The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (33 page)

He fell silent, because all the while Yellow Bell’s great face was smiling at him in such a friendly way that he let his voice trail off in confusion and stop.

Yellow Bell addressed him: “Don’t stop speaking, Yuan. No one will hold it against you if you say what’s in your heart.” He pumped his hands in greeting towards Ma and Yuan; they responded, hesitant and polite.

At last only Liang remained sitting on the ground, stared at the grass. Little Third spoke sympathetically to her; he helped her up; she went with lowered head to Yuan, bowed deeply before him until he returned the greeting; then she inclined her narrow shoulders before Ma, embraced him in front of the others, said in an unhappy voice, “Help, Ma No. Bring it all to an end. You are right about everything. No slaughter, don’t let that happen. Save whoever you
can, us included, me included.”

An hour later Ma and his confidants slipped away with the five village delegates. Most of the other villagers remained in the monastery at the urging of the respected salt panner, who told them to look after the threatened sectarians. It became evident on the way that Yellow Bell had not calmed down; during the night, which they had to spend in the open, he was heard groaning beside Liang, who tried to comfort him. In the morning he found some excuse to separate from them, and made his way back to the monastery.

Next afternoon they came to a village, the largest of this region, where the salt panner had his property. Quickly Ma surveyed what was of interest to him, listened to great numbers of people. They rode for a while on mules through other villages. Crowds of unemployed men emerged from the houses, stared at the strange procession, fell to the ground.

Before nightfall the sectarians held a brief discussion; they burned with the feverish notion that Imperial troops had already reached the monastery.

Then hinnies bore the exhausted figures back. More than a hundred of their new friends followed in excitement; they ran through the tall kaoliang. Overnight they allowed themselves an hour’s rest; early in the morning they approached the lake.

A pale gleam of fire rose across the water. They had come too late. The attack on the monastery already over; the monastery put to the torch by soldiers. Hundreds killed. The soldiers, scarcely hindered by the peasants who had stayed behind, fled after doing what they could to save the sisters, shut up in the chapels, from the flames. They had run away head over heels in superstitious fear as if they were the vanquished.

When Ma passed through the broken gate with the furious peasants, Yellow Bell was sitting in the gateway, called “Hail!” and
“Triumph!” to Ma, who lay drooping on the grey beast’s neck.

Ma, wordless, shook a fist over him. Even lovely Liang turned away sobbing from him.

How things went from here is well known. The Broken Melon left the monastery, the population of these regions rose against the Imperial officials. There followed the storming of prisons, expulsion of magistrates, landlords chased from their vast estates, their houses burnt. For days thick smoke piled over the farms. Not graves nor memorial arches nor pagodas were spared.

The first manifestos issued from a committee presided over by the salt-panner. The properties of evicted landlords were declared forfeit; the rule of the alien Manchu dynasty, the Ta Ch’ing, was branded illegitimate, foreign, and hence abolished.

Insurrection spread rapidly to the northeast. From there two groups of Wang Lun’s Truly Powerless, each of about three hundred men, marched towards the insurrectionaries, sought out the brothers in order to help them.

From the second week Ma No signed all proclamations, notices and so on. He sent emissaries to nearby towns, who pasted on the outer walls under cover of darkness a letter from Ma No to the Emperor Ch’ien-lung. In it Ma declared himself willing to acknowledge the rule of the Pure Dynasty, provided that the entire region affected by the rebellion was ceded by the central government to the administration of its own prince.

After another week the most crucial step was taken: the occupied districts were transformed into a spiritual kingdom on the pattern of Tibet, with the name “Isle of the Broken Melon”. The task of this new state was defined as the nurture of paradisial aspirations. Ma No proclaimed himself priest-king of this spiritual land; a commission of three men, titled Law Kings, served at his
side. Ma set up residence in the only town of any size in the occupied districts. Here plans were drawn up for the defence of the Isle, the raising of great double walls with watchtowers to encircle the whole region, watchtowers at stages on all main roads. Around a thousand of the local men remained under arms; arms for the rest were stored in the capital.

There were two kinds of people on the Isle: former residents in their houses, shops, in their fields, hills, in the orchards; and the brothers and sisters, by day toiling among them, otherwise keeping apart, many in huts, most in the fields near to the powerful spirits of the soil. The sectarians acquired no property, passed all earnings for which they had no immediate need to the royal treasury.

The time by the swamp of Talu had yielded full measure of wonder, tumult and joy. Here on the Isle they were hidden away. It was a masterstroke of Ma No’s. He had lifted every burden from the Broken Melon; the wall he had wished for was a living thing surrounding the brothers and sisters. The path of outward liberation for his adherents which he embarked on at the swamp had been trodden to its end. They were safe from destruction at the hands of blind fate.

Ma No’s hardness grew during this time. From the moment he became priest-king of the district a sternness surrounded him which bordered on cruelty and revealed the well-schooled student of ascetic monks. Ma was not changed; but he once again found himself in a position where only his word was law. The fire at the monastery, where brothers and sisters lay charred before his eyes, still burned in him. He experienced no feelings of revenge; only the feeling that things that had started like this should not be allowed to end in farce. He listened no more to advice from his confidants. Sympathy for the half dead, the speared in the courtyards, in all the corridors almost killed him. He descended from the peak, stood
among the wretched, confused, superstitious of his people, bent under their torments, was one with them.

Not one of his confidants did he acknowledge now. He strove in haste to draw all power to himself, feeling that otherwise he would sink under the responsibility. Not until he’d done his utmost for the sect would its fate be of no account; then he’d be able to stand and fall meekly with the others. No fire would trouble him then.

Ma No, unknowable man, sat on the throne of the Isle. No idol gazed more blindly than he. His faith in the Western Paradise had up to now been mingled with a sensation of ecstasy, a rapturous yearning; now Ma sat there sober, held this belief from him in an iron grip. He did not yearn for this paradise; coldly he requested, demanded entry for himself and his people. No longer was it a question of some dreamlike goal to to be reached slowly, step by step, but of something near, like the little wooden bridge he crossed every day, to which he went whenever he pleased, something purchased, paid for, overpaid tenfold, which no one could withhold from him. It was no longer a matter for dispute whether the Western Paradise really existed or not; events had furnished it with the most tangible signs of reality possible.

But now and then he was beset by a feeling that he would have to pay a price for it, that there might occur a circumstance in which a price such as he had already paid would have to be repaid, and so now what he wanted was not long life but a brief, urgent decision, even the rapid destruction of this Isle that he had adorned with the name of his brothers and sisters. By his cunning, decisiveness, on the strength of the uncanny powers ascribed to him, he had become ruler of this land whose occupants he despised, whose touch repelled him. It tormented him that he must make use of dirty things to help the Broken Melon. Never had his hatred for Wang
Lun been so constant, for the man who had allowed all this to pass when he might have prevented it with a small shift of his will.

In the first days after the reversal at the swamp of Talu, Ma served his people better than he knew. He had thought to make a journey back to himself, out of the clutter of daily command. But only with the burning of the monastery did this journey become possible. Ma became a hermit again, without in his role of king becoming aware of it. He gained empathy with vanished incidents on Nank’ou Pass. Through his dreams civet cats ran, sat on the Buddha shelf, flocks of crows waited for his scraps on the steps; and Ma No wondered at this upwelling of memories. Uncouth Wang Lun looked at the golden Buddhas, long since shattered, asked endlessly after a hundred-armed Kuan-yin of rock crystal whose splinters cut the feet of travellers in the vale of micanthus. Against fate the only salvation was through acquiescence; the slaughter at the foot of the mountains, the burning of the monastery once again proved all that. Ma felt that the immensity of this idea and the fruits of these facts were beyond his powers.

The sect was welded together by fate. The joy of the summer months no longer shone over them. Many became conscious only now of the deadly earnest of their sect. Ma radiated a dark glow that imparted itself to them. Yuan, fallen in the battles around the farms, lay under the earth. The Lius kept silent before Ma’s authority. Lovely Liang trembled at the glance of this rigid man and thought herself lucky to follow him. Yellow Bell had disappeared.

Once more the body of the sect shivered with an inner sickness. In a village barely eight li from the capital there lived among the Broken Melon a young, strange, handsome brother who, though a charcoal burner by trade, bore himself with enviable refinement and was always ready to help. Like not a few others he had left home out of filial devotion, from a vow to a wandering
brother that he would go to the Broken Melon himself if the brother would help his sick father. Now, torn from familiar surroundings, he journeyed with the others to the Western Paradise.

But he was disturbed in the purity and calm of his emotions by a feverish passion for a woman. This woman was a sister, but she found it a struggle to keep her spirit aimed surely towards the clearly seen goal. Of a girlish gentle beauty, a voice that was always husky, dreamily squinting eyes, she was first borne from her father’s house at the side of a coarse forty year old dealer in furs, from whom she fled two years later because she thought he had discovered her infidelity. The man fetched her back, she deceived him again and had to leave the town. She was glad to come upon the wandering brothers and sisters; she could indulge the vexing wildness of her body without mortal risk; she almost stumbled headfirst into their lusts.

Then she met the young charcoal burner. She didn’t deny him, but soon he drew back from her, desired her no more; grew gloomy. He declared to her one morning, when she came to his smoky billet in front of the village and sang, that he’d given no thought for days to heavenly things, he was in torment and begged her to stay with him and belong to him. The young woman covered her comely face weeping as soon as he began to speak, for she knew already what he would say. But when he finished she looked about to see if anyone was listening, sat in the smoke next to him, put her arms around his neck so that her full cheeks and unsated lips lay beside his smooth skull, and moistened his queue with tears and kisses. Surely he knew his wishes flew in the face of the precious rules, and what did he think he’d do if anyone found out.

Nung slowly turned to her his oval face that had lost all symmetry under his pain. What would happen if they were found out he didn’t know; he didn’t want to offend against the precious rules,
for that would be a sin against his father; but he didn’t know where to turn. The disgusting suicide demon in the wide trousers had fallen upon him, this last night and three evenings ago. “What’s the answer, dear sister? How should Brother Nung deal with it?” They sat quietly and without thought in the foul smoke; his sooty hands twined in her black artful locks.

The young woman, though worried for herself, followed him as he wished. She moved in with him at the charcoal burner’s that Nung worked for. The patient treetrunk of a man warned the youngsters, but they avoided him.

Meanwhile the year was far advanced; the Isle’s inhabitants prepared for the Yü-lan festival, All Soul’s Day. Everywhere in the open, swings were set up on which bright threads fluttered. Faded leaves drifted down from the horse chestnut trees. Fresh earth was piled onto graves. The usual hearty feasting began. Women went along every path with catkins behind their ears, so as not to be reborn as yellow dogs. The men strutted down alleyways, sat in the teashops in gold-embroidered jackets and belts and played at dominoes and dice.

Near the temple of the town deity lay the women’s burial ground; the women of the Broken Melon had their dead brought there in great state and compassion. As they flocked to the graveyard that festival morning—Ma No tolerated the observance of all folk traditions—some sisters came upon the young woman who was Nung’s beloved at the entrance to the burial ground, denied her entry. There were no harsh words; the sisters merely made it plain that she could no longer count as one of them since she was living with Nung as his wife.

The sister ran back home in shame, told Nung, whose knees began to tremble, that her spirit when she died wouldn’t find a resting place beside the other sisters, cried that she’d been driven
from the circle, that she couldn’t go on living so and must return to the sisters. Their host, the tall bent charcoal burner, heard her and growled, “That’s the way it should be.”

Nung, left alone, occupied himself all day numbly at his coals and in the garden. At night he threw himself fully dressed onto the earth, left his face unwashed, ignored his rice bowl. He took himself one morning to the wall of the women’s graveyard and waited for the girl. When she came past in the rainy evening together with a brother (not having fallen into bottomless misery she could now breathe again), Nung set upon them, shoved the brother in the chest, dragged the shrieking girl behind him by the hair. Villagers ran, tore the sister loose, beat the man.