A Cup of Light Read Free Page B

She always traveled like this. She pulled her clothes on in front of the mirror, watching her straight up-and-down body. She looked okay. She always felt she barely got by with dressing and adornment. At least she’d figured out how to put herself together, though it was an act, on a certain level. She leaned over from the waist to fasten her antique-penny-colored hair at the crown of her head, then stood up and braided it all the way down.
    Hitching up her leather bag and her computer, she stepped out into the soft morning air. Shiny-leafed camellias crowded up along the covered walkway. Above the arching roofs the sky was blue, faintly tinged with the brown of pollution. Through the old round gate she could see the car waiting. Oh, my pots! she thought. Finally.
    The driver took her northwest along Gulou, past the drum tower, and through a maze of hutongs to the shores of Houhai Lake, a long, thin finger of water here in north central Beijing. They drove along the lake and then turned sharply into the walled grounds of a sprawling white house trimmed with red verandas.
    A uniformed man in the gatehouse nodded them past. She jumped out and ran in. The garden was gorgeously tended, with light pooling down through trees over rocks and ponds, but she walked quickly through it and up a few slate steps to a stone-paved veranda. At the front door, under the incandescently painted roof overhang, a small man in a brown suit was waiting.
    She returned his polite greetings and followed him in over the worn, thin carpeting. It took her eyes a few seconds to adjust to the dark. Then she saw they were crossing a long living room, green walls reaching high up to ornate moldings and European chandeliers, curtains drawn behind square, Chinese-style arrangements of couches and tea tables. The must and smell of decades rose with every soft scuff of their feet. At the end of the living room, they followed a corridor past a dining room filled with Swiss clocks and a whitewashed, light-filled kitchen. Then the man opened a screen door and they stepped down into an enclosed inner court, across the grass, and up the steps on the other side. He clicked open the glass-paned doors and flung them wide.
    â€œThe light should be here, I believe.” He reached into the room and brushed the wall. The room choked in an incandescent flood.
    She stood staring. It was a vast room filled with wood packing crates. They made four neat rows. She counted. Forty crates. Forty of them. That couldn’t be. There were supposed to be twenty pots, which would be one crate. If there were forty crates of pots, there were— She hesitated.
    â€œMr.—” She turned to look for the man. He was gone.

2
    She went to the first crate, the one nearest her. It opened easily.
    At first all she saw was the nest of packed, tight-spiral wood shavings, flattened by years, springing up as if breathing at last. She sank her fingers in and rustled through. There, the first box. Her fingers traced its cotton-cloth-covered shape.
    She unrolled a length of thick felt on the floor and set the indigo-dyed box on it. She eased the ivory bit from its loop and tipped it open.
    Resting in the silk was a covered jar in underglaze blue, ornately bordered and inscribed in a faux-Arabic script. She recognized the Zhengde period, 1506 to 1521. The court had been infatuated at that time with the motifs of the Middle East, like this ten-inch jar, almost perfectly potted. She lifted it and checked the mark and period. Yes. Made in the reign of Zhengde.
    She turned on her laptop and brought up her template for measuring, describing, and recording. She entered everything about the Zhengde jar, carefully, quickly, heart going fast. There had to be eight hundred pots in this room. She made digital photos all the way around the piece, recorded all its physical details. At the same time she memorized what she saw and assigned it a place in her memory world. There were already many