The Ghost Brush (102 page)
In my dream the night before, the Dutch doctor was playing in the waves, the way my father did. I stood on the shore. The waves became higher and higher, and I walked up and down trying to keep him in sight. The waves swallowed the horizon, and then—even with his tall hat—they swallowed him.
It was a frightening dream and I couldn’t shake it. I walked along with it still alive in my mind, marvelling at the way I had recreated the tall barbarian so exactly.
Above me the Kawara-ban crier appeared, running, on the Ryogoku Bridge. I climbed the bank. At bridgeposts, the moneylenders and the soothsayers sat like bookends. You could borrow from your earthly future or gaze along into your heavenly fate, one-stop convenience. The moneylender had his long loops, with the hole-in-the-centre coins threaded through the rope coiled in front of him. The soothsayer moaned and swayed.
The crier pulled back his black hood as he reached the top of the arch of the bridge. I saw his human features for a moment: haggard, pockmarked.
“A typhoon has struck the town of Nagasaki. The Island of Red-headed Strangers has been destroyed.
“The typhoon has devastated the surrounding country. Whole towns have been blown down. Many people have died. The ship called the Cornelius Hauptman has been crushed on the rocks. Its cargo of eighty-nine chests of stolen Japanese treasures will be seized.
“Hear me, hear me. The Shogun tells our people that the Miracle Doctor has been found to be stealing many precious objects from the Japanese. The gods have acted to destroy the foreign devils.”
I followed him. I was frightened, of the news and of myself. The dream had told me this. How did it come to me, and from where? Was I, as some people said, a witch? I feared for the doctor. I feared for our paintings.
The crier came to a little storytelling hall. “This way to hear the story of the Dutch doctor,” he said, holding out his hand for coins.
Many of us crowded in. I tucked myself into the back row amongst the packages and the cats, the way I had twenty years ago.
“You all know of the Miracle Doctor who lives on the Island of Red-headed Strangers in Nagasaki Bay,” he said.
“Yes!” said many.
“No!” said others.
“He’s a good man,” some shouted. “He saved many lives.”
The storyteller appeared and the story began:
The Miracle Doctor was well loved. So well loved that his superior officer was jealous. That superior officer complained to the powers in his country across the sea: the Miracle Doctor spent too much money; he went his own way, heedlessly. The powers recalled the doctor to Holland. He must go back home.
He was devastated; he loved Japan. He had collected many treasures to take with him—flowers and trees and a giant salamander. But there was one treasure he could not take with him. She could not be bartered for or hidden in a cloak. Two treasures, actually: Otaki, his Japanese wife, and their daughter. Their keeper, the governor of Nagasaki, would not take a bribe.
He sat playing his piano in his quarters on the island in Nagasaki harbour. He heard a loud noise. He went to the narrow slit that let in air and caught a glimpse of a surge of water reaching over the wall and spilling on the inside.
He didn’t recall water that high. A storm was coming. He looked to the clouds: streaks of green. He’d sailed in a typhoon to get here five years ago. He was suddenly afraid he would not get away.
He thought of his lacquerware and baskets, kimono and objects of devotion. The small carved wooden toys and pictures of funerals. Books. Maps. He had filled the waiting ship with these treasures to take with him.
The storm lashed.
He went to the Water Gate. The guards were gesticulating at the edge of the water, their voices lost. The little sloops that went back and forth to the ships were foundering. The sky was black and yellow. The wind came into the bay as if down a tunnel.
The water leapt the walls of the island and splattered on the rooftop.
He called the captain.
“We must leave now.”
“It’s too late.”
“But the ship?”
“We are trying to secure it.”
I hadn’t encountered this storyteller before. He was good. He had thick hair that stood up straight on top of his head, and a stocky body, and a voice that he could send out of himself so it seemed to come from a man in the front row, whom he had made into the captain. I was not so impressed, as I could do that myself. Von Siebold’s accent he copied perfectly, and his voice he made high and womanish and sent it behind the curtain as if the Miracle Doctor were hiding. This was a good trick and made people laugh. The story captured my imagination and gave me time to think, to grow calm.
One day later von Siebold clung to a plum tree in his garden, trying to stay upright in the wind. He had transplanted it himself, and it was now ten feet tall. But even as he gripped its trunk the wind came down, sucked up its roots, and tossed it like a carrot upside down over the roof. He was thrown sideways against the wall. He roared with rage.
All of this the storyteller mimed. It might have been true or it might have been just an excuse for some crowd-pleasing action. People were leaning with him, and gasping, and it was a lot of fun, and they weren’t too concerned about the poor Dutch doctor from what I could see.
Now he was wading, waves bashing the back of his knees. He tried to catch things flying by—bushes and flowers, the little wrought-iron bench, a watering can. But it was hopeless. The little plants were drowning; his Otaki hydrangeas were swept away; his primroses, past bloom and crouching out of harm’s way, were under a foot of water; his lilies were sinking. And the seedlings were packed on the ship. Would all this be gone? A shriek came out of him. A vicious slap of water hit his cheek.
He did not understand: the sea did not come here; the sea was kept out by the wall. But the sea had broken through. Through the gap he could see the ship tethered, rocking, its sails bound tightly, its timbers creaking horribly. He prayed for the anchor to hold. He thought he would be swept away.
“What happened?” I shouted along with others. “Get to the point! You beat around the bush too much!” He looked me in the eye.
But he was not to be so lucky.
The typhoon had hit just in time to forestall his escape.
And it would have been an escape, that which only a few days ago had seemed banishment.
Suddenly he was sailing sideways, his feet above his head, to the western side, where he banged up against a wall of the warehouse. Inside the pigs and goats were bawling. The servants must be with them, he assured himself, trying to peel himself off the wooden wall. It was not for him to save a pig. The warehouses were being battered. He was being battered. How ridiculous to be imprisoned here, on a flat piece of reconstituted land, right in the eye of the storm!
Waves like mad dogs raced in through the breach in the wall, one after another, splitting on contact and shooting both ways. They tore planks from the side of the warehouse. These sailed away on the surface of the water and became weapons.
Where was everyone? Had they fled out the City Gate? No one came as crates of precious things begin to slide out of their storage places on sleek, glassy floors of water. Within minutes the near warehouse wall had softened and buckled. A high examination table floated out of the sickbay: this was where his daughter was born. His instruments—his acupuncture needles, a sealing jar of formaldehyde with a lobster inside—bobbed in the water. Tiles crashed off the roofs onto the stone.
He tried to walk, but the water picked him up and twirled him. Rain and wind blinded him. He was furious. He got down on his knees and crawled back to the shelter of the main house. His fellow Dutchmen were gathered there and stood watching as the pigs floated away, squealing in terror.
The audience loved this. What a diverting story! What a thrill to see this man, who had set himself above us all, caught out by nature and brought down. I was ashamed. This was our society; this was how we were—powerless, rumour-gripped, taking pleasure in catastrophe brought down by gods on anyone who tried to escape.
The ship was pushed up on the side of the harbour, damaged but afloat. The crates of treasures were unloaded and stacked to dry. The Dutchman survived, but the Japanese were not so lucky. Thousands drowned, or were hit by falling roof tiles, or were swept to sea.
The crowd stirred in anger, that the Dutchman’s punishment should become their own.
Still, the Miracle Doctor who tempted the gods will be caught. He has not departed. The ship will take three months to be repaired. The garden cannot be salvaged. Von Siebold himself is trying to appease the gods by helping with rescue work. He travels in the towns, amputating crushed limbs, suturing gashes, and wrapping broken skulls.
Now something worse than a storm has come. It is the call. Under guard, he must go before the governor of Nagasaki to be interrogated. The authorities have seen that he was stealing valuable treasures. Granted privileges, the Dutch doctor has repaid the Japanese with treachery.
There was general gasping and outrage.
Von Siebold had eighty-nine chests and thousands of other items, animal, mineral, and vegetable. He says he does not know where they came from. He says that the cargo was loaded by others. He simply cannot explain the treasures, except that he knows they are his. All the while he is relieved, because the greatest has not come to light. He has it hidden deep inside his house.
But that is not the end of it. The plot grows wider. The most powerful men in the realm are swept into it. Takahashi the court astronomer, the man they call Globius, has been dragged out of his library and thrown in jail. He has traded maps with von Siebold; he himself may be a Russian spy. The plot has reached into the very heart of the castle.
People were torn between thrill and horror. They feared everything because in the end they suffered it, and they understood nothing because they were never given any reasons. Only the gods, shifting their furniture, could bring down such heavy punishments to earth.
And do you know the very worst of it?
The hall fell silent.
Von Siebold saw the guards turning a man away from the City Gate. He was cloaked for travel and worn out.
“What is wrong, my friend?” He peered into the grizzled face and saw bruises. He recognized the man: a translator from the Shogun’s entourage.
“You have to watch out for these translators,” called a listener, obviously a practised one, from the front rows. “They are always two-faced.” I was immobilized with dread. This was a masterful story. It was too good to be invented. It had to be true.
The doctor invited the traveller inside to get warm. He had brought a warning: von Siebold’s home was going to be searched. The translator himself had been arrested and beaten. “I was freed only because I promised that I would come here and find all your maps and pictures so we can use them as evidence against you.”
“Then you must save yourself,” said von Siebold. “But first we will make copies.”
His most important map was of the Russian islands far to the north of our capital. The two of them sat up all night and copied it. The original he placed where it could be found. The copy he rolled in a can and stuffed in a hole in the log wall behind his piano. Here he also placed certain other papers, including pictures he had bought showing the Shogun’s castle and secret rituals of our people. They were so valuable that he had not sent them to the ship to be packed: he imagined he would carry them in his clothing. He hid daggers in the flower containers, in case he needed to defend himself.
Two days later, von Siebold watched as the guards found his precious maps and took them away.
“Did they find and confiscate the pictures he bought from Edo artists?” I shouted. The storyteller looked through me as if he knew. But how could he?
“Not yet,” he said.
The guards laughed at his hidden daggers. Then they sat down at the gates of Deshima and forbade him to leave the island. Every week the soldiers pull him from his desk and march him up to the governor’s house, where he is asked the same questions. He refuses to admit he has done wrong. He names no one.
Flight