The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, Page 23

  Crows perch along the ridge of the steep roof, eyeing the prisoner.

  Of all the women you could acquire, she would ask Enomoto, why rob me of my life?

  But in fifty days, the Abbot of Shiranui has not once visited his shrine.

  “In time,” Abbess Izu answers all her questions and entreaties, “in time.”

  In the kitchen, Sister Asagao is stirring soup over a huffing fire. Asagao’s disfigurement is one of the more arresting in the house: her lips are fused into a circle that also deforms her speech. Her friend Sadaie was born with a misshapen skull, giving her head a feline shape that makes her eyes appear unnaturally large. When she sees Orito, she stops speaking in mid-sentence.

  Why do those two watch me, Orito wonders, like squirrels watch a hungry cat?

  Their faces inform her that she is uttering her thoughts aloud again.

  This is another mortifying trick of solace and the house.

  “Sister Yayoi is sick,” says Orito. “I wish to take her a bowl of tea. Please.”

  Sadaie indicates the kettle with her eyes: one is brown, one is gray.

  Beneath her gown, Sadaie’s own pregnancy is becoming visible.

  It’s a girl, thinks the doctor’s daughter, pouring the bitter brew.

  WHEN ACOLYTE ZANÔ’S stuffed-nose shout rings out, “Gates opening, Sisters!” Orito hurries to a point in the inner corridor midway between Abbess Izu’s and Housekeeper Satsuki’s rooms and slides open the wooden screen. From this position, just once, in her first week here, she saw through both sets of gates into the precincts and glimpsed steps, a cluster of maples, a blue-cloaked master, and an acolyte in undyed hemp …

  … but this morning, as usual, the acolyte on sentry duty is more careful. Orito sees nothing but the closed outer gates, and a pair of acolytes bring in the day’s provisions by handcart.

  Sister Sawarabi swoops from the stateroom. “Acolyte Chûai! Acolyte Maboroshi! This snow hasn’t frozen your bones, I hope? Master Genmu’s a heartless one, starving his young mustangs into skeletons.”

  “We find ways,” Maboroshi flirts back, “to keep warm, Sister.”

  “Oh, but how can I forget?” Sawarabi brushes her middle breast with her fingertips. “Isn’t Jiritsu provisioning us this week, that shameless slugabed?”

  Maboroshi’s levity vanishes. “The acolyte has fallen into sickness.”

  “My, my. Sickness, you say. Not just … early-winter sneezes?”

  “His condition”—Maboroshi and Chûai begin carrying supplies into the kitchen—“is grave, it seems.”

  “We hope,” cleft-lipped Sister Hotaru adds, appearing from the stateroom, “that poor Acolyte Jiritsu is not in danger of death?”

  “His condition is grave.” Maboroshi is terse. “We must prepare for the worst.”

  “Well, the newest sister was a famous doctor’s daughter, in her previous life, so Master Suzaku could do worse than ask for her. She’d come, and gladly, because”—Sawarabi cups her mouth to her hand and calls across the courtyard to Orito’s hiding place—“she’d die to see the precincts, so as to plan her escape, wouldn’t you, Sister Orito?”

  Blushing, the exposed observer beats a tearful retreat to her cell.

  ALL THE SISTERS except Yayoi, along with Abbess Izu and Housekeeper Satsuki, kneel at the low table in the long room. The doors to the prayer room, where the gold-leafed statue of the pregnant Goddess is housed, are open. The Goddess watches the sisters over the head of Abbess Izu, who strikes her tubular gong. The Sutra of Gratitude begins.

  “To Abbot Enomoto-no-kami,” the women chorus, “our spiritual guide …”

  Orito pictures herself spitting on the illustrious colleague of her late father.

  “… whose sagacity guides the shrine of Mount Shiranui …”

  Abbess Izu and Housekeeper Satsuki notice Orito’s motionless lips.

  “… we, the Daughters of Izanazô, render the gratitude of the nurtured child.”

  It is a passive protest, but Orito lacks the means of more active dissent.

  “To Abbot Genmu-no-kami, whose wisdom protects the House of Sisters …”

  Orito glares at Housekeeper Satsuki, who looks away, embarrassed.

  “… we, the Daughters of Izanazô, render the gratitude of the justly governed.”

  Orito glares at Abbess Izu, who absorbs her defiance kindly.

  “To the Goddess of Shiranui, Fountainhead of Life and Mother of Gifts …”

  Orito looks above the sisters opposite at the hanging scrolls.

  “… we, the Sisters of Shiranui, render the fruits of our wombs …”

  The scrolls display seasonal paintings and lines from Shintô texts.

  “… so that fertility cascades over Kyôga, so famine and drought are banished …”

  The center scroll shows the sisters’ precedence, ranked by numbers of births.

  Exactly like, Orito thinks with disgust, a stable of sumo wrestlers.

  “… so that the wheel of life shall turn through eternity …”

  The wooden tablet inscribed ORITO is on the far right position.

  “… until the last star burns out and the wheel of time is broken.”

  Abbess Izu strikes her gong once to indicate the sutra’s conclusion. Housekeeper Satsuki closes the doors to the prayer room, while Asagao and Sadaie bring rice and miso soup from the adjacent kitchen.

  When Abbess Izu strikes the gong again, the sisters begin breakfast.

  Speech and eye contact are forbidden, but friends pour one another’s water.

  Fourteen mouths—Yayoi is excused—chew, slurp, and swallow.

  What fine foods is Stepmother eating? Hatred churns Orito’s insides.

  Every sister leaves a few grains of rice to feed the spirits of their ancestors.

  Orito does the same, reasoning that in this place, any and all allies are needed.

  Abbess Izu strikes the tubular gong to indicate the end of the meal. As Sadaie and Asagao clear the dishes, pink-eyed Hashihime asks Abbess Izu about the sick acolyte, Jiritsu.

  “He is being nursed in his cell,” replies the abbess. “He has a trembling fever.”

  Several of the sisters cover their mouths and murmur in alarm.

  Why such pity, Orito burns to ask, for one of your captors?

  “A porter in Kurozane died from the disease: poor Jiritsu may have breathed in the same vapors. Master Suzaku asked us to pray for the acolyte’s recovery.”

  Most of the sisters nod earnestly and promise to do so.

  Abbess Izu then assigns the day’s housekeeping. “Sisters Hatsune and Hashihime, continue yesterday’s weaving. Sister Kiritsubo is to sweep the cloisters; and Sister Umegae, twist the flax in the storeroom into twine, with Sisters Minori and Yûgiri. At the Hour of the Horse, go to the great shrine to polish the floor. Sister Yûgiri may be excused this, if she wishes, on account of her gift.”

  What ugly, twisted words, thinks Orito, for malformed thoughts.

  Every head in the room looks at Orito. She spoke aloud again.

  “Sisters Hotaru and Sawarabi,” continues the abbess, “dust the prayer room, then attend to the latrines. Sisters Asagao and Sadaie are on kitchen duty, of course, so Sister Kagerô and our newest sister”—the crueler eyes turn to Orito, saying, See the fine lady, working like one of her old servants—“are to work in the laundry. If Sister Yayoi is feeling better, she may join them.”

  THE LAUNDRY, a long annex to the kitchen, has two hearths to heat water, a pair of large tubs for washing linen, and a rack of bamboo poles where laundry is hung. Orito and Kagerô carry buckets of water from the pool in the courtyard. To fill each tub costs forty or fifty trips, and the two do not talk. At first the samurai’s daughter was exhausted by the work, but now her legs and arms are tougher, and the blisters on her palms are covered with calloused skin. Yayoi tends the fires to heat the water.

  Soon, Fat Rat taunts, balancing on the slop barrow, your belly shall look like hers.

 
; “I shan’t let the dogs touch me,” mutters Orito. “I shan’t be here.”

  Your body isn’t yours anymore. Fat Rat smirks. It’s the Goddess’s.

  Orito loses her footing on the kitchen step and spills her bucket.

  “I don’t know how,” says Kagerô coolly, “we coped without you.”

  “The floor needed a good wash, anyway.” Yayoi helps Orito mop the spillage.

  When the water is warm enough, Yayoi stirs in the blankets and nightshirts. With wooden tongs, Orito transfers them, dripping and heavy, onto the laundry vise, a slanted table with a hinged door that Kagerô closes to squeeze out the water from the linen. Kagerô then hangs the damp laundry on the bamboo poles. Through the kitchen door, Sadaie is telling Yayoi about last night’s dream. “There was a knocking at the gate. I left my room—it was summer—but it didn’t feel like summer, or night, or day …. The house was deserted. Still, the knocking went on, so I asked, ‘Who is it?’ And a man’s voice replied, ‘It’s me, it’s Iwai.’”

  “Sister Sadaie was delivered of her first gift,” Yayoi tells Orito, “last year.”

  “Born on the fifth day of the fifth month,” says Sadaie, “the Day of Boys.”

  The women think of carp streamers and festive innocence.

  “So Abbot Genmu,” Sadaie continues, “named him Iwai, as in ‘celebration.’”

  “A brewer’s family in Takamatsu,” Yayoi says, “called Takaishi adopted him.”

  Orito is hidden by a cloud of steam. “So I understand.”

  Asagao says, “Phut you uur spheaking a’out your drean, Sister …”

  “Well,” Sadaie says, scrubbing at a crust of burned-on rice, “I was surprised that Iwai had grown up so quickly and worried that he’d be in trouble for breaking the rule that bans gifts from Mount Shiranui. But”—she looks in the direction of the prayer room and lowers her voice—“I had to unbolt the inner gate.”

  “The ’olt,” Asagao asks, “’as on the inside oph the inner gate, you say.”

  “Yes, it was. It didn’t occur to me at the time. So the gate opened—”

  Yayoi provides a cry of impatience. “What did you see, Sister?”

  “Dry leaves. No gift, no Iwai, just dry leaves. The wind carried them away.”

  “That,” Kagerô leans hard on the vise’s handle, “is an ill omen.”

  Sadaie is unnerved by Kagerô’s certainty. “Do you really think so, Sister?”

  “How could your gift turning into dead leaves be a good omen?”

  Yayoi stirs the cauldron. “Sister Kagerô, you’ll upset Sadaie.”

  “Just speaking the truth,” Kagerô replies, squeezing out the water, “as I see it.”

  “Could you tell,” Asagao asks Sadaie, “I’ai’s phather phon his phoice?”

  “That’s it,” says Yayoi. “Your dream was a clue about Iwai’s father.”

  Even Kagerô shows interest in the theory: “Which monks were your engifters?”

  Housekeeper Satsuki enters, carrying a new box of soap nuts.

  THE RAREFIED SUNSET turns the snow-veined Bare Peak a bloodied fish pink, and the evening star is as sharp as a needle. Smoke and smells of cooking leak from the kitchen. With the exception of the week’s two cooks, the women’s time is their own until Master Suzaku’s arrival prior to supper. Orito embarks on her anticlockwise walk around the cloisters to distract her body from its clamorous longing for her solace. Several sisters are gathered in the long room, whitening one another’s faces or blackening their teeth. Yayoi is resting in her cell. Blind Sister Minori is teaching a koto arrangement of “Eight Miles Through a Mountain Pass” to Sadaie. Umegae, Hashihime, and Kagerô are also taking exercise, clockwise, around the cloisters. Orito is obliged to stand aside as they pass. For the thousandth time since her kidnapping, Orito wishes she had the means to write. Unauthorized letters to the outside world, she knows, are forbidden, and she would burn anything she wrote for fear of her thoughts being exposed. But an ink brush, she thinks, is a skeleton key for a prisoner’s mind. Abbess Izu has promised to present her with a writing set after her first gifting is confirmed.

  How could I endure that act, Orito shudders, and live afterward?

  When she turns the next corner, Bare Peak is no longer pink but gray.

  She considers the twelve women in the house who do endure it.

  She thinks about the last newest sister, who hanged herself.

  “Venus,” Orito’s father once told her, “follows a clockwise orbit. All her sister and brother planets circle the sun in an anticlockwise manner …”

  … but the memory of her father is chased away by jeering ifs.

  Umegae, Hashihime, and Kagerô form a shuffling wall of padded kimonos.

  If Enomoto had never seen me or chosen to add me to his collection …

  Orito hears the chop chop chop of knives in the kitchen.

  If Stepmother was as compassionate a woman as she once pretended …

  Orito must press herself against the wooden screen to let them pass.

  If Enomoto hadn’t guaranteed Father’s loans with the moneylenders …

  “Some of us are so well bred,” Kagerô remarks, “they think rice grows on trees.”

  If Jacob de Zoet had seen me at Dejima land gate, on my last day …

  The three women drift by, hems traipsing along the wooden planks.

  A Dutch alphabet V of geese crosses the sky; a forest monkey shrieks.

  Better a Dejima wife, Orito thinks, protected by a foreigner’s money …

  A mountain bird on the old pine sings in intricate stitches.

  … than what happens to me in the engifting week, if I don’t escape.

  The walled stream enters and leaves the courtyard under the raised cloister floor, feeding the pool. Orito presses herself against the wooden screen.

  “She supposes,” says Hashihime, “a magic cloud shall whisk her away.”

  Stars pollinate the banks of Heaven’s River, germinate and sprout.

  Europeans, Orito remembers, call it the Milky Way. Her soft-spoken father is back. “Here is Umihebi, the sea snake; there Tokei, the clock; over here, Ite, the archer”—she can smell his warm smell—“and above, Ranshinban, the compass …”

  The bolt of the inner gate screeches open: “Opening!”

  Every sister hears. Every sister thinks, Master Suzaku.

  THE SISTERS GATHER in the long room, wearing their finest clothes, save for Sadaie and Asagao, who are still preparing supper, and Orito, who owns only the work-kimono in which she was abducted, a warm quilted hakata jacket, and a couple of headscarves. Even lower-ranked sisters like Yayoi already have a choice of two or three kimonos of fair quality—one for every child born—with simple necklaces and bamboo hair combs. Senior sisters, like Hatsune and Hashihime, have acquired, over the years, as rich a wardrobe as that of a high-ranking merchant wife.

  Her hunger for solace is now an incessant pounding, but Orito also has the longest wait: one by one, in order of the list of precedence, the sisters are summoned to the square room, where Suzaku holds his consultations and administers his potions. Suzaku spends two or three minutes with each patient; for some sisters, the minutiae of their ailments and the master’s thoughts on the same are a fascination second only to the New Year letters. First Sister Hatsune returns from her consultation with the news that Acolyte Jiritsu’s fever is worsening, and Master Suzaku doubts he shall survive the night.

  Most of the sisters express shock and dismay.

  “Our masters and acolytes,” swears Hatsune, “are so very rarely ill …”

  Orito catches herself wondering what febrifuges have been administered, before thinking, He is no concern of mine.

  The women swap memories of Jiritsu, using the past tense.

  Sooner than expected, Yayoi is touching her shoulder. “Your turn.”

  “HOW DO WE FIND the newest sister this evening?” Master Suzaku gives the impression of a man perpetually on the brink of laughter tha
t never comes. The effect is sinister. Abbess Izu occupies one corner and an acolyte another.

  Orito answers her usual answer: “Alive, as you see.”

  “Do we know”—Suzaku indicates the young man—“Acolyte Chûai?”

  Kagerô and the meaner sisters nickname Chûai “the Swollen Toad.”

  “Certainly not.” Orito does not look at the acolyte.

  Suzaku clicks his tongue. “The first snow is not sapping our constitution?”

  Don’t plead for solace. She says, “No.” He loves you to plead.

  “We have no symptoms to report, then? No aches or bleedings?”

  The world, she guesses, is his own vast private joke. “Nothing.”

  “Or constipation? Diarrhea? Hemorrhoids? Thrush? Migraines?”

  “What I am suffering from,” Orito is goaded into saying, “is incarceration.”

  Suzaku smiles at Acolyte Chûai and the abbess. “Our ties to the world below cut us, like wire. Sever them, and be as happy as your dear sisters.”

  “My ‘dear sisters’ were rescued from brothels and freak shows, and perhaps, for them, life here is better. I lost more, and Enomoto”—Abbess Izu and Acolyte Chûai flinch to hear the abbot named with such contempt—“hasn’t even faced me since he bought me; and don’t dare”—Orito stops herself pointing at Suzaku like an angry Dutchman—“spout your platitudes about destiny and divine balance. Just give me my solace. Please. The women want their supper.”

  “It scarcely behooves you,” begins the abbess, “to address—”

  Suzaku interrupts her with a respectful hand. “Let us show her a little indulgence, Abbess, even if undeserved. Contrariness often is best tamed by kindness.” The monk decants a muddy liquid into a thimble-sized stone cup.

  See how painstakingly he moves, she thinks, to sharpen your hunger …

  Orito stops her hand from snatching the cup from the proffered tray.

  She turns away to conceal with her sleeve the vulgar act of drinking.

  “Once you are engifted,” promises Suzaku, “your sense of belonging shall grow, too.”

  Never, Orito thinks, never. Her tongue absorbs the oily fluid …