The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (11 page)

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 spectators 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.

And the desperation rising out of this struggle turned more and more to rage against the T’ouszu whose fault it all was. He feared the T’ouszu as he had shrunk from the flashing of his sabre. But rage against the T’ouszu gained the upper hand, violently hour by hour edged the fear aside. The groans of mindless suffering
transformed themselves to groans of a groping, searching, certain hatred. The endless days grew shorter, and one night he ran through the dumb streets of Chinan-fu and sat with T’o in his room. Did not think of the stag’s antlers as he tapped on the door. But when he stepped across the threshold he became warm. He thought of the playful mask, and that it was all in the past now; and in the same moment he felt a movement in his muscles: the mask gripped and thrust over the T’ouszu’s head, throttled, thrown aside. This was good. He was happy. Thrust it over his head, the mask over the T’ouszu, and then away. Thrust over the T’ouszu’s head, then away, away.