The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

  Here you are. He looks at her. The true you, truly here.

  “It is selfish of me,” she begins in Japanese, “to impose on such a busy chief resident whom I knew so briefly, and so long ago …”

  So many things you are, Jacob thinks, but never selfish.

  “… but Chief de Zoet’s son conveyed his father’s wish with such …”

  Orito looks at Yûan—who is besotted by the midwife—and smiles.

  “… such courteous persistence that it was impossible to leave.”

  Jacob’s glance thanks Yûan. “I hope he wasn’t overly bothersome.”

  “One doubts such a mannerly boy could ever be bothersome.”

  “His master—an artist—tries his best to instill discipline into him, but after his mother passed away, my son ran wild, and I am afraid the damage is irreparable.” He turns to Orito’s companion, wondering whether she is a servant, assistant, or equal. “I’m De Zoet,” he says. “Thank you for coming.”

  The young woman is unperturbed by his foreignness. “My name is Yayoi. I mustn’t say how often she talks about you or she’ll be cross with me all day.”

  “Aibagawa-sensei,” Yûan tells him, “said that she knew Mother long ago, even before you came to Japan.”

  “Yes, Yûan, Aibagawa-sensei was kind enough to treat your mother and her sisters in the Murayama teahouses from time to time. But why, sensei, do you happen to be in Nagasaki at this”—he looks toward the cemetery—“at this sad time? I understood you were practicing midwifery in Miyako.”

  “I still am, but Dr. Maeno invited me here to advise one of his disciples, who plans to establish a school of obstetrics. I hadn’t been back to Nagasaki since … well, since I left, and so I felt the time was ripe. That my visit coincided with Dr. Marinus’s demise is a matter of unhappy chance.”

  Her explanation makes no mention of a plan to visit Dejima, so Jacob assumes she has none. He senses the curiosity of onlookers and gestures at the long flight of stone steps descending from the temple gates to the Nakashima River. “Shall we walk down together, Miss Aibagawa?”

  “With the greatest pleasure, Chief Resident de Zoet.”

  Yayoi and Yûan follow a few steps behind, and Iwase and Goto bring up the rear, so Jacob and the celebrated midwife may speak in relative privacy. They tread carefully on the wet and mossy stones.

  I could tell you a hundred things, thinks Jacob, and nothing at all.

  “I understand,” says Orito, “your son is apprenticed to the artist Shunro?”

  “Shunro-sensei took pity on the talentless boy, yes.”

  “Then your son must have inherited his father’s artistic gifts.”

  “I have no gifts! I am a bumbler with two left hands.”

  “Forgive my contradiction: I carry proof to the contrary.”

  She still has the fan, then. Jacob cannot quite hide his smile.

  “Raising him must have been taxing, after Tsukinami-sama’s passing.”

  “He lived on Dejima until two years ago. Marinus and Eelattu tutored him, and I hired what we call in Dutch a ‘nanny.’ Now he lives in his master’s studio, but the magistrate lets him visit every tenth day. Much as I long for a ship to arrive from Batavia for Dejima’s benefit, I dread the prospect of leaving him, also …”

  An invisible woodpecker works in short bursts on a nearby trunk.

  “Maeno-sensei told me,” she says, “Dr. Marinus died a peaceful death.”

  “He was proud of you. ‘Pupils like Miss Aibagawa justify me, Domburger,’ he used to say, and ‘Knowledge exists only when it is given ….’” Like love, Jacob would like to add. “Marinus was a cynical dreamer.”

  Halfway down, they hear and see the foaming coffee-brown river.

  “A great teacher attains immortality,” she remarks, “in his students.”

  “Aibagawa-sensei might equally refer to ‘her’ students.”

  Orito says, “Your Japanese fluency is most admirable.”

  “Compliments such as that prove that I still make mistakes. That’s the problem with having a daimyo’s status: nobody ever corrects me.” He hesitates. “Ogawa-sama used to, but he was a singular interpreter.”

  Warblers call and query, higher up the hidden mountain.

  “And a brave man.” Orito’s tone tells Jacob that she knows how he died, and why.

  “When Yûan’s mother was alive, I used to ask her to correct my mistakes, but she was the worst teacher. She said my blunders sounded too sweet.”

  “Yet your dictionary is now found in every domain. My own students don’t say, ‘Pass me the Dutch dictionary,’ they say, ‘Pass me the Dazûto.’”

  The wind musses the long-fingered ash trees.

  Orito asks, “Is William Pitt still alive?”

  “William Pitt eloped with a monkey on the Santa Maria, four years ago. The very morning she sailed, he swam out to her. The guards weren’t sure whether the shogun’s laws applied, but they let him leave. With him gone, only Dr. Marinus, Ivo Oost, and I were left from your days as a ‘seminarian.’ Arie Grote has come back twice, but just for the trading season.”

  Behind them, Yûan says something funny and Yayoi laughs.

  “If Aibagawa-sensei wished, by chance … to visit Dejima, then … then …”

  “Chief de Zoet is most gracious, but I must return to Miyako tomorrow. Several court ladies are pregnant and will need my assistance.”

  “Of course! Of course. I didn’t mean to imply … I mean, I didn’t …” Jacob, stung, dare not say what he didn’t mean to imply. “Your duties,” he fumbles, “your obligations, are … paramount.”

  At the bottom of the flight of steps, porters around the palanquins are rubbing oil into their calves and thighs for their burdened journeys back to town.

  Tell her, Jacob orders himself, or spend your life regretting your cowardice.

  He decides to spend his life regretting his cowardice. No, I can’t.

  “There is something I must tell you. On that day, twelve years ago, when Enomoto’s men stole you away, I was on the watchtower, and I saw you …” Jacob dares not look at her. “I saw you trying to persuade the guards at the land gate to let you in. Vorstenbosch had just betrayed me and, like a sulky child, when I saw you I did nothing. I could have run down, argued, fussed, summoned a sympathetic interpreter or Marinus … but I didn’t. God knows, I couldn’t guess the consequences of my inaction … or that I’d never set eyes on you again until today—and even that afternoon I came to my senses, but”—he feels as though a fish bone is lodged in his throat—“but by the time I’d run down to the land gate to … to … help, I was too late.”

  Orito is listening and treading carefully, but her eyes are hidden.

  “A year later, I tried to make amends. Ogawa-sama asked me to keep safe a scroll he had been given by a fugitive from the shrine, your shrine, Enomoto’s shrine. Days later came the news of Ogawa-sama’s death. Month by month, I learned enough Japanese to decipher the scroll. The day I understood what my inaction had exposed you to was the worst day of my life. But despair wouldn’t help you. Nothing could help you. During the Phoebus incident, I earned the trust of Magistrate Shiroyama, and he earned mine, so I took the grave risk of showing him the scroll. The rumors around his death, and Enomoto’s, were so thick that there was no making sense of them … but soon after, I learned that the shrine at Shiranui had been razed and Kyôga Domain given to the lord of Hizen. I tell you this … I tell you this because—because not to tell you is a lie of omission, and I cannot lie to you.”

  Irises bloom in the undergrowth. Jacob is blushing and crushed.

  Orito prepares her answer. “When pain is vivid, when decisions are keen-edged, we believe that we are the surgeons. But time passes, and one sees the whole more clearly, and now I perceive us as surgical instruments used by the world to excise itself of the Order of Mount Shiranui. Had you given me sanctuary on Dejima that day, I would have been spared pain, yes, but Yayoi would still be a prisone
r there. The creeds would still be enforced. How can I forgive you when you did nothing wrong?”

  They arrive at the foot of the hill. The river booms.

  A stall sells amulets and grilled fish. Mourners revert to people.

  Some talk, some joke, some watch the Dutch chief and the midwife.

  “It must be hard,” says Orito, “not knowing when you can see Europe again.”

  “I try to think of Dejima as home. My son is here, after all.”

  Jacob imagines embracing this woman he can never embrace …

  … and imagines kissing her, once, between her eyebrows.

  “Father?” Yûan is frowning at Jacob. “Are you unwell?”

  How quickly you grow, the father thinks. Why wasn’t I warned?

  Orito says, in Dutch, “So, Chief de Zoet, our steps together is ended.”

  Part Five

  THE LAST PAGES

  Autumn 1817

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  QUARTERDECK OF THE PROFETES, NAGASAKI BAY

  Monday, November 3, 1817

  … AND WHEN JACOB LOOKS AGAIN, THE MORNING STAR IS gone. Dejima is falling away by the minute. He waves at the figure on the watchtower, and the figure waves back. The tide is turning but the wind is contrary, so eighteen Japanese boats of eight oars apiece are tugging the Profetes out of the long bay. The oarsmen chant the same song in rhythm: their ragged chorus merges with the sea’s percussion and the ship’s timbers. Fourteen boats would have done the job, thinks Jacob, but Chief Oost drove a fierce bargain on repairs to Warehouse Roos, so perhaps he was well advised to concede this point. Jacob rubs the fine drizzle into his tired face. A lantern still burns in the sea-room window of his old house. He remembers the lean years when he was forced to sell Marinus’s library, volume by volume, to buy lamp oil.

  “Morning, Chief de Zoet.” A young midshipman appears.

  “Good morning, though it’s plain old Mr. de Zoet now. You are?”

  “Boerhaave, sir. I’m to be your servant on the voyage.”

  “Boerhaave … a fine nautical name.” Jacob offers his hand.

  The midshipman grips it firmly. “Honored, sir.”

  Jacob turns to the watchtower, whose observer is now as small as a chessman.

  “Pardon my curiosity, sir,” begins Boerhaave, “but the lieutenants were talking at supper about how you faced down a British frigate in this bay, all alone.”

  “All that happened before you were born. And I wasn’t alone.”

  “You mean Providence had a hand in your defense of our flag, sir?”

  Jacob senses a devout mind. “Let us say so.”

  Dawn breathes muddy greens and ember reds through gray woods.

  “And afterward, sir, you were marooned on Dejima for seventeen years?”

  “‘Marooned’ is not quite the word, Midshipman. I visited Edo three times—a most diverting journey. My friend the doctor and I could go botanizing along these headlands, and in later years, I was allowed to visit acquaintances in Nagasaki more or less freely. The regime then more closely resembled that of a strict boarding school than it did a prison island.”

  A sailor on the mizzen yard shouts in a Scandinavian language.

  The delayed reply from the ratline is a long and filthy laugh.

  The crew is excited that twelve weeks of anchored idling is at an end.

  “You must be eager to see home, Mr. de Zoet, after so long away.”

  Jacob envies youth its clarities and certainties. “There’ll be more strangers’ faces than familiar ones on Walcheren, what with the war and the passage of twenty years. Truth be told, I petitioned Edo for permission to settle in Nagasaki as a sort of consul for the new company, but no precedent could be found in the archives.” He wipes his misted-over spectacles. “And so, as you see, I must leave.” The watchtower is clearer without his glasses, and farsighted Jacob puts them in his jacket pocket. He suffers a lurch of panic to discover his pocket watch is missing, before remembering that he gave it to Yûan. “Mr. Boerhaave, might you know the time?”

  “Two bells o’ the larboard watch was not so long ago, sir.”

  Before Jacob can explain that he meant the land time, the bell of Ryûgaji Temple booms for the Hour of the Dragon: a quarter past seven, at this time of year.

  The hour of my parting, Jacob thinks, is Japan’s parting gift.

  The figure on the watchtower is shrunk to a tiny letter i.

  He might be me, seen from the quarterdeck of the Shenandoah, though Jacob doubts that Unico Vorstenbosch was a man ever to look back. Captain Penhaligon, however, probably did … Jacob hopes, one day, to send a letter to the Englishman from the “Dutch shopkeeper” to ask what stayed his hand from firing the Phoebus’s carronades that autumn day: was it an act of Christian mercy, or did some more-pragmatic consideration belay the order to fire?

  The chances are, he must concede, Penhaligon, too, is dead by now.

  A black sailor scales a nearby rope, and Jacob thinks of Ogawa Uzaemon telling him how foreign vessels seem manned by phantoms and mirror images who appear and disappear through hidden portals. Jacob says a brief prayer for the interpreter’s soul, watching the ship’s restless wake.

  The figure on the watchtower is an indistinct smudge. Jacob waves.

  The smudge waves back, with two smudged arms, in wide arcs.

  “A particular friend of yours, sir?” asks Midshipman Boerhaave.

  Jacob stops waving. The figure stops waving. “My son.”

  Boerhaave is unsure what to say. “You’re leaving him behind, sir?”

  “I have no choice. His mother was Japanese, and such is the law. Obscurity is Japan’s outermost defense. The country doesn’t want to be understood.”

  “But … so … when may you meet your son again?”

  “Today—this minute—is the last I shall ever see of him … in this world, at least.”

  “I could obtain the loan of a telescope, sir, if you desire it?”

  Jacob is touched by Boerhaave’s concern. “Thank you, but no. I’d not see his face properly. But might I trouble you for a flask of hot tea from the galley?”

  “Of course, sir—though it may take a little while, if the stove isn’t yet lit.”

  “Take as long as it takes. It’ll … it’ll keep the chill from my chest.”

  “Very good, sir.” Boerhaave walks to the main hatch and goes below.

  Yûan’s outline is losing definition against the backdrop of Nagasaki.

  Jacob prays, and shall pray nightly, that Yûan’s life will be better than that of Thunberg’s tubercular son, but the ex-chief is well versed in Japan’s distrust of foreign blood. Yûan may be his master’s most gifted pupil, but he shall never inherit his master’s title, or marry without the magistrate’s permission, or even leave the wards of the city. He is too Japanese to leave, Jacob knows, but not Japanese enough to belong.

  A hundred wood pigeons scatter from a spur of beech trees.

  Even letters must rely upon the fair-mindedness of strangers. Replies will take three or four or five years.

  The exiled father rubs an eyelash from his wind-blurry eye.

  He stamps his feet against the early cold. His kneecaps complain.

  Looking backward, Jacob sees pages from the months and years ahead. Upon his arrival at Java, the new governor-general summons him to his palace in salubrious Buitenzorg, inland and high above the miasmic airs of Batavia. Jacob is offered a plum job in the new governorship, but he declines, citing his desire to return to his fatherland. If I cannot stay in Nagasaki, he thinks, better to turn my back on the Orient altogether. The following month, he watches nightfall smother Sumatra from a ship bound for Europe, and hears Dr. Marinus, clear as a harpsichord’s spindly refrain, remark upon the brevity of life, probably in Aramaic. Naturally, this is a trick of his mind. Six weeks later the passengers see Table Mountain rear up behind Cape Town, where Jacob recalls fragments of a story narrated by Chief van Cleef on the roof of a brothel, l
ong ago. Ship fever, a brutal storm off the Azores, and a brush with a Barbary corsair make the Atlantic leg more arduous, but he disembarks safely in the Texel roadstead in a hailstorm. The harbormaster presents Jacob with a courteous summons to The Hague, where his distant role in the war is recognized by a brief ceremony at the Department for Trade and the Colonies. He proceeds to Rotterdam and stands on the same quay where he once made a vow to a young woman called Anna that within six years he would return from the East Indies, with his fortune made. He has money enough now, but Anna died in childbirth long ago, and Jacob boards the daily packet to Veere on Walcheren. The windmills on his war-bruised native island are rebuilt and busy. Nobody in Veere recognizes the home-coming Domburger. Vrouwenpolder is only half an hour’s ride by trap, but Jacob prefers to walk so as not to disturb the afternoon classes at Geertje’s husband’s school. His sister opens the door when he knocks. She says, “My husband is in his study, sir, would you care to—” then her eyes widen, and she begins to weep and laugh.

  The following Sunday, Jacob listens to a sermon in Domburg church, among a congregation of familiar faces as aged as his own. He pays his respects at the graves of his mother, father, and uncle but declines the new pastor’s invitation to dine at the parsonage. He rides to Middelburg for meetings with the directors of trading houses and import companies. Positions are proposed, decisions taken, contracts signed, and Jacob is inducted into the Freemasons’ Lodge. By tulip-time and Whitsuntide, he emerges from a church arm in arm with the stolid daughter of an associate. The confetti reminds Jacob of the cherry blossoms in Miyako. That Mrs. de Zoet is half her husband’s age provokes no disapproval—her youth is an equitable exchange for his money. Man and wife find each other’s company agreeable, for most of the time, or, certainly, for some of it; during the earlier years of their marriage, at least. He intends to publish his memoirs about his years as chief resident in Japan, but somehow life always conspires to rob him of the time. Jacob turns fifty. He is elected to the council of Middelburg. Jacob turns sixty, and his memoirs are still unwritten. His copper hair loses its burnish, his face sags, and his hairline retreats until it resembles an elderly samurai’s shaven pate. A rising artist who paints his portrait wonders at his air of melancholic distance but exorcises the ghost of absence from the finished painting. One day Jacob bequeaths the De Zoet Psalter to his eldest son—not Yûan, who predeceased him, but his eldest Dutch son, a conscientious boy quite untroubled by curiosity about life beyond Zeeland. Late October or early November brings a gusty twilight. The day has stripped the elms and sycamores of their last leaves, and the lamplighter is making his rounds as Jacob’s family lines the patriarch’s bedside. Middelburg’s best doctor wears a grave demeanor, but he is satisfied that everything was done for his patient during the short but lucrative illness and that he will be home in time for supper. The clock’s pendulum catches the firelight, and in the rattle-breathed final moments of Jacob de Zoet, amber shadows in the far corner coagulate into a woman’s form.