The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: A Novel (37 page)

She was a fever
, Jacob hides behind his eyelids.
The fever is lifted
.

He looks again. The Captain of the guard is inspecting the pass.

Can she be here
, he wonders,
to seek sanctuary from Enomoto?

His proposal of marriage now returns like a risen golem.

I
did
want her, yes
, he fears,
when I knew I could never have her
.

The water-vendor flicks his switch on his ox's lumbering shanks.

She may just be here
, Jacob tries to calm himself,
to visit the Hospital
.

He notices her disarray: a sandal is missing; her neat hair is awry.

But where are the other students? Why won't the guards admit her?

The Captain is questioning Orito in sharp tones.

Orito's clarity is fraying; her despair is growing; this is no ordinary visit.

Act!
Jacob commands himself.
Show the guards she is expected; fetch Dr Marinus; fetch an interpreter: this is a balance that you may still tip
.

The three priests walk in a slow circle around the bloodstained dirt.

It's not
you
she wants
, whispers Pride.
It's incarceration she wants to avoid
.

Thirty feet away, the Captain turns Orito's pass over, unimpressed.

Suppose she were Geertje
, asks Compassion,
seeking sanctuary in Zeeland?

In the Captain's resonant string of words Jacob hears the name 'Enomoto'.

Across Edo Square, a shaven-headed figure appears in a sky-blue robe.

He catches sight of Orito and calls over his shoulder, motioning,
Hurry!

A sea-grey palanquin appears: it has eight bearers, denoting an owner of the highest rank.

Jacob has a sense of entering a theatre well into the play's final act.

I love her
, comes the thought, as true as sunlight.

Jacob is flying down the stairs, barking his shin on a corner-post.

He leaps the last six or eight steps and runs across Flag Square.

Everything is happening too slow and too fast and all at once.

Jacob clips an astonished priest and reaches the Land-Gate as it closes.

The Captain is brandishing his pike, warning him not to take another step.

Jacob's rectangle of vision is narrowing as the gates close.

He sees Orito's back as she is led away over Holland Bridge.

Jacob opens his mouth to call out her name . . .

. . . but the Land-Gate slams shut.

The well-oiled bolt slides home.

PART II

A Mountain Fastness

The Tenth Month in the Eleventh Year of the Era of Kansei

XIV

Above the Village of Kurozane in Kyoga Domain

Late on the Twenty-second Day of the Tenth Month

Twilight is cold with the threat of snow. The forest's edges dissolve and blur. A black dog waits on an outcrop. He scents a fox's hot stink.

His silver-haired mistress struggles up the twisted path.

A dead branch cracks under a deer's hoof across the loud stream.

An owl cries, in this cedar or that fir . . . once, twice, near, gone.

Otane carries a twentieth of a
koku
of rice, enough for a month.

Her youngest niece tried hard to persuade her to winter in the village.

The poor girl needs allies
, thinks Otane,
against her mother-in-law
.

'She's pregnant again, too, did you notice?' she asks her dog.

The niece had charged her aunt with the crime of making the entire family worry about her safety. 'But I
am
safe,' the old woman repeats her answer for the root-truckled steps. 'I'm too poor for cut-throats and too withered for bandits.'

Her niece then argued that patients could consult her more readily down in the village. 'Who wants to trek halfway up Mount Shiranui in midwinter?'

'My cottage is
not
"halfway up" anything! It's less than a mile.'

A song thrush in a mountain ash speaks of endings.

A childless crone
, Otane concedes,
is lucky to have relatives to house her . .
.

But she also knows that leaving her hut would be easier than returning.

'Come spring,' she mutters, 'it'll be, "Aunt Otane can't go back to
that
ruin!" '

Higher up, a pair of raccoons snarl murderous threats.

The herbalist of Kurozane climbs on, her sack growing heavier with each step.

Otane reaches the gardened shelf where her cottage stands. Onions are strung below the deep eaves. Firewood is stacked below. She puts her rice down on the raised porch. Her body aches. She checks the goats in their stall, and tips in a half-bale of hay. Last, she peers into the chicken coop. 'Who laid an egg for Auntie today, I wonder?'

In the ripe murk she finds one, still warm. 'Thank you, ladies.'

She bolts the cottage door against the night, kneels before her hearth with her tinderbox and coaxes a fire into life for her pot. In this she makes a soup of burdock root and yams. When it is hot, she adds the egg.

The medicine cabinet calls her into the rear room.

Patients and visitors are surprised to see such a beautiful cabinet reaching nearly to the ceiling of her humble cottage. Back in her great-great-grandfather's day, six or eight strong men had carried it up from the village, though as a child it was simpler to believe that it had grown here, like an ancient tree. One by one, she slides out the well-waxed medicine drawers and inhales their contents. Here is
toki
parsley, good for colicky infants; next, acrid
yomogi
shavings, ground to a powder for moxibustion; last in this row,
dokudami
berries or 'fish mint' to flush out sickness. The cabinet is her livelihood and the depository of her knowledge. She sniffs soapy mulberry leaves, and hears her father telling her, 'Good for ailments of the eye . . . and used with goatwort for ulcers, worms and boils . . .' Then Otane reaches the bitter motherwort berries.

She is reminded of Miss Aibagawa and withdraws to the fire.

She feeds the lean flames a fat log. 'Two days from Nagasaki,' she says, 'to "Request an Audience with Otane of Kurozane". Those were Miss Aibagawa's words. I was digging manure into my pumpkin patch one day . . .'

Dots of firelight are reflected in the dog's clear eyes.

'. . . when who appears at my fence but the village headman and priest.'

The old woman chews a stringy burdock root, recalling the burnt face.

'Can it truly be three whole years ago? It feels like as many months.'

The dog rolls on to his back, using his mistress's foot as a pillow.

He knows the story well
, thinks Otane,
but shan't mind indulging me again
.

'I thought she'd come for treatment, seeing her burnt face, but then the headman introduced her as "the celebrated Dr Aibagawa's daughter" and "practitioner of Dutch-style midwifery" - as if
he
knew what such words mean! But then she asked if I might advise her on herbal treatments for childbirth and, well, I thought my ears were liars.'

Otane rolls a boiled egg to and fro on her wooden platter.

'When she told me that amongst druggists and scholars in Nagasaki the name "Otane of Kurozane" is a guarantee of purity, I was horrified that
my
lowly name was known by such elevated folk . . .'

The old woman picks off the fragments of eggshell with her berry-dyed fingernails and remembers how gracefully Miss Aibagawa dismissed the headman and priest, and how attentively she wrote down Otane's observations. 'She wrote as well as any man.
Yakumoso
interested her. "Smear it over torn loins," I told her, "and it prevents fevers and heals the skin. It soothes nipples inflamed by breastfeeding, too . . ." ' Otane bites into the boiled egg, warmed by the memory of the samurai's daughter acting quite at home in this commoner's cottage while her two servants rebuilt a goat-pen and repaired a wall. '
You
remember the headman's eldest son bringing up lunch,' she tells the dog. 'Polished white rice, quail eggs and sea-bream, steaming in plantain leaves . . . Well, we thought we were in the Palace of the Moon Princess!' Otane lifts the kettle's lid and drops in a fistful of coarse tea. 'I spoke more in a single afternoon than I had done all year. Miss Aibagawa wanted to pay me "tuition money" - but how could I charge her a single sen? So she bought my stock of motherwort, but left three times the usual price . . .'

The darkness opposite stirs and quickens into the form of a cat.

'Where were you hiding? We were talking about Miss Aibagawa's first visit. She sent us dried sea-bream the following New Year. Her servant delivered it all the way from the city.' The sooty kettle begins to wheeze, and Otane thinks about the second visit during the Sixth Month of the following year, when the butterbur was in flower. 'She was in love that summer. Oh, I didn't ask, but she couldn't refrain from mentioning a young Dutch interpreter from a good family named Ogawa. Her voice altered' - the cat looks up - 'when she said his name.' Outside, night stirs the creaking trees. Otane pours her tea before the water boils and embitters the leaves. 'I prayed that, once they were married, Ogawa-
sama
would still let her visit Kyoga Domain to gladden my heart, and that her second visit would not be her last.' She sips her tea, recalling the day when the news reached Kurozane, passed up a chain of relatives and servants, that the head of the Ogawas had denied his son permission to marry Dr Aibagawa's daughter. Then in the New Year, Otane learned that Ogawa the Interpreter had taken another bride. 'Despite this unfortunate turn,' Otane pokes the fire, 'Miss Aibagawa didn't forget me. She sent me my shawl made out of the warmest foreign wool, as a New Year's gift.'