The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (8 page)

Young rakes with girls they had rescued from the painted houses drifted in. Often the girls, who were among the most revered of the sisters, could be seen in strange ecstasies under the purple callicarps, in the fields of millet, and heard to babble incomprehensibly.

Six girl friends from the northern Imperial Canal who had been married as children jumped, in the month when they were to be taken to the houses of their bridegrooms, tied together with a halter into the canal below the town. Since they injured themselves against the canal wall as they jumped and hung there wailing loudly, they were rescued by some passing barrow haulers who conveyed them to the nearest police post after making shift to bandage the quite unresisting girls with scraps of clothing. As they were recovering under the friendly care of the officials and putting themselves to rights, their fathers came storming up outside. The girls heard the noisy altercation with the constables, climbed out through a rear window and made off. They tramped from village to village, hid themselves in a secluded cave in the mountains, obtained
food by helping on the farms, in the mills round about. The youngest of them, a blooming fifteen year old, daughter of an old schoolmaster’s concubine, died there when a robber violated and then strangled her. Not long afterwards the robber together with the girls fell in with a group of sectarians.

In northeastern China, in the provinces of Chihli, Shantung, Shansi, even in Kiangsu and Honan, in great cities with several hundred thousand inhabitants, in hardworking villages and idle hamlets, it came to pass every day or two that someone went into the market and in front of a fraud or beggar priest or crippled child tipped all his money and valuables into a mule trough. That husbands disappeared from families much blessed with children; they would be seen, months later, in distant regions begging with the vagabonds.

Here and there a minor official went about listlessly and in a daze for weeks on end, answered every question snappishly, shrugged his shoulders insolently when rebuked, then suddenly committed some astonishing crime: embezzling public funds, tearing up important documents, attacking some harmless fellow and breaking ribs. Once sentenced he would bear his punishment and his shame with equanimity, or slip out of prison and into the woods. These were people to whom separation from family and possessions came hardest, who could break free of them only by a crime.

They taught nothing that was not already known. An old parable they told passed from mouth to mouth:

The land exhaled a sigh. Such joyglazed eyes had never been seen. A tremor passed through families. And when at evening there was once again talk of the “Truly Powerless” and the old parable was told, each looked at the others and in the morning took note of who was missing.

A sweet secret suffering appeared to afflict healthy young men and women in particular. It seemed they were being drawn away by bridal pangs of some kind.

Wang Lun was the head of the movement.

He came from Shantung, from a village on the coast called Hunkang-ts’un in the district of Hailing, the son of a simple fisherman. Later he would mention casually that his father was the first among the local fisherfolk: on the wall of the fisherman’s guildhouse you could still see his father’s name, the founder of the house. But in the whole of Hailing there was no guildhouse. The two hundred families of the hamlet scraped a hard living. The men sailed after the catch, the women tended the sparse fields. Soil was so scarce that they built artificial fields on the broad terraces of chalk cliff that descended close to the beach. Laboriously men and women hauled loose earth in wooden trugs up over the narrow ridges, trug after trug, then strewed meagre fertilizer of dried crab shells and human ordure.

There above the sea women, children and old men toiled all through the day. Shouts and dull noises wafted down into the empty village. More families had lived here once. But over fifty houses had been burned one day by a passing plundering band from Chefoo. They crushed the old headman’s feet between two blocks of
granite when he wouldn’t give them the two hundred taels they demanded, then broke his left arm with a blow from a plank, and after they had smashed a large hole in the ice—it was winter—threw him into a pond. The rhythmic yells of the six men as they pushed the frantic headman back again and again with boards, the clanging of planks on the ice, the noisy choking and blowing of the drowning man and the impatient whinnying of the stolen horses was one of Wang Lun’s few childhood memories.

During the two hot months Wang the elder went out at sunrise in his boat, a two-masted junk that gazed from two green goggle eyes painted on the bows. Five fishermen boarded it. The sails filled; they shipped oars; glided smoothly over the Po-hai with the neighbouring junks. They cast the serpentine, putrid-smelling net overboard, attached it to another junk. The capstans that lowered and raised the net snarled, screeched, held fast.

The men stayed out until late afternoon. The sun’s heat fell like dry, scorching rain over man and beast. Old Wang sat fatbellied on the rowing bench under a great straw hat like a plate and threw sharp stones at seagulls that dived out of the shimmering air behind the junks. While the other sailors in the boat smoked pipes or chewed tobacco. As soon as Wang prepared his sling a little sailor sat in front of him against the stem mast, smoked nonchalantly, carefully drew a springy willow switch from under the ropes. The sling whirred, the little man yawned noisily and stretched, the sling wound itself around his stick and outstretched arm, cracked the tensely waiting Wang unfailingly on the chest or legs with the stone. Glumly he looked after his flapping seagull. The boat rolled with the laughter of the four men sprawling on the wet planks.

Wang swaggered pompously through the teahouses; once, leaving his bean patch one idle morning, applied at the courthouse for the position of Chief Magistrate, to the wailing fury of his toil-jaded
wife who could already hear the mockery he would bring on himself. He liked lying on the sand next to the bucket that his two sons filled with charcoal to dry squid in. If around the time of the ebb tide they lit the bucket on the junk itself he would amble down to the beach and squat on his heels. Empty fish baskets lay there half overturned, the dried creatures spread on the sand colouring nicely in the sun. They felt hot to the touch.

The bigbellied man poked around in mudholes, pulled long sandworms out, gave half of them to his wife to dry and sell. He kept a great pile for himself, dried them furtively and slurped his delicious hearty soup behind the baskets.

Then after a while the two boys used to come over from the junk and, as he was sweating, unwind his footcloths. They crouched gravely in front of him with their little rattails of queues, and waited. In a proud, nasal tone loud enough for the neighbours to hear Wang spoke over their heads, flaunting his fat torso, leaning back on his elbows: he called this his lesson time. In fact he knew his primer, the
Book of One Thousand Characters
of Chou Hsingszu; a few mistakes aside he knew it by heart; he seemed to have learnt a few phrases as well from the
Book of Women
. Many times he explained to the children his regret that he was not stricter with them. To be strict with them was his sacred duty, for—and here the boys joined in chanting: “Upbringing without strictness is a father’s laziness.”

And every few days the future teacher of three provinces heard that joy, anger, grief, fear, love, hate and desire were the seven passions. It was not often the boys could attend to him at leisure. Wang Lun’s face was black-brown and square, broad; strong lines moulded a lively, cunning face. No amount of sea glare darkened the softer, sallower complexion of his brother of the same age: the boy remained suppler, paler and more serious than Wang Lun,
whose spiteful tricks earned him little love from his playmates and who showed little understanding of one of his father’s maxims: that among the five supreme moral relationships was brotherly love.

Lively, inclined more to play than work, they sat redcapped on the sharp stones of the beach by the great fishing net. On a grassy dune behind them ten paces off the shapeless bulk of their father lay, his bare legs, covered in black hairs, arranged one over the other as he picked small embedded mussel shells from horny soles. In his right hand resting on the ground he held one end of the net that the boys were staining with the thick sappy juice of mandarin peel. He hauled himself upright, the children clicked musically, he spat and grunted. Occasionally a teaching droned from his lips; for example: “Since time immemorial the gourd has been a symbol of fecundity.” Until a gust of wind blew gritty sand into his face, he rolled coughing out of his furrow and knocked over their pot of stain. With a doleful, beggarly look he told them they should have found a better place for the staining. And they wound the cloths again about his legs and moved a few paces farther off.

The greatest event in the life of Wang Lun’s father was the journey he made to his brother’s house for the wedding of his nephew, three hundred li from Hunkang-ts’un. For three weeks he didn’t see the beach or the scrubby bean fields. A barber, who was also a sorcerer on the side, lived in his brother’s house; Wang Shen sat with him a lot in the evenings.

And the morning after his return he walked with slow steps to a man who knew something of woodworking and promised him a quantity of dried sandworms worth four hundred and fifty cash if he would carve a tall red plaque for him with the inscription:
WANG SHEN, PUPIL OF THE RENOWNED SORCERER KWAI-TAI OF LIU-CHIA-TS’UN, MASTER OF THE WIND AND WATER
. After night fell, six days later, he fetched the gleaming plaque—
black characters on a raspberry-red ground, blue-edged—with his eldest son, climbed onto the roof of the house, with two ropes taken from his boat attached it to the projecting ridge beam while his wife slept, so that there over the doorway a plaque hung down:
WANG SHEN, PUPIL OF THE RENOWNED SORCERER KWAI-TAI OF LIU-CHIA-TS’UN, MASTER OF THE WIND AND WATER
.

Next morning his wife, when she saw the splendid plaque and had woken up her still sleeping husband, suffered the first recurrence for years of her nervous attack. Back then, when one of the arsonists had demanded through the window whether there was anyone apart from her in the house, in her terror she had concealed both one year old boys by gripping them in the folds of her wide trousers, and as she replied “No” had jerked her head sharply to the right. Now something green surged through her head, the two ropes holding the plaque grew as broad as leaves, sawed between her eyes; a blue unjointed arm reached out intermittently, a hand sent fingers streaming towards her. Rhythmically the woman threw her head from left to right, from right to left, her legs knocked together, she danced like a figure in a puppet show; the children hid from her on the brickbed.

And they screamed out loud and ran into the village street among yapping little dogs when Wang, the great elephant-legged clod, burst into the smoky room from the yard, stumped up and down with a tiger mask on, sang wheezily over his wife who was now prostrate, stroked, whispered. Half an hour later the woman was asleep. A crowd of children and women stood at the door, stood silently in the yard, scattered gabbling when the tiger mask came near.

That day was a turning point in Wang Shen’s life. His wife said not a word about the red plaque, indeed became sparing of words in dealings with her husband, kept out of his way.

Now he no longer passed himself off as a mere casual teacher. In the yard under an alder he set to studying peculiar signs on a bamboo tablet he had brought back from the sorcerer, walked back and forth between midden and tackle shed with his head in the air, recited out loud: “Eight times nine is seventy-two. Two rules the Pair. In the Pair is united the Unpair. The Unpair rules the Zodiac. The Zodiac holds sway over the Moon. The Moon holds sway over hair. Therefore hair grows in twelve months.” He referred from time to time perplexed to the bamboo tablet; pondered, ashamed of himself, freed himself with a quick rejecting gesture. He walked, brow wrinkled, among the busy fishermen on the beach of an evening, gazed raptly at the purple cloud masses, stopped for a long time lost in thought in front of a basket maker’s little poodle, said dreamily, as if talking to himself, “Seven times nine is sixty-three. Three rules the Pole Star. The star of dogs. Therefore dogs are born after three months.”

They laughed behind his back only at first; then the view took hold that he truly did have the makings of a Taoist savant, this former village clown. He knew so much: that swallows and sparrows dive into the sea and become lizards; he could name the thousand year old fox demon, the nine-headed pheasant demon and the scorpion demon; and no one could understand what he said about Yin and Yang, the bright Masculine and the dark brooding Feminine.

He went out to sea. When he made the experiment one morning of not going down to the junk, his wife stood silently beside the brickbed. He could see through flickering eyelids that she was going to wake him as usual with a punch in the ribs, but then she turned and went to wake fifteen year old Lun and his brother. And every morning before sunrise she woke the two lads; he snored snugly on in a half sleep.

Wang Shen went in the mornings to meditate in the little
temple of the God of Medicine, the last building but one in the village. Since everyone in and around the village knew him his singular offices were much in demand, his technique of the “Devil’s Leap”, and in particular the “Breaking of Pregnancy”. This term was used by the inhabitants of this part of Shantung for a strange custom. When old men or sickly children were seen in the vicinity of a pregnant woman it was feared they would enter the woman’s body, perhaps to make themselves well and young again. In such emergencies Wang Shen in his tiger mask stamped about the room while the woman squatted, charmed her body while flagellating it with rushes, and sweating uttered unrecognisable syllables. Sometimes he brought home a thousand cash from these operations.