The Printmaker's Daughter (30 page)
The bonito came on the black tide. The fishermen were out in their boats with their nets. I watched the waves; I walked beside them. I thought of my father and how he must need me. From the beach I could see Mount Fuji, resplendent in its cape of dazzling snow.
O
N THE FAN-SHAPED
island in Nagasaki Bay, the Dutch doctor sat at his piano. His fingers ran up and down the keys.
The fingers were strong and long, easily reaching an octave and a half. At the end of a run he rapped each yellowed ivory hard, twice: this was meant to be a workout. A surgeon needed strong hands.
The music rattled in the stillness. The Japanese guards who knelt at the doors gritted their teeth.
The doctor was a prisoner. His back door was the Water Gate and opened onto waves. That was where the ships docked. His front door was the City Gate and led to the town of Nagasaki. He was not allowed to go out there. And few people from the town were allowed in through the gate. On the high wall beside it was a sign that said, in Japanese and Dutch,
NO PRIESTS. NO BEGGARS. NO WOMEN.
Smaller brushstrokes added: “With the Exception of Prostitutes Bearing a Red Stamp in Their Papers.”
Philipp Franz von Siebold was twenty-seven. He was tall and blond, a strikingly beautiful man, although so strange did he appear to the Japanese that they imagined him to be a demon. The upper half of his face was generous: he had wide eyes and eyebrows that sprouted above deep sockets; his forehead was flat, and his look was ready. Below the eyes his face was quite different: it became narrow and sensitive. His nose ran like a plumb line down his face, long and thin; his lips, also long and thin, crossed it but, happily, turned up at the corners. He had been smiling since he arrived. But the smile was wearing. He was impatient. The world outside the City Gate was rich beyond knowing.
He wore a uniform with epaulets. The gold tassels on his shoulders shook. Up and down the ivories he went, fingers leaping, chin bobbing. He and the other traders of the Dutch East India Company lived on this man-made island called Deshima, at the very edge of the closed country of Japan. Von Siebold’s job was to provide medical care to his countrymen. There weren’t many of them left: trade had dwindled and did not justify the posting. Only curiosity did, and a collector’s avid desire for artifacts. The Dutch wanted information about the Japanese; they wanted objects, pictures, and growing things—trees and flowers. Philipp von Siebold was the perfect man to collect these.
If only he could escape from his little island prison.
He had landed a month ago. When his mind returned to the wild sea journey, he planted his feet wide on the floor under his piano stool, as if the stool might buck him off, as if he had to ride it like a horse. Sailing from Batavia in late spring, the ship
Drie Gezusters
had been caught in a typhoon as it approached the southern tip of the Japanese islands. Von Siebold was lurching along the deck thinking he might die. When he saw a fishing boat foundering in the waves, with no sails or oars, he shouted: “They’re going down! Can we hook them?”
“We might go down ourselves!”
“Try!”
The Dutch sailors pulled five Japanese from the water. The fishermen knelt on the deck and prayed as their boat was bashed to planks. Then they did a curious thing: they made a circle and shaved their beards and heads. They seemed to be in despair. They gestured: we wished to die in the water.
“You’re saved,” said the Dutch. “We saved you!” And they clapped their giant hands on the fishermen’s dripping backs.
But the fishermen trembled and prayed.
A week later the
Drie Gezusters
sailed into Nagasaki Bay, to be greeted by a row of fanatical sword-bearing men as wide as they were tall. Guards took the Dutchmen’s guns, and the rescued local sailors were marched away to whatever fate. Why? It was a crime to be rescued by foreigners.
The rulers of this shut-away place were perverse, thought the doctor.
While he was being searched for forbidden articles, von Siebold had looked around. The land, unlike the people, was gentle. Sheltering hills scattered with white houses surrounded the deep blue bay. The man-made traders’ island sat like a plug in the basin of the harbor. His Bible he sacrificed ostentatiously to the Bible barrel, but he kept a smaller version tucked down below his belt at the small of his back, its title page ripped out. He didn’t know why. He never sang a hymn or made the sign of the cross. The Japanese abhorred Christians. He had been prepared to stamp on his holy book, an act sometimes required of his predecessors. It would have cost him nothing. But they didn’t ask him to.
Still, at the end of it all, they had nearly refused him entrance. The guards spoke better Dutch than he did; he was born in Germany and had studied there and spoke with an accent. This made them suspicious that he was a German spy. He told them that he was a
yama-orandajin
, a mountain Dutchman.
He got a fresh chuckle out of this witticism as he banged down an octave lower on the piano. All that fierce display to stop spies and Christians, yet they had welcomed him. He had got this far. In fact, he
was
a spy, in a benevolent way, eager to endure his imprisonment on artificial earth and to submit to Japanese rules, if doing so would allow him access to their secrets. He had brought with him an electrostatic generator, an air pump, and a galvanizing apparatus, to impress the Japanese and encourage them to share their own wonders. And he had brought this piano, which he played every day.
Even his countrymen—the Dutch who inhabited the strange island prison with its low houses, enclosed courtyards, warehouses, and animal pens, with its salty smell of sea and rusted metal doors awaiting the next ship (not expected for half a year)—existed out of time. They dressed in what had been the court fashion before von Siebold was born, in quilted velvet coats and black cloaks. When they went out into Nagasaki, which they did only with permission and under guard, they wore hats with feathers and carried Spanish canes with gold handles. They loved to impress. They were tall and the Japanese short; they strode while the simple Japanese farmers and townsmen scuttled. The Japanese were thin and the Dutch were fat. When they returned from their town excursions, they were even fatter because of the parcels they hid in the folds of their cloaks.
They smuggled in these goods under the noses of the guards, who appeared blind as money changed hands. The Japanese used to allow their copper, gold, and silver out of the country, but no longer. Handmade carvings and dolls and pictures—and objects of worship and ritual—were meant to stay home as well, but they found their way into the hands and the tea chests of the Dutch, and eventually home to Holland.
“God’s grief, von Siebold, whatever the hell are you playing?”
One of the displaced Dutchmen stuck his face around the corner of the door: the partitions were so thin that the whole island was shaking with the music.
The young doctor raised his voice over the clatter. “It’s a popular German song by von Weber called
Invitation to the Dance.
”
The protruding square face arranged itself in a look of horror and then withdrew.
“Take pity, von Siebold! It’s after ten!” His superior, the
opperhoofd
de Sturler, clearly was already irritated by him. This von Siebold enjoyed. He was competitive with anyone above him and jovial to all below.
He completed his last crescendo and closed the top of his piano. Another day had passed.
Walking out of the room and across the little yard to his home, he kept his eyes low so he did not have to acknowledge the young Japanese women coming and going from the Dutch quarters. These were the prostitutes with the red stamps in their passports. His countrymen were fat and old-fashioned, but they enjoyed rude health.
He got ready for bed. On each wall of his chamber he had hung a chart of the phonetic characters that small children studied in schools here, and he ran through them before sleep. He was hungry for everything Japanese—words, pictures, flowers, animals, bamboo chests, lacquer boxes, the practice of acupuncture, and the worship of many gods. And he would get it. Little by little.
He lay on his back, wide awake. He had a plan. His first step had been to offer to teach Western medicine to Japanese doctors. Lectures were at Deshima: a steady stream of respectful men came to the City Gate, and he welcomed them all. He asked only that each man bring with him a living plant, in rich loam, so he could easily transplant it.
He had made a garden to receive these gifts. Tomorrow, early in the morning, when the sun first lit the edge of the hills, he would inspect it. The hosta would have added an inch to the height of its spearheads, and the buds on the maple tree might show a hint of orange. He would stoop and smell the crocus with its shy scent and fight back the longing for intimacy that often invaded him, as it did now. It was the sight of those evening women, the subdued clatter of their wooden sandals, that unbuttoned him.
But to the conquest! Tomorrow morning, after the garden walk, he would play the piano again to keep his fingers nimble. They were long and probing, like his regard: he maintained them like faithful slaves, well trained to answer the messages his brain sent. He was a young and inexperienced doctor, and one never knew when he would be required to commit an act of surgery. And the playing sent a message to the rest of the men: he was here, ready.
Thinking of this soothed him, and he slept.
And in the morning it all unrolled just as he had imagined. First came coffee and chocolate; then came inspection of the garden, which was growing, though not as fast as he hoped. The soil, dug out from the mountainside, was not rich. He would ask the servants to collect more pig manure and dig it in well. When he came in, he could see the Japanese doctors lined up early for his morning lecture. Wearing his first smile of the day, he went to greet them: he liked them more than he liked his fellow Dutchmen.
He moved among the long-skirted men, smiling and bowing. They kept their eyes down as if blinded by his height, his grace, his blondness. He enjoyed their admiration, the excess of politeness, the quiet, watchful eyes and quick brains, the fierceness of their will. They were as hungry as he was. They had studied Dutch for years, some of them—it was the “Latin of the East.” They excelled in coded behavior in their country and had agreed, tacitly, to play the necessary games to get what they wanted.
This morning they handed him their essays on subjects he had assigned: the annual festivals and their meanings, the confinement of women in pregnancy, the education of boys. Von Siebold read them quickly and asked questions.
“What do you do when a child cannot come out of the birth canal?”
“When a child cannot be born naturally, if he is caught inside the mother’s body, we try to pull him out with hands and fingers. But some parts are too large. Either the shoulders or the hindquarters”—he looked up, quizzical; what to call it?—“the back end, the rear cheeks.”
One of his countrymen issued a reprimand. The extrovert had used the expression commonly employed when speaking of a domestic animal. “No, no. That is not what we call it!”
“The buttocks?” said von Siebold helpfully.
“When the
bew-tox
be not out coming, it chances the child may perish,” the Japanese doctor concluded, with a look of relief that was not in tune with the information he was delivering. But he was not released. Von Siebold interrogated him: Why not use forceps for difficult deliveries?
“We use not these tools, as women have an abhorrence of them,” came the answer.
Von Siebold doubted that the women’s will would prevail, even in such matters.
“The women tell you what to do?” he prodded.
“We decide. It is not good for use metal in the body.”
“What happens, then, if the child cannot be extricated?”
“We will find what arm or leg we can reach and pull,” said a comical fellow, making a pantomime of it. His fellows coughed. “Maybe will be cutting it off, and the child out come in pieces.”
“And the woman?”
“Dies or lives, according to the gods,” the student concluded. Von Siebold’s expressive face showed dismay.
“Why do you not perform a caesarean section?”
The operation was known here; von Siebold had read the notes of his predecessor.
“Oh no no no no. That is wrong, murder; gods not happy, and both mother and child pay price,” said the Japanese doctor from his kneeling position on the floor.
Von Siebold gathered up the essays, informative writing that had bypassed the censors. He collected the little bamboo boxes of plants that the doctors presented as tributes, exclaiming over the ones he hadn’t yet seen. Here was a tiny yew tree. And this one appeared to be a variety of cypress. This was a precious bonsai: it had been pinched and tortured, so it was only a very small version of itself. He bowed deeply and the men bowed back.