A Cup of Light

by Nicole Mones

  “Researcher. On a fellowship. I’m studying children’s lead levels in Beijing.”

  “Oh! That’s important. Good for you.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Sounds depressing, though.”

  “It is, if I let it be. At the end of each day I try to forget. You know?”

  “I do know,” she said in a soft voice, thinking: Remembering? Forgetting? You have no idea.

  “What’s in your duffel?” he said.

  “Tools. Everything for looking at pots.” She touched the leather in a note of protection.

  “And with all your tools, what is it you look for?”

  She looked at him, her big eyes brimming with amusement, long quick fingers twined through her shoulder strap. Her hair was pulled up tight away from her face, and she could feel the faint pleasing weight of her silver hoops in her ears. “Fakes,” she said.

  “Ah. You mean forgeries?”

  “Exactly what I mean.”

  “So forgery must interest you greatly.”

  “It does.”

  “I have a friend you should meet.”

  “Really?” She could feel herself rising out of her long legs, chest against her shirt.

  “He’s into fakes.”

  “Is he a dealer?”

  “No! But he does make money from fakes.”

  “You mean that’s his job?”

  “No. He works with me. This is a thing he does on the side.”

  Her mouth was half open now, interest pulling it up at the corners. “What? Tell me.”

  “I could. Or,” he said. He wore the bemused look of someone talking on his feet, half surprising himself. “Or you could come with me and find out.” He moved his weight lightly from foot to foot. “Come look at fakes with me and An. We’re going anyway. Day after tomorrow.”

  She gave him a half smile. “How can I resist, if it has to do with fakes?”

  “I’ll leave you a note, when and where. What room are you in?”

  “Seventeen,” she said.

  “Ah. Side court?”

  “Side court.”

  “I’ve got to go,” he said.

  “And believe it or not”—she pointed down the lane to a far-off car whining toward them—“there’s my ride too. It was nice to meet you. Michael, right?”

  “Doyle,” he said. “Call me Doyle.”

  “Oh?” She turned her gaze on him. “Really?”

  “That’s what people call me. See you,” he said, and still smiling, he turned and walked away. He could hear the car grinding to a stop behind him, door opening and slamming, the engine roaring up and then evaporating away down the hutong.

  His mind went to the hearing aids. So she had hearing loss. But as soon as they’d started talking he’d forgotten about it. They had just clicked into conversation.

  And he made a plan to see her again. That was odd, for him. Especially because he could tell she was smart and offbeat. She was interesting, and thus at the beginning the bar was already bumped up. She was also pretty, in a way. And serious. He saw this from her reserved, intelligent mien and the controlled light in her eyes, and her business card, even. The serious type. Probably looking for a good man. He couldn’t be anybody’s good man. Not in the foreseeable future, anyway.

  Since his marriage ended he’d had his liaisons. He still needed to make love; that at least was intact in him. He still had to hold women, please them, and explode in vulnerability with them as much as he ever had. But caring was not something he could reawaken. So he limited himself to women who wanted lighter attachments. That was what he looked for now.

  He touched the card in his pocket. There was no point in misleading her. He’d take her to meet his friend An Xing; they would look at fakes, the three of them, together. It would be fun and diverting and then it would be over. How lovely. Lovely to meet you. Good-bye.

  He slipped his headphones out of his shoulder bag as he walked and turned on Cheb Khaled. He loved rai music. The Algerian singers were so brave, so irresistible to the part of him that just cockily believed he could do it, walk out on the gangplank and keep living. Rai was vital, secular, sexy, and just for singing it some of the musicians had been shot by Muslim fanatics. The rest of them kept singing.

  Especially he loved listening to rai in China. Here he was already out of place. He was thick-bodied and pale in the sea of Chinese, arms swinging loose, the opposite of all the people around him. Yet when he was out in the hutong, if he had that sinuous, wavering voice in Arabic filling his head, everything seemed right. The world was foreign, he was foreign. It fit. He walked lightly over the stones, happy for a few minutes in his music and his otherness and the quality of the north China light.

  The ah chan Bai leaned his head against the train window, rattling south on the rail line from Nanchang to Hong Kong. The red dirt walked away from the tracks in neat squares, dividing the rice paddies that terraced down to the river. From the froth of greenery on the other side rose the single tower of Fo Liang Temple, its roofs graduating one atop the other toward the sky.

  With his ankles Bai squeezed the tied-together boxes of the few pots he had just procured in Yanjing. None were imperial wares but all were fine heirloom pieces. He had paid well for them—well for inside China, anyway. That sum was nothing compared with what they would fetch for him in Hong Kong.

  His eyes followed the slow brown river as the rails clacked and the future spun out in his head. Down by the water, cattails waved in feathery golden clumps and morning glories, brilliant purple, twined up the red-dirt banks. It would take nine hours to reach the border. There would be a heart-pounding moment through Customs, but he had receipts showing that these were reproductions made by manufacturers in Jingdezhen. It was believable. The receipts looked right. The pots were good, though not breathtaking.

  He carried the boxes exposed, wrapped in plastic twine. Sometimes the best way to do it was openly, brazenly, with some paperwork to make it look right and a crowd all around him to swirl him through. Stopping at the counter, handing over his passport, holding his breath. Undistinguished. One of the crowd. A stamp, a wave. Then he’d be through, with money, enough for a while.

  It was enough cash to get himself a truly superb fake too. He knew exactly what he wanted. When he came back home to Jingdezhen he was going to see the man he considered one of the earth’s greatest living porcelain artists. And he was going to commission a replica of the Chenghua chicken cup.

  8

  The next day she opened the twenty-eighth crate and took the first pot from it. She drew a sharp breath of joy. It was a Ming moon flask, blue and white, depicting a dragon swimming among scrolled lotus blossoms. She could see it was from the reign of Yongle, the early 1400s.

  She lifted it. Ratio of weight to mass was very important. It was invisible to the eye alone, and sometimes overlooked by those who fashioned replicas. The composition and density of clay, the exact mode of firing . . . everything had to fit. Lia could sense how much a thing should weigh. When she surrounded a piece with her fingers and lifted it, she knew a little more about whether it was real or false.

  Though she herself went by feeling, she had the computer take the weight too. She activated the scale feature and clicked down the top of her laptop, which in this position took readings to a hundredth of an ounce. Weight and dimensions were transferred by the computer into the appraisal report. She took the flask up again and turned it every way. So hoi moon. So ideally shaped. And such a sedate, noble hue to the Yongle cobalt design.

  Yet there was something else that had caught her eye about it: its box. Glued along the bottom, on one edge, ran a thin strip of crumbly yellow silk. Some kind of mark, most likely, from an inventory or catalog. She centered the flask on her felt tray and took up the box and turned it over.

  After the last royal family moved out, several attempts had been made to list and assess what was in the Forbidden City. Mostly they were sporadic, partial stabs at a job so huge it was
almost impossible to complete. And of course, everything had ended on the night in 1931 when Japan had occupied Manchuria and the art had to be carried out of the Palace.

  But each time Palace officials had tried to sort through what they had, they’d hired people, made plans—they’d kept records, which were left behind. And they also left all manner of histories and lists and schedules. Lia had seen quite a few of these. They were in her memory.

  She sat on the floor against a rolled-up rug that braced her back. She needed a minute of quiet to go down to the bottom. She was looking for this particular cataloging effort—the one that had marked its boxes with strips of yellow silk. She wanted to fix it in time. Then there’d be one more point in the chronology, one more moment when she knew these pots were still inside the Palace walls.

  She took her hearing aids out. The emptiness inflated in her and she felt the familiar wash of pleasure and acceptance. There were the gates to the memory world; there was the way inside. She walked the brick lanes, reviewing what she knew. She found discrete nuggets; records, photos, newspaper accounts, Palace documents, and memorials. After a while they came together to form the picture in her mind.

  In March, 1924, a young man awoke in Peking.

  It was the tapping of his Ayi on the rice-paper-and-wood-lattice window that awakened him, her melodious voice saying his name. He pulled the quilts closer about himself. Not yet.

  Then he remembered. Last night his father had spoken to him of a new post, with the Committee for the Disposition of the Qing Imperial Household Possessions. It was perfect for him. His education had been classical, aiming him, as thirty-eight generations before him had been aimed, at success in the imperial examinations. Yet he would be the first of his line not to sit for them. They had been abolished. The old examination yards had been knocked down.

  He dressed quickly in the frigid room, lighting only the small oil lamp, leaving the brazier cold. He secured his trousers at the ankles and then fitted a gown shaped like a close sleeveless jacket over his shirt. Out of the room he hurried, across the flagstones and through the open gate to the Chrysanthemum Court. It was not time for chrysanthemums. It was Third Month. The air was wet and spiked with cold. The Gobi dust had not yet blown in to cover everything with its fine silt.

  Breakfast was hand-cut noodles in a soup of young chicken, mantou, pickled vegetable, and green tea. The Wens ate lightly in the morning.

  Guangyu took his place at the table opposite his white-haired father, in a low wooden chair inset with natural marble that falsely appeared to be an ink painting of mountains among clouds.

  “Second Director Tian of the Committee sent his valet here this morning,” said Guangyu’s father.

  Guangyu inclined his head.

  “You are to go there today and talk to him.” The older man knew this work would suit his son. Guangyu did better with art than anything else. And it was an official post too—of a sort.

  So Guangyu went downtown to an office near the rear gate of the Forbidden City and met Second Director Tian.

  The young man found the Second Director preoccupied behind stacks of aging, crumbling inventories, their spidery archaic characters organized according to forgotten systems and principles.

  So many back courts in the Palace had been closed off, dust-covered, unused for many decades, and yet were filled, stacked, with boxes from floor to ceiling. Guangyu knew this; it was a thing about which art lovers whispered. There were scrolls, rare books, textiles, porcelains, paintings, bronzes, enamels, calligraphies, diamonds, jade, treasures from all the corners of the empire and from beyond all seven oceans. All of it jumbled together, piled up, half forgotten.

  Guangyu stood in the Second Director’s office, nervous in his well-made gown. He was educated. He could recite the Five Classics and develop an elegant eight-legged essay on any Confucian citation. None of that mattered anymore.

  “Mr. Wen. How fast can you write?”

  “How fast?” Guangyu thought he might have heard wrong. “I suppose . . . forty characters a minute.”

  “Oh! Very good.” Second Director smiled. “The job is yours.”

  Guangyu stared. Did the man really not care for his academic rank? His knowledge of art?

  Tian pulled out a sheet of paper and swirled his brush. “What objects would you like to list?” He looked up when Guangyu did not answer. “Come!” he said. “Paintings, jade, bronzes, porcelains—“

  “Porcelains,” Guangyu said.

  “Porcelains.” Tian wrote directions on a piece of paper and handed it to Guangyu with a smudgily printed map. “Go to number twenty-four, the Pavilion for Listening to Cicadas. Rear court, southeast room. Begin there.”

  Guangyu looked at the map.

  “And here,” said Tian. He handed the young man a roll of yellow silk tape. “Every box you list should have a strip of this glued to the bottom.” Tian held up two fingers to show Guangyu how long the strip was to be. “Otherwise you will lose your way. There are too many works.” He smiled again. “You will see.”

  Guangyu made a reverence, offered his thanks, and went away down the hutong, past the gangs of children shouting rhymes, the old men airing caged birds, the women carrying home food. He crossed the street, darting in a youthful pulse of excitement between the rickshas and carts and sputtering motorcars. Men on foot formed a soft, dark-moving tide of gowns and fedoras. Itinerant vendors offered fruit and hot teas. Ruddy-faced market women rearranged their vegetables.

  He passed a few girls of his own class too, well-bred girls, avoiding his eyes as they were trained to avoid the eyes of all men, hidden behind robes, nothing of them visible except dark eyes and the slim fluttering ends of fingers. He walked past them, clutching his map and his roll of yellow silk tape, to the rear entrance of the Forbidden City.

  A guard examined his paper and waved him through. Guangyu had never imagined he would enter this part of the Palace. Until just recently the last Qing emperor, Pu Yi, had lived here.

  Now in front of him lay the imperial garden. He turned away from the artistic arrangement of rocks and twisted trees, the famous viewing pavilion. The marble balustrades, the paving stones of mosaics and fossils, the aged and massive Joined-Together Cypress, all of these he saw, awestruck, but kept walking. Here were the pavilions that had once housed the minor females, the passed-over concubines, their handmaids and eunuchs. Past the Palace of Pure Affection and the Palace of Southern View, then an opening, a turn to the right, and he found himself on a narrow street running north–south, which was flanked by high, tile-roofed walls. Everything was empty and silent. He stepped through a gate in the east wall that took him away from the larger ceremonial buildings—the Hall of Worshiping Ancestors and the Palace in Honor of Talent, in which, if Guangyu remembered correctly, congratulations were traditionally offered on the birth of a son. Away from these he entered a dusty labyrinth of smaller courts, barred by massive ceramic-tile spirit screens and topped by roofline arrangements of guardian animal figures. Between the broken, abandoned paving stones, tufts of grass pushed up. There were acres of this. He still had not seen another person.

  Here. He stepped over a half-rotted wooden sill, into the Pavilion for Listening to Cicadas. He stepped up on the porch of the southeast room and peered through the dirt-streaked glass. It was impossible to see anything. Were those piles of boxes? He tried the door. It opened.

  It was dark. Dust powdered up in his mouth and nose. He lit a small military-style oil lamp. The yellow glow jumped on the cluttered objects that filled the room and threw strange shadows against the high walls. It was cold. The ash on the little charcoal brazier had gone greasy with time.

  Guangyu clapped his hands together for warmth. Boxes were stacked up of every size, from the smallest, to hold a miniature carving or an exquisite little inkstone, up to boxes half a meter high that might hold bronzes or urns. Some of th
e boxes were covered in brocade, but most were the indigo cloth favored by antiquarians, museums, and merchants. The whole heap was dusted with Peking’s yellow silt.

  He turned to the pile nearest him, positioned the oil lamp, and opened the first one. He looked in. Time stopped. On its side, in a custom-crafted nest of snowy white, lay a moon flask in underglaze blue. Around its globe-swollen base a dragon swam, its yellow eyes blazing amid the lotuses. From the reign of Yongle, he thought. Or maybe Xuande. He tipped it over to look. Yongle.

  He put the flask in its box and laid out his writing things. His best boat-shaped ink stick. It had a poem by Du Fu stamped on it and a most graceful swirl of clouds. It dissolved into water to make wonderful ink, with a pigment that made his characters flow like yifan fengxu, a boat in good wind. He wetted it and ground it in his inkstone.

  He pressed back his journal book and began to write: Inventory of the Pavilion for Listening to Cicadas, southeast room. A blue-and-white moon flask, the dragon swimming through the lotus. Made in the reign of Yongle. Then he stopped, and cut a narrow strip of yellow silk ribbon, and glued it on a bottom corner of the box. Done, recorded, marked.

  Lia sat in the big room at the villa, amid the crates, holding the Yongle moon flask in underglaze blue on white. The dragon was so delicately delineated. The jar a perfect sphere in her hands, closing to an impossibly narrow and elegant neck. It was a full moon of articulate form, lovely and lovely forever.

  Now she knew it had been in the Palace as of 1924. It had been in the inventory done during that year. She was closer. A little closer, anyway. Here in the modern world, the real world, she held the same box marked with a faded strip of yellow silk in her hands.

  Doyle was on his way to the Haidian District of Beijing with his friend and colleague An Xing to pick up a child’s baby tooth. The mother had called this morning. Her daughter’s tooth had come out the night before.

  They always went out to the homes together. An did the talking in Chinese, and Doyle provided the conservative, calming presence. With his thin, straight, almost colorless hair falling forward in his eyes and his burly, benign physicality, he looked more respectable than An, who kept his long graying hair in a ponytail and on this day wore an African National Congress T-shirt.