The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (40 page)

He had seen again the enormous landscapes of Tartary. Few days in their profound silence had been disturbed by tribute bearers. Tigers loped out of the woods. Week by week letters of fealty arrived from the Imperial princes and high nobility, enquiring after his health.

No great train accompanied the aging Emperor: two hundred men of his lifeguard, one pure Manchu company, a small number of favourites, friends, slaves; lastly the exquisite orchestra. He had hunted the high country east of Kalgan, on the edge of Mongolia. Bright cold air, broad open grassland, mountain glens, broken vistas. He made camp in the troughshaped valley near Hsüanhua-fu. The houses were dug into the loess, with rooms, vaults, passages. On the thinly peopled plains shaggy brown horses galloped. Teaburdened camels swayed by. Nomad families camped in big round tents of felt. Brown flatfaced Mongols with gaily coloured ribbons prostrated themselves.

At the frontier the Imperial train was joined by the commander of the frontier troops in his red fur cap and red wing collars. Then they crossed the outliers of the great Hsingan range, descended towards Mukden.

The Emperor’s gaze was remote, his expression fearsomely bleak. Beneath tall willows clusters of peculiar houses appeared. A long, twisting mountain path led them to low hills where they saw broadleaved trees, women who wore arrows in their hair and fresh flowers. Cannons boomed from the eight towers on the walls of Mukden. They rode along the straight lines of the town, the Mongols behind on little ponies, until the roofs in the middle of the town came into view with their gleaming yellow tiles. For five days Ch’ien-lung remained in his palace.

In the autumnal park by a pond the Emperor sat alone on a stool, his lap filled with green lettuce leaves. In front of him a giant tortoise slept.

The carapace was black with yellow flutings. The broad central plate was edged in yellow with deep indentations. The clumsy forefeet extended sideways like flippers, toes like pegs driven into the feet. Hind legs drawn into the armour. The Emperor, dressed in black silk with a plain silk cap, rapped on the shell with a stout branch from which fircones dangled.

And then out of its lair the grey horny head emerged, that wonderfully passionless head on a wrinkled neck that sparkled like dried fish skin. Like a royal mummy: the long, withered, craning neck, the triangular skull turning in contemptuous unconcern. Jaws clamped, the severe work of plane and straightedge. Nostrils sunk with an auger. To the sides, lidless, immobile, clever wise eyes, windows of a gelid brain.

Slowly the shell lifts itself on one side, sinks back, pushes forward. It is the painful gait of a nimble but gouty and ancient man, who lifts his rump, doesn’t bend his knee, swings his legs stiffly out sideways, slowly turns a corner. The foreflippers swim, right, left, scrape. The armour sinks back, the hind legs stretch and follow. A highpitched wheezing, a gentle hiss comes from the punched-out
nostrils. Again the rump heaves, the front flippers slide forward. It is a climbing over level ground.

The Emperor sat on the stool with his fir branch. He tried to keep pace with the tortoise, to imitate it, and pondered. As it heaved forward it seemed to turn its eyes on him. He slid slowly after his branch to the ground, crouched on his knees behind the creature as it moved away from him towards the pond. For some reason he bowed down behind it.

Very slowly, as Ch’ien-lung wished, the procession continued on its way. Wide sandy spaces alternated with fields of watermelon. The Liao-ho channelled black soupy eddies in which strips of green bobbed. For two days they waited for the arrival of an ancient Supervisor of Traffic from Niuchuang in order to sacrifice to the river God. Then they entrusted the ferry with the placid Emperor to the waters.

His entourage recognized this state of profound abstraction and lassitude. It had come upon him with increasing age. This man, once so energetic and commanding, now let them do everything, lead him, seat him. The great monarch’s face as they rode silently past the li after li of shops in Hsinmi-ts’un was disconcerting in its uncanny absence of will, the rubbery softness and torpor of the eyes. His lips hung, he mumbled inarticulately. As the eight bearers marched slowly over the rippled sand his palanquin opened from within, he climbed out, the front bearers turning in astonishment, and ambled along beside an old halberdier who failed to recognise him. When the horrified Protocol Officers leapt out of their chairs and fell to the ground before him, led him by the hand to his palanquin, he stumbled along with them, wearily raised his swollen eyelids, looked at them in puzzlement. His eyes wept. Before he climbed back into the palanquin they wiped spittle from his grey beard. They walked along beside the palanquin. Across the Taling-ho
they came to Imperial grazing grounds. From the tall watchtowers in the centre of Chinchou-fu cannons again boomed greetings.

The officials stood beside the closed palanquin. They lay in the dust before his sleeping body. His state of indifference improved when they approached the Great Wall. A gentle excitement took hold of the Emperor. He ate well, refused to lie in the palanquin, plucked flowers by the wayside. Their progress had to be speeded. When they asked after his health he waved them away with his flywhisk, not speaking. Half fuddled, he climbed on one occasion during these days onto a block of granite beside the road, and fell. But he was visibly more responsive, observed the work in the fields, summoned his travelling librarian to his side, of whom, however, he asked nothing. They remarked happily on the icy looks he again cast.

A warm breeze blew. He had drawn aside the curtains of his yellow palanquin. In the late afternoon the Director of the Ministry of Rites, Sung, and Hu Chao, Superintendent of the Imperial Eunuchs, walked beside the Imperial chair. Sung a bent man, who wore hornrimmed spectacles on his little wrinkled face and screwing up his eyes sought in vain to discern the beauties of the landscape that Hu described to him so enthusiastically. Hu, a stout gentleman with pendulous cheeks, in the ardour of his descriptions often took the worthy Sung’s hand and squeezed it, so that the eager Minister could at least feel something of the general enchantment.

They chatted of the tenderness with which a young and rising poet had treated the melancholy of white poplars, and how well he had brought off a few interesting verses on the well-worn theme of a boatride on a moonlit lake. Hu, though not educated like Academician Sung, gushed praises of the poem’s strict form, of the poet’s wonderful calligraphy with its novel flourishes. They inhaled the strong dungy odour of the fields.

Then a fine perfume wafted at their side. A silken rustling. Between them walked a well-built man of medium height who, when they made to fall at his feet, grasped their queues and walked on with them, arms around their shoulders. The light hard voice of Ch’ien-lung inserted itself between Sung’s measured falsetto and the enthusiastic drone of fat Hu.

The Emperor smiled when they exchanged embarrassed glances at his seizing on something they had just said: “Don’t talk in the streets, as we say within the Four Seas. The paving stones have ears. Excellency Hu remarked on the marvellous calligraphy in which this young man wrote his poem. Some months ago in Peking I had the pleasure of speaking to a missionary of the Jesus religion. The redhaired people are barbarians, as we all know. They told me in their importunate way of many things; of their poets too. Those fellows write as they please. Calligraphy is of no consequence to the poetry. Even an illiterate peasant can be a poet.”

“How ridiculous, Majesty,” said old man Sung. “The western longnoses are—this ant was about to say, ruffians. How absurd, indeed, to speak to us of their so-called poets.”

“Your Grace will have read much of my work.”

“All of it, Majesty.”

“All, then. I don’t like flattery. Excellency Hu has also read much of my work?”

Hu was agitated. He was easily carried away, was a staunch admirer and protector of artists, but his learning left much to be desired.

“This donkey, Majesty, has indeed read much from the Imperial brush—”

“—but has not understood it. No blame for that, Hu. And no opinion is required. What I want to say is something else. A peasant woman, like that one there, scatters white grain on the ground.
A boy pulls a cart behind her with manure. Larks sing, autumn. There’s no reason why this scene should be—poetised; it is unsurpassably present. Nevertheless I could be tempted to poetise it, but then I enter into a commitment with—the scene.”

“Well put, Majesty!”

“Not yet, Your Grace. I mean a commitment to preserve it with respect, to leave the spirit of this moment undisturbed, to sacrifice to it as a creature of the earth. Thus, sitting in my study, do I think of poetry. I, an insignificant mortal, sit in my study and five days earlier there lived the spirit of a reverential moment: two different things. I sacrifice to the spirit of Heaven as befits a rich man and strive to please the spirit of that venerable moment. A peasant, a beggar can’t do that; there are other spirits for them. The finest, softest paper must be used; inks of deepest red and black have been made ready for the brush. And now I write the characters. Their purpose is not to inform, although of course they also serve to inform; round pictures rife with connotations, resonating to the works of the sages, beautiful in themselves, beautiful in juxtaposition. These pictures are themselves little souls, and the paper partakes of them.”

“Still better put, Majesty!” wheezed Sung. “Cretin that I am, I have heard the same from our astronomer, the Portuguese, that in the West people write as they speak. Which of course is as convenient as it is simple. But if your most exalted Majesty would favour me with a boon, I should like to make a request.”

“Your Grace?”

“That I might be permitted to sit in my sedan chair, or even better in a tent, out here in the country, and listen to Your Majesty for as long as is granted me. Your Majesty’s slave is growing weak in his ancient legs.”

At a nod from Ch’ien-lung the Minister gave brief commands
to two lancers up ahead; the vast train halted under the open sky. While the Emperor’s little yellow travelling tent was being erected in a meadow and lancers cleared the field of peasants, he himself stood before potbellied Hu and the Minister, whose scholar’s face bore signs of weariness; let his hands fall, and sighed.

But the two high officials who looked at each other in dismay were wrong: Ch’ien-lung was thinking of Peking and his sigh was of impatience.

The Emperor desired two more days on the road.

The deferment of their homecoming aroused pleasure in all the train. The unwonted sight of the Son of Heaven moving with a spring in his step enlivened everyone. For hours the Emperor debated, now with Sung, whose learning he treasured immensely, now with the tough, stocky general A-kuei, promoted at his own hand from common soldier to officer. A-kuei’s bellicose nature refreshed him; the drolleries of this uncultivated man were a source of amusement for the entire Imperial company.

They proceeded along the Chao-ho, crossed the grey stone bridge over the Pai-ho. Once through the village of Niulan-shan the train bore westward from the main road along avenues laid out especially for it towards the mountains northwest of the Residence, where the Emperor kept pleasure grounds.

In the northern Tartar quarter of Peking the streets along which the train must pass were cleansed and smoothed. Side streets were sealed off with painted boards; it was forbidden on pain of death to leave house or barracks during the morning. Gongs clashed and drums beat the whole day. Since the astrologers in the Imperial train had been unable to calculate the hour of entrance into the Vermilion City in time, the entrance was delayed past morning even though the travellers had lain up a whole day in the mountains to the northwest, and the country people had heard the
wonderful music of the court orchestra playing almost continuously across the shining lake of K’unming-hu.

The Emperor spent the last day before his return on the summit of Wanshou-shan, in the woods of whiterimmed spruce. Before dark he went down to the eastern shore of the lake, strolled over the seventeen-arched bridge to the island with its temple that only he might visit. A bronze cow stood mute at the entrance. In the temple the Emperor spoke to his ancestors.

The waterclock showed the double hour of the dragon as the Imperial train next morning passed through the village of Haitian. They came by the stoneflagged road to the northern gate of the Manchu city of Peking, the Tesheng-men. The double hour of the snake commenced as the Son of Heaven glimpsed the purple walls.

Chia-ch’ing was a son of Ch’ien-lung, son of the Emperor’s legitimate consort. Chia-ch’ing alone was permitted to accompany Ch’ien-lung as he strolled through the gardens of the Vermilion City. The Emperor bubbled over with animation, came to a halt beneath the giant cypresses, spoke urgently to his stolid son, who towered above him by a head. The prince, not yet forty, had a spongy, wrinkled face; smiles found no dwelling in these broad, bloated masses of flesh. When this lanky man whose head, round as a ball, was fixed solidly between his shoulders felt amused, a flickering and fluttering set up around the little plump mouth; the lines that rippled outwards from it were repulsed by the immobile cheeks, and so the smile fidgetted about his lips as if stranded. The puffy eyelids hung. He could open the left eye only a little. His skin had an unhealthy pallor. His Highness was unfathomable, no one came really close to him; indeed, the physical proximity of most of those in his retinue made him acutely nervous. The prince listened irresolute and passive to his father. He clung to his father as to some blessed object that one does not sniff at, accepts with gratitude.
They spoke of the unrest among the Mohammedans. Chia-ch’ing turned, and they strolled towards the menagerie of which they were both so fond. An iridescent green peacock strutted along the marble balustrade of a white bridge. The gentlest of breezes ruffled the reflection of the bridge in the dark water. It lifted the hem of the yellow Imperial gown slightly and swung the golden tassels at Chia-ch’ing’s girdle.