The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

There are limits, then, Jacob realizes, to this unexpected détente.

  “You are no scholar,” the doctor explains. “Nor am I your pimp.”

  “Is it fair to berate the less privileged for womanizing, smoking, and drinking”—Jacob pots Marinus’s cue ball—“whilst refusing to help their self-betterment?”

  “I am not a society for public improvement. What privileges I enjoy, I earned.”

  Cupido or Philander is practicing an air on a viol da gamba.

  The goats and a dog engage in a battle of bleating and barking.

  “You spoke of how you and Mr. Hemmij”—Jacob miscues—“used to play for a wager?”

  “You’re never proposing,” the doctor mock-whispers, “gambling on a Sabbath?”

  “If I reach five hundred and one first, take me to the Shirandô.”

  Marinus lines up his shot, looking doubtful. “What is my prize?”

  He’s not rejecting the idea, Jacob notices, out of hand. “Name it.”

  “Six hours’ labor in my garden. Now, pass me the bridge.”

  “FOR YOUR QUESTION’S intents and purposes …” Marinus considers his next shot from all angles. “Sentience in this life began in the rain-sodden summer of 1757 in a Haarlem garret: I was a six-year-old boy who had been taken to death’s door by a savage fever that had seen off my entire family of cloth merchants.”

  You, too, thinks Jacob. “I’m most sorry, Doctor. I didn’t guess.”

  “The world is a vale of tears. I was passed like a bad penning down a chain of relatives, each expecting a slice of an inheritance that had, in fact, been swallowed by debts. My illness made me”—he pats his lame thigh—“an unpromising investment. The last, a great-uncle of dubious vintage named Cornelis, told me I’d one evil eye and one queer one and took me to Leiden, where he deposited me on a canalside doorstep. He told me my ‘aunt-in-a-manner-of-speaking’ Lidewijde would take me in and vanished like a rat down a drain. Having no other choice, I rang the bell. Nobody answered. There was no point trying to limp after Great-Uncle Cornelis so I just waited on the high doorstep …”

  Marinus’s next shot misses both the red and Jacob’s cue ball.

  “… until a friendly constable threatened to thrash me for vagabondage.” Marinus drains his lemon juice. “I was dressed in my cousins’ castoffs, so my denial fell on deaf ears. Up and down the Rapenburg I walked, just to stay warm.” Marinus looks over the water toward the Chinese factory. “A sunless, locked-up, tiring afternoon, and chestnut sellers were out, and canine street urchins watched me, scenting prey, and across the canal, maples shed leaves like women tearing up letters … and are you going to play your shot or not, Domburger?”

  Jacob achieves a rare double cannon: twelve points.

  “Back at the house, the lights were still off. I rang the bell, beseeching the aid of every god I knew, and an old maid’s old maid flung the door open, swearing that were she the mistress I’d be turned away with no further ado, for tardiness was a sin in her book, but as she wasn’t, Klaas would see me in the back garden, though my entrance was the tradesman’s, down the steps. She slammed the door. So I made my descent, knocked, and the same wrathful Cerberus in petticoats appeared, noticed my stick, and led me down a dingy basement corridor to a beautiful sunken garden. Play your shot, or we’ll still be here at midnight.”

  Jacob pots both cue balls and lines up the red nicely.

  “An old gardener emerged from a curtain of lilac and told me to show him my hands. Puzzled, he asked whether I’d done so much as one day’s work as a gardener in my life. No, I said. ‘We’ll let the garden decide,’ said Klaas the Gardener, and very little besides all the livelong day. We mixed hornbeam leaves with horse manure; laid sawdust around the feet of roses; raked leaves in the small apple orchard … These were my first pleasant hours for a long, long time. We lit a fire with swept-up leaves and roasted a potato. A robin sat on my spade—it was already my spade—and sang.” Marinus imitates a robin’s chk-chk-chk. “It was getting dark when a lady in a satrap’s dressing gown and short white hair strode over the lawn. ‘My name,’ she declared, ‘is Lidewijde Mostaart, but the mystery is you.’ She had just heard, you see, that the real gardener’s boy, due that afternoon, had broken his leg. So I explained who I was and about Great-Uncle Cornelis …”

  Passing a hundred and fifty points, Jacob misses a shot to let Marinus on the table.

  In the garden, the slave Sjako is brushing aphids from the salad leaves.

  Marinus leans out the window and addresses him in fluent Malay. Sjako replies and Marinus returns to the game, amused. “My mother, it transpired, was a second cousin of Lidewijde Mostaart, whom she had never met. Abigail, the old maid, huffed, puffed, and complained that anyone would have taken me for the new gardener’s boy, given the rags I wore. Klaas said I had the makings of a gardener and retired to the shed. I asked Mrs. Mostaart to let me stay and be Klaas’s assistant. She told me it was ‘Miss,’ not ‘Mrs.,’ to most, but ‘Aunt’ to me, and took me inside to meet Elisabeth. I ate fennel soup and answered their questions, and in the morning they told me I could live with them for as long as I wished. My old clothes were sacrificed to the deity in the fireplace.”

  Cicadas hiss in the pines. They sound like fat frying in a shallow pan.

  Marinus misses a side-pocket pot and pockets his own cue ball by mistake.

  “Bad luck,” commiserates Jacob, adding the foul to his total.

  “No such thing, in a game of skill. Well, bibliophiles are not uncommon in Leiden, but bibliophiles made wise by reading are as rare there as anywhere. Aunts Lidewijde and Elisabeth were two such readers, as sagacious as they were rapacious devourers of the written word. Lidewijde had had ‘associations’ with the stage in her day, in Vienna and Naples, and Elisabeth was what we’d now call a blauw-stocking, and their house was a trove of books. To this printed garden, I was given the keys. Lidewijde, moreover, taught me the harpsichord; Elisabeth taught me both French and Swedish, her mother tongue; and Klaas the Gardener was my first, unlettered but vastly learned teacher of botany. Moreover, my aunts’ circle of friends included some of Leiden’s freest-thinking scholars, which is to say, ‘of the age.’ My own personal Enlightenment was breathed into being. I bless Great-Uncle Cornelis to this day for abandoning me there.”

  Jacob pockets Marinus’s cue ball and the red alternately three or four times.

  A dandelion seed lands on the green baize of the table.

  “Genus Taraxacum.” Marinus frees it and launches it from the window. “Of the family Asteraceae. But erudition alone fills neither belly nor pocketbook, and my aunts survived frugally on slender annuities, so as I reached maturity, it was settled that I should study medicine to support my scientific endeavors. I won a place at the medical school at Uppsala, in Sweden. The choice, of course, was no accident: cumulative weeks of my boyhood had been spent poring through Species Plantarum and Systema Naturae, and, once ensconced at Uppsala, I became a disciple of the celebrated Professor Linnaeus.”

  “My uncle says”—Jacob slaps a fly—“he was one of the great men of our age.”

  “Great men are greatly complex beings. It’s true that Linnaean taxonomy underlies botany, but he taught also that swallows hibernate under lakes; that twelve-foot giants thump about Patagonia; and that Hottentots are monorchids, possessing but a single testicle. They have two. I looked. Deus creavit, his motto ran, Linnaeus disposuit, and dissenters were heretics whose careers must be crushed. Yet he influenced my fate directly by advising me to win a professorship by traveling the East as one of his ‘apostles,’ mapping the flora of the Indies and trying to gain entry into Japan.”

  “You are approaching your fiftieth birthday, are you not, Doctor?”

  “Linnaeus’s last lesson, of which he himself was unaware, was that professorships kill philosophers. Oh, I’m vain enough to want my burgeoning Flora Japonica to be published one day—as a votive offering to human knowledge—but a seat at Uppsala, or Leiden,
or Cambridge, holds no allure. My heart is the East’s, in this lifetime. This is my third year in Nagasaki, and I have work enough for another three, or six. During the court embassy I can see landscapes no European botanist ever saw. My seminarians are keen young men—with one young woman—and visiting scholars bring me specimens from all over the empire.”

  “But aren’t you afraid of dying here, so far away from …?”

  “One has to die somewhere, Domburger. What are the scores?”

  “Your ninety-one points, Doctor, against my three hundred and six.”

  “Shall we put our finishing post at a thousand points and double the prizes?”

  “Are you promising you’ll take me to the Shirandô Academy twice?”

  To be seen by Miss Aibagawa there, he thinks, is to be seen in a new light.

  “Provided you are willing to dig horse manure into the beetroot beds for twelve hours.”

  “Very well, Doctor.” The clerk wonders whether Van Cleef might loan him the nimble-fingered Weh to repair the ruff on his best lace shirt. “I accept your terms.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE GARDEN ON DEJIMA

  Late in the afternoon of September 16, 1799

  JACOB DIGS THE LAST OF THE DAY’S HORSE MANURE INTO THE beetroot beds and fetches water for the late cucumbers from the tarred barrels. He started his clerical work one hour early this morning so he could finish at four o’clock and begin repaying the twelve hours’ garden labor he owes the doctor. Marinus was a scoundrel, Jacob thinks, to hide his virtuosity at billiards, but a wager is a wager. He removes the straw from around the cucumber plants’ stems, empties both gourds, then replaces the mulch to keep the moisture in the thirsty soil. Now and then a curious head appears above the Long Street wall. The sight of a Dutch clerk pulling up weeds like a peasant is worth catching. Hanzaburo, when asked to help, laughed until he saw that Jacob was in earnest, then mimed a back pain and walked away, pocketing a fistful of lavender heads by the garden gate. Arie Grote tried to sell Jacob his shark-hide hat so he could “toil with elegance, like a gentleman farmer”; Piet Baert offered to sell him billiards lessons; and Ponke Ouwehand helpfully pointed out some weeds. Gardening is harder labor than Jacob is used to, and yet, he admits to himself, I enjoy it. His tired eyes are rested by the living green; rosefinches pluck worms from the ramped-up earth; and a black-masked bunting, whose song sounds like clinking cutlery, watches from the empty cistern. Chief Vorstenbosch and Deputy van Cleef are at the Nagasaki residence of the Lord of Satsuma, the shogun’s father-in-law, to press their case for more copper, so Dejima enjoys an unsupervised air. The seminarians are in the hospital: as Jacob hoes the rows of beans, he hears Marinus’s voice through the surgery window. Miss Aibagawa is there. Jacob still hasn’t seen her, much less spoken to her, since giving her the daringly illustrated fan. The glimmers of kindness the doctor is showing him shall not extend to arranging a rendezvous. Jacob has considered asking Ogawa Uzaemon to take her a letter from him, but if it was discovered, both the interpreter and Miss Aibagawa could be prosecuted for secret negotiations with a foreigner.

  And, anyway, Jacob thinks, what would I even write in such a letter?

  PICKING SLUGS FROM the cabbages with a pair of chopsticks, Jacob notices a ladybird on his right hand. He makes a bridge for it with his left, which the insect obligingly crosses. Jacob repeats the exercise several times. The ladybird believes, he thinks, she is on a momentous journey, but she is going nowhere. He pictures an endless sequence of bridges between skin-covered islands over voids, and wonders if an unseen force is playing the same trick on him …

  … until a woman’s voice dispels his reverie: “Mr. Dazûto?”

  Jacob removes his bamboo hat and stands up.

  Miss Aibagawa’s face eclipses the sun. “I beg pardon to disturb.”

  Surprise, guilt, nervousness … Jacob feels many things.

  She notices the ladybird on his thumb. “Tentô-mushi.”

  In his eagerness to comprehend, he mishears: “O-ben-tô-mushi?”

  “O-ben-tô-mushi is ‘luncheon-box bug.’” She smiles. “This”—she indicates the ladybird—“is O-ten-tô-mushi.”

  “Tentô-mushi,” he says. She nods like a pleased teacher.

  Her deep-blue summer kimono and white headscarf lend her a nun’s air.

  They are not alone: the inevitable guard stands by the garden gate.

  Jacob tries to ignore him. “‘Ladybird.’ A gardener’s friend …”

  Anna would like you, he thinks, looking into her face. Anna would like you.

  “… because ladybirds eat greenfly.” Jacob raises his thumb to his lips and blows.

  The ladybird flies all of three feet to the scarecrow’s face.

  She adjusts the scarecrow’s hat as a wife might. “How you call him?”

  “A scarecrow, to ‘scare crows’ away, but his name is Robespierre.”

  “Warehouse Eik is ‘Warehouse Oak’; monkey is ‘William.’ Why scarecrow is ‘Robespierre’?”

  “Because his head falls off when the wind changes. It’s a dark joke.”

  “Joke is secret language”—she frowns—“inside words.”

  Jacob decides against referring to the fan until she does; it would appear, at least, that she is not offended or angered. “May I help you, Miss?”

  “Yes. Dr. Marinus ask I come and ask you for rôzu-meri. He ask …”

  The better I know Marinus, thinks Jacob, the less I understand him.

  “… he ask, ‘Bid Dombâga give you six … “sprogs” of rôzu-meri.’”

  “Over here, then, in the herb garden.” He leads her down the path, unable to think of a single pleasantry that doesn’t sound terminally inane.

  She asks, “Why Mr. Dazûto work today as Dejima gardener?”

  “Because,” the pastor’s nephew lies through his teeth, “I enjoy a garden’s company. As a boy,” he leavens his lie with some truth, “I worked in a relative’s orchard. We cultivated the first plum trees ever to grow in our village.”

  “In village of Domburg,” she says, “in province of Zeeland.”

  “You are most kind to remember.” Jacob breaks off a half dozen young sprigs. “Here you are.” For a priceless coin of time, their hands are linked by a few inches of fragrant herb, witnessed by a dozen blood-orange sunflowers.

  I don’t want a purchased courtesan, he thinks. I wish to earn you.

  “Thank you.” She smells the herb. “‘Rosemary’ has meaning?”

  Jacob blesses his foul-breathed martinet of a Latin master in Middelburg. “Its Latin name is rosmarinus, wherein ros is ‘dew’—do you know the word ‘dew’?”

  She frowns, shakes her head a little, and her parasol spins slowly.

  “Dew is water found early in the morning before the sun burns it away.”

  The midwife understands. “‘Dew’ … we say asa-tsuyu.”

  Jacob knows he shall never forget the word “asa-tsuyu” so long as he lives. “Ros being ‘dew,’ and marinus meaning ‘ocean,’ rosmarinus is ‘dew of the ocean.’ Old people say that rosemary thrives—grows well—only when it can hear the ocean.”

  The story pleases her. “Is it true tale?”

  “It may be”—let time stop, Jacob wishes—“prettier than it is true.”

  “Meaning of marinus is ‘sea’? So doctor is ‘Dr. Ocean’?”

  “You could say so, yes. Does ‘Aibagawa’ have meaning?”

  “Aiba is ‘indigo.’” Her pride in her name is plain. “And gawa is ‘river.’”

  “So you are an indigo river. You sound like a poem.” And you, Jacob tells himself, sound like a flirty lecher. “Rosemary is also a woman’s Christian name—a given name. My own given name is”—he strains to sound casual—“Jacob.”

  She swivels her head to show puzzlement. “What is … Ya-ko-bu?”

  “The name my parents gave me: Jacob. My full name is Jacob de Zoet.”

  She gives a cautious nod. “Yakobu Dazûto.”


  I wish, he thinks, spoken words could be captured and kept in a locket.

  “My pronounce,” Miss Aibagawa asks, “is not very good?”

  “No no no: you are perfect in every way. Your pronounce is perfect.”

  Crickets scritter and clirk in the garden’s low walls of stones.

  “Miss Aibagawa—” Jacob swallows. “What is your given name?”

  She makes him wait. “My name from mother and father is Orito.”

  The breeze twists a coil of her hair around its finger.

  She looks down. “Doctor is waiting. Thank you for rosemary.”

  Jacob says, “You are most welcome,” and doesn’t dare say more.

  She takes three or four paces and turns back. “I forget a thing.” She reaches into her sleeve and produces a fruit, the size and hue of an orange but smooth as hairless skin. “From my garden. I bring many to Dr. Marinus, so he ask I take one to Mr. Dazûto. It is kaki.”

  “Then, in Japanese, a persimmon is a cacky?”

  “Ka-ki.” She rests it on the crook of the scarecrow’s shoulder.

  “Ka-ki. Robespierre and I shall eat it later; thank you.”

  Her wooden slippers crunch the friable earth as she walks along the path.

  Act, implores the Ghost of Future Regret. I shan’t give you another chance.

  Jacob hurries past the tomatoes and catches her up near the gate.

  “Miss Aibagawa? Miss Aibagawa. I must ask you to forgive me.”

  She has turned and has one hand on the gate. “Why forgive?”

  “For what I now say.” The marigolds are molten. “You are beautiful.”

  Her mouth opens and closes. She takes a step back …

  … into the wicket gate. It rattles. The guard swings it open.

  Damned fool, groans the Demon of Present Regret. What have you done?

  Crumpling, burning, and freezing, Jacob retreats, but the garden has quadrupled in length, and it may take a Wandering Jew’s eternity before he reaches the cucumbers, where he kneels behind a screen of dock leaves; where the snail on the pail flexes its stumpy horns; where ants carry patches of rhubarb leaf along the shaft of the hoe; and he wishes the earth might spin backward to the moment when she appeared, asking for rosemary, and he would do it all again, and he would do it all differently.