“Where’s Jingdezhen?”
“In the south, in Jiangxi Province. The emperor’s porcelain was made there for almost a thousand years. It’s still the center of pots culture. The best artists are there. Ah, it’s too bad about these cracks. That’s what An meant when he said it was damaged. Remember?” She ran the soft pad of her finger along one, coming down from the rim. The crack itself was a rift as wide as the ocean under her skin, a wilderness canyon, tragic. She felt a stab of such empathy. Would that she could heal it. “Do you know this bowl would be valued at one or two million dollars if it wasn’t damaged? Even as it is, it could fetch twenty thousand U.S.”
“I don’t think he’d ever sell it.”
“No. He shouldn’t.” To possess something of this order was to possess the past, but she sensed she didn’t need to say it. He knew; she could tell by the way he looked at the piece. She could feel the warmth of him. “Look,” she said. “Look with me when I turn it over. It will have a four-character reign mark in puce. So rare, the puce. Usually the reign mark was cobalt. Ready?” She upended it. “See?”
He looked. She was right. Four characters in puce on a white background. And rarer still, a collector’s seal was applied to the base in tiny spaced droplets of sealing wax. Not quite connecting, impressionistic, a tiny masterpiece of dripped-wax calligraphy, they suggested the characters for Ivory Fan Study, the family collection name.
“Watching you, I see… you use your hands with pots, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. “You’re right. In some way I know how it’s supposed to feel.” She fitted the bowl back into its box and hooked the lid down, put it in his hands.
He pushed it back on the shelf, all the way against the wall. He could hear An talking on the phone in the outer room. He turned to her, right next to him, her eyes on a level with his, and to his faint surprise he saw the web of exhaustion around her eyes, the shadows on her face. “You’re tired,” he said. “You look tired.”
She met his eyes gratefully. “I am. I haven’t been sleeping. Not enough anyway. My pots are so incredible. And there are so many of them.”
“You have to sleep.”
“I know.”
“Come on, I’ll take you back,” he said, and he reached to touch her shoulder in an easy American way. Then An Xing was in the doorway. “Well,” he said, “zenmoyang?” What do you think?
“It’s fantastic,” she said to An, “completely lovely. Thank you. And thank you,” she said to Michael in English, with an inflection she was sure he would understand, because in the nicest possible way she felt shepherded by him and she wanted him to know she got it, she felt it, and she liked the way it felt.
Back in her room she settled down in her favorite spot on the bed. She had really enjoyed herself with him. She felt the link with him. She wished she didn’t live on the other side of the world. She wished she weren’t leaving soon. But she did and she was.
So she worked. After calling Dr. Zheng and leaving a message asking him to send Phillip, she found herself pulled back to the chicken cup. She brought the image up again on her screen. The form and shape were sublime. The pots of the Chenghua reign had low, ideally balanced bodies, with a graceful emphasis on the horizontal. Relaxed yet precise. This little cup nailed it.
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?