Picking Bones from Ash

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

  “I got a tip that several retired generals are holding garage sales today,” François explained to me on a drive south from San Francisco to the wealthy community of Pebble Beach. “High-ranking military people are always a good source for antiques since they get to live in conquered countries long before we civilians are able to visit.”

  There was nothing truly valuable at the first two houses. The third was an enormous Spanish-style mansion with white stucco, chocolate trim, and a garden of ferns. In the distance, I heard the whack of men hitting golf balls, while cypress trees drooped under the weight of a porous blanket of moss.

  “Rumi. Come here,” François said. He had found a collection of gongs mixed in with several sets of weights and a dusty exercise bike. “One of these belonged to the Ch’ing emperor,” he whispered. I tested gong after gong. Waves of sound overlapped each other. Finally I struck one of the last remaining gongs. Shimmering silver flooded the garage, colliding with windows and the electrical wiring. The walls buzzed. When the tight, higher waves of the sound died down, the cavernous lower register continued on, pinning my ankles to the floor.

  “That’s it,” I said, and to this day, when I look at a fake, it strikes me as if it were a wrong note in a song.

  It isn’t just musical instruments that have a voice. This is what most people don’t understand. They look at a vase or a statue and see something static. I hear the way the robes of a Japanese wooden warrior god cut through the air, and the sound tells me if the statue was crafted during the dramatic Kamakura period, or later. I watch porcelain bowls open their mouths, like a school of fish in a pond, and hear them sing in clear or cloudy notes.

  I learned to hear how different objects speak with the same voice if they were crafted around the same time. By the time I was twenty, I understood that the squabbling of the Warring States era carried over from a chaotic frieze of warriors and chariots decorating a metal flagpole to a clay half-dragon-half-lion, the kind of fanciful creature that can only come to life when a country is in chaos. An Edo print of a town scene, sharp with detail and color, came from the same period as a Buddha carved in haste, his allure forgotten as people turned their attention away from the temples to the streets.

  “Now you can see clearly,” my father said to me.

  “Actually,” I said, “the objects talk to me.”

  He thought I was joking. “Objects don’t talk.”

  “They do to me.”

  “Whatever you have to believe.” He shrugged. “Whatever it takes for you to realize your potential.”

  My relationship with objects developed in secret. Over time, I became almost as good at identifying art as my father. He was proud and liked to place piece after piece before me as a test. Secretly, I would wait until the object opened up its heart and told me its story. Out loud I would justify my discovery using the language and terms of which my father approved.

  I was just a teenager when he brought me out from the back of the store where I was shyly researching and cataloging our inventory, to demonstrate my abilities to some dealer acquaintances, in town for the San Francisco Arts of Pacific Asia show.

  “Pull out your treasures, gentlemen,” he said, “and let’s see how she does.”

  Peter Brockman from Chicago put on a pair of white gloves he’d kept tucked in his pocket. He untied twin strings wrapped around a cylindrical scroll and unfurled the paper on the glass countertop. I went over to inspect the sheet.

  It was quiet, with only the sound of men breathing. I put on my own pair of white gloves and held the scroll open myself, running my eyes across its lines and shading. I could feel my father beside me, all anticipation and nerves. If I succeeded, his standing would be enhanced in the eyes of these men.

  I waited for the painting to speak to me. It was a standard composition of a little hut on a sparsely wooded island in the foreground, separated from distant hills by a large body of water. I focused on the trees, on the way their roots gripped the earth. The roots should have been full of tension, like claws gripping a shoulder. But these roots were flat and almost floating against the dirt. There was no sound at all. Then my eyes slid over the slick, frictionless surface of the paper.

  “Mid-twentieth-century copy of Ni Tsan,” I said. “The paper is all wrong and the brushstrokes too timid.”

  “Aha!” François exclaimed.

  “And this?” Another man I didn’t recognize held out a small metal object.

  “Archaistic door handle. The lines are too stylized to really be Han. There’s no … life.”

  “You see,” my father smiled. “She’s quite bright.”

  At dinner that evening, which I cooked, I basked in not only his attention but also that of his colleagues. When my classmates at school picked on me the next day for failing to understand the punch line of a joke concerning a pencil sharpener, I comforted myself with the knowledge that at home there was someone much smarter and stronger than they were, someone who understood me and who would always render their criticisms unnecessary.

  So it went, François and I living and working together in the dark-green Victorian house, whose goggled windows were bordered with chiseled lattices and scrolls. I graduated early from college, UC Berkeley, and became his partner. We divided business duties. I spent time at the university library doing research; he met with clients and went on buying trips to augment our stock.

  I always spent the evening with my father. I loved walking home from the bus stop in the fog and looking at our house and marveling how it loomed over Pine Street in Pacific Heights like a majestically carved ship anchored in the fog. François had had the good fortune to buy our house in the seventies, when housing prices were low and the goodness of California still something of a secret. Over the years, the building had increased exponentially in value, and François swore we could never move. Around us, old Victorians were one by one converted by youthful couples into monuments to yuppie glory: pink and purple palaces, red and coral estates. Our house remained as it always had been, slightly disheveled, enigmatic, a creaking reminder of a time when California was synonymous with restless beatniks in search of poetry and truth.

  I turned and looked inside the window of the first floor, which housed our shop, Silk Road Antiques. How I loved its ramshackle, exotic beauty! Just one peek through the doors revealed a jumble of contents—here an edge of a painting, there a chair, and there again a glimpse of the corner of a blood-red porcelain bowl. It all reminded me of a glass greenhouse swollen with tropical flowers.

  I passed through the heavy double glass doors to the back of the shop and François’ office, with a small library of glossy-spined books and two wooden filing cabinets. On one wall, a white-and-indigo noren curtain displayed a design of dragonflies caught in a basket. Hidden behind this was a door, which opened to a staircase that led up to the kitchen of our house. The library and living room, which was nearly overrun with books and magazines, were on the same floor, and beside them was a dining room furnished with a rich saffron-and-mustard-colored rug from Turkey and a brooding table from China. Upstairs, on the third floor, were several additional rooms, one of which belonged to me.

  Sondra left my father not too long after we had returned from the New York trip. I never really knew what set her off. I simply came home from school one day to find her in tears, bags packed and apologizing to me over and over again that she just “had to follow her intuition” and that she “couldn’t take it anymore.” One day, she insisted, I would understand. From then on, it was just François and me.

  So it would have stayed, had it not been for an unexpected visitor one afternoon not long after my twenty-first birthday.

  I came home after my usual Sunday trip to the library with a bag full of photocopies and books. I opened up the dark-green door to our shop and made my way through to the back where I could see my father’s foot sticking out through the entrance to his office.

  There, seated on a Ch’ing dynasty huang-li chair beside my father,
was Snowden-roshi.

  He was still very fair with pale, pure skin that blended easily into his light hair, cut short in the manner of a priest’s. This paleness only offset his blue eyes. When they held still and took me in, as they did now, I felt a gentle pressure as though two snowflakes had landed on my skin.

  “Darling,” my father stood up and kissed me. “We have a visitor.”

  “I hope you don’t mind too much,” Snowden-roshi recrossed his ankles. “I was in the area and suddenly realized how much I wanted to see you.”

  “Of course we don’t mind,” my father replied. “We can cook an extra crab and you can join us for dinner.”

  We exchanged pleasantries.

  François commandeered Snowden-roshi’s shoulder and steered him around the store, lustily pointing out the Chang Dai-Chien paintings on the wall. I kept expecting Snowden-roshi to speak to me, but he didn’t. Still, I was keenly aware of him and how he glided noiselessly over the wooden floor, long fingers cradling a bowl or tracing a line of paint across a dish.

  “Rumi,” François said, “let’s show Snowden-roshi how much your powers have improved.”

  We went to the back-room office, and François pulled back a silk cloth to reveal a four-panel Japanese screen.

  The screen was a Zen-style landscape, a valley town tucked in between bulbous, cerebral mountain peaks. The artist had rendered the entire scene with black ink on paper, varying the pressure of his brush. Here the mountains were stormy, there the air was clear. The detail of a bridge leapt out starkly in one spot, while tall, mysterious peaks receded into infinitely lighter shades of gray.

  “Rumi has the brightest eye of anyone I know.” François smiled. Then he looked at me. “There’s one correction I had to make. Can you find it?”

  I studied the screen, looking for a spot where the gray did not recede seamlessly, or where the artist’s brush seemed to have been momentarily possessed by another hand. “It’s a warm black,” I said.

  My father nodded eagerly. “The artist wanted you to feel introspective. But he did not want you to be left cold.”

  “Mmm.”

  I could hear my father breathing, and could feel Snowden-roshi’s eyes searching the screen, trying to see as I did.

  A small patch of paper near the middle spine did not have the same sheen as the rest of the screen and interrupted the whispering voice of the ink. But my father’s work had been steady, blending in well with the rest of the piece. “You did a good job matching the color and the strokes.”

  “Yes.” My father nodded. “It was as though the original artist and I were briefly speaking the same language. It was a joy to repair. A conversation in mist and mountains. Can you give me a date?”

  “Seventeenth century. Early.”

  “That’s my girl.” He nodded proudly and I beamed. “It should go for a good price. There’s a gentleman who lives not far from here who has asked me several times to ring him when I come across just such a piece. Now, let’s see. I have something over here.”

  He placed a Chinese box in my hands.

  I undid the ivory clasp and looked inside. Nestled in the satin pillow was a piece of jade in the shape of a cicada. I put the box down on his desk.

  “You don’t like it?” François was incredulous.

  “Funerary objects make me …”

  “Funerary objects,” he interrupted. “Good lord, you sound like a college textbook! The cicada is a magical creature. The Chinese believed it could impart immortality.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you that this was stuck in the mouth of some dead person?” I asked.

  “It could have gone in other orifices.”

  “François.”

  He picked up the cicada with his bare hands. “See how beautifully it is carved?” He took my hand, uncurled my fingers, and placed the little amulet in my palm. Then he rolled the cicada over with his thumb and forefinger.

  “It’s beautiful,” I finally admitted.

  “A date, Rumi?”

  I gazed into the cicada’s eyes and could hear it humming, an archaic orchestra that sounded like the wind and reeds. “Han.”

  “Ah. Have a look again.”

  “Han,” I repeated.

  My father was frowning. “No, I don’t think so …”

  I racked my mind for technical information. “Aventurine in the cracks. So it was polished with quartz, not a modern tool.” The words tumbled out of my mouth.

  François took the cicada from me and inspected it intently with a small collapsible magnifying glass he kept in his pocket.

  “Hmm.” He put away the glass and slipped the cicada back into its box. Then he nodded and said, “About two thousand years old, is our Mr. Bug. Think of everything that has happened in all that time,” he said softly.

  “Empires.” Snowden-roshi nodded, glancing quickly in my direction.

  “Men’s fortunes.” My father beamed, clapping his friend on the shoulder.

  I stood in place, smiling nervously at them both.

  We locked the shop, set the alarm, and passed through the noren to the staircase. In the kitchen on the second floor, François wrangled the crabs into boiling water while I made a salad. I was grateful for this domestic distraction. I didn’t fully comprehend what had happened a moment ago with the Han jade. What was more, I feared François’ reaction to my not responding the way he’d wanted me to. And yet, I’d been right. He had been wrong.

  Fortunately, the conversation burbled along in a polite and banal fashion with Snowden-roshi at the helm. He told us about his impending move from Los Angeles for a new job at the Stillness Zen Center in San Francisco. We laughed over a terrible pun Snowden-roshi made about mistaking the term tao for Dow. After a couple of hours had gone by, we retired to the living room. Snowden-roshi stretched his legs and walked around, looking at the objects in our personal collection.

  “You have an altar,” he said to my father, inspecting the makeshift structure: a Chinese table with a small Edo-period Buddha, incense burner, and candles.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you give incense every day?”

  “No.”

  “I would have expected a picture of Satomi,” Snowden-roshi said softly.

  “As I said, we aren’t Japanese.”

  “But she was.” Now I felt the cool and insistent probing of his blue eyes on me. “You’ve grown, Rumi.” He smiled. “You’re quite accomplished now.”

  I blushed.

  “Connoisseurship is like learning to play a musical instrument. Start training young and the mind is flexible enough to develop a true instinct.” My father said this proudly.

  “Some of my parishioners go to Japan and report that they simply feel at home once they land there. An intensive Buddhist study—a very old tradition, mind you—prepared them for the unique beauty of Japan.”

  “American Buddhism is not at all like the Japanese version,” François retorted. “The Japanese turn to Buddhism for clearly defined services—funerals, for example. Americans think that Buddhism is some sort of alternative approach to living.”

  “It is an alternative.” Snowden-roshi twirled his wineglass slowly with his fingers.

  “Yes, but that automatically gives it a meaning here that it didn’t have in its homeland.”

  “I think it’s a wonderful way for people to naturally appreciate something that might otherwise seem foreign.” Snowden-roshi smiled and turned to me. “What do you think, Rumi? Do you enjoy Japan?”

  “I’ve never been.”

  Snowden-roshi stared. “Surely you have plans to go?”

  I looked at François. “I … I don’t have any plans,” I said.

  “What a pity. Here you are immersed in all these things which …,” he hesitated for just a moment, “with which you have a personal connection. I should think you’d be a little bit curious.” He took a long drink of wine and pretended to need several minutes to inhale its perfume.

  “I rely on Rumi to run the b
usiness when I’m away,” François declared cheerfully. “I’m the traveler in the family, you see.”

  “Aha.” Snowden-roshi nodded, giving me a curious look as if to say, so that’s how it is.

  That evening, before we all went to bed, I spoke to François and apologized for having embarrassed him over the cicada.

  “Not at all,” he waved his hand and smiled. “It’s natural, I suppose, that I make a mistake every once in a while. Lucky for me that the piece turned out to be more valuable rather than less. It would have been worse if you had identified the screen, for example, as a fake.”

  I smiled back at him, relieved that all was right again.

  In the morning, Snowden-roshi invited us to a party. A number of potential donors for the Stillness Center were meeting at the Lorenzi Winery in Napa Valley and Snowden-roshi thought we might like to go. François demurred because of a scheduling conflict, and I was about to refuse the offer out of habit when Snowden-roshi made a special plea for me to accompany him.

  “You’ll meet interesting people. And I’d much rather go to the party with an attractive young woman than all by myself.” He grinned.

  “I’m not very good at parties.”

  Lightning quick, his features changed. He dropped the seductive smile and became businesslike. “Think of it as work, then. You’ll have the opportunity to scout out potential clients.” Snowden-roshi looked at my father. “You did say that you needed to build the business a bit more. Improve your cash flow.”

  “Yes, but it’s François who does that. Not me,” I explained.

  “She has to learn to deal with the public if she’s going to take over your business one day,” Snowden-roshi protested to my father. “I understand why you want to protect her, but you can’t keep spoiling her like this.”

  “I’m not spoiled …”

  “She’s just very shy, Timothy,” François said.

  Snowden-roshi shook his head. “It’s our job to help her out of her shyness.”

  “Your job?” I asked.

  “I’d appreciate it, François, if you would let me take Rumi.”