The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

  “‘Hello’ed be thy daily heaven …’” Gerritszoon belches. “Howz’ fockit go?”

  Yano mimes a constriction with his fist. “Stone … stop … water.”

  “So.” Marinus sniffs. “The stone is blocking the urethra. What fate awaits the patient who cannot pass urine, Mr. Ikematsu?”

  Uzaemon watches Ikematsu deduce the whole from the parts, “cannot,” “urine,” and “fate.” “Body who cannot pass urine cannot make blood pure, Doctor. Body die of dirty blood.”

  “It dies.” Marinus nods. “The Great Hippocrates warned the phys—”

  “Will yer cork yer quack’n’ an’ do the f’ckin’ t’ do it yer f’ck’r …”

  Jacob de Zoet and Con Twomey, here to assist the doctor, exchange glances.

  Marinus takes a length of cotton dressing from Eelattu, tells Gerritszoon, “Open, please,” and gags his mouth. “The Great Hippocrates warned the physician to ‘cut no stones’ and leave the job to lowly surgeons; the Roman Ammonius Lithotomos, the Hindoo Susruta, and the Arab Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi—who, en passant, invented the ancestor of this”—Marinus wiggles his blood-encrusted double-sided scalpel—“would cut the perineum”—the doctor lifts the outraged Dutchman’s penis and indicates between its root and the anus—“here, by the pubic symphysis.” Marinus drops the penis. “Rather more than half the patients in those bad old days died—in agonies.”

  Gerritszoon abruptly stops struggling.

  “Frère Jacques, a gifted French quack, proposed a suprapubic incision, above the corpus ossis pubis”—Marinus dips his fingernail into an inkpot and marks a line below and to the left of Gerritszoon’s navel—“and entering the bladder sideways. Cheselden, an Englishman, perfected the operation, losing less than one patient in ten. I have performed upwards of fifty lithotomies and lost four. Two were not my fault. The two were … Well, we live and learn, even if our dead patients cannot say the same, eh, Gerritszoon? Cheselden’s fee was five hundred pounds for two or three minutes’ work. But luckily,” the doctor says, slapping the trussed patient’s buttock, “Cheselden taught a student named John Hunter. Hunter’s students included a Dutchman, Hardwijke, and Hardwijke taught Marinus, who today performs this operation gratis. So. Shall we begin?”

  The rectum of Wybo Gerritszoon releases a hot fart of horror.

  “View halloo.” Marinus nods at De Zoet and Twomey; they secure a thigh each. “The less movement, the less the accidental damage.” Uzaemon sees that the seminarians are uncertain of this pronouncement, so he translates it for them. Eelattu kneels astraddle the patient’s midriff, parts Gerritszoon’s buttocks, and blocks his view of the knives. Dr. Marinus now asks Dr. Maeno to hold the lamp close to the inked mark and takes up his scalpel. His face changes into the face of a swordsman.

  Marinus sinks the scalpel into Gerritszoon’s abdomen.

  The patient’s entire body tenses like a single muscle; Uzaemon shudders.

  The four seminarians, peer, transfixed.

  “Fat and muscle thickness vary,” says Marinus, “but the bladder—”

  Still gagged, Gerritszoon releases a loud noise not unlike a man in orgasm.

  “—the bladder,” continues Marinus, “is about a thumb’s width in.”

  The scalpel inscribes the whole incision mark: Gerritszoon shrieks in pain.

  Uzaemon forces himself to watch: lithotomies are unknown outside Dejima, and he must supplement Maeno’s report to the academy.

  Gerritszoon snorts like a bull, his eyes water, and he groans.

  Marinus dips his left forefinger into rapeseed oil and inserts it into Gerritszoon’s anus up to its knuckle. “Thus the patient should void his bowels beforehand.” There is the smell of rotting meat and sweet apples. “One locates the stone through the rectal ampulla”—with his right hand, Marinus inserts the tweezers into the blood-brimming incision—“and pushes it from the fundus up toward the incision.” Liquid feces ooze out of the patient’s rectum around the doctor’s hand. “The less one pokes around with the tweezers, the better … One puncture is quite enough, and—ah! Almost had it … and—aha! Ecco siamo!” He takes out the stone, retrieves his finger from Gerritszoon’s anus, and wipes both on his apron. The stone is as big as an acorn and the yellow of a diseased tooth. “The gash must be stanched before our patient dies of blood loss. Domburger, Corkonian, pray stand aside.” Marinus pours another oil over the incision, and Eelattu covers it with a scab-crusty bandage.

  Gagged Gerritszoon sighs as the pain lessens from unendurable to grueling.

  Dr. Maeno asks, “What is oil, Doctor, if you please?”

  “Extract of the bark and leaves of Hamamelis japonica, which I named myself. It’s a local variety of witch hazel, which lessens the risk of fevers—a trick taught me by an unschooled old woman, many lifetimes ago.”

  Orito, too, remembers Uzaemon, learned from old mountain herbalists.

  Eelattu changes the dressing, then binds its replacement against Gerritszoon’s waist. “The patient should lie down for three days, and eat and drink in moderation. Urine shall leak through the wound in his bladder wall; one must be ready for fevers and swellings; but urine should be appearing by the usual means within two or three weeks.” Marinus now unties Gerritszoon’s gag and tells him. “About the same time required by Sjako to walk again in the wake of the drubbing you gave him last September, no?”

  Gerritszoon unscrews his eyes. “Yer f’ckin’ yer, yer … f’ckin’ f’ckin’ yer …”

  “Peace on earth.” Marinus puts his finger on the patient’s lips, badly blotched with cold sores. “Goodwill to all men.”

  CHIEF VAN CLEEF’S DINING ROOM is noisy with six or eight conversations in Japanese and Dutch; silver cutlery clinks on the best tableware; and though it is not yet evening, the candelabra are lighting a battlefield of goat bones, fish spines, bread crusts, crab claws, lobster shells, blancmange gobbets, and holly leaves and berries, fallen from the ceiling. The panels between the dining room and the bay room are removed, affording Uzaemon a view all the way to the distant mouth of the open sea: the waters are slate blue, and the mountains half erased by the cold drizzle turning last night’s snow to slush.

  The chief’s Malay servants finish one song on flute and violin and begin another. Uzaemon remembers it from last year’s banquet. It is understood by the ranked interpreters that “Dutch New Year” on the twenty-fifth day of December coincides with the birth of Jesus Christ, but this is never acknowledged in case an ambitious spy one day accuses them of endorsing Christian worship. Christmas, Uzaemon has noticed, affects the Dutch in strange ways. They can become intolerably homesick, even abusive, merry and maudlin, often all at once. By the time Arie Grote brings up the plum pudding, Chief van Cleef, Deputy Fischer, Ouwehand, Baert, and the youth Oost are somewhere between quite drunk and very drunk. Only the soberer Marinus, De Zoet, and Twomey converse with any of the Japanese banqueters.

  “Ogawa-san?” Goto Shinpachi looks concerned. “Are you ill?”

  “No, no … I’m sorry. Goto-san asked me a question?”

  “It was a remark about the beauty of the music.”

  “I’d rather listen,” declares Interpreter Sekita, “to butchered hogs.”

  “Or a man having his stone cut out,” says Arashiyama, “eh, Ogawa?”

  “Your description murdered my appetite.” Sekita stuffs another deviled egg into his mouth, whole. “These eggs really are very good.”

  “I’d trust Chinese herbs,” says Nishi, the monkey-faced scion of a rival dynasty of Nagasaki interpreters, “before I’d trust a Dutch knife.”

  “My cousin trusted Chinese herbs,” says Arashiyama, “for his stone—”

  Deputy Fischer laughs his galloping laugh as he bangs on the table.

  “—and died in a way that would truly murder your appetite.”

  Chief van Cleef’s current Dejima wife, wearing a snow-patterned kimono and jangling bracelets, slides open the door and bows demurely to the room. Several conve
rsations fall away, and the better-mannered diners stop themselves ogling. She whispers something in Van Cleef’s ear that makes his face light up; he whispers back and slaps her buttocks like a farmer slapping an ox. Feigning coquettish anger, she returns to Van Cleef’s private chamber.

  Uzaemon suspects Van Cleef contrived the scene to show off his possession.

  “More’s the pity,” croons Sekita, “she’s not on the menu.”

  If De Zoet had had his way, thinks Uzaemon, Orito would be a Dejima wife, too …

  Cupido distributes a bottle to each of the two dozen diners.

  … giving herself to one man—Uzaemon bites—instead of being given to many.

  “I was afraid,” says Sekita, “they’d forgo this pleasant custom.”

  That’s my guilt talking, Uzaemon thinks. But what if my guilt is right?

  The Malay servant Philander follows, uncorking each bottle.

  Van Cleef stands and chimes a spoon on a glass until he has the table’s attention. “Those of you who honored the Dutch New Year banquet under Chiefs Hemmij and Snitker shall know of the hydra-headed toast …”

  Arashiyama whispers to Uzaemon, “What’s a hydra?”

  Uzaemon knows but shrugs, unwilling to lose more of Van Cleef’s sentences.

  “We make a toast, one by one,” says Goto Shinpachi, “and—”

  “—and get drunker and drunker,” belches Sekita, “minute by minute.”

  “… whereby our joint desires,” Van Cleef says, swaying, “forge a … a … brighter future.”

  As the custom dictates, each diner fills his neighbor’s glass.

  “And so, gentlemen, to the nineteenth century!” Van Cleef raises his glass.

  The room echoes the toast, despite its irrelevance to the Japanese calendar.

  Uzaemon notices how unwell he is feeling.

  “I give you friendship,” Deputy Fischer says, “betwixt Europe and the East!”

  How often, wonders Uzaemon, am I doomed to hear these same hollow words?

  Interpreter Kobayashi looks at Uzaemon. “To soon recovery of very dear friends Ogawa Mimasaku and Gerritszoon-san.” So Uzaemon must stand and bow to Kobayashi the Elder, knowing that he is maneuvering at the Interpreters’ Guild to have his son promoted over Uzaemon’s head to second rank when Ogawa the Elder accepts the inevitable and retires from his coveted post.

  Dr. Marinus’s turn is next: “To the seekers of truth.”

  For the benefit of the inspectors, Interpreter Yoshio proposes in Japanese, “To health of our wise, beloved magistrate.” Yoshio also has a son in the third rank with high hopes for the upcoming vacancies. To the Dutch, he says, “To our rulers.”

  This is the game one must play, thinks Uzaemon, to rise at the guild.

  Jacob de Zoet swirls his wine. “To all our loved ones, near or far.”

  The Dutchman happens to catch Uzaemon’s eye, and they both avert their gaze while the toast is chorused. The interpreter is still turning his napkin ring moodily when Goto clears his throat. “Ogawa-san?”

  Uzaemon looks up to find the entire company looking at him.

  “Pardon, gentlemen, the wine stole my tongue.”

  Goblin laughter sloshes around the room. The diners’ faces swell and recede. Lips do not correspond to blurred words. Uzaemon wonders, as consciousness drains away, Am I dying?

  THE STEPS OF Higashizaka Street are slippery with frozen slush and strewn with bones, rags, decayed leaves, and excrement. Uzaemon and bowlegged Yohei climb past a chestnut stall. The smell makes the interpreter’s stomach threaten rebellion. Unaware of the approaching samurai, a beggar up ahead is pissing against a wall. Lean dogs, kites, and crows squabble over the street’s mean pickings.

  From a doorway comes a funerary mantra and tendril of incense.

  Shuzai is expecting me for sword practice, Uzaemon remembers …

  A heavily pregnant girl at a crossroads is selling pig-fat candles.

  … but to pass out twice in one day would start unhelpful rumors.

  Uzaemon bids Yohei buy ten candles; the girl has cataracts in both eyes.

  The candle seller thanks her customer. Master and servant continue climbing.

  Through a window, a man shouts, “I curse the day I married!”

  “Samurai-sama?” a lipless fortune-teller calls out from a half-open door. “Someone in the world above needs your deliverance, Samurai-sama.”

  Uzaemon, irritated by her presumption, walks on.

  “Sir,” says Yohei, “if you’re feeling unsteady again, I could—”

  “Don’t fuss like a woman: the foreign wine disagreed with me.”

  The foreign wine, Uzaemon thinks, on top of the surgical procedure.

  “Reports of my momentary lapse,” he tells Yohei, “would worry Father.”

  “He’ll not hear it from my lips, sir.”

  They pass through the ward gate; the warden’s son bows to one of the neighborhood’s most important residents. Uzaemon returns a brisk nod and thinks, Nearly home. The prospect does not bring much comfort.

  “MIGHT OGAWA-SAMA be generous enough to spare a little time?”

  Waiting for his gate to be opened, Uzaemon hears an elderly voice.

  A bent-backed mountain woman climbs from the thicket by the stream.

  Yohei obstructs her. “By what right do you use my master’s name?”

  The servant Kiyoshichi opens the Ogawa gates from inside. He sees the mountain woman and explains, “Sir, this feeble-minded creature knocked at the side door earlier, asking to speak with Interpreter Ogawa the Younger. I bade the crazed old crow be gone but, as sir can see …”

  Her weathered face, framed by a hat and straw coat, lacks the seasoned beggar’s cunning. “We have a friend in common, Ogawa-sama.”

  “Enough, Grandmother.” Kiyoshichi takes her arm. “Time for you to go home.”

  He checks with Uzaemon, who mouths, “Gently.”

  “The ward gate is this way.”

  “But Kurozane is three days away, young man, on my old legs, and—”

  “The sooner you start back home, then, the better, don’t you think?”

  Uzaemon steps through the Ogawa gate and crosses the sunless stone garden where only lichen thrives on the ailing shrubs. Saiji, his father’s gaunt and bird-faced manservant, slides open the door to the main house from inside, a beat before Yohei can open it from the outside. “Welcome home, sir.” The servants are jostling for position ahead of the day when their master is not Ogawa Mimasaku but Ogawa Uzaemon. “The senior master is asleep in his room, sir, and sir’s wife is suffering from a headache. Sir’s mother is nursing her.”

  So my wife wants to be alone, thinks Uzaemon, but Mother won’t let her.

  The new maid appears with slippers, warm water, and a towel.

  “Light a fire in the library,” he tells the maid, intending to write up his lithotomy notes. If I am working, he hopes, Mother and my wife may keep their distance.

  “Prepare tea for the master,” Yohei tells the maid. “Not too strong.”

  Saiji and Yohei wait to see whom the master-in-waiting chooses to attend him.

  “Attend to”—Uzaemon sighs—“whatever needs attending to. Both of you.”

  He walks down the cold, waxed corridor, hearing Yohei and Saiji blame each other for the master’s bad mood. Their bickering has a marital familiarity, and Uzaemon suspects they share more than a room at night. Gaining the sanctuary of the library, he shuts the door on the cheerless household, the mountain madwoman, the Christmas banquet’s babble, and his ignominious exit, and sits at his writing table. His calves ache. He enjoys scraping his inkstone, mixing a few drops of water, and dipping his brush. The precious books and Chinese scrolls sit on the oaken shelves. He remembers his awe at entering the library of Ogawa Mimasaku fifteen years ago, never dreaming then that he might one day be adopted by its master, much less become its master.

  Be less ambitious, he warns the younger Uzaemon, and more content.r />
  Catching his eye on the nearest shelf is De Zoet’s Wealth of Nations.

  Uzaemon marshals his memories of the lithotomy.

  There is a knock: the servant Kiyoshichi slides open the door.

  “The weak-witted creature shan’t be troubling us again, sir.”

  Uzaemon needs a moment to make sense of the sentence. “Good. Her family should be told what a nuisance she is making of herself.”

  “I asked the warden’s son to do so, sir, but he didn’t know her.”

  “Then she might be from … Kurozaka, was it?”

  “Kurozane, begging sir’s pardon. I believe it’s a small town on the Ariake Sea Road, in Kyôga Domain.”

  The name sounds familiar. Perhaps Abbot Enomoto mentioned it once.

  “Did she say what her business with me was about?”

  “‘A private matter’ was all she said, and that she is an herbalist.”

  “Any addled crone able to brew fennel calls herself an herbalist.”

  “Indeed, sir. Perhaps she heard about the house’s ailments and wanted to peddle some miracle cure. She deserves a beating, really, but her age …”

  The new maid enters with a bucket of coals. Because of the cold afternoon, perhaps, she has put on a white headscarf. A detail from Orito’s ninth or tenth letter comes back to Uzaemon. The herbalist of Kurozane, it read, lives at the foot of Mount Shiranui, in an ancient mountain hut, with goats, chickens, and a dog …

  The floor tilts. “Fetch her back.” Uzaemon hardly knows his voice.

  Kiyoshichi and the maid look at their master in surprise, then at each other.

  “Run after the herbalist of Kurozane—that mountain woman. Fetch her back.”

  The astonished servant is unsure whether to trust his ears.

  Uzaemon realizes how oddly he is behaving. First I faint on Dejima, and now this fickleness over a beggar. “When I prayed for Father at the temple, a priest suggested that the sickness may be due to a … to a want of charity in the Ogawa household, and that the gods would send a … an opportunity to make amends.”