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 potter! 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.