The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, Page 53

  To win, his father taught him, purify yourself of the desire to win.

  Enomoto secures his northern army by opening an eye in its ranks.

  The blind man moves fast: click goes his cane; click, a stone is placed.

  A few moves later, Shiroyama’s black takes six white prisoners.

  “They were living on borrowed time,” Enomoto remarks, “at crippling interest.” He plants a spy deep behind black’s western frontier.

  Shiroyama ignores it and starts a road between his western and central armies.

  Enomoto places another strange stone in the southwest of nowhere.

  Two moves later, Shiroyama’s bold black bridge is only three stones from completion. Surely, thinks the magistrate, he can’t allow me to go unchallenged?

  Enomoto places a stone within hailing distance of his western spy …

  … and Shiroyama sees the way stations of a black cordon, curving in a crescent from southwest to northeast.

  If white prevents black’s main armies conjoining at this late stage …

  … my empire, Shiroyama sees, is split into three paltry fiefdoms.

  The bridge is just two intersections away: Shiroyama claims one …

  … and Enomoto places a white stone on the other: the battle turns.

  I go there so he goes there; I go there so he goes there; I go there …

  But by the fifth move and countermove, Shiroyama forgets the first.

  Go is a duel between prophets, he thinks. Whoever sees furthest wins.

  His divided armies are reduced to praying for a white blunder.

  But Enomoto, knows the magistrate, does not make blunders.

  “Do you ever suspect,” he asks, “we don’t play go; rather, go plays us?”

  “Your Honor has a monastic mind,” Enomoto replies.

  More moves follow, but the game has passed its perfect ripeness.

  Discreetly, Shiroyama counts his territory and the prisoners taken.

  Enomoto does the same for white, and waits for the magistrate.

  The abbot makes it eight points in white’s favor; Shiroyama puts Enomoto’s margin of victory at eight and a half points.

  “A duel,” remarks the loser, “between boldness and subtleties.”

  “My subtleties very nearly undid me,” concedes Enomoto.

  The players return the stones to the bowls.

  “Ensure this go set goes to my son,” Shiroyama orders Tomine.

  SHIROYAMA INDICATES the red gourd. “Thank you for providing the sake, Lord Abbot.”

  “Thank you for respecting my precautions, even now, Magistrate.”

  Shiroyama sifts Enomoto’s tone for glints of irony but finds none.

  The acolyte fills the four black cups from the red gourd.

  The Hall of Sixty Mats is now as quiet as a forgotten graveyard.

  My final minutes, thinks the magistrate, watching the careful acolyte.

  A black swallowtail butterfly blunders across the table.

  The acolyte hands one cup of sake to the magistrate first, one to his master, one to the chamberlain, and returns to his cushion with the fourth.

  So as not to glance at Tomine or Enomoto’s cup, Shiroyama imagines the wronged souls—how many tens, how many hundreds?—watching from the slants of darkness, thirsty for vengeance. He raises his cup. He says, “Life and death are indivisible.”

  The other three repeat the well-worn phrase. The magistrate shuts his eyes.

  The volcano-ash glaze of the Sakurajima cup is rough on his lips.

  The astringent spirit sluices around the magistrate’s mouth …

  … and its aftertaste is perfumed … untainted by the additive.

  From inside the dark tent of his eyelids, he hears loyal Tomine drink …

  … but neither Enomoto nor the acolyte follows. Seconds pass.

  Despair possesses the magistrate. Enomoto knew about the poison.

  When he opens his eyes, he will be greeted by wry mockery.

  Our planning, ingenuity, and Tomine’s terrible sacrifice are in vain.

  He has failed Orito, Ogawa, and De Zoet, and all the wronged souls.

  Did Tomine’s procurer betray us? Or the Chinese druggist?

  Should I try to kill the devil with my ceremonial sword?

  He opens his eyes to gauge his chances, as Enomoto drains his cup …

  … and the acolyte lowers his own, a moment after his master.

  Shiroyama’s despair is gone, replaced in a heartbeat by a flat fact. They will know in two minutes, and we will be dead in four. “Would you spread the cloth, Chamberlain? Just over there …”

  Enomoto raises his palm. “My acolyte can perform such work.”

  They watch the young man unfold the large sheet of white hemp. Its purpose is to absorb blood from the decapitated body and to wrap the corpse afterward, but its role this morning is to distract Enomoto from the magistrate’s true endgame while the sake is absorbed by their bodies.

  “Shall I recite,” the lord abbot offers, “a mantra of redemption?”

  “What redemption can be won,” replies Shiroyama, “is mine now.”

  Enomoto makes no comment but retrieves his sword. “Is your harakiri to be visceral, Magistrate, with a tantô dagger, or shall it be a symbolic touch with your fan, after the modern fashion?”

  Numbness is encrusting the ends of Shiroyama’s fingers and toes. The poison is safe in our veins. “First, Lord Abbot, an explanation is owed.”

  Enomoto lays his sword across his knees. “Regarding what matter?”

  “Regarding why the four of us shall be dead within three minutes.”

  Enomoto studies Shiroyama’s face for evidence that he misheard.

  The well-trained acolyte rises, reading the silent hall for threat.

  “Dark emotions,” Enomoto speaks with indulgence, “may cloud one’s heart at such a time, but for the sake of your posthumous name, Magistrate, you must—”

  “Quiet before the magistrate’s verdict!” The crushed-nose chamberlain speaks with the full authority of his office.

  Enomoto blinks at the older man. “Addressing me in that—”

  “Lord Abbot Enomoto-no-kami”—Shiroyama knows how little time remains—“daimyo of Kyôga Domain, high priest of the shrine of Mount Shiranui, by the power vested in me by the august shogun, you are hereby found guilty of the murder of the sixty-three women buried behind the Harubayashi Inn on the Sea of Ariake Road, of orchestrating the captivity of the sisters of the Shrine of Mount Shiranui, and of the persistent and unnatural infanticide of the issue fathered upon those women by you and your monks. You shall atone for these crimes with your life.”

  The muffled clatter of horses penetrates the closed-off hall.

  Enomoto is impassive. “It grieves me to see a once-noble mind—”

  “Do you deny these charges? Or suppose yourself immune?”

  “Your questions are ignoble. Your charges are contemptible. Your assumption that you, a disgraced appointee, could punish me—me!—is a breathtaking vanity. Come, Acolyte, we must leave this pitiable scene and—”

  “Why are your hands and feet so cold on such a warm day?”

  Enomoto opens his scornful mouth and frowns at the red gourd.

  “It never left my sight, Master,” states the acolyte. “Nothing was added.”

  “First,” says Shiroyama, “I offer up my reasons. When, two or three years ago, rumors reached us about bodies being hidden in a bamboo grove behind the Harubayashi Inn, I paid little heed. Rumors are not proof, your friends in Edo are more powerful than mine, and a daimyo’s back garden is no one else’s concern—ordinarily. But when you spirited away the very midwife who saved the lives of my concubine and son, my interest in the Mount Shiranui Shrine grew. The lord of Hizen produced a spy who told some grotesque tales about your retired nuns. That he was soon killed only confirmed his tales, so when a certain testament in a dogwood scroll tube—”

  “Apostate Jiritsu wa
s a viper who turned against the order.”

  “And Ogawa Uzaemon was, of course, killed by mountain bandits?”

  “Ogawa was a spy and a dog who died like a spy and a dog.” Enomoto sways as he stands, staggers, falls, and snarls, “What have you—what have you—”

  “The poison attacks the body’s musculature, beginning at the extremities and ending with the heart and diaphragm. It is extracted from the glands of a tree snake found only in a Siamese delta. This creature is known as the four-minute snake. A learned chemist can guess why. It is unsurpassingly lethal, and unsurpassingly difficult to procure, but Tomine is an unsurpassingly well-connected chamberlain. We tested it on a dog, which lasted … how long, Chamberlain?”

  “Less than two minutes, Your Honor.”

  “Whether the dog died of bloodlessness or suffocation, we shall soon discover. I am losing my elbows and knees as we speak.”

  Enomoto is helped by his acolyte into a sitting position.

  The acolyte tumbles and lies struggling, like a cut-string puppet.

  “In air,” the magistrate continues, “the poison hardens into a thin, clear flake. But a liquid—especially a spirit, like sake—dissolves it instantaneously. Hence the coarse Sakurajima cups—to hide the painted-on poison. That you saw through my offensive on the go board, but overlooked this simple stratagem, amply justifies my death.”

  Enomoto, his face distorted by fear and fury, reaches for his sword, but his arm is stiff and wooden and he cannot draw his weapon from its scabbard. He stares at his hand in disbelief and, with a guttural snarl, swings his fist at his sake cup.

  It skips across the empty floor, like a pebble skimming dark water.

  “If you knew, Shiroyama, you horsefly, what you’ve done …”

  “What I know is that the souls of those unmourned women buried behind the Harubayashi Inn—”

  “Those disfigured whores were fated from birth to die in gutters!”

  “—those souls may rest now. Justice is served.”

  “The order of Shiranui lengthens their lives, not shortens them!”

  “So that ‘gifts’ can be bred to feed your derangement?”

  “We sow and harvest our crop! Our crop is ours to use as we please!”

  “Your order sows cruelty in the service of madness and—”

  “The creeds work, you human termite! Oil of souls works! How could an order founded on insanity survive for so many centuries? How could an abbot earn the favor of the empire’s most cunning men with quackery?”

  The purest believers, Shiroyama thinks, are the truest monsters. “Your order dies with you, Lord Abbot. Jiritsu’s testimony is gone to Edo and”—his breaths grow sparser as the poison numbs his diaphragm—“and without you to defend it, Mount Shiranui Shrine will be disestablished.”

  The flung-away cup rolls in a wide arc, trundling and whispering.

  Shiroyama, sitting cross-legged, tests his arms. They predecease him.

  “Our order,” Enomoto gasps, “the Goddess, the ritual, harvested souls …”

  A guppering noise escapes Chamberlain Tomine. His jaw vibrates.

  Enomoto’s eyes fry and shine. “I cannot die.”

  Tomine falls forward onto the go board. Bowls of stones scatter.

  “Senescence undone”—Enomoto’s face locks—“skin unmottled, vigor unstolen.”

  “Master, I’m cold.” The acolyte’s voice melts. “I’m cold, Master.”

  “Across the River Sansho,” Shiroyama spends his last words, “your victims are waiting.” His tongue and lips no longer cooperate. Some say—Shiroyama’s body turns to stone—that there is no afterlife. Some say that human beings are no more eternal than mice or mayflies. But your eyes, Enomoto, prove that hell is no invention, for hell is reflected in them. The floor tilts and becomes the wall.

  Above him, Enomoto’s curse is malformed and strangled.

  Leave him behind, the magistrate thinks. Leave everything now …

  Shiroyama’s heart stops. The earth’s pulse beats against his ear.

  An inch away is a go clamshell stone, perfect and smooth …

  … a black butterfly lands on the white stone, and unfolds its wings.

  Part Four

  THE RAINY SEASON

  1811

  CHAPTER FORTY

  MOUNT INASA TEMPLE, OVERLOOKING NAGASAKI BAY

  Morning of Friday, July 3, 1811

  THE CORTEGE PROCEEDS ACROSS THE CEMETERY, LED BY TWO Buddhist priests, whose black, white, and blue-black robes remind Jacob of magpies, a bird he has not seen for thirteen years. One priest bangs a dull drum, and another strikes a pair of sticks. Following behind are four eta, carrying Marinus’s coffin. Jacob walks alongside his ten-year-old son, Yûan. Interpreters of the First Rank Iwase and Goto walk a few steps behind, with the hoar-frosted, evergreen Dr. Maeno and Ôtsuki Monjurô from the Shirandô Academy ahead of the four guards in the rear. Marinus’s headstone and coffin were paid for by the academicians, and Chief Resident de Zoet is grateful: for three seasons Dejima has been dependent upon loans from the Nagasaki Exchequer.

  Droplets of mist cling to Jacob’s red beard. Some escape down his throat, beneath his least-frayed collar, and are lost in the warm sweat drenching his torso.

  The foreigners’ enclosure is at the far end of the cemetery, by the edge of the steep forest. Jacob is reminded of the burial place reserved for suicides adjacent to his uncle’s church in Domburg. My late uncle’s church, he corrects himself. The last letter from home reached Dejima three years ago, though Geertje had written it two years before. After their uncle’s death, his sister had married the schoolmaster of Vrouwenpolder, a small village east of Domburg, where she teaches the younger children. The French occupation of Walcheren makes life difficult, Geertje admitted—the great church at Veere is a barracks and stables for Napoleon’s troops—but her husband, she wrote, is a good man, and they are luckier than most.

  The calls of cuckoos haunt the mist-dripping morning.

  Within the foreigners’ enclosure waits a large group of mourners, half hidden under umbrellas. The slow pace of the cortege allows him to peruse some of the twelve or thirteen dozen headstones: his are the first Dutch feet ever to enter this place, so far as he can determine from his predecessors’ day registers. The names of the very earliest dead are lost to frost and lichen, but from the Genroku Era onward—the 1690s, Jacob calculates—inscriptions can be discerned with increasing certainty. Jonas Terpstra, a likely Frieslander, died in the First Year of Hôei, at the beginning of the last century; Klaas Oldewarris was summoned to God in the Third Year of Hôryaku, during the 1750s; Abraham van Doeselaar, a fellow Zeelander, died in the Ninth Year of An’ei, two decades before the Shenandoah sailed to Nagasaki. Here is the grave of the young mestizo who fell from the English frigate, whom Jacob christened in death “Jack Farthing”; and Wybo Gerritszoon, dead of a “ruptured abdomen” in the Fourth Year of Kyôwa, nine years ago: Marinus suspected a burst appendix but kept his promise not to cut open Gerritszoon’s body to check his diagnosis. Jacob recalls Gerritszoon’s aggression very well, but the man’s face has faded from memory.

  Dr. Marinus arrives at his final destination.

  The headstone reads, in both Japanese and the Roman alphabet, DR. LUCAS MARINUS, PHYSICIAN AND BOTANIST, DIED 7TH YEAR OF THE ERA OF BUNKA. The priests intone a mantra as the coffin is lowered. Jacob removes his snakeskin hat and, by way of counterpoint to the heathen chant, silently recites sections of the Hundred and Forty-first Psalm. “‘Our bones are scattered at the grave’s mouth …’”

  Seven days ago, Marinus was in as hale health as ever.

  “‘… as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth. But mine eyes are unto Thee, O God the Lord …’”

  On Wednesday he announced that he was going to die on Friday.

  “‘… in Thee is my trust; leave not my soul destitute.’”

  A slow aneurysm in his brain, he said, was hooding his senses.

 
; “‘Let my prayer be set forth before Thee as incense …’”

  He looked so unworried—and so well—as he wrote his will.

  “‘… and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.’”

  Jacob didn’t believe him, but on Thursday Marinus took to his bed.

  “‘His breath goeth forth,’ says the Hundred and Forty-sixth Psalm, ‘he returneth to his earth …’”

  The doctor joked that he was a grass snake, shedding one skin.

  “‘… in that very day his thoughts perish.’”

  He took an afternoon siesta on Friday and never woke up.

  The priests have finished. The mourners look at the chief resident.

  “Father”—Yûan speaks in Dutch—“you may say a few words.”

  The senior academicians occupy the center; to the left stand fifteen of the doctor’s past and present seminarians; to the right stand an assortment of the upper-ranked and curious, a scattering of spies, monks from the temple, and a few others whom Jacob does not examine.

  “I must first,” he says in Japanese, “express my sincere thanks to everyone …”

  A breeze shakes the trees and fat drops splash on umbrellas.

  “… for braving the rainy season to bid our friend farewell …”

  I shan’t feel his death, Jacob thinks, until I return to Dejima and want to tell him about the temple at Mount Inasa, but cannot …

  “… on his final journey. I offer my thanks to the priests here for providing my compatriot with a resting place and for sanctioning my intrusion this morning. Until his final days, the doctor was doing what he loved best: teaching and learning. So when we think of Lucas Marinus, let us remember a …”

  Jacob notices two women hidden under broad umbrellas.

  One is younger—a servant?—and wears a hood that conceals her ears. Her older companion wears a headscarf hiding the left side of her face …

  Jacob cannot remember what he was saying.

  “HOW KIND OF YOU to wait, Aibagawa-sensei …” There was a donation to offer at the temple, pleasantries to exchange with the scholars, and Jacob was as afraid she would be gone as he was nervous she would not.