The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (37 page)

Since the days by the swamp of Talu the brothers and outsiders had craved forgetfulness through passion, and she had not drawn back from her holy duty. She possessed no organ of desire. But since the burning of the monastery, when she had ridden together with Ma No, answering some restlessness in her body she often embraced a brother and found transient inward peace. In the Mongolian town her vehemence grew precipitately. She recalled her illness following the birth of her child, was tormented by an urge to weep, flail her arms, groaned and wandered without knowing why. She often hankered after home, spurned it. Prayer formulae, immersion in the prescribed ecstasies disgusted her, as she shamelessly proclaimed a thousand times out loud by day and moaning by night. Potions, ashes, exorcisms were attempted by way of cure. Then a coarse peasant she had taken up with some days past dragged the screaming woman out of the faceloorning night to Ma No. Who succeeded with a few words and handpasses over mouth and breast. She overcame the crisis. Quite soothed, pale and thin she assumed like a physical talisman some of Ma No’s characteristics, his absent gaze, the protecting gesture of the left hand in front of the eyes, his mouth gasping for breath.

One of the Lius, the elder, was still alive. The sceptical Little Third, in an uncontrollable transport at the festival in the capital, was one of those brothers who had let themselves be butchered by the Manchu prisoners. The tragedy had made a joker of the elder Liu. He still carried his little pot of cinnabar at his belt, showed it to everyone he saw, ridiculed himself. When laughter echoed through the narrow alleys of the Mongol town, there was Liu at a doorway with a dead rat, a discarded felt sole, between his fingers,
making comic funeral speeches. Or he would swing himself across the street on a loose overhanging roof beam and pin his portrait on it. This man was certain they’d secure themselves a new kingdom more splendid than the last, and their souls would gain that lofty paradise with one great bound. The persecutions they’d suffered were caused by envy; you couldn’t blame the Emperor for being envious, and the sectarians had no reason to complain: a man who travels with a bright lantern attracts robbers.

In a corner of the empty marketplace, in the little house, Ma No sat.

He was completely wrapped up in himself. His arrogance was a blast of trumpets, whose menacing violence shatters the earth. A flapping Imperial banner unfurled within him. Ma strolled around this banner. He let no one approach, for he wanted only to listen to the banner. Wang Lun had believed Ma ready for the hard lessons of fate. But fate did not assail the priest. He himself drew misfortune on with grasping arms, like a madman who no longer knows food from poison. He proudly gulped down a misfortune that could have had no business with him. He did not unravel himself. He was a hunk of meat, and sunned himself. The things that ran past him had no smell and no colour. In the background something tossed and turned: the Western Paradise he stretched his dessicated hand towards. Relentless, smooth, he went to gather in his guilt.

He stayed there turned to stone. His pride flapped like an Imperial banner. He believed Wang Lun had become his convert. The land within the Four Seas had never seen the like of the Broken Melon.

Then there howled minutes of terrible self-laceration, when he stood revealed to himself as the errant monk of P’ut’o-shan, the violent ecstatic in need of correction. He peeled away his skin, uncoiled the bundles of white nerves, cut a ghastly resume of his life:
standing on an unsteady lurching spot, wallowing around his own skull after security—amidst human sacrifice, the razing of whole cities. Nothing had been accomplished; he was dragging it all down with him to ruin. P’ut’o stood like a fortress he couldn’t take as he panted past it. The horror of this idea swept over him. He had meddled with fate. There was nothing in all that had happened, nothing to find but filth, corruption, a vain gamble. The thousands out there: no end of unfortunates; more beggars and criminals by the thousand in the vast land. And he like them: footing lost, into the cesspit, gulping slime into the lungs—so stupid, so stupid, deserving no sympathy, laughable.

In such anguish Ma No flung himself about for sweatdrenched minutes. Then his arms and legs came together with a start at a hammering outside, tramping of the gate guard, crackling of fire from the Lower Town. He sighed free of his brooding, slipped off into the marketplace. Sisters sang. The women cast reverent glances: calm trusting eyes. There were no more fine jewels, no bridal flowers. Violins and guitars trampled in the mire. Girls, the poor ones, no longer turned themselves inside out, spread their gospel. They’d kept nothing for themselves, yet the danger was not averted. They’d kept their necks intact; surely they would make it. Such was fate, and therefore good. They were like water, that moulds itself to any jar. Even that wasn’t enough to let them live.

Ma No slunk past brothers who jumped up from their torpid squatting, turned grubby, emaciated faces to him, surrounded him reverently. What nightshades beset him. P’ut’o with its slavish ideas had worked itself into his brain, after all these decades still wouldn’t let its servant go. Here they followed stricter paths, the hardest path of all. The naked deadly horror of existence had forced itself on them; they’d accepted it without running away, like holy Siddhartha, the Crown Prince, had experienced everything
for themselves. If the Western Paradise should open, they and he would enter. The Imperial banner fluttered over their path. They sped to the summit like arrows.

He sank onto the wide wall, under his shoulders. Somewhere in that plain Wang Lun roamed. Lost to his own teaching.

Here fire sizzled. They let themselves be driven, couldn’t even swim any more. Wu-wei triumphed.

Everything heaped up over the Mongolian town. Banner upon banner! Ghostly pulses throbbed through the little town.

The key to the golden gate was being pressed into their hands. All around bodies sat still as corpses. One puff and they collapsed. Anyone with the Tao in him has no wish to see, to taste, to hear. Churlishly turns his body aside. Flees.

And really. The Mongolian town lay in a black, hot ecstasy of prayer. Rigid possessed torsoes cringed in alleys, deaf, blind.

The day after Wang Lun visited the Mongol town two apothecary’s assistants laboured in the long courtyard of their house in a large village south of the town. The elder, nearer the gate, shovelled charcoal into a little iron stove. On it steamed a broad, deepbellied porcelain basin. The thin white fumes of the charcoal escaped through a spout at the side; the medicine stove, smoking, looked like a giant teapot. A finely domed head turned slowly on the assistant’s short, scrawny body. He had thick flabby cheeks, nose sunk between them. Lips strove by their thickness to emerge from under them. He was a close fellow, highly regarded by his master. He was an adherent of Wang Lun’s, but unsuited to the wandering life. His face was stolid, but when he glanced up phlegmatically from his work he betrayed himself: it was evident that something stirred in him that would not let him be, gave no peace.

Upwind from the smoke the younger assistant sat astride a
stool by the wall of the house, trod the wheel of a treadmill. The wheel crushed dried herbs to powder in a flat wooden tray.

The elder apothecary was trudging into the house to fetch a fine hair sieve—he intended to make from rabbit’s liver a decoction for plethora and irascibility—when the gate opened and a tall beggar stood beside the medicine stove.

The assistant called, Please to wait outside. The man walked right up to him, pushed back his straw hat, grasped the assistant by the shoulder reassuringly as, recognising Wang, he was about to prostrate himself. They whispered a few words; with loud blessings the importunate beggar thanked the assistant for the cash he drew from his belt.

An hour later the assistant was walking with Wang over the wild overgrown hills and valleys to the west of the village. Wang left him alone. The apothecary searched.

The landscape was swampy. Broad peat bogs fringed it. On the low hills yellowed kaoliang stalks and sprawling ferns. The path over the higher hills was dark, so thickly were the evergreen oaks clustered. Closemeshed shrubbery obstructed progress. This was the domain of the little bright boys, so called from the profusion of gaily coloured mushrooms.

Between massive trunks, on the ground, lurked the puffball with the greeny-white cap: pretty white ruffs hung about its throat; so as not to touch the oozy damp soil it wore a delicate toecap, a shoe no thicker than skin. The little apothecary, wide blue simple-pouch at his breast, scurried down a slope where red flashed and the fly agaric flaunted its purple pomp. Many caps were dotted with little warts, white dots exuding a viscous, glassy substance. The collector broke off a large number of them, threw them into his pouch. Not far away among the weeds grew the saffron milkcaps, their heads covered with broad brick red depressions; from
their caps brown-white veils fluttered, seemingly torn to shreds by the wind. When he snapped the sterns a slimy latex oozed out and stuck to his fingers. He stuffed his oval pouch full, until juice trickled through it.

Came in the afternoon back to the apothecary’s, where he withdrew to his room. Then with the help of his companion he carried the little stove over the step into the room and set to work with the door closed, the window opened just a little.

He threw into the seething water in the basin a handful of mushrooms cut into little pieces; after a short time, indicated precisely by an hourglass, lifted the basin using wooden handles, poured the viscous brown brew with the mushrooms through a fine strainer into a wooden pail. He emptied the strainer into a second pail. Again he brought the water in the basin to the boil, poured off the mushroom broth, strained it. When he had boiled up all the mushrooms, he began to pound the retained pieces to a pulp with a wooden mortar, flushed them into the basin, boiled them for a long time and again filtered them. The residue in the strainer he packed into a thin pouch which he squeezed over the big pail containing the liquor. Then he flung the fibrous pulp in the pouch into a rubbish bin.

Now began weary work on the liquor. On the stove and on the hearth in the corner of the room, where a kettle hung from an iron hook, the brown liquid was slowly evaporated. Holding his breath he tended the little fires in the stove and under the hearthplate. Then, after opening the window wide, he returned to his work in the pharmacy, mixing officinal pills. From time to time he straddled back to the room, poured more liquid from the pail into the basin and the kettle. Bustled about all night between the pharmacy and his room until morning. When the liquor was reduced to syrup he emptied the contents of the kettle into the basin. Not until early
morning, when he went back to the room for the last time, were the contents of the basin ready. The juice was now sticky, dark brown; formed threads on the stirring spoon.

The assistant spent a long time inspecting and sniffing the result. Then he fetched from the pharmacy a sack of black powdered charcoal and some whitish earth, shook them in stirring, poured on a layer of hot water and filled a tall glass jar with the black liquid. Barely an hour later a white and a brown layer had separated out at the bottom of the jar, brown transparent water above them with which, through a narrow wooden funnel, the assistant carefully filled to the brim two gourd flasks, tall big-bellied vessels. After some thought he divided the contents among six little earthenware jars that he stopped tight, hung on cords around his shoulders. Day had not yet broken when the yard gate creaked. The assistant with his jars left house and village behind.

While the apothecary had been botanising in the domain of the little bright boys, there was unceasing turmoil at the north and west gates of the Lower Town of Yangchou. Wheelbarrows entered in a long train, merchants with wives and children on foot, wide covered travelling wagons, a sailcart that had come a great distance. Piping, gongbeats; the gate was barred for a short period; a mandarin’s green palanquin was borne slowly out followed by a horde of retainers. The high official was taking the delightful autumn air. The gate guards with their short thick cudgels set about great half-naked youths who ran begging behind the retainers.

Before noon a crowd of traders passed into the town, cringing before the burly guard with his sickleshaped halberd. Once inside they separated after a few streets.

One of them carried a gallows contraption from which queuestrings dangled; around his chest he wore a blue cloth on which black characters advertised the virtues of his acclaimed queuestrings.

A few, brandishing loud wooden clappers, sold betelnut cakes that they carried cut up in slabs on trays hanging from their necks.

Others lugged narcissi in buckets.

One by one they entered a busy soup kitchen next door to a large concern hiring sedan chairs and wedding paraphernalia, and sat together. A large, rather bent man with a poorly shaven skull sat with them; he placed his bellshaped wooden chest, painted in black stripes, under the table in front of him. He dealt in human hair. This was Wang Lun.

They had hot broth poured from great porcelain kettles into their shallow bowls. As warm flourcakes were served, Wang and the string seller stood up. They mingled with the customers thronging the entrance to the kitchen, conversed politely. They enquired about the prospects for selling their wares in the town, asked about other businesses, guilds. Wang recalled an old friend who had once earned good money carrying water in this town and then settled in Peking as a hirer of boats; he asked casually where the water carriers lived and where he could find one to speak to. When Wang and the string seller had ascertained that the water carriers frequented a soup kitchen two doors down, they excused themselves from their table and went there.

This establishment was quiet, for the water carriers were busiest around midday. Wang and his companion sat in the middle of the room, guzzled little meat dumplings and drank weak tea. The courteous host stood near, enquired after their health, was grateful for the honour of their patronage.