The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, Page 21

  Jacob swallows. “Ordinarily, sir, one of the servants—”

  “Ah, yes, but I direct you”—Fischer prods Jacob’s sternum with his dirty thumb—“to clean the shelves now, because you dislike slaves, servants, and inequalities.”

  A ewe, escaped from her paddock, ambles down Long Street.

  He wants me to hit him, thinks Jacob. “I shall clean them later.”

  “You shall address the deputy as Deputy Fischer, at all times.”

  Years of this ahead, thinks Jacob. “I shall clean them later, Deputy Fischer.”

  Protagonist and antagonist stare at each other; the ewe squats and pisses.

  “Clean the shelves now, Clerk de Zoet. If you do not—”

  Jacob is breathless with a fury he knows he shan’t control: he walks off.

  “Chief van Cleef,” Fischer calls after him, “and I shall discuss your insolence!”

  Ivo Oost smokes in a doorway. “It’s a long way down …”

  “It is my signature,” Fischer shouts after him, “that authorizes your wages!”

  JACOB CLIMBS THE watchtower, praying that nobody is on the platform.

  Anger and self-pity are lodged in his throat like fish bones.

  This prayer, at least—he gains the vacant platform—is answered.

  The Shenandoah is half a mile up Nagasaki Bay. Tugboats trail in her wake like unwanted goslings. The narrowing bay, pouring clouds, and the brig’s billowing canvas suggest a model ship being drawn from its bottle’s mouth.

  Now I understand, thinks Jacob, why I have the watchtower to myself.

  The Shenandoah fires her cannons to salute the guard posts.

  What prisoner wants to behold his prison door slammed shut?

  Petals of smoke are plucked by the wind from the Shenandoah’s gunports …

  … the shot reverberates, like the lid of a harpsichord dropped shut.

  The farsighted clerk removes his spectacles in order to see better.

  The burgundy blotch on the quarterdeck is certainly Captain Lacy …

  … so the olive one must be the incorruptible Unico Vorstenbosch. Jacob imagines his erstwhile patron using Investigation into Misgovernance to blackmail company officials. “The company’s mint,” Vorstenbosch could now argue most persuasively, “requires a director with my experience and discretion.”

  Landward, citizens of Nagasaki are sitting on their roofs to watch the Dutch ship embark and dream of its destinations. Jacob thinks of his peers and fellow voyagers from home in Batavia; of colleagues in various offices during his days as a shipping clerk; of classmates in Middelburg and childhood friends in Domburg. Whilst they are out in the wide world, finding their paths and good-hearted wives, I shall be spending my twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth, and thirtieth years—my last best years—trapped in a dying factory with whatever flotsam and jetsam happen to wash up.

  Below, out of sight, a reluctant window of the deputy’s house is opened.

  “Be careful with that upholstery,” commands Fischer, “you mule …”

  Jacob looks in his tobacco pouch for a shred of leaf, but there is none.

  “… or I shall use your shit-brown skin to repair it: you savvy?”

  Jacob imagines returning to Domburg to find strangers in the parsonage.

  In Flag Square, priests conduct purification rites on the execution ground.

  “If you not pay priest,” Kobayashi warned Van Cleef yesterday, when Jacob’s future was silver if not golden, “ghosts of thiefses not find rest and become demon, so no Japanese enter Dejima again.”

  Hook-beaked gulls duel above a fishing skiff hauling up its nets.

  Time passes, and when Jacob looks down the bay, he is just in time to see the Shenandoah’s bowsprit vanish behind Tempelhoek …

  Her fo’c’sle is eaten by the rocky headland, then her three masts …

  … until the bottle’s mouth is blue and vacant as the third day of Creation.

  A WOMAN’S STRONG voice rouses Jacob from his half doze. She is nearby and sounds angry or frightened or both. Curious, he looks around for the source of the commotion. In Flag Square, the priests are still chanting prayers for the executed men.

  The land gate is open to let the water vendor’s ox off Dejima.

  Standing outside the gate, Aibagawa Orito is arguing with the guards.

  The watchtower lurches: Jacob finds he has lain flat on the platform, out of her line of vision.

  She is brandishing her wooden pass and pointing up Short Street.

  The guard examines her pass with suspicion; she looks over her shoulder.

  The ox, an empty urn hanging from each shoulder, is led over Holland Bridge.

  She was a fever. Jacob hides behind his eyelids. The fever is lifted.

  He looks again. The captain of the guard is inspecting the pass.

  Can she be here, he wonders, to seek sanctuary from Enomoto?

  His proposal of marriage now returns like a risen golem.

  I did want her, yes, he fears, when I knew I could never have her.

  The water vendor flicks his switch on his ox’s lumbering shanks.

  She may just be here—Jacob tries to calm himself—to visit the hospital.

  He notices her disarray: a sandal is missing; her neat hair is awry.

  But where are the other students? Why won’t the guards admit her?

  The captain is questioning Orito in sharp tones.

  Orito’s clarity is fraying; her despair is growing; this is no ordinary visit.

  Act! Jacob commands himself. Show the guards she is expected; fetch Dr. Marinus; fetch an interpreter: this is a balance that you may still tip.

  The three priests walk in a slow circle around the bloodstained dirt.

  It’s not you she wants, whispers Pride. It’s incarceration she wants to avoid.

  Thirty feet away, the captain turns Orito’s pass over, unimpressed.

  Suppose she were Geertje, asks Compassion, seeking sanctuary in Zeeland?

  In the captain’s resonant string of words Jacob hears the name “Enomoto.”

  Across Edo Square, a shaven-headed figure appears in a sky-blue robe.

  He catches sight of Orito and calls over his shoulder, motioning, Hurry!

  A sea-gray palanquin appears; it has eight bearers, denoting an owner of the highest rank.

  Jacob has a sense of entering a theater well into the play’s final act.

  I love her, comes the thought, as true as sunlight.

  Jacob is flying down the stairs, barking his shin on a corner post.

  He leaps the last six or eight steps and runs across Flag Square.

  Everything is happening too slow and too fast and all at once.

  Jacob clips an astonished priest and reaches the land gate as it closes.

  The captain is brandishing his pike, warning him not to take another step.

  Jacob’s rectangle of vision is narrowing as the gate closes.

  He sees Orito’s back as she is led away over Holland Bridge.

  Jacob opens his mouth to call out her name …

  … but the land gate slams shut.

  The well-oiled bolt slides home.

  Part Two

  A MOUNTAIN FASTNESS

  The tenth month in the eleventh year of the Era of Kansei

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ABOVE THE VILLAGE OF KUROZANE IN KYÔGA DOMAIN

  Late on the twenty-second day of the tenth month

  TWILIGHT IS COLD WITH THE THREAT OF SNOW. THE FOREST’S edges dissolve and blur. A black dog waits on an outcrop. He scents a fox’s hot stink.

  His silver-haired mistress struggles up the twisted path.

  A dead branch cracks under a deer’s hoof across the loud stream.

  An owl cries, in this cedar or that fir … once, twice, near, gone.

  Otane carries a twentieth of a koku of rice, enough for a month.

  Her youngest niece tried hard to persuade her to winter in the
village.

  The poor girl needs allies, thinks Otane, against her mother-in-law.

  “She’s pregnant again, too, did you notice?” she asks her dog.

  The niece had charged her aunt with the crime of making the entire family worry about her safety. “But I am safe,” the old woman repeats her answer to the root-truckled steps. “I’m too poor for cutthroats and too withered for bandits.”

  Her niece then argued that patients could consult her more readily down in the village. “Who wants to trek halfway up Mount Shiranui in midwinter?”

  “My cottage is not ‘halfway up’ anything! It’s less than a mile.”

  A song thrush in a mountain ash speaks of endings.

  A childless crone, Otane concedes, is lucky to have relatives to house her …

  But she also knows that leaving her hut would be easier than returning.

  “Come spring,” she mutters, “it’ll be, ‘Aunt Otane can’t go back to that ruin!’”

  Higher up, a pair of raccoons snarl murderous threats.

  The herbalist of Kurozane climbs on, her sack growing heavier with each step.

  OTANE REACHES THE gardened shelf where her cottage stands. Onions are strung below the deep eaves. Firewood is stacked below. She puts her rice down on the raised porch. Her body aches. She checks the goats in their stall and tips in a half bale of hay. Last, she peers into the chicken coop. “Who laid an egg for Auntie today, I wonder?”

  In the ripe murk she finds one, still warm. “Thank you, ladies.”

  She bolts the cottage door against the night, kneels before her hearth with her tinderbox, and coaxes a fire into life for her pot. In this she makes a soup of burdock root and yams. When it is hot, she adds the egg.

  The medicine cabinet calls her into the rear room.

  Patients and visitors are surprised to see such a beautiful cabinet reaching nearly to the ceiling of her humble cottage. Back in her great-great-grandfather’s day, six or eight strong men had carried it up from the village, though as a child it was simpler to believe that it had grown here, like an ancient tree. One by one, she slides out the well-waxed medicine drawers and inhales their contents. Here is toki parsley, good for colicky infants; next, acrid yomogi shavings, ground to a powder for moxibustion; last in this row, dokudami berries, or “fish mint,” to flush out sickness. The cabinet is her livelihood and the depository of her knowledge. She sniffs soapy mulberry leaves and hears her father telling her, “Good for ailments of the eye … and used with goat wort for ulcers, worms, and boils …” Then Otane reaches the bitter motherwort berries.

  She is reminded of Miss Aibagawa and withdraws to the fire.

  SHE FEEDS THE LEAN fire a fat log. “Two days from Nagasaki,” she says, “to ‘request an audience with Otane of Kurozane.’ Those were Miss Aibagawa’s words. I was digging manure into my pumpkin patch one day …”

  Dots of firelight are reflected in the dog’s clear eyes.

  “… when who appears at my fence but the village headman and priest.”

  The old woman chews a stringy burdock root, recalling the burned face. “Can it truly be three whole years ago?”

  The dog rolls onto his back, using his mistress’s foot as a pillow.

  He knows the story well, thinks Otane, but shan’t mind indulging me again.

  “I thought she’d come for treatment, seeing her burned face, but then the headman introduced her as ‘the celebrated Dr. Aibagawa’s daughter’ and ‘practitioner of Dutch-style midwifery’—as if he knew what such words mean! But then she asked if I might advise her on herbal treatments for childbirth and, well, I thought my ears were liars.”

  Otane rolls a boiled egg to and fro on her wooden platter.

  “When she told me that amongst druggists and scholars in Nagasaki, the name ‘Otane of Kurozane’ is a guarantee of purity, I was horrified that my lowly name was known by such elevated folk …”

  The old woman picks off the fragments of eggshell with her berry-dyed fingernails and remembers how gracefully Miss Aibagawa dismissed the headman and priest, and how attentively she wrote down Otane’s observations. “She wrote as well as any man. Yakumosô interested her. ‘Smear it over torn loins,’ I told her, ‘and it prevents fevers and heals the skin. It soothes nipples inflamed by breastfeeding, too …’” Otane bites into the boiled egg, warmed by the memory of the samurai’s daughter acting quite at home in this commoner’s cottage while her two servants rebuilt a goat pen and repaired a wall. “You remember the headman’s eldest son bringing up lunch,” she tells the dog. “Polished white rice, quail eggs, and sea bream, steaming in plantain leaves … Well, we thought we were in the Palace of the Moon Princess!” Otane lifts the kettle’s lid and drops in a fistful of coarse tea. “I spoke more in a single afternoon than I had done all year. Miss Aibagawa wanted to pay me ‘tuition money’—but how could I charge her a single sen? So she bought my stock of motherwort but left three times the usual price.”

  The darkness opposite stirs and quickens into the form of a cat.

  “Where were you hiding? We were talking about Miss Aibagawa’s first visit. She sent us dried sea bream the following New Year. Her servant delivered it all the way from the city.” The sooty kettle begins to wheeze, and Otane thinks about the second visit during the sixth month of the following year, when the butterbur was in flower. “She was in love that summer. Oh, I didn’t ask, but she couldn’t refrain from mentioning a young Dutch interpreter from a good family named Ogawa. Her voice altered”—the cat looks up—“when she said his name.” Outside, night stirs the creaking trees. Otane pours her tea before the water boils and embitters the leaves. “I prayed that, once they were married, Ogawa-sama would still let her visit Kyôga Domain to gladden my heart and that her second visit would not be her last.” She sips her tea, recalling the day when the news reached Kurozane, passed up a chain of relatives and servants, that the head of the Ogawas had denied his son permission to marry Dr. Aibagawa’s daughter. Then, in the New Year, Otane learned that Ogawa the Interpreter had taken another bride. “Despite this unfortunate turn”—Otane pokes the fire—“Miss Aibagawa didn’t forget me. She sent me my shawl made out of the warmest foreign wool, as a New Year’s gift.”

  The dog wriggles on his back to scratch his flea bites.

  Otane recalls this summer’s visit as the strangest of Miss Aibagawa’s three excursions to Kurozane. Two weeks before, when the azaleas were in flower, a salt merchant had brought news to the Harubayashi Inn about how Dr. Aibagawa’s daughter had performed “a Dutch miracle” and breathed life into Magistrate Shiroyama’s stillborn child. “So when she visited, half the village walked up to Otane’s cottage, hoping for more Dutch miracles. ‘Medicine is knowledge,’ Miss Aibagawa told the villagers, ‘not magic.’” She gave advice to the small crowd, and they thanked her but left disappointed. When they were alone, the young woman confided that it had been a trying year. Her father had been ill, and the careful way she avoided any mention of Ogawa the Interpreter indicated a badly bruised heart. Brighter news, however, was that the grateful magistrate had given her permission to study on Dejima under the Dutch doctor. “Well, I must have looked worried.” Otane strokes her cat. “You hear such stories about foreigners. But she assured me that this Dutch doctor was a great teacher, known even to Lord Abbot Enomoto.”

  Wings beat by the chimney flue. The owl is out hunting.

  Then, six weeks ago, came the most shocking news of Otane’s recent life.

  Miss Aibagawa was to become a sister at Mount Shiranui Shrine.

  OTANE TRIED TO VISIT Miss Aibagawa at the Harubayashi Inn the night before she was taken up the mountain, but neither their existing friendship nor Otane’s twice-yearly delivery of medicines to the shrine convinced the monk to ignore the prohibition. She could not even leave a letter. She was told that the newest sister could have nothing to do with the world below for twenty years. What sort of a life, Otane wonders, shall she have in that place? “Nobody knows,” she
mutters to herself, “and that is the problem.”

  She turns over the few known facts about Mount Shiranui Shrine.

  It is the spiritual seat of Lord Abbot Enomoto, daimyo of Kyôga Domain.

  The shrine’s goddess ensures the fertility of Kyôga’s streams and rice fields.

  None but the masters and acolytes of the order enter and leave.

  These men number about sixty in total, and the sisters, about a dozen. The sisters live in their own house, within the shrine walls, and are governed by an abbess. Servants at the Harubayashi Inn report blemishes or defects that, in most cases, would doom the girls to lives as freaks in brothels, and Abbot Enomoto is praised for giving these unfortunates a better life …

  … but surely not, Otane frets, the daughter of a samurai and doctor?

  “A burned face makes marriage harder,” she mumbles, “but not impossible.”

  The scarcity of facts leaves holes where rumors breed. Many villagers have heard how former sisters of Shiranui receive lodgings and a pension for the rest of their lives, but as the retired nuns never stop in Kurozane, no villager has ever spoken with one face-to-face. Buntarô, the blacksmith’s son, who serves at the halfway gate up Mekura Gorge, claims that Master Kinten trains the monks to be assassins, which is why the shrine is so secretive. A flirty chambermaid at the inn met a hunter who swore he had seen winged monster women dressed as nuns flying around Bare Peak at the summit of Shiranui. This very afternoon, the mother-in-law of Otane’s niece in Kurozane observed that monks’ seeds are as fertile as any other men’s and asked how many bushels of “angel-making” herbs the shrine ordered. Otane denied, truthfully, supplying medicines to cause abortions to Master Suzaku and realized that discovering this had been the mother-in-law’s goal.

  The villagers speculate, but they know better than to hunt for answers. They are proud of their association with the reclusive monastery and are paid for provisioning it; to ask too many questions would be to bite the hand of a generous donor. The monks probably are monks, Otane hopes, and the sisters live as nuns …