A Cup of Light

1

From his black-windowed sedan roaring to the airport, Gao Yideng looked out on Beijing. Steel-and-glass skyscrapers, banks, hotels, international corporations and consulting groups flashed by. Ads and billboards blinked against the sky. The future was here. That which was irrecoverable-the past-had come to seem more desired, more priceless than ever. And Gao had a piece of it to sell.

The right buyer would give almost anything to possess it. The trick was making it happen.

He watched the Jichang Expressway, hands tight in concentration. Now one of the foreign porcelain experts had fallen ill on the plane and the other, the woman, was arriving alone. Perhaps she’d be more malleable by herself than the two of them would have been together. Not that Gao would lie to her. But there were many facets of this situation, those that were exposed, those kept from view. The bottom line was the art, and thank the gods, that was straight from heaven. It was extraordinary and spoke for itself.

He winced away from the part of his insides that grieved him. It was a dull knife scraping, the same place, familiar, like a well-worn knob of bone. He didn’t have enough. He never would. Not the blocks of real estate in Shanghai and Beijing; not the shares of computer companies. Every day of his life was a maw that needed more. He laid his hand across his stomach. And he’d had the dream once more last night.

In the dream he was always back in the famine-1961. He was in the place he grew up, a Yangtze town, in a maze of alleys, with trailing trees and decrepit stone buildings.

And he was with Peng, his best boyhood friend. Out of everyone in his life, all those whom he’d known, Peng was the one person for whom he would have died. What he had with Peng was deeper than friendship. Not love, but something like it.

Peng and Yideng had foraged for food together. Most of their days and nights were devoted to scavenging whatever scraps they could. They were a team. What they found they split scrupulously. Their trust in each other was supreme.

On this day they went along the stone wall that ran behind the slop stream, staying close in, light and fast-moving. There were people back here who still managed to keep a few animals. There was a man named Chu up this way who still had a starving, ornery pig. What every child in the District dreamed of was that on the day old Chu decided to kill that pig, they’d be close enough to get so much as a hair, or a drop of blood, or a whiff of the life-giving skin.

But it was only sometimes, on some days, that this raging pig was fed. And it was fed that day. Destiny smiled on them. As they came close to the rear of the Chu property, the door clattered open. The lugging breaths of old Chu could be heard over the wonderful sound, heaven itself, the wet, nutritious slosh of his bucket.

“I’ll go,” whispered Peng, and before Yideng could say a word his quicker, smaller friend was gone over the wall.

The pig whuffed and turned around.

“Old bonehead!” Chu called. “Over here!” and he swung the bucket, pulled it back-even Yideng, perched on a ledge now, looking over the wall, could hear the bumpy promise in that soup as it rearranged itself in the bucket-back, further, and then Chu flung it forward and water, offal, bits of food flew in a divine arc across the tiny yard. Peng swung at the same moment, diving out from behind the gardenias and catching, in midair, part of a stale steamed bun. The pig turned on him in a fury, snorting. It stood its ground for only a second before commencing its charge, but that was enough for Peng to gain the foot of the wall. As he scooted up, pulling on vines with one hand and cradling the precious bun in the other, the pig hurled itself the last few feet to the wall and smashed its teeth against the fitted stone, with Peng’s bare foot then, just that second, out of reach.

Oh, it had been excellently done. They had run, the two of them, full of youth. They climbed down behind Dongping Lu to a culvert beneath the footbridge. This was a special place of theirs. There was a not-too-fetid stream, trickling through the pipe. No one could see them.

Down below the street, their backs curved to the concrete culvert, they divided the bun in half. No surgery ever received greater attention. Fair was fair between them.

And that moment, at the end of the dream, when Peng handed him his wet, old piece of bun, an offering as luminous as a handful of diamonds, Gao Yideng felt as close as he ever would again to another person.

Thirty million people died of hunger in the famine. But he and Peng lived.

And now he was in this sleek, faintly humming car, alone, always alone. Yes, he was married and his days and nights were filled with people, but that didn’t change anything. He and Peng had long since lost touch. Now all he had was what he acquired, the world he built by adding.

The pain eased a little. He was about to add more, much more, by selling this porcelain. He’d have cash, liquid, against uncertainties. Somehow he felt if this succeeded, he’d never have the dream again.

Strange. Survival, in the famine, had hinged on a ragtag assortment of gifts from heaven like scraps of discarded wheat bun. Now it was the myriad opportunities and fallback plans he conceived and concealed where he needed them. Like this one.

They pulled into the airport. The driver crunched to a halt at a special gate, showed a card to the sentry, and turned down a small side road to a private rear entry.

They stopped behind the terminal. He leapt out, handmade shoes spattering in the puddles left from the afternoon’s rain, opened the door into the glaring corridor. He strode between the concrete walls to Systems Management. He checked his watch; she’d be deplaning. “Ni hao,” he greeted the computer operator. “If I may trouble you, I need someone flagged.”

“Of course,” the man said, recognizing him. “Nationality?”

“American.”

“Name?”

“Lia Frank.”

The clerk tapped a few keys.

“Canada Airlines.”

“Eh.” The clerk frowned. “That flight’s landed. The passenger is not to Customs yet. I’ll put it through right now.”

“Thank you.” Gao Yideng turned and was out the door before the man looked up.

The plane howled down in Beijing with a scream of engines and a clattering roar of overhead bins. It was dark outside, nothing but scattered lights and runways. Five hours had gone by since she’d left David Hong at a Tokyo hospital, safe in the care of their local staff. He’d needed an emergency appendectomy. It was routine as such things went. She was sure he’d be all right.

But now he would not be here with her. And she was taxiing directly toward what looked, from the photos, like some of the finest pots she might ever see in her career.

People like her always went out in pairs. Dr. Zheng would certainly have someone over here in a few days. Still… here she was, alone.

Had she remembered everything? With a transient tremor her feet squeezed each side of her brown leather tool case, pushed under the seat in front of her. Lia couldn’t work without her objects. She needed her loupe to dial up the texture of a glaze, the heap-and-pile of a cobalt border, the wear marks too faint for the naked eye. The camera was critical with its Micro-Nikkor lens and tripod, and the silver umbrella to absorb the camera’s flash. Hard measuring tape, calipers, cloths, contact-lens solution… the snuff-bottle light, with its long flexible wire, that let her see deep down inside the longest and narrowest ceramic neck. She sensed the shapes with her ankles, through the thin fabric of her socks; there was one, there another. She wished she could take them out and hold them. Not now. The plane was landing.

If the pictures she had seen in New York told the truth, there were twenty amazing pots waiting for her here. They were imperial pieces from the Ming and Qing. She remembered the blinding, almost physical impact of first seeing the images in New York.

“Are they good?” Dr. Zheng asked her with a grin in his voice.

“Completely hoi moon.” This was one of the few phrases that people like her always, reflexively, uttered in Cantonese even when speaking Mandarin or English. Maybe it was because the term was Hong Kong porcelain slang; or maybe because the Cantonese just had more sing and sinew. Hoi moon geen san. Let the door open on a view of mountains. See beauty. See authenticity. She’d flipped through the photos. One never found twenty imperial pots together. It was rare to find even two. “We have a buyer for this?” she asked, feeling as if every cell in her body were singing.

“We have,” he said.

Big spender, she thought, instantly placing the value of these works-assuming, of course, they were authentic-at fifteen, twenty million dollars. “One person?”

“One person.”

“Where’s the collection?”

“Beijing.”

“Beijing!” This stopped her. Fine porcelains almost never came up for sale from the Mainland. No porcelain manufactured before the twentieth year of the Qianlong reign, 1756, and no porcelain of any era from the imperial kilns could leave China. Something like this would have to be arranged or at least sanctioned by the government. Then they issued a special permit. “Is there a visa?”

“Yes. Though I only have the faxed copy.” He pulled a page from another file.

She leaned over it. All the chops looked correct, the Ministry of Culture letterhead familiar and imposing.

“Who approached us?”

“A wealthy developer. Gao Yideng. You know the name?”

“No.”

“He hasn’t been a… presence. He might be an intermediary. If it’s being sold by a major museum, or the government-well, I’m sure if I were in their position I wouldn’t want it known either. How soon can you leave?”

“Tomorrow?”

“All right.” His eyes smiled under their hood of brown-splotched skin; his refined hands tapped the desk. He leaned toward her, deepening the hollow drape of his Italian suit. “David?” he said. “Shouldn’t David be the one to go?”

“Yes. He’s perfect.” She liked teaming with David Hong. He was instinctive; she was the mental librarian type. They meshed well. That wasn’t going to happen now, though. The plane bounced a few times on the tarmac and hit the runway’s wind tunnel. The brakes screamed. It was nine-thirty at night here. Between the flights, the ambulance, and the Tokyo hospital, she’d had it. What she wanted more than anything was to sleep.

But the bright lights crackled on and she moved to the aisle, carry-ons cutting into her shoulder. She could feel the Chinese man behind her looking at her hearing aids, always visible because she wore her hair pulled up. She ignored him. She was used to people’s looks.

As soon as she stepped into the open rotunda she punched in Zheng’s number. It was morning back in New York, but he’d be up.

“Hello?” he said. “Lia?”

“It’s me. How’s he doing?”

“Fine. I talked to him in the recovery room.” Zheng had spent most of the night on the phone. Now the morning light had turned the dreamlike shadows on his desk into true and luminous objects: a table screen of carved nephrite, a brush washer with a pale celadon glaze. “I think he’s sleeping now,” he said.

“Good. Well. I won’t call him.”

“No. Don’t. We’ll take care of him. He’ll be in the hospital for some days, and then it’s a five- or six-week recovery. He’s not going to be able to help you at all.”

“I figured. So who are you going to send?”

He gave a long, thinking pause and then said, “As soon as I send anyone, more people will know.”

The implication multiplied inside her with an uneasy mix of feelings. Not send someone? Yet he was right, of course. If word got out, the competition would be all over their seller in an instant.

Because everyone would want pieces like these. This was true even though China was still the poor stepchild in the art world. Western masterworks fetched vastly higher sums than did Eastern ones. A very rare imperial porcelain, like a fine scroll painting or an important religious statue, might be worth three or four million U.S. dollars, while a work by a Western master might fetch ten times as much. But that was what made Chinese art attractive to investors. It was a good buy. And these were treasures, and the true treasures of any tradition were very, very hard to find.

“First look at the pots,” Zheng said. “Then we’ll talk.”

“I’m just the memory person,” she joked, but meaning it, wanting to make sure he remembered the kernel of truth in it. She was a data fiend, not a spotter. She wasn’t the one with the sure eye who always knew at a glance whether something was real or not. She was the one who backed things up, who could document, reference, and prove.

Doing this job alone was hardly even thinkable. Not that she’d be the first. For a crumb of comfort she looked back through history. Several hundred years ago there was a Hanlin scholar named Zhu, who was sent off alone on a porcelain mission. He had been ordered south by the emperor to oversee the royal kilns at Jingdezhen. He’d written:

Smoke rises day and night.

Who knows about me, alone in the Bingli Pavilion of the Zhaotiange?

Lia read this in a 1742 Fouliang Xianzhi, or Gazetteer of Fouliang District. There was a wealth of interesting information in gazetteers. For a moment, she felt okay. She was part of, or at least near to, a tradition. “All right,” she said. “I’ll look at them.”

“Very good, Luo Na,” said Dr. Zheng, using the familiar form of her Chinese name.

“My best to David.”

“I’ll tell him. He’s going to be fine.”

“Sorry-I’ve got to go.” She had turned the corner and found herself in the Immigration area. The passengers from her flight stood in ragged lines. She waited her turn and then stepped up to the counter with its bank-teller windows.

“Passport,” said the Immigration clerk. “Arrival card.”

Lia handed these across, watched the man flip through the stamped passport pages. She had a tourist visa. It was the easiest and fastest way to get in.

He checked his computer screen. “Occupation?”

“Scholar of art.”

“Purpose of visit?”

“Look at art.”

He looked again at the screen.

Lia felt her brow retracting in surprise. This never happened. Entering China was a glance, a stamp, no questions.

The man touched some keys. Then he slid her passport back across the glossy ledge to her. “Step to the left,” he said.

“What?” Suddenly her leather tool case felt heavy, like it could drag her to the ground. “What did you say?”

“Step to the left.”

She looked. There was nothing there. A wall, unappetizing pale green. A single door. There? That door?

The Immigration officer confirmed it with his eyes.

All right, she thought, and walked to the door. It opened. A Chinese man with high cheekbones, a bald, luminous head, and a fine tropical wool suit smiled and shook his own hands. “Miss Frank,” he said in English. “Welcome.”

“Thank you,” she answered. She removed a business card from her pocket and held it out.

He took it and turned it, checking both languages.

“Please call me Fan Luo Na if you prefer,” she said in Chinese. Her spoken Chinese was only fair. She’d had little practice, colloquial Chinese being somewhat removed from the literary forms in which she’d trained for her job.

He was taking out his own card. “Gao Yideng,” he said. “My personal welcome.”

Gao Yideng himself? She stared. Why would he come, instead of sending someone?

“Your colleague is doing well,” he said. “He is out of surgery and all things were successful.”

“Yes. Yes, I just called also. Thank you.” As she spoke she looked at the card in her hand: the understated corporate logo of his Cloud Development Group and a short, impressive list of his titles. “It’s exceptionally kind of you to meet me yourself,” she said. “Too kind.”

“It’s nothing but my pleasure.” Amiable wrinkles fanned out from the ends of his eyes and framed the sides of his face. She saw him take her measure, her no-nonsense clothes, her spare, conservative body, and then she saw his eyes rest infinitesimally on her ears. Didn’t expect that, did you? She held his gaze easily.

“Come,” he said. “Your luggage has been seen to. I’m sure you’re very tired.”

His driver took the expressway to Dongzhimenwai, through an endless forest of white high-rise apartment buildings and office towers, all the same, the repeating pattern left by sudden modernization. When they stopped at a traffic light, Gao saw her rolling down the window, tilting her face to the air from the outdoors. “What is it?” he said.

She let out a small laugh. “The Beijing smell.”

He smiled at her. He knew that smell too. It was largely gone now, suffocated by the dust of demolition and construction. Yet the half-fetid aroma still pooled here and there. It smelled neither pleasant nor unpleasant; like garbage, progress, the past. It was seven hundred years of living and dying, all manner of putrid waste finished with a lovely overlay, the delicate xiang of each pale flower of culture and learning in its season. One of the city’s subtle charms.

The shouts of vendors washed into the car, the roaring and gunning of vehicles, the bursts of recorded music from thrust-open doors. Character signs blinked and glowed in the night, advertising stores, restaurants, businesses; trees and awnings were festooned with light. They turned south on Jiaodaokou and then west into a long hutong, a narrow lane lined with stone walls rising to the old-fashioned curved roof eaves. In through a double gate, then they stopped. Already an attendant was removing Lia’s bags and walking them away to a side court.

“The driver will return for you at eight in the morning,” Gao Yideng told her from the front seat. He took out another card and wrote on it. “My mobile phone.” He handed it to her. “It’s always on. Call me anytime, dark or light.”

“Thank you.”

He looked at her speculatively. She stood under the glow of the streetlamp, not unattractive, odd-looking, prim with intelligence. She also seemed strong. He would enjoy this. “Peaceful night, Miss Fan,” he said courteously.

“The same.”

She walked away from the car, thinking, why this place? Foreigners usually stayed at big, well-appointed hotels with conference rooms and Internet trunk lines. Secrecy, she guessed. Discretion.

Her courtyard did have charm. Four inward-facing rooms looked out from under wood-arched verandas, intricately painted in ersatz Qing style. At that moment she realized she’d have to draw on her last reserves to even walk the last few steps to the door of her room, where surely there waited at least a bed. A yawn ballooned up in her throat. She liked it well enough. It would do.

When some hours later she opened her eyes again, in that small room in a side court in Beijing, she did not get up right away but let herself drift. Her hearing aids were out and she was in an ocean of peace. She liked to reach back to this, her silent void.

It was not until she was seventeen months old that she had been diagnosed and fitted with hearing aids. When they were ready, the audiologist pressed them in and suddenly the sharp, blinding noise of the world exploded in her head. She burst into tears, terrified. Nothing in her life could have prepared her to imagine sound. Later, of course, she came to love being able to hear-for what it was. To her it had its limitations. She also liked not hearing. She liked to lie like this, right now, with her hearing aids out, in the silence. The empty space had a soothing pressure.

She remembered what it was like before. What she did hear was bloated, underwater versions of sounds-especially when people tried to talk at her. It was impossible for her to make any sense of the stretched-out, distorted noises that came from people’s mouths. She also heard what she later understood to be the tinnitus commonly associated with her type of sensory neural hearing loss-a roaring, a remote wind, an intermittent wall of interference. She wondered if this was a set of signals from the world around her, but it too proved unintelligible.

Luckily the language of objects, with its patterns of form and color and feeling, made sense to her from the start. She started with the things in their apartment. Her mother, Anita, had loved things and constantly acquired them. She shopped, she walked galleries, she cruised flea markets and junk stores. She took Lia. And this in its way was Lia’s first tongue, the language of longing and being sated. By the time she started hearing, and others began to “fix” her, certain things in her were already fixed. Objects spoke to her with their form and their finish, their shape, their physical soul. She wanted to know and feel all of them she could.

Yet even to understand the objects in a single room, in a single drawer, took such concentration. One leaf contained a neural branchwork of almost infinite complexity, as well as endless shades of green. External factors such as the play of light and the movement of air multiplied things further. Yet the object itself was constant. It stayed where you put it. You could study it for a lifetime, you could spend years knowing it; it would not change. It would still be there, be the same.

At first she cataloged things by feelings. There was the white-lit joy in the round, perfect forms of her toys; the statuesque upward longing of the legs of a table; the tristesse of sun slanting down on her mother’s grouping of statues and vases and antique dolls. These became her first memory-markers. They led her, in her mental maze, to the rooms of memory that contained what she knew. This was always her system. It was right for her. Much later she read about how Seneca of Rome had been able to repeat back two thousand names in order, and King Cyrus of Persia had recited the law in twenty-two languages-and then she knew she was not alone. Remembering made sense to her. It was something she was born to do, even if it meant she was born in the wrong time. Some kids played sports, some studied piano; she worked at memory.

She glanced at the clock. Seven-fifty. Driver at eight. She rolled off the bed and stood up and stretched and checked herself in the bathroom mirror. Her eyes were puffy. They were gray and expressive, but they had a sad downcast tilt to them. Swollen, they looked pathetic. She applied a cold-soaked cloth to them, counted to thirty, and pulled it off. Nope. The same. She gave up.

She rummaged in her suitcase. Already things were spilled out over the floor. She pulled out a gray skirt and a long gray tube-shaped top. Had she brought any other colors? She pushed the disorganized pile aside. A flash of red, salmon, chalky white-yes, there were a few other things. Everything was knit, nothing wrinkled. She always traveled like this. She pulled her clothes on in front of the mirror, watching her straight up-and-down body. She looked okay. She always felt she barely got by with dressing and adornment. At least she’d figured out how to put herself together, though it was an act, on a certain level. She leaned over from the waist to fasten her antique-penny-colored hair at the crown of her head, then stood up and braided it all the way down.

Hitching up her leather bag and her computer, she stepped out into the soft morning air. Shiny-leafed camellias crowded up along the covered walkway. Above the arching roofs the sky was blue, faintly tinged with the brown of pollution. Through the old round gate she could see the car waiting. Oh, my pots! she thought. Finally.

The driver took her northwest along Gulou, past the drum tower, and through a maze of hutongs to the shores of Houhai Lake, a long, thin finger of water here in north central Beijing. They drove along the lake and then turned sharply into the walled grounds of a sprawling white house trimmed with red verandas.

A uniformed man in the gatehouse nodded them past. She jumped out and ran in. The garden was gorgeously tended, with light pooling down through trees over rocks and ponds, but she walked quickly through it and up a few slate steps to a stone-paved veranda. At the front door, under the incandescently painted roof overhang, a small man in a brown suit was waiting.

She returned his polite greetings and followed him in over the worn, thin carpeting. It took her eyes a few seconds to adjust to the dark. Then she saw they were crossing a long living room, green walls reaching high up to ornate moldings and European chandeliers, curtains drawn behind square, Chinese-style arrangements of couches and tea tables. The must and smell of decades rose with every soft scuff of their feet. At the end of the living room, they followed a corridor past a dining room filled with Swiss clocks and a whitewashed, light-filled kitchen. Then the man opened a screen door and they stepped down into an enclosed inner court, across the grass, and up the steps on the other side. He clicked open the glass-paned doors and flung them wide.

“The light should be here, I believe.” He reached into the room and brushed the wall. The room choked in an incandescent flood.

She stood staring. It was a vast room filled with wood packing crates. They made four neat rows. She counted. Forty crates. Forty of them. That couldn’t be. There were supposed to be twenty pots, which would be one crate. If there were forty crates of pots, there were- She hesitated.

“Mr.-” She turned to look for the man. He was gone.