Jürgen watched him carefully.
Bärger seemed to be totally focused and at the same time completely relaxed. He projected a feeling of immense confidence as he sat, the right elbow supported on the table, the brush loose in his hand. It seemed as if he were waiting for a signal that would be given to him by the blank sheet of paper.
Abruptly, Bärger dipped the brush in the water jar and lightly drew it down a linen cloth, which had been folded several times, to remove excess water. Then he rolled the brush across the flat rim of the plate with a circular motion to pick up a little of the rain cloud gray ink mixture. Finally, he dipped the point of the brush into the shiny black in the rubbing dish.
Near the lower left corner, he angled his brush across the paper and, holding it this way, moved it perhaps a hand-breath toward the top.
Jürgen was fascinated. It was one brush stroke, painted in a fraction of a second. But even so, he now saw the stem of a strong bamboo stem, so clearly that he felt he could touch it. The clear line had a dark shadowy edge, fading gradually away, and was lightest in the middle of the brushstroke and a little darker on the opposite edge. The rapid stroke had left a couple of long white streaks, like streaks of light falling on the stem of the bamboo. At its beginning and end, the brush stroke that had become a bamboo shoot thickened slightly to show the places where there were knots.
Without hesitation, Bärger applied his brush a second time, a little above the knot, and without touching the first stroke. He repeated this rapid motion a second, third, and fourth time, interrupted by carefully refilling the brush point, until the fifth and last stroke came to an obvious end toward the top of the sheet of paper.
Only now did Jürgen see that the brush strokes were not the same, but each stage was longer than the one below it, while at the same time, they seemed to become narrower. The line was not straight but was inclined slightly toward the right.
Bärger filled his brush again: dip in water, squeeze, take thinned ink from the rim of the plate, concentrated ink from the rubbing dish. On the picture, a second bamboo shoot rapidly grew right next to the first; a little more slender, and bending a little more to the right. This one also appeared to growing upward through the top of the painting.
The third was even more slender, placed next to the other two but a hand breadth further to the left, bent so strongly that it was covered by the other two as their stems crossed in the upper third of the picture, and then it reappeared behind them.
Bärger sat back to examine the picture. Quite obviously, it wasn’t even partially finished and yet, even at this phase, it already seemed to be a harmonious picture, full of tension and life.
Bärger rinsed out the brush in the water jar, dried it with the linen cloth and dipped it once again in the black ink in the rubbing dish, which had noticeably diminished.
He began to draw heavy jagged broken lines from the center of the picture toward the lower right edge. The shape of a cliff, or rather a large slender stone, leaning into the picture toward the left, seeming to grow gradually from the ground. The side of the almost dry brush wiped rough scratches in a seemingly hard surface. Now the three bamboo shoots stood in front of a stone, which seemed to have emerged at their feet.
Once again Bärger washed out his brush and wiped it dry.
While he had been painting the stone, the brush strokes of the bamboo had dried and become a little lighter. He dipped the point of the brush into the unthinned ink and now painted the knots in the same sequence as he had drawn the segments of the stems. The point of the brush made a little hook downwards and then swung in a flat curve to the right, continued, and then finished in another little upwards hook.
Now the three bamboo stems appeared to be strongly joined, full of tension against the edged rock.
This time, Bärger laid the brush to one side after washing it out. He picked up the bar of ink, dropped some water on the rubbing dish, and began to scrape ink again. Jürgen sat silently next to him and watched. His glass of wine sat untouched on the bookcase.
Bärger began to paint the leaves. He had prepared a very dark mixture of thinned ink on the plate, in which he now dipped his brush. He painted the leaves from their base to the points with an accelerating stroke which ended in the air above the paper and which gave the leaves a needle sharp point. They were groups of three and five of the lanceolate leaves, all pointing in more or less the same direction; a flat angle toward the right.
Wind, thought Jürgen. There was a strong wind and he saw that the shoots all bent in the same direction that the leaves pointed. He could almost hear their dry rustling.
The groups of leaves grew variably thicker. Bärger thinned the ink several times, and the leaves he drew became lighter, seeming to sink back into the picture. Brush in hand, Bärger leaned back and stared at the picture in which three thickly leaved bamboo stems leaned against the wind in front of a rock. He hesitated then dipped the brush in the ink dish again and began to dab loose groups of points on the paper, which ran into fringing clumps of moss.
For the last time, he used the thinned ink on the plate. Short vertical strokes in front of the rock and in the area of the bamboo roots became clumps of grass, making the ground visible. Then he washed out his brush, dabbed it dry, put it back in the cup, and turned around slowly to Jürgen.
“Here’s your bamboo picture,” said Bärger.
“Fantastic,” said Jürgen, and shook his head slowly. “Just fantastic,” he said again.
Bärger laughed.
From the cabinet, he took a small round porcelain box with the picture of a dragon on the lid, and a small, cubical, polished stone on top.
There was a vermillion paste in the box, which seemed to have fibers running through it. The cubical stone was a seal with a simply cut inscription in Chinese script.
Bärger looked carefully at the picture, which still looked wet and a little wavy. Then he pushed the seal forcefully into the red color and set his stamp in a small opening at the lower left of the picture next to the foot of the rock and the roots of the three bamboo stems.
“If I were any good, I would also be able to write a line from a poem for you. It would go here!”
With his finger he traced a line from the upper right of the picture down to about the middle.
“Perhaps you can find a Japanese to do it.
I call it, Bamboos in the Morning Wind.”
“It won’t be ready for quite a while yet,” said Bärger as they went back into the living room.
The light from the streetlamps shone onto the ceiling through the huge, curtainless window and bathed the room in a milky half-light.
“Leave it off,” said Jürgen as Bärger reached for the light switch. So they sat for a while, until their eyes could make out the details around them again.
Jürgen still hadn’t said anything else.
“I can’t make a real scroll picture out of it for you,” began Bärger once again. “First of all, I have no picture silk and second, I could only guess at how they were made. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any literature covering the process. All I really know is that, in China, the creation of scroll pictures is a separate craft.”
He finished his glass, poured some more, and leaned forward to fill Jürgen’s glass as well. However, Jürgen held