David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Gerritszoon abruptly stops struggling.

‘Frère Jacques, a gifted French quack, proposed a suprapubic incision, above the corpus ossis pubis,’ Marinus traces an arc with his fingernail to the left of Gerritszoon’s navel, ‘and entering the bladder sideways. Cheselden, an Englishman, combined Jacques le Quack with the ancients to pioneer the lateral perineal lithotomy, losing less than one patient in ten. I have performed upwards of fifty lithotomies and lost four. Two were not my fault. The two were… Well, we live and learn, even if our dead patients cannot say the same, eh, Gerritszoon? Cheselden’s fee was five hundred pounds for two or three minutes’ work. But luckily,’ the doctor slaps the trussed patient’s buttock, ‘Cheselden taught a student named John Hunter. Hunter’s students included a Dutchman, Hardwijke, and Hardwijke taught Marinus, who today performs this operation gratis. So. Shall we begin?’

The rectum of Wybo Gerritszoon releases a hot fart of horror.

‘View halloo.’ Marinus nods at de Zoet and Twomey; they secure a thigh each. ‘The less movement, the less the accidental damage.’ Uzaemon sees the seminarians are uncertain of this pronouncement, so he translates it for them. Eelattu kneels a-straddle the patient’s midriff, holding Gerritszoon’s flaccid penis back and blocking his view of the knives. Marinus asks Dr Maeno to hold the lamp close to the patient’s groin and takes up his scalpel. His face becomes the face of a swordsman.

Marinus sinks the scalpel into Gerritszoon’s perineum.

The patient’s entire body tenses like a single muscle; Uzaemon shudders.

The four seminarians, peer, transfixed.

‘Fat and muscle thickness vary,’ says Marinus, ‘but the bladder-’

Still gagged, Gerritszoon releases a loud noise not unlike a man in orgasm.

‘- the bladder,’ continues Marinus, ‘is about a thumb’s length in.’

The doctor lengthens the bloody incision with his scalpel: Gerritszoon shrieks.

Uzaemon forces himself to watch: lithotomies are unknown outside Dejima, and he has agreed to supplement Maeno’s report to the Academy.

Gerritszoon snorts like a bull, his eyes water and he groans.

Marinus dips his left forefinger into rape-seed oil and inserts it into Gerritszoon’s anus up to its knuckle. ‘Thus the patient should void his bowels beforehand.’ There is the smell of rotting meat and sweet apples. ‘One locates the stone through the rectal ampulla…’ with his right hand Marinus inserts the tweezers into the blood-brimming incision ‘… and pushes it from the fundus up towards the incision.’ Liquid faeces ooze out of the patient’s rectum around the doctor’s hand. ‘The less one pokes around with the tweezers, the better… One puncture is quite enough, and – ah! Almost had it… and – aha! Ecco siamo!’ He takes out the stone, retrieves his finger from Gerritszoon’s anus and wipes both on his apron. The stone is as big as an acorn and the yellow of a diseased tooth. ‘The gash must be staunched before our patient dies of blood loss. Domburger, Corkonian, pray stand aside.’ Marinus pours another oil over the incision and Eelattu covers it with a scab-crusty bandage.

Gagged Gerritszoon sighs as the pain lessens from unendurable to gruelling.

Dr Maeno asks, ‘What is oil, Doctor, if you please?’

‘Extract of the bark and leaves of Hamamelis japonica – which I named myself. It’s a local variety of witch hazel, which lessens the risk of fevers – a trick taught me by an unschooled old woman, many lifetimes ago.’

Orito too, remembers Uzaemon, learnt from old mountain herbalists.

Eelattu changes the dressing, then binds its replacement against Gerritszoon’s waist. ‘The patient should lie down for three days, and eat and drink in moderation. Urine shall leak through the wound in his bladder wall; one must be ready for fevers and swellings; but urine should be appearing by the usual means within two or three weeks.’ Marinus now unties Gerritszoon’s gag and tells him. ‘About the same time required by Sjako to walk again in the wake of the drubbing you gave him last September, no?’

Gerritszoon unscrews his eyes. ‘Yer f’ckin’ yer, yer… f’ckin’ f’ckin’ yer…’

‘Peace on Earth,’ Marinus puts his finger on the patient’s lips, badly blotched with cold sores. ‘Goodwill to all Men.’

Chief van Cleef’s Dining Room is noisy with six or eight conversations in Japanese and Dutch; silver cutlery clinks on the best tableware; and though it is not yet evening, the candelabra are lighting a battlefield of goat bones, fish spines, breadcrusts, crab claws, lobster shells, blancmange gobbets and holly leaves and berries, fallen from the ceiling. The panels between the Dining Room and the Bay Room are removed, affording Uzaemon a view all the way to the distant mouth of open sea: the waters are slate-blue, and the mountains half erased by the cold drizzle turning last night’s snow to slush.

The Chief’s Malay servants finish one song on flute and violin, and begin another. Uzaemon remembers it from last year’s banquet. It is understood by the ranked interpreters that ‘Dutch New Year’ on the Twenty-fifth Day of December coincides with the birth of Jesus Christ, but this is never acknowledged in case an ambitious spy one day accuses them of endorsing Christian worship. Christmas, Uzaemon has noticed, affects the Dutch in strange ways. They can become intolerably homesick, even abusive, merry and maudlin, often all at once. By the time Arie Grote brings up the plum pudding, Chief van Cleef, Deputy Fischer, Ouwehand, Baert and the youth Oost are somewhere between quite drunk and very drunk. Only the soberer Marinus, de Zoet and Twomey converse with any of the Japanese banqueters.

‘Ogawa-san?’ Goto Shinpachi looks concerned. ‘Are you ill?’

‘No, no… I’m sorry. Goto-san asked me a question?’

‘It was a remark about the beauty of the music.’

‘I’d rather listen,’ declares Interpreter Sekita, ‘to butchered hogs.’

‘Or a man having his stone cut out,’ says Arashiyama, ‘eh, Ogawa?’

‘Your description murdered my appetite.’ Sekita stuffs another devilled egg into his mouth, whole. ‘These eggs really are very good.’

‘I’d trust Chinese herbs,’ says Nishi, the monkey-faced scion of a rival dynasty of Nagasaki interpreters, ‘before I’d trust a Dutch knife.’

‘My cousin trusted Chinese herbs,’ says Arashiyama, ‘for his stone -’

Deputy Fischer laughs his galloping laugh as he bangs on the table.

‘- and died in a way that would truly murder your appetite.’

Chief van Cleef’s current Dejima wife, wearing a snow-patterned kimono and jangling bracelets, slides open the door and bows demurely to the room. Several conversations fall away and the better-mannered diners stop themselves ogling. She whispers something in van Cleef’s ear that makes his face light up; he whispers back and slaps her buttocks like a farmer slapping an ox. Feigning coquettish anger, she returns to van Cleef’s private chamber.

Uzaemon suspects van Cleef contrived the scene to show off his possession.

‘More’s the pity,’ croons Sekita, ‘she’s not on the menu.’

If de Zoet had had his way, thinks Uzaemon, Orito would be a Dejima wife, too…

Cupido the slave distributes a bottle to each of the two dozen diners.

… giving herself to one man, Uzaemon bites, instead of being given to many.

‘I was afraid,’ says Sekita, ‘they’d be forgoing this pleasant custom.’

That’s your guilt talking, Uzaemon thinks. But what if my guilt is right?

The Malay servant Philander follows, uncorking each bottle.

Van Cleef stands and chimes a spoon on a glass until he has the table’s attention. ‘Those of you who honoured the Dutch New Year Banquet under Chiefs Hemmij and Snitker shall know of the Hydra-headed Toast…’