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The laughter is raucous but Ogawa’s smile is weak.
‘You ask a starved man,’ Gerritszoon answers, ‘to drink to a glutton.’
‘Mr Gerritszoon want girl?’ Hori is solicitude personified. ‘My servant fetch. Say you want. Fat? Tight? Tiger? Baby cat? Gentle sister?’
‘We’d all like a gentle sister,’ complains Arie Grote, ‘but what o’ the money, eh? A man could buy a brothel in Siam for a tumble with a Nagasaki doxy. Is there no case, Mr Vorstenbosch, for the Company providin’ a subsidy, eh, in this quarter? Consider poor Oost: on his official wages, sir, a little… feminine consolation, eh, would cost him a year’s wages.’
‘A diet of abstinence,’ replies Vorstenbosch, ‘never hurt anyone.’
‘But, sir, what vices might a red-blooded Dutchman be pushed to without a conduit for the, eh, unloosin’ o’ Nature’s urges?’
‘You miss your wife, Mr Grote,’ Hori asks, ‘at home in Holland?’
‘ “South of Gibraltar”,’ quotes Captain Lacy, ‘ “all men are bachelors.” ’
‘Nagasaki’s latitude,’ says Fischer, ‘is, of course, well north of Gibraltar.’
‘I never knew,’ says Vorstenbosch, ‘you were a married man, Grote.’
‘He’d as soon not,’ Ouwehand explains, ‘hear the subject raised, sir.’
‘A mooing West Frieslander slut, sir.’ The cook licks his brown incisors. ‘When I consider her at all, Mr Hori, ’tis to pray the Ottomans’ll storm West Friesland an’ make off with the bitch.’
‘If not like wife,’ asks Interpreter Yonekizu, ‘why not do divorce?’
‘Easier said than done, sir,’ Grote sighs, ‘in the so-called Christian lands.’
‘So why marry,’ Hori coughs out tobacco smoke, ‘at first place?’
‘Oh, ’tis a long an’ sorry saga, Mr Hori, what’d not be of interest to-’
‘On Mr Grote’s last trip home,’ obliges Ouwehand, ‘he wooed a promising young heiress at her town-house in Roomolenstraat who told him how her heirless, ailing papa yearned to see his dairy farm in the hands of a gentleman son-in-law, yet everywhere, she lamented, were thieving rascals posing as eligible bachelors. Mr Grote agreed that the Sea of Courtship seethes with sharks, and spoke of the prejudice endured by the young colonial parvenu, as if the a
A belch erupts from Lacy. ‘Pardon: ’twas the Devilled Eggs.’
‘Deputy van Cleef?’ Goto is alarmed. ‘Do Ottomans invade Holland? This news is not in recentest fusetsuki report…’
‘Mr Grote,’ van Cleef brushes his napkin, ‘spoke in jest, sir.’
‘In jest?’ The earnest young interpreter frowns and blinks. ‘In jest…’
Cupido and Philander are playing a languid air by Boccherini.
‘One grows despondent,’ ruminates Vorstenbosch, ‘to think that, unless Edo authorises an increase in the copper quota, these rooms shall fall for ever silent.’
Yonekizu and Hori grimace; Goto and Ogawa wear blank faces.
Most of the Dutchmen have asked Jacob whether the extraordinary ultimatum is a bluff. He told each to ask the Chief Resident, knowing that none of them would. Having lost last season’s cargo aboard the doomed Octavia, many would be returning to Batavia poorer men than when they left.
‘Who was that bizarre female,’ van Cleef squeezes a lemon into a Venetian glass, ‘in Warehouse Doorn?’
‘Miss Aibagawa,’ says Goto, ‘is daughter of doctor and scholar.’
Aibagawa. Jacob handles each syllable in turn. Ai-ba-ga-wa…
‘The Magistrate give permission,’ says Iwase, ‘to study under Dutch doctor.’
And I called her a ‘whore’s helper’, remembers Jacob, and winces.
‘What a bizarre Locusta,’ says Fischer, ‘to be at ease in a surgery.’
‘The fairer sex,’ objects Jacob, ‘can show as much resilience as the uglier one.’
‘Mr de Zoet must publish,’ the Prussian picks his nose, ‘his dazzling epigrams.’
‘Miss Aibagawa,’ states Ogawa, ‘is a midwife. She is used to blood.’
‘But I understood,’ says Vorstenbosch, ‘a woman was forbidden to set foot on Dejima, without she be a courtesan, her maid or one of the old crones at the Guild.’
‘It is forbidden,’ affirms Yonekizu, indignantly. ‘No precedent. Never.’
‘Miss Aibagawa,’ Ogawa speaks up, ‘work hard as midwife, both for rich customers and poor persons who ca
‘Woman study in Hospital,’ declares Yonekizu, ‘is not good thing.’
‘Yet she held the blood-basin steady,’ says Con Twomey, ‘spoke good Dutch with Dr Marinus, and chased an ape while her male classmates looked seasick.’
I would ask a dozen questions, Jacob thinks, if I dared: a dozen dozen.
‘Doesn’t a girl,’ asks Ouwehand, ‘arouse the boys in troublesome places?’
‘Not with that slice of bacon,’ Fischer swirls his gin, ‘stuck to her face.’
‘Those are ungallant words, Mr Fischer,’ says Jacob. ‘They shame you.’
‘One ca
Jacob imagines smashing the Prussian’s jaw with the Delft jug.
A candle collapses; wax slides down the candlestick; the dribble hardens.
‘I am sure,’ says Ogawa, ‘Miss Aibagawa one day make joyful marriage.’
‘What’s the one sure cure for love?’ asks Grote. ‘Marriage is, is what.’
A moth careers into a candle flame; it drops to the table, flapping.
‘Poor Icarus.’ Ouwehand crushes it with his tankard. ‘Won’t you ever learn?’
Night insects trill, tick, bore, ring; drill, prick, saw, sting.
Hanzaburo snores in the cubby-hole outside Jacob’s door.
Jacob lies awake clad in a sheet, under a tent of netting.
Ai, mouth opens; ba, lips meet; ga, tongue’s root; wa, lips.
Involuntarily, he re-enacts today’s scene over and over.
He cringes at the boorish figure he cut, and vainly edits the script.
He opens the fan she left in Warehouse Doorn. He fans himself.
The paper is white. The handle and struts are made of paulownia wood.
A watchman smacks his wooden clappers to mark the Japanese hour.
The yeasty moon is caged in his half-Japanese half-Dutch window…
… Glass panes melt the moonlight; paper panes filter it, to chalk dust.
Daybreak must be near. 1796’s ledgers are waiting in Warehouse Doorn.
It is dear A
Beneath his glaze of sweat he sweats. His bed linen is sodden.
Miss Aibagawa is as untouchable, he thinks, as a woman in a picture…
Jacob imagines he can hear a harpsichord.
… spied through a keyhole in a cottage happened upon once in a lifetime…
The notes are spidery and starlit and spun from glass.
Jacob can hear a harpsichord: it is the doctor, playing in his long attic.
Night silence and a freak of conductivity permit Jacob this privilege: Marinus rejects all requests to play, even for scholar friends or visiting nobility.
The music provokes a sharp longing the music soothes.
How can such a prig, wonders Jacob, play with such divinity?
Night insects trill, tick, bore, ring; drill, prick, saw, sting…