3 Zhu’s father worked as a painter and calligrapher. His father, too, had been a much-revered painter and scholar.
Zhu’s grandfather had made him a scroll painting of a dragon for his bedroom. The young Zhu thought this dragon was the largest creature that had ever existed. Its sinuous body writhed in rhythmic loops and looked so lifelike that each morning Zhu was glad to see his dragon had not changed position in the picture.
In his dreams the fire-spitting monster broke free from the paper and little Zhu had to leap into the water to save himself. He would dive under and the flames would turn to steam as they hissed on the surface. Looking up through the water, he could see the dragon’s green shimmering eyes and flared nostrils in a cloud of steam. Even in the light of the morning, the dragon looked as if it might fly away at any moment or escape by setting fire to the paper surrounding it. The monster’s scaly skin drifted between green and turquoise depending on how the light fell.
And yet his grandfather had not used any colours, only black ink on brownish paper.
On one of his earliest birthdays his father painted him a huge lotus flower. Zhu had never seen one of these flowers before, nor did he know its name.
His father placed a large piece of rice paper on the ground and picked up a brush with compact bristles. He dipped it in ink and wiped off the excess on a stone shaped like a peach. Then, with one long, rich stroke of his brush, he painted a gentle curve from the bottom to the top of the paper. Beneath his hand the upper end of the line unfurled into a flower.
At the base of the flower stem his father painted a surface of glistening grey across the entire width of the paper, occasionally allowing the brush to create darker patches. When the ink was dry he hung the painted paper on the wall.
Now Zhu noticed the lotus flower’s slender stem shooting up from dirty, muddy water and opening its bloom in the clear spring air.
Some leaves were floating on the water and Zhu thought he could feel a gentle breeze sweeping across the surface, faintly bending the stem and wafting the perfume of the flower into his nose.
His father sat there calmly, frowning at the paper, and said nothing. Perhaps at that very moment he would have liked to talk about the flower that was hanging on the wall to his son, who was gazing at it wide-eyed and with lips pressed shut.
But his father remained silent. Zhu had never heard his father speak. And yet he felt as if he knew his voice.
They sat there beside each other, looking at the picture. All of a sudden Zhu thought he could hear a rattling from his father’s throat and he grabbed his arm. But his father had said nothing; he merely turned his head, fixed the boy with his old, watery eyes, and the line between his lips turned up a whisker at the ends.
‘You just gurgled then, Father,’ Zhu said. ‘Like a fish underwater.’
He fixed his gaze on the lotus flower once more.
The fish remained silent.
‘I expect you’ve told me everything already.’
4 On one occasion his father made him step bare-foot into a bowl full of ink and then walk along the length of a roll of paper. To begin with, Zhu’s footprints were wet and black; with each step they became lighter until they were barely visible any more. Then he hopped from the paper back onto the wooden floor.
His father took a brush and wrote at the top of the scroll: A small segment of the long path of my son Zhu Da. And further down: A path comes into existence by being walked on.
The palace had its own workshop for manufacturing brushes and ink. Zhu liked to watch the master and his assistants at work. The open stoves made the workshop dingy and dusty. The fire, Zhu thought, so that’s where he gets his colourful dragon, and the lotus flower too.
One day, after Zhu pleaded with him insistently, the master explained how ink is made.
‘To make ink we need two ingredients,’ he said, ‘soot and glue.
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