The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (2 page)

“Do you think the cord can be released?” Maeno forgets to speak Dutch.

“Well, I must try. Insert the cloth,” Orito tells the maid, “now, please.”

When the linen wad is secured between Kawasemi’s teeth, Orito pushes her hand in deeper, hooks her thumb around the umbilical cord, sinks four fingers into the underside of the fetus’s jaw, pushes back his head, and slides the cord over his face, forehead, and crown. Kawasemi
screams, hot urine trickles down Orito’s forearm, but the procedure works first time: the noose is released. She withdraws her hand and reports, “The cord is freed. Might the doctor have his”—there is no Japanese word—“forceps?”

“I brought them along,” Maeno taps his medical box, “in case.”

“We might try to deliver the child”—she switches to Dutch—“without amputating the arm. Less blood is always better. But I need your help.”

Dr. Maeno addresses the chamberlain: “To help save Miss Kawasemi’s life, I
must
disregard the magistrate’s orders and join the midwife inside the curtain.”

Chamberlain Tomine is caught in a dangerous quandary.

“Blame me,” Maeno suggests, “for disobeying the magistrate.”

“The choice is mine,” decides the chamberlain. “Do what you must, Doctor.”

The spry old man crawls under the muslin, holding his curved tongs.

When the maid sees the foreign contraption, she exclaims in alarm.

“‘Forceps,’” the doctor replies, with no further explanation.

The housekeeper lifts the muslin to see. “No, I don’t like the look of
that!
Foreigners may chop, slice, and call it ‘medicine,’ but it is quite unthinkable that—”

“Do
I
advise the housekeeper,” growls Maeno, “on where to buy fish?”

“Forceps,” explains Orito, “don’t cut—they turn and pull, just like a midwife’s fingers but with a stronger grip …” She uses her Leiden salts again. “Miss Kawasemi, I’m going to use this instrument”—she holds up the forceps—“to deliver your baby. Don’t be afraid, and don’t resist. Europeans use them routinely—even for princesses and queens. We’ll pull your baby out, gently and firmly.”

“Do so …” Kawasemi’s voice is a smothered rattle. “Do so …”

“Thank you, and when I ask Miss Kawasemi to
push
 …”

“Push …” She is fatigued almost beyond caring. “Push …”

“How often,” Tomine peers in, “have you used that implement?”

Orito notices the chamberlain’s crushed nose for the first time: it is as severe a disfigurement as her own burn. “Often, and no patient ever suffered.” Only Maeno and his pupil know that these “patients” were hollowed-out melons whose babies were oiled gourds. For the final time, if all goes well, she works her hand inside Kawasemi’s womb. Her
fingers find the fetus’s throat, rotate his head toward the cervix, slip, gain a surer purchase, and swivel the awkward corpse through a third turn. “Now, please, Doctor.”

Maeno slides in the forceps around the protruding arm.

The onlookers gasp; a parched shriek is wrenched from Kawasemi.

Orito feels the forceps’ curved blades in her palm: she maneuvers them around the fetus’s soft skull. “Close them.”

Gently but firmly, the doctor squeezes the forceps shut.

Orito takes the forceps’ handles in her left hand: the resistance is spongy but firm, like
konnyaku
jelly. Her right hand, still inside the uterus, cups the fetus’s skull.

Dr. Maeno’s bony fingers encase Orito’s wrist.

“What is it you’re waiting for?” asks the housekeeper.

“The next contraction,” says the doctor, “which is due any—”

Kawasemi’s breathing starts to swell with fresh pain.

“One and two,” counts Orito, “and—
push
, Kawasemi-
san
!”

“Push, Mistress!” exhort the maid and the housekeeper.

Dr. Maeno pulls at the forceps; with her right hand, Orito pushes the fetus’s head toward the birth canal. She tells the maid to grasp the baby’s arm and pull. Orito feels the resistance grow as the head reaches the aperture. “One and two … now!” Squeezing the glans of the clitoris flat comes a tiny corpse’s matted crown.

“Here he is!” gasps the maid, through Kawasemi’s animal shrieks.

Here comes the baby’s scalp; here his face, marbled with mucus …

… Here comes the rest of his slithery, clammy, lifeless body.

“Oh, but—oh,” says the maid. “Oh. Oh.
Oh
 …”

Kawasemi’s high-pitched sobs subside to moans, and deaden.

She knows
. Orito discards the forceps, lifts the lifeless baby by his ankles and slaps him. She has no hope of coaxing out a miracle: she acts from discipline and training. After ten hard slaps, she stops. He has no pulse. She feels no breath on her cheek from the lips and nostrils. There is no need to announce the obvious. Splicing the cord near the navel, she cuts the gristly string with her knife, bathes the lifeless boy in a copper of water, and places him in the crib.
A crib for a coffin
, she thinks,
and a swaddling sheet for a shroud
.

Chamberlain Tomine gives instructions to a servant outside. “Inform His Honor that a son was stillborn. Dr. Maeno and his midwife did their best but were powerless to alter what Fate had decreed.”

Orito’s concern is now puerperal fever. The placenta must be extracted,
yakumosô
applied to the perineum, and blood stanched from an anal fissure.

Dr. Maeno withdraws from the curtained tent to make space.

A moth the size of a bird enters and blunders into Orito’s face.

Batting it away, she knocks the forceps off one of the copper pans.

The forceps clatters onto a pan lid; the loud clang frightens a small creature that has somehow found its way into the room; it mewls and whimpers.

A puppy?
wonders Orito, baffled.
Or a kitten?

The mysterious animal cries again, very near: under the futon?

“Shoo that thing away!” the housekeeper tells the maid. “Shoo it!”

The creature mewls again, and Orito realizes it is coming from the crib.

Surely not
, thinks the midwife, refusing to hope.
Surely not
 …

She snatches away the linen sheet just as the baby’s mouth opens.

He inhales once, twice, three times; his crinkled face crumples …

… and the shuddering newborn boiled-pink despot howls at Life.

“H
OW
ELSE
,”
DEMANDS DANIEL SNITKER, “IS A MAN TO EARN JUST
reward for the daily humiliations we suffer from those slit-eyed leeches? ‘The unpaid servant,’ say the Spanish, ‘has the right to pay himself,’ and for once, damn me, the Spanish are right. Why so certain there’ll still
be
a company to pay us in five years’ time? Amsterdam is on its knees; our shipyards are idle; our manufactories silent; our granaries plundered; The Hague is a stage of prancing marionettes tweaked by Paris; Prussian jackals and Austrian wolves laugh at our borders: and Jesus in heaven, since the bird-shoot at Kamperduin we are left a maritime nation
with no navy
. The British seized the Cape, Coromandel, and Ceylon without so much as a kiss-my-arse, and that Java itself is their next fattened Christmas goose is plain as day! Without neutral bottoms like this”—he curls his lip at Captain Lacy—“Yankee, Batavia would
starve
. In such times, Vorstenbosch, a man’s sole insurance is
salable goods in the warehouse
. Why else, for God’s sake, are
you
here?”

The old whale-oil lantern sways and hisses.

“That,” Vorstenbosch asks, “was your closing statement?”

Snitker folds his arms. “I
spit
on your drumhead trial.”

Captain Lacy issues a gargantuan belch. “’Twas the garlic, gentlemen.”

Vorstenbosch addresses his clerk: “We may record our verdict …”

Jacob de Zoet nods and dips his quill: “… drumhead trial.”

“On this day, the twentieth of July, 1799, I, Unico Vorstenbosch, chief-elect of the trading factory of Dejima in Nagasaki, acting by the powers vested in me by His Excellency P. G. van Overstraten, governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, witnessed by Captain Anselm Lacy of the
Shenandoah
, find Daniel Snitker, acting chief of the above-mentioned factory, guilty of the following: gross dereliction of duty—”

“I fulfilled,” insists Snitker,
“every duty
of my post!”

“‘Duty’?” Vorstenbosch signals to Jacob to pause. “Our warehouses were burning to cinders whilst
you
, sir, romped with strumpets in a brothel—a fact omitted from that farrago of lies you are pleased to call your day register. And had it not been for the chance remark of a Japanese interpreter—”

“Shit-house rats who blacken my name ’cause I’m wise to their tricks!”

“Is it a ‘blackening of your name’ that the fire engine was missing from Dejima on the night of the fire?”

“Perhaps the defendant took the engine to the House of Wistaria,” remarks Captain Lacy, “to impress the ladies with the thickness of his hose.”

“The engine,” objects Snitker, “was Van Cleef’s responsibility.”

“I’ll tell your deputy how faithfully you defended him. To the next item, Mr. de Zoet: ‘Failure to have the factory’s three senior officers sign the
Octavia
’s bills of lading.’”

“Oh, for God’s sake. A mere administrative
oversight!”

“An ‘oversight’ that permits crooked chiefs to cheat the company in a hundred ways, which is why Batavia in
sists
on triple authorization. Next item: ‘Theft of company funds to pay for private cargoes.’”

“Now
that,”
Snitker spits with anger,
“that
is a
flat lie!”

From a carpetbag at his feet, Vorstenbosch produces two porcelain figurines in the Oriental mode. One is an executioner, ax poised to behead the second, a kneeling prisoner, hands bound and eyes on the next world.

“Why show me those”—Snitker is shameless—“gewgaws?”

“Two gross were found in your private cargo—‘twenty-four dozen Arita figurines,’ let the record state. My late wife nurtured a fondness for Japanese curiosities, so I have a little knowledge. Indulge me, Captain Lacy: estimate their value in, let us say, a Viennese auction house.”

Captain Lacy considers. “Twenty guilders a head?”

“For these slighter ones alone, thirty-five guilders; for the gold-leafed courtesans, archers, and lords, fifty. What price the two gross? Let us aim low—Europe
is
at war, and markets unsettled—and call it thirty-five per head … multiplied by two gross. De Zoet?”

Jacob’s abacus is to hand. “Ten thousand and eighty guilders, sir.”

Lacy issues an impressed “
Hee
-haw!”

“Tidy profit,” states Vorstenbosch, “for merchandise purchased at the company’s expense yet recorded in the bills of lading—unwitnessed, of course—as ‘Acting Chief’s Private Porcelain,’ in
your
hand, Snitker.”

“The former chief, God rest his soul”—Snitker changes his story—“willed them to me, before the court embassy.”

“So Mr. Hemmij
foresaw
his demise on his way back from Edo?”

“Gijsbert Hemmij was an uncommon cautious man.”

“Then you will show us his uncommon cautious will.”

“The document,” Snitker wipes his mouth, “perished in the fire.”

“Who were the witnesses? Mr. van Cleef? Fischer? The monkey?”

Snitker heaves a disgusted sigh. “This is a childish waste of time. Carve off your tithe, then—but not a sixteenth more, else by God I’ll dump the blasted things in the harbor.”

The sound of carousing washes over from Nagasaki.

Captain Lacy empties his bullish nose into a cabbage leaf.

Jacob’s nearly worn-out quill catches up; his hand aches.

“What, I wonder”—Vorstenbosch looks confused—“is this talk of a ‘tithe’? Mr. de Zoet, might you shed a little light?”

“Mr. Snitker is attempting to bribe you, sir.”

The lamp has begun to sway; it smokes, sputters, and recovers.

A seaman in the lower deck tunes his fiddle.

“You suppose,” Vorstenbosch blinks at Snitker, “that my integrity is for sale? Like some pox-maggoty harbormaster on the Scheldt extorting illegal fees from the butter barges?”

“One-ninth, then,” growls Snitker. “That’s my last offer.”

“Conclude the charge list”—Vorstenbosch snaps his fingers at his secretary—“with ‘attempted bribery of a fiscal comptroller’ and proceed to sentencing. Roll your eyeballs
this
way, Snitker: this affects you. ‘Item the first: Daniel Snitker is stripped of office herewith and all’—yes, all—‘pay backdated to 1797. Second: upon arrival in Batavia, Daniel Snitker is to be imprisoned at the old fort to account for his actions.
Third: his private cargo is to be auctioned. Proceeds shall recompense the company.’ I see I have your attention.”

“You’re making”—Snitker’s defiance is crushed—“a pauper of me.”

“This trial makes an example of you to every parasitic chief fattening himself on the company’s dugs: ‘Justice found Daniel Snitker,’ this verdict warns them, ‘and justice shall find you.’ Captain Lacy, thank you for your participation in this squalid affair; Mr. Wiskerke, pray find Mr. Snitker a hammock in the fo’c’sle. He shall work his passage back to Java as a landsman and be subject to common discipline. Moreover—”