The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: A Novel (26 page)

He's right
, thinks Jacob, and asks, 'May I accompany you to the Shirando?'

'Certainly not.' Marinus tries to pot both his cue ball and Jacob's, but misses.

There are limits, then
, Jacob realises,
to this unexpected detente
.

'You are no scholar,' the doctor explains. 'Nor am I your pimp.'

'Is it fair to berate the less-privileged for womanising, smoking and drinking . . .' Jacob pots Marinus's cue ball '. . . whilst refusing to help their self-betterment?'

'I am not a Society for Public Improvement. What privileges I enjoy, I earned.'

Cupido or Philander is practising an air on a viol da gamba.

The goats and a dog engage in a battle of bleating and barking.

'You spoke of how you and Mr Hemmij -' Jacob miscues '- used to play for a wager?'

'You're never proposing,' the doctor mock-whispers, 'gambling on a Sabbath?'

'If I reach five hundred and one first, grant me one visit to the Shirando.'

Marinus lines up his shot, looking doubtful. 'What is my prize?'

He's not rejecting the idea
, Jacob notices,
out of hand
. 'Name it.'

'Six hours' labour in my garden. Now, pass me the bridge.'

'For your question's intents and purposes . . .' Marinus considers his next shot from all angles '. . . sentience in this life began in the rain-sodden summer of 1757 in a Haarlem garret: I was a six-year-old boy who had been taken to death's door by a savage fever that had seen off my entire family of cloth merchants.'

You too
, thinks Jacob. 'I'm most sorry, Doctor. I didn't guess.'

'The world is a vale of tears. I was passed like a bad
penning
down a chain of relatives, each expecting a slice of an inheritance that had, in fact, been swallowed by debts. My illness made me,' he pats his lame thigh, 'an unpromising investment. The last, a great-uncle of dubious vintage named Cornelis, told me I'd one evil eye and one queer one, and took me to Leiden where he deposited me on a canal-side doorstep. He told me my "aunt-in-a-manner-of-speaking" Lidewijde would take me in, and vanished like a rat down a drain. Having no other choice, I rang the bell. Nobody answered. There was no point trying to limp after Great-Uncle Cornelis so I just waited on the high doorstep . . .'

Marinus's next shot misses both the red and Jacob's cue ball.

'. . . until a friendly constable,' Marinus drains his lemon juice, 'threatened to thrash me for vagabondage. I was dressed in my cousins' cast-offs, so my denial fell on deaf ears. Up and down the Rapenburg I walked, just to stay warm . . .' Marinus looks over the water towards the Chinese factory '. . . a sunless, locked-up, tiring afternoon, and chestnut sellers were out, and canine street urchins watched me, scenting prey, and across the canal, maples shed leaves like women tearing up letters . . . and are you going to play your shot or not, Domburger?'

Jacob achieves a rare double-cannon: twelve points.

'Back at the house the lights were still off. I rang the bell, beseeching the aid of every god I knew, and an old maid's old maid flung the door open, swearing that were
she
the mistress I'd be turned away with no further ado, for tardiness was a sin in her book, but as she wasn't, Klaas would see me in the back garden, though my entrance was the tradesman's, down the steps. She slammed the door. So I made my descent, knocked, and the same wrathful Cerberus in Petticoats appeared, noticed my stick and led me down a dingy basement corridor to a beautiful sunken garden. Play your shot, or we'll still be here at midnight.'

Jacob pots both cue balls and lines up the red nicely.

'An old gardener emerged from a curtain of lilac and told me to show him my hands. Puzzled, he asked whether I'd done so much as one day's work as a gardener in my life. No, I said. "We'll let the garden decide," said Klaas the Gardener, and very little besides all the live-long day. We mixed hornbeam leaves with horse manure; laid sawdust around the feet of roses; raked leaves in the small apple orchard . . . these were my first pleasant hours for a long, long time. We lit a fire with swept-up leaves and roasted a potato. A robin sat on my spade - it was already
my
spade - and sang.' Marinus imitates a robin's
chk-chk-chk
. 'It was getting dark when a lady in a satrap's dressing-gown and short white hair strode over the lawn. "My name," she declared, "is Lidewijde Mostaart, but the mystery is you." She had just heard, you see, that the real gardener's boy, due that afternoon, had broken his leg. So I explained who I was and about Great-Uncle Cornelis . . .'

Passing a hundred and fifty points, Jacob misses a shot to let Marinus on the table.

In the garden, the slave Sjako is brushing aphids from the salad leaves.

Marinus leans out of the window and addresses him in fluent Malay. Sjako replies and Marinus returns to the game, amused. 'My mother, it transpired, was a second cousin of Lidewijde Mostaart, whom she had never met. Abigail, the old maid, huffed, puffed and complained that anyone would have taken me for the new gardener's boy, given the rags I wore. Klaas said I had the makings of a gardener and retired to the shed. I asked Mrs Mostaart to let me stay and be Klaas's assistant. She told me it was "Miss", not "Mrs", to most, but "Aunt" to me, and took me inside to meet Elisabeth. I ate fennel soup and answered their questions, and in the morning they told me I could live with them for as long as I wished. My old clothes were sacrificed to the deity in the fireplace.'

Cicadas hiss in the pines. They sound like fat frying in a shallow pan.

Marinus misses a side-pocket pot and pockets his own cue ball by mistake.

'Bad luck,' commiserates Jacob, adding the foul to his total.

'No such thing, in a game of skill. Well, bibliophiles are not uncommon in Leiden, but bibliophiles made wise by reading are as rare there as anywhere. Aunts Lidewijde and Elisabeth were two such readers, as sagacious as they were rapacious devourers of the word. Lidewijde had had "associations" with the stage in her day, in Vienna and Naples, and Elisabeth was what we'd now call a
blauw-stocking
, and their house was a trove of books. To this printed garden, I was given the keys. Lidewijde, moreover, taught me the harpsichord; Elisabeth taught me both French and Swedish, her mother tongue; and Klaas the Gardener was my first, unlettered but vastly learned teacher of botany. Moreover, my aunts' circle of friends included some of Leiden's freest-thinking scholars, which is to say, "of the age". My own personal Enlightenment was breathed into being. I bless Great-Uncle Cornelis to this day for abandoning me there.'

Jacob pockets Marinus's cue ball and the red alternately three or four times.

A dandelion seed lands on the green baize of the table.

'Genus
Taraxacum
,' Marinus frees it and launches it from the window, 'of the family
Asteraceae
. But erudition alone fills neither belly nor pocket-book, and my aunts survived frugally on slender annuities, so as I reached maturity, it was settled that I should study medicine to support my scientific endeavours. I won a place at the medical school at Uppsala, in Sweden. The choice, of course, was no accident: cumulative weeks of my boyhood had been spent poring through
Species Plantarum
and
Systema Naturae
, and, once ensconced at Uppsala, I became a disciple of the celebrated Professor Linnaeus.'

'My uncle says,' Jacob slaps a fly, 'he was one of the great men of our age.'

'Great men are greatly complex beings. It's true that Linnaean taxonomy underlies botany, but he taught also that swallows hibernate under lakes; that twelve-foot giants thump about Patagonia; and that Hottentots are monorchids, possessing but a single testicle. They have two. I looked. "
Deus creavit
," his motto ran, "
Linnaeus disposuit
", and dissenters were heretics whose careers must be crushed. Yet he influenced my fate directly by advising me to win a professorship by travelling the East as one of his "Apostles", mapping the flora of the Indies and trying to gain entry into Japan.'

'You are approaching your fiftieth birthday, are you not, Doctor?'

'Linnaeus's last lesson, of which he himself was unaware, was that professorships kill philosophers. Oh, I'm vain enough to want my burgeoning
Flora Japonica
to be published one day - as a votive offering to Human Knowledge - but a seat at Uppsala, or Leiden, or Cambridge, holds no allure. My heart is the East's, in this lifetime. This is my third year in Nagasaki and I have work enough for another three, or six. During the Court Embassy I can see landscapes no European botanist
ever
saw. My seminarians are keen young men - with one young woman - and visiting scholars bring me specimens from all over the Empire.'

'But aren't you afraid of dying here, so far away from . . . ?'

'One has to die somewhere, Domburger. What are the scores?'

'Your ninety-one points, Doctor, against my three hundred and six.'

'Shall we put our finishing post at a thousand points and double the prizes?'

'Are you promising you'll take me to the Shirando Academy twice?'

To be seen by Miss Aibagawa there
, he thinks,
is to be seen in a new light
.

'Provided you are willing to dig horse manure into the beetroot beds for twelve hours.'

'Very well, Doctor . . .' the clerk wonders whether van Cleef might loan him the nimble-fingered Weh to repair the ruff on his best lace shirt '. . . I accept your terms.'

X

The Garden on Dejima

Late in the afternoon of the 16th September, 1799

Jacob digs the last of the day's horse manure into the beetroot beds, and fetches water for the late cucumbers from the tarred barrels. He started his clerical work one hour early this morning so he could finish at four o'clock and begin repaying the twelve hours' garden labour he owes the doctor.
Marinus was a scoundrel
, Jacob thinks,
to hide his virtuosity at billiards, but a wager is a wager
. He removes the straw from around the cucumber plants' stems, empties both gourds, then replaces the mulch to keep the moisture in the thirsty soil. Now and then a curious head appears above the Long Street wall. The sight of a Dutch clerk pulling up weeds like a peasant is worth catching. Hanzaburo, when asked to help, laughed until he saw that Jacob was in earnest, then mimed a back-pain and walked away, pocketing a fistful of lavender heads by the garden gate. Arie Grote tried to sell Jacob his sharkhide hat so he could 'toil with elegance, like a gentleman farmer'; Piet Baert offered to sell him billiard lessons; and Ponke Ouwehand helpfully pointed out some weeds. Gardening is harder labour than Jacob is used to,
and yet
, he admits to himself,
I enjoy it
. His tired eyes are rested by the living green; rosefinches pluck worms from the ramped-up earth; and a black-masked bunting, whose song sounds like clinking cutlery, watches from the empty cistern. Chief Vorstenbosch and Deputy van Cleef are at the Nagasaki Residence of the Lord of Satsuma, the Shogun's father-in-law, to press their case for more copper, so Dejima enjoys an unsupervised air. The seminarians are in the Hospital: as Jacob hoes the rows of beans, he hears Marinus's voice through the Surgery window. Miss Aibagawa is there. Jacob still hasn't seen her, much less spoken to her, since giving her the daringly illustrated fan. The glimmers of kindness the doctor is showing him shall not extend to arranging a rendezvous. Jacob has considered asking Ogawa Uzaemon to take her a letter from him, but if it was discovered, both the interpreter and Miss Aibagawa could be prosecuted for secret negotiations with a foreigner.