The Scroll

A short story about love and the impossible

The emperor was known to ask the impossible.

The Son of Heaven sliced his thin whiskers with fingernails curving long and sharp as a Mongol’s scimitar. He sighed at last, rustled a bony wrist from the embroidered sleeve of his royal robe, crooked the forefinger toward the shaved head bowing now at his silk slippers.

You are an artist, yes? He asked of the monk summoned into the divine presence.

Wu knew better than to speak. He also understood that his imperial master wanted nothing more than to be amused. Wars raged like fires around the Middle Kingdom. The long wall against the barbarians had been breached. Bones scattered the borderlands, earthquakes toppled ancient shrines, and showering stars foretold evil days ahead. But at the court, the nightingales still sang, the courtesans batted painted eyes over the ornate fans. All continued as before.

Paint me, then, a picture, said the Son of Heaven.

Wu shuddered, having heard of the last monk brought to court and commanded to paint a scroll. A demanding patron, the emperor had traced his fingernail along the brushstroke portraying his favorite concubine. He frowned. In an instant, the poor artist had his offending hand removed with a single swipe of steel, painting the tiles red with his blood.

Show me all that passes and all that remains, ordered the emperor.

Wu heard the swishing robes that signified the Son of Heaven’s passage from the sight of mortals. He was alone now in the room, his furrowed forehead pressed to the cold tile, bowing to an empty throne. A year was all he had.

Wu journeyed from the royal city into the countryside, crossed the three rivers floating with corpses and spring blossoms, and climbed again the path to his mountain hermitage. The firs gathered the first snows in their green arms. The clouds froze outside his window. He retraced all his steps, all that he had seen, sitting morning and night in deep meditation.

Now, he bowed again, touching his head to the silk unscrolled across his low table. He felt the smooth fabric, the warp and woof of unthinking silkworms. The inks stood in their jars. The brush rested on the table’s edge. He breathed slowly. The blood ran dizzy in his head, safe for now on his bent shoulders. Taking up the brush, he was laying his life down.

---

Lovely. He cleared his throat and said at last.

What?

She looked up and across the glass display at this stranger, this man evidently talking to her now, after trailing her through three galleries, always an object or two behind her steps, until they came to the exhibition treasure, the silk scroll painted by an unknown Chinese scholar, circa 927 of the common era.

This, he quickly said, a gesture of his long fingers, sweeping nonchalantly across the glass and the silk world underneath.

Yes, isn’t it? She repeated his word, Lovely, and gave him a smile as she pretended to study the exquisite scenes of rural life along the banks of the great river, peasants fishing the waters, the fantastic dragons coiled under the shade trees, asleep, their tails dangling in the water.

She had noticed him galleries ago, of course. Good-looking, graying temples, cobalt eyes that tracked her every move, but looked down discretely whenever she stole a glance his way. She felt his eyes embolden her. A ripple went through her flesh, a flush in her neck.

A fine suit, well-made shoes, a man who knew the better things, but there was also a hunger in his face, a darkness he had brought inside the museum from the rain-swept streets. She could imagine his wallet stacked with neat cards, lines of credit, perhaps a snapshot of a wife and a child, but still he was not happy. His eyes hunted the rooms, the goddesses of Renaissance oils, the virgins of Orthodox icons, the whores of the Moderns, looking for a beauty that had always eluded him.

Have you seen them? He tapped the glass. The couple?

They were in the right corner of the foreground, almost an afterthought by the anonymous artist. The couple drinking tea in a small pavilion as a great wave gathered its frothy curls about to dash their dreams.

Just think, she said.

What? Now it was the man’s turn to ask.

What they must be feeling, being there, in that hut. To be doomed and not know it. Just imagine.

But the wave never breaks, the cup is never empty. Their thirst is never quenched. The rim never reaches their lips.

It was lovely, enchanting, and made her pause. Sighing, she felt her breath leave her body like a ghost. The man’s reflection moved over and stood next to hers, two pale Western faces hovering like moons over an ancient Chinese landscape.

---

Wu spent months in meditation, through the heat of the summer, and the snows of winter, calling the couple into being before he put them in brushstrokes on the scroll. A man, a woman, it did not matter who, but what was important was their being together. They kneel face to face, eyes averted, heads bowed. He holds his cup before her.

Wu painted the woman slowly, the badger hairs of his best brush stroking out her dark hair, her white face, ink dropping on raw silk like tears on the empty sky the monk made. Then the man’s square jaw, his strong shoulders.

Again and again, Wu made the wrong move in his mind, the couple fell apart, the brush smudged. The beauty of the moment was broken. It was as if a tiny crack lined the porcelain cup. In the six-foot scroll, the cup was the barest gesture, a drop of ink, but in the entire scheme it was central. Until Wu could weld that crack in the cup held between the man’s hands, to the woman pouring her passion, her heart with the warm tea from the pot, the world he imagined would never be whole.

---

At the man’s offhanded invitation, she joins him in the pavilion, the eatery adjacent to the main galleries. Face to face, she has her chance to study his features. Sadder than before, a flaw in his right eye, a broken ridge to his nose that lends him a little boy’s pugnacious look.

She looks him over, this stranger, over the rim of her cup, drinks again, closes her eyes. Everything is possible. The ripple lifting the down of her arms becomes a wave. She sips him in slowly as the oolong on her tongue, the sudden bitterness.

In that taste is the whole history of the affair.

Later, much later, she will see her eyes run with mascara in the mirror of a hotel bathroom.

Drinking tea in the pavilion with this wonderful woman he has pursued through the museum for weeks and in his mind forever, the man cannot believe his luck.

But he moves too quickly, chokes on the tea, feels the confusion of word and air and fluid in his throat, convulsing, He’s about to spit into her face, waving away her frightened look with frantic gestures. Turning red, then almost purple in the face. He watches her perfect porcelain face register surprise, then fear, then concern, then a kind of boredom. He is a drowning man, sliding underwater away from her.

He masters himself, holding a fist to the center of his chest, his fluttering heart. Sorry, he says at last, the breath returning again.

It’s fine, she sips her tea again slowly.

Don’t know what got into me there. Sorry, he repeats himself

Sorry?, she muses. Let’s not be that so soon.

So it began. What Wu had painted a thousand years ago, the couple drinking tea, by the river with the dreaming dragons, coiled about the trees, theirs tails adrift in the silken currents. They wake and roar, flooding the brushed earth, firing the sky white.