The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (5 page)

I shall sacrifice to him behind my window, to this wise old man

Lieh-tzu

with this impuissant book
.

The Attack on Chao Lao-hsü
 

Darkly the ridges of the Hsi-shan marched inland from the coast. A long way from the golden coast rose the mass of the Tu-shan, only reluctantly, as if they might desert it, leaving the flowerstrewn hills to lie beside the yellow-grey water. In the bright air lines shimmered beyond and above the mountains. They were the peaks of the Pien-wai; they were oscillations, resembling the eyebrows of a woman.

It was evening on the Gulf of Pei-Chihli.

The sea beat higher and brighter on the rocky shore. The warm turbid waves carved grooves in the sand around the little junks on the beach. During long harsh hours the sun’s rays had lashed the water; now they rebounded. The sea had covered itself in an armour which, it is said, is the back of the P’eng bird. When the P’eng rises up and flies to the southern seas, his scaly body stretches millions of miles and his gigantic wings are able to propel the clouds. A soft haze glided over the surface, gathered loose and thick like cotton wool. The sun’s rays draped themselves in loose folds of mist. Moments before a round furnace in the sky had roared forth heat; now the fire was sintered over. A misty shade had suddenly been placed over the world. Things swelled into one another.

The shouts of the harbour workers came muffled from the Customs House. Beside the harbour lay the old town of Shanhaikwan. House shouldered house. Low broad mud huts in narrow alleys, slender wooden structures, ponderous warehouses and
pawnshops, a few brightly painted temples, memorial arches, government yamens.

The streets grew quieter as darkness gathered. Mist fell like a wedge between the passers by, the merchants, peddlars, street hawkers. In the Oxmarket, a wide space in Tso-fu Street, fat glossy beasts lowed and flicked their tails at the bluebottles that flew up from the hoof high dung. The drovers, five of them, sat in a shabby teashop. Fat Chang squatted crosslegged outside by the door, on the ground. He strummed a bigbellied mandolin, a yüeh-ch’in, they sang the response, a coarse peasant song. Two old knife grinders were making their way up the long street. Their little barrows scarcely rattled in the soft muck. On a street they simultaneously took the ching-kuei from around their necks, the Maidens’ Terror, brass plates five spans wide threaded on a string. They pulled the wooden handle; a jangling like shattered panes. The elder whistled mournfully and stood on one leg. He had a blue cloth tied over his right ear. They walked on opposite sides along the housefronts, cocked their ears, came back. Then they pushed their barrows onwards, trailing behind a water cart. They shouted a few words to the water carrier but he did not turn round. At the Oxmarket they stopped. The grinders upended their barrows. The water carrier stepped from the shafts, swinging his arms. He spat into his hands, rubbed them together. He stumped into the teas hop ahead of the others, joined in the peasant song loudly from the doorway.

The mist hung impenetrable from curving roofs. A light drizzle fell. From the eastern part of the town, the shop quarter, walking slowly through the streets came young Chao Lao-hsü and Han Yung-kuang. They held elegant gardenias, with which they pointed laughing. They told each other the thick mist was just the thing for flirting and catching girls. Delicate Lao-hsü, only son of General Chao Hui, walked in front with the dancing, springy, careful gait
that jugglers use when they juggle on bamboo poles. He wore a bright blue damask undergarment, a dark overgown with the finest embroidery on the wide sleeves and shiny collar. There were lotus blossoms with dragoneyed fish, white flower stems that ended swelling in the goggle eyes of fish. His shoes were painted green and blue with thornapple blossom.

Lao-hsü turned from time to time to warn his friend of a puddle, revealing to him a childish, fineformed face. It was not so strongly Manchu as Yung-kuang’s: he had slanted, flickering eyes in a long face, cheekbones jutting out sharply, thin lips. It was more softly contoured, the eyes more rounded, but their laugh was the same: soft, trilling, beginning like a cough. They were still laughing about their sedan chairs, which were waiting in front of a shop in Wei-ai Street, while to the astonishment of the shopkeeper they climbed a ladder over the courtyard wall into the neighbouring yard through the shoemaker’s workshop into a parallel street, merrily pulling and jostling each other. The mud in the streets was deep. The beautiful white felt of their shoes was soon brown. On their backs, on their queues crusts of mud stuck, thrown up by runners and carriers who appeared suddenly through the mist and ran frantically from them. But their pleasure was unclouded. If a shuffling of slippers, the tripping of a girl’s feet made itself noticeable at a gate, at a window, behind a lattice, Lao-hsü would whip an inlaid dagger from his sleeve and spring forward.

He had bought it in a nearby town ten days before, when an itinerant Peking opera troupe was performing the old play “The Temple of the Eight Chao’s”. He had watched the pranks of Fei-te Kung, the ravisher of maidens, with delight. From his seat, to the terror of the women, he set off a rocket which he aimed right across the theatre, so that a general sneezing and spitting began. But during the prelude to the final scene, where the cocksure hero
is robbed of his weapon by a crude female trick, he stood up noisily with his friend and pushed along the narrow row of benches out of the theatre, considered first whether it wasn’t more appropriate to rob the bonze outside the theatre of an ornamental sword, then for a hundred taels and without bargaining bought his old inlaid sleeve dagger. “We shouldn’t lower ourselves to the tradesman’s level of these Chinese,” he said to Yung-kuang, as without a word he handed the huge sum to the stupefied bonze. They teased him: he was holding the sword in his hand like a boy his new plaything. Again and again he laid it lovingly across both arms, showed and concealed fine engravings on the handle, wondered if he shouldn’t have it consecrated by a priest of Wu-ti, god of war.

They turned towards the poor western part of town, so as to arrive at the river and the flowerboats, and the pretty singing of pretty women.

They had scarcely stepped into Tso-fu Street when a broadshouldered Chinese by the wall of the ivory carvers’ clubhouse looked them closely in the face. He had a carrying pole on his shoulder, sank back again to the wall. He followed them.

They walked faster. The rain was heavier now, and it was growing darker. Lao-hsü’s merriment was increasing. He grabbed the hands of a serving girl who was on her way at this late hour to buy ointments from an old herb woman for her mistresses; no one was to know that these ladies obtained their rouge and ointments from a disreputable woman. The little thing, muffled up to the eyes, was so frightened she could not cry out or run away when a hand grasped her waist, a short sword danced in front of her face. The empty ointment jar dropped to the ground. Lao-hsü looked stern, like a policeman; he pulled her along, and Yung-kuang followed close behind grotesquely grimacing.

The coolie put his pole flat on the ground. He glided past
them in the mist, in the darkness, knocked on a house door: three double knocks, then twice with the palm. A boy in a red cap opened it. Behind him stood a tall man, naked to the waist, scarred. As the coolie whispered to him he pulled over his thin arms with movements quick as lightning a long gown that was hanging at the hearth to dry. With great strides both were outside. They left the door open.

Finally Yung-kuang could go no farther for laughing. As Lao-hsü was explaining solemnly to the girl that in this time of unrest any Chinese who stuck his dirty nose outside the door after sunset without first plugging his nostrils was liable, according to a prefectural decree, to a summary sentence of three weeks in the cangue, two figures fell on them out of the gloom, hit them over the head with wooden clubs, threw them to the ground, chased away the girl. They cut off their queues with short knives, removed their shoes, ripped from their gowns the embroidered insignia showing membership of the eight Manchu Banners. They dragged the two boys, senseless in the churned up filth of the street, into the doorway of a ruined house and propped them against the half open door. On the foreheads of the two motionless youths they drew in mud the sign of the five evil demons. Lao-hsü’s bloody head lolled all the while on his left shoulder. They shoved his arms together and laid the magnificent sleeve dagger across them. Hu, the tall man, strode across the Oxmarket to the teahouse. The two old knife grinders came back sleepily with him; they smiled and rocked their heads. Three melon sellers and a salt boiler jostled for a look. They exchanged greetings, sighed. The salt boiler spat on the still body with the sleeve dagger. The coolie, an old, serious face, fingered the long, gaping wound on Lao-hsü’s head, then rested the lolling skull on his left arm as he knelt beside the boy and with quivering lips poured a healing draught from a little gourd flask
that had stood for a hundred sutras on an altar table.

There was movement in the street. Muffled the night watchman’s drum beat between the houses. They vanished behind the door. The young night watchman whistled a chirpy tune. The dull light from the round lantern that he carried before him on a long pole slid over the still bodies. Muffled his drum echoed across the wide market place.

The men behind the door separated, after the coolie had told them the name of his family and where he lived, and had invited them to honour him soon with a visit to his miserable hovel.

A fine rain was still falling. In the main streets the lamplighters went about, climbed their hand ladders and lit the oil lamps in front of the houses of the rich merchants, the doctors and midwives. Songs and gongbeats blared from many shops. A rumbling and distant thunder came from the Hsi-shan. Beyond the harbour where the dark warm sea stirred, strumming came from a little vegetable patch behind a fisherman’s hut. The sound from the longnecked bottle-shaped p’ip’a was now loud, now carried scarcely ten paces. A man’s uncertain highpitched voice sang in an unfathomable rhythm, wandering among the same few notes:

Old Chao Hui paced to the upper window of his house.

The second night watch was already past.

He had been waiting for young Lao-hsü.

The house stood alone behind the town on the northwestern Magnolia Slopes. In the darkness it stood out harshly, as narrow
and tall as a lance. He had not built himself one of those miserable Manchu dwellings with flat roof and walls of mud, like his northern ancestors from the River of the Black Dragon. As General vested by the Emperor with a special commission and authority in a turbulent province he lived in splendour under the tall trunks of the elms and the whiterimmed spruce. Before him the tangle of alleys, the huge empty squares, the meandering streets feeling their way to the harbour. His house lay high enough to afford a view of the sea, if it were not for the triumphal arch at the end of Han-pen Street, that ancient edifice erected in the time of Chu Yuan-chang to commemorate some securing of the border against the Mongols. Four smooth pillars, straddled high up by broad crossbeams, supported stepped cornices. On each step crouched stone phoenixes; each beam bore reliefs and boastful inscriptions. Whoever passed through the wide central arch of the monumental p’ai-lou could read on every frieze about that grand old victory on the Northeast Frontier.

Chao Hui laughed as he looked. They rejoiced over that ancient victory—and wore shaven heads in their own land, the mark of the Manchu, despite the presence of their tutelary ancestors. Deeply embedded in the Chinese earth in front of the house two wooden flagpoles reared threateningly; from fine, ornately perforated flagbaskets hung white pennants with the insignia of the Banner Lord. A low green wooden fence enclosed the house, whose two storeys, a red and gold upper floor over a bluewashed ground floor, were decked with an immense, overornate roof. Above the door, between two paper-covered windows an engraved tablet hung, with the inscription: Righteousness and the Pure Dynasty. The blind upper floor was painted gold and red, and was straddled by roof spars that flashed gold and red, the side beams ending in dragonheads. Monstrous lions squatted big as children on
the balustrade around the upper floor. They snapped with twisted mouths, bit their long, itchy poodle ears, they growled and curled pointed tongues, they flopped lazily on their sides and nuzzled their fur.

And inside at the open balcony door lean, restless Chao Hui stood, lightly dressed in black, trying to penetrate the mist. Prized by his troops, his clan, an object of jealousy among the courtiers, the intriguing eunuchs. Here he was in this northern province, and knew he had been sent here to be got swiftly out of the way.