The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

  After the male students have distinguished “anal” from “oral,” Yano responds, “Body more quick absorb medicine.”

  “Good.” Marinus’s slight smile is menacing. “Now. Who knows the smoke glister?”

  The male seminarians confer without including Miss Aibagawa. At length, Muramoto says, “We do not know, Doctor.”

  “Nor could you, gentlemen: the smoke glister has never been seen in Japan until this hour. Eelattu, if you please!” Marinus’s assistant enters, carrying a leather tube as long as a forearm and a deep-bellied lit pipe. The tube he hands to his master, who flourishes it like a wayside performer. “Our smoke glister, gentlemen, possesses a valve in its midriff, here, into which the leather tube is inserted, here, via which the cylinder can be filled with smoke. Please, Eelattu …” The Ceylonese inhales smoke from the pipe and exhales it into the leather tube. “‘Intussusception’ is the ailment for which this instrument is the cure. Let us speak its name together, seminarians, for who can cure what he cannot pronounce? ‘In-tus-sus-cep-tion!’” He waves one finger like a conductor’s baton. “A-one, a-two, a-three …”

  “‘In-tus-sus-cep-tion.’” The students falter. “‘Intus-sus-cep-tion.’”

  “A terminal condition where an upper portion of the intestine passes into a lower, thusly …” The doctor holds up a piece of sailcloth, stitched like a trouser leg. “This is the colon.” He narrows one end in his fist, and feeds it backward inside the cloth tube toward the other end. “Ouch and itai. Diagnosis is difficult, its symptoms being the classic alimentary triad, namely, Mr. Ikematsu?”

  “Abdomen pain, groin swelling …” He massages his temples to loosen the third. “Ah! Blood in feces.”

  “Good: death by intussusception, or,” he looks at Jacob, “in the vernacular, ‘shitting out your own intestines,’ is, as you would expect, a laborious affair. Its Latin name is miserere mei, translatable as ‘Lord have mercy.’ The smoke glister, however, can reverse this wrong,” he pulls the knotted end of the sailcloth tube out again, “by puffing in such a density of smoke that the ‘slippage’ is reversed and the intestine restored to its natural state. Domburger, in guerno for favors granted, shall loan his gluteus maximus to medical science, that I may demonstrate the passage of smoke ‘through caverns measureless to man’ from anus to esophagus, whence smoke trickles through his nostrils like incense from a stone dragon, though not, alas, so sweet-scented, given its malodorous voyage.”

  Jacob begins to understand. “Surely, you don’t intend—”

  “Remove your breeches. We are all servants of medicine.”

  “Doctor.” The sickroom is disagreeably cool. “I never consented to this.”

  “To treat nerves,” Marinus flips Jacob over with an agility belying the doctor’s partial lameness, “ignore them. Eelattu: let the seminarians inspect the apparatus. Then we begin.”

  “A fine joke,” wheezes Jacob, under two hundred pounds of Dutch physician, “but—”

  Marinus unhooks the now-squirming clerk’s braces.

  “No, Doctor! No! Your little joke has gone far enough …”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TALL HOUSE, DEJIMA

  Early on Tuesday, August 27, 1799

  THE BED SHAKES ITS SLEEPER AWAKE; TWO OF ITS LEGS SNAP, tipping Jacob onto the floor, whacking his jaw and knee. Merciful Christ is his first thought. The Shenandoah’s magazine is exploded. But the spasm seizing Tall House grows stronger and faster. Joists groan; plaster patters like grapeshot; a window casement flies from its mount and the lurching room is lit apricot; the mosquito net enwraps Jacob’s face and the unappeasable violence is magnified threefold, fivefold, tenfold, and the bed drags itself across the room like a wounded beast. A frigate, or a man-of-war, is unloosing a broadside, Jacob thinks. A candlestick hops in dithyrambic circles; sheaves of paper from high shelves swoop in loops. Don’t let me die here, Jacob prays, seeing his skull smashed under beams and yolky brains dashed in Dejima’s dust. Prayer grips the pastor’s nephew, raw-throated prayer, to the Jehovah of the early Psalms: O God, Thou hast cast us off, Thou hast scattered us, Thou hast been displeased; O turn Thyself to us again! Jacob is answered by roof tiles smashing on Long Street and cows lowing and goats bleating. Thou hast made the earth to tremble; Thou hast broken it; heal the breaches thereof; for it shaketh. Glass panes shatter into false diamonds, timber cracks like bones, Jacob’s sea chest is tossed by undulating planks, the water jug spills and the chamber pot is upended and Creation herself is being undone and God God God, he implores, bid it cease bid it cease bid it cease!

  THE LORD OF HOSTS is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah. Jacob shuts his eyes. Silence is peace. He thanks Providence for subduing the earthquake and thinks, Dear Christ, the warehouses! My mercury calomel! He snatches his clothes, steps over the flattened door, and meets Hanzaburo emerging from his nest. Jacob barks, “Guard my room!” but the boy does not understand. The Dutchman stands in the doorway and makes the shape of an X with his arms and legs. “Nobody enter! Understand?”

  Hanzaburo nods nervously, as if he must placate a madman.

  Jacob clatters down the stairs, unbolts the door, and finds Long Street looking as if an army of British looters just passed through. Shutters lie in pieces, tiles lie in shards, the entire garden wall has collapsed. Dust thickens the air, corroding the sun. On the city’s high eastern flank, black smoke billows, and somewhere a woman is wailing out her lungs. The clerk makes his way to the chief’s residence but collides with Wybo Gerritszoon at the crossroads. The hand sways and slurs, “Bastard French bastards’ve landed an’ the bastards’re everywhere!”

  “Mr. Gerritszoon: see to the Doorn and the Eik. I’ll check elsewhere.”

  “You,” the tattooed strongman spits, “parleyin’ wi’ me, Monsewer Jacques?”

  Jacob steps around him and tests the Doorn’s door: it is secure.

  Gerritszoon grabs the clerk’s throat and roars, “Get yer filthy French hands off my house an’ take yer filthy French fingers off my sister!” He relinquishes his grip in order to hurl a jaw-breaker: had its aim been true it could have killed Jacob, but instead its force flings Gerritszoon onto the ground. “French bastards winged me! Winged me!”

  In Flag Square, the muster bell begins to ring.

  “Ignore that bell!” Vorstenbosch, flanked by Cupido and Philander, paces up Long Street. “The jackals would line us up like children even as they reef us!” He notices Gerritszoon. “Is he injured?”

  Jacob rubs his aching throat. “By grog, I fear, sir.”

  “Leave him be. We must guard ourselves against our protectors.”

  THE DAMAGE CAUSED by the earthquake is bad but not disastrous. Of the four Dutch-owned warehouses, the Lelie is still under reconstruction following Snitker’s Fire, and its frame held firm; the doors stayed up on the Doorn; and Van Cleef and Jacob were able to guard the damaged Eik against looters until Con Twomey and the Shenandoah’s carpenter, a wraithlike Québecois, had rehung the thrown-down doors. Captain Lacy reported that while they didn’t feel the earthquake on board the ship, the noise was as loud as war between God and the devil. Some tens of crates, moreover, toppled onto the floor in various warehouses; all must be inspected for breakages and spillages. Dozens of roof tiles must be replaced, new earthenware urns must be procured; the flattened bathhouse must be repaired at the company’s expense and the toppled dovecote mended; and the plaster shaken loose from the north wall of Garden House will have to be applied again from scratch. Interpreter Kobayashi reported that the boathouses where the company sampans are stored collapsed and quoted what he called “a superlative price” for repairs. Vorstenbosch shot back, “Superlative for whom?” and swore not to part with a penning until he and Twomey had inspected the damage themselves. The interpreter left in a state of stony anger. From the watchtower, Jacob could see that not every ward in Nagasaki escaped as lightly as Dejima: he counted twenty substantial buildings collapsed and four serious fires pouring smoke in
to the late August sky.

  IN WAREHOUSE EIK, Jacob and Weh sort through crates of toppled Venetian mirrors: every last glass is to be unwrapped from its straw and recorded as undamaged, cracked, or smashed. Hanzaburo curls up on a pile of sacking, and soon he is asleep. For most of the morning, the only sounds are mirrors being laid aside, Weh chewing betel nut, the scratch of Jacob’s nib, and, over at the sea gate, porters bringing ashore tin and lead. The carpenters who would ordinarily be at work on Warehouse Lelie, across the weighing yard, are engaged, Jacob guesses, on more-pressing jobs in Nagasaki.

  “Well, it ain’t seven years o’ bad luck here, Mr. de Z., but seven ’undred, eh?”

  Jacob hadn’t noticed Arie Grote enter.

  “Quite pard’nable ’twould be, eh, were a cove to lose count an’ enter a few whole mirrors as ‘smashed,’ wholly in error …”

  “Is this a thinly veiled invitation”—Jacob yawns—“to commit fraud?”

  “May wild dogs chew my head off first! Now, I’ve arranged a meetin’ for us. You,” Grote glances at Weh, “can make yerself scarce: a gent’s comin’ what’d take offense at your shit-brown hide.”

  “Weh is going nowhere,” counters Jacob. “And who is this ‘gent’?”

  Grote hears something and peers out. “Oh, bloody oath, they’re early.” He points to a wall of crates and orders Weh, “Hide behind there! Mr. de Z., dispense with yer sentiments regardin’ our sable brethren, ’cause piles an’ piles an’ piles o’ money is at stake.”

  The slave youth looks at Jacob; Jacob, reluctantly, nods; Weh obeys.

  “I am here, eh, to play the go-between twixt you and—”

  Interpreter Yonekizu and Constable Kosugi appear at the door.

  Ignoring Jacob altogether, both men usher in a familiar stranger.

  Four young, lithe, and grim personal guards appear first.

  Next enters their master: an older man who walks as if treading on water. He wears a sky-blue cape and his head is shaven, though a sword hilt shows from his waist sash.

  His is the only face in the warehouse not sheathed in sweat.

  From what flickering dream, wonders Jacob, do I know your face?

  “Lord Abbot Enomoto of the Domain of Kyôga,” announces Grote. “My associate, Mr. de Zoet.”

  Jacob bows: the abbot’s lips tighten into a smile of recognition.

  He speaks to Yonekizu in a burnished, uninterruptible voice.

  “Abbot,” translates Yonekizu, “says he believed you and he share affinity, on first time he see you at magistracy. Today he know his belief was correct.”

  Abbot Enomoto asks Yonekizu to teach him the Dutch word “affinity.”

  Jacob now identifies his visitor: he was the man sitting close to Magistrate Shiroyama in the Hall of Sixty Mats.

  The abbot has Yonekizu repeat Jacob’s name three times over.

  “Da-zû-to,” echoes the abbot, and checks: “I say correct?”

  “Your Grace,” Jacob says, “speaks my name very well.”

  “The abbot,” Yonekizu adds, “translated Antoine Lavoisier into Japanese.”

  Jacob is duly impressed. “Might Your Grace know Marinus?”

  The abbot has Yonekizu translate his reply: “Abbot meet Dr. Marinus at Shirandô Academy often. He has much respect for Dutch scholar, he say. But abbot also have many duties, so cannot devote all life to chemical arts.”

  Jacob considers the power his visitor must wield to waltz into Dejima on a day turned upside down by the earthquake and mingle with foreigners, free from the usual phalanx of spies and shogunal guards. Enomoto runs his thumb along the crates, as if divining their contents. He encounters the sleeping Hanzaburo and makes a motion in the air above the boy, like a genuflection. Hanzaburo mouths groggy syllables, wakes, sees the abbot, yelps, and rolls onto the floor. He flees from the warehouse like a frog from a water snake.

  “Young mans,” Enomoto says in Dutch, “hurry, hurry, hurry …”

  The world outside, framed by the Eik’s double doors, dims.

  The abbot handles an undamaged mirror. “This is quicksilver?”

  “Silver oxide,” replies Jacob. “Of Italian manufacture.”

  “Silver is more truth,” remarks the abbot, “than copper mirrors of Japan. But truth is easy to break.” He angles the mirror so as to capture Jacob’s reflection and puts a question to Yonekizu in Japanese. Yonekizu says, “His Grace ask, ‘At Holland also, do dead people lack reflection?’”

  Jacob recalls his grandmother saying as much. “Old women believe so, sir, yes.”

  The abbot understands and is pleased with the answer.

  “There is a tribe at the Cape of Good Hope,” Jacob ventures, “called the Basutos, who credit a crocodile may kill a man by snapping his reflection in the water. Another tribe, the Zulus, avoid dark pools lest a ghost seize the reflection and devour the observer’s soul.”

  Yonekizu gives a careful translation and explains Enomoto’s reply. “The abbot says idea is beautiful and wishes to know, ‘Does Mr. de Zoet believe in soul?’”

  “To doubt the soul,” says Jacob, “would strike me as peculiar.”

  Enomoto asks, “Does Mr. de Zoet believe soul can be taked?”

  “Taken not by a ghost or crocodile, no, but by the devil, yes.”

  Enomoto’s ha denotes surprise that he and a foreigner could agree so well.

  Jacob steps out of the mirror’s field of reflection. “Your Grace’s Dutch is excellent.”

  “Listening difficult”—Enomoto turns—“so glad interpreters is here. Once I speak—spoke—Spanish, but now knowledge is decayed.”

  “It is two centuries,” says Jacob, “since the Spaniards walked Japan.”

  “Time …” Idly, Enomoto lifts the lid of a box; Yonekizu exclaims in alarm.

  Coiled like a small whip is a habu snake. It rears its angry head …

  … its twin fangs glint white; its neck sways back, ready to strike.

  Two of the abbot’s guards rush up, swords drawn …

  … but Enomoto makes a pressing motion with his flat hand.

  “Don’t let it bite him!” exclaims Grote. “He ain’t yet paid for the—”

  Instead of attacking the abbot’s hand, the habu’s neck turns limp, and it slumps back on its crate. Its jaws are frozen, wide open.

  Jacob’s jaws, too, are agape; he glances at Grote, who looks afraid.

  “Your Grace, did you … charm the snake? Is it … is it asleep?”

  “Snake is dead.” Enomoto orders his guard to take it outside.

  How did you do that? Jacob wonders, searching for tricks. “But …”

  The abbot sees the Dutchman’s bafflement and speaks to Yonekizu.

  “Lord abbot say,” begins Yonekizu, “‘Not trick, not magic.’ He says, ‘It is Chinese philosophy who scholars of Europe is too clever to understand.’ He says … excuse, very difficult. He says, ‘All life is life because possess force of ki.’”

  “Force of key?” Arie Grote mimes turning a key. “What’s that?”

  Yonekizu shakes his head. “Not key: ki. Ki. Lord abbot explain that his studies, his order, teach how to … what is word? How to manipule force of ki, to heal sickness, et cetera.”

  “Oh, Mr. Snaky,” mutters Grote, “got his fair share of et cetera.”

  Given the abbot’s status, Jacob worries that an apology is due. “Mr. Yonekizu: pray tell His Grace how sorry I am that a snake threatened his well-being in a Dutch warehouse.”

  Yonekizu does so; Enomoto shakes his head. “Nasty bite, but not very poison.”

  “… and say,” continues Jacob, “what I just saw shall stay with me all my life.”

  Enomoto replies with an ambiguous hnnnnnn noise.

  “In next life,” the abbot tells Jacob, “be born in Japan so come to shrine, and—excuse, Dutch is difficult.” He addresses several long sentences to Yonekizu in their mother tongue. The interpreter translates them in order. “Abbot says, Mr. de Zoet must not think he
is powerful lord like lord of Satsuma. Kyôga Domain is only twenty miles wide, twenty miles long, very many mountains, and has just two towns, Isahaya and Kashima, and villages along road of Sea of Ariake. But,” Yonekizu perhaps adds this on his own initiative, “special domain gives lord abbot high rank—in Edo can meet shogun, in Miyako, can meet emperor. Lord abbot’s shrine is high on Shiranui Mountain. He say, ‘In spring and autumn, very beautiful; in winter, a little cold, but summer, cool.’ Abbot say, ‘One can breathe and does not grow old.’ Abbot say, ‘He have two lifes. World above, at Mount Shiranui, is spirit and prayer and ki. World below is men and politics and scholars … and import drugs and money.’”

  “Oh, at flamin’ last,” mutters Arie Grote. “Mr. de Z.: this is our cue.”

  Jacob looks uncertainly at Grote, at the abbot, and back at the cook.

  “Raise,” sighs Grote, “the subject o’ trade.” He mouths the word “mercury.”

  Jacob, belatedly, understands. “Pardon my directness, Your Grace,” he addresses Enomoto while glancing at Yonekizu, “but may we render any service today?”

  Yonekizu translates; with a glance, Enomoto sends the query back to Grote.

  “Fact, Mr. de Z., is this: Abbot Enomoto wishes to purchase, eh, all eight chests of our mercury powder for the sum of one hundred an’ six koban per crate.”

  Jacob’s first thought is, “Our” mercury? His second is, One hundred and six?

  His third thought is a number: eight hundred and forty-eight koban.

  “Twice as much again,” Grote reminds him, “as the Osaka druggist.”

  Eight hundred and forty-eight koban is a half fortune, at least.

  Wait, wait, wait, Jacob thinks. Why so high a price?

  “Mr. de Zoet’s so ’appy,” Grote assures Enomoto, “he can’t speak.”

  The snake trick dazzled my senses, but keep a calm head now …

  “A more deservin’ cove,” Grote says, clapping Jacob’s shoulder, “I never knew …”

  … a monopoly, Jacob hypothesizes. He’s after a temporary monopoly.