The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

The Hall of Sixty Mats looks on with undisguised curiosity.

  “It is meet, Mr. Kobayashi,” says Vorstenbosch, “to warn these good gentlemen—and even the magistrate—that our governor-general sends an ultimatum.”

  Kobayashi glares at Ogawa, who begins to ask, “What is ‘ultim—’?”

  “‘Ultimatum,’” says Van Cleef. “A threat; a demand; a strong warning.”

  “Very bad time,” Kobayashi shakes his head, “for strong warning.”

  “But surely Magistrate Shiroyama must know as soon as possible,” Chief Vorstenbosch’s concern is soft with malice, “that Dejima is to be abandoned after the current trading season unless Edo gives us twenty thousand piculs?”

  “‘Abandoned,’” repeats Van Cleef, “stopped; ended; finished.”

  Blood drains from the two interpreters’ faces.

  Inwardly, Jacob squirms with sympathy for Ogawa.

  “Please, sir,” Ogawa swallows, “not such news, here, now …”

  Running out of patience, the chamberlain demands a translation.

  “Best not keep His Honor waiting,” Vorstenbosch tells Kobayashi.

  Word by faltering word, Kobayashi delivers the appalling news.

  Questions are fired from all quarters, but Kobayashi’s and Ogawa’s replies would be drowned out even if they tried to answer. During this mayhem, Jacob notices a man seated three places to the left of Magistrate Shiroyama. His face disturbs the clerk, though he could not say why; neither can Jacob guess his age. His shaven head and water-blue robes suggest a monk or even a confessor. The lips are tight, the cheekbones high, the nose hooked, and the eyes ferocious with intelligence. Jacob finds himself as little able to evade the man’s gaze as a book can, of its own volition, evade the scrutiny of a reader. The silent observer twists his head, like a hunting dog listening to the sound of its prey.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WAREHOUSE DOORN ON DEJIMA

  After lunch on August 1, 1799

  THE COGS AND LEVERS OF TIME SWELL AND BUCKLE IN THE HEAT. In the stewed gloom, Jacob hears, almost, the sugar in its crates hissing into fused lumps. Come auction day, it shall be sold to the spice merchants for a pittance, or else, as well they know, it must be returned to the Shenandoah’s hold for a profitless return voyage back to the warehouses of Batavia. The clerk drains his cup of green tea. The bitter dregs make him wince and amplify his headache but sharpen his wits.

  On a bed of clove crates and hempen sacking, Hanzaburo lies asleep.

  Mucus from his nostril to his rocky Adam’s apple.

  The scratch of Jacob’s quill is joined by a not dissimilar noise from a rafter.

  It is a rhythmic scratting, soon overlain by a tiny, sawing squeak.

  A he-rat, the young man realizes, mounting his she-rat

  Listening, he becomes enwrapped by memories of women’s bodies.

  These are not memories he is proud of, or ever discusses …

  I dishonor Anna, Jacob thinks, by dwelling on such things

  … but the images dwell on him and thicken his blood like arrowroot.

  Concentrate, donkey, the clerk orders himself, on your work.

  With difficulty, he returns to his pursuit of the fifty rix-dollars fleeing through thickets of forged receipts found in one of Daniel Snitker’s boots. He tries to pour more tea into his cup, but the pot is now empty. He calls out, “Hanzaburo?”

  The boy does not stir. The rutting rats have fallen silent.

  “Hai!” Long seconds later, the boy jolts upright. “Mr. Dazûto?”

  Jacob raises his ink-smudged cup. “Tea, please, Hanzaburo.”

  Hanzaburo squints and rubs his head and blurts, “Huh?”

  “More tea, please.” Jacob waggles his teapot. “O-cha.”

  Hanzaburo sighs, heaves himself up, takes the teapot, and plods away.

  Jacob sharpens his quill, but soon his head is drooping …

  … A HUNCHBACK DWARF stands silhouetted in the white glare of Bony Alley.

  Gripped in his hairy hand is a club … no, it is a long joint of bony, bloodied pork.

  Jacob lifts his heavy head. His stiff neck cricks.

  The hunchback enters the warehouse, grunting and snuffling.

  The joint of pork is, in fact, an amputated shin, with ankle and foot attached.

  Nor is the hunchback a hunchback: it is William Pitt, ape of Dejima.

  Jacob jumps up and bangs his knee. The pain is prismatic.

  William Pitt clambers up a tower of crates with his bloody prize.

  “How in God’s name,” Jacob rubs his kneecap, “did you come by such a thing?”

  There is no reply but the calm and steady breathing of the sea …

  … and Jacob remembers: Dr. Marinus was summoned to the Shenandoah yesterday, where an Estonian seaman’s foot had been crushed by a fallen crate. Gangrenous wounds spoiling faster than milk in a Japanese August, the doctor prescribed the knife. The surgery is being performed today in the hospital so his four students and some local scholars may watch the procedure. However improbably, William Pitt must have forced an entry and stolen the limb: what other explanation is there?

  A second figure, momentarily blinded by the warehouse darkness, enters. His willowy chest is heaving with exertion. His blue kimono is covered with an artisan’s apron, spattered dark, and strands of hair have escaped from the headscarf that half conceals the right side of his face. Only when he steps into the shaft of light falling from the high window does Jacob see that the pursuer is a young woman.

  Aside from the washerwomen and a few “aunts” who serve at the Interpreters’ Guild, the only women permitted through the land gate are prostitutes, who are hired for a night, or “wives” who stay under the roofs of the better-paid officers for longer periods. These costly courtesans are attended by a maid: Jacob’s best guess is that the visitor is one such companion, who wrestled with William Pitt for the stolen limb, failed to prize it from his grasp, and chased the ape into the warehouse.

  Voices—Dutch, Japanese, Malay—clatter down Long Street from the hospital.

  The doorway frames their outlines, brief as blinks, running down Bony Alley.

  Jacob sifts his meager Japanese vocabulary for any suitable items.

  When she notices the red-haired, green-eyed foreigner, she gasps with alarm.

  “Miss,” implores Jacob in Dutch, “I—I—I—please don’t worry—I …”

  The woman studies him and concludes that he offers no threat.

  “Bad monkey,” she regains her composure, “steal foot.”

  He nods at this, then realizes: “You speak Dutch, Miss?”

  Her shrug replies, A little. She says, “Bad monkey—enter here?”

  “Aye, aye. The hairy devil is up there.” Jacob indicates William Pitt up on his crates. Wanting to impress the woman, he strides over. “William Pitt: unhand that leg. Give it to me. Give!”

  The ape places the leg at his side, grips his rhubarb-pink penis, and twangs it like a harpist in a madhouse, cackling through bared teeth. Jacob fears for his visitor’s modesty, but she turns aside to hide her laughter and, in doing so, reveals a burn covering much of the left side of her face. It is dark, blotched, and, close up, very conspicuous. How can a courtesan’s maid, Jacob wonders, earn a living with such a disfigurement? Too late, he is aware that she is watching him gawp. She pushes back her headscarf and thrusts her cheek toward Jacob. There, this gesture declares, drink your fill!

  “I—” Jacob is mortified. “Please forgive my rudeness, Miss …”

  Fearing she doesn’t understand, he holds a deep bow for the count of five.

  The woman reties her headscarf and directs her attention to William Pitt. Ignoring Jacob, she addresses the ape in lilting Japanese.

  The thief hugs the leg like a motherless daughter hugs a doll.

  Determined to cut a better figure, Jacob approaches the tower of crates.

  He jumps up onto an adjacent chest. “Listen to me, you flea-bitten slave�
��”

  A warm and liquid whiplash, smelling of roast beef, flays his cheek.

  In his effort to deflect the warm stream, he loses his balance …

  … tumbles off the chest, heels over arse, onto the beaten earth.

  Mortification, thinks Jacob, as the pain eases, requires at least a little pride …

  The woman is leaning against Hanzaburo’s improvised cot.

  … but I have no pride left, for I am pissed upon by William Pitt.

  She is dabbing her eyes and shivering with near-silent laughter.

  Anna laughs that way, Jacob thinks. Anna laughs that very way.

  “I sorry.” She inhales deeply and her lips twitch. “Excuse my … ‘lewdness’?”

  “‘Rudeness,’ Miss.” He goes to the water pail. “‘Rude,’ with an R.”

  “‘Rewdness,’” she repeats, “with an R. It is nothing funny.”

  Jacob washes his face, but to rinse the monkey urine from his second-best linen shirt he must first remove it. To do so here is out of the question.

  “You wish”—she hunts in a sleeve pocket, taking out a closed fan and putting it on a crate of raw sugar, before producing a square of paper—“wipe face?”

  “Most kind.” Jacob takes it and dabs his brow and cheeks.

  “Trade with monkey,” she suggests. “Trade thing for leg.”

  Jacob gives the idea its due. “The beast is a slave to tobacco.”

  “Ta-ba-ko?” She claps her hands once in resolve. “You have?”

  Jacob hands her the last of his Javanese leaf in a leather pouch.

  She dangles the bait from a broom head, level with William Pitt’s aerie.

  The ape reaches out; the woman sways it away, mumbling entreaties …

  … before William Pitt lets go of the leg to seize his new prize.

  The limb thumps to earth and stops dead at the woman’s foot. She gives Jacob a glance of triumph, discards the broom, and takes up the amputated limb as casually as a farmhand picking up a turnip. Its hacked-through bone pokes from the bloody sheath, and its toes are grubby. Up above, the casement rattles: William Pitt has escaped through the window with his bounty, over the roofs of Long Street. “Tobacco is lose, sir,” says the woman. “Very sorry.”

  “No matter, Miss. You have your leg. Well, not your leg …”

  Shouted questions and answers fly up and down Bony Alley.

  Jacob and his visitor take a couple of steps back from each other.

  “Forgive me, Miss, but … are you a courtesan’s maid?”

  “Kôchi—zanzu—meido?” This baffles her. “What is?”

  “A … a”—Jacob grasps for a substitute word—“a whore’s … helper.”

  She lays the limb on a square of cloth. “Why horse need helper?”

  A guard appears in the doorway; he sees the Dutchman, the young woman, and the lost foot. He grins and shouts into Bony Alley, and within moments more guards, inspectors, and officials arrive, followed by Deputy van Cleef; then Dejima’s strutting Constable Kosugi; Marinus’s assistant, Eelattu, his apron as bloodied as the burned woman’s; Arie Grote and a Japanese merchant with darting eyes; several scholars; and Con Twomey, carrying his carpenter’s rule and asking Jacob in English, “What’s that feckin’ smell about ye, man?”

  Jacob remembers his half-restored ledger on the table, wide open for all to see. Hastily, he conceals it, just as four youths arrive, each with the shaven heads of medical disciples and aprons like the burned woman’s, and commence to fire questions at her. The clerk guesses these are Dr. Marinus’s “seminarians,” and soon the intruders let the woman recount her story. She indicates the tower of crates where William Pitt clambered up and now gestures toward Jacob, who blushes as twenty or thirty heads look his way. She speaks her language with quiet self-possession. The clerk awaits the hilarity that must greet his dousing in ape piss, but she omits the episode, it seems, and her narrative ends in nods of approval. Twomey leaves with the Estonian’s limb, to fashion a wooden substitute of the same length.

  “I saw you,” Van Cleef snatches a guard’s sleeve, “you damned thief!”

  A shower of bright-red nutmeg berries spills across the floor.

  “Baert! Fischer! Show these blasted robbers out of our warehouse!” The deputy makes herding motions toward the door, shouting, “Out! Out! Grote, frisk whoever looks suspicious—aye, just as they frisk us. De Zoet, watch our merchandise or it’ll sprout legs and walk.”

  Jacob stands on a crate, the better to survey the departing visitors.

  He sees the burned maid step into the sunlit alley, assisting a frail scholar.

  Contrary to his expectations, she turns and waves her hand.

  Jacob is delighted by this secret acknowledgment and waves back.

  No, he sees, she is sheltering her eyes from the sun …

  Yawning, Hanzaburo enters, carrying a pot of tea.

  You didn’t even ask her name, Jacob realizes. Jacob de Bonehead.

  He notices that she left behind the closed fan on the crate of raw sugar.

  Storm-faced Van Cleef leaves last, pushing past Hanzaburo, who stands at the threshold, holding the pot of tea. Hanzaburo asks, “Thing happen?”

  BY MIDNIGHT, THE chief’s dining room is foggy with pipe smoke. The servants Cupido and Philander play “Apples of Delft” on viol da gamba and flute.

  “President Adams is our ‘shogun,’ yes, Mr. Goto.” Captain Lacy flicks crumbs of pie crust from his mustache. “But he was chosen by the American people. This is the point of democracy.”

  The five interpreters exchange a look Jacob now recognizes.

  “Great lords,” Ogawa Uzaemon clarifies, “choose president?”

  “Not lords, no.” Lacy picks his teeth. “Citizens. Every one of us.”

  “Even”—Interpreter Goto’s eyes settle on Con Twomey—“carpenters?”

  “Carpenters, bakers”—Lacy belches—“and candlestick makers.”

  “Do Washington’s and Jefferson’s slaves,” asks Marinus, “also vote?”

  “No, Doctor.” Lacy smiles. “Nor do oxen, bees, or women.”

  But what junior geisha, wonders Jacob, would wrestle an ape for a leg?

  “What if,” asks Goto, “people make bad choice and president is bad man?”

  “Come the next election, we vote him out of office.”

  “Old president,” Interpreter Hori is maroon with rum, “is executed?”

  “‘Elected,’ Mr. Hori,” says Twomey. “When the people choose their leader.”

  “A better system, surely,” Lacy holds his glass for Van Cleef’s slave, Weh, to fill, “than waiting for death to remove a corrupt, stupid, or insane shogun?”

  The interpreters look uneasy: no informer is fluent enough in Dutch to understand Captain Lacy’s treasonous talk, but there is no guarantee that the magistracy has not recruited one of the four to report on his colleagues’ reactions.

  “Democracy,” says Goto, “is not a flower who bloom in Japan.”

  “Soil in Asia,” agrees Interpreter Hori, “is not correct for Europe and America flowers.”

  “Mr. Washington, Mr. Adams,” Interpreter Iwase shifts the topic, “is royal bloodline?”

  “Our revolution”—Captain Lacy clicks his fingers to order the slave Ignatius to bring the spittoon—“in which I played my part, when my paunch was flatter, sought to purge America of royal bloodlines.” He spews out a dragon of phlegm. “A man might be a great leader—like General Washington—but why does it follow that his children inherit their pa’s qualities? Are not inbred royals more often dunderheads and wastrels—proper ‘King Georges,’ one might say—than those who climb the world using God-given talent?” He mumbles an aside in English to Dejima’s secret subject of the British monarch. “No offense intended, Mr. Twomey.”

  “I’d be the last fecker,” avows the Irishman, “to take offense.”

  Cupido and Philander strike up “Seven White Roses for My One True Love.”
<
br />   Baert’s drunken head droops and settles in a plate of sweet beans.

  Does her burn, Jacob wonders, register touch as heat, cold, or numbness?

  Marinus takes up his stick. “The party shall excuse me: I have left Eelattu rendering the Estonian’s shinbone. Without an expert eye, tallow shall be dripping from the ceiling. Mr. Vorstenbosch, my compliments …” He bows to the interpreters and limps out of the room.

  Captain Lacy’s smile is soapy. “Does the law of Japan permit polygamy?”

  “What is po-ri-ga-mi?” Hori stuffs a pipe. “Why need permit?”

  “You explain, Mr. de Zoet,” Van Cleef is saying. “Words are your forte.”

  “Polygamy is …” Jacob considers. “One husband, many wives.”

  “Ah. Oh.” Hori grins, and the other interpreters nod. “Polygamy.”

  “Mohammedans sanction four wives.” Captain Lacy tosses an almond into the air and captures it in his mouth. “Chinese may round up seven under one roof. How many may a Japanese man lock up in his personal collection, eh?”

  “In all countries, same,” says Hori. “In Japan, Holland, China; all same. I say why. All mans marry first wife. He”—leering, Hori makes an obscene gesture with a fist and finger—“until she”—he mimes a pregnant belly—“yes? After this, all mans keep number wives his purse says he may. Captain Lacy plans to have Dejima wife for trading season, like Mr. Snitker and Mr. van Cleef?”

  “I’d rather,” Lacy bites a thumbnail, “visit the famous Maruyama District.”

  “Mr. Hemmij,” recalls Interpreter Yonekizu, “ordered courtesans for his feasts.”

  “Chief Hemmij,” says Vorstenbosch darkly, “partook of many pleasures at the company’s expense, as did Mr. Snitker. Hence, the latter dines on hardtack tonight, whilst we enjoy the rewards of honest employees.”

  Jacob glances at Ivo Oost: Ivo Oost is scowling at him.

  Baert lifts his bean-spattered face, exclaims, “But, sir, she ain’t really my aunt!,” giggles like a schoolgirl, and falls off his chair.

  “I propose a toast,” declares Deputy van Cleef, “to all our absent ladies.”

  The drinkers and diners fill one another’s glasses. “To all our absent ladies!”