A Cup of Light (19 page)

“You did promise,” she said.

“Thanks for showing me that.”

“You're welcome.”

“We going out?”

“Yes.” This time she stood and reburied the box in its crate. They left the lights on. She knew she'd be back. Following him out the door, walking in his wake, she felt she might have drifted into one of life's brief and temporary harbors.

When she returned—they'd said good-bye in the taxi, talk radio still pounding; she'd apologized again and said she had to finish—she ran back in, barely skimming the ground, and went straight to her pots. So much light. She had never in her life seen anything like it in one place.

And now him. He wasn't like men she'd been drawn to in the past. Most of them had had some kind of high-stakes, power-driven edge. He might have been like that once; if so he'd left it behind. He made her feel that nothing needed to be proven, for some reason. It felt great. And he wanted to touch her more, she could tell. That was probably just a matter of time. She walked over to the thirty-eighth crate.

From this she withdrew a Qianlong bowl in polychrome enamels,
falang cai,
painted with a view of rock-garden palace architecture. The inside of the bowl was an empty field of brilliant white with three centered peonies in famille-rose enamels. She circled her hands around it, over the piled-up pigment that made garden rocks, porches, harmoniously drawn palace buildings; worlds within worlds.

One of the hardest things about working with great art was letting it go. As she would let him go in a few days, she thought—no matter what happened. With one difference. This bowl in her hands was real, a perfect and supremely
hoi moon
object. This she could hold in memory forever, unmarked and unqualified.

She put it back in its box and looked around the room. Normally it was her expectation that an appraisal be perfect, that there be no mistakes. That every call be real. Unimpeachable.

She couldn't guarantee this now. She had done her best and she had to let go of everything else. Let it be, she thought. Stand behind it as it is. And strangely enough, as her hopes and expectations of the ideal fell away from her, fear and all its grating tethers vanished too. She felt oddly strong, almost pure. She was ready. It was time to present to the buyer.

Lia sat on the bed, working late. The only light in the room was the silver light from her laptop, which changed and flickered as she ticked through the inventory. Alone with it, not even with the pots themselves but their images, their descriptions, their references to other works in collections and museums—just these echoes—she felt the elation of the deal about to be made. It was a right world that had this much beauty. She was a right woman to live in it. She clicked through the inventory, checking, correcting, polishing. She had been doing this for hours. She tried not to even look at the clock.

The next thing she remembered, she was awakened by the euphonious little bell that meant e-mail. When had she fallen asleep? She was on her side now, one arm under her head.

She pushed herself up. The computer was still on, glowing, in front of her. Maybe she should go to sleep after all. The clock on the bedside table said two thirty-eight. And she did have an e-mail. Who was sending her e-mail?

She touched the icon and brought up the mail program. She looked at the sender's name.
Now
she was awake. Yu Weiguo. The potter. She clicked it open.

The Chinese language template activated and the characters spilled across her screen. She drew her brows together and took it in, character by character.

Yu's message started with a typical set of Chinese disclaimers.

Right now, here, this is the best version of the story I can assemble. Who's to say if it's the right one? The facts—haven't you heard it said?—are as clay in the hands of the potter! I can only give you this sum of what I have heard mixed with my own opinions of the matter.

People seem to think the Wu Collection was buried near here, across the river in Anhui Province, for close to fifty years. And then there is a story told—it is told quietly but enough people have heard of it to keep it alive—it's said that of the tens of thousands of pots known to have left the Forbidden City in the imperial convoy, of course there were the twenty-one hundred cases left behind in Nanjing, the ones now stored at the Nanjing Museum, but people say that also a few more cases were separated up in Anhui, in Jinhua County. This is the seven or eight hundred pots they call the Wu Collection. Some people swear it does not exist. They say it's a legend. Others claim they know someone who has seen it. And then you arrived in my studio from nowhere, from America, nothing but an outsider, and
you
knew something about it! Well. Miraculous. How high the sky and how deep the earth.

Tian gao di hou,
Lia thought, How high the sky, how deep the earth.

She saw at once the place from which Yu's story sprang. In her mind, in her memory, she followed back along the flight of the imperial art collection. During the sixteen years of their journey, the works were split into three shipments to enhance their odds of survival. One had gone northwest by the Yellow River, one went through the southwest, and one went through the mountains of central China, snaking through the deep belt of green above and below the Yangtze.

It was this central branch of the convoy he was talking about. But how could so many pots be buried and forgotten?

Because no one survived who remembered they were there, she thought. Because grass and brush grew over them. Because when the wars ended and another branch of the Wu clan came to live on the land, to farm it, to release it to nationalization in the 1950s, and then to have it quietly given back to them in the 1980s, they did not know. She looked back at the mail.

The family only discovered the pots a few years ago. They were plowing and hit one of the crates. The Wu family knew right away they could not keep these porcelains. They made arrangements, which were quiet. They were well paid. But who bought the pots, and where the pots went . . . this is unknown. And one cannot ask the family directly, for they emigrated, as soon as the transfers were completed. They went to your country. People say they live in Detroit.

And there the message ended, abruptly. She closed it and shut down the program, set the computer aside. That was it. Potter Yu had gone to the bottom of the ocean and brought her back a pearl. Pearl of knowing. She could feel the truth locking in around her, and it made her almost numb. She crawled in beneath her covers and let sleep take her.

15

The next morning she lay still in the gathering light. When you dreamed of someone, did he dream of you? She had just dreamed, about him.

Yet she couldn't remember it. She wanted to get back into it. No. Then remember it, please; she felt her body stretch as she reached back. At least a memory. Nothing. Only the feeling.

Dream memory was different; she knew this much. It couldn't be commanded and controlled. It rose on its own, when ready. It was stored and triggered in the body, in the mystery of bones and muscles, not in the mental world where she felt most at home. It was not thought that recovered a dream. It was the shift of a leg, the slight turn of the torso. Sometimes when the body resumed the position in which it had dreamed, the dream came back to the mind.

Nothing was harder for Lia than to release herself within thought instead of driving thought to her will. But she wanted this dream. It was a door and she needed to get through it. She rolled over. There was a flash of the feeling, of him. But it stopped and calcified into conscious memory. Then a noise sounded from somewhere outside the courtyard and the light pressed against her eyelids; day was coming up. That was it. It was over.

So she got up and showered, put on a garnet tunic and pencil-leg knit pants. With a shiver she remembered that her silk dress would be ready soon, the one she had ordered on Dashanlan. She pulled her hair tightly up and braided it. She fixed her hearing aids and put pearls in her ears. Usually she wore hoops, but the shirt was a deep color and the pearls had a pale, otherworldly gleam. She rarely wore them at home. Here she looked different. They brought her to life. She blinked at herself. She tilted her head and looked at her ears; the hearing aids were soft-colored, all but invisible, part of her. The pearls made her feel pure. She rolled on a nut-brown lipstick.

Now the world was alive. Out in the hutong she could hear motorcycles stuttering and backfiring, the distant jackhammers of construction, and closer, in the kitchens in the next courtyard, the clatter of the cooks making breakfast. She poured a cup of tea from the thermos and went out with it.

There was no one in the courtyard. She sat at the stone table and drank her dragon well green. She was close, she knew; almost ready to sign off. There was just that last piece of the story she needed.

Her hands laced together on the cool stone. These pots would have left Beijing in 1931, in the convoy. If buried on Wu land in Anhui, they were part of that leg of the shipment that passed nearby along the Qingyi River.

The flight of the imperial art collection was well chronicled in one Chinese-language history, though no accounts existed in English. She filed back. She had read it, so she could fix the moment in time at which the shipment passed that stretch, near a town called Yijiangzhen.

She released her hands for a long stinging drink of tea and pulled out her hearing aids. Quiet exploded over the stone table and the garden. In her mind's eye she entered the examination yard and walked through chronological time, back through the years of war. Here in the memory world were the photos, the accounts, the stories heard from old-timers. She had random letters, local news accounts, and municipal records—the notes and oddments left behind by all the people of each village who crouched among the crop rows, peering through the fronds and cattails, down the red clay banks to the river on that day. The whisper went through the grass like fire, as the great boat floated by, that here went two hundred thousand shining stars of the emperor's treasure.

Anhui Province, 1939. Commanding officer Captain Lu Guoping stood still in the snapping wind. His pants whipped around his legs. He was looking down through a gap in the trees at the writhing curve of the river against the spring earth. This river led back to the Yangtze, to Wuhu, and to Nanking, which the Japanese had not yet taken. If he could make it there he could breathe.

He pictured the two other shipments. One was far to the north. The second was nearby. It had left Hankou already and would meet him in Nanking.

On the flat silver snake of water below, he could see the ferry approaching. They had waited hours for this fresh boat. And now the enemy was less than a hundred
li
away.

He strode down a steep cramped-back path, between boxes of sunlight shafting through the trees. Moss-covered rocks and ferns, loam, and gravel slipped under his feet. It was spring, the waxing crescent of the second lunar month, but the cold metal of winter was not yet ready to release its hold.

When he broke through to the river's edge, he saw the thick swarm of people on the wharf. They knew the Japanese were coming.

His heart sank. They all wanted to get on the boat. And every one of them might as well fight to the death to do so.

His cross-strapped soldiers, in a powerful line three men deep, held back the crowd from the stacked crates. He shouldered through the crowd, stepping around the women, the men, the elderly on their piles of bundles. He dodged the boys laughing in their high thin voices, darting through the press of people as if this sharp damp afternoon were only another in a long string of their days growing up. Captain Lu thought of his own family, the children, his hometown, which had been taken eight months before. He had to force himself not to think about it. He had the genius of eleven dynasties to see to safety.

The fresh boat was tying up and lowering its planks. “Load the collection,” Lu ordered. The smell rose to him, the tarred, weathered wood of the dock; the living, decaying saltwater smell of the wharf; the pressing crowd.

Children were crying. So many women, babies. “Sorry,” he said, and elbowed them out of his way.

A woman stepped in front of him.

He pressed her to the side.

“Sir!” She blocked him with her baby. “You've no room. Take my baby. Just the baby.” Before he could even perceive what she was doing, before he'd even fully understood her rough country words, she'd shoved the baby into his arms.

“No!” he shouted, and pushed it back at her.

A torrent of will twisted her face. She clenched her arms down at her sides as if straitjacketed, then turned and ran, craning, dodging, into the crowd. The mass of pushing people meshed back in around her.

“Come back!” he screamed.

A mewling sound came from the infant. Lu looked down at the clear, shiny eyes. “I order you!” he screamed again. In the silence that bloomed in the afterspace, he heard the creaking sound of the ship, his men, their voices. He turned on his heel and continued shoving his way up front, the baby under one arm. Other mothers now held up their babies to him. He cursed them away in three dialects. The air around them exploded with the pressed-down groaning of the ship's horns.

The baby was crying. He looked at it, anger gathering. Now he needed another woman: there. He pushed the baby into the arms of the closest female. Her mouth opened in a stunned circle. But she took the child.

He stepped up to the line of men. “Almost ready?”

“Sixty left, sir.”

“Good.” But the soldiers were straining at the line. He watched the crowd shoving.

“Should we fire?” his man whispered.

“No! They're Chinese.”

But now screams and shouts rose above the wall of wailing. The crowd pushed and retreated as one, with the suck and release of a wave. His men were surging with it, gripping tight to one another's wrists, holding, holding, shouting, how long could they hold? Lu threw a frantic look behind him. Crates were being run up the ramp one after another, men under them, heaving, sinews bursting.

A shout went up. He scanned quickly to his right. They were breaking now. They couldn't hold.

He yanked his pistol from his belt and fired into the air. A puff of smoke rose above him. A stunned silence.

“Stop it!” he roared. “Let us finish loading and we'll take you on!”

“Sir,” the subordinate hissed. “There's no room.”

“Quiet,” Lu ordered.

The silence still hung.

Then suddenly a man standing near them in the crowd shouted into the emptiness: “There's no room!”

“No room!”

The crowd started calling out again, shoving, and this time the tide gathered itself, breathed deeply in with a bobbing of heads and a last chance to stay alive, and then pushed forward in a tangle of arms and legs and backs and shoulders, one wedge, no stopping it. They streamed up the ramp and onto the boat.

“Stop!” screamed Captain Lu, but now the wind had whipped up and his voice was snatched out of his throat and tossed away. He saw the people fanning out on the deck of the boat, crowding on board until the deck itself sank, groaning and pitching, almost to the level of the water itself.

“The boat will sink!” he screamed. “Some of you must get off! One in three, get off!” At the same time he looked back at the dock and cursed inwardly. There were still crates waiting.

“One in three!” he called again.

No one moved.

“Now!” he shouted, and raised his handgun high and cocked it, to make clear what he meant.

The boat rocked in the waves. Then a woman, in silence, held up her small child above her head. Another woman raised a baby. A wail came threading up, just the thinnest single voice at first, but soon all the women had babies and toddlers over their heads, wailing, sobbing, pleading for their lives. Where was the baby he had given to the woman? But the baby would be all right. The woman would take care of it.

His man was back. “Sir, we have forty crates yet.”

Yes. He saw them. Still on the dock. And all the babies, all the mothers.

He turned to the flank of men who had assembled. “Up anchor. We leave.”

Eyes popped. “Sir!”

“Ready the boat. We leave.” His voice was crisp and hard. He walked away rapidly, concealing his terror and his shame. He could not put them off to their deaths. He ran down the plank and onto the warped, river-smelling boards. He touched one of the crates, laid his hand on it. What was inside? He glanced at the stenciled characters.
Meishu taoci.
Ceramics. He offered a silent reverence of apology, then he turned and ran, last man up, jumping onto the ship as the ramp rose. The boat's engines roared and it pulled away, turning in its wide arc down the river. He watched the little stack of crates left behind growing smaller and smaller as the dock floated away into the distance.

So, she thought, raising her eyes again to the red-framed doors. Left behind, then taken off the dock, and buried under Wu land and forgotten. The land belonging to the Wus and then to the state and then back to the Wus again. And it was there all that time.

She put her hearing aids in and the world came back, abruptly amplified. A car engine roared up the hutong, cresting, fading. She finished her tea and walked out across the entry court. She passed the fountain with its spattering flow of sound and walked through the gate of ornamental rock.

She thought he was in his room. It was early morning; he'd be getting ready for work. She knocked.

“I knew it was you,” he said when he opened the door.

It seemed to her that he stood over her, but actually they were the same height. “I know you have to go to work,” she said.

He drew her in and shut the door. “I do have to go to work. I'm also glad you came.”

“I was going to ask if you wanted to walk out and have breakfast in the hutong.” Usually she didn't eat in the morning, but today she felt alive, she felt hungry, and with her smile she challenged him. “It's wild. I know.”

“I love wild.” He looked at his watch. “Even if only on principle. I have time too. I have to get to work, but I have time. Let me get my things.”

She watched him move around, collecting papers, making a wedge of his hand and tucking his shirt in, all the way around. She looked at his things. A man's things were always, for her, a glimpse of who he was.

But he didn't have much. A desk, a bed, and an old wooden wardrobe. A TV. The white walls were bare. There was a table with rows of Polaroids on it. “What's this?” she said. All Chinese children.

“Those are the kids in my study,” he said.

She saw that each child was posed the same way, in the same spot, yet each was a universe of uniqueness. “You took these?”

“I did. Lia?”

She turned and in that questing instant, her eyes alight and the beginning of a smile on her face, he took her picture. The little motor ground and the print shot out in its tray.

“Here.” He tore it off. They leaned closer. First it was a pale, ghostly square, then her face emerged, looking over her shoulder. She looked pretty. He took a loop of tape and stuck it to the door frame, just above another instant photo, of a small Chinese girl. “You can stay there,” he said, “with her.”

“Honored.” She liked it. She liked his room too, in a way. “I admire your room. It's so plain it's aggressive. You said something the other day, that you wanted to forget everything. This is the room for it.”

“It's true. Here I like to forget.”

“Great thinkers have preceded you. You know that? You're like Themistocles.”

He turned around slowly, the smile in his eyes canny, awaiting the joke.

“No,” she said, “I mean it. Everybody in his era was doing memory work. It was the thing. Memory feats were much admired.”

“But not by Themistocles.”

“No.
He
was famous for saying he preferred the science of forgetting to the art of memory.” She touched on the plain surroundings with her eyes. “Like you.”

“Like me,” he said.