The Wall That Closed

He came back to the county town on a market day, which was exactly the day he would have chosen. The square was full, and his mother was weeping, and his father was standing in the doorway of the house with his arms folded, looking as if he meant to be angry and was not quite managing it.

Wang Qi let them all have their fill of weeping and questioning, and then he asked for the people of the village to be gathered in the courtyard. His wife, whom he had left as a girl and found a woman, asked him what on earth he was about, and he told her she would see.

By late afternoon the whole village had come. They stood in the courtyard in their best clothes, with their hands behind their backs, and they looked at the young man who had come back from the mountain with a changed face, and they did not know what to expect.

Wang Qi pointed to the west wall of his father's house. It was a good, solid wall, the kind a house had stood behind for a hundred years. He told them what he could do. He told them loudly, the way he had told the priest he wanted to learn.

There was laughter at first. There is always laughter at a young man who promises wonders in his own courtyard. Wang Qi waited for the laughter to die. He closed his eyes. He said the short words, slowly, the way the priest had taught him.

He ran at the wall. He did not walk at it, the way he had been told. He ran at it, because he had an audience, and because he wanted them to gasp before he reached it, and because the wall, in his mind, was something to be defeated.

His forehead struck the plaster. There was a sound, a dull and very final sound, like a mallet on a gate that no one opens any more. The wall did not open. It did not let him through. It met him, and it held, and it had remembered him exactly as the old priest had warned.

He woke on the ground with a lump on his forehead the size of a small egg, and silence above him. The villagers, who had come to gasp, did not gasp. They helped him up, which was worse, because pity is the one sound a braggart cannot survive.

His wife knelt beside him and bathed his forehead, and she did not say I told you so, which he would have hated her for less. She said only, The wall has always been there, husband. Perhaps it was waiting for you to learn what it was made of.

Wang Qi never walked through a wall again. He did not go back to Laoshan; the mist had closed behind him, and he knew better than to ask it to open. He sat for a long time in his father's courtyard, touching the lump on his forehead, and he thought of the old priest's words, which had been so short that he had despised them.

The wall remembers, he said, to no one in particular. And the village, having seen its marvel and its fall in the same afternoon, went home to supper, and told the story, and ended it, as all such stories end, with the young man who learned too late that the quiet heart was the one thing the mountain had asked of him.