David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

I take the long way back to the Deputy’s House. The White masters complain about the heat all summer long, but I love to let the sun warm my bones so I can survive the winters. The sun reminds me of Weh, my home. When I pass the pig-pens, d’Orsaiy sees me and asks why Master Fischer hit me on Long Street. With my face, I say, Does a master need a reason? and d’Orsaiy nods. I like d’Orsaiy. D’Orsaiy comes from a place called the Cape, halfway to the White Man’s World. His skin is the blackest I ever saw. Dr Marinus says he is a Hottentot, but the master hands call him ‘Knave o’ Spades’. He asks me if I am going to study reading and writing at Master de Zoet’s this afternoon. I say, ‘Yes, unless Master Fischer gives me more work.’ D’Orsaiy says that writing is a magic that I should learn. D’Orsaiy tells me that Master Ouwehand and Master Twomey are playing billiards in Summer House. This is a warning to walk briskly so that Master Ouwehand does not report me to Master Fischer for idling.

Back at the Deputy’s House, I hear snoring. I creep up the stairways, knowing which steps creak and which do not. Master Fischer is asleep. This is a problem, because if I go to Master de Zoet’s house for my writing lesson without Master Fischer’s permission, he will punish me for being wilful. If I do not go to Master de Zoet’s house, Master Fischer will punish me for laziness. But if I wake up Master Fischer to ask his permission, he will punish me for spoiling his siesta. In the end, I slide the chamber pot under Master Fischer’s bed and go. Perhaps I will be back before he wakes.

The door of Tall House, where Master de Zoet lives, is ajar. Behind the side door is a large, locked room full of empty crates and barrels. I knock on the lowest step, as usual, and expect to hear Master de Zoet’s voice calling, ‘Is that you, Weh?’ But today, there is no reply. Surprised, I climb the stairs, making enough noise to warn him that I am coming. Still there is no greeting. Master de Zoet rarely takes a siesta, but perhaps the heat has overcome him this afternoon. On the landing, I cross the side room where the house interpreter lives during the trading season. Master de Zoet’s door is half open, so I peer in. He is sitting at his low table. He does not notice me. His face is not his own today. The light in his eyes is dark. He is afraid. His lips are half mouthing silent words. On my home-island, we would say that he has been cursed by a bad kwaio.

Master de Zoet is staring at a scroll in front of him.

It is not a White man’s book, but a Yellow man’s scroll.

I am too far away to see well, but the letters on it are not Dutch ones.

It is Yellow man’s writing – Master Yang and his sons used such letters.

Next to the scroll on Master de Zoet’s table is a notebook. Some Chinese words are written next to Dutch words. I make this guess: Master de Zoet has been translating the scroll into his own language. This has freed a bad curse, and this bad curse has possessed him.

Master de Zoet senses I am here, and he looks up.

Around three o’clock on the 16th October, 1800

Indeed it seems [John Penhaligon reads] that Nature purposely designed these islands to be a sort of little world, separate and independent of the rest, by making them of so difficult an access, and by endowing them plentifully, with whatever is requisite to make the lives of their Inhabitants both delightful and pleasant, and to enable them to subsist without a commerce with foreign Nations…

The Captain yawns and cricks his jaw. Lieutenant Hovell declares there to be no better text on Japan than Engelbert Kaempfer’s and never mind its age; but by the time Penhaligon staggers to the end of one sentence, its beginning has receded into fog. Through the stern window he studies the ominous, busy horizon. His whale’s-tooth paperweight rolls off his desk, and he hears Wetz, the Sailing Master, ordering the topgallants trimmed. None too soon, thinks the Captain. The Yellow Sea has changed colour from this morning’s robin’s-egg blue to ordure-grey, with a sky of scabby pewter.

Where is Chigwin, he wonders, and where is my damn coffee?

Penhaligon retrieves his paperweight and pain bites his right ankle.

He squints at his barometer, whose needle is stuck to the g of ‘Changeable’.

The Captain returns to Engelbert Kaempfer to pick at a knot of illogic: the corollary of the phrase ‘Whatever is requisite’ is that man’s needs are universal whereas, in truth, a king’s requisites differ radically from a reed-cutter’s; a libertine’s from an archbishop’s; and his own from his grandfather’s. He opens his notebook and, bracing himself against the swell, writes:

What prophet of commerce in, let us say, the Year 1700 could have foreseen a time when commoners consume tea by the bucket and sugar by the sack? What subject of William and Mary could have predicted the ‘need’ of today’s middling multitudes for cotton sheets, coffee and chocolate? Human requisites are prone to fashion; and, as clamouring new needs replace old ones, the face of the world itself changes…

It is too rough to write, but John Penhaligon is pleased and his gout has calmed down again, for now. A rich vein. He takes out his shaving mirror from his escritoire. Sweetmeat pies have fattened the fellow in the glass, brandy reddened his complexion, grief sunk his eyes and bad weather blasted away his thatch, but what restores a man’s vigour – and name – better than success?

He sketches his first speech at Westminster. ‘One recalls that the Phoebus,’ he shall inform their enrapt lordships, ‘one recalls that my Phoebus was no five-decked ship-of-the-line with an auditorium of thunder-spouting guns, but a modest frigate of twenty-four eighteen-pounders. Her mizzen had sprung in the Straits of Formosa, her cordage was tired, her canvas threadbare, half our supplies from Fort Cornwallis were rotted, and her geriatric pump wheezed like my lord Falmouth atop his disappointed whore, and to as little profit -’ the chamber shall erupt with laughter as his old enemy flees to die of shame in his stoat-hole ‘- but her heart, my lords, was English oak; and when we hammered on the bolted gates of Japan, we did so with that resolve for which our race is justly notorious.’ Their lordships’ hush shall grow reverential. ‘The copper we seized from the perfidious Dutch on that October day was but a token. Our truest prize, and the legacy of the Phoebus, was a market, sirs, for the fruits of your mills, mines, plantations and manufactories; and the gratitude of the Japanese Empire for rousing her from feudal somnambulance into our modern century. To claim that my Phoebus drew the political map of Eastern Asia anew is no hyperbole.’ Their lordships nod their cluttered heads, and declare, ‘Hear, hear!’ Lord Admiral Penhaligon continues: ‘This august chamber is cognisant of History’s diverse instruments of change: the diplomat’s tongue; treachery’s poison; a monarch’s mercy; a pope’s tyranny…’

By God, Penhaligon thinks, this is good: I must write it down later.

‘… and it is nothing less than the greatest honour of my life that, in the first year of the nineteenth century, History chose one plucky ship, His Majesty’s Frigate Phoebus to open the doors of the most reclusive empire in the modern world – for the glory of His Majesty and the British Empire!’ By now every last bewigged bastard in the place, Whig, Tory, cross-bencher, bishop, general and admiral alike shall be jumping to his feet and roaring with applause.

‘Cap-’ outside his door, Chigwin sneezes ‘- tain?’