Chapter Four: The Onlooker

The next morning, Wang Erlang climbed back up the scaffold, tools, pigments, and wooden bucket on his back. From a distance, he spotted once more a flash of bright crimson — the young woman was sitting at the edge of the scaffold again, swinging her legs. Startled, he quickened his pace to the top of the scaffold and blurted out without thinking, "Why are you here again?"

Hearing this, the young woman turned her head, her expression puzzled yet perfectly serious. "To watch you paint the apsara, of course!"

As Wang Erlang set down and arranged his things, he asked, "Didn't you say it doesn't look right? And yet you're back? Why not go watch the other painters' apsaras instead?"

"They're not worth looking at," the young woman said flatly.

Wang Erlang's mind went inexplicably muddled. Whose work did she mean wasn't worth looking at — the other painters', or his own? If she thought his was good, she wouldn't have said it "doesn't look right," and she certainly wouldn't have gone to the trouble of showing him at the cave entrance how a sash moved naturally in the wind. But if she thought everyone's was bad, why come specifically to watch him paint?

The more he thought about it, the more tangled his thoughts became, but he was too embarrassed to ask again, and could only blame his own lack of learning for failing to grasp what she meant. Even that single word "doesn't look right" — he wasn't even sure he truly understood what she meant by "looking right" in the first place, let alone anything else.

Having consoled himself in this way, Wang Erlang quickly rallied his spirits, took out his brush, ink, inkstone, and water, and prepared to paint the ribbons anew onto the now-dry white plaster.

As he ground the ink, he gazed at the wall in thought, and at last dipped his brush and began sketching, from the apsara's side, a faint outline of the ribbons. This time, he resolved to let the ribbons rise and fall naturally, as though drifting through open air.

Every stroke he laid down that day came slower than usual, and more than once he stopped halfway through. The image of yesterday's sash, lifting in the wind at the cave mouth, kept surfacing before his eyes again and again, and he tried, bit by bit, to translate what he had seen onto the wall. He would lift his brush and lay down a faint line of ink, only to gently wipe it away again after a few inches; then try once more, stretching it a little further than before. He would step back to look, then step closer to add another stroke. After repeating this many times over, he finally fixed the outline in place.

Yet even with the outline settled, he studied it from every angle and still felt something was off. He brooded for a long while without arriving at any answer. Yesterday's sash still seemed to drift and sway before his eyes; he had done his utmost to capture that natural rhythm, yet the newly traced ribbons on the wall felt disjointed, each going its own way, clashing awkwardly with the apsara herself.

Wang Erlang let out a sigh, utterly stumped, unwilling to rashly apply color before he had truly found the cause of the problem. So he decided to deal with his urge to relieve himself first. He'd had more thin porridge than usual that morning, and the need had come rather earlier today. But remembering yesterday's chaotic episode still left him uneasy. He glanced anxiously at the young woman and asked in a low voice, "Could you cover your eyes, quickly..."

"Oh!" The young woman had clearly learned her lesson the day before, and caught on at once this time. She hurriedly and earnestly clapped her hands over her eyes, then added, not forgetting to remind him, "Hurry up."

Hearing that near-fatal phrase again, Wang Erlang was thrown straight back into yesterday's flustered ordeal. But today he was clearly better prepared, and the whole process went far more smoothly; he finished before she could voice another complaint. He couldn't help but feel secretly relieved not to embarrass himself again — surely from now on things could only get easier — and he found himself growing steadily less afraid of having a young woman covering her eyes through the entire business of him relieving himself.

Just as he felt thoroughly refreshed, Wang Erlang found himself troubled once more by his mural. The young woman had barely lowered the hands covering her eyes when she saw the look of baffled misery on his face; she seemed to see straight through to what was bothering him, and rose at once, saying without the slightest hesitation, "Can't figure it out? Let me dance for you." No sooner had she spoken than, without waiting for any response from Wang Erlang, she began to dance right there on the high platform of the scaffold.