The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: A Novel (31 page)

* * *

The wheezing lantern reveals the unburied treasure on Marinus's bookshelves. Jacob twists his head and squints at the titles:
Novum Organum
by Francis Bacon; Von Goethe's
Versuch die Metamorphose de Pflanzen zu erklaren
; Antoine Galland's translation of
One Thousand and One Nights
. 'The printed word is food,' says Marinus, 'and you look hungry, Domburger.'
The System of Nature
by Jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud: the pseudonym, as any Dutch pastor's nephew knows, of the atheist Baron d'Holbach; and Voltaire's
Candide, ou l'Optimisme
. 'Enough heresy,' remarks Marinus, 'to crush an Inquisitor's rib-cage.' Jacob makes no reply, encountering next Newton's
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
; Juvenal's
Satires
; Dante's
Inferno
in its original Italian; and a sober
Kosmotheeros
by their countryman Christiaan Huygens. This is one shelf of twenty or thirty, stretching the attic's breadth. On Marinus's desk is a folio volume:
Osteographia
by William Cheselden.

'See who's waiting inside for you,' says the doctor.

Jacob contemplates the details and the devil plants a seed.

What if
this
engine of bones
, the seed germinates,
is a man's entirety . . .

Wind wallops the walls like a dozen tree-trunks tumbling.

. . . and Divine Love is a mere means of extracting
baby
engines of bones?

Jacob thinks about Abbot Enomoto's questions at their one meeting. 'Doctor, do you believe in the Soul's existence?'

Marinus prepares, the clerk expects, an erudite and arcane reply. 'Yes.'

'Then where . . .' Jacob indicates the pious, profane skeleton '. . .
is
it?'

'The soul is a verb,' he impales a lit candle on a spike, 'not a noun.'

Eelattu brings two beakers of bitter beer and sweet dried figs . . .

Each time Jacob is certain the wind cannot rampage more maniacally without the roof tearing free; the wind does, but the roof doesn't, not yet. Joists and beams strain and clunk and shudder like a windmill rattling at full kilter.
A terrifying night
, Jacob thinks,
yet even terror can pale into monotony
. Eelattu darns a sock whilst the doctor reminisces about his journey to Edo with the late Chief Hemmij and Head Clerk van Cleef. 'They bemoaned the lack of buildings to compare to St Peter's or Notre Dame: but the genius of the Japanese race is manifest in its roads. The Tokaido Highway runs from Osaka to Edo - from the Empire's belly to the head, if you will - and knows of no equal,
I
assert, anywhere on Earth, in either modernity or antiquity. The road is a city, fifteen feet in width, but three hundred well-drained, well-maintained and well-ordered German miles in length, served by fifty-three way stations where travellers can hire porters, change horses and rest or carouse for the night. And the simplest, most commonsensical joy of all? All traffic proceeds on the left-hand side, so the numerous collisions, seizures and stand-offs that so clog Europe's arteries are here unknown. On less populated stretches of the road, I unnerved our inspectors by slipping out of my palanquin and botanising along the verges. I found more than thirty new species for my
Flora Japonica
, missed by Thunberg and Kaempfer. And then, at the end, is Edo.'

'Which no more than . . . what, a dozen Europeans alive have seen?'

'Fewer. Seize the head clerk's chair within three years, you'll see it yourself.'

I shan't be here
, hopes Jacob, and then, uneasily, thinks of Orito.

Eelattu snips a thread. The sea writhes, just one street and a wall away.

'Edo is a million people in a grid of streets that stretches as far as the eye can travel. Edo is a tumultuous clatter of clogs, looms, shouts, barks, cries, whispers. Edo is a codex of every human demand and Edo is the means of supplying them. Every
daimyo
must keep a residence there for his designated heir and principal wife, and the largest such compounds are
de facto
walled towns. The Great Edo Bridge - to which every milestone in Japan refers - is two hundred paces across. Would that I could have slipped into a native's skin and roamed that labyrinth, but naturally, Hemmij, van Cleef and I were confined to our inn "for our own protection", until the appointed Day of our Interview with the Shogun. The stream of scholars and sightseers was an antidote to monotony, especially those with plants, bulbs and seeds.'

'Upon what matters were you consulted?'

'The medical, the erudite, the puerile: "Is electricity a fluid?"; "Do foreigners wear boots because they have no ankles?"; "For any real number
ph
does Euler's formula universally guarantee that the complex exponential function satisfies
ei
ph
=
cos
ph
+
sin
ph
?"; "How may we construct a Montgolfier Balloon?"; "Can a cancerous breast be removed without killing the patient?"; and once, "Given that the Flood of Noah never submerged Japan, do we conclude Japan is a more elevated country than others?" Interpreters, officials and innkeepers all charged admittance to the Delphic Oracle, but, as I intimated--'

The building shudders, as in the earthquake: its timbers shriek.

'- I find a certain comfort,' confesses Marinus, 'in humanity's helplessness.'

Jacob cannot agree. 'What of your meeting with the Shogun?'

'Our costume was the mothballed pomp of a century and a half: Hemmij was bedecked in a pearl-buttoned jacket, a Moorish waistcoat, an ostrich-feathered hat, and white
tapijns
over his shoes, and with van Cleef and I in like mishmash, we were a true trio of decayed French pastries. We rode in palanquins to the castle gates, thereafter proceeding on foot three hours down corridors, across courtyards, through gates to vestibules where we swapped stilted pleasantries with officials, councillors and princes until, at last, we gained the Throne Room. Here the pretence that the Court Embassy
is
a Court Embassy, and not a ten-weeks' tributary arse-licking pilgrimage, becomes impossible to maintain. The Shogun - half hidden by a screen - sits on the raised rear of the room. When his interlocutor announces, "
Oranda Kapitan
", Hemmij scuttled, crab-wise, Shogun-wards, knelt at a designated spot, forbidden even to look at the lofty personage, and waited in silence until the barbarian-quelling generalissimo lifted a single finger. A chamberlain recited a text unrevised since the 1660s, forbidding us to proselytise the wicked Christian faith or to accost the junks of the Chinese or the Ryukyu Islanders, and commanding us to report any designs against Japan that came to our ears. Hemmij scuttled backwards, and the ritual was complete. That evening, I recorded in my journal, Hemmij complained of stomach-gripes, which turned into dysenteric fever - an uncertain diagnosis, I confess - on the way home.'

Eelattu has finished his darning; he unrolls the bedding.

'A foul death. The rain was incessant. The place was called Kakegawa. "Not here, Marinus, not like this," he groaned, and died . . .'

Jacob imagines a grave in pagan soil: and his own body lowered there.

'. . . as if
I
, of all people, had powers of divine intercession.'

They are aware of a change in the timbre of the typhoon's roar.

'Its eye,' Marinus glances upwards, 'is above us . . .'

XII

The State Room in the Chief's House on Dejima

Minutes after ten o'clock on the 23rd October, 1799

'We are all busy men,' Unico Vorstenbosch stares at Interpreter Kobayashi over the State Table. 'Pray discard the garnish for once and tell me the number.'

Drizzle hisses on the roofs. Jacob dips his quill in ink.

Interpreter Iwase translates for Chamberlain Tomine, who arrived with the hollyhock-crested scroll-tube delivered this morning from Edo.

Kobayashi's Dutch translation of Edo's message is half unrolled. 'Number?'

'
What
,' Vorstenbosch's patience is exaggerated, 'is the Shogun's offer?'

'Nine thousand six hundred piculs,' announces Kobayashi. 'Best copper.'

9,600
, scratches the nib of Jacob's quill,
piculs copper
.

'This offer is,' affirms Iwase Banri, 'a good and big increase.'

A ewe bleats. Jacob fails to guess what his patron is thinking.

'We request twenty thousand piculs,' assesses Vorstenbosch, 'and we are offered less than ten? Does the Shogun mean to insult Governor van Overstraten?'

'To treble quota in single year,' Iwase is no fool, 'is not insult.'

'Such generosity,' Kobayashi uses the weapon of offence, 'is no precedent! I strive earnestly for many weeks to achieve result.'

Vorstenbosch's glance at Jacob means,
Do not record this
.

'Copper can arrive,' says Kobayashi, 'in two or three days, if you send.'

'Warehouse is in Saga,' says Iwase, 'castle town of Hizen, is near. I amaze Edo release so much copper. As High Councillor say in message,' he indicates the scroll, 'most warehouses are empty.'