A Cup of Light

by Nicole Mones

  A shout went up. He scanned quickly to his right. They were breaking now. They couldn’t hold.

  He yanked his pistol from his belt and fired into the air. A puff of smoke rose above him. A stunned silence.

  “Stop it!” he roared. “Let us finish loading and we’ll take you on!”

  “Sir,” the subordinate hissed. “There’s no room.”

  “Quiet,” Lu ordered.

  The silence still hung.

  Then suddenly a man standing near them in the crowd shouted into the emptiness: “There’s no room!”

  “No room!”

  The crowd started calling out again, shoving, and this time the tide gathered itself, breathed deeply in with a bobbing of heads and a last chance to stay alive, and then pushed forward in a tangle of arms and legs and backs and shoulders, one wedge, no stopping it. They streamed up the ramp and onto the boat.

  “Stop!” screamed Captain Lu, but now the wind had whipped up and his voice was snatched out of his throat and tossed away. He saw the people fanning out on the deck of the boat, crowding on board until the deck itself sank, groaning and pitching, almost to the level of the water itself.

  “The boat will sink!” he screamed. “Some of you must get off! One in three, get off!” At the same time he looked back at the dock and cursed inwardly. There were still crates waiting.

  “One in three!” he called again.

  No one moved.

  “Now!” he shouted, and raised his handgun high and cocked it, to make clear what he meant.

  The boat rocked in the waves. Then a woman, in silence, held up her small child above her head. Another woman raised a baby. A wail came threading up, just the thinnest single voice at first, but soon all the women had babies and toddlers over their heads, wailing, sobbing, pleading for their lives. Where was the baby he had given to the woman? But the baby would be all right. The woman would take care of it.

  His man was back. “Sir, we have forty crates yet.”

  Yes. He saw them. Still on the dock. And all the babies, all the mothers.

  He turned to the flank of men who had assembled. “Up anchor. We leave.”

  Eyes popped. “Sir!”

  “Ready the boat. We leave.” His voice was crisp and hard. He walked away rapidly, concealing his terror and his shame. He could not put them off to their deaths. He ran down the plank and onto the warped, river-smelling boards. He touched one of the crates, laid his hand on it. What was inside? He glanced at the stenciled characters. Meishu taoci. Ceramics. He offered a silent reverence of apology, then he turned and ran, last man up, jumping onto the ship as the ramp rose. The boat’s engines roared and it pulled away, turning in its wide arc down the river. He watched the little stack of crates left behind growing smaller and smaller as the dock floated away into the distance.

  So, she thought, raising her eyes again to the red-framed doors. Left behind, then taken off the dock, and buried under Wu land and forgotten. The land belonging to the Wus and then to the state and then back to the Wus again. And it was there all that time.

  She put her hearing aids in and the world came back, abruptly amplified. A car engine roared up the hutong, cresting, fading. She finished her tea and walked out across the entry court. She passed the fountain with its spattering flow of sound and walked through the gate of ornamental rock.

  She thought he was in his room. It was early morning; he’d be getting ready for work. She knocked.

  “I knew it was you,” he said when he opened the door.

  It seemed to her that he stood over her, but actually they were the same height. “I know you have to go to work,” she said.

  He drew her in and shut the door. “I do have to go to work. I’m also glad you came.”

  “I was going to ask if you wanted to walk out and have breakfast in the hutong.” Usually she didn’t eat in the morning, but today she felt alive, she felt hungry, and with her smile she challenged him. “It’s wild. I know.”

  “I love wild.” He looked at his watch. “Even if only on principle. I have time too. I have to get to work, but I have time. Let me get my things.”

  She watched him move around, collecting papers, making a wedge of his hand and tucking his shirt in, all the way around. She looked at his things. A man’s things were always, for her, a glimpse of who he was.

  But he didn’t have much. A desk, a bed, and an old wooden wardrobe. A TV. The white walls were bare. There was a table with rows of Polaroids on it. “What’s this?” she said. All Chinese children.

  “Those are the kids in my study,” he said.

  She saw that each child was posed the same way, in the same spot, yet each was a universe of uniqueness. “You took these?”

  “I did. Lia?”

  She turned and in that questing instant, her eyes alight and the beginning of a smile on her face, he took her picture. The little motor ground and the print shot out in its tray.

  “Here.” He tore it off. They leaned closer. First it was a pale, ghostly square, then her face emerged, looking over her shoulder. She looked pretty. He took a loop of tape and stuck it to the door frame, just above another instant photo, of a small Chinese girl. “You can stay there,” he said, “with her.”

  “Honored.” She liked it. She liked his room too, in a way. “I admire your room. It’s so plain it’s aggressive. You said something the other day, that you wanted to forget everything. This is the room for it.”

  “It’s true. Here I like to forget.”

  “Great thinkers have preceded you. You know that? You’re like Themistocles.”

  He turned around slowly, the smile in his eyes canny, awaiting the joke.

  “No,” she said, “I mean it. Everybody in his era was doing memory work. It was the thing. Memory feats were much admired.”

  “But not by Themistocles.”

  “No. He was famous for saying he preferred the science of forgetting to the art of memory.” She touched on the plain surroundings with her eyes. “Like you.”

  “Like me,” he said.

  “And then these,” she said, looking down at the rows of photographs. “They’re beautiful in a strange way.” She picked one up. “Who is this?”

  “Hu Meiru. She lives over in the western district, near the zoo. Seven and a half.”

  She looked at him. “Does she have lead poisoning?”

  “Yes. They all have elevated levels.”

  “All of them? That’s terrible.”

  “All I’ve gotten back,” he corrected himself. “I haven’t collected teeth from all of them yet.”

  “It’s awful.” She picked up another one. “Who’s this?”

  He stepped closer to the table. “Zhang Yeh.”

  “Him too?”

  “Him too.”

  “And what about you?” she said, because in his eyes she was sure she saw an accumulation of sadness. “You think about it all day long.”

  “It’s different for me.” He straightened one of the pictures. She saw his hands were careful, precise.

  “You care for what you’re doing.”

  “I can’t care for them.”

  “Look at this.” She swept a hand above the table.

  “I just record them.” He picked up one of the pictures and balanced it in his palm.

  She took it from him. “What’s his name?”

  “That’s Little Chen.”

  She looked at him over the top of the picture. “Special,” she said. “He’s special to you.”

  He smiled, caught. “Yes. He’s one I’ve gotten to know. He’s been in and out of the hospital, though for other reasons.”

  She looked down at the picture as if it were animate, as if it had a soul, and to his surprise pressed it to her cheek. Then she handed it back. “This one’s good to care about,” she said. “I think you’re doing the right thing.”

  He put the picture back in its spot. “I just record
them.”

  “That’s right,” she said, and he could hear the grin in her voice. “The whole world knows that’s all you do.”

  He pushed the fine sandy-gray hair off his forehead and swallowed a smile of his own. She turned away from him, looking down at the pictures, and there was something about her long back, bent over a table, interested, distracted, that made him see her in other rooms in other places. He could imagine her in a room that belonged to them. It was a strange feeling, indistinct, powerful. An involuntary glimpse. He hardly knew her. Yet it felt real. He walked over next to her, as close as he could. “Ready, Lia?” he said, and now she turned to him, happy, looking the same way she looked in the picture on the wall, and they went out together into the hutong.

  They walked on the side to stay out of the way of the cars bouncing and honking down the uneven pavement, the bicyclists and pedestrians separating in a constant tide for them, people going to work, and other people, old people and small children, out for the early air, sauntering, talking, sitting. Along the way people were opening their shops and rattling out their metal awnings.

  They walked down the hutong to his favorite vendor, an old lady with a starched white cap behind an iron griddle. “She’s very particular,” he said. “She only comes in the morning, and just for a few hours.” He smiled at the lady. “Zaoshang hao,” he said to her, Good morning.

  “Zao,” she boomed back, and then looked at Lia. “You’re now bringing your wife! Very good.”

  They both ignored this. “Two with egg,” he said, and paid.

  “Two with egg.” She reached into the warmer and pulled out a pair of sesame bing, palm-sized disc-shaped flatbreads crusted with seeds. She split them, and little clouds of steam puffed out. Eggs were frying on the griddle. She turned them a few more times, until the yolk was almost set and the whites flecked with brown, and then dropped an egg into each of the pockets. She folded them in twists of paper and passed them across the counter. “Man man chi,” she said.

  “It’s hot,” Michael warned Lia, but then immediately took a bite of his anyway.

  She took a bite of hers too, and thought it might have been the best thing she’d ever eaten. Just a fried egg, with salt, in split chewy bread, but it made her feel for a minute like she belonged on earth. “Michael,” she said. “Can we come here every morning and eat for the rest of our lives?”

  He laughed. “I will if you will.”

  She couldn’t believe she had just said that. “I was kidding,” she said.

  He touched her foot with his. “I know. Let’s go sit down.” And they took a few steps to a low stone wall and perched, eating. “How’s the job?” he said.

  “Done, almost done. But I can’t quite let go of it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I’ve found fakes, you know. I think I’m right about everything. But what if I’m wrong?”

  He looked at her, chewing, thinking. When he had swallowed he said, “Let’s consider it, then. What if you are?”

  “Well—“”

  “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “It could mean a lot of money.”

  “I guess that would be bad.” He dropped in the last piece of bing and smiled, his round mouth making an amused bow. “But that’s just money. Do we really think it would be all that bad?”

  She smiled at his saying “we,” at the warm sense that someone stood in the ring with her. It was not real, she knew, just a transient kindness, but it felt good. “I guess not. It’s just money. Then there’s reputation.”

  “That’s a little harder. But still not a killer.”

  “It’s just we never do these alone.”

  “Well. Tell you what I’ll do.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll come and stand beside you and we’ll look at them, and I’ll tell you you’re right. Unless of course I think you’re wrong. In which case I’ll tell you that too.”

  She laughed.

  “Would that help?” He cocked his head at her.

  “No. But thank you.”

  “You’re always thanking me. Now I have to go to work.” He stood up.

  “I do too.”

  “So.” He stood across from her.

  “Good luck today,” she said.

  “Thanks. See you later?”

  “Sure.” She brought the flat of her hand up to shield her eyes against the climbing sun. Watching him walk away down the hutong, she wished she knew when later would be and what he wanted to do with her then. When she turned the last corner back to the guesthouse, she saw her driver waiting.

  At the villa she went to her big room, flooded with morning, and looked up and down the rows of crates. There was number nineteen, with the gold-decorated white-glazed dish from the Yuan Dynasty; number thirty-one, with its pair of blue-and-white dragon roundel bowls from the reign of Kangxi. She loved them especially.

  She sat in the front, before her pots, and clicked on her laptop. She opened the inventory and scanned through it. Everything was there. It was finished and it was cleaned. She scrolled down through, fast, the digital photo images blinking past her subconscious. She had it, okay, she could believe in it. She thought of him standing beside her, large and comforting, telling her yes, she was right. And sometimes telling her she was wrong. This made her give just the tiniest bubble of a laugh. For a second she let herself imagine them together.

  In a careful set of keystrokes she encrypted the long document and then entered Dr. Zheng’s most private electronic address. Good-bye to all of you, she thought from her heart to the pots in the room; thank you for having come through my life. And she pressed SEND.

  Jack and Anna had eaten, steak and asparagus off hundred-year-old Limoges. They liked eating alone. They had personal assistants who prepared their food and served it, but then they preferred for those people to leave. They liked to wash the dishes together by hand, listening to public radio. They didn’t want employees in the house overnight. They did not even like having guests. They had always been like that, since they’d been together. It was one of the many small resonances that made them happy as a pair.

  It was when they were watching sports, later, that he told her. First he turned down the TV.

  “What?” she said.

  “I want to buy it. Are you agreed?”

  “What?” Although she knew.

  “The porcelain.”

  “How much?”

  “Seven hundred ninety pieces. She found ten fakes.”

  He felt the little snort of laughter lift her shoulders, next to him. “I meant money.”

  “They are quoting one hundred ninety million dollars. I wouldn’t expect to pay that.”

  “I should hope not.”

  “No,” he said. The real offer would never be made up front. They didn’t expect that and neither did he. The most interesting and climactic part of the deal would begin now, the mutual pushing and posturing and retreating that would bring them eventually to an agreed price.

  He would find the negotiation diverting, maybe even obsessive, and with any luck it might sharpen him, polish him a little, but the real match was with his wife. All manner of obstacles in the outside world had proven surmountable, but Anna Sing presented a lifetime of challenge. With her he felt alive. He gave thanks every day for having a woman who was his equal.

  At this moment she was giving him the raised eyebrow. “You know what I think. It’s fashion, taste, art—fundamentally unstable.”

  “But it doesn’t often lose.”

  She closed her eyes and smiled privately, into herself. They’d been covering the same ground for days. “It’s not worth a hundred ninety million.”

  “No,” he said softly. “Actually it’s worth more than that. It’s worth two hundred million, three. Ten. It’s the past. It’s objects adored by an emperor. That is something that will never come again. Ever in the world. Xuanfei,” he said, deliberately using her Chinese name and feeling her start, because he never c
alled her that. He dropped his hand down from behind and covered her gently curving abdomen. He was calling on her deeper obligations, and he knew it.

  “It’s not that day,” she said.

  “Sure it is,” he said, and she laughed, and they slowly moved into a different position on the couch.

  “You’ve seen the inventory?”

  “All of it.”

  “Photos?”

  “Everything. Well—I just got it. I have to study it.”

  “And?”

  “It’s magnificent. Come on. Let’s go look.”

  “In a minute.” She smiled that smile he knew, because he was a connoisseur of the many moods of Anna Sing. This smile meant she wasn’t ready to say so, she was going to torture him quite a bit longer and get maximum oppositional points out of it, but eventually she was going to warm to his plan.

  “Just wait,” he said, catching her legs on either side of him. “In ten years, if the market continues this way, it’ll be worth three hundred million.”

  Bai brought the truck to the address on the north shore of Houhai Lake before dawn, as he had been instructed. He pulled up to the gatehouse, cigarette dangling casually from his hand, and called a gruff, complicit greeting to the guard, who stood drinking tea from a jar. The guard waved him ahead. Wide gates at the rear of the court lay open to a long drive rustling with trees. He could see a rambling white house with curving red roofs. Workmen were waiting.

  Bai pulled up to them and shut down the engines.

  “The cargo goes in the back there?” said the head man.

  “Just so, but let me show you.” He took the man behind and opened the gleaming double doors. He had turned off the freezer before he set out. Still, it was cold. They climbed in and Bai unlocked and slid open the hidden doors in the back. Bai heard a northern expletive of surprise slip from the other man’s mouth.

  “The cargo goes in here,” Bai said, flipping a switch to light up the main compartment. Then he turned and stepped back onto the shiny-speckled metal floor of the freezer. “And when you are finished, this compartment must be left completely clean! This is a hygienic carrier!”