The Wall

The temple stood at the foot of the hill, just far enough from the town that scholars came to it when they wished to be alone with their own thoughts. It was old, and its timbers were the color of old tea, and its walls were covered in murals so faded that visitors were expected to bring their imagination as well as their eyes.

Two friends came up the path that autumn morning. Chen was the younger, a man of thirty with a restless face and a habit of looking at beautiful things a moment too long. His friend, surnamed Zhu, was older, steady, and had spent twenty years being the man who had to pull Chen away from whatever had caught his attention.

The monks received them politely and left them to walk. The main hall was dim, and the murals on its four walls were the work of a painter long dead, who had filled the place with the company of the blessed: attendants, musicians, and the flying figures who drift across the upper air.

Most of the figures were saints and monks, stern and still, painted in the way such figures are, as if goodness were a kind of standing at attention. Chen walked past them without interest. His eye moved along the wall the way a finger moves along a string, looking for the note that answers.

He found it on the north wall. There, among the companies of the blessed, was a mural of a heavenly maiden. She was not stern. She was leaning a little to one side, as if listening to something only she could hear, with flowers in her hand and a smile that the painter had somehow left unfinished on her lips.

Chen stopped. He stopped so suddenly that Zhu, who had been walking beside him, walked on two paces before he noticed and turned back.

Chen was standing very close to the wall, almost nose to it. His eyes were wide, and he had the expression of a man who has heard his own name called in a house he thought was empty.

She was painted with her head turned, and her hair half-loosed, and her bare feet among the painted flowers. The painter had given her the particular look of a woman who is just about to say something she has been meaning to say for a long time.

Chen. Zhu said his name. Chen did not answer. Chen had gone the way people go when they are not dead, and not quite alive either, but somewhere between, leaning into a thing they cannot pull themselves back from.

Zhu took him by the arm. The arm was there, and it was solid, and it was warm, but it belonged to a man who was no longer using it. Zhu shook him, and called him, and his friend's eyes did not blink, and his friend's lips moved with a smile that was not his own.

The light in the hall dimmed, though no cloud had crossed the sun. The painted maiden on the wall seemed to have moved half a hand's breadth closer, as the eye of a picture seems to follow a man across a room. Zhu stepped back and felt, for the first time in his sensible life, that a wall might not be what he had always assumed it was.