A Cup of Light

10

“Would you like to see my ducks?” Gao Yideng asked when she answered her cell phone.

Her comprehension was fairly good, but she wondered if she’d heard him right. “Mr. Gao? Your ducks?”

“My ducks,” he repeated. “I keep ducks and chickens and pigs on a place out in the country, not far from the city’s edge at all. It is my dacha,” he joked, using the sinicized version of the Russian word. “Right now I will take a short ride there. If you like, I can pick you up.”

He made it sound entirely incidental, a casual excursion, when in fact he was an enormously busy man and she had left word that she wished to talk to him. He was so seamless. “Of course,” she said. “When?”

“Trouble you to come out to the gate, facing the lake. In fifteen minutes I will be there.”

So they drove out through Beijing’s southwestern suburbs until wooded valleys unfurled between jagged green hills. She marveled again at the personal, very private treatment she was getting from this mogul. Obviously the collection mattered to him. She looked at the light from the sunroof gleaming on his bare head, his imported sunglasses. Prada. She smiled. Real, not fake.

They drove up beside a little stone house with a low-walled animal yard; ducks and chickens, pigs. A garden on the south flank of the house teemed with vegetables.

“This place is always kept for me.” He unlocked the door, opened several of the windows to the June air. “That’s better. Let us drink some tea.” He went into the small kitchen to prepare it. She asked if she could help, but no, he would do it. She watched him at the simple stone counter. That was all there was. A sink, a half refrigerator, and a single wok-ring. It was crazy, she thought; it was theater. It was a fake dacha, but the rustic kitchen and the plants pushing up were real, the ducks genuinely clamorous. He poured boiling water into the teapot. Back at the table he let it rest a few minutes and then filled two plain cups with it, frothy, astringent green. He raised his cup to her and they both drank. “Now tell me how you progress with the collection,” he said.

“It’s magnificent. Overall. I have found more copies, though.”

“Really. What?”

“A so-called pair of Daoguang wine cups. Tiny, delicate, quite lovely. But fake. This tea is excellent.”

“It’s just what happened to be here.”

“As forgeries the cups are of no consequence. The pieces that they impersonate are not terribly valuable.” She shrugged as if it were perfectly normal for them to come all the way out here to discuss such a trifle. “Rather it is a matter of… accumulation.” She had found the chicken cup, the Daoguang wine cups, and earlier today two more fakes. It was then she decided to leave him a message. She smiled at him. “Now I’ve seen several more. I thought you’d want to know.”

He looked at her with a faint, constructed touch of a smile. “I am grateful that a collection like this should even pass through my hands, no matter what its flaws.”

“I understand,” she said.

“Both sides depend on you to look at it most carefully.”

“I will. But, Mr. Gao, I think it would really be best if I had one of my colleagues come to Beijing and look everything over with me. In view of the situation.”

“As you wish,” he said.

“Not that I’m not confident,” she said. “I am.” She drew the plain gray fabric of her tunic loosely away from her body. “But forgeries have been found. A second person should go through it.”

“Miss Fan.” Gao was already looking at his watch. “Women gai zou-le,” I think we should go.

Michael took her to An Xing’s place the next night to see the bowl. The Chinese man came to the door in shiny athletic warm-ups and led them in to a couple of rooms, commodious but cramped. “Welcome to my ancestral home,” he joked.

“I love it,” said Lia. She saw that one wall of this main room was all books; the others were hung with Asian minority textiles. There were a few shelves of well-chosen contemporary lacquerware and one especially charming row of ceramic goldfish pots in motley sizes.

“I’m a bad host!” An said delightedly. “Ah, you are looking at my things. There isn’t much.”

“I like it.”

“It really was my ancestral home, for three hundred years.”

“Is that so?” So they had let him stay, she thought, or come back, and now he was down to what was basically a small corner of the place.

“I still have a few things. Books. Family papers. Old records.”

“Records?” Her eyes lit. “What kind of records?”

“Family holdings. Financials. Genealogies.”

“Art collections?”

“Yes.”

“Inventories?”

“Yes.”

“Porcelain?”

“Yes.”

“May I see?”

“Of course!” He pulled out a chair for her at the small table and turned his back to scan the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. He touched his ponytail absently, looking, then after a minute he reached up with a jubilant cry and pulled out a crumbly stack-paged book. It was open-bound in old Chinese style. She and An bent over it. Doyle stood behind. It had a hand-brushed character title. An Family Porcelain Holdings, from the Ivory Fan Study.

“How wonderful that you’ve kept this,” she said.

“It’s come down to me, that’s all,” An said. “I’m not the only descendant, but there are no others in China. Just me. Look. Here are the lists of their art collections.” He opened the first page for Lia.

She scanned through it. “Oh, it’s marvelous.”

She could feel Michael’s eyes on the back of her head and smell him, a spiky brown-eyed smell, softened by his fair hair, individuated by the turns of his life. How old was he? Past forty, by the look of him. But he’d been very sick. He might have been younger.

“Do you want to memorize it?” she heard him say behind her. “Because An and I can go in the other room.”

She smiled back up at him. “That’s nice of you.” Ordinarily she might say yes, please, go away and let me work. There was never enough for the memory world. Never enough histories, gazetteers, catalogs, auction descriptions, records, inventories. But she didn’t want to do it now, in front of him. She’d rather talk to him. “An Xing, thank you for showing me, thank you. Another time perhaps I’ll read it line by line.”

“These are only some old lists, hardly worth an hour of your attention.”

“Nali,” she said, Nonsense. “There have been great collectors in your family.”

“But speaking of porcelains! We are forgetting the bowl I have to show you.”

A ringing sound bleated out. An’s cell phone. He took it from his clip, excusing himself with his eyes. “Wei?” He listened. “Ei. Dui, dui. Deng yixia.” He turned to Michael. “You show her,” he whispered, covering the mouthpiece.

Michael opened a door. “In here,” he said, and slipped ahead of her into a small anteroom lined with shelves, a bathroom at the far end. He switched on a lamp, took down a plain indigo box, unhooked the bit, and opened it. There was the ruby ground Kangxi bowl. He reached in.

“No,” she said. “Let me.” He pulled back. Her long fingers made a net under the bowl and she lifted it out. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

“It’s so beautiful,” she said. “Really hoi moon.”

“Hoi moon?”

“That’s Cantonese. Hoi moon geen san. The Mandarin would be kai men jian shan. Let the door open on a view of mountains. The dealers in Hong Kong, the runners who bring the pots out of China-they all say this. They love to say it.”

“And it means?”

“It means, it’s beautiful. It’s right. It means, look at it! That’s when it’s said admiringly. When it’s said in exasperation it means damn you, don’t you see, don’t you get it? Of course it’s right. You idiot! It’s gorgeous.”

“What does it mean when you say it?”

“When I say it right now, about this piece? My God. It’s lovely.” She looked at him. “Don’t you think so?”

“I do,” he said. “I think so.” He did like the bowl. He had seen it before. But right now he was watching her.

She held it closer to the light and he caught the soft pink of her hearing aid.

She felt his eyes there. That’s me, she thought; take a good look. I wear them to hear, to be like everybody else. She could still hear her mother’s voice: “Don’t ever take them out! Don’t do it! Ever! You’re to leave them in at all times!” But I’m all right in here, she would think. And in time she learned to just take them out when she could, when she was alone. “Do you see the enameling?” she said to Michael. “The painting, the Jesuit style. Very fine. This bowl was fired in the biscuit in Jingdezhen, then brought to the Palace to be painted.”

“Where’s Jingdezhen?”

“In the south, in Jiangxi Province. The emperor’s porcelain was made there for almost a thousand years. It’s still the center of pots culture. The best artists are there. Ah, it’s too bad about these cracks. That’s what An meant when he said it was damaged. Remember?” She ran the soft pad of her finger along one, coming down from the rim. The crack itself was a rift as wide as the ocean under her skin, a wilderness canyon, tragic. She felt a stab of such empathy. Would that she could heal it. “Do you know this bowl would be valued at one or two million dollars if it wasn’t damaged? Even as it is, it could fetch twenty thousand U.S.”

“I don’t think he’d ever sell it.”

“No. He shouldn’t.” To possess something of this order was to possess the past, but she sensed she didn’t need to say it. He knew; she could tell by the way he looked at the piece. She could feel the warmth of him. “Look,” she said. “Look with me when I turn it over. It will have a four-character reign mark in puce. So rare, the puce. Usually the reign mark was cobalt. Ready?” She upended it. “See?”

He looked. She was right. Four characters in puce on a white background. And rarer still, a collector’s seal was applied to the base in tiny spaced droplets of sealing wax. Not quite connecting, impressionistic, a tiny masterpiece of dripped-wax calligraphy, they suggested the characters for Ivory Fan Study, the family collection name.

“Watching you, I see… you use your hands with pots, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. “You’re right. In some way I know how it’s supposed to feel.” She fitted the bowl back into its box and hooked the lid down, put it in his hands.

He pushed it back on the shelf, all the way against the wall. He could hear An talking on the phone in the outer room. He turned to her, right next to him, her eyes on a level with his, and to his faint surprise he saw the web of exhaustion around her eyes, the shadows on her face. “You’re tired,” he said. “You look tired.”

She met his eyes gratefully. “I am. I haven’t been sleeping. Not enough anyway. My pots are so incredible. And there are so many of them.”

“You have to sleep.”

“I know.”

“Come on, I’ll take you back,” he said, and he reached to touch her shoulder in an easy American way. Then An Xing was in the doorway. “Well,” he said, “zenmoyang?” What do you think?

“It’s fantastic,” she said to An, “completely lovely. Thank you. And thank you,” she said to Michael in English, with an inflection she was sure he would understand, because in the nicest possible way she felt shepherded by him and she wanted him to know she got it, she felt it, and she liked the way it felt.

Back in her room she settled down in her favorite spot on the bed. She had really enjoyed herself with him. She felt the link with him. She wished she didn’t live on the other side of the world. She wished she weren’t leaving soon. But she did and she was.

So she worked. After calling Dr. Zheng and leaving a message asking him to send Phillip, she found herself pulled back to the chicken cup. She brought the image up again on her screen. The form and shape were sublime. The pots of the Chenghua reign had low, ideally balanced bodies, with a graceful emphasis on the horizontal. Relaxed yet precise. This little cup nailed it.

She rotated the image. There was something quirky about one of the chickens, something that pulled at her. That chicken’s tail. The way its proud feathers rose bristling into the air. What did she remember? The exact flip of that tail-

She knew something about this. She had heard David talk about this. He had seen it.

David. Dr. Zheng had told her explicitly not to talk to David.

But she could e-mail him, she reasoned. Just this one question. Hospital or home, David checked his e-mail.

For she sensed this might be a forger whose work David had followed. David called him the Master of the Ruffled Feather. The Master gave a signature curl to his chickens’ tails. She herself had never seen it.

She clipped the image from six angles and attached it to the message. Atop she wrote: Is this the Master of the Ruffled Feather? She pressed SEND.

He must have been sitting at the screen, because a few minutes later his reply came. Don’t tell me. You found one. And then, underneath that: If he’s alive he’s in Jingdezhen.

That’s right, she thought, when she read it. That’s where he had to be. While she was staring at the message she heard her cell phone going off in her purse. She didn’t answer it. She was thinking about Jingdezhen. There were answers there. Could she do it? Could she leave for a few days?

She took out her phone and dialed in to the voice mail. Dr. Zheng. “Lia, I got your message. I think you’re right. Second pair of eyes, just at the end. I’m arranging for Phillip’s flights back from England, and then to China. It will take about two and a half days. Gao will have him met and brought to you. Call me.” She felt herself relax for a moment, the ground a little firmer.

She could go to Jingdezhen and be back by the time Phillip arrived. And there, in that smoke-pluming town in the south, she might find the card her hand was missing.

In Jingdezhen it had been raining. When Bai got back from Hong Kong the place was cleaning up after summer torrents that had swelled the Chang River as high as a house. The lowest parts had been flooded. The waters had just receded the night before. Up here where he was walking on Fengjing Road everything looked scrubbed, soft, newly vital. Tender June leaves unfurled in the trees. The birds had come back and they trilled and chattered.

He walked along the river, with mattresses and clothing spread out to dry all along its banks. People squatted among their possessions, scrubbing off mud and drying their pots and their baskets and their books one by one.

After a while he raised his hand for a clattery little aluminum-can taxi and rode northwest, away from the center of town, toward Yu’s place. The awnings and poor storefronts fell away. Dark leaves crowded along the base of the old stone and concrete walls, lowering and settling, closing around little houses and courtyards that spread out and relaxed into larger, more rambling spaces as the puttering taxi left the downtown behind.

Many of these dwellings were also studios, or small family factories. Ninety-five percent of the people who made pots here in Jingdezhen worked at home. Yes, some of the big factories were still running, turning out dishware, pouring black smoke up to heaven. They supplied the world with what was everywhere called “china.” But the factories employed only a fraction of Jingdezhen’s porcelain people, and the less skilled ones at that. The best artists worked alone.

He had the driver take him out to where the road turned to hard-packed dirt, now wet and rutted. He got out of the taxi when they came to the opening of Yu’s alley, barely a meter and a half wide. He could touch the old houses on either side. Here was the gate. He called out softly, pushed it open, and stepped in.

The long, narrow yard was a repeating trestlework of wooden trays and poles, rows of pots in all phases of production. Three worktables were squeezed in, and Potter Yu sat at one. He was incising something with a fine-pronged tool. At other tables his two assistants bent over their wheels. One was a middle-aged man, maybe his son. The other was a teenage girl. His granddaughter?

“Ei,” said Bai.

“Ei,” answered Yu without looking up.

“These smoke-dried fish are beneath notice,” Bai said, and deposited a package on the bench behind the worktable.

“They’re appreciated,” Yu answered without ever breaking the rhythm of the delicate little tooth scraping in the clay. Bai saw that he was using a stencil. Of course, most people did these days, when putting in a precise background pattern, scrolling or curling leaves, for example. But Yu’s studio was known for its rare freehand work. Maybe the old man was just taking a break. Bai watched him work.

He was relaxed, the rhythm of his hands companionable with the passage of time. “How have you been?” he asked Bai.

“Well. And well traveled. You?”

“Well enough. How about business?”

“I stand a moment in fortune’s favor. That’s one bit of a beautiful cup.” He nodded at the piece under Yu’s hand.

“After the Ming prototype,” Yu said. “There’s a reason why the sweet-white ware from the Yongle reign remains all but unsurpassable. It’s not easy to reproduce! Truly. Everything depends on the materials used.”

“It is inappropriate for me to even say, for I’m a rank beginner,” Bai said, “but is it not so that in the body of the sweet-white, the level of alumina should be high?” He glanced at Yu to see if he was right.

The older man dipped his metal point into a saucer of water, swirled it. He patted it dry on a towel and looked up expectantly at Bai. “And?” he said.

Bai sang inside, for that meant he was right. “Yongle pots had higher kaolin content. They needed higher firing temperatures. So the body was stronger and could be as thin as eggshells, thin as a spectrum of light.”

“And are you on equally intimate terms with the sweet-white glaze?”

“I am a poor student,” Bai said gleefully, blessing all the nights he’d spent, elbows on the table, forehead in his hands, bent over the books in his room. “In the glaze there was less lime and more potash. This means there was more feldspar, and that change, combined with the lowered lime levels, evaporated away the blue tint of a lime-ash glaze. And that is what made the sweet-white color.”

“Good!” Potter Yu laughed. “How did you know?”

“That one! I admit, Old Ma over at the Ming excavations told me.”

“Ah! Is it so? Old Ma!” Yu knew the man very well. Old Ma had been minding the kiln site for more than fifty years. Over the yawning hole in the ground he’d built a little brick structure, with wire-mesh windows high up in its walls. Old Ma himself had dug the great pit a spoonful at a time, had exposed the centuries-old stones of the firing chambers, the work area, the all-important shard pile. Here, in the northeast corner of the excavation, he had unearthed thousands of pounds of broken china.

And these pieces were the true prizes. They were some of the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of pots smashed because they were not perfect.

Through shards, every compositional detail of the best imperial porcelains could be dissected. If a man knew exactly how kaolin and petuntse were combined in a given reign, what minerals, what levels, that man, if otherwise an artist, could make a pot that had the ineffably correct look.

Yes, Old Ma was the place to learn, Yu thought. And if this ah chan was smart enough to listen to the old man, he might succeed. His tortoise-frame glasses slipped a little as he moved to his feet, untied his blue apron, and laid it over the chair. “Come inside, Bai. I have something to show you.”

Bai followed him down the long aisle-on one side, finished works of majestic scale: garden stools, great oversize standing urns, enormous goldfish pots, all painted in a riot of styles from Ming to new China kitsch. On the left, the horizontal racks of narrow rough-hewn boards held marching lines of unfired pots: bowls, cups, plates, ewers, vases, jars. Dozens of each type.

Yu pushed back a swinging door and they were in the room where he kept his finished wares. There were two facing couches and a commodious, low felt-lined table for looking at pots and drinking tea, but otherwise the room was all shelves. Shelves of porcelain were interrupted only by a few crank windows in their metal frames, kept more or less permanently open to the sultry hillside air. The room was well lit with thoughtfully placed spots. Yu knew what his wares were worth.

Bai circled appreciatively, drinking in Xuande bowls and Yongle stem cups and Chenghua wine cups and Yuan platters and Hongwu vases. Yu had chosen to work in fang gu, the reproduction of past masterpieces. All the best potters made fang gu, but for some it was an occasional thing. There were only a few like Yu, who placed it above all other pursuits.

Bai admired an ingot-shaped covered box of the late Ming, the Longqing reign-blue and white with swimming dragons, it was scoop-waisted, like a dumbbell, and its upper half was a fitted lid. The Longqing emperor had reigned from 1567-1572; a short reign, but one that had left its own stamp on porcelain’s evolution, with covered boxes, wine pots with overhead handles, and other objects of art intended to suggest use. Not that these pieces were actually used. The whiff of use, the patina, was enough. They were far too perfect to use. Their utilitarian aspect was purely metaphorical.

“Beautiful,” Bai said. It was so pitiable about Hu and Sun, he thought suddenly, so terrible. To have been caught. For lightning to have struck.

But he was still here. The bolt wouldn’t strike again, not so soon. He would make it through and he would be rich and everybody would call him Emperor. He needed something magical, some symbol of power, some connection to the gods to carry with him. “Potter Yu,” he said. “I’d like you to make me a chicken cup. If you can get it right, make it truly fine, I’ll pay double. Really! This is a thing I want for myself. I want a cup that is exactly like the ones made for the Chenghua emperor right over there-” Bai cocked his glance north in the direction of the Ming kiln, with its pit of shards. “I will rely on you. Truly. I want a piece that from every angle, on every facet, is as fine as the cup of the Chenghua emperor himself.”

“No, not Nanchang. I want to fly straight to Jingdezhen. What do you mean?” Lia pressed the phone to her ear, crossed out what she had written and started again. “One flight a week? Are you serious?”

She listened. “And when’s the next flight there? And when returning?” She closed her eyes. She would have to leave the following evening, right after work. She could finish the rough inventory by then. When she returned, she and Phillip could go over it.

Unfortunately she’d have to fly to Nanchang, and from there take a four-hour train to Jingdezhen. Then a day in Jingdezhen could follow, and she could catch the weekly flight from Jingdezhen to Beijing. It made her tired just to think about it. “Book it,” she told the phone agent.

It was worth it. The history of pots was impressed into the very texture of Jingdezhen, like ingrained kiln dust. The town was the art, and the art, the town. She knew a few people there. Through one she would meet another; it always happened that way. She might even find the Master of the Ruffled Feather.

She stepped out into the night air. It was fresh, cooler, with a half-moon rising over the roofs. Standing in her court she could feel a pull, a well of life, from his court on the other side. It’s amazing, she thought, the observational side of herself off to the side, marveling; as if feeling can actually change physical laws. Specify the bend of light. Make me want to go to him, right now, and tell him I’m leaving Beijing.

But she saw through the gates his courtyard was dark. She couldn’t tell him. He was out somewhere. Of course, she thought, why shouldn’t he be? It was strange, the way she felt. Nothing had been said and yet here she was wanting to go and tell him she was leaving town. She had the uncomfortable sense that her feelings had gone out of line with the situation. Abruptly, she turned around and walked out and away down the lane.

Michael had slipped out earlier and caught a taxi on Jiaodaokou. First he spent an hour at a Hunanese restaurant next to the entrance to the Yonghegong Temple, complete with altar to Mao-surely the twentieth century’s most famous native of Hunan-the altar draped in red velvet and decked with candles, incense, cakes, fruits, and brimming miniature glasses of high-octane white liquor. He squeezed into a booth at the end of the room. He couldn’t read Chinese, he didn’t even bother looking at the menu, but he had memorized the names of certain dishes and he ordered food to sear the soul, pungent with whole cloves of garlic, cured pork, tiny smoked fish, and peppers. He wanted it to burn everything out of him, fry him, make his nose run and his eyes water. It did, but when he was through with eating and back on the street the past was there again, still too much with him. He stood shifting from side to side, clearing his mind, thinking about where to go and what to do. Then a taxi was coming along with its light on, and his hand went up in the air. This was a daily wonder of Beijing: Even though the traffic was awful, taxis were ubiquitous and cheap. He would go find some music. He opened the door and clambered into the back.

Where? He closed his eyes. Definitely not Sanlitun. The bar district was dense with loud, light-flashing clubs. There was Japanese techno, Thai grunge, Malagasy trance, reggae, and hip-hop, and Chinese punk bands with names like Anarchy Jerks and Scream Frame and Body Fluid. There were raves almost every night, but they moved around, first one venue, then another, easily found by the hordes of young, hungry avant-garders in face paint, outlandish garb, and two-foot-high hairstyles frosted with glitter. They were on their own group radar. When he went to Sanlitun he would see droves of them, milling, laughing, and hammering in Mandarin, and scattered among them foreigners and all manner of other young Chinese. There were bands from Mongolia, from Qinghai, from all over China. He liked to go sometimes. It felt good to walk through pounding low-register rhythms from the open doors.

But not tonight. He didn’t want a long, curving bar and hordes of laconic, heavily made-up young people. He wanted someplace quiet. “Sen di ka fei,” he told the driver, naming a jazz club called CD Café in English.

When he got there he took a small table upstairs on the balcony. The club was dark, generic, softly lit with yellow arcs of light. He had a light rickety chair at a tiny round table, a brimming beer. He looked down at the small stage. The piano player was Italian, the drummer and stand-up-bass player Chinese-sober clothes. Long hair. They flexed their fingers and shoulders in the manner of reserved jazz players, preparing to play. Then they turned the pages of their music and all held together for a single, counting breath.

The piano player set up an insistent stride of a rhythm, and the bass and drums accented in behind. Doyle felt himself pulled in with them, a river stumbling, sailing, pouring over the rocks. He had come in here to forget, but instead he was remembering.

He remembered the day he had moved out into his own apartment. Daphne had come over to bring some books he’d left behind. She’d come and given him the books and chatted nicely about his apartment-and this had been painful, of course, watching his wife talk to him like he was a stranger. But then she had capped it by asking for his key.

“What do you mean?” He didn’t get it.

“I want you to give me your key back.”

“To our house?”

She flinched. “Yes. I’d be more comfortable.”

They had already separated. He had moved out. Even now, sitting here in China, more than a year later, he didn’t know why this simple request of hers had put him into such an agony of severance, but it did. And one last time he tried, to his misery and regret, to get her back.

“I really want the key,” she had said gently but insistently. Her face was neutral. She looked soft but she was all steel.

He took his key ring out. “We don’t have to do this,” he said.

“It’s just a key.”

“I mean separate.”

“Michael.”

She sounded impatient and sad. There was no conflict in her voice. He could almost feel himself being extinguished. Meanwhile she was waiting. He worked the key off the ring. “Daphne.” He wanted her attention, her real attention. He held up the key and took another key off his ring. “Take it. Take my key too. Come back anytime, any hour you’re ready. I know you have things to work out. That’s okay. Take the key. I want you. I don’t want anyone else. I’ll wait.” He extended both keys.

She took only one key, her own, and slid it in her pocket. “That’s very sweet,” she said. Her eyes filled. “I’m touched. I’ll always remember that you said that.” And then she had turned and left.

He remembered the feeling of being sliced, of an ice pick through the center of him. That was the best she could do? Cry a little as she said it? Even now he still felt the sharp blade of hurt here in this bar, the piano marching around him over the slapping of the bass, the drum with its light, dividing accent beats. Evaporate, he told his memory. Go away. It crinkled to nothing. It would be back, he knew, but not tonight. He tuned in to the music, eyes closed, tapping his fingers softly in his own layer of syncopation, behind and all around the tempo from the stage below.