The Three Leaps of Wang Lun Read online

  In northeastern China, in the provinces of Chihli, Shantung, Shansi, even in Kiangsu and Honan, in great cities with several hundred thousand inhabitants, in hardworking villages and idle hamlets, it came to pass every day or two that someone went into the market and in front of a fraud or beggar priest or crippled child tipped all his money and valuables into a mule trough. That husbands disappeared from families much blessed with children; they would be seen, months later, in distant regions begging with the vagabonds.

  Here and there a minor official went about listlessly and in a daze for weeks on end, answered every question snappishly, shrugged his shoulders insolently when rebuked, then suddenly committed some astonishing crime: embezzling public funds, tearing up important documents, attacking some harmless fellow and breaking ribs. Once sentenced he would bear his punishment and his shame with equanimity, or slip out of prison and into the woods. These were people to whom separation from family and possessions came hardest, who could break free of them only by a crime.

  They taught nothing that was not already known. An old parable they told passed from mouth to mouth:

  There was once a man who was frightened of his shadow and loathed his footprints. T’o escape both he decided to run away. But the more he moved his legs the more footprints he left behind. And however fast he ran the shadow never left his body. So he fancied he was going too slow, began to run faster, not stopping until his strength was exhausted and he died. He didn’t know that all he had to do to lose his shadow was linger in some shady spot; that in order not to leave footprints he needed only to keep still.…

  The land exhaled a sigh. Such joyglazed eyes had never been seen. A tremor passed through families. And when at evening there was once again talk of the “Truly Powerless” and the old parable was told, each looked at the others and in the morning took note of who was missing.

  A sweet secret suffering appeared to afflict healthy young men and women in particular. It seemed they were being drawn away by bridal pangs of some kind.

  Wang Lun was the head of the movement.

  He came from Shantung, from a village on the coast called Hunkang-ts’un in the district of Hailing, the son of a simple fisherman. Later he would mention casually that his father was the first among the local fisherfolk: on the wall of the fisherman’s guildhouse you could still see his father’s name, the founder of the house. But in the whole of Hailing there was no guildhouse. The two hundred families of the hamlet scraped a hard living. The men sailed after the catch, the women tended the sparse fields. Soil was so scarce that they built artificial fields on the broad terraces of chalk cliff that descended close to the beach. Laboriously men and women hauled loose earth in wooden trugs up over the narrow ridges, trug after trug, then strewed meagre fertilizer of dried crab shells and human ordure.

  There above the sea women, children and old men toiled all through the day. Shouts and dull noises wafted down into the empty village. More families had lived here once. But over fifty houses had been burned one day by a passing plundering band from Chefoo. They crushed the old headman’s feet between two blocks of granite when he wouldn’t give them the two hundred taels they demanded, then broke his left arm with a blow from a plank, and after they had smashed a large hole in the ice—it was winter—threw him into a pond. The rhythmic yells of the six men as they pushed the frantic headman back again and again with boards, the clanging of planks on the ice, the noisy choking and blowing of the drowning man and the impatient whinnying of the stolen horses was one of Wang Lun’s few childhood memories.

  During the two hot months Wang the elder went out at sunrise in his boat, a two-masted junk that gazed from two green goggle eyes painted on the bows. Five fishermen boarded it. The sails filled; they shipped oars; glided smoothly over the Po-hai with the neighbouring junks. They cast the serpentine, putrid-smelling net overboard, attached it to another junk. The capstans that lowered and raised the net snarled, screeched, held fast.

  The men stayed out until late afternoon. The sun’s heat fell like dry, scorching rain over man and beast. Old Wang sat fatbellied on the rowing bench under a great straw hat like a plate and threw sharp stones at seagulls that dived out of the shimmering air behind the junks. While the other sailors in the boat smoked pipes or chewed tobacco. As soon as Wang prepared his sling a little sailor sat in front of him against the stem mast, smoked nonchalantly, carefully drew a springy willow switch from under the ropes. The sling whirred, the little man yawned noisily and stretched, the sling wound itself around his stick and outstretched arm, cracked the tensely waiting Wang unfailingly on the chest or legs with the stone. Glumly he looked after his flapping seagull. The boat rolled with the laughter of the four men sprawling on the wet planks.

  Wang swaggered pompously through the teahouses; once, leaving his bean patch one idle morning, applied at the courthouse for the position of Chief Magistrate, to the wailing fury of his toil-jaded wife who could already hear the mockery he would bring on himself. He liked lying on the sand next to the bucket that his two sons filled with charcoal to dry squid in. If around the time of the ebb tide they lit the bucket on the junk itself he would amble down to the beach and squat on his heels. Empty fish baskets lay there half overturned, the dried creatures spread on the sand colouring nicely in the sun. They felt hot to the touch.

  The bigbellied man poked around in mudholes, pulled long sandworms out, gave half of them to his wife to dry and sell. He kept a great pile for himself, dried them furtively and slurped his delicious hearty soup behind the baskets.

  Then after a while the two boys used to come over from the junk and, as he was sweating, unwind his footcloths. They crouched gravely in front of him with their little rattails of queues, and waited. In a proud, nasal tone loud enough for the neighbours to hear Wang spoke over their heads, flaunting his fat torso, leaning back on his elbows: he called this his lesson time. In fact he knew his primer, the Book of One Thousand Characters of Chou Hsingszu; a few mistakes aside he knew it by heart; he seemed to have learnt a few phrases as well from the Book of Women. Many times he explained to the children his regret that he was not stricter with them. To be strict with them was his sacred duty, for—and here the boys joined in chanting: “Upbringing without strictness is a father’s laziness.”

  And every few days the future teacher of three provinces heard that joy, anger, grief, fear, love, hate and desire were the seven passions. It was not often the boys could attend to him at leisure. Wang Lun’s face was black-brown and square, broad; strong lines moulded a lively, cunning face. No amount of sea glare darkened the softer, sallower complexion of his brother of the same age: the boy remained suppler, paler and more serious than Wang Lun, whose spiteful tricks earned him little love from his playmates and who showed little understanding of one of his father’s maxims: that among the five supreme moral relationships was brotherly love.

  Lively, inclined more to play than work, they sat redcapped on the sharp stones of the beach by the great fishing net. On a grassy dune behind them ten paces off the shapeless bulk of their father lay, his bare legs, covered in black hairs, arranged one over the other as he picked small embedded mussel shells from horny soles. In his right hand resting on the ground he held one end of the net that the boys were staining with the thick sappy juice of mandarin peel. He hauled himself upright, the children clicked musically, he spat and grunted. Occasionally a teaching droned from his lips; for example: “Since time immemorial the gourd has been a symbol of fecundity.” Until a gust of wind blew gritty sand into his face, he rolled coughing out of his furrow and knocked over their pot of stain. With a doleful, beggarly look he told them they should have found a better place for the staining. And they wound the cloths again about his legs and moved a few paces farther off.

  The greatest event in the life of Wang Lun’s father was the journey he made to his brother’s house for the wedding of his nephew, three hundred li from Hunkang-ts’un. For three weeks he didn’t see the beach or the scrubby be
an fields. A barber, who was also a sorcerer on the side, lived in his brother’s house; Wang Shen sat with him a lot in the evenings.

  And the morning after his return he walked with slow steps to a man who knew something of woodworking and promised him a quantity of dried sandworms worth four hundred and fifty cash if he would carve a tall red plaque for him with the inscription: WANG SHEN, PUPIL OF THE RENOWNED SORCERER KWAI-TAI OF LIU-CHIA-TS’UN, MASTER OF THE WIND AND WATER. After night fell, six days later, he fetched the gleaming plaque—black characters on a raspberry-red ground, blue-edged—with his eldest son, climbed onto the roof of the house, with two ropes taken from his boat attached it to the projecting ridge beam while his wife slept, so that there over the doorway a plaque hung down: WANG SHEN, PUPIL OF THE RENOWNED SORCERER KWAI-TAI OF LIU-CHIA-TS’UN, MASTER OF THE WIND AND WATER.

  Next morning his wife, when she saw the splendid plaque and had woken up her still sleeping husband, suffered the first recurrence for years of her nervous attack. Back then, when one of the arsonists had demanded through the window whether there was anyone apart from her in the house, in her terror she had concealed both one year old boys by gripping them in the folds of her wide trousers, and as she replied “No” had jerked her head sharply to the right. Now something green surged through her head, the two ropes holding the plaque grew as broad as leaves, sawed between her eyes; a blue unjointed arm reached out intermittently, a hand sent fingers streaming towards her. Rhythmically the woman threw her head from left to right, from right to left, her legs knocked together, she danced like a figure in a puppet show; the children hid from her on the brickbed.

  And they screamed out loud and ran into the village street among yapping little dogs when Wang, the great elephant-legged clod, burst into the smoky room from the yard, stumped up and down with a tiger mask on, sang wheezily over his wife who was now prostrate, stroked, whispered. Half an hour later the woman was asleep. A crowd of children and women stood at the door, stood silently in the yard, scattered gabbling when the tiger mask came near.

  That day was a turning point in Wang Shen’s life. His wife said not a word about the red plaque, indeed became sparing of words in dealings with her husband, kept out of his way.

  Now he no longer passed himself off as a mere casual teacher. In the yard under an alder he set to studying peculiar signs on a bamboo tablet he had brought back from the sorcerer, walked back and forth between midden and tackle shed with his head in the air, recited out loud: “Eight times nine is seventy-two. Two rules the Pair. In the Pair is united the Unpair. The Unpair rules the Zodiac. The Zodiac holds sway over the Moon. The Moon holds sway over hair. Therefore hair grows in twelve months.” He referred from time to time perplexed to the bamboo tablet; pondered, ashamed of himself, freed himself with a quick rejecting gesture. He walked, brow wrinkled, among the busy fishermen on the beach of an evening, gazed raptly at the purple cloud masses, stopped for a long time lost in thought in front of a basket maker’s little poodle, said dreamily, as if talking to himself, “Seven times nine is sixty-three. Three rules the Pole Star. The star of dogs. Therefore dogs are born after three months.”

  They laughed behind his back only at first; then the view took hold that he truly did have the makings of a Taoist savant, this former village clown. He knew so much: that swallows and sparrows dive into the sea and become lizards; he could name the thousand year old fox demon, the nine-headed pheasant demon and the scorpion demon; and no one could understand what he said about Yin and Yang, the bright Masculine and the dark brooding Feminine.

  He went out to sea. When he made the experiment one morning of not going down to the junk, his wife stood silently beside the brickbed. He could see through flickering eyelids that she was going to wake him as usual with a punch in the ribs, but then she turned and went to wake fifteen year old Lun and his brother. And every morning before sunrise she woke the two lads; he snored snugly on in a half sleep.

  Wang Shen went in the mornings to meditate in the little temple of the God of Medicine, the last building but one in the village. Since everyone in and around the village knew him his singular offices were much in demand, his technique of the “Devil’s Leap”, and in particular the “Breaking of Pregnancy”. This term was used by the inhabitants of this part of Shantung for a strange custom. When old men or sickly children were seen in the vicinity of a pregnant woman it was feared they would enter the woman’s body, perhaps to make themselves well and young again. In such emergencies Wang Shen in his tiger mask stamped about the room while the woman squatted, charmed her body while flagellating it with rushes, and sweating uttered unrecognisable syllables. Sometimes he brought home a thousand cash from these operations.

  But once he came back from an exorcism walking gingerly with the mask pulled crooked over his face, down the street, into his yard, up to the door, where he collapsed. His wife tore the wooden mask from his leaden face. He wheezed. A whistle came from his chest; he twisted his body and his hands grabbed about him. His wife ran for herbs, heated up two tiles for his feet. She despatched a small child. Since it had no cash it had to beg the money to buy a bamboo fortune slip in the Medicine Temple. The village shopkeeper and apothecary administered the decoction indicated on the slip. Wang spat it out.

  Then in the afternoon a babble of many voices grew outside the house. Gongbeat after gongbeat, ceaselessly; bells, shouts from afar. Heavy steps stumbled from the yard into the stuffy sickroom. The God of Medicine, a redpainted pillar of wood, had come himself to his pupil to make the diagnosis, bring healing. The woman shouted into her sleeping husband’s ear, “Show yourself, come, show yourself!” She supported the half blind man, who mumbled and gaped. It was quiet in the room.

  Out the god stepped to the apothecary’s. The bearers swayed into the shop with their poles, the god’s staff pointed to the lowest corner of the shelves. Secretly and in horror the young apothecary’s assistant with his back turned made the protective sign of the tiger: the staff had pointed to the Draught of Black Water.

  And nothing more could be done.

  The god was back alone in his mean, dilapidated dwelling at the end of the village. Darkness had fallen. His fat pupil, the bold coercer of demons, turned quickly onto his back during the third night watch. His wife asked what he wanted. She could only pull on the shoes that would carry him over the River of Death, the shoes embroidered with plum blossom, toad and goose, and with a white unfurled waterlily.

  Old Wang had wanted Lun to prepare for the first examination. But his talents lay elsewhere and were quite special. Already when his head was first sheared and shaved a long black-brown mark had been noticed on his right temple, and identified by his father as the Pearl of Perfection.

  Wang Lun grew apace, clever and with a giant’s strength.

  Mules, dogs, fish and people all suffered under his roughness and his practical jokes. As a six year old he had been introduced to thieving by his own father, in a remarkable manner. It was the villagers’ custom, at the time of the Spring Festival, and in particular on the fifth day of the first month, to steal vegetables from each other’s gardens and fields, because such vegetables bring luck. No trespasser, as long as he belonged to the locality, was allowed to be driven off that day; the owners themselves made sure to put aside and conceal all produce of any value.

  When Wang Lun accompanied his father and brother to try his luck on one such sanctioned thieving expedition, he fared badly: a couple of dried-up peanuts was all he scraped from the mud. He trotted away from the others in a rage, ran home, sat quietly sucking on a salt crab in the low parlour beside his mother, who praised him for not joining in such foolishness.

  But it was for another reason that he sat quietly there. He had reached a very simple and brief conclusion: if you want to steal something nice, the fifth day of the first month is the worst possible day for it. It’s ridiculous and absurd to go stealing on the very day when everyone steals and hides their things.

  He promised himself a
nother way of celebrating the filth day of the first month: divide the day into several portions throughout the year, for there were twenty-four hours in the day that had to be used up; he would use the permitted twenty-four hours to steal the whole year through.

  And so the clever, cunning boy stole by skips and jumps for twenty-four hours in the year and every theft had the appearance of legitimacy, and was accompanied by the pleasant feeling that he had pulled a fast one on the village; stealing was a delight.

  Once, even, during the old man’s last year, Wang Lun directed his thievish logic against his father: he took from him the thin bamboo tablet, now grown dark brown and unreadable. The white-bearded Wang Shen was overcome with deep sadness when he saw Lun sitting in the yard with the long lost tablet on his knees, turning it this way and that, sniffing at it suspiciously. Lun bounded away with the tablet; the old man wept, for the tablet and for his son.

  There were few in the village willing to pick a fight with the rough fellow; his brother was completely under his thumb.

  Everyone was very happy when, bored with fishing, drying, netmending, discontented with the poverty of his native place where even the best contrived scheme yielded no more than thirty or forty tiao, he marched aimlessly one day with a few copper cash on a string out of Hunkang-ts’un along the high road to Chinan-fu.

  It was springtime. At first he walked alone. Then when the bile rose into his mouth he tagged on to trains of barrows carrying pottery from the kilns out to the villages, and earned a few cents. He climbed, seething at the niggardly wage, out of the green valley of the Wei-ho up into wild hills; behind lonely houses, grasping an axe of green sandstone in a shaft of sandalwood, he waylaid the occupants, grabbed whatever they had about them and fled. On the dreadful craggy paths he clambered along there was no sign of spring. Becks rushed in deep carved gullies, in spate with the melting snow; the tattered vagrant never went down to them to wash; he was scared. For days he carried in his jerkin twenty valuable snuff bottles of finest glass; ate yellow-red kakis, sweet dried apples, didn’t shave, didn’t tie up his matted hair: he had knocked into a little girl as he fled from the caravanserai; when she fell she rolled over a cliff, smashed onto a sharp rock. Wang dared not go into the gully for fear of the child’s ghost.