The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (14 page)

There were rare, striking phenomena, Wang Lun among them: restless souls never long in one place, who turned up here as everywhere among trusted comrades and disappeared. Many such man-ripples passed over the face of the vast Empire.

The hard, immovable kernel of all the mountain-runners comprised four or five old criminals who had plagued the higher roads and passes for years. They were amiable, rather false men, who had a fund of anecdotes to tell, listened good-naturedly to others, played crude tricks on the younger fellows. One in the fullness of his figure had the appearance of a mandarin; only the button was missing from his cap. He placed great store by respectful behaviour, and had a comical habit of responding to the most trivial communication with ceremonial politeness; if interrupted at this he was liable to break out in unspeakably common abuse. He was a hypochondriac, terribly self-pitying, and spent most of the money he got from stealing and robbing on little herb women, hawkers in nearby villages that he frequented in search of medicines. He
had a mass of peculiarities, carved very delicate tobacco boxes with flowery lids, sought from every newcomer information on the latest novelties in the towns, went to unbelievable lengths, when he wanted and it was necessary for him, to obtain samples. To his hawker women, who treated him like a fine gentleman, he sighed at how a poor man had to take his own skin to market, even when he only wanted some trifle. At break-ins he was the toughest, surest of men, with muscles of steel, indefatigable patience and coolness. People, especially young men, who took him by surprise so he had to attack them disgusted him if they did not defend themselves, or asked for mercy after he seized hold of them. Once two shop assistants cried out in fear on their brickbed when he burst into their room at night; first he stunned them with an iron bar; then when the brawny fellows, despite his orders, kept on whimpering under the blankets he strangled them one after the other with best quality cord, ran like mad back to the mountains without taking anything. From then on he was known as “Silken Cord”.

Another of the five was a big bony Cantonese with hornrimmed spectacles. This one liked neither killing nor break-ins; he was a scholar and wrote poetry, social and moral treatises, observations on all manner of topics including the animal world, geology, astrology. His nature remained forever alien to most of the vagabonds. He kept himself quite aloof from them; they came to his cave for advice on all kinds of matters, particularly illnesses and lucky days. He was a man of a certain education, who could quote from many authors and write neat characters. Every few months a change came over this big peaceful man. His visitors noticed the signs: he no longer listened patiently to them; his normally rather tidy dwelling in the cliffside was in disorder. He explained, when anyone asked him, that he was busy with his own affairs, just for a few days; they shouldn’t be put off; he would give his thorough
attention to the matter they were consulting him on later, and let them know. Then came a few days when the bandits couldn’t hold back their laughter, when the learned man climbed muddy and tattered up and down over all the paths, addressed all his acquaintances with a flood of pompous incomprehensible words and scraps, interspersing them lavishly with outrageous obscenities such as otherwise were never heard from him, and couldn’t stop laughing, so that his face was buried under a thousand dry wrinkles. On these excursions, when he allowed himself no rest, slept barely two hours a day with no sign of exhaustion, his gaunt figure hid sometimes on a moonlit night behind a rock by a bend in the road, fell with loud shouts on entire caravans, which more often than not scattered before him; after stalking a solitary pilgrim for some distance, growling with fury, pushed him with a shout of triumph into the gorge; behaved swinishly to women and children in the little market towns. After a day or two he sat once more in his cave, earnestly showed his guests the chaps and chilblains he had acquired. He treated these outbreaks for the first few days as something holy, quickly resumed his old ways, the scholarly work, and woe betide anyone who reminded him of his derangement.

These men had little influence on the others; they weren’t even very close among themselves. The others considered them dangerous eccentrics, not amenable to any common purpose.

The vagabonds spoke furtively about Wang Lun in the overheated kitchens of the village. His prolonged visits to the sorcerer Ma No made them shiver. Everyone conceded that there was more to it than met the eye. He was on the run, persecuted, found nowhere safe. A hunchback who shared the same house as Wang thumped the table: “Something happened to this Wang in Shantung. He’s gone to learn how to exorcize ghosts and get his revenge on someone. There’s a fellow up on Liangfu-shan who has the demons
of the whole province sealed up in jars.” Another agreed: “Ma No’s lived up there a long while. He knows all the mountain spirits. What does Wang want from him?” The hunchback: “I watched him at the mills once. He was swatting his hands about in front of his eyes. Why? He saw demons and wanted to crush them.” An old man leaned across the table and smirked: “He’s a scholar, is Wang Lun. He carries something about with him. What’s so strange if he can do magic? Who knows the one knows the other.”

Thoughtfulness and resolve crept over Wang under the influence of his conversations with Ma No. He grew calmer. The walls and curtains that screened off something dark inside him fell away. He smoothed himself, mastered himself with the greatest stealth. The seesaw in him appeared only occasionally: in practical jokes that got on the others’ nerves, in hourlong spells of apathy with no cause; in transient spite, obstinacy. The older vagabonds knew that something holy lay behind the tricks he played, that it was no different from rolling around in a fit.

Towards the end of their stay in Pat’a-ling, Wang stomped one evening shivering into the kitchen. He laughed, yelled, jumped about the room. In a drift of fresh snow, completely freshly fallen white snow, he’d found—they should just think, just imagine it—an enormous locked leather bag with the Imperial war seal; and when he felt inside it he had lots of round gold nuggets in his hand. He threw a black bag onto the table. Ten smooth shaved pigtailed heads cracked together over the bag, a happy startled jabbering arose. One of them grabbed, and had coaldust up to his elbows; another felt carefully inside, with the same result. And so with two more. They stared puzzled at each other in sheepish silence across the table with the oil lamp, blinked at the tall figure of Wang lounging calmly by the brickbed, looked from one to the other and back again, shook the coaldust from their hands. A fat albino lifted
the bag to his ear, shook it, listened. The four who had felt inside the bag shoved forward and laid their heads against it. The albino put the bag down on the table, shrank back, said without looking at Wang, “He’s right. Wang’s right.” He was so confused he didn’t do what it occurred to another of them, the hunchback, to do: namely, without touching the bag, ask Wang to show them the Imperial seal and check whether it was a seal of Ch’ien-lung or of some earlier emperor. But what if he didn’t feel like showing it to them. If he still had something to say to them about the seal, and about the gold nuggets. They were startled, very startled, of course they were; he was too; but they’d listen gladly, and tell the others.

Tall Wang Lun had long since stopped smiling. His face growing ever more agitated he stood by the brickbed. The wide left leg of his trousers was singeing on the grill, but he didn’t notice, paid no attention to the smell of scorching. He went slowly and quite hesitantly from one to the other, pulled each one by the hand into the light, gazed searchingly into his face: “What is it? What is it then? What do you think?” He leaned both hands on the edge of the table, standing behind the table, eyed the bag from all sides, bent down, stroked it fearfully. Then he wrapped his left hand around it, took it into the next room, all the while casting glances at the men left and right as if he thought they might hit him. He left a thin trail of coaldust behind him. Tall Wang bolted the door and squatted down in the little room, which contained only jars, empty barrels and farm tools, turned a hatchet in his right hand, placed it carefully beside him. Then he lifted the almost empty leather bag in his outspread hands up to his sweating face and dropped his head onto his raised knee. He said out loud, through chattering teeth, for them to hear next door, “What is it then, what do you want of me?” His clothes stuck to his limbs. He stood up, noticed the hole in his trouser leg. Such a silent dizzying fear took
hold of him that he turned around in circles, stared at the wooden planks under his felt soles, passed his hands over the floor, pressed bent fingers to the wall.

He stood up, his back slumped into a corner, hugging his arms tight inside the wide long sleeves; considered with staring eyes what had happened to him. Suddenly everything died away in him. He trod calmly through the jumble of implements to the open window. The air was biting. Wang Lun, his head stuck outside in the darkness, didn’t know what he looked at. The little houses over there were far away, the sky’s blackness was no farther. He observed everything with astonishment.

He pulled his tunic close around him, drew his head down between his shoulders and went back next door where five of the vagabonds sat playing shadows. They noticed how fixed his look was, how expressionless his face. He stood by the table. He said softly to the hunchback, embracing him but not directing his gaze higher than his shoulders, that he was going to walk through the village once more.

And then he went through the empty street, turned back, went farther up the hill. Ran as he broke through the blackness of the night, skin after skin, shell after shell. Before he realized what was happening his arms had started swinging like clubs, a sickle sprang from his forehead and he was slicing the night with it. He leapt over the cliff known as Shen-yi. His body ran on, already without feeling; he rode breathing gently on feathered shanks. He was glad that something had taken him up and was running away with him. Over the hills, up to the crags. To Ma No, to Ma No. Surely he could hear the chamois leaping towards his hut out of the recumbent night.

There was still no sign of morning in the sky when Ma No heard his name called, ran down the steps leading to his hut.

The smoky wick puttered. Silent and mild his Buddhas sat in the background. Earlobes extending down to their shoulders; blue knotted hair; distant gazes; evanescent smiles on protruding lips; squatting on slim round shanks. Wang lay with his forehead before the thousand-armed goddess of rock crystal, accusing, begging, distraught. Willed that he should stay lying here, not go away. Confusedly stammering what had happened to him.

“What happened to Su-ko is nothing to this. They cut Su-ko down with five sabres by the little wall. They took him prisoner and then sent him over the Nai-ho. I’ve been lured, trapped in their midst, bewitched. They want to charm a demon into my breast, the hunchback wants to, they all want to. I’ve been good to them, stopped all their quarrels. A lot of them wouldn’t be alive but for me. I went down the village street. The bag had coal in it. It’s not my fault it was only coal. And there wasn’t any gold or any seal. How could there be gold, how could the Emperor’s seal have got into the leather bag? Why do they ask that of me? They shouldn’t want it, they shouldn’t want it. They ought to let me go again, I said nothing about the leather bag. I’m Wang Lun from Hunkang-ts’un. I’m a murderer; no mandarin will help me now. I won’t let them set me on. You must help me, you five Fos. Ma No, help me, pray with me, help me persuade them.”

He raised himself on his knees, held fast to Ma No, who had dropped down beside him. “Or am I already bewitched? Tell me, Ma No. I’ve left it too late, haven’t I, it’s too late now.”

Turning from the Buddhas he uttered long howling cries, again and again flung his arms wide and smote them together. “What will happen, Ma No? What will happen to Wang Lun? Evil spirits have possessed him. Wang Lun’s been possessed by evil spirits.”

Ma No prised himself loose from Wang’s clenched fingers, let him slide to the ground, placed a thin yellow redbordered cloak
over his patchwork gown, put on the square black cap, the Roof of Life, banged the rattlestick, shook the clappers. The piping words he uttered were drowned in the tinny jangling; and as he invoked with curses the foul snake gods, the Nagas and Lus and their kings, as under the dinning of the clappers the Garuda birds whirred up charmed out of the circle, the green fluttering Garudas with the red breasts of men, white bellies, two horns projecting from their black birdheads, Ma No’s heart trembled with joy. Himself in a dream he danced enraptured around Wang, who bowed his head. He understood everything Wang said. He bent down, stroked his shoulders, his skull, managed to transform his snarling and hissing into laughter. Wang recalled his father and mother, and how his mother fell asleep as his father leapt about in a tiger mask yelping like a dog in front of her and wheezed and whispered over the unconscious body. He felt frozen suddenly under the shoulders, in the knees, the heels.

He lay dizzy, stretched full length on the floor. Ma heaped covers over him, snuffed out the light. White brightness entered through the pasted-over window. A scraping and scratching at the bolted door, feet and beaks of hungry crows. Then came a soft running over the steps, crawling over the low roof, a weaselish sniffing and snuffling away over the rafters. Every moment there came a crashing from far off; distant shoving, sheering, rumbling followed. Snow masses came with a lurch, plunged into the gorges.

Ma No in his sulphur yellow cowl with a red border, four-pointed cap on his head, opened the door. The booming of the river surged into the stuffy room where the clapper was now silent. Dazzling white reflected off the snow masses. Ma whistled and ducked. He held the big begging bowl in his hand, full of grains and crumbs. Crows uttered furious cries. He kept the importunate birds back with shrill laughter. Far over the slope, onto the deep snow hiding the road the hard scraps flew.