The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

  Eighteen years? Jacob notices this number. Eighteen …

  The Shenandoah, he thinks, embarked less than one year ago …

  His tether to the netherworld snipped, he wakes, next to Orito.

  PRAISE MERCIFUL GOD in heaven, the waker finds himself in Tall House …

  … where everything is exactly as it appears to be.

  Orito’s hair is mussed from last night’s lovemaking.

  Dust is gold in the light of dawn; an insect sharpens its scalpels.

  “I am yours, beloved,” Jacob whispers, and kisses her burn …

  Orito’s hands, her slim hands, wake, and cup his nipples …

  So much suffering, Jacob thinks, but now you are here, I will heal you.

  … cup his nipples, and circle his navel, and knead his groin, and—

  “As a snail which melteth …” Orito’s purpled eyes swivel open.

  Jacob tries to wake up, but the wire around his neck pulls tight.

  “… let every one pass away,” quotes the corpse, “like the untimely birth …”

  The Dutchman is covered with snails—bed, room, Dejima, all snails …

  “… like the untimely birth of a woman, that they may not see the sun.”

  JACOB SITS UP, wide awake, his pulse galloping away. I am in the House of Wistaria, and last night I slept with a prostitute. She is here, with a mousy snore caught in her throat. The air is warm and fetid with the smells of sex, tobacco, soiled linen, and overboiled cabbage from the chamber pot. Creation’s light is pure on the papered window. Amorous thumps and titters emanate from a nearby room. He thinks about Orito and Uzaemon in various shades of guilt and closes his eyes, but then he sees them more clearly, Orito locked, reaped, and harvested, and Uzaemon hacked to death, and Jacob thinks, Because of you, and he opens his eyes. But thought has no eyelids to close or ears to block, and Jacob remembers Interpreter Kobayashi’s announcement that Ogawa Uzaemon had been slain by mountain bandits on a pilgrimage to the town of Kashima. Lord Abbot Enomoto had hunted down the eleven outlaws responsible for the atrocity and tortured them to death, but not even vengeance, Kobayashi had opined, can bring the dead to life. Chief van Cleef sent the company’s condolences to Ogawa the Elder, but the interpreter never returned to Dejima again, and nobody was surprised when he died shortly after. Any faint doubts in De Zoet’s mind that Enomoto had killed Ogawa Uzaemon were dispelled a few weeks later, when Goto Shinpachi reported that the previous night’s fire on the eastern slope had begun in the library of the old Ogawa residence. That evening, by lamplight, Jacob retrieved the dogwood scroll tube from under his floorboards and began the most exacting mental labor of his life. The scroll was not long—its title and twelve clauses ran to a little more than three hundred characters—but Jacob had to acquire the vocabulary and grammar entirely in secret. None of the interpreters would risk being caught teaching Japanese to a foreigner, though Goto Shinpachi would sometimes answer Jacob’s casual questions about specific words. Without Marinus’s knowledge of Chinese, the task would have been impossible, but Jacob dared not show the doctor the scroll for fear of implicating his friend. It took two hundred nights to decipher the creeds of the order of Mount Shiranui, nights that grew darker as Jacob groped closer and closer to its revelations. And now that the work is done, he wonders, how can a closely watched foreigner ever transform it into justice? He would need the sympathetic ear of a man as powerful as the magistrate to stand the remotest chance of seeing Orito freed and Enomoto brought to justice. What would happen, he wonders, to a Chinaman in Middelburg who sought to prosecute the duke of Zeeland for immorality and infanticide?

  The man in the nearby room is blurting, “Oh oh Mijn God, Mijn God!”

  Melchior van Cleef: Jacob blushes and hopes his girl doesn’t wake.

  Prudishness the morning after, he must admit, is a hypocrite’s guilt.

  His condom of goat’s intestine lies in a square of paper by the futon.

  It is a revolting object, Jacob thinks. So, for that matter, am I …

  Jacob thinks about Anna. He must dissolve their vow.

  That honest girl deserves, he thinks unflinchingly, a truer husband.

  He imagines her father’s happiness when she tells him the news.

  She may have dissolved her vow to me, he admits, months ago …

  No ship from Batavia this year meant no trade or letters …

  A water vendor in the street below calls out, “O-miiizu, O-miiizu.”

  … and the threat of insolvency for Dejima and Nagasaki looms larger.

  Melchior van Cleef arrives at his “OOOOOOoOoOoOoooo …”

  Don’t wake, Jacob begs the sleeping woman, don’t wake …

  Her name is Tsukinami: “Moon Wave.” Jacob liked her shyness.

  Though shyness, too, he suspects, can be applied with paint and powder.

  Once they were alone, Tsukinami complimented his Japanese.

  He hopes he did not revolt her. She called his eyes “decorated.”

  She asked to snip off a lock of his copper hair to remember him by.

  Postclimactic Van Cleef laughs like a pirate watching a rival mauled by sharks.

  And is this Orito’s life, Jacob shudders, as Ogawa’s scroll describes?

  Millstones in his conscience grind, grind, and grind …

  The bell of Ryûgaji Temple announces the Hour of the Rabbit. Jacob puts on his breeches and shirt, cups some water from the pitcher, drinks and washes, and opens the window. The view is fit for a viceroy: Nagasaki falls away, in stepped alleyways and upthrust roofs, in duns, ochers, and charcoals, down to the arklike magistracy, Dejima, and beyond to the slovenly sea …

  He obeys an impish urge to shimmy out along the ridge of the roof.

  His bare feet grip the still-cool tiles; there is a sculpted carp to hold on to.

  Saturday, October 18, in the year 1800 is calm and blue.

  Starlings fly in nebulae; like a child in a tale, Jacob longs to join them.

  Or else, he daydreams, let my round eyes become nomadic ovals …

  West to east, the sky unrolls and rolls its atlas of clouds.

  … my pink skin turn dull gold; my freakish hair, a sensible black …

  From an alleyway, the clatter of a night cart threatens his reverie.

  … and my boorish body become one of theirs … poised and sleek.

  Eight liveried horses proceed along a road. Their hoofs echo.

  How far would I get, Jacob wonders, if I ran, hooded, through the streets?

  … up through rice terraces, up to the folded mountains, the folds within folds.

  Not so far as Kyôga Domain, Jacob thinks. Someone fumbles at a casement.

  He readies himself to be ordered inside by a worried official.

  “Did gallant Sir de Zoet,” hairy and naked Van Cleef taunts, flashing his teeth, “find the golden fleece last night?”

  “It was”—not, Jacob thinks, to my credit—“it was the thing it was.”

  “Oh, hearken to Father Calvin.” Van Cleef puts on his breeches and clambers out of the window to join him, with a flagon hooked on his thumb. He is not drunk, Jacob hopes, but he is not altogether sober.

  “Our Divine Father made all of you, man, in his own image, under-tackle included—or do I lie?”

  “God did make us, yes, but the Holy Book is clear about—”

  “Oh, lawful wedlock, awful bedlock, yes, yes, well and good in Europe, but here”—Van Cleef gestures at Nagasaki like a conductor—“a man must improvise! Celibacy is for vegetarians. Neglect your spuds—I quote a medical fact—and they shrivel up and drop off, and what future then—”

  “That is not”—Jacob almost smiles—“a medical fact, sir.”

  “—what future then for the Prodigal Son on the Isle of Walcheren, sans cods?” Van Cleef swigs from his flagon, wiping his beard on his forearm. “Bachelordom and an heirless death! Lawyers feasting on your estate like crows on a gibbet! This fine house”—he slaps the ridg
e tile—“is no sink of iniquity but a spa to nourish later harvests—you did use the armor urged upon us by Marinus? But who am I talking to? Of course you did.”

  Van Cleef’s girl watches them from the depths of her room.

  Jacob wonders what Orito’s eyes look like now.

  “A pretty little butterfly on the outside …” A sigh heaves Van Cleef, and Jacob fears his superior is drunker than he thought—a fall could end in a broken neck. “But, unwrapped, one finds the same disappointments. ’Tweren’t the girl’s fault; it’s Gloria’s fault—the albatross hanging ’round my neck …. But why would you want to hear about that, young man, with your heart not yet broken?” The chief stares in the face of heaven, and the breeze stirs the world. “Gloria was my aunt. Batavia-born, I was, but sent to Amsterdam to learn the gentlemanly arts: how to spout bastard Latin, how to dance like a peacock, and how to cheat at cards. The party ended on my twenty-second birthday, when I took passage back to Java with my uncle Theo. Uncle Theo had visited Holland to deliver the governor-general’s yearly fictions to East India House—the Van Cleefs were well connected in those days—grease palms, and marry for the fourth or fifth time. My uncle’s motto was ‘Race Is All.’ He’d fathered half a dozen children on his Javanese maids, but he acknowledged none and made dire warnings about God’s discrete races mingling into a single pigsty breed.”

  Jacob remembers the son in his dream. A Chinese junk’s sails swell.

  “Theo’s legal heirs, he avowed, must have ‘currency’ mothers—white-skinned, rose-cheeked flowers of Protestant Europe—because Batavia-born brides all have orangutans cavorting in the family tree. Alas, his previous wives all expired within months of arriving in Java. The miasma did for them, you see. But Theo was a charming dog, and a rich charming dog, and, lo, it came to pass that between my cabin and my uncle’s aboard the Enkhuizen was accommodated the latest Mrs. Theo van Cleef. My ‘aunt Gloria’ was four years my junior and one-third the age of her proud groom …”

  Below, a rice seller opens up his shop for the day.

  “Why bother describing a beauty in her first bloom? None of the bewhiskered nabob hookers on the Enkhuizen could compare, and before we’d rounded Brittany, all the eligible men—and many ineligible ones—were paying Aunt Gloria more attention than her new husband would wish. Through my thin cabin wall, I’d hear him warning her against holding X’s gaze or laughing at Y’s limp jokes. She’d reply, ‘Yes, sir,’ meek as a doe, then let him exact his marital dues. My imagination, De Zoet, was better than any peephole! Then, afterward, when Uncle Theo was back in his own cot, Gloria would weep, so delicately, so quietly, none but I could hear. She’d had no say in the marriage, of course, and Theo allowed her just one maid from home, a girl called Aagje—a second-class fare would buy five maids at Batavia’s slave market. Gloria, you must remember, had rarely gone beyond the Singel Canal. Java was as far off as the moon. Farther, in fact, for the moon is, at least, visible from Amsterdam. Come morning, I’d be kind to my aunt …”

  In a garden, women drape washing on a juniper tree.

  “The Enkhuizen took a bad mauling in the Atlantic,” Van Cleef went on, pouring the last sunlit drops of beer onto his tongue, “so the captain settled upon a month’s stay at the Cape for repairs. To protect Gloria from the common gaze, Uncle Theo took apartments in the villa of the sisters Den Otter, high above Cape Town, up between Lion’s Head and Signal Hill. The six-mile track was a quagmire in wet weather and a hoof-twister in dry. Once upon a time the Den Otters were among the colony’s grandest families, but by the late seventies the villa’s once-famous stuccowork was falling off in chunks, its orchards were reverting to Africa, and its former staff of twenty or thirty reduced to a housekeeper, a cook, a put-upon maid, and two white-haired black gardeners, both called ‘Boy.’ The sisters kept no carriage but sent for a landau from an adjoining farmstead, and most of their utterances began with ‘When dear Papa was alive’ or ‘When the Swedish ambassador would call.’ Deathly, De Zoet—deathly! But young Mrs. van Cleef well knew what her husband wanted to hear and declared the villa to be private, safe, and enchantingly Gothic. The sisters Den Otter were ‘a treasure trove of wisdom and improving stories.’ Our landladies were defenseless against her flattery, and her sturdiness pleased Uncle Theo, and her brightness … her loveliness … She pulled me under, De Zoet. Gloria was love. Love was Gloria.”

  A tiny girl skips like a skinny frog around a persimmon tree.

  I miss seeing children, Jacob thinks, and looks away to Dejima.

  “On our first week at the villa, in a grove of agapanthus run amok, Gloria found me and told me to go and tell my uncle that she had flirted with me. Surely I’d misheard. She repeated her injunction: ‘If you are my friend, Melchior, as I pray God you are, for I have no other in this wilderness, go to my husband and tell him that I confessed “inappropriate sentiments”! Use those very words, for they could be yours.’ I protested that I couldn’t besmirch her honor or place her in danger of a beating. She assured me that if I didn’t do as she asked, or if I told my uncle about this conversation, then she would earn a beating. Well, the light in the grove was orange, and she squeezed my hand and said, ‘Do this for me, Melchior.’ So I went.”

  Fingers of smoke appear from the House of Wistaria’s chimney.

  “When Uncle Theo heard my false witness, he agreed with my charitable diagnosis of nerves damaged by the voyage. I went for a confused walk along the steep cliffs, afraid of what might befall Gloria back at the villa. But at lunch Uncle Theo made a speech about family, obedience, and trust. After the blessing, he thanked God for sending him a wife and nephew in whom these Christian virtues blossomed. The sisters Den Otter chimed their brandy glasses with their apostle spoons and said, ‘Hear, hear!’ Uncle Theo gave me a pouch of guineas and invited me to go and enjoy all the pleasures the Tavern of the Two Seas could offer for two or three days …”

  A man leaves from a brothel’s side door. He is me, Jacob thinks.

  “… but I’d rather have broken a bone than be separated from Gloria. I begged my donor leave to return his guineas, asking only to keep the empty pouch to encourage me to fill it, and ten thousand more, with the fruits of my own acumen. All Cape Town’s tinsel and baubles, I claimed, were not worth an hour of my uncle’s company, and, time allowing, perhaps a game of chess? My uncle was silent, and I feared I’d over-sugared the tea, but then he declared that, whilst most young men were rascally popinjays who considered it their birthright to spend their fathers’ hard-won fortunes in dissipation, heaven had sent him an exception for a nephew. He toasted the finest nephew in Christendom and, forgetting to conceal his clumsy test of marital fidelity, ‘a true little wife.’ He enjoined Gloria to raise his future sons with my image in mind, and his true little wife said, ‘May they be in our nephew’s image, Husband.’ Theo and I then played chess, and it taxed my ingenuity, De Zoet, to let the clod outmaneuver me.”

  A bee hovers around Jacob’s face, and goes.

  “Gloria’s and my loyalties now proven, my uncle felt at liberty to enter Cape Town society himself. These pursuits took him out of the villa for most of the day, and sometimes he even slept down in the town. Me, he set to the task of copying paperwork in the library. ‘I’d invite you along,’ he said, ‘but I want the Kaffirs hereabouts to know there’s a white man in the villa who can use a flintlock.’ Gloria was left to her books, diary, the garden, and the ‘improving stories’ of the sisters: a spring that ran dry by three o’clock daily, when their lunchtime brandy plunged them into bottomless siestas …”

  Van Cleef’s flagon rolls down the tiles, falls through the Wistaria frames, and smashes in the courtyard. “My uncle’s bridal suite lay down a windowless corridor from the library. Concentrating on correspondence, I’ll admit, was harder than usual that afternoon … The library clock, in my memory, is silent. Perhaps it is wound down. Orioles are singing like the choirs of Bedlam, and I hear the click of a key … that pregnant silence, when s
omeone is waiting … and here she is in silhouette at the far end. She …” Van Cleef rubs his sunburned face. “I was afraid Aagje would find us, and she says, ‘Haven’t you noticed, Aagje’s in love with the eldest son of the next farm?’ and it’s the most natural thing in the world to tell her I love her, and she kisses me, and she tells me she makes my uncle bearable by imagining he is me, and his is mine, and I ask, ‘What if there’s a child?’ and she says, Shush …”

  Mud-brown dogs race up the mud-brown street.

  “Our unlucky number was four. The fourth time Gloria and I lay together, Uncle Theo’s horse threw him on his way to Cape Town. He walked back to the villa, so we didn’t hear the horse. One moment I was deep inside Gloria, as naked as silk. The next, I was still as naked as silk but lying amongst shards of the mirror my uncle had hurled me against. He told me he’d snap my neck and throw my carcass to the beasts. He told me to go to town, withdraw fifty guilders from his agent, and make sure I was too ill to board the Enkhuizen when she sailed on to Batavia. Last, he swore that whatever I’d put inside that whore, his wife, he would be digging out with a spoon. To my shame—or not, I don’t know—I went away without saying goodbye to Gloria.” Van Cleef rubs his beard. “Two weeks later I watched the Enkhuizen embark. Five weeks later I shipped on a maggoty brig, the Huis Marquette, whose pilot spoke with dead spirits and whose captain suspected even the ship’s dog of plotting mutiny. Well, you’ve crossed the Indian Ocean, so I shan’t describe it: eternal, sinister, obsidian, mountainous, monotonous … After a seven-week crossing, we weighed anchor in Batavia by the grace of God, with little thanks due to the pilot or the captain. I walked along the stinking canal, steeling myself for a thrashing from Father, a duel with Theo, lately arrived on the Enkhuizen, disinheritance. I saw no familiar faces and none saw me—ten years is a long time—and knocked on the shrunken door of my boyhood home. My old nurse, wrinkled now like a walnut, opened the door and screamed. I remember Mother hurrying through from the kitchen. She held a vase of orchids. Next thing I knew, the vase had turned into a thousand broken pieces, and Mother was slumped against the wall. I assumed that Uncle Theo had made a persona non grata of me … but then noticed that Mother was in mourning. I asked if my father was dead. She answered, ‘You are, Melchior: you drowned.’ Then there was a sobbing embrace, and I learned that the Enkhuizen had been wrecked on a reef just a mile from the Straits of Sunda, in a bright and savage sea, with all hands lost …”