The Friend at the Wall

Outside the painting, Zhu had done what sensible men do. He had run for the abbot.

The old monk came, and when he saw Chen standing with his nose to the wall and his eyes fixed on the painted maiden, he nodded slowly, as if he had seen this before, or as if he had always half-expected to see it.

This one, the abbot said. This one does this sometimes. The painter was a man who put too much of himself into the wall. The figures are not as still as they look. He put his hands together and began to speak, very low, the way one speaks to a horse that has started at nothing.

Zhu watched the old man's face while he chanted, and saw there the patience of a man who has spent a lifetime in a temple and is not, at last, surprised by anything the walls choose to do.

Zhu did not understand the words, but he understood the tone. He took his friend by both shoulders and called him, not the way a man calls another man, but the way a man calls a sleeper who is dreaming a dream he should not be dreaming any longer.

Chen's body did not move. His body was standing exactly as it had stood, leaning toward the wall, with that borrowed smile on his lips. But Zhu, holding him, felt a small and gradual resistance, the way a door resists when someone on the other side is deciding whether to open.

Inside, Chen heard his friend's voice. It came to him faintly, the way a bell comes through water, and he felt the hand of the painted maiden slip from his, and he felt himself being drawn, as gently as a leaf is drawn to the edge of a stream.

He did not want to go. That was the worst of it, and the truest. He did not want to go, because the painted country was warm and understood him, and because the maiden had finished her smile for him, and did not finish it for anyone else. He understood now why no one ever came back from such a place wishing to.

But his friend's voice came again, and the abbot's low chant went on behind it, and there was the real world waiting, with its small town and its restless face and the life he had not yet lived. The painting had given him a perfect hour. The rest of his life was waiting outside, imperfect, and his.

He looked back once. The maiden was standing among her flowers, with her head turned, and she was not crying, because painted figures do not cry. But the smile on her lips was unfinished again, and in that unfinishedness he saw the whole of what he was leaving, and the whole of why.

Then the wall was a wall again. The flowers were paint. The warm hand was a memory. Chen stumbled forward into his friend's arms, and the borrowed smile went out of his lips like a lamp blown out, and he began, all in a rush, to cry.