A Cup of Light (15 page)

“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. “Daphne.” 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.”

And then it was only one more hour to Jingdezhen, an hour to herself. At first all she thought about was Michael. It was like he was there inside her, waiting for a private moment so he could well up and fill her mind again. If they kept seeing each other . . . but she pushed this warm-flooding premonition away. Maybe it was not real. Even if it was, she was still going to have to leave in a few days.

Then there was the job. She still had some questions to answer. As the train rocked along the rails she turned over and over what she had gotten from Gao, and what she'd dug out on her own. If the collection had not been moved out of the Forbidden City in 1913 for J. P. Morgan, if it had still been inside the Palace as of the 1924 inventory, then it was separated later.

She still thought this most likely happened during the collection's flight across China, through the war against the Japanese and then the civil war, 1931 to 1947—when the emperor's art made it to Taiwan.
That
was a long, arduous struggle in trucks, trains, and boats, often barely hours ahead of the bombs and artillery of advancing armies. It was the Nationalists, the Guomindang, who had the shipment. They moved it by night, sometimes by whatever rough hands could be assembled. How could some of it
not
have disappeared? The curators of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, where the collection found its home, always took pride in saying that every one of the six hundred forty thousand pieces moved out of the Forbidden City arrived intact. Oh sure, Lia had always thought. Right.

Of course there were the twenty-one hundred crates that were well known to have been left behind in Nanjing—twenty-one hundred crates with some twenty-six thousand pieces of imperial porcelain. As everyone knew, they remained in deep storage in Nanjing while still, to this day, museum officials from Nanjing and Beijing feuded over who would get them. No one had ever seen them, except for a few curators who weren't talking. Aside from those crates, she had never heard a definitive story about any part of the collection being lost or separated along the way.

The art had started out on trains. Five trains, thirty-nine sealed cars each. The Japanese occupation of Manchuria had reached all the way down to Liaoning Province, perilously close to Peking. They could sweep in at any time. And so in a single night, in the fall of 1931, all the art was carried out of the Forbidden City and taken away.

She went inside, to her most private door. In deep memory she wanted to see this. She plucked out her hearing aids, rested her head against the train seat, and locked her vision through the glass. Out there were blurring, hurtling banks of green, dissolving. Inside her mind were the gates to the examination yard, great red gates with brass joins. They opened and she walked through.

Liu Weijin, one of the bureaucrats in charge of the Forbidden City in 1931, knew the end was near. They'd been updating inventories and packing boxes for months already, and the advance of the enemy had been as inexorable as lava flow. Now all Manchuria was Japanese.

They couldn't take all the art out to safety. They could only take the best of it. They worked fast: open the padded silk boxes, check the contents, add to the list, prioritize—staying, or going?—stack them to one side or another. The best workers were those who swiped like lightning with their brushes, methodical, unemotional, who could comb the dusty piles without stopping to gaze at the glory they held in their hands. If they stopped to look, to feel, they could not do it. They could not keep up the pace.

They wrote: a pale celadon vase, crackleware, ring-handled, mark and period from the Southern Song. A pair of mille-fleur wine cups, Qing, mark and period Qianlong. A hanging scroll painting of men crossing a bridge beneath steep mountains, signed by Tai Chin.

And then the word came. No one had known exactly when it would happen. Now it was here. In an instant, in a single turn of the head, they would have to flee. Today.

Liu Weijin put the phone down and turned to his colleague Tan Hui. “They are at the edge of Liaoning.” It was only a few hundred
li
away. The orders went out like fire over dry grass. Crating and loading sped to a frenzy.

Now Liu needed soldiers. It was two miles from the Forbidden City to the train station. He could not transport the collection without armed guard. He knew the streets were awash in refugees, people trying to get out, walking, spilling on either side of the puttering string of motorized vehicles, stepping around the iron-wheeled rickshas, the bicycle-pumped carts, the mules pulling entire families heaped up with children and servants and possessions. Liu needed men—a lot of them. He dialed General Tong.

“General Tong, sir,” he said breathlessly. “It is Liu Weijin—“

“Mr. Liu! You have received our message! Everything must be moved tonight.”

“Yes.” Liu said a silent prayer. “General. We need troops.”

“Impossible,” Tong said.

“The art must be guarded.”

“The capital must be guarded,” the General corrected him. “I cannot spare troops.”

Liu swallowed. Most residents, of course, had no choice but to either flee or go inside, lock their doors, and wait for the inevitable. “Sir,” he said, “please listen.”

The General lapsed into reluctant silence.

“No matter what happens, we can get the art out. This is cultural patrimony. This above all we should protect.”

On the crackly phone he heard a long breath. Liu knew his words had flown home.

“All right.” General Tong's words all but collapsed Liu's heart with relief. “You'll have troops.”

So Nationalist soldiers arrived in trucks an hour later and dismounted amid the loading of wheeled carts and the harnessing of mules. Their rifles swung against their khaki puttees as they stepped in and out of the decrepit Palace buildings, across courtyards with roots and tufts of grass heaving up the ancient marble paving stones, listening to the strange bounce of their voices off the timeless stone walls and the whistle of wind on marble, trading cigarettes, laughing. Most had never been inside the Forbidden City before. Most were young. Some seemed like children.

In front of the soldiers, the laborers swarmed the line. They heaved the crates into the big iron-wheeled wooden carts, stacked them like tall, fat coffins, shouting, strapping the cargo down, pulling tight the ropes.

Finally they were ready to move. They had closed the streets running south from the Forbidden City, and they'd closed Jung Hsien Hutong east, all the way from the main corner where the Guomindang Party Headquarters faced the Supreme Court to the station. Thousands of recruits with smart brown straps of leather across their chests lined up shoulder to shoulder along the entire route. They made a human wall two
li
long.

When the first mule creaked and clopped through this uniformed human tunnel, dragging the first cart, Liu Weijin walked beside it. This was his cart, his most beloved things, and he meant to stay beside it all the way and make sure it reached its destination. In here were his treasured Chenghua chicken cups, his favorite painting, Fan Kuan's “Travelers by a Mountain Stream,” his favorite Qin bronzes and Yuan Dynasty carvings in white jade.

The mules set a slow, steady rhythm with their hooves against the broad flat stones, the spindly metal wheels creaked, and everything else held its breath in unnatural silence. The people had been ordered inside and away; those in the buildings on either side of Jung Hsien had been told to extinguish all lights. The only glow was from the torches carried by the mule drivers.

But the people were there. All the windows, all the cracks and crannies and peepholes, all the upper floors with their built-out, ornate porches—these were alive with eyes. Liu could feel the avid faces in the shadows, feel the gasping, riveted human energy. Whole clans pressed against windows to watch the emperor's treasures pass beneath. It was unheard of, it tore heaven and earth apart. Some people unrolled plain white banners from upper floors to signify mourning.

This will be a new Chinese world now, Liu thought. He looked behind him at the caravan of carts stretching away into the darkness pinpointed by the flaming brands, the rolling mule-drawn line he knew would rumble all through the night. Soon they would be Japanese subjects.

In a strange way he felt resignation. When the collection was loaded and had pulled out, he planned to melt away into the city, and from that moment on he'd put everything he had into surviving. He was lucky to have no family. Preservation would be his only goal.

And then they were there, rolling into the dark cavernous hall of P'ing Han Station with its soaring metal struts up under the distant roof, and the soldiers now shouted orders, directing, moving crates on the trains. Five full trains to load. Thirty-nine cars each. And as he watched his cart, his crates, his own personal points of light loaded into the first car, on the first train, he let himself exhale. And then mute, held up by equal parts grief and wonder, he stood witness through all the hours it took the collection to arrive. Nineteen thousand, five hundred fifty-seven crates. One at a time. All night long.

And from there, Lia knew, the art began its journey. Somewhere along those sixteen years lay her clue.

Jingdezhen was close. Already outside the train window, rising and receding out of the foaming red earth, she could see the low, sharp-topped green hills around the town. They were familiar to her. Like most porcelain people, she'd been here already. On pilgrimage.

She leaned her head against the glass. Thatched mud and brick homes of villagers raced by. Far ahead, down the track, she could see the charcoal haze that hung like a pall over the town, as it had for a thousand years. It was the smoke of pots cooking, an indescribably exciting scent.

The train squealed to a stop. Jingdezhen was the end of the line. The passengers dragged their bags over the steamy platform, across the tile floor, and through a low-ceilinged concrete terminal. The big glass windows were streaked with dirt of many years and admitted only a vague light. She was the only foreigner in the crowd, and tall too. She stood out as they all spilled onto the sidewalk, blinking in the hot liquid glare of the south China summer. Yet no one looked twice at her. They were used to outside pots people.

First she'd go to the Jingdezhen Hotel to get a room. She could see the flashes of Jiangxi's beauty, even here, walking up Zhushan Lu in the center of town. Banana fronds lined the roadway. Trees rustled over the low concrete buildings. Above the noises of traffic and machinery and the modern world rose the cacophony of birds. She raised her hand for a taxi and had the driver take her high on Lianhuatang Lu, over a park with a small lake, to the Jingdezhen Hotel. It was a pretty, leafy spot backed up against the hillside, a backwater modern hotel with blank, inexpensive furniture, which always seemed empty. She checked in for a night.

From there she went straight to the Ceramics Research Institute. The best local professors and historians were here. She knew a few of them.

“Professor Lu Bin, is he by any chance in his office today?” she inquired of a thirtyish male clerk at the front desk.

“Professor Lu is here.”

“Ah, so excellent.” She handed him her card. “Please convey my apologies for visiting unexpectedly. But if he's free . . .”

The clerk picked up the phone, punched a code, and began talking in low and rapid Jiangxi dialect. It was a natural, territory-marking response to her having spoken Mandarin. She waited patiently. “He is free,” the clerk told her finally, and she turned for the stairs. They were worn to soft, smooth basins under her feet.

Professor Lu was waiting for her at the top of the stairs. “Fan Luo Na,” he said with his charming, rumpled surprise. Lu had overlong gray hairs he combed across the top of his head. Sometimes, like now, these picked up electric charge and lifted ghostlike from his scalp. He pulled off his brown glasses and smiled and blinked her into his office.

“It's been a long time,” she said, which was a standard greeting whether it had been one year or ten. “Everything well?”

“Everything's well. Now, sit down! Have tea.” He pulled her into his office and busied himself briefly with the things. “Now. Here.” He set the cup in front of her. “Ah! But I have something to show you.”

He fetched a catalog from a drawer in a side table and came back with it. She recognized its cover before he even sat down. It was the book from the last spring auction of Armstrong's, their principal rival house.

He opened it to a marked page. “Just look at this.” He turned it toward her so she could see a tall, narrow-necked vase in iron-red glaze with a dragon design. Late Qing. She glanced at the caption below the photograph.
Reign of Xuantong.
She remembered it. It was a good piece, not a great one, but good. It had sold for about fifty thousand dollars.