The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

  “Worm breeder!” Baert starts laughing. “I just smoked yer, Grote!”

  Something in Baert’s sack kicks, and Grote looks anxious to leave. “Off we go, then, Greasy Lightnin’.” They hurry off up Long Street.

  Jacob watches Shunsuke Thunberg being helped into the hospital.

  Birds are notched on the low sky. Autumn is aging.

  HALFWAY UP TWO FLIGHTS OF steps to the chief’s residence, Jacob encounters Ogawa Mimasaku, the father of Ogawa Uzaemon, coming down.

  Jacob stands aside. “Good day, Interpreter Ogawa.”

  The older man’s hands are hidden in his sleeves. “Clerk de Zoet.”

  “I haven’t seen the younger Mr. Ogawa for … it must be four days.”

  Ogawa Mimasaku’s face is haughtier and stonier than his son’s.

  An inky growth is spreading out from near his ear.

  “My son,” says Ogawa Mimasaku, “is very busy outside of Dejima at this time.”

  “Do you know when he shall be back at the guild?”

  “No, I do not.” The tone of rebuff is intentional.

  Have you discovered, Jacob wonders, what I asked your son to do?

  From the customs house comes the noise of outraged hens.

  A carelessly tossed stone, he frets, can sometimes result in a rock fall.

  “I was concerned he might be sick, or … or unwell.”

  Ogawa Mimasaku’s servants are staring at the Dutchman with disapproval.

  “He is well,” says the older man. “I report your kind concern. Good afternoon.”

  “YOU FIND ME”—Vorstenbosch is peering at a bloated cane toad in a specimen jar—“enjoying a quiet discourse with Interpreter Kobayashi.”

  Jacob looks around before realizing the chief means the toad. “I left my sense of humor in bed this morning, sir.”

  “But not, I see”—Vorstenbosch looks at Jacob’s portmanteau—“your report.”

  What lies behind, Jacob wonders, this shift from “our” to “your”?

  “The gist, sir, you know from our periodic meetings—”

  “Law requires details, not gist.” The chief resident holds out his palm for the black book. “Details beget facts, and facts, judiciously sent forth, become assassins.”

  Jacob removes the Investigation and delivers it to the chief.

  Vorstenbosch balances it in his hands, as if determining its weight.

  “Sir, if you’d forgive me, I’m curious about—”

  “—the post you are to hold in the forthcoming year, yes, but you shall wait, young De Zoet, with everyone else, until the officers’ supper tonight. The copper quota was the penultimate component of my future plans, and this”—he holds up the black book—“this is the last.”

  DURING THE AFTERNOON Jacob works with Ouwehand in the clerks’ office, copying this season’s bills of lading for the archives. Peter Fischer makes restless exits and entrances, radiating even more hostility than usual. “A sign,” Ouwehand tells Jacob, “that he thinks the head clerkship is as good as yours.” Evening brings steady rain and the coolest air of the season, and Jacob decides to bathe before supper. Dejima’s small bathhouse is attached to the guild’s kitchen: the pans of water are heated on copper-plated hobs jutting through the stone wall, and precedent permits the ranked interpreters to treat the facility as their own, despite the exorbitant price the company is obliged to pay for charcoal and faggots. Jacob undresses in the outer changing room and crouches to enter the steamy enclosure, little larger than a big cupboard. It smells of cedarwood. Damp heat fills Jacob’s lungs and unplugs the clogged pores on his face. A single storm lamp, steam-fogged, provides enough light for him to recognize Con Twomey soaking in one of the two tubs. “So it is the sulfur of Jean Calvin,” says the Irishman, in English, “making war on my nostrils.”

  Jacob ladles lukewarm water over himself. “Why, it’s the popish heretic, first in the bath again. Not enough work, is it?”

  “The typhoon gave me all I could wish for. ’Tis daylight I lack.”

  Jacob scrubs himself with a wad of sailcloth. “Where’s your spy?”

  “Drowned under my fat arse, he is. Where’s your Hanzaburo?”

  “Stuffing his face in the guild’s kitchen.”

  “Well, with the Shenandoah leaving next week, he must fatten himself up whilst he may.” Twomey sinks up to his chin like a dugong. “Come a twelve-month, my five years’ service’ll be finished …”

  “Are you fixed”—Jacob turns away to scrub his groin—“on going home?”

  They hear the cooks talking in the Interpreters’ Guild.

  “A new start in the New World might suit better-like, I’m thinking.”

  Jacob removes the wooden lid from the bathtub.

  “Lacy tells,” says Twomey, “the Indians’re being cleared west of Louisiana …”

  Warmth sinks into every muscle and bone in Jacob’s body.

  “… and no man afraid of hard work need go without. Settlers need carts to get where they’re going and houses once they’re there. Lacy reckoned I could work my passage to Charleston from Batavia as ship’s carpenter. I’ve no appetite for war or being pressed into fighting for the British. Would you go back to Holland in the present weather?”

  “I don’t know.” Jacob thinks of Anna’s face by a rainy window. “I do not know.”

  “A coffee king you’ll be, sure, with a plantation up in Buitenzorg, or else a merchant prince with new warehouses along the Ciliwung …”

  “My mercury didn’t fetch so high a price, Con Twomey.”

  “Aye, but with Councillor Unico Vorstenbosch pulling strings for you …”

  Jacob climbs into the second tub, thinking of his Investigation.

  Unico Vorstenbosch, the clerk wants to say, is a fickle patron.

  Heat soaks into his joints and robs him of the urge to speculate aloud.

  “What we need, De Zoet, is a smoke. I’ll fetch us a couple of pipes.”

  Con Twomey rises like a stocky King Neptune. Jacob sinks until only a small island of lips, nostrils, and eyes remains above the water.

  WHEN TWOMEY RETURNS, Jacob is in a warm trance with his eyes shut. He listens to the carpenter rinse and reimmerse himself. Twomey makes no mention of smoking. Jacob mumbles, “Not a shred of leaf to be had, then?”

  His neighbor clears his throat. “I am Ogawa, Mr. de Zoet.”

  Jacob lurches and water spills. “Mr. Ogawa! I—I thought …”

  “You so peaceful,” says Ogawa Uzaemon, “I do not wish disturb.”

  “I met your father earlier, but …” Jacob wipes his eyes, but with the steamy dark and his farsightedness, his vision is no better. “I’ve not seen you since before the typhoon.”

  “I am sorry I could not come. Very many things happen.”

  “Were you able to—to fulfill my request, regarding the dictionary?”

  “Day after typhoon, I send servant to Aibagawa residence.”

  “Then you didn’t deliver the volume yourself?”

  “Most trusted servant delivered dictionary. He did not say, ‘Parcel is from Dutchman de Zoet.’ He explained, ‘Parcel is from hospital on Dejima.’ You see, it was misappropriate for me to go. Dr. Aibagawa was ill. To visit at such hour is bad … breeding?”

  “I am sorry to hear it. Is he recovered now?”

  “His funeral was conducted a day before yesterday.”

  “Oh.” Everything, Jacob thinks, is explained. “Oh. Then Miss Aibagawa …”

  Ogawa hesitates. “There is bad news. She must leave Nagasaki …”

  Jacob waits and listens, as droplets of condensed steam fall.

  “… for long time, for many years. She shall not return more to Dejima. Of your dictionary, of your letter, of how she thinks, I have no news. I am sorry.”

  “The dictionary be damned—but … where is she going, and why?”

  “It is domain of Abbot Enomoto. Man who bought your mercury.”

  The man who kills snakes by
magic. The abbot looms in Jacob’s memory.

  “He want her to enter temple of”—Ogawa falters—“female monks. How say?”

  “Nuns? Pray don’t tell me Miss Aibagawa’s going to a nunnery.”

  “Species of nunnery, yes … on Mount Shiranui. There she is going.”

  “What use is a midwife to a pack of nuns? Does she want to go?”

  “Dr. Aibagawa had great debts with moneylenders, to purchase telescopes, et cetera.” Pain strains Ogawa’s voice. “To be scholar is costly. His widow must now pay these debts. Enomoto makes contract, or deal, to widow. He pays debts. She gives Miss Aibagawa for nunnery.”

  “This is tantamount,” Jacob protests, “to selling her into slavery!”

  “Japanese custom,” Ogawa sounds hollow, “is different to Dutch—”

  “What say her late father’s friends at the Shirandô Academy? Shall they stand by doing nothing whilst a gifted scholar is sold, like a mule, into a life of servitude up some bleak mountain? Would a son be sold to a monastery in such manner? Enomoto is a scholar, too, is he not?”

  Cooks in the Interpreters’ Guild can be heard laughing through the wall.

  Jacob sees another implication. “But I offered her sanctuary here.”

  “Nothing can be done.” Ogawa stands up. “I must go now.”

  “So … she prefers incarceration to living here, on Dejima?”

  Ogawa steps out of the bathtub. His silence is blunt and reproachful.

  Jacob sees how boorish he must appear in the interpreter’s eyes: at no small risk, Ogawa tried to help a lovesick foreigner, who now rewards him with resentment. “Forgive me, Mr. Ogawa, but surely if—”

  The outer door slides open and a cheerful whistler enters.

  A shadow parts the curtain and asks, in Dutch, “Who goes there?”

  “It is Ogawa, Mr. Twomey.”

  “Good evening to you, Mr. Ogawa. Mr. de Zoet, our pipe must wait. Chief Vorstenbosch wishes to discuss an important matter with you in his bureau. Straightaway. My bones tell me there is good news waiting.”

  “WHY THE GLUM FACE, De Zoet?” Investigation into the Misgovernance of Dejima Factory sits in front of Unico Vorstenbosch. “Lost in love, have we?”

  Jacob is appalled that his secret is known even to his patron.

  “A quip, De Zoet! Nothing more. Twomey says I interrupt your ablutions?”

  “I was just finishing in the bathhouse, sir.”

  “Cleanliness being next to godliness, I am told.”

  “I make no claims on godliness, but bathing wards off the lice, and the evenings are a little cooler now.”

  “You do look drawn, De Zoet. Did I drive you too long, too exactingly, on”—Vorstenbosch drums his fingers on the Investigation—“your assignment?”

  “Exacting or not, sir, my work is my work.”

  The chief resident nods, like a judge hearing evidence.

  “May I hope that my report does not disappoint your expectations, sir?”

  Vorstenbosch unstoppers a decanter of ruby Madeira.

  Servants are setting the table in the dining room.

  The chief fills his own glass but offers nothing to Jacob. “We have gathered painstaking, merit-worthy, and undeniable proof of Dejima’s shameful misrule in the nineties, proof that shall justify, amply, my punitive measures against ex–Acting Chief Daniel Snitker …”

  Jacob notices the “we” and the omission of Van Cleef’s name.

  “… assuming our proof is presented to Governor van Overstraten with the necessary vigor.” Vorstenbosch opens the cabinet behind him and takes out another glass.

  “Nobody can doubt,” Jacob says, “that Captain Lacy shall do a good job.”

  “Why should an American care about company corruption, so long as he makes his profits?” Vorstenbosch fills a glass and hands it to Jacob. “Anselm Lacy is no crusader but a hired hand. Back in Batavia he would dutifully deliver our Investigation to the governor-general’s private secretary and never give it a second thought. The private secretary would, like as not, deposit it in a quiet canal and warn the men you name—and Snitker’s cronies—who would grind their long knives in preparation for our return. No. The whys and wherefores of Dejima’s crisis, its correctives, and the justice of Daniel Snitker’s punishment must be explicated by one whose future is bonded with the company’s. Therefore, De Zoet, I”—the pronoun is voiced significantly—“shall return to Batavia on the Shenandoah, alone, to prosecute our case.”

  The Almelo clock is loud against the drizzle’s hush and the lamp’s hiss.

  “And,” Jacob keeps his voice flat and steady, “your plans for me, sir?”

  “You are my eyes and ears in Nagasaki, until next trading season.”

  Without protection, Jacob considers, I shall be eaten alive in a week …

  “I shall, therefore, appoint Peter Fischer as the new head clerk.”

  The clatter of consequences tramples over the Almelo clock.

  Without status, Jacob thinks, I shall indeed be a lapdog, thrown into a bear pit.

  “The sole candidate for chief,” Vorstenbosch is saying, “is Mr. van Cleef …”

  Dejima is a long, long way, Jacob is afraid, from Batavia.

  “… but what say you to the sound of Deputy Chief Resident Jacob de Zoet?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  FLAG SQUARE, DEJIMA

  Morning mustering on the last day of October, 1799

  “LITTLE MIRACLE, IT IS.” PIET BAERT LOOKS AT THE SKY. “THE rain’s drained away ….”

  “Forty days an’ forty nights,” says Ivo Oost, “we was in for, I thought.”

  “Bodies was washed down the river,” Wybo Gerritszoon remarks. “I saw the boats haulin’ ’em in with big hooks on poles.”

  “Mr. Kobayashi?” Melchior van Cleef calls louder. “Mr. Kobayashi?”

  Kobayashi turns around and looks in Van Cleef’s direction.

  “We have a lot of work before the Shenandoah is loaded: why this delay?”

  “Flood broke convenient bridges in city. There is much lateness today.”

  “Then why,” asks Peter Fischer, “did the party not leave the prison earlier?”

  But Interpreter Kobayashi has turned back and watches Flag Square. Converted to an execution ground, it holds the biggest assembly Jacob has seen in Japan. The Dutchmen, their backs to the flagpole, stand in a half-moon. An oblong is drawn in the dirt where the teapot thieves are to be decapitated. Opposite ascend three steps under an awning: on the topmost row sit Chamberlain Tomine and a dozen senior officials from the magistracy; the middle row is filled with other dignitaries of Nagasaki; on the lowest step sit all sixteen ranked interpreters, barring Kobayashi, who is on duty at Vorstenbosch’s side. Ogawa Uzaemon, whom Jacob has not met since the bathhouse, looks tired. Three Shintô priests in white robes and ornate headpieces conduct a purification ritual involving chants and the throwing of salt. To the left and right stand servants; eighty or ninety unranked interpreters; coolies and day laborers, happy to be enjoying the sport at the company’s expense; and assorted guards, friskers, oarsmen, and carpenters. Four men in ragged clothing wait by a handcart. The executioner is a hawkeyed samurai, whose assistant holds a drum. Dr. Marinus stands to one side with his four male seminarians.

  Orito was a fever, Jacob reminds himself. Now the fever is lifted.

  “Hangin’s’re more of a holiday ’n this in Antwerp,” notes Baert.

  Captain Lacy looks at the flag, thinking of winds and tides.

  Vorstenbosch asks, “Shall we be needing tugboats later, Captain?”

  Lacy shakes his head. “We’ll have puff enough if this breeze holds.”

  Van Cleef warns, “The tugs’ skippers’ll try to attach the ropes regardless.”

  “Then the pirates’ll have a lot of sliced ropes to replace, ’specially if—”

  Toward the land gate, the crowd stirs, hums louder, and parts.

  The prisoners are conveyed in large rope nets
suspended on poles, carried by four men each. They are paraded past the grandstand and dumped on the oblong, where the nets are opened. The younger of the two is only sixteen or seventeen; he was probably handsome until his arrest. His older accomplice is broken and shivering. They wear only long cloths wrapped around their loins and a carapace of dried blood, welts, and gashes. Several fingers and toes are scabby maroon lumps. Constable Kosugi, the stern master of today’s grisly ceremony, opens a scroll. The crowd falls silent. Kosugi proceeds to read a Japanese text.

  “It is statement of accuse,” Kobayashi tells the Dutch, “and confessment.”

  When Constable Kosugi finishes, he proceeds to the awning, where he bows as Chamberlain Tomine delivers a statement. Constable Kosugi then walks to Unico Vorstenbosch to relay the chamberlain’s message. Kobayashi translates with marked brevity: “Do Dutch chief grant pardon?”

  Four or five hundred eyes fix themselves on Unico Vorstenbosch.

  Show mercy, Deputy-elect de Zoet prays in the rotating moment. Mercy.

  “Ask the thieves,” Vorstenbosch instructs Kobayashi, “whether they knew the likely punishment for their crime.”

  Kobayashi addresses the question to the kneeling pair.

  The older thief cannot speak. The defiant younger one declares, “Hai.”

  “Then why should I interfere in Japanese justice? The answer is no.”

  Kobayashi delivers the verdict to Constable Kosugi, who marches back to Chamberlain Tomine. When it is delivered, the crowd mutters its disapproval. The young thief says something to Vorstenbosch, and Kobayashi asks, “Do you wish for me to translate?”

  “Tell me what he says,” says the chief resident.

  “The criminal say, ‘Remember my face when you drink tea.’”

  Vorstenbosch folds his arms. “Assure him that twenty minutes from now I shall forget his face forever. In twenty days, few of his friends shall recall his features with clarity. In twenty months, even his mother shall wonder how her son looked.”

  Kobayashi translates the sentence with stern relish.

  Nearby spectators overhear and watch the Dutchmen ever more balefully.