The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: A Novel (51 page)

That
'No'
is my stepbrother's victory
, she thinks. 'My stepmother in Nagasaki has a son. I'd rather not name him. During Father's marriage negotiations, it was settled that he'd train to be a doctor and a scholar. It didn't take long, however, for his lack of aptitude to betray itself. He hated books, loathed Dutch, was disgusted by blood, and was despatched to an uncle in Saga, but he returned to Nagasaki for Father's funeral. The tongue-tied boy was now a seventeen-year-old man of the world. It was "Oy, bath!"; it was "Hey, tea!" He watched me, as men do, with no encouragement. None.'

Orito pauses as footsteps in the passageway come and go.

'My stepmother noticed her son's new attitude but said nothing, not yet. Until Father died, she passed as a dutiful doctor's wife, but after the funeral she changed . . . or changed back. She forbade me to leave our residence without her permission, permission that she rarely gave. She told me, "Your days of playing at scholars are over." Father's old friends were turned away until they no longer called. She dismissed Ayame, our last servant from Mother's time. I had to take over her duties. One day my rice was white: from the next, it was brown. What a pampered creature that must make me sound.'

Yayoi gasps slightly at a kick in her uterus. 'They're listening, and none of us thinks you were a pampered creature.'

'Well, then my stepbrother taught me that my troubles had not yet begun. I slept in Ayame's old room - two mats, so it was more of a cupboard - and one night, a few days after Father's funeral, when the whole house was asleep, my stepbrother appeared. I asked him what he wanted. He told me that I knew. I told him to get out. He said, "The rules have changed, dear stepsister." He said that as head of the Aibagawas of Nagasaki' - Orito tastes metal - 'the household's assets were his. "This one, too," he said, and that was when he touched me.'

Yayoi grimaces. 'It was wrong of me to ask. You don't have to tell me.'

It was his crime
, Orito thinks,
not mine
. 'I tried to . . . but he hit me as I'd never been hit before. He clamped his hand over my mouth, and told me . . .'
to imagine
, she remembers,
he was Ogawa
. 'He swore that if I resisted, he would hold the right side of my face over the fire until it matched the left side, and do what he wanted to do to me anyway.' Orito stops to steady her voice. 'Acting frightened was easy. Acting submissive was harder. So I said, "Yes." He licked my face like a dog and unfastened himself and . . . then I sank my fingers deep between his legs and squeezed what I found there, like a lemon, with all my strength.'

Yayoi looks at her friend in a wholly new way.

'His scream woke the house up. His mother came running and ordered the servants away. I told her what her stepson had tried to do. He told her
I
had begged him to my bed. She slapped the head of the Aibagawas of Nagasaki once for being a liar, twice for being stupid, and ten times for almost wasting the family's most saleable property. "Abbot Enomoto," she told him, "will want your stepsister
intact
when she arrives at his Nunnery of Freaks." That was how I learnt why Enomoto's bailiff had been visiting. Four days later I found myself here.'

The storm pelts the roofs and the fire growls.

Orito remembers how all her fathers' friends refused to shelter her on the night she ran away from her own house.

She remembers hiding all night in the House of Wistaria, listening.

She remembers her painful decision to accept de Zoet's proposal.

She remembers her final shaming and capture at Dejima's Land-Gate.

'The monks aren't like your stepbrother,' Yayoi is saying. 'They're gentle.'

'So gentle that when I say, "No," they stop, and leave my room?'

'The Goddess chooses the Engifters, just as she chooses us Sisters.'

To implant belief
, Orito thinks,
is to dominate the believers
.

'At my first Engiftment,' Yayoi confesses, 'I imagined a boy I once loved.'

So the hoods
, Orito realises,
are to hide the men's faces, not ours
.

'Might you have known a man,' Yayoi hesitates, 'who you could . . .?'

Ogawa Uzaemon
, the midwife thinks,
is no longer my concern
.

Orito banishes all thought of Jacob de Zoet, and recalls Jacob de Zoet.

'Oh,' says Yayoi, 'I'm as nosy as Hashihime tonight. Pay me no mind.'

But the Newest Sister slips from the warmth of their blankets, goes to the chest given her by the Abbess and takes out a bamboo-and-paper fan. Yayoi sits up, curious. Orito lights a candle and opens the fan.

Yayoi peers at the details. 'He was an artist? Or a scholar?'

'He read books, but he was just a clerk in an ordinary warehouse.'

'He loved you.' Yayoi touches the ribs of the fan. 'He loved you.'

'He was a stranger from another . . . domain. He scarcely knew me.'

Yayoi looks at Orito pityingly, and sighs. 'So?'

* * *

The sleeper knows she is dreaming because the moon-grey cat pronounces, 'Someone carried this fish all the way up this mountain.' The cat takes the pilchard, jumps to the ground and vanishes beneath the walkway. The dreamer lowers herself on to the Courtyard, but the cat has gone. She sees a narrow rectangular hole in the foundations of the House . . .

. . . Its breath is warm. She hears children and summer's insects.

A voice up on the walkway asks, 'Has the Newest Sister lost anything?'

The moon-grey cat licks its paws and speaks in her father's voice.

'I know you're a messenger,' says the dreamer, 'but what is your message?'

The cat looks at her pityingly, and sighs. 'I left through this hole, beneath us . . .'

The dark universe is packed into one small box that slowly opens.

'. . . and reappeared at the House gate a minute later. What does that mean?'

The sleeper wakes up in frosted darkness. Yayoi is here, fast asleep.

Orito gropes, grapples, fumbles and understands.
A conduit . . . or a tunnel
.

XX

The Two Hundred Steps leading to Ryugaji Temple in Nagasaki

New Year's Day, the Twelfth Year of the era of Kansei

The holiday crowds throng and jostle. Boys are selling warblers in cages dangling from a pine tree. Over her smoking griddle a palsy-handed grandmother croaks, '
Squiiiiiiiiid on a stick-
oh
, squiiiiiiiiid on a stick-
oh
, who will buy my squiiiiiiiiid on a stick-
oooh
!
' Inside his palanquin Uzaemon hears Kiyoshichi shout, 'Make way, make
way
!' less in hope of clearing a path than to insure himself against being scolded by Ogawa the Elder for laziness. 'Pictures to as
tound
! Drawings to a
maze
!' hollers a seller of engravings. The man's face appears in the grille of Uzaemon's palanquin, and he holds up a pornographic woodblock print of a naked goblin, who bears an undeniable likeness to Melchior van Cleef. The goblin possesses a monstrous phallus as big as his body. 'Might I
proffer
for Sir's delec
tation
a sample of "Dejima Nights"?' Uzaemon growls, 'No!' and the man withdraws, bellowing, 'See Kawahara's Hundred and Eight Wonders of the Empire without leaving your house!' A storyteller points to his storyboard about the Siege of Shimabara: 'Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the Christian Amakusa Shiro, bent on selling our souls to the King of Rome!' The entertainer plays his audience well: there are boos and yells of abuse. 'And so the Great Shogun expelled the foreign devils, and so the yearly Rite of
fumi-e
continues to the present day, to weed out these heretics feeding off our udders!' A disease-gnawed girl, breastfeeding a baby so deformed that Uzaemon mistakes it for a shaven puppy, implores, 'Mercy and a coin, sir, mercy and a coin . . .' He slides open the grille just as the palanquin lurches forward a dozen steps, and Uzaemon is left holding a one
mon
piece against all the laughing, smoking, joking passers-by. Their joy is insufferable.
I am like a dead spirit at O-bon
, Uzaemon thinks,
forced to watch the carefree and the living gorge themselves on Life
. His palanquin tips, and he must grip the lacquered handle as he slides backwards. Near the top of the temple steps a handful of girls on the cusp of womanhood whip their spinning tops.
To know the secrets of Mount Shiranui
, he thinks,
is to be banished from this world.

A lumbering ox obscures Uzaemon's view of the girls.

The Creeds of Enomoto's Order shine darkness on all things.

When the ox has passed, the girls are gone.

The palanquins are set down in the Courtyard of the Jade Peony, an area reserved for samurai families. Uzaemon climbs out of his box, and slides his swords into his sash. His wife stands behind his mother, whilst his father attacks Kiyoshichi like the snapping turtle he has come, in recent weeks, to resemble: 'Why did you allow us to be buried alive in that -' he jabs his stick towards the thronged steps '- in that human mud?'

'My lapse,' Kiyoshichi bows low, 'was unforgivable, Master.'

'Yet this old fool,' growls Ogawa the Elder, 'is to forgive you anyhow?'

Uzaemon tries to intervene. 'With respect, Father, I'm sure--'

' "With respect" is what scoundrels say when they mean the opposite!'