The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

  “That tricolored tablecloth wouldn’t die for you, Domburger.”

  The Phoebus bears down: she is sleek, beautiful, and malign.

  “Nobody ever died for a flag, only what the flag symbolizes.”

  “I’m agog to learn what you are risking your life for.” Marinus thrusts his hands into his eccentric greatcoat. “It can’t just be because the English captain dubbed you a ‘shopkeeper.’”

  “For all we know, that flag is the last Dutch flag in the world.”

  “For all we know, it is. But it still wouldn’t die for you.”

  “He”—Jacob notices the English captain watching them through his telescope—“believes we Dutch are cowards. But starting with Spain, every power in our rowdy neighborhood has tried to extinguish our nation. Every power failed. Not even the North Sea has dislodged us from our muddy fringe of the continent, and why?”

  “Here’s why, Domburger: because you have nowhere else to go!”

  “It’s because we are stubborn sons of guns, Doctor.”

  “Would your uncle want you to demonstrate Dutch manliness by dying in a crush of roof tiles and masonry?”

  “My uncle would quote Goethe: ‘Our friends show us what we can do; our enemies teach us what we must do.’ Jacob distracts himself by studying the ship’s figurehead of the frigate—a mere six hundred yards away now—through his telescope. Its carver endowed Phoebus with a diabolic determination. “Doctor, you must go now.”

  “But consider Dejima post De Zoet! We’d be reduced to Chief Ouwehand and Deputy Grote. Lend me your telescope.”

  “Grote is our best merchant: he could sell sheep shit to shepherds.”

  William Pitt snorts at the Phoebus with a very human defiance.

  Jacob takes off Kobayashi’s straw coat and puts it on the ape.

  “Please, Doctor.” Rain wets wooden boards. “Don’t add to my debt of guilt.”

  Gulls vacate the roof ridge of the boarded-up Interpreters’ Guild.

  “You’re absolved! I’m indestructible, like a serial Wandering Jew. I’ll wake up tomorrow—after a few months—and start all over again. Behold: Daniel Snitker is on the quarterdeck. It’s his hominid walk that betrays him …”

  Jacob’s fingers touch his kinked nose. Was it only last year?

  The Phoebus’s master shouts orders. Sailors on the yards furl the topsails …

  … and the warship drifts to a dead halt, three hundred yards out.

  Jacob’s fear is the size of a new internal organ, between his heart and his liver.

  A gang of the topmen cup their mouths and shout at the acting chief, “Scrub, little Dutch boy, scrub scrub scrub!” and wave the reverse of their index and middle fingers.

  “Why”—Jacob’s voice is taut and high—“why do the English do that?”

  “I believe it goes back to archers at the Battle of Agincourt.”

  A cannon is run through the aft-most port; then another; then all twelve.

  Lapwings fly low over the stony water; their wingtips drip.

  “They’re going to do it.” Jacob’s voice is not his own. “Marinus! Go!”

  “As a matter of fact, Piet Baert told me that one winter—near Palermo, I believe—Grote actually did sell sheep shit to shepherds.”

  Jacob sees the English captain open his mouth and bellow …

  “Fire!” Jacob’s eyes clench tight; he puts his hand on the Psalter.

  Rain baptizes each second until the cannons explode.

  STACCATO THUNDER bludgeoned Jacob’s senses. The sky swung sideways. One tardy cannon fired after the others. He has no memory of throwing himself onto the watchtower’s decking, but here is where he finds himself. He checks his limbs. They are still there. His knuckles are grazed and, mysteriously, his left testicle is aching, but he is otherwise unharmed.

  All the dogs are barking and the crows are crazed.

  Marinus is leaning on the railing. “Warehouse number six needs rebuilding; there’s a big hole in the seawall behind the guild; Constable Kosugi shall probably”—from Seawall Lane comes an almighty sigh and crash—“shall certainly be lodging elsewhere tonight, and I pissed my thigh from fear. Our glorious flag, as you see, is unhurt. Half of their shots flew over us”—the doctor looks landward—“and caused damage ashore. Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, Auri sacra fames.”

  The frigate’s smoke shroud is being torn by the breeze.

  Jacob stands up and tries to breathe normally. “Where’s William Pitt?”

  “Ran off: one Macaca fuscata is cleverer than two Homines sapientes.”

  “I didn’t know you were a veteran of battle, Doctor.”

  Marinus blows out a mouthful of air. “Did close-range artillery knock any sense into you, or are we staying?”

  I can’t abandon Dejima, Jacob knows, and I am terrified of dying.

  “Staying, then.” Marinus clicks his tongue. “We have a short interval before the British resume their performance.”

  Ryûgaji Temple intones the Hour of the Horse, as on any other day.

  Jacob watches the land gate. A few uncertain guards venture out.

  A group runs from Edo Square, over Holland Bridge.

  He remembers Orito being led away into the palanquin.

  He wonders how she is surviving and prays a wordless prayer.

  Ogawa’s dogwood scroll tube is snug in his jacket pocket.

  If I am killed, let it be found and read by somebody in authority …

  Some of the Chinese merchants are pointing and waving from their roofs.

  Activity in the Phoebus’s gunports promises another round.

  If I don’t keep talking, Jacob realizes, I shall crack like a dropped dish.

  “I know what you don’t believe in, Doctor: what do you believe?”

  “Oh, Descartes’s methodology, Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas, the efficacy of Jesuits’ bark … So little is actually worthy of either belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disprove …”

  Clouds spill over mountain ridges; rain drips off Arie Grote’s hat.

  “Northern Europe is a place of cold light and clear lines”—Jacob knows he is spouting nonsense but cannot stop—“and so is Protestantism. The Mediterranean world is indomitable sunshine and impenetrable shade. So is Catholicism. Then this”—Jacob sweeps his hand inland—“this … numinous … Orient … its bells, its dragons, its millions … Here, notions of transmigrations, of karma, which are heresies at home, possess a—a—” The Dutchman sneezes.

  “Bless you.” Marinus splashes rainwater on his face. “A plausibility?”

  Jacob sneezes again. “I am making little sense.”

  “One may make most sense of all when one makes no sense at all.”

  Up a slope of crowded roofs, smoke hemorrhages from a cleft house.

  Jacob tries to find the House of Wistaria, but Nagasaki is a labyrinth. “Do believers in karma, Doctor, believe that one’s … one’s unintentional sins come back to haunt one not in the next life but within this one, within a single lifetime?”

  “Whatever your putative crime, Domburger,” Marinus says, producing an apple for them each, “I doubt it can be so bad that our current situation is a measured and justified punishment.” He puts his apple to his mouth—

  THE ARTILLERY BLAST this time knocks both men over.

  Jacob comes to, curled up like a boy under blankets in a haunted room.

  Fragments of tile smash on the ground. I lost my apple, he thinks.

  “By Christ, Mahomet, and Fhu Tsi Weh,” says Marinus, “that was close.”

  I survived twice, thinks Jacob, but troubles come in threes.

  The Dutchmen help each other up like a pair of invalids.

  The land gate’s doors are blown away, and the tidy ranks and files of guards in Edo Square are no longer tidy. Two shots tore through the soldiers in two different places: like marbles, Jacob recalls a boyhood game, through wooden men.

  Five or six or seven fle
sh-and-blood men are down, twitching and screaming.

  There is chaos and shouting and running and places of bright red.

  More fruits of your principles, mocks an inner voice, President de Zoet.

  The Phoebus’s sailors have stopped taunting them now.

  “Look below.” The doctor points to the roof underneath. A shot passed first through one side, then out through the other. Half the stairs going down to Flag Square were knocked away. As they watch, the roof ridge collapses into the upper room. “Poor Fischer,” remarks Marinus. “His new friends have broken all his toys. Look, Domburger, you’ve made your stand and there’s no dishonor in—”

  Timber sings and the watchtower stairs crash to the ground.

  “Well,” says Marinus, “we could jump into Fischer’s room … possibly …”

  Damn me—Jacob trains his telescope on Penhaligon—if I run now.

  He sees gunners up on the quarterdeck. “Doctor, the carronades …”

  He sees Penhaligon training his telescope on him.

  Damn you, watch and learn, Jacob thinks, about Dutch shopkeepers.

  One of the English officers appears to be remonstrating with the captain.

  The captain ignores him. Barrels are lifted to the mouths of the ship’s deadliest close-range guns. “Chain shot, Doctor,” says Jacob. “Hazard that leap.”

  He lowers his telescope: there is no gain in looking further.

  Marinus throws his apple at the Phoebus. “Cras ingens iterabimus aequor.”

  Jacob imagines the dense cones of shrapnel hurtling toward them ….

  … about forty feet wide by the time they reach the platform.

  The shrapnel will tear through his clothes, skin, and viscera and out again …

  Don’t let death, Jacob reproves himself, be your final thought.

  He tries to map, backward, the tortuous paths that led to this present …

  Vorstenbosch, Zwaardecroone, Anna’s father, Anna’s kiss, Napoleon …

  “You have no objection if I say the Twenty-third Psalm, Doctor?”

  “Provided you have no objection if I join you, Jacob.”

  Side by side, they grip the platform’s rail in the slippery rain.

  The pastor’s nephew removes Grote’s hat to address his Creator.

  “‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.’”

  Marinus’s voice is a seasoned cello’s; Jacob’s is shaking.

  “‘He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me …’”

  Jacob closes his eyes and imagines his uncle’s church.

  “‘… in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.’”

  Geertje is at his side. Jacob wishes she had met Orito …

  “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …’”

  … and Jacob still has the scroll, and I’m sorry, I’m sorry …

  “‘I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff …’”

  Jacob waits for the explosion and the swarm and the tearing.

  “‘… they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me …’”

  Jacob waits for the explosion and the swarm and the tearing.

  “‘… in the presence of mine enemies; Thou anointest my head with oil …’”

  Marinus’s voice has fallen away: his memory must have failed him.”

  “‘… my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me …’”

  Jacob hears Marinus shake with quiet laughter.

  He opens his eyes to see the Phoebus tacking away.

  Her mainsails are falling, catching the wet wind and billowing …

  JACOB SLEEPS FITFULLY in Chief van Cleef’s bed. A habitual maker of lists, he lists the reasons for his fitful sleep: first, the fleas in Chief van Cleef’s bed; second, Baert’s celebratory “Dejima Gin,” so named because gin is the only drink it doesn’t taste of; third, the oysters sent from Magistrate Shiroyama; fourth, Con Twomey’s ruinous inventory of damage inflicted to the Dutch-owned properties; fifth, tomorrow’s meetings with Shiroyama and magistracy officials; and sixth, his mental record of what history shall call the Phoebus Incident, and its ledger of outcomes. In the profit column, the English failed to extract one clove from the Dutch or crystal of camphor from the Japanese. Any Anglo-Japanese accord shall be unthinkable for two or three generations. In the debit column, the factory’s complement is now reduced to eight Europeans and a handful of slaves, a roster too lean even to be called “skeletal,” and unless a ship arrives next June—unlikely if Java is in British hands and the VOC is no longer extant—Dejima must rely on loans from the Japanese to meet its running costs. How welcome a guest the “ancient ally” will be when reduced to rags remains to be seen, especially if the Japanese view the Dutch as partly responsible for conjuring up the Phoebus. Interpreter Hori brought news of damage ashore: six soldiers dead in Edo Square and another six injured, and several townspeople burned in a fire begun when a ball struck a kitchen in Shinmachi Ward. The political consequences, he intimated, were even farther-reaching. I never heard, Jacob thinks, of a twenty-six-year-old chief resident …

  … or, he turns, a factory so beset by crises as Dejima.

  He misses Tall House, but the chief must sleep near the safe boxes.

  EARLY THE FOLLOWING morning, Jacob is met at the magistracy by Interpreter Goto and Chamberlain Tomine. Tomine apologizes for asking Jacob to perform a distasteful service before meeting the magistrate: the body of a foreign sailor was retrieved yesterday evening by a fishing boat, near the Papenburg Rock. Would Chief de Zoet examine the corpse and assess the likelihood of its being from the Phoebus?

  Jacob is not afraid of corpses, having helped his uncle at every funeral in Domburg.

  The chamberlain leads him across a courtyard to a storehouse.

  He says a word unknown to Jacob; Goto says, “Place dead body wait.”

  A mortuary, Jacob realizes. Goto asks Jacob to teach him the word.

  Outside, an elderly Buddhist priest is waiting with a pail of water.

  “To make pure,” Goto explains, “when leave … ‘mortuary.’”

  They enter. There is one small window and the smell of death.

  The single inmate is a young, pigtailed mestizo sailor on a pallet.

  He wears nothing but a sailor’s duck trousers and a lizard tattoo.

  A cold draft is sucked from the window through the open door.

  It tousles the boy’s hair, accentuating his motionlessness.

  Alive, the boy’s slack gray skin must have been bruised gold.

  “Were any items,” Jacob asks in Japanese, “in his possession?”

  The chamberlain produces a tray; on it is a British farthing.

  GEORGIVS III REX, reads the obverse; Britannia sits on the reverse.

  “I am in no doubt,” says Jacob, “he was a sailor from the Phoebus.”

  “Sa,” responds Chamberlain Tomine. “But is he an Englishman?”

  Only his mother and his Creator could answer, Jacob thinks. He tells Goto, “Please inform Tomine-sama that his father was probably European. His mother was probably Negro. Such is my best guess.”

  The chamberlain is still not satisfied. “But is he English?”

  Jacob exchanges a look with Goto: interpreters often have to provide both the answer and the tools to understand it. “If I had a son with a Japanese woman,” Jacob asks Tomine, “would he be Dutch or Japanese?”

  Involuntarily, Tomine winces at the tasteless question. “A half.”

  Then so, says Jacob’s gesture over the corpse, is he.

  “But,” the chamberlain persists, “does Chief de Zoet say he is English?”

  Trilling of doves from under the eaves ruffles the still morning.

  Jacob misses Ogawa. He asks Goto in Dutch: “What don’t I understand?”

  “If foreigner is English,” replies the interpreter, “body shall throw in ditch.”

  Thank you, thinks Ja
cob. “Otherwise he rests in the foreigners’ cemetery?”

  The intelligent Goto nods. “Chief de Zoet is correct.”

  “Chamberlain.” Jacob addresses Tomine. “This youth is not English. His skin is too dark. It is my wish that he is buried”—like a Christian—“in the cemetery of Mount Inasa. Please place the coin in his grave.”

  HALFWAY DOWN THE corridor to the Room of the Last Chrysanthemum is a little-visited courtyard where a maple stands over a small pond. Jacob and Goto are asked to wait on the veranda while Chamberlain Tomine consults with Magistrate Shiroyama prior to their audience.

  Fallen red leaves drift over a smeared sun held in dark water.

  “Congratulations,” says a voice in Dutch, “on promotion, Chief de Zoet.”

  Somehow inevitable. Jacob turns to Ogawa’s killer and Orito’s jailer.

  “Good morning, Lord Abbot,” he replies in Dutch, feeling the dogwood scroll tube pressing against his ribs. A long, thin ridge must be visible down his left side.

  Enomoto tells Goto, “Some paintings in the vestibule would interest you.”

  Goto bows. “Lord Abbot, the rules of my guild forbid—”

  “You are forgetting who I am. I forgive only once.”

  Goto looks at Jacob; Jacob nods consent. He tries to turn a little to the left to hide the scroll tube.

  One of Enomoto’s servants accompanies Goto; another stays nearby.

  “Dutch chief was brave against warship.” Enomoto practices his Dutch. “News is traveling all over Japan, even now.”

  Jacob can think only of the Twelve Creeds of the Order of Shiranui. When members of your order die, Jacob wonders, are the creeds not exposed as false commandments? Is your Goddess not proven to be a lump of lifeless wood? Are all the sisters’ misery and the drowned infants not shown to be in vain?

  Enomoto frowns, as if trying to catch a distant voice. “At first I saw you, in Hall of Sixty Mats, one year ago, I think …”

  A slow white butterfly passes within inches of Jacob’s face.

  “… I think, Strange: he is foreigner, but there is affinity. You know?”

  “I remember that day,” affirms Jacob, “but I felt no affinity at all.”

  Enomoto smiles like an adult at a child’s harmless lie. “When Mr. Grote say, ‘De Zoet sells mercury,’ I think, There: affinity!”