Chapter 481
Julie turns to a priest for help, and in her prayers she says she longs to start loving life again, after years of finally coming out of the shadows of the loss of her husband and son – a persona Julie has fabricated for herself.
When she came back to England from China, she had to have a good reason to be accepted again, and she looked bad.
So she tells the priest that she married shortly after her return and was happy at first, but then there was an accident, her husband’s family died of illness, her parents’ family died of illness, and she was the only one who survived, and she was so devastated that she returned to the place she remembers as her home: England, where she had been raised as a teenager, and which was the place she remembers as being so much happier.
Most of this was true, and the priest believed her and sympathized with the woman whose family had all died.
That’s all the villagers knew, including the village.
Julie’s deeply private lifestyle and her unsocialized nature were tolerated.
After all, the woman had been so miserable.
Now she says she intends to start her life over, and the priest is happy for her.
The priest asked, “My child, what can I do for you?”
Julie said, “Father, my foster mother left me two portraits, which reminds me of the time I learned to paint in the castle, when I never took my lessons seriously □□□ was to eat all the fruit that was laid out without waiting for the painting to be finished.” Thinking of the past made her break into an involuntary smile.
She said, “I want to learn to paint again.”
The priest smiled and said, “I’m certainly very supportive. Are you in need of someone to get you some painting supplies from the city? That’s no problem, I can talk to someone at the post office.”
Julie: “My good friend, Mrs. Tehran’s sister, who comes into town a lot because of her work, has promised to bring me the right painting supplies. It’s just that I haven’t painted in a long time, and I’ve never had a serious lesson with a teacher before, so I’d like to practice a bit before I actually put pen to paper.”
The priest nods, “That’s the right posture for learning.”
Julie: “Father, I want to buy a camera and some film so I can take pictures of the scenery around me to use for practicing, but my friends can’t help with products like cameras, do you have any ideas how to help me?”
Priest: “Oh, a camera? That’s not cheap.”
Julie smiled shyly and said, “I still have some savings.”
Zhu Yuyan said, “Money is not a problem!
The priest agreed, “Wait a minute while I ask my friends.”
The priest’s circle of friends was also very strong, and under his description, Julie was a poor, lovely, honorable lady who needed the camera purely out of artistic pursuit, and could not possibly be dangerous.
After a short time, the priest introduced Julie to a businessman.
This merchant was a multinational businessman who specialized in buying and selling a few tight commodities. He could buy German Leica cameras, as well as film.
Julie paid the money and soon got what she wanted.
She also bought coffee beans and sugar through this merchant after establishing a good relationship with him.
“Fantastic!” Zhu Yuyan held the heavy sugar tower and put it into her suitcase, “This is really the best return gift I’ve ever received.”
This sugar tower weighed ten pounds and could be eaten for a long time!
Zhu Yu Yan was so happy that she started thinking about whether to go back and make bread or cookies first!
It was better to make cookies first!
It had been over two weeks since they had gotten here, extended a few more days later to wait for the camera and film to arrive, and now they had to leave.
She said to Julie, “Not for a while yet, why don’t you just take some random pictures with the camera and send me a letter and I’ll send it to town to get the pictures developed. I’ll go back and buy the painting stuff, I’ll send it to you when I get it. You can just paint a couple of brushstrokes when you’re not doing anything, too, I guess.”
Julie took the unprecedented step of walking out of the house to send Zhu Yuyan and Su Chunjun to the train station.
The wind outside was all fresh and unfamiliar, making her slightly uneasy.
But holding Zhu Yuyan’s arm and standing in the crowd, she felt safe again like a fish finally returning to its school.
She became just like everyone else.
After Yu Yan left, her life once again returned to peace.
The jade cicadas would not bother her often, but they would always come to see her once every two days, even if it was just to stand in the courtyard and say a few words. She always felt that they were probably worried that she might commit suicide at home.
She wouldn’t kill herself.
She had worked so hard to escape, how much of Yu Yan’s spirit had been wasted, how much pain and suffering she had put her through, she would be too ungrateful if she committed suicide.
She was just waiting for her life to slowly fade away.
Life would come to an end one day.
She was just waiting for this end to come, and it must be very peaceful, slow, and not disturb anyone, even grief was as quiet as dust.
In order not to let Yu Yan and Yu Cicada’s kindness go to waste, she also stood in the yard from time to time with her camera and took pictures, not knowing what they would turn out to be, and for the things that were captured, she sometimes felt a slight curiosity when she looked at that heavy camera.
About ten days later, Yuyan sent her the painting tools.
It was such a big box that it startled her.
The postman drove a horse-drawn carriage to deliver it to her, and both she and the postman were surprised to see such a big box.
The postman was probably worried that she couldn’t open the crate and asked her, “Ma’am, would you like me to open it for you? It may require a little strength; do you have an iron bar or something else at home?”
She hurriedly turned down the kind mailman, hoping he wouldn’t be upset; she just wasn’t too brave to be around strange men for too long.
She pushed that box into the house and it took her two hours to pry it open.
There was a surprising amount of stuff inside.
There were at least a hundred paintbrushes of various sizes and dimensions, twenty to thirty pencils of various kinds, a box of pencil sharpeners of various kinds, and a box of charcoal strips.
There were several large packs of various kinds of drawing paper, different kinds of sketch paper and different kinds of watercolor paper, and there were several large and small books.
There was also a large roll of canvas, heavy like a roll of carpet.
There were easels and frames of different sizes.
And paints, both watercolor and oil.
After Julie unpacked everything, she found it all over the living room floor, brushes and paints all over the table, paper and canvas stacked high on the floor, as well as easels, frames, several palettes, and a few things she didn’t even know what they were.
And, of course, there was a letter written to her by Yuyan.
— “Hi, Julie. You must have been surprised, and so was I. If I hadn’t gone to the department store, I wouldn’t have known that there were so many different kinds of drawing supplies, and they said that each one was very useful. You could certainly use the sketching stuff, every painter starts with sketching; watercolors are completely different from oils, they’re as different as different flavors of spaghetti – I’m sorry, the salesgirl said too much, I really don’t remember, but I’m sure they’re all useful. Anyway, I think even if you can’t use it, it’s good as a decorative piece, and an easel in the house would look special, right? I look forward to seeing you next time. Yours Elizabeth.”
She read the short letter many times and wondered to herself why she was smiling.
She thought Yuyan was right – she remembered that her English name was the name of the future Queen of England.
To Yuyan: “You can’t expect me to remember too many English names, I just randomly came up with the one that stuck out the most. I can’t call myself Jane Austen, then I wouldn’t be able to work now.”
At the time she said that, she didn’t know what was so funny about it, but she just couldn’t stop laughing.
She found Yuyan funny everywhere, and she was amused by anything she said.
She stood the easel up and arranged the brushes neatly – those buckets turned out to not all be buckets for washing brushes, they were pen buckets, right?
There were sketchbooks, pencils, watercolors and oil paints.
Yuyan was right, they really looked like home decorations when they were put together, and her little living room took on a completely different air.
She had already shot a few rolls of film, and she sent them to Yuyan to be cleaned, so that she could get in touch with the film dealer there.
Yuk Yin always had a way of getting what she wanted.
After another week, she received the developed photos.
She had taken three or four rolls, but only seven or eight of them came out of the wash, and the film washer said that there was a large amount of scrap film in the photos she had taken, and that there was nothing in them.
But these were all pretty good.
Yuyan’s letter said, “There’s warmth in your photos, it’s like they can talk.”
She complimented one of them as the most beautiful, which she took at home.
This one looks quite dark and was taken of a bottle of flowers placed in front of a window.
The person who washed the photo had made it rather white, losing much of the color, and the shape of the flower was mostly unreadable, as if it had melted into the light.
But it was really pretty.
Yu Yan had inscribed under this picture, and to avoid being noticed she had written in English.
But Julie read it at a glance.
— “To the death.”
Flowers melting in the light, shadows as deep as the pitch-black night. The flowers were open and passionate, faintly red.