Piano Keys and Plaster Statue

18-Year-old Gong Shuyao is the quietest student in the Fine Arts Department of Peking University. In her world there are only the lines of the sketch, the cold whiteness of the plaster sculptures, and the lingering smell of turpentine in the studio. She didn't talk to anyone and just sat in front of her drawing board for the whole afternoon. Until late one night, she heard the sound of the piano in the school's abandoned old auditorium. Following the sound, the door was opened, and the moonlight poured down from the broken skylight, falling on an old Steinway piano and also on the silhouette of a woman. The 54-year-old woman, named Jiang Yi, moved her fingertips across the keys as if caressing something precious but fragile. "When you play the piano," Gong Shuyao stood in the shadows, her voice very soft, "my brush will tremble." Jiang Yi stopped his fingers and turned his head to look at her. It was a girl with a drawing board on her back, the cuffs of her school uniform stained with traces of paint, and her eyes were astonishingly bright. "You are the first person to describe my music as 'trembling'." Jiang Yixiao, "Others only say it sounds good." That's how they met. Jiang Yi was once a well-known piano player in the circle, but now he is just an ordinary shop owner of a corner flower shop. He only sneaks back to this abandoned auditorium late at night to play those unpopular etudes that no one wants to listen to. Gong Shuyao was the only uninvited listener and the only one who could "see" the color of her music. "When you played Chopin, what I saw was a mixture of dark blue and silver gray." Gong Shuyao took the initiative to share her sketchbook for the first time, which was full of flowing lines. "When you played Debussy, it was misty green, like a lotus pond after the rain." Jiang Yi stared at the paintings and said nothing for a long time. She had been playing the piano for thirty years, and for the first time, someone had turned her voice into a vision. They spent many nights together in the abandoned auditorium. One bomb, one painting. The 36-year-old gap disappears in the face of art. Jiang Yi taught Gong Shuyao to understand the layers of light and shadow from musical scales, while Gong Shuyao used paintbrushes to preserve every fleeting emotion for Jiang Yi. But Jiang Yi's old wrist disease is getting worse. At first it was an occasional tremor, then it was aching all night long, and finally I couldn't even press the simplest chord. The last time she sat down at the piano, she tried to play a Chopin nocturne, but when the first note sounded, her fingers slipped out of control. Gong Shuyao rushed over and held the trembling hands. "Stop playing." She gently held Jiang Yi's hand in her palm, "From now on, you hum it to me and I will draw it. I will see your music for you." Jiang Yi raised his head, his eyes red: "Shu Yao, I have nothing left." "You still have me." Gong Shuyao's voice was steady, with the unique determination of an 18-year-old, "The plaster statue is cold, but your piano sound is always hot. From now on, I am your piano key." Intention: Talent will fade away, but the echo of the soul will not. When the sound of the piano is silent, the paintbrush becomes another kind of hearing.