The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (27 page)

The night before he left Ma No’s troop, two girls came into his tent. They held yellow lanterns on bamboo staves which they shone on him, leaned the lanterns out of the way in a corner. They rolled the sleeping man off his pile of straw, rubbed his eyes for him, squatted alert side by side as he sat up, carefully exercised his injured knee and slowly began to smile.

He wore a long brown tunic, his coarse feet were bare. Each girl took one of his hands and raised him up, so that he took them both in his hands and supported himself on round submissive shoulders. Held thus, heads pressed together, they exchanged nervous glances. The younger in his left arm trembled and sought the other girl’s fingers. They both thought the terrible sorcerer was going to carry them away through the tent roof, or twine like a snake around their necks.

But Wang released them, one after the other stroked smooth the straightcut fringes on their foreheads. They were entranced.
The younger one shook herself and ground her teeth. They pinched his arms that he held out between them. They felt his muscles, right and left, pulled themselves up by his elbows, swung, the elder grabbing just in time at the neck of his tunic, the younger tottering unsteadily on her shoulders. Suddenly the younger one, wobbling on Wang’s forearm, scratching and tapping at the skin on his breast, overbalanced, dragging the other girl down with her, bit his arm close to the wrist like a playful young puppy at a bone, slipped interestedly onto her feet and stood chewing and snapping at Wang’s unmoving yellow-brown left arm. She looked sidelong into the man’s face, waiting for him to twitch, astonished that he still didn’t flinch. His hardness hurt her teeth. Exhausted she smacked her lips, licked herself.

She was a native of Shensi, small, lithe, a chatterer. You could take her for a poodle or a rabbit. She told lies freely and happily, in a certain silly way, just as they came into her head. Along with the other girl she had been a house slave on the country estate of a family near Kuangp’ing, fled when her carelessness caused a fire in her mistress’ room, didn’t dare return, cheerfully let three begging sisters bring her along to the camp of the Broken Melon. She was lazy, said yes to everyone, was impervious to teaching.

The other, no bigger than her but fuller, with a longer nose, much more delicate than the younger girl, was no less a liar but in more of a swaggering, boastful way. She inclined easily to sentimentality and self-worship. Ever since her twelfth year she’d suffered occasional spells of strange humour that lasted months, gave herself up to romantic imaginings and thoughts of suicide. Later she liked to assume the expression of a blessed martyr, as if she’d had some tremendous experience, but when anyone pressed her admitted lightly that homeless, orphaned and bereft of family as she was she found the emptiness and hopelessness of her
existence an absolute torment. She considered herself special, clung intimately, even passionately, to her girlfriends, got on with them only for a matter of weeks, was considered clever, pretty and quarrelsome. Had she come into the house, not of an honourable gentleman but of a sharp man of business, she would have been sold long before into a theatrical troupe, where she could have developed her gifts to the best advantage.

Wang slipped into trousers and sandals. The girls wanted to help. They fussed chattering around him. The younger offered herself to him in excitement as she explained through a welter of questions that she was over fifteen and was glad to come across such a fearsome conqueror of demons. Oh, she was so looking forward to plucking flowers with him. Wang said he’d have to think about it, pushed them away one after the other as they danced around him. The younger one ripped her gown at the neck and under the shoulder. Pleased and bashful, she showed Wang the meagre roundness of her breasts. The sentimental girl stood pouting because the little one kept nudging her with her shoulder, told her to go away, hit her from behind over the nose.

When Wang grasped the little one by the shoulders, sent her spinning over the mossy ground so the girl became dizzy and lurching crazily split open her too tight trousers, the sentimental one scolded her: she didn’t learn that in the old master’s respectable house. Wang took her by the shoulder too. But she pulled herself free, said with downcast shining eyes that she’d like to make a proposition. She’d wrestle with the little one, or lift stones, or whatever the little one wanted. They should see which was best. The man set them on each other, then sat down in the straw. They had to crouch down beside him, he comforted them, stroked their glowing faces that they averted bitterly from one another.

He told as he petted them stories that he’d heard in Chinan-fu.

The ovenblack masses of the night loosened. A thin grey gas disjointed them and dispersed, dissipated them in space. The catalpa forest, uncovered, stepped forward like a ram with lowered horns.

Wang put on his blue smock, hung the sword around his neck. They’d better run, fetch their begging bowls and stuff; they must leave the camp together. As he walked slowly beside them, sparing his knee, he didn’t say why he had to leave so stealthily or where they were going.

He wandered for three weeks through central Chihli, sent emissaries into many of the larger settlements and towns, which had already received news from Shantung that the Wu-wei under Wang Lun from Hunkang-ts’un belonged to those friends of the motherland the White Waterlily, and should be supported by every conceivable secret means. Wang’s emissaries went as fig sellers; in their long narrow box between layers of figs lay the sword, Yellow Leaper, Ch’en Yao-fen’s heirloom, with a letter from Wang in the prearranged cipher of the White Waterlily whereby, starting with a character to be communicated only by mouth, only the third and then the seventh word were to be read, then from another specified character every second and fourth word. The secret aid of the White Waterlily was quickly mobilized; there was complete trust in the committee in Shantung.

At the same time Wang amended his rules governing the way the brothers and sisters lived; in the poorer districts he tolerated and desired the complete dissolution and dispersal of the brothers and sisters in settlements, villages, towns. In this Wang was yielding to the wishes of two members of the Pailien-chiao, who told him they did not favour the strict isolation of the Truly Powerless, their owl existence; an alliance needed more than a letter; actually there wasn’t any sword under the sweetness of the figs. But Wang gave secret instructions to the precentors of every group to
warn the brothers and sisters before they entered human society that they were the equals of the brothers of the White Waterlily. Patriots they all were, but only the Wu-wei in peace and toleration, truest children of their poor race that none could truly entangle in a war, since it flowed forever like water and assumed the form of every vessel.

After these efforts to secure the safety of the brothers and sisters in central Chihli, Wang Lun should have been able to retire and devote himself to his own preparations for the great heavenly voyage. But a horse cannot graze with an arrow in its shank, and a wind that rushes against a flagpole cannot be silent. There were evenings for Wang that summer when, sitting in a forsaken teahouse, on a woodland path, he was ambushed by thoughts of Ma No and laid low by them. One day he conquered his feelings and sent a messenger, a swift young man, with a letter for Ma No, in which he asked him to forget their meeting and to deliver up to him the souls that were now befuddled, and to come himself with them. Not even the messenger returned.

It happened as Ma No said: there had never been among the brothers and sisters a devotion more intense, feelings more tender, a sweeter sense of life than since that morning when they confessed themselves out loud to be Broken Melons. A few months later none of them lingered this side of existence; wherever they had passed they left a soft buzz of talk: that theirs had been the greatest happiness.

Even before the Broken Melon reached the foothills of the T’aihang-shan, north of Shunte, a robber band fell on the endless column of brothers and sisters. They were straggling one rainy afternoon through a monotonous loess landscape. There was a baggage train of carts, wide wagons. The armed ruffians, eighty of
them, fell on these, thinking to make a haul. When they found only boards, beans, a little rice and water together with a considerable number of invalids they overturned the wagons, polluted the water barrels, took the sacks of provisions. Most of the brothers in the rearguard fled; six braver ones, wanting to carry away the invalids, were driven off with kicks and with blows from the flat of sword blades. One who tried to remonstrate with the criminals had his tongue cut out and tied to his forehead, to general laughter. The robbers, who now realized who they were dealing with, had great fun chasing after some of the sisters. Under the rousing chorus of a pious hymn that a sister struck up in her deadly terror when they threw her to the ground, they made off with eleven tighttrussed disrobed girls.

The sectarians meanwhile crowded round Ma No and the elders at the front of the column. A massing of confused cries, of clueless grimaces, knocking knees. They tried to surround the leaders from behind and bring them to a stop. The leaders slipped free, forcibly knocked away arms that stretched out to them, shook their heads, pressed on, shrugged hands from their shoulders and backs.

What did the brothers and sisters want. Didn’t they know the precious teaching of their sect? To be unresisting. Didn’t they know that?

Only now did the frightfulness, the terrible solitude of their doctrine swoop down upon the chalkwhite men. They flapped round one another, dragged tormented eyes from the rear of the column, forced their feet into Ma No’s tracks. Writhing under the screams they skirled a cracked song meant for their ears alone. They called on secret spirits, consoled each other.

Ma No walked slowly with the elders in the dripping rain. The elders wrung their hands whispering, glanced at each other, stood wishing the earth would swallow them. Ma’s eyes opened wide; an
outburst of tense fury. Why hadn’t they seized daggers and knives? The difference between this suffering and any other, come, what was it? How was it different? Yes, you had to force yourself to see this as good, as very good, to worship it, for this was fate. Exactly. Fate.

And he forced them and himself to turn around, watch there over the loess landscape the depredations of the robbers on the brothers and sisters and swallow this poison. He silenced the brothers’ brazen stupid singing. They threw themselves to the wet ground, were hacked to pieces by what they heard. The sectarians flocked about the grimly kneeling, agonizing leaders.

Breathless calm. Open stage. Screams from the trussed-up sisters, stripping of tender bodies, clubs ringing on the skulls of brothers, roaring, trampling horses, timid whimpering of the sick, empty plain, rain.

Everything agglomerated round the wreckage of the wagons. When the drenched invalids began to yammer the brothers couldn’t look them in the face. When the tongueless man rasped and gaped his bloody mouth they turned their backs.

At discussion near a market town that evening Ma No was unshaken. No one said much. They separated groaning, expressions paintight. Dull seething unease among the brothers and sisters.

Fifty brothers came together in the night, searched through the market town for the robbers. They learned that the robbers had their lair in a village some distance back from the town, that neither authorities nor private citizens had been able to dislodge them. Some locals also brought news that three of the abducted girls had been carried off right away to Shunte; eight were being held in the village.

That night the brothers burst into the houses pointed out to them in the village, fought with the robbers, who assumed it was a military raid and made haste to escape. The sisters were found
and freed, two criminals and three brothers lay dead in the moonlit village street.

The brothers grew so bold now that next day they sniffed out the whereabouts in the town of the other girls, who were lodged in an obscure house of pleasure. At evening they visited the place in groups of three and five, enjoyed themselves until the third night watch, then without difficulty broke down the doors, lay low for a whole day among the beggars of the town, a week later by roundabout means gained Ma No’s camp on the flowery slopes of the T’aihang.

Ma No, alerted to these events, considered expelling them. A majority of the sectarians had already reverted to the notion that Wu-wei was the core and the salvation, must remain core and salvation. The liberators hung their heads. Where sorrow appeared genuine Ma forgave. Five who had been unwise enough to boast were turned away.

A bitter secret struggle developed between Ma No and his antagonists in the league. Ma’s victory, which soon became apparent, demonstrated the enormous power at the disposal of this utterly changed man.

In the fertile populous region at the foot of the T’aihang holy prostitution emerged from the bosom of the league.

Ever since their sojourn by the swamp of Talu the sisters had acquired the habit, whenever men approached as they wandered in lonely regions, mountain paths, woods, of going up to them and exchanging friendly words; even caresses were hard to slip away from without risk. After the attack near the T’aihang-shan this practice became general.

The sisters mobilized to erect a dike of gentleness around the Broken Melon. They no longer went about in ragged beggar’s
traps; sought with help from the brothers to acquire bright clothing, lovely painted parasols, fine combs. They congregated every day at evening, and the more experienced taught them seductive love songs from the pleasure houses, how to strum the p’ip’a. They no longer hurried anxiously past labourers repairing the Imperial highway, peanut gleaners grubbing in the fields; they fought with feminine weapons, glided past. Among the almost five hundred women there were ten who saw the situation of Ma No’s group clearly, who joined their destiny to that of the Broken Melon, brought intelligence and determination to the strengthening of the league. It was the younger beauties who established holy prostitution. No one, they said, should hinder them in smoothing a path to the Western Paradise, now that they shared everything, everything with everyone.