Chapter 15 Mural
After washing up, everyone walked towards Mogao Grottoes together. It was still dark, so they strolled slowly.
There was talk and laughter in Hang Liumei's ears, but she was absent-minded, trying to remember everything: a white corner in the east, the scattered stars, the endless yellow sand... She composed words in her mind, wishing she could write all of this in a letter and send it back home.
Seeing her walking alone with a heavy heart, Qi Xiuchun took her arm and joined the others in a chat: "Xiaohang, are you cold? Wear your gloves! Hey, did you all hear the wind last night? When I woke up this morning, I saw that our broken window bolt was almost blown off!"
The short young woman next to her asked Hang Liumei, "Xiao Hang, how did you sleep last night? Let me tell you, on my first night here, something ran across the beam and landed on my pillow. Guess what it looked like? It looked like a giant rat, this big! I got up and chased it with a broom!"
Hang Liumei knew this girl; she was the first one to speak to her the night she arrived at the institute. Her name was He Fang. There was another girl at the institute whose name also contained the character "Fang," and everyone distinguished them by their body shapes, calling them Xiaofang and Dafang. Xiaofang was from Sichuan, and her speech made little distinction between retroflex and flat tongue sounds. However, the institute itself was a gathering place for students from all over the world, so it didn't take long for the young people to understand each other.
Qi Xiuchun winked at Hang Liumei mischievously. Instead of exposing her embarrassing incident last night, he comforted her: "Don't listen to her scares. The rat hole has been blocked long ago."
Xiaofang sighed, "Xiaohang, you're so lucky to be sharing a room with Xiaoqi. She's like a good wife and mother. We don't even know how to heat a kang, so when we first got here we could only warm up a stone and cuddle it to sleep on. Hey, you guys said there are more and more newcomers now, when will you build us a new dormitory?"
"Yes, why is it that after I came here, I only saw young people? Do the old seniors only come out to work in the afternoon?" Hang Liumei asked them.
The people around laughed. Qi Xiuchun said, "Don't you know that the tomb of Prince Yide has been dug up in your hometown? The experienced veterans have been sent there and will be back soon."
As they chatted, a gust of wind blew sand into their noses, like a stream of ice. Hang Liumei raised her hand to rub it and sneezed twice. Everyone fell silent and covered their mouths and noses.
After the storm passed, Mogao Grottoes suddenly appeared before our eyes.
The sky, the ground, and the cliffs were the same color, and the cliff walls were dotted with caves of varying heights. A sense of shock and bewilderment enveloped Hang Liumei. Above and below her was a winding expanse of space, and before her were the grottoes, the product of millennia of time.
The sky and earth are vast, the mountains and cliffs are boundless, and in such a universe, a tiny individual has no shelter.
From the vermilion eaves of the nine-story building hangs an iron horse wind chime, emitting a haunting hum. She feels the call of the Mogao Grottoes and involuntarily draws closer. For millennia, people have rubbed shoulders with each other, carving their brief lives on the stone walls.
Tears welled up in her eyes, and fearing she would be laughed at, Hang Liumei turned away and quietly wiped them away. When they arrived, her colleagues, who had been chatting and laughing, became serious, carrying paper, pens, and tools, and going into different caves to begin work.
Qi Xiuchun climbed up with Hang Liumei: "Xiao Hang, these many caves are enough for you to get familiar with for a while. I still have some clay sculptures that have not been restored, so I won't accompany you to see them. Anyway, everyone here is our family, you can find anyone if you have any problems, do you hear me? Don't be shy to talk." Hang Liumei nodded, and Qi Xiuchun left in a hurry with his bag on his back, saying a series of hello along the way.
Hang Liumei's attention had long been on her colleague who was painting.
The institute's regulations prohibited the use of candles or oil lamps in the caves, and certainly not the practice of covering or even nailing paper to the murals like the great painter who had come before—this would be condemned. Therefore, everyone's copying relied on tirelessly looking up and down, relying on their eyes to grasp the spirit of the shapes.
Not only did they have to use paint and paper sparingly, but even light was borrowed. Some shallow caves allowed direct sunlight, while deeper ones required mirrors placed at the entrance to refract the sunlight, constantly adjusting their angles as the sun moved. Sometimes, even mirrors were insufficient, so white paper was nailed to wooden blocks instead.
It was freezing cold in the cave this month, and they would rub their hands and stamp their feet after painting for a while. But they were obsessed with it, and once they started painting, they didn't care about anything else.
The current Cave 285 was excavated during the Western Wei Dynasty and is famous for its "wide robes and belts, and beautiful figures."
The entire cave is filled with paintings. East and West, Buddhism and Taoism, bodhisattvas, apsaras, and gods and monsters, once separated by vast mountains and rivers, now meet in this tiny space. Former donors and painters placed their faith here. Hang Liumei sought nothing; simply seeing was enough for her joy. Divinity and humanity merged in a single thought.
Xiaofang was copying the human-headed, snake-chested figures of Fuxi and Nuwa in the upper east corner, her head tilted up almost 90 degrees, and after a while she felt dizzy. Hang Liumei stood nearby, feeling that even the sound of her own breathing was a disturbance, but she couldn't help but move closer, entranced.
"I'm not good at drawing. You should go and see Jia Zhipeng draw. Even the director says he has the best basic skills." Xiaofang advised Hang Liumei with a smile.
Since Hang Liumei arrived at the institute, she'd heard this name mentioned no fewer than ten times. Everyone praised his painting skills, but they hesitated to speak. Only Qi Xiuchun confided in her that Jia Zhipeng loved to add his own ideas to his paintings, often earning criticism from the director. However, he refused to accept the criticism and never corrected himself, which was why he received so much praise and received so much instruction.
Jia Zhipeng was painting the famous beautiful bodhisattva in Cave 57, and Hang Liumei hesitated to go see it. Suddenly, there was a commotion outside, and someone could be heard calling for help. Hang Liumei and Xiaofang ran out to see what was going on.
It turned out that three male colleagues had climbed up a centipede ladder to a cave near the top of the cliff. Once they were inside, the ladder fell and they were trapped inside, helpless. The people below were huddled together.
"Make way! Make way!" Several young men rushed over carrying wooden ladders, but the ladders were too short to reach the entrance of the cave.
Everyone came up with a new idea: two strong guys stood on each other's backs to form a human ladder, and the person on top stepped on their shoulders to get down. The previous ladder was at least solid, but the people now were soft, and they were wearing thick and heavy winter clothes. As soon as the person on top put one foot down, one of them lost his footing and almost fell down, and almost kicked the person who was waiting to get down.
They were all scared out of their wits and no one dared to act rashly.
Hang Liumei ran a few meters further and saw that the cave was only two or three meters away from the cliff top. She stood on the high ground and shouted loudly for everyone to stop making noise. Everyone fell silent and looked at Hang Liumei. Many people didn't recognize her and were whispering about who this strange girl was.
Hang Liumei ignored their comments and said in a hoarse voice with a red face, "It's too dangerous to go down. Why don't we have a few people go to the top of the cliff and lower the rope ladder, let the people inside climb up, and the people outside can give them a hand. This is worse than what we have now."
Everyone immediately did what she said and worked together to rescue the people from above. Several of the trapped people even ran to Hang Liumei to express their gratitude.
From then on, everyone remembered Hang Liumei. She got along well with her colleagues and became comfortable studying in the caves.
Less than a month later, the director returned from Lanzhou, and the senior researchers who had been copying and conducting archaeological excavations at the tomb of Prince Yide also arrived one after another. Hang Liumei was officially assigned to Cave 285, alongside Xiaofang, but she began by copying a section of "The Five Hundred Bandits Becoming Buddhas."
Lines are the essence of mural painting, but when Hang Liumei began copying them, she realized her skills were far from enough. So she started competing with herself, always being the first to arrive and the last to leave, only to lament that the sun set so quickly that it would be dark before she could even finish painting.
She ate with her left hand holding a steamed bun and her right hand rubbing it against her lap. She often finished her steamed bun but still had half a bowl of cabbage and potato stew left. When she slept, she stared at the tattered newspaper stuck to the ceiling, and the murals appeared on the paper.
That day, she had just laid down, and before the lights were turned off, she sat up in surprise and shook Qi Xiuchun, saying that she understood. There was something wrong with the layout of one character, and she had finally figured it out.
Qi Xiuchun said that Hang Liumei was possessed by a demon.
Indeed, even though it was the same painting, she could discern a subtle difference each time she looked at it. Once she finally understood how the artisans had applied their brush thousands of years ago, her focus shifted from studying the painting to studying the artist. Sometimes, when Hang Liumei was alone in the cave, she felt as if she were surrounded by fellow painters, learning from her skills.
She is depicting the passage of time and forgetting time itself.
Today, after painting in the grottoes for another morning, Hang Liumei was about to make a crucial stroke, determined to finish it in one go, when a figure running through the cave in anger knocked over the mirror she was using to reflect light. Hang Liumei, also angry, chased after him and saw that it was Jia Zhipeng.
Not only did she run out, but a row of colleagues were outside watching the excitement. Jia Zhipeng rushed into the courtyard without looking back. That evening at dinner, I heard that he had been improvising while copying again, and was criticized by senior colleagues. He had a quarrel with the director and decided to leave Dunhuang and return home.
"He is talented and ambitious, so it's normal that he doesn't want to follow others all the time. Jia Zhipeng once said that he came here after reading a report about Zhang Daqian. Zhang Daqian said that painting according to the ancients' paintings is to make the ancients' things one's own. Zhang Daqian became a master, so Jia Zhipeng might also want to learn from him. Who knows?" Qi Xiuchun chatted with Hang Liumei while washing dishes.
Hang Liumei, however, didn't understand Jia Zhipeng. She, too, graduated with praise from her teachers. She had initially arrived in Dunhuang filled with pride, but later, the more she painted, the more she felt guilty. Whenever she unconsciously applied familiar techniques, the painting became distorted. Dunhuang didn't tolerate any sloppiness or trickery. There were so many treasures here, and she feared she hadn't even grasped a tiny fraction of them.
At night, when they had some free time, they would gather together to practice line drawing, a tradition that had always existed in the institute. Today, they still sat together to draw, but it was much more dull than before.
Just then, the director walked in with a stack of picture albums.
He was already over seventy years old, and today's argument seemed to have drained a lot of his energy. He had been coughing constantly since the afternoon, and his voice was hoarse. "Everyone, please stop writing. Today I want to share a few words from the heart. You've all been at the institute for a while. Whether you're in the art group, the archaeology group, or the conservation group, you've all come into contact with our copying work to some extent."
"I know many of my colleagues come to Dunhuang hoping to find inspiration for their own future works. Many also think copying is not something artists should do, but something craftsmen should do. But in Dunhuang, copying is a big deal. It's not just about reproducing a painting; it's about protecting and studying it."
The director unfolded the album in his hand and said, "This is the mural copied by our veteran comrades in 1950. It is different from what you see and paint now. In this way, the same mural, recorded in different eras, has become a valuable historical document. No matter how hard we try, the mural is disappearing bit by bit. You are still young and can still race against time."
"There's nothing wrong with wanting to preserve your individuality and be a free artist. But if you want to stay here as a researcher and protector, you must first let go of your ego before you can enter Dunhuang. It's difficult and requires sacrifice, but if you can truly do it, then one day you will understand that it was worth it."
The director left after he finished speaking. After that night, several more people left.
Hang Liumei knew it was a choice between two options. That day, she entered the cave and gazed once again at the murals, mottled by millennia of wind and sand erosion. The figures in the murals seemed to gaze intently at her, and she made a promise to herself to stay.
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