The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

  Dejima’s rooster crows. Noisy feet tromp down Long Street.

  “Domenico Scarlatti, is it? He has flown a long way to be here.”

  Marinus’s indifference, Jacob suspects, is too airy to be genuine.

  “He shall fly a long way back.” He turns. “I incommode you no longer.”

  “Oh, wait, Domburger: sulking doesn’t suit you. Miss Aibagawa—”

  “—is no courtesan: I know. I don’t view her in that light.” Jacob would tell Marinus about Anna, but he doesn’t trust the doctor enough to unlock his heart.

  “Then in what light,” Marinus probes, “do you see her?”

  “As a …” Jacob searches for the right metaphor. “As a book whose cover fascinates, and in whose pages I desire to look a little. Nothing more.”

  A draft nudges open the creaking door of the two-bed sickroom.

  “Then I propose the following bargain: return here by three o’clock and you may have twenty minutes in the sickroom to peruse what pages Miss Aibagawa cares to show you—but the door remains open throughout, and should you treat her with one dram less respect than you would your own sister, Domburger, my vengeance shall be biblical.”

  “Thirty seconds per sonata hardly represents good value.”

  “Then you and your sometime gift know where the door is.”

  “No bargain. Good day.” Jacob leaves and blinks in the steepening sunlight.

  He walks down Long Street to Garden House and waits in its shade.

  The cicadas’ songs are fierce and primal on this hot morning.

  Over by the pine trees, Twomey and Ouwehand are laughing.

  But dear Jesus in heaven, thinks Jacob, I am lonely in this place.

  Eelattu is not sent after him. Jacob returns to the hospital.

  “We have a deal, then.” Marinus’s shave is finished. “But my seminarian’s spy must be blind-sided. My lecture this afternoon is on human respiration, which I intend to illustrate via a practical demonstration. I’ll have Vorstenbosch loan you as a demonstrator.”

  Jacob finds himself saying, “Agreed …”

  “Congratulations.” Marinus wipes his hands. “Maestro Scarlatti, if I may?”

  “… but your fee is payable upon delivery.”

  “Oh? My word as a gentleman is not enough?”

  “Until a quarter to three, then, Doctor.”

  FISCHER AND OUWEHAND fall silent as Jacob enters the records office.

  “Pleasant and cool,” says the newcomer, “in here, at least.”

  “I,” Ouwehand declares to Fischer, “find it heated and oppressive.”

  Fischer snorts like a horse and retires to his desk: the highest one.

  Jacob puts on his glasses at the shelf housing the current decade’s ledgers.

  He returned the 1793 to 1798 accounts yesterday; now they are gone.

  Jacob puts his glasses back on and looks at Ouwehand; Ouwehand nods at Fischer’s hunched back.

  “Would you know where the ’93 to ’98 ledgers are, Mr. Fischer?”

  “I know where everything is in my office.”

  “Then would you kindly tell me where to find the ’93 to ’98 ledgers?”

  “Why do you need them”—Fischer looks around—“exactly?”

  “To carry out the duties assigned to me by Chief Resident Vorstenbosch.”

  Ouwehand hums a nervous bar of the Prinsenlied.

  “Errors,” Fischer gnashes his words, “here”—the Prussian thumps the pile of ledgers in front of him—“occur not because we unfrauded the company”—his Dutch deteriorates—“but because Snitker forbade us to keep proper ledgers.”

  Farsighted Jacob removes his glasses to dissolve Fischer’s face.

  “Who has accused you of defrauding the company, Mr. Fischer?”

  “I am sick—do you hear? Sick!—of the never-ending inference!”

  Lethargic waves die on the other side of the seawall.

  “Why does the chief,” demands Fischer, “not instruct me to repair the ledgers?”

  “Is it not logical to appoint an auditor unconnected with Snitker’s regime?”

  “So I, too, am an embezzler now?” Fischer’s nostrils dilate. “You admit it! You plot against us all! I dare you to deny it!”

  “All the chief wants,” says Jacob, “is one version of the truth.”

  “My powers of logic,” Fischer says, waving an erect index finger at Jacob, “destroy your lie! I warn you, in Surinam I shot more blacks than Clerk de Zoet can count on his abacus. Attack me, and I crush you under my foot. So, here.” The ill-tempered Prussian deposits the pile of ledgers in Jacob’s hands. “Sniff for ‘errors.’ I go to Mr. van Cleef to discuss—to make a profit for the company this season!”

  Fischer rams on his hat and leaves, slamming the door.

  “It’s a compliment,” says Ouwehand. “You make him nervous.”

  I just want to do my job, Jacob thinks. “Nervous about what?”

  “Ten dozen boxes marked ‘Kumamoto Camphor’ loaded in ’96 and ’97.”

  “Were they something other than Kumamoto camphor?”

  “No, but page fourteen of our ledgers lists twelve-pound boxes; the Japanese records, as Ogawa can tell you, list thirty-six-pounders.” Ouwehand goes to the water pitcher. “At Batavia,” he continues, “one Johannes van der Broeck, a customs officer, sells the excess: the son-in-law of Chairman van der Broeck of the Council of the Indies. It’s a swindle as sweet as honey. A cup of water?”

  “Yes, please.” Jacob drinks. “And this you tell me because …”

  “Blank self-interest: Mr. Vorstenbosch is here for five whole years, no?”

  “Yes.” Jacob lies because he must. “I shall serve my contract with him.”

  A fat fly traces a lazy oval through light and shadow.

  “When Fischer wakes up to the fact that it’s Vorstenbosch and not Van Cleef he must wed and bed, he’ll stick a knife into my back.”

  “With what knife,” Jacob sees the next question, “might he do that?”

  “Can you promise”—Ouwehand scratches his neck—“I shan’t be Snitkered?”

  “I promise”—power has an unpleasant taste—“to tell Mr. Vorstenbosch that Ponke Ouwehand is a helper and not a hinderer.”

  Ouwehand weighs Jacob’s sentence. “Last year’s private sales records will show that I brought in fifty bolts of Indian chintz. The Japanese private sales accounts, however, shall show me selling one hundred and fifty. Of the surplus, Captain Hofstra of the Octavia commandeered half, though of course I can’t prove that, and neither can he, God grant mercy to his drowned soul.”

  The fat fly settles on Jacob’s blotter. “A helper not a hinderer, Mr. Ouwehand.”

  DR. MARINUS’S STUDENTS arrive at three o’clock precisely.

  The sickroom door is ajar, but Jacob cannot see into the surgery.

  Four male voices chorus, “Good afternoon, Dr. Marinus.”

  “Today, seminarians,” says Marinus, “we have a practical experiment. Whilst Eelattu and I prepare this, each of you shall study a different Dutch text and translate it into Japanese. My friend Dr. Maeno has agreed to inspect your handiwork later this week. The paragraphs are relevant to your interests: to Mr. Muramoto, our bonesetter-in-chief, I proffer Albinus’s Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis humani; Mr. Kajiwaki, a passage on cancer from Jean-Louis Petit, who lends his name to the trigonum Petiti, which is what and where?”

  “Muscle hole in back, Doctor.”

  “Mr. Yano, you have Dr. Olof Acrel, my old master at Uppsala; his essay on cataracts I translated from the Swedish. For Mr. Ikematsu, a page of Lorenz Heister’s Chirurgie on disorders of the skin … and Miss Aibagawa shall peruse the admirable Dr. Smellie. This passage, however, is problematical. In the sickroom awaits the volunteer for today’s demonstration, who may assist you on matters of Dutch vocabulary …” Marinus’s lumpish head appears around the door frame.

  “Domburger! I present Miss Aibagawa, and urge yo
u, Orate ne intretis in tentationem.”

  Miss Aibagawa recognizes the red-haired green-eyed foreigner.

  “Good afternoon”—his throat is dry—“Miss Aibagawa.”

  “Good afternoon”—her voice is clear—“Mr …. ‘Dom-bugger’?”

  “‘Domburger’ is … is the doctor’s little joke. My name is De Zoet.”

  She lowers her writing desk: a tray with legs. “‘Dom-bugger’ is funny joke?”

  “Dr. Marinus thinks so: I am from a town called ‘Domburg.’”

  She makes an unconvinced rising mmm noise. “Mr. de Zoet is sick?”

  “Oh—that is to say—a little, yes. I have a pain in …” He pats his abdomen.

  “Stools like water?” The midwife assumes control. “Bad smell?”

  “No.” Jacob is thrown by her directness. “The pain is in my—in my liver.”

  “Your”—she enunciates the l with great care—“liver?”

  “Just so: my liver pains me. I trust that Miss Aibagawa is well?”

  “Yes, I am quite well. I trust that your friend monkey is well?”

  “My—oh, William Pitt? My monkey friend is—well, he is no more.”

  “I am sorry not to understand. Monkey is … no more what?”

  “No more alive. I”—Jacob mimes breaking a chicken’s neck—“killed the rascal, you see; tanned his hide and turned him into a new tobacco pouch.”

  Her mouth and eyes open in horror.

  If Jacob had a pistol, he would shoot himself. “I joke, Miss! The monkey is happy and alive and well, shooling, somewhere—thieving, that is …”

  “Correct, Mr. Muramoto.” Marinus’s voice travels from the surgery. “First one boils away the subcutaneous fat and after injects the veins with colored wax …”

  “Shall we”—Jacob curses his misfired joke—“open your text?”

  She is wondering how this can be done at a safe distance.

  “Miss Aibagawa could seat herself there.” He points to the end of the bed. “Read your text aloud, and when you meet a difficult word, we shall discuss it.”

  She nods that the arrangement is satisfactory, sits, and begins reading.

  Van Cleef’s courtesan speaks at a shrill pitch, apparently considered to be feminine, but Miss Aibagawa’s reading voice is lower, quieter, and calming. Jacob blesses this excuse to study her part-burned face and her careful lips. “‘Soon after this occ-u-rrence …’” She looks up.

  “What is, please?”

  “An occurrence would be a—a happening, or an event.”

  “Thank you. ‘… this occurrence, in consulting Ruysch about everything he had writ concerning women … I found him exclaiming against the premature extraction of the placenta, and his authority confirmed the opinion I had already adopted … and induced me a more natural way of proceeding. When I have separated the funis … and given away the child … I introduce my finger into the vagina …’”

  In all his life, Jacob has never heard this word spoken aloud.

  She senses his shock and looks up, half alarmed. “I mistake?”

  Dr. Lucas Marinus, Jacob thinks, you sadistic monster. “No,” he says.

  Frowning, she finds her place again: “… to feel if the placenta is at the os uteri … and if this is the case … I am sure it will come down of itself in any rate … I wait for some time, and commonly in ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes … the woman begins to be seized with some after-pains … which gradually separate and force it along … but pulling gently at the funis, it descends into the’”—she glances up at Jacob—“‘vagina. Then, taking hold of it, I bring it through the … the os externum.’ There.” She looks up. “I finish sentences. Liver is making much pain?”

  “Dr. Smellie’s language”—Jacob swallows—“is rather … direct.”

  She frowns. “Dutch is foreign language. Words do not have same … power, smell, blood. Midwife is my”—she frowns—“‘vacation’ or ‘vocation’—which?”

  “‘Vocation,’ I hazard, Miss Aibagawa.”

  “Midwife is my vocation. Midwife who fear blood is not helpful.”

  “Distal phalanx,” comes Marinus’s voice, “middle and proximal phalanxes …”

  “Twenty years ago,” Jacob decides to tell her, “when my sister was born, the midwife couldn’t stop my mother bleeding. My job was to heat water in the kitchen.” He is afraid he is boring her, but Miss Aibagawa watches him with calm attention. “If only I can heat enough water, I thought, my mother will live. I was wrong, I’m sorry to say.” Now Jacob frowns, uncertain why he raised this personal matter.

  A large wasp settles on the broad foot of the bed.

  Miss Aibagawa produces a square of paper from her kimono’s sleeve. Jacob, aware of Oriental beliefs in the ascent of the soul from bedbug to saint, waits for her to guide the wasp out through the high window. Instead, she crushes it in the paper, scrunches it into a little ball, and, with perfect aim, tosses it through the window. “Your sister, too, have red hair and green eyes?”

  “Her hair is redder than mine, to our uncle’s embarrassment.”

  This is another new word for her. “‘Am-bass-a-ment’?”

  Remember to ask Ogawa for the Japanese word later, he thinks. “‘Embarrassment,’ or shame.”

  “Why uncle feel shame because sister has red hair?”

  “According to common people’s belief—or superstition—you understand?”

  “‘Meishin’ in Japanese. Doctor call it, ‘enemy of reason.’”

  “According to superstition, then, Jezebels—that is, women of loose virtue—that is, prostitutes—are thought to have, and are depicted as having, red hair.”

  “‘Loose virtue’? ‘Prostitutes’? Like ‘courtesan’ and ‘whore’s helper’?”

  “Forgive me for that.” Jacob’s ears roar. “Now the embarrassment is mine.”

  Her smile is both nettle and dock leaf. “Mr. de Zoet’s sister is honorable girl?”

  “Geertje is a … very dear sister; she is kind, patient, and clever.”

  “Metacarpals”—the doctor is demonstrating—“and here, the cunning carpals …”

  “Miss Aibagawa,” Jacob dares to ask, “belongs to a large family?”

  “Family was large, is small now. Father, father’s new wife, father’s new wife’s son.” She hesitates. “Mother, brothers, and sisters died, of cholera. Much years ago. Much die that time. Not just my family. Much, much suffer.”

  “Yet your vocation—midwifery, I mean—is … an art of life.”

  A wisp of black hair is escaped from her headscarf: Jacob wants it.

  “At old days,” says Miss Aibagawa, “long ago, before great bridges built over wide rivers, travelers often drowned. People said, ‘Die because river god angry.’ People not said, ‘Die because big bridges not yet invented.’ People not say, ‘People die because we have ignoration too much.’ But one day, clever ancestors observe spiders’ webs, weave bridges of vines. Or see trees, fallen over fast rivers, and make stone islands in wide rivers, and lay from islands to islands. They build such bridges. People no longer drown in same dangerous river, or many less people. So far, my poor Dutch is understand?”

  “Perfectly,” Jacob assures her. “Every word.”

  “Nowadays, in Japan, when mother, or baby, or mother and baby die in childbirth, people say, ‘Ah … they die because gods decide so.’ Or, ‘They die because bad karma.’ Or, ‘They die because o-mamori—magic from temple—too cheap.’ Mr. de Zoet understand, it is same as bridge. True reason of many, many death of ignoration. I wish to build bridge from ignoration,” her tapering hands form the bridge, “to knowledge. This,” she lifts, with reverence, Dr. Smellie’s text, “is piece of bridge. One day, I teach this knowledge … make school … students who teach other students … and in future, in Japan, many less mothers die of ignoration.” She surveys her daydream for just a moment before lowering her eyes. “A foolish plan.”

  “No, no, no. I cannot imagine a noble
r aspiration.”

  “Sorry …” She frowns. “What is ‘noble respiration’?”

  “Aspiration, Miss: a plan, I mean to say. A goal in life.”

  “Ah.” A white butterfly lands on her hand. “A goal in life.”

  She puffs it away; it flies up to a bronze candle on a shelf.

  The butterfly closes and opens and closes and opens its wings.

  “Name is ‘monshiro,’” she says, “in Japanese.”

  “In Zeeland, we call the same butterfly cabbage white. My uncle—”

  “‘Life is short; the art, long.’” Dr. Marinus enters the sickroom like a limping gray-haired comet. “‘Opportunity is fleeting; experience—’ and, Miss Aibagawa? To conclude our first Hippocratic aphorism?”

  “‘Experience is fallacious’”—she stands and bows—“‘judgment difficult.’”

  “All too true.” He beckons in his other students, whom Jacob half-recognizes from Warehouse Doorn. “Domburger, behold my seminarians: Mr. Muramoto of Edo.” The eldest, and dourest, bows. “Mr. Kajiwaki, sent by the Chôshu Court of Hagi.” A smiling youth not yet grown into his ropy body bows. “Next is Mr. Yano of Osaka.” Yano peers at Jacob’s green eyes. “And, lastly, Mr. Ikematsu, native son of Satsuma.” Ikematsu, pocked by childhood scrofula, gives a cheerful bow. “Seminarians: Domburger is our brave volunteer today; please greet him.”

  A chorus of “Good day, Domburger” fills the whitewashed sickroom.

  Jacob cannot believe his allotted minutes have passed so soon.

  Marinus produces a metal cylinder about eight inches in length. It has a plunger at one end and a nozzle at the other. “This is, Mr. Muramoto?”

  The elderly-looking youth replies, “It is call glister, Doctor.”

  “A glister.” Marinus grips Jacob’s shoulder. “Mr. Kajiwaki: to apply our glister?”

  “Insert to rectum, and in-jure … no, in-pact.… no, aaa nan’dattaka? In—”

  “—ject,” prompts Ikematsu, in a comic stage whisper.

  “—inject medicine for constipation, or pain of gut, or many other ailment.”

  “So we do, so we do; and, Mr. Yano, where lies the advantage in anally administered medicines over their orally administered counterparts?”