David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

‘Woman study in Hospital,’ declares Yonekizu, ‘is not good thing.’

‘Yet she held the blood-basin steady,’ says Con Twomey, ‘spoke good Dutch with Dr Marinus, and chased an ape while her male classmates looked seasick.’

I would ask a dozen questions, Jacob thinks, if I dared: a dozen dozen.

‘Doesn’t a girl,’ asks Ouwehand, ‘arouse the boys in troublesome places?’

‘Not with that slice of bacon,’ Fischer swirls his gin, ‘stuck to her face.’

‘Those are ungallant words, Mr Fischer,’ says Jacob. ‘They shame you.’

‘One cannot pretend it isn’t there, de Zoet! We’d call her a “tapping cane” in my home-town because, of course, only a blind man would touch her.’

Jacob imagines smashing the Prussian’s jaw with the Delft jug.

A candle collapses; wax slides down the candlestick; the dribble hardens.

‘I am sure,’ says Ogawa, ‘Miss Aibagawa one day make joyful marriage.’

‘What’s the one sure cure for love?’ asks Grote. ‘Marriage is, is what.’

A moth careers into a candle flame; it drops to the table, flapping.

‘Poor Icarus.’ Ouwehand crushes it with his tankard. ‘Won’t you ever learn?’

Night insects trill, tick, bore, ring; drill, prick, saw, sting.

Hanzaburo snores in the cubby-hole outside Jacob’s door.

Jacob lies awake clad in a sheet, under a tent of netting.

Ai, mouth opens; ba, lips meet; ga, tongue’s root; wa, lips.

Involuntarily, he re-enacts today’s scene over and over.

He cringes at the boorish figure he cut, and vainly edits the script.

He opens the fan she left in Warehouse Doorn. He fans himself.

The paper is white. The handle and struts are made of paulownia wood.

A watchman smacks his wooden clappers to mark the Japanese hour.

The yeasty moon is caged in his half-Japanese half-Dutch window…

… Glass panes melt the moonlight; paper panes filter it, to chalk dust.

Daybreak must be near. 1796’s ledgers are waiting in Warehouse Doorn.

It is dear Anna whom I love, Jacob recites, and I whom Anna loves.

Beneath his glaze of sweat he sweats. His bed linen is sodden.

Miss Aibagawa is as untouchable, he thinks, as a woman in a picture…

Jacob imagines he can hear a harpsichord.

… spied through a keyhole in a cottage happened upon once in a lifetime…

The notes are spidery and starlit and spun from glass.

Jacob can hear a harpsichord: it is the doctor, playing in his long attic.

Night silence and a freak of conductivity permit Jacob this privilege: Marinus rejects all requests to play, even for scholar friends or visiting nobility.

The music provokes a sharp longing the music soothes.

How can such a prig, wonders Jacob, play with such divinity?

Night insects trill, tick, bore, ring; drill, prick, saw, sting…

Very early on the morning of the 10th August, 1799

Light bleeds in around the casements: Jacob navigates the archipelago of stains across the low wooden ceiling. Outside, the slaves d’Orsaiy and Ignatius are talking as they feed the animals. Jacob recalls Anna’s birthday party a few days prior to his departure. Her father had invited half a dozen eminently eligible young men and given a sumptuous dinner prepared so artfully that the chicken tasted of fish and the fish of chicken. His ironic toast was to ‘the fortunes of Jacob de Zoet, Merchant Prince of the Indies ’. Anna rewarded Jacob’s forbearance with a smile: her fingers stroked the necklace of Swedish white amber he had brought her from Gothenburg.

On the far side of the world, Jacob sighs with longing and regret.

Unexpectedly, Hanzaburo calls out, ‘Mr Dazûto want thing?’

‘Nothing, no. It’s early, Hanzaburo: go back to sleep.’ Jacob imitates a snore.

‘Pig? Want pig? Ah ah ah, surîpu! Yes… yes, I like surîpu…’

Jacob gets up and drinks from a cracked jug, then rubs soap into lather.

His green eyes watch him from the freckled face in the speckled glass.

The blunt blade tears his stubble and nicks the cleft in his chin.

A tear of blood, red as tulips, oozes out, mixes with soap and foams pink.

Jacob considers how a beard would save all this trouble…

… but recalls his sister Geertje’s verdict when he returned from England with a short-lived moustache. ‘Ooh, dab it in lampblack, brother; and polish our boots!’

He touches his nose, recently adjusted by the disgraced Snitker.

The nick by his ear is a memento of a certain dog that bit him.

When shaving, thinks Jacob, a man rereads his truest memoir.

Tracing his lip with his finger, he recalls the very morning of his departure. Anna had persuaded her father to take them both to Rotterdam wharf in his carriage. ‘Three minutes,’ he had told Jacob as he climbed out of the carriage to speak to the head clerk, ‘and no more.’ Anna knew what to say. ‘Five years is a long time, but most women wait a lifetime before finding a kind and honest man.’ Jacob had tried to reply, but she had silenced him. ‘I know how men overseas behave and, perhaps, how they must behave – shush, Jacob de Zoet – so all I ask is that you are careful in Java, that your heart is mine alone. I shan’t give you a ring or locket because rings and lockets can be lost, but this, at least, cannot be lost…’ Anna kissed him for the first and last time. It was a long, sad kiss. They watched rain stream down the windows, the boats, and the shale-grey sea, until it was time to go…

Jacob’s shave is finished. He wipes his face, dresses and polishes an apple.

Miss Aibagawa, he bites the fruit, is a scholar, not a courtesan…

From the window, he watches d’Orsaiy water the runner beans.

… illicit rendezvous, much less illicit romances, are impossible here.

He eats the core and spits out the pips on to the back of his hand.

I just want to converse, Jacob is sure, and know a little more about her…

He takes the chain from his neck and turns the key in his sea-chest.

Friendship can exist between the sexes: as with my sister and I.

An enterprising fly buzzes over his urine in the chamber pot.

He digs down, nearly as far as his Psalter, and finds the bound folio.

Jacob unfastens the volume’s ribbons and studies the first page of music.

The notes of the luminous sonatas hang like grapes from the staves.

Jacob’s sight-reading skills end with the Hymnal of the Reformed Church.

Perhaps today, he thinks, is a day to mend bridges with Dr Marinus…

Jacob takes a short walk around Dejima, where all walks are short, to polish his plan and hone his script. Gulls and crows bicker on the ridge of Garden House.

In the garden, the cream roses and red lilies are past their best.

Bread is being delivered by provedores at the Land-Gate.

In Flag Square, Peter Fischer sits on the Watchtower’s steps. ‘Lose an hour in the morning, Clerk de Zoet,’ the Prussian calls down, ‘and you search for it all day.’

In van Cleef’s upper window, the Deputy’s latest ‘wife’ combs her hair.

She smiles at Jacob; Melchior van Cleef, his chest hairy as a bear’s, appears.

‘ “Thou Shalt Not”,’ he quotes, ‘ “Dip Thy Nib in Another Man’s Inkwell.” ’

The Deputy Chief slides shut the shoji window before Jacob can protest his innocence.

Outside the Interpreters’ Guild, palanquin bearers squat in the shadows. Their eyes follow the red-haired foreigner as he passes.

Up on the Sea Wall, William Pitt gazes at the whale-rib clouds.