The Ghost Brush (95 page)

“We might go down ourselves!”

“Try!”

The Dutch sailors pulled five Japanese from the water. The fishermen knelt on the deck and prayed as their boat was bashed to planks. Then they did a curious thing: they made a circle and shaved their beards and heads. They seemed to be in despair. They gestured: we wished to die in the water.

“You’re saved,” said the Dutch. “We saved you!” And they clapped their giant hands on the fishermen’s dripping backs.

But the fishermen trembled and prayed.

A week later the Drie Gezusters sailed into Nagasaki Bay, to be greeted by a row of fanatical sword-bearing men as wide as they were tall. Guards took the Dutchmen’s guns, and the rescued local sailors were marched away to whatever fate. Why? It was a crime to be rescued by foreigners.

The rulers of this shut-away place were perverse, thought the doctor.

While he was being searched for forbidden articles, von Siebold had looked around. The land, unlike the people, was gentle. Sheltering hills scattered with white houses surrounded the deep blue bay. The manmade traders’ island sat like a plug in the basin of the harbour. His Bible he sacrificed ostentatiously to the Bible barrel, but he kept a smaller version tucked down below his belt at the small of his back, its title page ripped out. He didn’t know why. He never sang a hymn or made the sign of the cross. The Japanese abhorred Christians. He had been prepared to stamp on his holy book, an act sometimes required of his predecessors. It would have cost him nothing. But they didn’t ask him to.

Still, at the end of it all, they had nearly refused him entrance. The guards spoke better Dutch than he did; he was born and had studied in Germany and spoke with an accent. This made them suspicious that he was a German spy. He told them that he was a yama-orandajin, a Mountain Dutchman.

He got a fresh chuckle out of this witticism as he banged down an octave lower on the piano. All that fierce display to stop spies and Christians, yet they had welcomed him. He had got this far. In fact he was a spy, in a benevolent way, eager to endure his imprisonment on artificial earth and to submit to Japanese rules, if doing so would allow him access to their secrets. He had brought with him an electrostatic generator, an air pump, and a galvanizing apparatus, to impress the Japanese and encourage them to share their own wonders. And he had brought this piano, which he played every day.

E
ven his countrymen—the Dutch who inhabited the strange island prison with its low houses, enclosed courtyards, warehouses, and animal pens, with its salty smell of sea and rusted metal doors awaiting the next ship (not expected for half a year)—existed out of time. They dressed in what had been the court fashion before von Siebold was born, quilted velvet coats and black cloaks. When they went out into Nagasaki, which they did only with permission and under guard, they wore hats with feathers and carried Spanish canes with gold handles. They loved to impress. They were tall and the Japanese short; they strode while the simple Japanese farmers and townsmen scuttled. The Japanese were thin and the Dutch were fat. When they returned from their town excursions, they were even fatter because of the parcels they hid in the folds of their cloaks.

They smuggled in these goods under the noses of the guards, who appeared blind as money changed hands. The Japanese used to allow their copper, gold, and silver out of the country, but no longer. Handmade carvings and dolls and pictures—and objects of worship and ritual—were meant to stay home as well, but they found their way into the hands and the tea chests of the Dutch, and eventually home to Holland.

“God’s grief, von Siebold, whatever the hell are you playing?”

One of the displaced Dutchmen stuck his face around the corner of the door: the partitions were so thin that the whole island was shaking with the music.

The young doctor raised his voice over the clatter. “It’s a popular German song by von Weber called ‘Invitation to the Dance.’”

The protruding square face arranged itself in a look of horror and then withdrew.

“Take pity, von Siebold! It’s after ten!” His superior, the opperhoofd de Sturler, clearly already was irritated by him. This von Siebold enjoyed. He was competitive to anyone above him and jovial to all below.

He completed his last crescendo and closed the top of his piano. Another day had passed.

Walking out of the room and across the little yard to his home, he kept his eyes low so he did not have to acknowledge the young Japanese women coming and going from the Dutch quarters. These were the prostitutes with the red stamps in their passports. His countrymen were fat and old-fashioned, but they enjoyed rude health.

He got ready for bed. On each wall of his chamber he had hung a chart of the phonetic characters that small children studied in schools here, and he ran through them before sleep. He was hungry for everything Japanese—words, pictures, flowers, animals, bamboo chests, lacquer boxes, the practice of acupuncture, and the worship of many gods. And he would get it. Little by little.

He lay on his back, wide awake. He had a plan. His first step had been to offer to teach Western medicine to Japanese doctors. Lectures were at Deshima: a steady stream of respectful men came to the City Gate, and he welcomed them all. He asked only that each man bring with him a living plant, in rich loam so he could easily transplant it.

He had made a garden to receive these gifts. Tomorrow, early in the morning, when the sun first lit the edge of the hills, he would inspect it. The hosta would have added an inch to the height of its spearheads, and the buds on the maple tree might show a hint of orange. He would stoop and smell the crocus with its shy scent and fight back the longing for intimacy that often invaded him, as it did now. It was the sight of those evening women, the subdued clatter of their wooden sandals, that unbuttoned him.

But to the conquest! Tomorrow morning, after the garden walk, he would play the piano again to keep his fingers nimble. They were long and probing, like his regard: he maintained them like faithful slaves, well trained to answer the messages his brain sent. He was a young and inexperienced doctor, and one never knew when he would be required to commit an act of surgery. And the playing sent a message to the rest of the men: he was here, ready.

Thinking of this soothed him, and he slept.

A
nd in the morning it all unrolled just as he had imagined. First came coffee and chocolate; then came inspection of the garden, which was growing, though not as fast as he hoped. The soil, dug out from the mountainside, was not rich. He would ask the servants to collect more pig manure and dig it in well. When he came in, he could see the Japanese doctors lined up early for his morning lecture. Wearing his first smile of the day, he went to greet them: he liked them more than he liked his fellow Dutchmen.

He moved amongst the long-skirted men, smiling and bowing. They kept their eyes down as if blinded by his height, his grace, his blondness. He enjoyed their admiration, the excess of politeness, the quiet, watchful eyes and quick brains, the fierceness of their will. They were as hungry as he was. They had studied Dutch for years, some of them—it was the “Latin of the East.” They excelled in coded behaviour in their country and had agreed, tacitly, to play the necessary games to get what they wanted.

This morning they handed him their essays on subjects he had assigned: the annual festivals and their meanings, the confinement of women in pregnancy, the education of boys. Von Siebold read them quickly and asked questions.

“What do you do when a child cannot come out of the birth canal?”

“When a child cannot be born naturally, if he is caught inside the mother’s body, we try to pull him out with hands and fingers. But some parts are too large. Either the shoulders or the hindquarters”—he looked up, quizzical; what to call it?—“the back end, the rear cheeks.”

One of his countrymen issued a reprimand. The extrovert had used the expression commonly employed when speaking of a domestic animal. “No, no. That is not what we call it!”

“The buttocks?” said von Siebold helpfully.

“When the bew-tox be not out coming, it chances the child may perish,” the Japanese doctor concluded, with a look of relief that was not in tune with the information he was delivering. But he was not released. Von Siebold interrogated him: Why not use forceps for difficult deliveries?

“We use not these tools, as women have an abhorrence of them,” came the answer.

Von Siebold doubted that the women’s will would prevail, even in such matters.

“The women tell you what to do?” he prodded.

“We decide. It is not good for use metal in the body.”

“What happens, then, if the child cannot be extricated?”

“We will find what arm or leg we can reach and pull,” said a comical fellow, making a pantomime of it. His fellows coughed. “Maybe will be cutting it off, and the child out come in pieces.”

“And the woman?”

“Dies or lives, according to the gods,” the student concluded. Von Siebold’s expressive face showed dismay.

“Why do you not perform a Caesarean section?”

The operation was known here; von Siebold had read the notes of his predecessor.

“Oh no no no no. That is wrong, murder; gods not happy, and both mother and child pay price,” said the Japanese doctor from his kneeling position on the floor.

Von Siebold gathered up the essays, informative writing that had bypassed the censors. He collected the little bamboo boxes of plants that the doctors presented as tributes, exclaiming over the ones he hadn’t yet seen. Here was a tiny yew tree. And this one appeared to be a variety of cypress. This was a precious bonsai: it had been pinched and tortured, so it was only a very small version of itself. He bowed deeply and the men bowed back.

Later, he patted the new seedlings into place in his garden. He had magnolias and wisteria and varieties of pine. To each one he gave a small whispered blessing: take root!

A
T NIGHTFALL, THE ISLAND WAS SO SILENT
that he could hear the waves slurping at the Water Gate. At the City Gate the prostitutes presented their red-stamped passports to the implacable guards and went quickly in their hobbled gait to the men. He saw one clearly in silhouette as she crossed the courtyard. Pregnant. The children of these liaisons were adopted into Japan, but a Dutch father had no claim—and maybe wanted none.

No woman arrived for him. Restless, he sat and read the essays in stiff Dutch offering him the secrets of the people’s customs, their laws, their history as they understood it, the art of healing by needles. He went to the toilet in the backyard. He had glued the chart of Japanese characters on the wall so he would not waste time there either. It was in this refuge, thinking over the day’s class, that he resolved to persuade the doctors to perform Caesarean sections. He would do that by offering his best students a very special Dutch doctor’s diploma.

And this would give him reason to apply to the bugyo, the governor of Nagasaki, for special leave to make daily consultations off the island. Lives would be saved and he would get out.

The next day, von Siebold expressed this plan carefully to de Sturler. The request was duly transmitted to the Japanese. A message came back, so courteous. No. We are very sorry.

They gave no reason. Von Siebold argued in his mind with the invisible bugyo. He had only Japanese interests at heart. Lives of women were being lost, or more important, one could say, lives of boy children were being lost. But he could not ask again, he knew that, and so he dug pig manure. He was kneading it into the roots of his hostas when a messenger came. The man was burdened with heavy braided armour, two swords, and a flag and standard.

He brought a written summons: the doctor must go to the home of a wealthy merchant who had been struck blind.

Von Siebold was only too happy. He put on his giant hat and his black cape, took the gold-handled cane and the black leather bag containing the surgical tools. With a samurai in front of him and a samurai behind him, he walked out the City Gate into the early morning and the town.

The first thing to hit him was the sound. He heard the guttural cries of porters pushing donkeys. Hawkers were singing in a higher pitch. Temple bells clanged. The life of the place hit him between the eyes: women wrapped in sashes and in fabrics of stripes and swirls; men running with tea caddies. A riot of country people selling faggots and birds in cages, turnips, and fish on skewers. Children of three were lighting fires under huge cauldrons. Fishermen with dark skin and bands across their brows had their catch in barrels. A procession of pilgrims all in white went by, chanting and looking at the ground. It made him laugh out loud. He was amongst—and towered two feet above—these preoccupied people.

He could have walked forever, but the merchant’s house was not far away. The guards pushed von Siebold though the gate, in a bogus show of force intended to impress. At the door, a shy young woman bowed him in. The interior was dim, black-timbered with low ceilings. Von Siebold had to remove his hat, but he was still too tall, so he stooped and leaned to the side.

The merchant Kusumoto sat cross-legged on a Chinese cushion. He did not flinch under von Siebold’s glare. The Dutch doctor could see that a whitish film was spreading over the man’s eyes. It was a simple case of cataracts. At school he had watched the operation to remove them, but he had never done it himself. Nevertheless he told Kusumoto with confidence that he could restore his eyesight.