14.再见了，亲人

Lesson Fourteen

Paint-Brush Li

1. Brush Li specializes in painting.

2. If he paints a room for you, you don’t have to put anything in it. He can do this work very well.

3. The most amazing thing is that he always wears black when brushing, and never has a white spot on his body after finishing his work.

4. You don’t believe it?

5. He also made a rule for himself, as long as he had white spots on his body, he paint the wall for free.

6. But this is a legend, and people will not believe it all.

7. The laymen who have never seen did not believe it, while the insiders were angry and said they did not believe it.

8. One day of the year, Brush Li received an apprentice named Cao Xiaosan.

9. At first, Cao Xiaosan serves tea, smokes cigarettes, and carries things behind him.

10. Cao Xiaosan, of course, has long heard of Brush Li’s unique skills, and has been skeptical. This time he has to see it with his own eyes.

11. On that day, Cao Xiaosan went out to work with his master for the first time, and went to Zhennan Road to brush the new building of Li’s family.

12. When they get there, Brush Li talked with the steward, Cao Xiaosan knows that the master is full of style.

13. According to his rules, he only paints one room a day.

14. This building has nine rooms, and it needs painting for nine days.

15. Before working, he opened a small boxy bag with him, in which there was the black trousers and a pair of black cloth shoes.

16. Wearing this black dress is like being stronger than a bucket of white pulp on the ground.

17. A house has one ceiling and four walls. Normally we paint the ceiling first and then the walls.

18. The ceiling is especially difficult to paint. How can anyone lift up the scrubber brush saturated with thin watery whitewash and not a drop is dripped?

19. The drip will for sure fall on the body.

20. But when Paint-Brush Li lifted his whitewash-soaked brush, it would beat operating a brush without whitewash.

21. When his brush swept across the ceiling, immediately an even, solid, shiny and crisp white stripe would appear.

22. Some people said that there is a clever way for the dip technique, some say that the ingredients of this mixing have secret recipe.

23. How can Cao Xiaosan know that?

24. He could only see that the rhythms of Paint-Brush Li’s whitewash-stained arm moving unhurriedly back and forth rivaled harmonizing drum beats and piano sounds. At every stroke of the brush, the whitewash-soaked long brittles made a distinct smacking sound on the wall surface quite pleasing to the ears.

25. At those slapping sounds, rows after rows of seamless whitewash were brushed across the wall surface

26. as if a neat and tidy snow-white screen was opened up.

27. But what Cao Xiaosan was most concerned about was whether Paint-Brush Li had white spots on his body after all?    

28. In carrying out his job, Paint-Brush Li had a routine.

29. After painting a wall, he had to sit on a stool for a long while to smoke a pipe and drink a cup of tea before moving on to paint the next face of wall.

30. Cao Xiaosan made use of the opportunity in pouring tea and lighting cigarette for his master Li to check out his entire body thoroughly.

31. After each wall had been painted, Cao would search again but couldn’t find even a white speck the size of a sesame seed on Li’s body.

32. He really felt Li’s black outfit had an eerily unfathomable power.

33. But when Li finished the last face of wall and sat down, Cao lit a cigarette for him and noticed a white speck the size of a soybean on Li’s pants.

34. It was a white spot on black background, which stood out more than black on white.

35. Cao thought, “It’s all over. Master has revealed his untold secret. He’s human after all. His legendary image of invincibility appeared to have collapsed utterly.”

36. But Cao was afraid his master would feel really embarrassed and he didn’t dare to say anything or look Li’s direction. In the end, however, he couldn’t hold back any longer and took another peek.

37. At that moment, Li suddenly said to him, “Xiaosan, you must have seen the white speck on my pants.

38. You think your master’s ability is flawed and reputation is phony, isn’t that right?

39. Silly boy, look again.”

40. At saying that, Li lightly squeezed the pants and lifted it up. The white dot disappeared immediately. When he let go the pants, the white speck appeared again. That was strange.

41. He moved his face closer and tried harder to look, and then realized the white dot was in fact a small hole.

42. The hole was inadvertently burned by a lit cigarette just a moment ago,

43. and the white underpants showed through. At a glance it looked the same as a dot caused by dripping whitewash.  

44. Li was amused by Cao’s stunned-silly expression and said with a smile, “Try harder to learn, would you?”

45. What Cao saw and learned on his first day of apprenticeship were things which others would not be able to understand all their lives.