The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (15 page)

Although on the first evening Wang was already anxious to be gone, Ma No detained him on the mountain for three more days. On the morning of the fourth day men knocked at Ma’s door, five robbers from the village. They were looking for Wang; brought news that they’d been betrayed: the previous afternoon thirty horsemen despatched from the sub-prefecture of Chatuo under the command of a gigantic Patsung had swooped on the village. With the villagers’ help they’d driven off the soldiers, lamed a horse, but hadn’t been able to prevent four elderly footpads, one of them a sick man, from being seized and carried off by the soldiers on their horses. By the time they noticed the abduction the horsemen were already at full gallop, shooting arrows behind them. The brothers were all for pulling out, they reported. The well-meaning inhabitants too advised them to leave quickly, otherwise both bandits and villagers were done for. All the roads were easily passable, the weather tolerable, spring was coming early.

Three of the men sent to the hermit’s lair were close friends of Wang from the stamping mills. They were the most experienced, most dependable men.

Yielding to Wang’s agitated entreaties they stayed almost half a day together in Ma No’s hut.

Wang could hardly control himself. He went helplessly in a tumult of feelings across to the low, glowing hearth above which a kettle hung on a rough, badly trimmed oak branch. His broad face shrivelled in the heat. He turned and his flapping sleeves brushed against the golden Buddhas, whose entrancing, glimmering, iridescent features gazed out at silent Ma No, who tried to catch their eye, at the wanderer Wang, the five squatting vagabonds with their heads together slurping tea, gossiping disparagingly of places round about. They were wrapped in layer upon layer of ragged clothing, were barrels of cloth, barely mobile packages of meat.

With an unbearable seething welling in his breast Wang staggered down the steps, and his narrow slanting eyeslits blinked, dazzled by the rebounding whiteness. He stood at the side of the mountain road. Shreds of mist slid out of the valley. Caught by an eddying draught they rose swiftly, sinuously and blew in broad veils over Wang and the long mountain road. The booming rapids sounded unbelievably close. The valley boiled cold and was filled with bubbling vapour. Soft unmuscled arms of snow stretched up out of it.

They took counsel in the barely manhigh hut under the rock. Ma No with his sharp withered face, patchwork gown, tightly wound queue, polite, slightly condescending, strutting inwardly, expectantly excited. Wang, at the hearth with the others, hunched his back; his look wandered from one pair of eyes to another.

He began to speak, to stretch out his hands, to implore his friends: “The horsemen have taken our four comrades away, they’ll be thrown in prison and have their heads chopped off. They couldn’t run as fast as you. I carried the cripple on my back when we were running down from the mountains. No one will believe them, how wretched we were and the frost was so bad. The cripple believes it, because a boatman broke his leg. What terrible luck, they’ll bury him in an inauspicious place, his spirit will have to beg just as it starved and froze in life. His leg was too short, and the soldiers had horses. They take everything from us. We’re supposed to freeze to death in these desolate mountains, the crows have had their fill of us, no one could survive, there weren’t any caravans for food. They’re taking our poor brothers from us. Oh we are wretched.”

Thus Wang Lun lamented, looked all of them in their sad downcast faces, and suffered. Suddenly the fear came again, that estrangement from them. He turned away, gulped on the lump at the back of his mouth. He forced it down, held his icy sweating hands
over the hearth. They weren’t doing anything to him, they didn’t want anything from him, it was all just talk, he had nothing to ask them. Oh, life was hard. And then it flashed in front of his eyes; now like sparks scattering from the hearth, now merging so quick and sleek, five sabres and a little whitewashed wall.

A broadshouldered old man, one of the envoys, a peasant whose land and family had been washed away, maintained his resolute expression at Wang’s tremulous words. “We must get our brother back. Since you carried him down into the village, Wang, you must fetch him back again. If we’d had bows and horses like the soldiers, nothing would have happened. The Sub-prefect in Chatuo is supposed to be a clever man from Szechuan. But he’s too well bred for us here in Nank’ou. Come, Chu, Ma No, something must come from all this talk.”

“Sub-prefect Liu of Chatuo,” interposed a big young man next to him, with a strikingly fair complexion, large sharp eyes, “he comes from Szechuan, but this miserable Hsü knows where he got his taels from. He didn’t pick them out of the canonical books; the songs of the
Shih-ching
don’t wear gold chains around their throats. I heard of a great city called Kuangyuan once when I was wandering beyond the Tapa-shan. Into the yamen of the magnificent Sub-prefect came a courier from the Viceroy of Szechuan; new taxes must be levied from so and so on such and such, for the war. This miserable Hsü knows what answer the magnificent Liu sent back to the exalted Viceroy, because as a matter of fact I laid the returning courier in the dust in order to secure a few cash for myself before venturing into so great a city. Liu had such a fatherly love for the city he declined to impose the tax on Kuangyuan: ‘The city is too poor, smallpox is raging, the price of rice beyond the means of the common man.’ But when I personally entered those happy gates two days later, struck all of a heap at such humanity, lovely
long notices were pasted up on every wall with the stamp of the magnificent Liu and a plain but dignified text. He let the mighty Viceroy have the first word: ‘Son of Heaven, war with so and so.’ And to end up, taxes on this and that, donations from everyone, this guild, that guild. Suddenly the people knew the worth of everything in their city walls, this, that and the other. They were so happy and praised Liu for his noble service in promoting their city so well, praised his parents and grandparents and for three years paid the likin contributions to—Liu, the wise Sub-prefect.”

The light-complexioned man laughed like a drunkard. Ma looked severely at him; Wang knew there was no holding Hsü. One of those next to Wang jogged his neighbour, whose face glowed from the hot water, whispered to him to speak up; that was better than cursing under your breath outside other people’s windows.

Wang was gripped by his pain, was being held by iron hands drowning under a thick dark bog. It was all wrong, what they were saying here.

While the two men next to him gesticulated awkwardly, harangued each other and Hsü launched braggingly into a new story, Wang started to moan, pulled Ma No next to him on the floor. He spoke in helpless gasps, turned his head, his lips quivered: “Ma, sit down here. Don’t be upset, dear brother. Hsü, you’re a good lad, it’s right what you say. I don’t want to weary you, but something came to me as Hsü told us about the Sub-prefect of Kuangyuan in Szechuan, who’s robbed us of our four poor companions. For sure we shan’t let him, dear children. Don’t doubt me on that, dear children. Something just came to me, from Shantung, when I was in the city of Chinan-fu, in that great city, and served a bonze, his name was T’o Chin. You won’t know him, he was a good man, he looked after me well. I want to tell you about Su-ko, that was his name. Then you’ll see why I can’t leave those four poor men in the
Sub-prefect’s hands. Not after what happened to me in Chinan-fu, not after they struck down my friend Su-ko. He was a follower of the Western god Allah, who’s said to grant much to his followers. But disturbances broke out in Kansu when these people suddenly wanted to pray aloud, and Su-ko’s nephew was the first to read aloud out of an old book, and they chopped him into pieces with his family. Then they came to look for my friend in Chinan-fu, he was such a grave dignified man, he’d passed the highest examinations. It fell out as it must. They caught him again after I’d already freed him and his two sons. He told them they had no need to worry about him, he was leaving to settle elsewhere, but first he had to pay his debts and sell his house and his priest had to choose an auspicious day for him. But drums came. A lizard, a white tiger, a thinshanked T’ouszu hit him from behind with his sabre pommel, outside his house by a little whitewashed wall. And then when he turned round they hacked him down with five sabres.

“You mustn’t laugh because I did nothing to help. His spirit must have flown out of his body into my liver, because for days I was possessed. And this happened in Chinan-fu, to my own friend. The T’ouszu is no longer alive, I can assure you of that. But it makes you weep, going unaided across the Nai-ho. They keep coming back and taking something away. They give you no rest and no peace. They want to exterminate me and you and all of us and not let us live. What shall we do, dear children? I, your friend Wang from Hunkang-ts’un, I’m already like trampled flesh, like stinking rags. I can only weep and moan.” Wang had assumed the posture of a sick child before Ma No, and his breast heaved with groans, gasps and sobs.

Water streamed from his eyes and nose, his broad coarse-skinned face was all small and girlish. He leaned against Ma No in a kind of daze.

What he said of Su-ko was no lie. In killing Su-ko they had torn a friend from him. Wang the street runner and pious barker of Chinan-fu had met the Mohammedan in his inn. The grave, tranquil being captivated him, attracted him more strongly than he realized in the city’s restless bustle. He suddenly had a quite indistinct feeling of having met here something fateful, something so profound that he had to turn away from it. He seldom came together with Su-ko and his two sons; their talk touched only on everyday matters. Then came Su-ko’s arrest, and the fearsome strength of his relationship with this man revealed itself. Not that he formed any conception of what his contact with the Mohammedan meant: he only noticed his fascination and his complete involvement in Su’s fate. Wang had a leaden feeling that he himself, something horribly secret within him, was being attacked. And it was not the crudity of the attack that alarmed him, but horror at the secret which rose up before his eyes, which he did not want to see, not yet, later perhaps, much much later. The five sabres and the little wall merged before his eyes, always anew, every hour, every minute, it was unbearable, it must be covered over, buried.

And so vengeance for Su emerged as something thoughtout, forced. Only when he had the stag mask in his hands, in the bonze’s room, and fled at the powerful smell of the mask into the memories that rose up in him of pranks, of careering through market places, balancing across roofs, only then did he know for sure that he would kill the T’ouszu, would use the mask with a quick firm gesture to thrust everything down. At the time this movement made him happy and secure. Thrust down. Once again he wanted to delude himself about the future which he faced with shame and horror. He really did not need to climb out of the wayside shrine that morning and run to the drill square: during the night he had already throttled the captain ten times, fifty times with the mask, it
had all happened already. But still he ran; he had to see it for himself, impress it firmly on himself. And so the murder took place, as a sacrifice that he offered to himself. Thus did Wang avenge the Mohammedan, his friend.

The sharp dispassionate voice of the man who had earlier been jostled by Wang’s neighbour rose above the confusion of hissed fury and curses. The man nearest the door, he cried, should go around the hut and check if anyone was outside; then he would speak. When the door was heaved open and a tall young fellow with his head thrust forward disappeared outside the hut, it was silent for a minute inside so that for the first time they heard the boom of the river and the plunging masses of snow. The young man came back in grinning: there was only something dead sitting near the hut. And he pulled a grey-brown civet pelt from under his shirt. Ma No shuddered in revulsion; he wanted to kick the fellow out, mastered himself and snuffled excitedly when he saw the over-earnest faces of the others.

The man at the hearth, from whose chin a little grey beard sprouted, stood up, stationed himself at the door which he barred with his back, spoke softly, sharply, gesticulated strangely as if he were catching flies. He plucked at his beard. His ancient face with its large eye pouches was lively as a purring tomcat’s. The slack skin did not detract from the play of his expressiveness: it rippled, flashed, rolled over the flat face with its prognathous jaw. Often he snapped his teeth together; they could see his little pink tongue curling, he bent his thickly padded back, crooked one knee or the other. It was known that he had left his home and a position of respectability for no reason. He had lived for years in the Nank’ou mountains, performed honourable services in the villages. People from his home town who were pestered by curious vagabonds for information about him reported with a shake of the head that he
had dropped everything without the slightest cause. They were convinced that the old man had anticipated the discovery of a crime which in the event was not discovered, a story they found very amusing and which threw light on his timorous and secretive nature.

Chu spoke softly, “Since no one is listening at the door, your servant will speak. We must not breathe a word of it, good sirs, not out of fear and anxiety, I mean, which are not at all appropriate to people who have nothing to lose, but for reasons. Your servant Chu has good reason to speak softly and bar the door, and when you have heard him patiently, good sirs, and find yourselves in agreement, then you will speak as softly as he.

“I have good connections with Poshan, my home town in Shantung, where my nephews and siblings manage my property. We have often encountered there what our beloved brother Wang has suffered, and what the inhabitants of Kuangyuan have suffered. Fine things we’ve encountered, fine things, but the child who stands before you mustn’t prattle before men of your experience. See now: how often in the rich southern provinces does the Great River overflow its banks, and how often does the sea with its white breast hurl itself on the land, casting down houses and man and woman and child? How often does the Typhoon beat along the swarming coast, dance over the Yellow Sea and every junk and boat and great sailing ship suddenly grows legs and joins with him in a barbaric, horrible dance? And this little child will say nothing of the wicked demons that blight the fields so that famines break out. But see: people want to imitate the great powers; and whoever is a great lord wants to be a greater. And there are men, born of mothers, who swagger around the Eighteen Provinces, who have power in their hands, and they throw themselves like the grim sea over the flat land, so painfully cultivated, and with their broad bodies
trample down the rice and all the fruits. There are gentlemen who swirl like a dark sandstorm over whole towns and populous villages and as they swirl suck up as much sand as people so that no one remembers how to breathe. And worst of all rages the spring tide that long ago fell upon the precious land, the Flower of the Middle, and ripped away its leaves and blooms. This tide came from the north and breaks against our rich fields and towns. It has dumped its slime and coarse grit on our rich fields and peaceable towns, and is called Ta Ch’ing, the Pure Dynasty. And I want to tell you something about it.”