Chapter 8: Secret Violation
Pu Zhihe signaled Hang Liumei with her eyes to look around.
The sky is bright, the mountains are stacked up, and the willows are beautiful. The plum blossoms in Hangzhou seem like a dream, and singing in the bar seems like a thing of the past.
Tall green trees surrounded a vermilion low wall and stood in front of the two people. Three powerful characters "Caotang Temple" were hung high above the door.
There are vendors selling kites, bubble water, and snacks at the entrance. There are not many people visiting on weekdays, and they are not busy with business. They gather together to bask in the sun, lean on their backs and chat.
"The music festival is here? That's so disrespectful! I don't think it looks like this on the posters." Hang Liumei asked as she gathered her hair, then pinched the wet wipes into corners and gently wiped away the dirt from her eyes, wiped her hands clean, applied hand cream, and then started to apply lip balm.
Pu Zhihe smiled without saying anything and took down a familiar canvas bag from the car. Hang Liumei thought it was the equipment she had prepared for the music festival and walked into the yard with Pu Zhihe on her arm.
Inside the gate, the ground was neatly paved with flagstones. Stone statues of the Four Heavenly Kings stood before the hall. The only flowers left in the temple were the peony garden, yet to bloom. Hang Liumei, leaning over under a parasol, gazed at the white hydrangeas and sighed, "There's a saying that goes, 'White clouds change with time.' This place is nothing like when I first came here to paint."
"Yeah?"
"Really? This place was really run down back then. Everyone knows it was the place where Kumarajiva translated Buddhist scriptures and the ancestral home of the Three Treatise School, but as the saying goes, 'clothes make the man, and gold makes the Buddha.' Without anyone to take care of it, even the brightest sign would eventually gather dust."
Hang Liumei and Pu Zhihe walked to the back of Maitreya Buddha, where they saw a golden statue of Weituo Bodhisattva standing with his hands clasped together.
"Hey, this Skanda statue is still here. Zhihe, look, the Skanda Bodhisattva's vajra is held flat on his arm. That means foreign monks who travel here can get free food and lodging for one day. If the vajra is facing the sky, it means three days. If it is facing the ground, no food and lodging will be provided. This was told to us by the monk in the temple when we first came here."
"Let's go sit over there in the pavilion. I'm old, and my legs get sore after just a few steps." Hang Liumei sat down, pounding her legs as she asked, "We've been here for a while, but why haven't we seen anyone else? Are we in the right place?"
"Now that we're here, let's take a good look around first. We must be in the right place." Pu Zhihe said firmly and without any doubt.
Hang Liumei actually wanted to go home and rest, but she stood up again with her hands on her legs, followed Pu Zhihe through the Main Hall on the platform, and walked into the Great Compassion Hall behind it.
As soon as she arrived here, Hang Liumei recognized that this was the original site where they created the murals. The green smoke from the incense burner made the hall even darker and blurry, and she could only see the golden silk cloth swaying slightly. She seemed to have returned to the days when she worked here thirty years ago, and stood at the door and hesitated to step in.
"I didn't expect this place to be preserved. I wonder if it's still the same inside?" Hang Liumei didn't know who she was asking.
Pu Zhihe whispered beside him, "It's a rare opportunity for you to come back, why don't you go in and take a look?"
The Buddha statue is new, while the surrounding murals are older. Nine flying figures, each with a different appearance, hold a pipa, flute, konghou, drum, sheng, and lotus, their graceful figures situated at the top of the mural.
Looking downward, auspicious clouds are everywhere, and the Buddha is seated in lotus position, with Guanyin and Mahasthamaprapta standing on his left and right, some holding pure bottles or making Dharma seals, and all wearing necklaces, armlets, and bracelets, with countless gold, jade, and precious stones.
Surrounded by clouds, flowers and leaves, which are blue-white, earth-red and malachite respectively, the red is rich and the green is vivid, and with the treatment of gold leaf, the whole picture is solemn and dignified.
"Teacher Hang, are you familiar with this?" Pu Zhihe took out a folding chair from the canvas bag, opened it and sat down, then took out a drawing board, opened it and started tracing the line draft.
How could I not be familiar with what I painted? Hang Liumei finally understood what tricks she was playing and walked around the mural, looking at it with mixed feelings.
It's strange to say, thirty years later, after I finished painting, I rarely come back to look back. After all these years, the place hasn't been well preserved, but it's not bad either. After a circle, I returned to the starting point, and Pu Zhihe invited her to sit down with him.
"I never slack off when I'm working, and I never work on my days off. This is the rule I've set for myself since I started working at age nineteen." Hang Liumei took the folding chair, frowned as she held it in her hands, "I may be retired, but my principles haven't. You can paint, but I won't. I'm going to go bask in the sun by the door."
With that, she sat down by the temple's railing, her head resting against the stone railing, legs stretched out, leaving a sharply defined shadow on the ground. From this angle, she could see Pu Zhihe, hunched over inside the temple, her head constantly looking up and down. She was swallowed up by the quiet darkness, like a wisp of white smoke lingering around a Buddha statue, unwilling to dissipate.
Hang Liumei felt something sink beside her legs. She didn't know what it was. She opened her eyes and saw a black and white cow cat, probably one of the free-range cats in the temple. It curled up and leaned against her to sleep. Hang Liumei let it sleep.
She saw visions of floating plankton under strong light. These were floaters, a symptom of long periods spent intensely focused on the canvas. At first, she dismissed them as nothing. When painting, she considered herself a pen, oblivious to the slightest movement. However, when she wasn't painting, the problem surfaced.
Why wasn’t there such nice sunshine when I came here to paint that year?
"Zhihe, while you paint, I'll tell you a story. When we first came here, we lived in an old nunnery. There were only wheat fields nearby, and few houses. It was extremely desolate. Didn't I tell you I loved 'A Chinese Ghost Story'? It's just like in that movie here at midnight. It was even colder than it is now, and the four of us women slept crammed together on one kang."
"The food wasn't very good back then, and Guanzhong people loved noodles, so we walked to a nearby town to buy vegetables to make sauerkraut. On the road, we saw a footprint, so we stepped on it to compare it. It looked like a human foot, but bigger than ours. That night, we talked about it again. The cat was outside calling for mating. Besides slaughtering pigs during the New Year in Dunhuang, I've never heard a cat cry more miserable than the one that night. We were all scratching our heads, our hairs standing on end in fear. Some people said the footprint belonged to a hairy wild man."
"Hairy savage?" Pu Zhihe asked as he straightened up and leaned back.
Hang Liumei stroked the cat's back and continued, "Yes, that person told us a ghost story about a hairy wild man two meters tall, with fangs and covered in hair, who would turn into the person he ate. They scared themselves and couldn't sleep. I knew this wasn't going to work, so I told them about the two cypress trees in front of the Kumarajiva stupa."
"There used to be a very small well among the cypress trees. The young monks in the temple took turns to draw water from it. One day, a new monk went to fetch water and found a lotus flower blooming by the well. He was puzzled. Don't lotus flowers grow in mud? If it grew from a well, could there be something dirty down there?"
"Then the monks followed the lotus and discovered that it had blossomed on Kumarajiva's tongue. Word spread, and everyone said this was the 'lotus coming out of the mouth.' I then told them that this place is blessed by Buddhism and is safe from evil spirits, a truly infallible treasure."
"Finally, they all fell asleep, and I woke up, and I also wanted to go to the bathroom. I had to get off the kang and go out, and I found those big footprints in the yard. I don't know how I was so bold as to follow them. It turned out that the sole of our old man's shoe fell off at the heel, and he didn't fix it, so he just wore it untied, leaving these strange footprints."
After Hang Liumei finished speaking, both of them burst into laughter, and the cat was startled awake. Hang Liumei suddenly remembered that this was a temple, and looked around to see if anyone noticed their noise.
"Teacher Hang, are you tired? I'm done with painting, too. Let's go back." Pu Zhihe wasn't distracted by the story; she'd been stuck in a painting bottleneck for a long time. Copying someone else's masterpiece in front of the original artist made her feel more and more guilty, so she decided to surrender.
"Why are you leaving just as you started?" Hang Liumei walked behind her and saw the flying musician playing the sheng that Pu Zhihe had just copied, and she saw the problem at a glance.
Pointing at the mural, she explained to Pu Zhihe, "For this painting, I used the Tang Dynasty line method, which emphasizes roundness and thickness, and uses the center of the brush. You like to wait until you stop to close the brushstrokes, but it should be closed gradually, so this and this look unnatural."
Hang Liumei pointed at the mural, then at the same spot on Pu Zhihe's painting: "There are still some places where the brushwork is incorrect. Here it's willow leaf drawing, here it's nail head and rat tail drawing... Zhihe, the force of each line interacts with each other, and only then will the whole painting be vivid..."
The paintings that had captivated Pu Zhihe at age six now came alive before her eyes. The shells that had clung to her for years also loosened, and the confusion that had once been a fog gradually became clearer.
Painting is like leading an army into battle, her eyes, hands, and mind mobilizing at will, yet she always ends up in disarray. Because the enemy is herself, every move is already perfectly ingrained, and no amount of dismantling is enough to stop her from progressing.
So the pen is dead, the paper is dead, and people who don’t understand much praise her for her good painting, but she knows that her paintings are also exquisite “dead objects”.
Hang Liumei's works are so vivid and lively, her spirit and energy have been completely transformed into the images, yet she is so at ease and controls every line as easily as breathing.
The light slowly faded from the wall, and the hall was already too dark to copy. Pu Zhihe and Hang Liumei gathered their drawing paper and stools and stood up to leave. The setting sun melted into a golden glow. The two walked side by side, silent, each preoccupied with their own affairs.
After leaving the temple gate, a group of vendors appeared from nowhere. Their carts were covered with glass covers and hung with colorful lights. Inside were various classic snacks from Xi'an: honey jelly, candied date steamed cake, rose mirror cake, persimmon paste cake... all of them were bright yellow and shiny. People queuing up to buy were looking forward to it. Even before they put the food in their mouths, they could already imagine the sweet and sticky taste.
After spending the whole afternoon strolling around Hang Liumei, I was already feeling hungry. I was racking my brains to find a way to get Pu Zhihe to stay for a meal before leaving, but before I could come up with an idea, my stomach started growling. Pu Zhihe was very considerate and took the initiative to suggest that we grab a few bites here first.
Carbohydrate-rich provinces have no shortage of staple foods. However, the lamb blood noodles were a bit fishy, the oil-splashed noodles were difficult to digest, the golden thread fried dough sticks were too dry, the clay pot rice noodles were too hot, and the vegetable dumplings served with spicy dipping sauce were most to Hang Liumei's liking, but there was already a long line, so she had to give up.
The two of them ended up enjoying the classic "Chang'an three-piece set"—cold noodles and roujiamo (Chinese roujiamo)—along with Bingfeng, a glass bottle of orange-flavored soda. Hang Liumei always advised Xiaomai to drink less carbonated drinks, claiming online that they were "bone-dissolving water." Today, she secretly drank some, figuring Xiaomai couldn't know.
The boss put the steamed cold noodles on the chopping board, folded them a few times, cut them into thin noodles, picked up two noodles and dipped them into the chili oil, then put them back into the bowl and stirred them with chopsticks. The cold noodles, bean sprouts and red oil were all in one, and the rich aroma of crushed chili seeds rushed into their noses.
The two of them held the roujiamo in one hand and picked up the liangpi with chopsticks in the other, enjoying the familiar taste they had been eating since childhood.
Hang Liumei ate while thinking about Pu Zhihe's paintings. She had talent, but needed some guidance. If she were willing, she'd be a good candidate to study murals in Dunhuang. But the problem was, even though she seemed willing now, she might regret it later. Why bother messing around like herself when she got old?
"She doesn't know yet, that's why I want to go back to her age and live again." Hang Liumei decided to do the opposite. She had to stop Pu Zhihe from going down the wrong path, let her know how much stability and comfort she had to give up, and also test her.
Hang Liumei was so engrossed in her thoughts that she choked on the Baiji steamed bun. She coughed and looked for water to drink, and unexpectedly saw a bottle of apricot peel tea next to the store counter.
The simple wooden tables and chairs, the evening breeze wrapped in the fragrance of sand and leaves, and the sweet and sour apricot peel tea, are the Dunhuang that Hang Liumei is familiar with.
Fifty years ago, on a night like this, she was preparing to set off.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
