One Stroke, One Year

The messenger came for the old painter at the hour when the sparrows were still arguing in the persimmon tree behind his house. He was already awake. He had been awake, in fact, for most of that week, sitting at his low table with his hands folded over a square of unmarked paper, as if waiting for someone to knock.

He was old. His hair had gone the color of bleached reed and his fingers had the particular crook that comes from a lifetime of holding a brush at one stubborn angle. The boy at the door wore the pale blue of the palace and would not meet his eyes. The king was dying, the boy said. The king had asked for a tiger.

Everyone in the village knew what that meant. The painters in this line had always paid the same price. One stroke laid down, one year drawn out of the painter's own body — it was not a story they told children, but it was a story the children somehow knew. His own master had told him plainly, the day the brushes were handed over: this work is a kind of giving. You will know, when it is your turn, how much of yourself you intend to spend.

He folded the paper, tied his roll of brushes, and walked behind the boy down the hill. The morning was cold and very bright. The plum trees along the road were in their loud red flower and the sky behind them was the flat, perfect blue of a child's drawing, without a single cloud to soften it.

In the palace they had prepared a small inner room for him. A long sheet of pale paper had been stretched on a board on the floor. Beside it, ranged in shallow dishes, were the colors he had asked for: cinnabar ground in honey, malachite green powdered fine, azurite the deep blue of a winter river at dusk, ochre the color of old straw, and lampblack so dark it drank the light around it. Behind a thin curtain on the far side of the room the king lay listening. The painter could hear his breathing, careful and shallow, like someone walking on ice.

He knelt. He laid out his brushes the way he always had — fat ones for the body of the beast, narrow ones for the whiskers and the curl of the tail, one fine point kept aside in its own dish for the eye. Then he lifted the largest brush, dipped it in lampblack, and made the first stroke.

It was the spine of the tiger, one long confident arc from shoulder to haunch. He felt the year leave him as cleanly as breath leaves a window in cold weather. He was not surprised. He had been preparing for this since he was a boy of twelve.

He worked slowly. He laid down the ribs of black outline first — the great round head, the heavy paws, the broad smiling mouth, the upturned tail curled like a question — and with each line he counted, quietly, the years left in him. Forty, he had thought, when he began. He drew the ears. Thirty-eight. He drew the long muscled back. Thirty-five. He drew the four stout legs planted square against the paper.

Then he opened the cinnabar. The red went on flat and unhesitant, the color of pomegranate seed, the color of a child's painted lip. He filled the tongue. He filled the inside of the mouth. The tiger began to grin out of the paper at him with a kind of bewildered tenderness, as if it had only just discovered it existed and was pleased about it.

He lowered the brush and set the dot.

Outside, the plum-red and the sky-blue went on blazing in their flat, shadowless afternoon, as though his whole life had been one steady stroke, laid down without ever once lifting the brush to hesitate.