The Olympic Games is coming. You’ll see, Melbourne will change, Sydney also. I have rich clients who come down from Sydney. They are all buying property to develop later.’
‘Anna, that takes money, property development takes
real
money.’
Anna smiled proudly. ‘Madam Butterfly is not cheap. I have already bought two workers’ cottages in Abbotsford, near the brewery. It is slums now and cheap and I think a good investment.’