by Nicole Mones
“Don’t even ask me to keep you out. You’re going back to work.”
“Yes. All right.” She was smiling into the phone. “See you.” They hung up and she phoned out to the gatehouse to expect him.
Some time later she heard the door open and slam, far away, and heard the footsteps following the route she knew so well, the green damask rooms and the long corridor, the inner courtyard, the three steps up. She opened the door before he could knock on it.
“Hi,” he said, half-surprised, as if he had not quite expected to smile so at the sight of her. Then he registered the large room. He went still as an animal, eyes clocking down the rows of crates. “Look at all this. I had no idea there was so much.”
“You can’t tell anyone.” In a blink her voice was serious. “I mean it.”
“Who would I tell?”
“I’m sorry. But you must promise.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. His voice was soft. He really didn’t want her to worry. “Where’d all this come from?”
She laughed with the delight of the one whisking away the veil. “The front man is a wealthy developer, but it’s a government-sanctioned sale. As far as I can tell it’s a tiny part of the imperial collection, which was hidden in the countryside and rediscovered much later. Kind of a common story. After that it was either nationalized, or the government’s cooperating in the sale.”
“And the pots? Are they great?”
“Oh.” She closed her eyes in bliss at the thought. “I’m telling you, the stars in this room. There are things in here that would make you cry.”
“Show me. Make me cry.”
She looked at him and thought: But I don’t want to do that. “Let me think.” She turned her head, tapped through what she knew was in the crates. She paused in her mind on one she’d especially loved, a clair de lune dish.
“How about this.” She crossed to the thirty-fourth crate and dug out a box. She really wanted him to like it. “I don’t know if this is the right thing to show you. It’s a monochrome. Its rarity lies in qualities not easy to see at first.” She lifted out a dish of flower shape with gently raised sides and a faintly lobed, petaled rim, in a moonlight glaze of palest blue, almost white. “Can you see what I mean?” she asked. “Its beauty is different. Very distilled.”
He lowered himself in one fold to the floor, and again she was amazed at how lightly he moved around, for his size. And look, he was riveted by the dish. “Do you see it?”
“Yes,” he said, “I do.”
“This is nice.” She laid her hand on the inner flat of the dish as if taking its pulse. Then she drew her finger along the curves between the subtly incised, overlapping flower petals. “Here the glaze accumulates just a bit and darkens to make a suggestion of shadow.”
He looked at her hand.
“Do you want to touch it?” she said.
“Can I?”
“Of course.”
He looked up at her face.
“Come on.” She picked up his hand, which willingly came to hers, and guided it into the dish. She felt his strong fingers wrapping around hers, saying yes. But she disengaged and laid his hand in the dish—cool, soft, pearlized. He arched his palm back and rotated the flat of his hand softly in its bottom. Neither of them moved until he withdrew. “Thank you,” he said.
“You feel it?”
“I do.”
“Look.” She turned the dish over and pointed to the reign mark in underglaze blue. “Made in the Qing Dynasty, reign of Yongzheng.”
“When was that?”
“The 1720s.”
“It looks so perfect.”
“Ah!” She raised a pleased eyebrow. “That’s porcelain. It is immortal.” She placed the pale, glowing dish back in its silk cloud, in its dark box, and latched the cover down. “Good-bye,” he heard her say to the box before she pushed it to the side.
Before she could move to stand up, he leaned forward and kissed her, just her lips, softly. He did not enter her mouth. He stayed still and so did she and their mouths floated against each other until he reached out and gave her lower lip one touch. He pulled away. “I promised you, right back to work,” he said. But his smile had something different in it now.
“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 potte
r! 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, we
athered 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.
