by Nicole Mones
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 fel
t-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. “D
aphne.” 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.
11
Lia’s train shot through the dense subtropical hills, a rattling stream of mercury against the red earth with its rippling shades of green. It felt good to be alone. Most of the way from Nanchang she’d sat with a family bringing their aged father back from the big city after an operation. They were loud, friendly, all doting on the old patriarch. They insisted she share their elaborate breakfast, stacked up on the little train table in tin containers.
They talked about their lives, about the scenery, and finally at the last town the family had got off after much exchange of addresses and exhortations to come and visit them in China, to bring her own family, her husband; yes, she’d said, of course, she would. She didn’t bother telling them she had no husband, no children. No need to make it real. They did not actually expect to hear from her again. Still, they were all over her in the fullness of Chinese social grace. “Good-bye,” she said again and again, all warmth and smiles, “good-bye.”
