The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (72 page)

A sailor on the mizzen yard shouts in a Scandinavian language.

The delayed reply from the ratline is a long and filthy laugh.

The crew is excited that twelve weeks of anchored idling is at an end.

“You must be eager to see home, Mr. de Zoet, after so long away.”

Jacob envies youth its clarities and certainties. “There’ll be more strangers’ faces than familiar ones on Walcheren, what with the war and the passage of twenty years. Truth be told, I petitioned Edo for permission to settle in Nagasaki as a sort of consul for the new company, but no precedent could be found in the archives.” He wipes his misted-over spectacles. “And so, as you see, I must leave.” The watchtower is clearer without his glasses, and farsighted Jacob puts them in his jacket pocket. He suffers a lurch of panic to discover his pocket watch is missing, before remembering that he gave it to Yûan. “Mr. Boerhaave, might you know the time?”

“Two bells o’ the larboard watch was not so long ago, sir.”

Before Jacob can explain that he meant the land time, the bell of Ryûgaji Temple booms for the Hour of the Dragon: a quarter past seven, at this time of year.

The hour of my parting
, Jacob thinks,
is Japan’s parting gift
.

The figure on the watchtower is shrunk to a tiny letter i.

He might be me, seen from the quarterdeck of the
Shenandoah, though Jacob doubts that Unico Vorstenbosch was a man ever to look back.
Captain Penhaligon, however, probably did
 … Jacob hopes, one day, to send a letter to the Englishman from the “Dutch shopkeeper” to ask what stayed his hand from firing the
Phoebus
’s carronades that autumn
day: was it an act of Christian mercy, or did some more-pragmatic consideration belay the order to fire?

The chances are
, he must concede,
Penhaligon, too, is dead by now
.

A black sailor scales a nearby rope, and Jacob thinks of Ogawa Uzaemon telling him how foreign vessels seem manned by phantoms and mirror images who appear and disappear through hidden portals. Jacob says a brief prayer for the interpreter’s soul, watching the ship’s restless wake.

The figure on the watchtower is an indistinct smudge. Jacob waves.

The smudge waves back, with two smudged arms, in wide arcs.

“A particular friend of yours, sir?” asks Midshipman Boerhaave.

Jacob stops waving. The figure stops waving. “My son.”

Boerhaave is unsure what to say. “You’re leaving him behind, sir?”

“I have no choice. His mother was Japanese, and such is the law. Obscurity is Japan’s outermost defense. The country doesn’t
want
to be understood.”

“But … so … when may you meet your son again?”

“Today—this minute—is the last I shall ever see of him … in this world, at least.”

“I could obtain the loan of a telescope, sir, if you desire it?”

Jacob is touched by Boerhaave’s concern. “Thank you, but no. I’d not see his face properly. But might I trouble you for a flask of hot tea from the galley?”

“Of course, sir—though it may take a little while, if the stove isn’t yet lit.”

“Take as long as it takes. It’ll … it’ll keep the chill from my chest.”

“Very good, sir.” Boerhaave walks to the main hatch and goes below.

Yûan’s outline is losing definition against the backdrop of Nagasaki.

Jacob prays, and shall pray nightly, that Yûan’s life will be better than that of Thunberg’s tubercular son, but the ex-chief is well versed in Japan’s distrust of foreign blood. Yûan may be his master’s most gifted pupil, but he shall never inherit his master’s title, or marry without the magistrate’s permission, or even leave the wards of the city.
He is too Japanese to leave
, Jacob knows,
but not Japanese enough to belong
.

A hundred wood pigeons scatter from a spur of beech trees.

Even letters must rely upon the fair-mindedness of strangers. Replies will take three or four or five years.

The exiled father rubs an eyelash from his wind-blurry eye.

He stamps his feet against the early cold. His kneecaps complain.

Looking backward, Jacob sees pages from the months and years ahead. Upon his arrival at Java, the new governor-general summons him to his palace in salubrious Buitenzorg, inland and high above the miasmic airs of Batavia. Jacob is offered a plum job in the new governorship, but he declines, citing his desire to return to his fatherland.
If I cannot stay in Nagasaki
, he thinks,
better to turn my back on the Orient altogether
. The following month, he watches nightfall smother Sumatra from a ship bound for Europe, and hears Dr. Marinus, clear as a harpsichord’s spindly refrain, remark upon the brevity of life, probably in Aramaic. Naturally, this is a trick of his mind. Six weeks later the passengers see Table Mountain rear up behind Cape Town, where Jacob recalls fragments of a story narrated by Chief van Cleef on the roof of a brothel, long ago. Ship fever, a brutal storm off the Azores, and a brush with a Barbary corsair make the Atlantic leg more arduous, but he disembarks safely in the Texel roadstead in a hailstorm. The harbormaster presents Jacob with a courteous summons to The Hague, where his distant role in the war is recognized by a brief ceremony at the Department for Trade and the Colonies. He proceeds to Rotterdam and stands on the same quay where he once made a vow to a young woman called Anna that within six years he would return from the East Indies, with his fortune made. He has money enough now, but Anna died in childbirth long ago, and Jacob boards the daily packet to Veere on Walcheren. The windmills on his war-bruised native island are rebuilt and busy. Nobody in Veere recognizes the home-coming Domburger. Vrouwenpolder is only half an hour’s ride by trap, but Jacob prefers to walk so as not to disturb the afternoon classes at Geertje’s husband’s school. His sister opens the door when he knocks. She says, “My husband is in his study, sir, would you care to—” then her eyes widen, and she begins to weep and laugh.

The following Sunday, Jacob listens to a sermon in Domburg church, among a congregation of familiar faces as aged as his own. He pays his respects at the graves of his mother, father, and uncle but declines the new pastor’s invitation to dine at the parsonage. He rides to Middelburg for meetings with the directors of trading houses and import companies. Positions are proposed, decisions taken, contracts signed, and Jacob is inducted into the Freemasons’ Lodge. By tulip-time and Whitsuntide, he emerges from a church arm in arm with the stolid
daughter of an associate. The confetti reminds Jacob of the cherry blossoms in Miyako. That Mrs. de Zoet is half her husband’s age provokes no disapproval—her youth is an equitable exchange for his money. Man and wife find each other’s company agreeable, for most of the time, or, certainly, for some of it; during the earlier years of their marriage, at least. He intends to publish his memoirs about his years as chief resident in Japan, but somehow life always conspires to rob him of the time. Jacob turns fifty. He is elected to the council of Middelburg. Jacob turns sixty, and his memoirs are still unwritten. His copper hair loses its burnish, his face sags, and his hairline retreats until it resembles an elderly samurai’s shaven pate. A rising artist who paints his portrait wonders at his air of melancholic distance but exorcises the ghost of absence from the finished painting. One day Jacob bequeaths the De Zoet Psalter to his eldest son—not Yûan, who predeceased him, but his eldest Dutch son, a conscientious boy quite untroubled by curiosity about life beyond Zeeland. Late October or early November brings a gusty twilight. The day has stripped the elms and sycamores of their last leaves, and the lamplighter is making his rounds as Jacob’s family lines the patriarch’s bedside. Middelburg’s best doctor wears a grave demeanor, but he is satisfied that everything was done for his patient during the short but lucrative illness and that he will be home in time for supper. The clock’s pendulum catches the firelight, and in the rattle-breathed final moments of Jacob de Zoet, amber shadows in the far corner coagulate into a woman’s form.

She slips between the bigger, taller onlookers, unnoticed …

… and adjusts her headscarf, the better to hide her burn.

She places her cool palms on Jacob’s fever-glazed face.

Jacob sees himself, when he was young, in her narrow eyes.

Her lips touch the place between his eyebrows.

A well-waxed paper door slides open.