The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: A Novel (41 page)

* * *

The Laundry, a long annex to the Kitchen, has two hearths to heat water, a pair of large tubs for washing linen, and a rack of bamboo poles where laundry is hung. Orito and Kagero carry buckets of water from the pool in the Courtyard. To fill each tub costs forty or fifty trips and the two do not talk. At first the samurai's daughter was exhausted by the work, but now her legs and arms are tougher, and the blisters on her palms are covered with calloused skin. Yayoi tends the fires to heat the water.

'Soon,' Fat Rat balances on the slop barrow, 'your belly shall look like hers.'

'I shan't let the dogs touch me,' mutters Orito. 'I shan't be here.'

'Your body isn't yours any more.' Fat Rat smirks. 'It's the Goddess's.

Orito loses her footing on the kitchen step and spills the bucket of water.

'I don't know how,' says Kagero, coolly, 'we ever coped without you.'

'The floor needed a good wash, anyway.' Yayoi helps Orito mop the spillage.

When the water is warm enough, Yayoi stirs in the blankets and nightshirts. With wooden tongs, Orito transfers them, dripping and heavy, on to the laundry vice, a slanted table with a hinged door that Kagero closes to squeeze out the water from the linen. Kagero then hangs the damp laundry on the bamboo poles. Through the Kitchen door, Sadaie is telling Yayoi about last night's dream. 'There was a knocking at the gate. I left my room . . . it was summer - but it didn't feel like summer, or night, or day . . . The House was deserted. Still, the knocking went on, so I asked, "Who is it?" And a man's voice replied, "It's me, it's Iwai." '

'Sister Sadaie was delivered of her first Gift,' Yayoi tells Orito, 'last year.'

'Born on the Fifth Day of the Fifth Month,' says Sadaie, 'the Day of Boys.'

The date makes the women think of carp-streamers and festive innocence.

'So Abbot Genmu,' Sadaie continues, 'named him Iwai, as in "Celebration".'

'A brewer's family in Takamatsu,' Yayoi says, 'called Takaishi adopted him.'

Orito is hidden by a cloud of steam. 'So I understand.'

Asagao says, '
Ph
ut you
uu
r s
ph
eaking a'
out
your drea
n
, Sister . . .'

'Well,' Sadaie scrubs at a crust of burnt-on rice, 'I was surprised that Iwai had grown up so quickly, and worried that he'd be in trouble for breaking the Rule that bans Gifts from Mount Shiranui. But,' she looks in the direction of the Prayer Room and lowers her voice, 'I had to unbolt the Inner Gate.'

'The '
olt
,' Asagao asks, ''
os
on the
in
side o
ph
the Inner Gate, you say.'

'Yes, it was. It didn't occur to me at the time. So the gate opened--'

Yayoi provides a cry of impatience. 'What did you see, Sister?'

'Dry leaves. No Gift, no Iwai, just dry leaves. The wind carried them away.'

'Now
that
,' Kagero puts her weight on the vice's handle, 'is an ill omen.'

Sadaie is unnerved by Kagero's certainty. 'Do you really think so, Sister?'

'How could your Gift turning into dead leaves be a good omen?'

'Sister Kagero,' Yayoi stirs the cauldron, 'you'll upset Sadaie.'

'Just speaking the truth,' Kagero squeezes out the water, 'as I see it.'

'Could you tell,' Asagao asks Sadaie, 'I'ai's
pha
ther
phon
his
phoi
ce?'

'That's it,' says Yayoi. 'Your dream was a clue about Iwai's father.'

Even Kagero shows interest in the theory: 'Which monks were your Engifters?'

Housekeeper Satsuki enters the Laundry carrying a new box of soap-nuts.

* * *

The rarefied sunset turns the snow-veined Bare Peak a bloodied fish pink and the evening star is as sharp as a needle. Smoke and smells of cooking leak from the Kitchen. With the exception of the week's two cooks, the women's time is their own until Master Suzaku's arrival prior to supper. Orito embarks on her anti-clockwise walk around the Cloisters to distract her body from its clamorous longing for her Solace. Several Sisters are gathered in the Long Room, whitening one another's faces or blackening their teeth. Yayoi is resting in her cell. Blind Sister Minori is teaching a
koto
arrangement of 'Eight Miles Through a Mountain Pass' to Sadaie. Umegae, Hashihime and Kagero are also taking exercise, clockwise, around the Cloisters. Orito is obliged to stand aside as they pass. For the thousandth time since her kidnapping, Orito wishes she had the means to write. Unauthorised letters to the outside world, she knows, are forbidden, and she would burn anything she wrote for fear of her thoughts being exposed.
But an ink-brush
, she thinks,
is a skeleton key for a prisoner's mind
. Abbess Izu has promised to present her with a writing set after her first Gifting is confirmed.

How could I endure that act
, Orito shudders,
and live afterwards?

When she turns the next corner, Bare Peak is no longer pink but grey.

She considers the twelve women in the House who do endure it.

She thinks about the last Newest Sister who hanged herself.

'Venus,' Orito's father once told her, 'follows a clockwise orbit. All her sister and brother planets circle the sun in an anti-clockwise manner . . .'

. . . but the memory of her father is chased away by jeering
if
s.

Umegae, Hashihime and Kagero form a shuffling wall of padded kimonos.

If Enomoto had never seen me, or chosen to add me to his collection . . .

Orito hears the
chop chop chop
of knives in the Kitchen.

If Stepmother was as compassionate a woman as she once pretended . . .

Orito must press herself against the wooden screen to let them pass.

If Enomoto hadn't guaranteed Father's loans with the money-lenders . . .

'
Some
of us are so well-bred,' Kagero remarks, 'they think rice grows on trees.'

Or if Jacob de Zoet had known I was at Dejima Land-Gate, on my last day . . .

The three women drift by, hems traipsing along the wooden planks.

A Dutch alphabet V of geese crosses the sky; a forest monkey shrieks.

Better a Dejima wife
, Orito thinks,
protected by a foreigner's money . . .

A mountain bird on the old pine sings with intricate stitches.

. . .
than what happens to me in the Engifting Week, if I don't escape
.

The walled stream enters and leaves the courtyard under the raised Cloister floor, feeding the pool. Orito presses herself against the wooden screen.

'She supposes,' says Hashihime, 'a magic cloud shall whisk her away . . .'

Stars pollinate the banks of Heaven's River, germinate and sprout.

Europeans
, Orito remembers,
call it the 'Milky Way'
. Her soft-spoken father is back. 'Here is Umihebi, the Sea Snake, there Tokei, the Clock; over here, Ite, the Archer . . .' she can smell his warm smell '. . . and above, Ranshinban, the Compass . . .'

The bolt of the inner gate screeches open: 'Opening!'

Every Sister hears. Every Sister thinks,
Master Suzaku
.

The Sisters gather in the Long Room, wearing their finest clothes, save for Sadaie and Asagao who are still preparing supper, and Orito, who owns only the work-kimono in which she was abducted, a warm quilted
hakata
jacket and a couple of headscarves. Even lower-ranked Sisters like Yayoi already have a choice of two or three kimonos of fair quality - one for every child born - with simple necklaces and bamboo hair-combs. Senior Sisters, like Hatsune and Hashihime, have acquired, over the years, as rich a wardrobe as that of a high-ranking merchant wife.

Her hunger for Solace is now an incessant pounding, but Orito also has the longest wait: one by one, in order of the List of Precedence, the Sisters are summoned to the Square Room where Suzaku holds his consultations and administers his potions. Suzaku spends two or three minutes with each patient; for some Sisters, the minutiae of their ailments and the master's thoughts on the same are a fascination second only to the New Year Letters. First Sister Hatsune returns from her consultation with the news that Acolyte Jiritsu's fever is worsening, and Master Suzaku doubts he shall survive the night.

Most of the Sisters express shock and dismay.

'Our masters and acolytes,' swears Hatsune, 'are so very rarely ill . . .'

Orito catches herself wondering what febrifuges have been administered, before thinking,
He is no concern of mine
.

The women swap memories of Jiritsu using the past tense.

Sooner than expected, Yayoi is touching her shoulder. 'Your turn.'

'How do we find the Newest Sister this evening?' Master Suzaku gives the impression of a man perpetually on the brink of laughter that never comes. The effect is sinister. Abbess Izu occupies one corner and an acolyte another.

Orito answers her usual answer: 'Alive, as you see.'

'Do we know' - Suzaku indicates the young man - 'Acolyte Chuai?'

Kagero and the meaner Sisters nickname Chuai 'The Swollen Toad.'

'Certainly not.' Orito does not look at the acolyte.

'The first snow,' Suzaku clicks his tongue, 'is not sapping our constitution?'

Don't plead for Solace
. She says, 'No.'
He loves you to plead
.

'We have no symptoms to report, then? No aches or bleedings?'

The world
, she guesses,
is his own vast private joke
. 'Nothing.'

'Or constipation? Diarrhoea? Haemorrhoids? Thrush? Migraines?'

'What I am suffering from,' Orito is goaded into saying, 'is incarceration.'

Suzaku smiles at Acolyte Chuai and the Abbess. 'Our ties to the World Below cut us, like wire. Sever them, and be as happy as your dear Sisters.'

'My "dear Sisters" were rescued from brothels and freak-shows and perhaps, for them, life here is better. I lost more, and Enomoto' - Abbess Izu and Acolyte Chuai flinch to hear the Abbot named with such contempt - 'hasn't even faced me since he bought me; and don't
dare
' - Orito stops herself pointing at Suzaku like an angry Dutchman - 'spout your platitudes about Destiny and Divine Balance. Just give me my Solace.
Please
. The women want their supper.'

'It scarcely behoves the Newest Sister,' begins the Abbess, 'to address--'