The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: A Novel (70 page)

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 kind and 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 trading season and no letters . . .

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

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

Melchior van Cleef arrives at his 'OOO
OOO
oOoOoOo
ooo
. . .'

Don't wake
, Jacob begs the sleeping woman,
don't wake, 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 him on 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.

Post-climactic van Cleef laughs like a pirate seeing 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 Ryugaji 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 up-thrust roofs, in duns, ochres and charcoals, down to the ark-like Magistracy, Dejima, and beyond to the slovenly sea . . .

He obeys a mischievous impulse 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 18th in the year 1800 is calm and blue.

Starlings fly in nebulae: like a child in a fairy-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 thoroughfare. 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 Kyoga 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 flashes his teeth, 'find the golden fleece last night?'

'It was . . .'
not
, Jacob thinks,
to my credit
'. . . it was what it was, sir.'

'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 ridge-tile, 'is no sink of iniquity but a spa to nourish later harvests - you
did
use the armour 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 about Orito's eyes, 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 pig 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 orang-utans 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 peep-hole! Then, afterwards, 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. Further, 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 pours the last sunlit drops of beer on to 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 amongst the colony's grandest families, but by the late seventies the villa's once-famous stucco-work 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 defenceless 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 honour 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 . . .'

Below, 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 outmanoeuvre me.'