The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (23 page)

“Pardon me”—Ogawa opens his notebook—“what is ‘notorious’?”

“Something that is notorious is ‘famous for being bad.’”

“Mr. de Zoet say,” recalls Ogawa, “home island is below level of sea.”

“Walcheren? So it is, so it is. We Dutch live beneath the fishes.”

“To stop the sea to flood the land,” Ogawa imagines, “is ancient war.”

“‘War’ is the word, and we lose battles sometimes.” Jacob notices dirt underneath his thumbnail from his last hour in Dr. Marinus’s garden this morning. “Dikes break. Yet whilst the sea is the Dutchman’s enemy, it is also his provider and the—the ‘shaper’ of his ingenuity. Had Nature blessed us with high, fertile ground like our neighbors, what need to invent the Amsterdam Bourse, the Joint Stock Company, and our empire of middlemen?”

Carpenters lash the timbers of the half-built Warehouse Lelie.

Jacob decides to broach a delicate subject before Hanzaburo returns. “Mr. Ogawa, when you searched my books, on my first morning ashore, you saw my dictionary, I believe?”

“New
Dictionary of Dutch Language
. Very fine and rare book.”

“It would, I assume, be of use to a Japanese scholar of Dutch?”

“Dutch dictionary is magic key to open many lock doors.”

“I desire …” Jacob hesitates. “… to give it to Miss Aibagawa.”

Wind-harried voices reach them like echoes from a deep well.

Ogawa’s face is stern and unreadable.

“How do you think,” probes Jacob, “she might respond to such a gift?”

Ogawa’s fingers pluck at a knot around his sash. “Much surprise.”

“Not, I hope, an unpleasant surprise?”

“We have proverb.” The interpreter pours himself a bowl of tea. “‘Nothing more costly than item that has no price.’ When Miss Aibagawa receive such a gift, she may worry, ‘What is true price if I accept?’”

“But there is no obligation. Upon my honor, none whatsoever.”

“So …” Ogawa sips his tea, still avoiding Jacob’s eyes. “Why Mr. de Zoet give?”

This is worse
, thinks Jacob,
than speaking with Orito in the garden
.

“Because,” the clerk swallows, “well,
why
I wish to present her with the gift, I mean, the
source
of that urge, what motivates the puppet master, as it were, is, as Dr. Marinus might express it, that is … one of the great imponderables.”

What inchoate garble
, replies Ogawa’s expression,
are you spouting?

Jacob removes his spectacles, looks out, and sees a dog cocking its leg.

“Book is …” Ogawa peers at Jacob under an invisible frame. “Love gift?”

“I
know
”—Jacob feels like an actor obliged to go onstage without a glimpse of the script—“that she—Miss Aibagawa—is no courtesan, that a Dutchman is not an ideal husband, but nor am I a pauper, thanks to my mercury. But none of that matters, and doubtless some would consider me the world’s greatest fool …”

A twisted ribbon of muscle ripples under Ogawa’s eye.

“Yes, perhaps one
could
call it a love gift, but if Miss Aibagawa cares nothing for me, it doesn’t matter. She may keep it. To think of her using the book would …”
Bring me happiness
, Jacob cannot quite add. “Were
I
to give the dictionary to her,” he explains, “spies, inspectors, and her classmates would notice. Nor may I stroll over to her house of an evening. A ranked interpreter, however, carrying a dictionary, would raise no alarums. Nor, I trust, would it be smuggling, for this is a straightforward gift. And so … I would like to ask you to deliver the volume on my behalf.”

Twomey and the slave d’Orsaiy dismantle the great tripod in the weighing yard.

Ogawa’s lack of surprise suggests that he anticipated this request.

“There is no one else on Dejima,” says Jacob, “whom I can trust.”

No, indeed
, agrees Ogawa’s clipped
hmm
noise,
there is not
.

“Inside the dictionary, I would—I have inserted a … well, a short letter.”

Ogawa lifts his head and views the phrase with suspicion.

“A letter … to say that the dictionary is hers for always, but if”—
now I sound
, Jacob thinks,
like a costermonger honey-talking housewives at the market
—“were she … ever … to consider me a patron, or let us say a protector, or … or …”

Ogawa’s tone is brusque. “Letter is to propose marriage?”

“Yes. No. Not unless …” Wishing he had never begun, Jacob produces the dictionary, wrapped in sailcloth and tied with twine, from under his table. “Yes, damn it. It is a proposal. I beg you, Mr. Ogawa, cut short my misery and just give her the damned thing.”

THE WIND IS DARK
and thunderous; Jacob locks the warehouse and crosses Flag Square, shielding his eyes against dust and grit. Ogawa and Hanzaburo have returned to their homes while it is still safe to be out. At the foot of the flagpole, Van Cleef is bellowing up at d’Orsaiy, who is, Jacob sees, having difficulty shimmying up. “You’d do it for a coconut sharp enough, so you’ll damned well do it for our flag!”

A senior interpreter’s palanquin is carried by; its window is shut.

Van Cleef notices Jacob. “Blasted flag’s knotted and can’t be lowered—but I’ll not have it ripped to shreds just because this sloth’s too afeared to untangle it!”

The slave reaches the top, grips the pole between his thighs, untangles the old United Provinces tricolor, and slides down with the prize, his hair waving in the wind, and hands it to Van Cleef.

“Now run and see what use Mr. Twomey can put your damned hide to!”

D’Orsaiy runs off between the deputy’s and captain’s houses.

“Mustering is canceled.” Van Cleef folds the flag in his jacket and shelters under a gable. “Snatch a bowl of whatever Grote has cooked and go home. My latest wife predicts the wind’ll turn twice as fierce as this before the typhoon’s eye passes over.”

“I thought I’d just”—Jacob points up the watchtower—“take in the view.”

“Keep your sightseeing short! You’ll be blown to Kamchatka!”

Van Cleef shambles up the alley to the front of his house.

Jacob climbs up the stairs, two at a time. Once he’s above roof level, the wind attacks him; he grips the rails tight and lies flat against the platform’s planks. From Domburg’s church tower, Jacob has watched many a gale gallop down from Scandinavia, but an Oriental typhoon possesses a sentience and menace. Daylight is bruised; woods thrash on the prematurely twilit mountains; the black bay is crazed by choppy surf; gobbets of sea spray spatter Dejima’s roofs; timber grunts and sighs. The men of the
Shenandoah
are lowering her third anchor; the first mate
is on the quarterdeck, bellowing inaudibly. To the east, the Chinese merchants and sailors are likewise busy securing their property. The interpreter’s palanquin crosses an otherwise empty Edo Square; the row of plane trees bends and whiplashes; no birds fly; the fishermen’s boats are dragged high up the shorefront and lashed together. Nagasaki is digging itself in for a bad, bad night.

Which of those hundreds of huddled roofs
, he wonders,
is yours?

At the crossroads, Constable Kosugi is tying up the bell rope.

Ogawa shan’t deliver the dictionary tonight
, Jacob realizes.

Twomey and Baert hammer shut the door and casements of Garden House.

My gift and letter are clumsy and rash
, Jacob admits,
but a subtle courtship is impossible
.

Something cracks and shatters, over in the garden …

At least now, I can stop cursing myself for cowardice
.

Marinus and Eelattu are struggling with trees in clay pots and a handcart …

… AND TWENTY
minutes later, two dozen apple saplings are safe in the hospital’s hallway.

“
I
 … we”—panting, the doctor indicates the young trees—“are in your debt.”

Eelattu ascends through the darkness and vanishes through the trapdoor.

“I watered those saplings.” Jacob catches his breath. “I feel protective toward them.”

“I didn’t consider damage from sea salt until Eelattu raised the matter. Those saplings I brought all the way from Hakine: unbaptized in Latin binomials, they might have all perished. There’s no fool like an old fool.”

“Not a soul shall know,” Jacob promises, “not even Klaas.”

Marinus frowns, thinks, and asks, “Klaas?”

“The gardener,” Jacob replies, brushing his coat, “at your aunts’ house.”

“Ah, Klaas! Dear Klaas reverted to compost many years ago.”

The typhoon howls like a thousand wolves; the attic lamp is lit.

“Well,” says Jacob, “I’d best run home to Tall House while I still can.”

“God grant it may still be tall in the morning.”

Jacob pushes open the hospital door: it is struck with a great blow that knocks the clerk back. Jacob and the doctor peer outside and see a barrel bounding down Long Street toward Garden House, where it smashes into kindling.

“Take refuge upstairs,” Marinus proposes, “for the duration.”

“I’d not want to intrude,” Jacob replies. “You value your privacy.”

“What use would your corpse be for my seminarians were your body to share the fate of that barrel? Lead the way upstairs, lest I fall and crush us both …”

THE WHEEZING LANTERN
reveals the unburied treasure on Marinus’s bookshelves. Jacob twists his head and squints at the titles:
Novum Organum
by Francis Bacon; Von Goethe’s
Versuch die Metamorphose den Pflanzen zu erklären;
Antoine Galland’s translation of
The Thousand and One Nights
. “The printed word is food,” says Marinus, “and you look hungry, Domburger.”
The System of Nature
by Jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud: the pseudonym, as any Dutch pastor’s nephew knows, of the atheist Baron d’Holbach; and Voltaire’s
Candide, ou l’Optimisme
. “Enough heresy,” remarks Marinus, “to crush an Inquisitor’s rib cage.” Jacob makes no reply, encountering next Newton’s
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica;
Juvenal’s
Satires;
Dante’s
Inferno
in its original Italian; and a sober
Kosmotheeros
by their countryman Christiaan Huygens. This is one shelf of twenty or thirty, stretching across the attic’s breadth. On Marinus’s desk is a folio volume:
Osteographia
by William Cheselden.

“See who’s waiting inside for you,” says the doctor.

Jacob contemplates the details, and the devil plants a seed.

What if
this
engine of bones
—the seed germinates—
is a man’s entirety
 …

Wind wallops the walls like a dozen tree trunks tumbling.

… and divine love is a mere means of extracting
baby
engines of bones?

Jacob thinks about Abbot Enomoto’s questions at their one meeting. “Doctor, do you believe in the soul’s existence?”

Marinus prepares, the clerk expects, an erudite and arcane reply. “Yes.”

“Then where”—Jacob indicates the pious, profane skeleton—“is it?”

“The soul is a verb.” He impales a lit candle on a spike. “Not a noun.”

Eelattu brings two beakers of bitter beer and sweet dried figs.

EACH TIME JACOB
is certain the wind cannot rampage more maniacally without the roof tearing free, the wind does, but the roof doesn’t, not yet. Joists and beams strain and clunk and shudder like a windmill rattling at full kilter.
A terrifying night
, Jacob thinks,
yet even terror can pale into monotony
. Eelattu darns a sock while the doctor reminisces about his journey to Edo with the late Chief Hemmij and Head Clerk van Cleef. “They bemoaned the lack of buildings to compare to St. Peter’s or
Notre Dame, but the genius of the Japanese race is manifest in its roads. The Tôkaido Highway runs from Osaka to Edo—from the empire’s belly to the head, if you will—and knows of no equal,
I
assert, anywhere on earth, in either modernity or antiquity. The road is a city, fifteen feet in width, but three hundred well-drained, well-maintained, and well-ordered German miles in length, served by fifty-three way stations where travelers can hire porters, change horses, and rest or carouse for the night. And the simplest, most commonsensical joy of all? All traffic proceeds on the left-hand side, so the numerous collisions, seizures, and standoffs that so clog Europe’s arteries are here unknown. On less populated stretches of the road, I unnerved our inspectors by slipping out of my palanquin and botanizing along the verges. I found more than thirty new species for my
Flora Japonica
, missed by Thunberg and Kaempfer. And then, at the end, is Edo.”

“Which no more than, what, a dozen Europeans alive have seen?”

“Fewer. Seize the head clerk’s chair within three years, you’ll see it yourself.”

I shan’t be here
, hopes Jacob, and then, uneasily, thinks of Orito.

Eelattu snips a thread. The sea writhes, just one street and a wall away.

“Edo is a million people in a grid of streets that stretches as far as the eye can travel. Edo is a tumultuous clatter of clogs, looms, shouts, barks, cries, whispers. Edo is a codex of every human demand and Edo is the means of supplying them. Every
daimyo
must keep a residence there for his designated heir and principal wife, and the largest such compounds are de facto walled towns. The Great Edo Bridge—to which every milestone in Japan refers—is two hundred paces across. Would that I could have slipped into a native’s skin and roamed that labyrinth, but, naturally, Hemmij, Van Cleef, and I were confined to our inn ‘for our own protection,’ until the appointed day of our interview with the shogun. The stream of scholars and sightseers was an antidote to monotony, especially those with plants, bulbs, and seeds.”