The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (9 page)

But once he came back from an exorcism walking gingerly with the mask pulled crooked over his face, down the street, into his yard, up to the door, where he collapsed. His wife tore the wooden mask from his leaden face. He wheezed. A whistle came from his chest; he twisted his body and his hands grabbed about him. His wife ran for herbs, heated up two tiles for his feet. She despatched a small child. Since it had no cash it had to beg the money to buy a bamboo fortune slip in the Medicine Temple. The village shopkeeper and apothecary administered the decoction indicated on the slip. Wang spat it out.

Then in the afternoon a babble of many voices grew outside the house. Gongbeat after gongbeat, ceaselessly; bells, shouts from afar. Heavy steps stumbled from the yard into the stuffy sickroom. The God of Medicine, a redpainted pillar of wood, had come himself to his pupil to make the diagnosis, bring healing. The woman shouted into her sleeping husband’s ear, “Show yourself, come, show yourself!” She supported the half blind man, who mumbled and gaped. It was quiet in the room.

Out the god stepped to the apothecary’s. The bearers swayed
into the shop with their poles, the god’s staff pointed to the lowest corner of the shelves. Secretly and in horror the young apothecary’s assistant with his back turned made the protective sign of the tiger: the staff had pointed to the Draught of Black Water.

And nothing more could be done.

The god was back alone in his mean, dilapidated dwelling at the end of the village. Darkness had fallen. His fat pupil, the bold coercer of demons, turned quickly onto his back during the third night watch. His wife asked what he wanted. She could only pull on the shoes that would carry him over the River of Death, the shoes embroidered with plum blossom, toad and goose, and with a white unfurled waterlily.

Old Wang had wanted Lun to prepare for the first examination. But his talents lay elsewhere and were quite special. Already when his head was first sheared and shaved a long black-brown mark had been noticed on his right temple, and identified by his father as the Pearl of Perfection.

Wang Lun grew apace, clever and with a giant’s strength.

Mules, dogs, fish and people all suffered under his roughness and his practical jokes. As a six year old he had been introduced to thieving by his own father, in a remarkable manner. It was the villagers’ custom, at the time of the Spring Festival, and in particular on the fifth day of the first month, to steal vegetables from each other’s gardens and fields, because such vegetables bring luck. No trespasser, as long as he belonged to the locality, was allowed to be driven off that day; the owners themselves made sure to put aside and conceal all produce of any value.

When Wang Lun accompanied his father and brother to try his luck on one such sanctioned thieving expedition, he fared badly: a couple of dried-up peanuts was all he scraped from the mud. He
trotted away from the others in a rage, ran home, sat quietly sucking on a salt crab in the low parlour beside his mother, who praised him for not joining in such foolishness.

But it was for another reason that he sat quietly there. He had reached a very simple and brief conclusion: if you want to steal something nice, the fifth day of the first month is the worst possible day for it. It’s ridiculous and absurd to go stealing on the very day when everyone steals and hides their things.

He promised himself another way of celebrating the filth day of the first month: divide the day into several portions throughout the year, for there were twenty-four hours in the day that had to be used up; he would use the permitted twenty-four hours to steal the whole year through.

And so the clever, cunning boy stole by skips and jumps for twenty-four hours in the year and every theft had the appearance of legitimacy, and was accompanied by the pleasant feeling that he had pulled a fast one on the village; stealing was a delight.

Once, even, during the old man’s last year, Wang Lun directed his thievish logic against his father: he took from him the thin bamboo tablet, now grown dark brown and unreadable. The white-bearded Wang Shen was overcome with deep sadness when he saw Lun sitting in the yard with the long lost tablet on his knees, turning it this way and that, sniffing at it suspiciously. Lun bounded away with the tablet; the old man wept, for the tablet and for his son.

There were few in the village willing to pick a fight with the rough fellow; his brother was completely under his thumb.

Everyone was very happy when, bored with fishing, drying, netmending, discontented with the poverty of his native place where even the best contrived scheme yielded no more than thirty or forty tiao, he marched aimlessly one day with a few copper cash on a string out of Hunkang-ts’un along the high road to Chinan-fu.

It was springtime. At first he walked alone. Then when the bile rose into his mouth he tagged on to trains of barrows carrying pottery from the kilns out to the villages, and earned a few cents. He climbed, seething at the niggardly wage, out of the green valley of the Wei-ho up into wild hills; behind lonely houses, grasping an axe of green sandstone in a shaft of sandalwood, he waylaid the occupants, grabbed whatever they had about them and fled. On the dreadful craggy paths he clambered along there was no sign of spring. Becks rushed in deep carved gullies, in spate with the melting snow; the tattered vagrant never went down to them to wash; he was scared. For days he carried in his jerkin twenty valuable snuff bottles of finest glass; ate yellow-red kakis, sweet dried apples, didn’t shave, didn’t tie up his matted hair: he had knocked into a little girl as he fled from the caravanserai; when she fell she rolled over a cliff, smashed onto a sharp rock. Wang dared not go into the gully for fear of the child’s ghost.

On the last western outrunners of T’ai-shan, overlooking the flowerdrenched plain of the Tach’ing-ho, he laid up for almost a month among the beggars and vagabonds of the area, who squatted together in miserable hovels. Grew thin; felt wretched; he kept quiet about his means of subsistence in front of the idle creatures that he set up puzzles with in the evenings using pieces of quartz. Around midday he took a rocky path upwards, clambered through a bare gorge, then arrived at the back wall of a vile inn that owned three Mongolian cattle. The first time he rabbitpunched the boy who looked after them and threatened him with the axe as he helped himself to half a pail of milk. Now the boy expected him every third day, hid old rice cakes for him, raw eggs, let him take as much milk as he wanted.

When the boy was not there one day and two snapping dogs were running around the cowshed, Wang slowly and hungrily retraced
his weary steps, through the gorge, down the rocky path. At first he wanted to get back to the beggars and give one of them a thrashing; then he sunned himself for the last few hours of daylight, stayed sleeping on the loose gneiss and at the first glimmer of dawn climbed down from the mountains over the gentle hills, the smooth elevations of chalk. The well watered plain stretched out beyond the horizon. In the dazzling light of evening he saw in front of him the strong walls and the great city of Chinan-fu.

It was immensely lush, the country around Chinan-fu.

On this side of the broad, clay-coloured river and across it the millet fields stood higher than a man already, erect stems with green sharp leaf blades and brown heads that bent heavily and hung like warhorse manes or helmet plumes, fuzzy with fine hairs. When the warm breeze from the mountains passed over them the fields shook themselves as if the stalks were fleeing, all crouched in the starting position. Young fresh plants grew in the narrow footpaths that Wang Lun ambled along next morning; he pulled a few up, stuck the thin tender silky fronds in his mouth and sucked on them. Thrushes and great ravens chased each other noisily over the damp earth, perched on slender locust trees in whose broad crowns the gynandrous leaves set up a swaying and rustling, as if the trees were suppressing frantic laughter.

In a roadside barber stall outside the gate the unkempt man had himself washed, shaved and cheaply outfitted for one of his glass bottles. Then, smiling, he strolled with a familiar greeting to the fat gate guard into the town, in a blue-black overgown, on new felt soles, an empty snuff bottle at his green, rather frayed belt, as if he were just back from one of the many small tea pavilions outside the walls frequented by poets and young gallants.

A great bewildering maze of streets. Shop crammed against
shop; food stalls, inns, teahouses, gaudy temples; on the walls bells tinkled in two lovely pagodas to ward off homeless spirits. Wang let himself be carried along in the stream of people, gazed about craftily and with pleasure, in a narrow alley shoved aside a sedan chair and its two bearers.

And after he had laid them both on the ground he found in them his first friends in Chinan-fu, who took him within the hour to their lodging house, an open airy clapboard building doubling as a food stall in Unicorn Street. One wing of the house contained the sordid eating place, from which smoke and smells penetrated the other wings, the open terrace for tea drinkers overlooking the street, and the sleeping quarters. These were cubicles at the back of the tearoom, low, narrow, with a bench to lie on and a stool. Wang only glanced into his room, then went roaming through the nearby streets, spied out opportunities. He had no cash.

He followed two hawker women who were carrying a basket between them into a building, across a wide courtyard and into a half dark room that he recognized only by its thick sweet smell as a temple hall. In the round carved doorway an old, sturdy man sat in a bright green robe with wide sleeves, queue tied neatly on his crown; he was sitting in front of a little table with incense sticks, paper figures, making an unctious face by pushing his lips down to form a snout, placing his hands before him with the fingers twisted in a peculiar way, and closing his eyes. The women had bought six sticks of incense from him, set them up in front of a brightly coloured wooden statue in the background, a seated god, next to whom drums, mandolins and panpipes hung on the empty wall.

Wang walked past the women’s basket that was sitting in the middle of the floor, saw from the corner of his eye as the bonze counted his few cash from one hand to the other and made them vanish without a sound into a box on the wall by the door, again
put on his unctious fishface. It was a temple of Han Hsiang-tzu, patron of musicians.

As Wang turned towards the door the bonze stood up, bowed to him, reverenced with folded hands, praised his exalted visitor’s piety in a well sifted rhythmical flood of words. Wang too bowed politely. At last the bonze enquired whether the subscription list for a water Mass had yet found favour of admittance at the palace of his patron; five poor blind musicians had drowned in a boat as they were returning from a village on the other side. The Mass for the souls of the drowned would begin in two days. Wang gave a false name and false residence, offered to enter his name there and then on the list of donors affixed to the temple wall.

Then in the dark he broke without difficulty into the temple, got away with over seven hundred cash.

He lived contentedly at the inn for more than a week, then chance brought him in bustling White Tombs Street face to face with the bonze. It was already too late to conceal himself when he saw the light grey priest robes. But to his astonishment the man passed him by grinning with a wave of his hand.

That same night he broke into the bonze’s place. The money box was locked but empty. Wang felt his way in the dark to the offering table; under the ashes too there was nothing. Only when he pulled aside the soft cloth on the Eight Immortals table did something clink: spread out under the cloth were a few handfuls of copper coins.

When the money was spent he worked here and there for some days as a coal hauler, runner in a yamen; but the paltry wages stung him to fury, and also he could get along with nobody. His swaggering nature, his hot temper allied with his giant’s strength impelled him everywhere to deeds of violence.

So two weeks later he broke in again at the Music God’s temple.
He considered first where the bonze might have concealed the day’s takings. Not in his bed or sleeping room, that was clear; the bonze knew beyond a doubt that it was Wang who had robbed him, and in his bedroom he would certainly fear for his life. For almost an hour he felt around in the temple, knocked on walls and floor. Finally he placed the bonze’s stool on the altar table, felt the statue of silent Han Hsiang-tzu. The god’s throat rang hollow: he climbed up, and standing on the wooden thigh easily reached the little money box and opened it. Three handfuls of cash slid into the pouch at his belt.

When he tried to let himself down from his perch he felt something pulling on his queue, no, his neatly tied queue was stuck fast to the ceiling and back wall of the room. With his free hand he fumbled above and behind him. A thick tarry mass was stuck there; he freed his hand with difficulty, fearing that he and the heavy statue would topple down together. Painfully and with the loss of much hair he extricated his queue from the sticky ooze. Growling softly at the bonze he slipped into the street. The stuff stuck resinous on the well shaven skin of his head; his left hand clung to whatever it touched.

His friends in Unicorn Street next morning scraped him clean, painfully, with sharp sticks of wood; his skin bled. No one laughed at him; they feared and loved him, they wondered at his daring. Also he divided the spoils with them.

After that night the flayed thief Wang Lun had only one wish: to avenge himself on the bonze. The man seemed to know where he lived: a few days after this episode he met the grey robe strolling slowly down Unicorn street. The wrinkled face smiled only slightly as Wang bent over the balustrade of the tea terrace; it converted itself to an expression of pained sympathy for Wang’s bandaged skull. The bonze turned many times to look at the poor thief, who
made faces behind his back.

Now Wang gave nothing of his last haul to his two friends; he placed almost all of it with his landlord so that he could carry out his plans undisturbed. It had come to a contest between him and the bonze.