A Mind of Winter (40 page)

These rooms are well appointed; I have never seen lodgings designed with such taste. Several of the objects within them are beautiful and also unusual. One, in particular, captures my imagination. It is a Chinese urn—not an antique but a fine reproduction. It sits on the white marble mantelpiece and I find myself often drawn to contemplate it; standing before the fireplace, I regard the bucolic scene etched into the finely cracked glaze: a vertical array of hills, delicate trees in full leaf, several with papery blue flowers. A lone farmer bears two buckets of water on a yoke across his shoulders and amid wafting banks of cloud, tiny birds dot the sky.

It is a funeral urn. Perhaps it holds the remains of some long-departed stranger, though I’ve not had the courage to remove the lid to find out if this is the case. At times, gazing at the lovely, distant, peaceful scene—another world entirely, a forgotten era—I feel that I am somehow like that funereal porcelain, a vessel for the ashes of the dead.