The Three Leaps of Wang Lun Read online

  His antics filled half the town. Like when he sat down somewhere in the street, in the middle of a pack of stray dogs, pulled on the stag mask, snarled at the dogs, then made off at their head across busy squares: shrieking of women and children, pandemonium, leaping, barking, running around, and the chase disappeared down an alley where with a kick he conveyed the howling dogs through a paper window or into a sedan chair and ran on whooping.

  One event, momentous in its background, and in its consequences to affect him drastically, made him notorious.

  Some Chinese tribes in Kansu, adherents of the Mohammedan faith, had comported themselves in a defiant and rebellious manner. They called themselves the Salarrh of the White Turbans, were divided among themselves; they had been put down with force.

  Now everything in any way connected or related to them in other provinces was to be identified, banished and uprooted, long after their leader and all his followers had yielded up their lives. The ground trembled already under the feet of secret leagues who raged against the warrior Emperor and the alien Manchu dynasty, but no one in the proud Vermilion City paid any heed to this dull murmuring, whose voice would later be augmented by the swishing of arrows, the clashing of curved sabres, the unearthly ruddy-white cackle of pillars of fire, the groaning and bursting of collapsing roofs.

  In Chinan-fu there lived among other Mohammedan families the family of a certain Su. He made wicks from plant pith; he was a respected, worthy man who had achieved the lowest civil rank. The Su’s resided in Unicorn Street, almost opposite Wang Lun’s inn, and Wang greatly esteemed the clever, though conceited, man.

  The Taot’ai of Chinan-fu established that Su-ko was the uncle of a man who had instigated the first disturbances in Kansu. Constables arrested the manufacturer of wicks, took him and his two sons to the town gaol where he was interrogated daily under torture.

  He had spent three weeks in custody before Wang heard of it in his lodgings. At once cold terror coursed through his bones. He conjured up the image of the grave, solicitous man, asked time and again, “But why? What for?”; couldn’t rest until he had confirmed for himself that Su-ko really was in prison together with his two sons and was being interrogated every day under torture. And just because that agitator, the one who’d first read aloud from an old book in Kansu, was his nephew.

  At midday Wang sat down together with his two friends and three beggars in the inn and discussed with them what to do. He brandished his two open hands in front of his face in the way he had and said: “Su-ko is an upright man. His relatives and friends are not here, they’re already headless. Su-ko shall not remain in prison.”

  The one-eyed beggar told how he had heard in the Taot’ai’s yamen that the provincial judge from Kuangp’ing-fu would arrive in three or four days to sit in judgement on the Su’s. Wang pumped him with excited questions: who’d said it, how many had heard, were preparations already in hand to receive the Nieht’ai, the judge, how many would come with the Nieht’ai. When he heard it was an old judge, appointed specially for this case and unknown in the town, his narrow eyes gleamed scornfully; then he grinned, after a pause laughed out loud so that the chopsticks fell off the table and the other five laughed too, punched one another, melodiously echoed each others’ laughter. A huddle of heads, rapid exchanges of words, frequent furious insistence from Wang. Each went his way.

  In two days every yamen runner in Chinan-fu, and thus the whole town, knew that the Nieht’ai coming to give judgement at the pending political trials would arrive the following day, sooner than expected.

  Wang Lun and twenty idlers and ruffians he had quickly rounded up in the town had rendered impassable no fewer than three bridges that the envoy would have to cross, had hired formal dress for himself and his accomplices from a pawnshop that owed him and T’o a favour for several cheaply acquired items, and on the given day marched with exaggeratedly stem features into the great city through the same gate that he had passed through a few months before, alone, smiling, with a familiar greeting to the fat gate guard, as if he were just back from one of the many small tea pavilions outside the walls frequented by poets and young gallants.

  On this hot morning in the eighth month gongs clashed ceaselessly before him, demanding reverence. Two of the ruffians, halberds at the ready, rode in front on rickety bays, unsteady in the saddle. Behind them marched two gong beating youths with menacing frowns, four minor officials with freshly lacquered insignia of judicial dignity. And in the blue palanquin, concealed by drawn curtains, a venerable dreaming ancient with a white beard that hung in thick tassels left and right from cheeks and chin onto the shiny black silk robe, almost covering the beautiful breast badge with its embroidered silver pheasant: Wang Lun himself. The round black mandarin’s hat was ornamented with the sapphire button.

  A small troop headed by an officer brought up the rear, soldiers of the provincial Green Banner regiment. Across squares and crowd jammed marketplaces, his erstwhile haunts, Wang rode between walls of dumbstruck citizenry. The doors of the yamen stood wide open.

  The Nieht’ai stayed only half a day in the prefecture. He resolved not to sentence the political prisoners of the Su clan at once, but to take them back to Kuangp’ing and there await the Emperor’s response to his report.

  Without even lodging overnight in the town, towards evening the exalted bluebutton departed from the fluttering town; on a cart guarded by the soldiers of his train stood a narrow wooden cage. In it, their necks held in a single collar of wood, sat Su and his two sons.

  At evening on the following day the runners of the authentic Nieht’ai arrived, conveying complaints from the judge about the poor state of the roads and the police in the district. The monstrous news, becoming known, filled the whole town with horror.

  The highest judicial authorities had been made game of. The Taot’ai and all his staff were lost; the Mohammedan inhabitants faced summary justice: the perpetrators must have come from among them. It was quite likely that Imperial displeasure would deny the town for years the right to take part in the examinations.

  Wang and his companions meanwhile had removed their disguises in one of the mountain gorges. Su-ko and his sons, already resigned to death, declared brotherhood with Wang. For all their fearful gladness there was no loud rejoicing in the gorge: the three of them had grown frail under torture.

  Wang returned to the town next day and took T’o Chin into his confidence.

  The Nieh-t’ai stayed five more days in Chinan to investigate. After his departure at nightfall the priest of the Patron of Music was woken by a light knocking at the door of his room. Su-ko’s legitimate wife slipped into the room, covered her weeping face with a thick white veil and sat on the floor unable to speak. Su-ko and his sons had returned to the house armed, refused to conceal themselves; Su declared that if anyone tried to force entry into the house to arrest him, he would strike him down with the help of his sons and his clansmen. On her knees she implored the bonze and Wang Lun to join her in urging her husband and sons back to the mountains.

  The woman stayed with the bonze, Wang ran to Su’s house. He found the father restored, calm, as dignified as ever but with an unyielding bitterness. Su-ko explained that he would leave the town and the province, but first he would take time to sell his possessions, settle his debts, and consult his priest on a choice of domicile. Wang, head hunched between his shoulders, offered to take charge of the sale and the clearing of obligations, also to arrange the business with the Mohammedan priest. Su declined on all counts.

  So Wang Lun decided to shadow him and help him.

  Su-ko went early in the morning from house to horrified house, desired to pay his debts and those his wife had contracted in his absence. He asked if anyone knew where he could sell his house at a reasonable price. In the throng that followed close behind him leapt the public jester, the assistant of T’o Chin the bonze, the giant Wang Lun, garrulous and excited.

  It was not long before the police came running up. But Wang
and his helpers managed to arrange it so that the crowd pressed menacingly with its women and children close about Su-ko. The old man had completed his business, returned unruffled by the shouts from the crowd and from urgent acquaintances to his little house. There followed a drumming and trumpeting. Blue-jacketed soldiers blockaded the street leaving only a narrow passageway, drove bystanders into houses. A lean T’ouszu, a captain, commanded them.

  Su-ko came bareheaded from his house, bowed politely to the officer and, not glancing at the soldiers and showing no surprise at his surroundings, proceeded along the house wall on an errand a couple of doors away. The bony T’ouszu sprang behind the slow, portly man, hit him in the small of the back with the pommel of his sabre, pulled him round by the shoulder shouting: Was he Su-ko, the absconded wick manufacturer. Su folded his arms and said: Indeed he was; but who was the T’ouszu? Was he a footpad and a robber? And why did he carry his impudence so far as to hit an innocent man in broad daylight with his sabre pommel and waylay him?

  Su had not even finished speaking, when with several sabre blows the officer and two soldiers who sprang to his aid cut him down by the wall.

  Wang cried out sharply, as did the others who watched this from the street corners. He wanted to leap forward, but he was trembling, rooted to the spot, his limbs had fallen sudden victim to weakness and paralysis. He swept with the flood of bodies in a zigzag through the squares, not quite conscious. His gaze ran helplessly over faces, over shop signs painted in gold. He could not discern colours. An ever growing anxiety drove him on. Five sabres swept side by side through the air, ten paces from him, in front of his eyes. And then a grey jumble, turmoil.

  Su-ko, his grave brother, lay unrescued in the street.

  Su-ko was his brother.

  Su-ko had not been rescued.

  Su-ko lay in the street.

  By the wall.

  “But where is that wall?”

  He was impelled to the little whitewashed wall. Su-ko had only wanted to run an errand. His house was not yet sold; the priest had to be consulted; there was the question of his new domicile to consult the priest on. So he had to go along by the wall. Why had they prevented his brother Su-ko from going along by the wall. Oh, he felt so hot, and he was freezing.

  He stumbled trembling into the room where T’o Chin was expecting him.

  When he saw Wang so pale he grasped him about the waist and pulled him, passive, groaning bitterly, twisting his hands, into the temple. There beside the music god’s statue he opened a handleless door; they emerged into an area full of rubble and bricks, sat facing the street in a wayside shrine for homeless spirits, a square stone structure in the interior of which a hollow had been excavated large enough for two men to squat crouching in. On the street side stood a wide offering bowl for donations. They climbed in from the building site through a hole covered over with boards.

  In the dark, in the stale air they sat for a long while until T’o Chin’s flint had taken and the little oil lamp glowed. The bonze was more agitated than Wang, who responded passively, embraced T’o, laid his head on his shoulder. The distraught man then told how Su had been butchered, cried like a refractory child, spoke of the five sabres, and Su-ko was hacked to death. Under T’o Chin’s voice he calmed down, breathed deeper and more slowly, and was silently contemplative for a considerable while.

  Where could they find a remedy that would let Su-ko his brother stand up again and walk around and get everything ready for his departure? It was all the fault of the flashing that there could be no remedy, that the grave man who had only folded his arms was flung to the ground and dragged along like a dead cat. They were probably killing his sons now. Why had they laid hands on Su-ko? If he had read aloud from the old book like his nephew, it would have been no crime; but no one had ever heard anything from him. And for that they cast down his brother, left his soul no repose. The T’ouszu had wronged him. The T’ouszu had struck him down with his sabre.

  Wang half turned away from the bonze’s side, whispered that he would flee now; he would come sometimes at night, knock six times on his door. T’o Chin was happy.

  Wang’s face, when outside he saw the daylight again, streamed with tears. He wept despairing in the space between the broken bricks and the shrine for homeless spirits; he unwound his queue, tore his thin green smock, gnawed mindlessly at the knuckles of his icy hands. The purse of copper cash that T’o gave him he refused; he clambered round the edge of the shrine, swung himself over the palings, ran off without drying his face.

  Wang wandered for six days in the plain, over the hills around the city. On the night of the sixth day he appeared beside the bonze, asked for his stag mask. T’o Chin searched it out, was glad to see his former assistant, rejoiced at his grave determination. Wang held the mask in his hands, stroked it, placed it over his face; the bonze saw how greatly his pupil had changed. Beneath the low, resolute forehead were eyes that mostly looked out sad and full of pain, but sometimes quite intemperately raged wild and blind. And the wide peasant mouth with its upthrust lower lip was no different: often open in a ravening hunger, mostly slack, resigned. The lines of cunning at the corners of the mouth floated there empty and disconnected.

  The priest, this mendacious, deceitful creature, became gentle and pious before his pupil and was surprised at the feeling of submission that Wang produced in him.

  For the rest of the night T’o sat awake in his room and thought about Wang, who had long since stowed himself with the stag mask in the wayside shrine without saying what he intended to do.

  The night faded. Clumps of onlookers gawped and idled at the fence as soldiers performed archery drill in Wanching Square; dust drifted like a high loose curtain over the treeless square. After the archery came gymnastics.

  All of a sudden dogs began baying, the people scattered; over the low fence a furious figure in a stag mask paused, ran straight into a troop of soldiers lined up at ease before a vaulting rope, supervised by a lean T’ouszu. The strays, thirty of them, hurtled between the legs of the barefooted soldiers, who ran about laughing, evaded the snapping beasts with curses. The T’ouszu ran roaring up behind the stag-mask, which flicked his ear with a child’s whip and then with an astonishing bound set itself beside him, thrust the mask over his head, pressed down on him and laid him on the ground.

  On the square it was remarkably quiet at that moment; everyone heard a ghastly groaning and snoring. Already the dreadful bareheaded man was hurling himself into the crowd; a couple of barking dogs followed; in a moment he had disappeared. The big dogs ran whimpering on the sandy ground around the twitching body of the T’ouszu, sniffed at it. The soldiers drove them off with stones. They pulled the heavy antlers off the T’ouszu.

  His face was black and puffy. He had been throttled; the vertebrae of his neck had been wrung.

  It was no use the soldiers lashing into the onlookers with their whips; the dogs ran about in the nearby alleys. Mothers swept their children, who were sieving sand, from the path of the onrushing soldiers.

  It was no use rushing hither and thither. It was no use bursting into houses. At last one of the soldiers found a child’s whip, but that was no help: such whips were produced from other houses, where they were used by children to urge on hobby-horses.

  Around midday word swept through all the marketplaces, through every shop and alley, the teahouses, taverns and lodging houses, the wide courtyards of the government yamen of Chinan-fu, through the four gates into the millet fields, vegetable gardens, over the mud coloured Tach’ing-ho up into the dark hills: It was Wang Lun, the fisherman’s son from Hunkang-ts’un, the town jester of Chinan, who had freed old Su-ko and his two sons disguised as the provincial judge of Shantung, who had tricked the Taot’ai with a rabble of rogues and criminals from the hills of T’ai-shan, with painted shields from a pawnshop, that Wang Lun had avenged his brother Su-ko on the captain of the troop of executioners. With the stag mask that he used to frighten market women, in full view of the spect
ators in Wanching Square he had throttled the T’ouszu of the provincial regiment in front of his own soldiers.

  The subject of the town’s gossip climbed this noontime sluggishly up rocky paths into the mountains. Then he lay on the far side of an inaccessible gorge on loose gneiss, stretched out on his back oblivious of the sharpedged stones. He lay motionless, not lifting his heavy hands, in the sun’s glare. Basically he was waiting and probing inside himself to see if everything was now well, if he had made everything well.

  The anguish of the past few weeks had become insupportable. It drove him on, from hut to ridge; for four days he ate and drank nothing: he forgot about eating for walking, shutting his eyes, tossing and turning. When thirst pangs grew, he didn’t realize that lack of water was parching him; he thought it was misfortune that swelled and scorched in him. The idea often came to him that he must buy new things, because his clothes and skin had been ripped from him. That he was suddenly terribly heavy and terribly big. It tormented him to an extraordinary degree that he was so immovable, wouldn’t let himself be pushed from his place, rolled over. It was just like bathing on the distant beach at Hunkangts’un as the tide turned: the strong waves were still lifting him a moment ago, dragging him rolling over the sand; little by little the transparent water receded; his swarthy breast lay dry, his toes peeped out of the water. The sea peeled his arms and legs bare: he lay dripping ponderously on the damp sand and had to prop himself to avoid rolling into the tide.

  Nothing bore him up. He lifted his arms, balanced them a hundred times; they wouldn’t swing.

  In between came the flashing of sabres, so dazzling that he blinked.

  He hid from the beggars, thieves and fences. He didn’t know how to face them.

  Su-ko had been cut down. They had done that to him.

  He could feel the overpowering pressure of suffering, in the back of his head, on his tongue, in the hollow of his breast. And it was a violently spontaneous direction he gave to his thoughts when he transposed them to fantasies of revenge, passionless fantasies conjured up to heal, to free him. He poured out his woes to himself: there were good reasons for revenge. But he did not believe himself, could not believe.