David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

By the Kitchen, Arie Grote tells him, ‘Yer bamboo hat makes yer look like a Chinaman, Mr de Z. Have yer not considered-’

‘No,’ says the clerk, and walks on.

Constable Kosugi nods at Jacob outside his small house on Sea Wall Lane.

The slaves Ignatius and Weh row in heated Malay as they milk the goats.

Ivo Oost and Wybo Gerritszoon throw a ball to one another, in silence.

‘Bow-wow,’ one of them says as Jacob passes: he decides not to hear.

Con Twomey and Ponke Ouwehand smoke their pipes under the pines.

‘Some blue-blood,’ sniffs Ouwehand, ‘has died in Miyako, so hammering and music are forbidden for two days. There’ll be little work done anywhere, not just here but throughout the Empire. Van Cleef swears it’s a stratagem to postpone the rebuilding of Warehouse Lelie so we’ll be more desperate to sell…’

I am not polishing my plan, Jacob admits. I am losing my nerve…

In the Surgery, Dr Marinus is lying flat on the operating table with his eyes closed. He hums a baroque melody inside his hoggish neck.

Eelattu brushes his master’s jowls with scented oil and feminine delicacy.

Steam rises from a bowl of water; light is sliced on the bright razor.

On the floor, a toucan pecks beans from a pewter saucer.

Plums are piled in a terracotta dish, blue-dusted indigo.

Eelattu announces Jacob’s arrival in murmured Malay, and Marinus opens one displeased eye. ‘What?’

‘I should like to consult with you on a… certain matter.’

‘Continue shaving, Eelattu. Consult, then, Domburger.’

‘I’d be more comfortable in private, Doctor, as-’

‘Eelattu is “private”. On our little paradise, his grasp of anatomy and pathology is second only to mine. Unless it is the toucan you mistrust?’

‘Well, then…’ Jacob sees he must rely on the servant’s discretion as well as Marinus’s. ‘I’m a little curious about one of your students…’

‘What business have you’ – his other eye opens – ‘with Miss Aibagawa?’

‘None at all: I just… wished to converse with her…’

‘Then why are you here, conversing with me instead?’

‘… to converse with her without a dozen spies looking on.’

‘Ah. Ah. Ah. So you wish me to bring about an assignation?’

‘That word smacks of intrigue, Doctor, which would not-’

‘The answer is “Never”. Reason the first: Miss Aibagawa is no rented Eve to scratch your itch of Adam, but a gentleman’s daughter. Reason the second: even were Miss Aibagawa “available” as a Dejima wife, which, emphatically, she is not -’

‘I know all this, Doctor, and upon my honour, I didn’t come here to-’

‘- which she is not, then spies would report the liaison within a half-hour, whereupon my hard-won rights to teach, botanise and scholarise around Nagasaki would be withdrawn. So be gone. Deflate your testicles comme à la mode: via the village pimp or Sin of Onan.’

The toucan taps the dish of beans and utters ‘Raw!’ or a word very similar.

‘Sir,’ Jacob blushes, ‘you grievously misjudge my intentions: I’d never-’

‘It is not even Miss Aibagawa after whom you lust, in truth. It is the genus, “The Oriental Woman” who so infatuates you. Yes, yes, the mysterious eyes, the camellias in her hair, what you perceive as meekness. How many hundreds of you besotted white men have I seen mired in the same syrupy hole?’

‘You are wrong, for once, Doctor. There’s no-’

‘Naturally, I am wrong: Domburger ’s adoration for his Pearl of the East is based on chivalry: behold the disfigured damsel, spurned by her own race! Behold our Occidental Knight, who alone divines her inner beauty!’

‘Good day.’ Jacob is too bruised to endure any more. ‘Good day.’

‘Leaving so soon? Without even offering that bribe under your arm?’

‘Not a bribe,’ he half lies, ‘but a gift from Batavia. I had hopes – vain and foolish ones, I now see – of establishing a friendship with the celebrated Dr Marinus, and so Hendrik Zwaardecroone of the Batavian Society recommended me to bring you some sheet music. But I see now that an ignorant clerk is beneath your august notice. I shall trouble you no more.’

Marinus scrutinises Jacob. ‘What sort of a gift is it that the giver doesn’t offer until he wants something from the intended recipient?’

‘I tried to give it to you at our first meeting. You slammed a trapdoor on me.’

Eelattu dips the razor in water and wipes it on a sheet of paper.

‘Irascibility,’ the doctor admits, ‘occasionally gets the better of me.’

‘Who is’ – Marinus flicks a finger at the folio – ‘the composer?’

Jacob reads the title page: ‘ “Domenico Scarlatti’s Chefs-d’oeuvre, for the Harpsichord or Piano-Forte; Selected from an Elegant collection of Manuscripts in the Possession of Muzio Clementi… London, and to be had at Mr Broadwood’s Harpsichord Maker, in Great Pulteney Street, Golden Square.” ’

Dejima’s rooster crows. Noisy feet tromp down Long Street.

‘Domenico Scarlatti, is it? He has flown a long way to be here.’

Marinus’s indifference, Jacob suspects, is too airy to be genuine.

‘He shall fly a long way back.’ He turns. ‘I incommode you no longer.’

‘Oh, wait, Domburger: sulking doesn’t suit you. Miss Aibagawa-’

‘- is no courtesan: I know. I don’t view her in that light.’ Jacob would tell Marinus about Anna, but he doesn’t trust the doctor enough to unlock his heart.

‘Then in what light,’ Marinus probes, ‘do you see her?’

‘As a…’ Jacob searches for the right metaphor ‘… as a book whose cover fascinates, and in whose pages I desire to look, a little. Nothing more.’

A draught nudges open the creaking door of the two-bed Sick Room.

‘Then I propose the following bargain: return here by three o’clock and you may have twenty minutes in the Sick Room to peruse what pages Miss Aibagawa cares to show you – but the door remains open throughout, and should you treat her with one dram less respect than you would your own sister, Domburger, my vengeance shall be Biblical.’

‘Thirty seconds per sonata hardly represents good value.’

‘Then you and your sometime gift know where the door is.’

‘No bargain. Good day.’ Jacob leaves and blinks in the steepening sunlight.

He walks down Long Street to Garden House and waits in its shade.

The cicadas’ songs are fierce and primal on this hot morning.

Over by the pine trees, Twomey and Ouwehand are laughing.

But dear Jesus in Heaven, thinks Jacob, I am lonely in this place.

Eelattu is not sent after him. Jacob returns to the Hospital.

‘We have a deal, then.’ Marinus’s shave is finished. ‘But my seminarian’s spy must be blind-sided. My lecture this afternoon is on Human Respiration, which I intend to illustrate via a practical demonstration. I’ll have Vorstenbosch loan you as a demonstrator.’

Jacob finds himself saying, ‘Agreed…’

‘Congratulations.’ Marinus wipes his hands. ‘Maestro Scarlatti, if I may?’

‘… but your fee is payable upon delivery.’

‘Oh? My word as a gentleman is not enough?’

‘Until a quarter to three, then, Doctor.’

Fischer and Ouwehand fall silent as Jacob enters the Records Office.

‘Pleasant and cool,’ says the newcomer, ‘in here, at least.’

‘I,’ Ouwehand declares to Fischer, ‘find it heated and oppressive.’

Fischer snorts like a horse and retires to his desk: the highest one.

Jacob puts on his glasses at the shelf housing the current decade’s ledgers.

He returned the 1793 to 1798 accounts yesterday; now they are missing.