The Three Leaps of Wang Lun

by Alfred Doblin

  They turned towards the poor western part of town, so as to arrive at the river and the flowerboats, and the pretty singing of pretty women.

  They had scarcely stepped into Tso-fu Street when a broadshouldered Chinese by the wall of the ivory carvers’ clubhouse looked them closely in the face. He had a carrying pole on his shoulder, sank back again to the wall. He followed them.

  They walked faster. The rain was heavier now, and it was growing darker. Lao-hsü’s merriment was increasing. He grabbed the hands of a serving girl who was on her way at this late hour to buy ointments from an old herb woman for her mistresses; no one was to know that these ladies obtained their rouge and ointments from a disreputable woman. The little thing, muffled up to the eyes, was so frightened she could not cry out or run away when a hand grasped her waist, a short sword danced in front of her face. The empty ointment jar dropped to the ground. Lao-hsü looked stern, like a policeman; he pulled her along, and Yung-kuang followed close behind grotesquely grimacing.

  The coolie put his pole flat on the ground. He glided past them in the mist, in the darkness, knocked on a house door: three double knocks, then twice with the palm. A boy in a red cap opened it. Behind him stood a tall man, naked to the waist, scarred. As the coolie whispered to him he pulled over his thin arms with movements quick as lightning a long gown that was hanging at the hearth to dry. With great strides both were outside. They left the door open.

  Finally Yung-kuang could go no farther for laughing. As Lao-hsü was explaining solemnly to the girl that in this time of unrest any Chinese who stuck his dirty nose outside the door after sunset without first plugging his nostrils was liable, according to a prefectural decree, to a summary sentence of three weeks in the cangue, two figures fell on them out of the gloom, hit them over the head with wooden clubs, threw them to the ground, chased away the girl. They cut off their queues with short knives, removed their shoes, ripped from their gowns the embroidered insignia showing membership of the eight Manchu Banners. They dragged the two boys, senseless in the churned up filth of the street, into the doorway of a ruined house and propped them against the half open door. On the foreheads of the two motionless youths they drew in mud the sign of the five evil demons. Lao-hsü’s bloody head lolled all the while on his left shoulder. They shoved his arms together and laid the magnificent sleeve dagger across them. Hu, the tall man, strode across the Oxmarket to the teahouse. The two old knife grinders came back sleepily with him; they smiled and rocked their heads. Three melon sellers and a salt boiler jostled for a look. They exchanged greetings, sighed. The salt boiler spat on the still body with the sleeve dagger. The coolie, an old, serious face, fingered the long, gaping wound on Lao-hsü’s head, then rested the lolling skull on his left arm as he knelt beside the boy and with quivering lips poured a healing draught from a little gourd flask that had stood for a hundred sutras on an altar table.

  There was movement in the street. Muffled the night watchman’s drum beat between the houses. They vanished behind the door. The young night watchman whistled a chirpy tune. The dull light from the round lantern that he carried before him on a long pole slid over the still bodies. Muffled his drum echoed across the wide market place.

  The men behind the door separated, after the coolie had told them the name of his family and where he lived, and had invited them to honour him soon with a visit to his miserable hovel.

  A fine rain was still falling. In the main streets the lamplighters went about, climbed their hand ladders and lit the oil lamps in front of the houses of the rich merchants, the doctors and midwives. Songs and gongbeats blared from many shops. A rumbling and distant thunder came from the Hsi-shan. Beyond the harbour where the dark warm sea stirred, strumming came from a little vegetable patch behind a fisherman’s hut. The sound from the longnecked bottle-shaped p’ip’a was now loud, now carried scarcely ten paces. A man’s uncertain highpitched voice sang in an unfathomable rhythm, wandering among the same few notes:

  The bat flits at the east gate.

  The pale rain pours down on the plum trees. A shrill wind will soon rise.

  Why does the squirrel seek sweet fruit

  By night, while the pale rain pours down?

  Old Chao Hui paced to the upper window of his house.

  The second night watch was already past.

  He had been waiting for young Lao-hsü.

  The house stood alone behind the town on the northwestern Magnolia Slopes. In the darkness it stood out harshly, as narrow and tall as a lance. He had not built himself one of those miserable Manchu dwellings with flat roof and walls of mud, like his northern ancestors from the River of the Black Dragon. As General vested by the Emperor with a special commission and authority in a turbulent province he lived in splendour under the tall trunks of the elms and the whiterimmed spruce. Before him the tangle of alleys, the huge empty squares, the meandering streets feeling their way to the harbour. His house lay high enough to afford a view of the sea, if it were not for the triumphal arch at the end of Han-pen Street, that ancient edifice erected in the time of Chu Yuan-chang to commemorate some securing of the border against the Mongols. Four smooth pillars, straddled high up by broad crossbeams, supported stepped cornices. On each step crouched stone phoenixes; each beam bore reliefs and boastful inscriptions. Whoever passed through the wide central arch of the monumental p’ai-lou could read on every frieze about that grand old victory on the Northeast Frontier.

  Chao Hui laughed as he looked. They rejoiced over that ancient victory—and wore shaven heads in their own land, the mark of the Manchu, despite the presence of their tutelary ancestors. Deeply embedded in the Chinese earth in front of the house two wooden flagpoles reared threateningly; from fine, ornately perforated flagbaskets hung white pennants with the insignia of the Banner Lord. A low green wooden fence enclosed the house, whose two storeys, a red and gold upper floor over a bluewashed ground floor, were decked with an immense, overornate roof. Above the door, between two paper-covered windows an engraved tablet hung, with the inscription: Righteousness and the Pure Dynasty. The blind upper floor was painted gold and red, and was straddled by roof spars that flashed gold and red, the side beams ending in dragonheads. Monstrous lions squatted big as children on the balustrade around the upper floor. They snapped with twisted mouths, bit their long, itchy poodle ears, they growled and curled pointed tongues, they flopped lazily on their sides and nuzzled their fur.

  And inside at the open balcony door lean, restless Chao Hui stood, lightly dressed in black, trying to penetrate the mist. Prized by his troops, his clan, an object of jealousy among the courtiers, the intriguing eunuchs. Here he was in this northern province, and knew he had been sent here to be got swiftly out of the way.

  He had grown too big for them the day he was awarded the title Guardian of a Gate of Peking, the day the Emperor had come bearing a cup of tea to welcome him at the door of the Summer Palace. His glittering eyes darted over the walls of the room. The entire study was surrounded by a fantastic hunt. A broad relief carved in black wood covered the low walls. In the dim oil light figures flickered in ghostly life. Horses and carts, warriors between colossal wheels and targets as tall as horses. They continued from wall to wall with fluttering banners in uninterrupted procession, rode over a kneeling man who was touching a cloud-soaring Buddha’s head. Demons like dragonflies flew round a tree. A yard-long phoenix swished down; behind it a groaning man swam with the tail and fins of a fish, trying to grab the phoenix; there was wave after wave of dragons and men and genies.

  The terrible things of the last few years rose before him.

  He had marched four times against the Dzungars, had helped to exterminate them. The Emperor granted every last man who took part in that bloodbath a homecoming; they had to go as settlers to the New Frontier. Some thousands declined the opportunity. Chao Hui on the advice of the Emperor took them on as a standing army for the suppression of internal unrest.

  These were the core of Chao Hui’s troops, his
horde: the incendiary ravagers of Ili. Now they were camped across the province of Chihli that seethed with rebellion. They were posted before the gates of the Northern Residence.

  Rebellion was rippling through this province, through Shantung, across Liaotung, and the burrowing worm could not be crushed. It smouldered in many hundreds of villages and towns. And no enemy showed itself! His horde were yawning. His patrons in the Ministry, high officials in the Ping-pu, wanted him drowned here, as his estates had drowned in the Great River, down in the Lower Reaches. He wanted to hurl himself, a scourge, a violence, upon the unruly populace, teach them as they prayed to Buddha and read their sutras the religion of the halberd, the prayer of the long rod. They should all be burned to ashes.

  The mist lay thick enough to cut on the black town. Sailors’ songs rose from it like breathing. From the forest came the scream of a wild goose and the tumult of several geese squabbling. They quietened down; one continued scolding for a time.

  The lean mandarin with the grey drooping moustache hunched in fury in his black silk gown. He wrenched the long chain of glass beads that he wore around his neck, threw it clattering across the table. It rolled and slid hesitantly to the floor. Mindful suddenly of the Son of Heaven he dropped to press his forehead to the floor.

  He went to the gong that hung in a fourlegged stand near the southern wall of the room, rapped quickly with his knuckles twice. Tai-tsung, the old house slave, the “Little Father without a tongue”, knelt in the doorway. The young folk had still not returned to the palace. He looked uncertainly beyond his lord, who stalked from balcony door to his low couch and from the couch to the balcony door. The mist had thickened very early; the young illuminary hadn’t been long in this disreputable den of fisherfolk; might he have lost his way. The mandarin’s laugh was like his son’s: beginning with a cough, then pealing, then a throaty cooing. “Do you intend to join a jugglers’ guild in this disreputable den of fisherfolk? Have you ever seen the streets of Liu-yu? A street goes over roofs, fences, walls, through yards and cellars. Within three days Lao-hsü had his bearings.”

  Tai-tsung did not rise, raked his stringy beard, sighed and followed his lord with tragic eyes. “Will the favourite of Wu-ti not send after the young illuminary?”—“The flowerboats are an hour away,” and Chao Hui laughed again.

  “I was so bold as to send to the flowerboats two hours ago, and ask. The resplendent Lao is not amusing himself there. He went into a shop in Wei-ai Street with the inestimable Yung-kuang. Their chairs came home without them. But they were in Tso-fu Street, in the dark. The young radiances were in very high spirits.”

  “And went off to the flowerboats.”

  “They aren’t at the flowerboats,” the old man murmured obstinately, picking the pacing general’s glass bead chain from the floor.

  Chao stood in front of him, knocked him on the back of the head with his fist. “What do you want with me, you bag of shit? What are you doing down there?”—“It’s dangerous in the town, Excellency. He is the son of a righteous but severe general. He can’t come home. He is being held.”—“Out!” roared Chao Hui, his eyes flashing.

  Half an hour later a quite unfamiliar sound hummed through the palace. Two soft deep gongbeats, very close to the house, ghostly, as if a great wounded bird had stroked the metal with its wings as it sank. It was the gong out in the northern side hall, placed there since the start of the troubles for public use in emergencies. Only in dangerous places and times did leading officials set up a public alarm gong before their yamens. Three servants—a cook and two sedan bearers—and the Little Father too ran at each other’s heels through the back door. Suddenly they stopped. To all of them at once came the fearful thought that it was not the house gong but the alarm gong, the northern one. As they stared at each other and ran about excitedly, two figures with paper lanterns were already whispering in the hall, two of the general’s people, barelegged, pointing animatedly at the damp ground between them. Nobody near the gong. No sign. Only a man’s footprint, broadsoled, on the ground. A lengthy whispering began among the six in the windy hall. Anxiously they glanced about to see if the general was corning, but the house was quiet. He was sleeping. They stayed hidden in the shrubbery behind the northern gong.

  The two bearers were already on their backs, the little old man with the white beard snored squatting, when a very soft, almost vibrationless note sounded, then a full plaintive beat. Something white was still falling under the gong as the first bearer ran up. Before he could look at it, old Tai-tsung grabbed it from his hand. On the paper were the words: Tso-fu Street. Beneath them the characters for Sun and Moon: the sign of the rebels. In all stealth they woke Chao Hui’s twenty bodyguards in the rear apartments. Silently, barefoot, halberds in hand, they raced down into the black town. Before them four lanterns swayed on long bamboo poles.

  Now and then water splashed as they ran through puddles. The wooden drums of the night watchmen sounded now near, now farther off. The streets were steps leading down. Across the sinister Oxmarket they ran, into Tso-fu Street. They felt their way from house to house. The lanterns hovered over every doorway. Finally the soldiers banged on doorposts with their halberds, woke the startled, shouting inhabitants, who came rushing out. Rapid words were being exchanged when from the last house but one before the market a long whistle came. Then several piercing whistles. Against the half open doors of an empty, tumbledown house two bloody sacks were leaning, from which shoeless human feet projected. When a soldier and Tai-tsung pulled up the coarse matting two men were sitting there motionless on the threshold, breathing shallowly, queueless heads sunk on their chests. The sign of the five evil demons on their foreheads. On the crossed arms of one—neck and half the face thick-crusted with blood—a superb sleeve dagger.

  They thronged into the stinking house. Rats scuttled big as cats over the front yard, over the steps, through the empty rooms with their collapsed roof beams. On the strawstrewn k’ang, lying on its side, a dead dog mouldered.

  Tai-tsung, knees trembling with cold, stood in the doorway. He let the lantern drop, howled as he knelt and rubbed Lao-hsü’s hands.

  The whole street gathered round. As knowledge spread of who it was that lay here the men lifted their hands, the women cried out in fear. They brought water and powdered whitecake, washed the wounds, dusted them.

  The soldiers had quickly got hold of two public sedan chairs.

  The bearers jostled each other in their haste. On the way Lao-hsü awoke, asked Tai-tsung where he was. The old man comforted him. In front of the palace he whimpered for his knife. Louder than the alarm gong the clear boyish voice resounded through the sleeping house: “Who’s got my knife? Yung-kuang! Yung-kuang! Give me the dagger. Your dagger!”

  Upstairs Chao Hui’s gong squalled.

  Tai-Tsung was astonished next morning at his master’s calm. Chao asked, as the slave soaped and shaved his head, where they had found Lao-hsü. He had asked five times already. At great length and with many fanciful details the man crouching behind him told the tale. He skipped over the deplorable situation in which they had found the wounded boys. He patted the gleaming skull with tissue paper. Chao tossed about on his couch, raised himself with cracking joints onto his elbows, looked the old man, who shrank respectfully back, in the face. Who did he suspect, then? He grunted in his deep bass voice. Was Lao-hsü’s breast badge intact, with its Banner device? And when Tai-tsung coloured Chao roared, “Did they leave him his pigtail?” A friendly, hefty slap on the old man’s hunched shoulders, then Chao Hui stretched.

  His little eyes again wandered restlessly about the room. They bored, excavated.

  A little servant girl slipped through the door. The grieving Hai-t’ang would be glad to speak with Old Master. He followed the girl at once, through the hall of twelve green pillars that served as a reception room, into the women’s quarters that lay towards the woods. Hai-t’ang was not in her room, nor on the balcony with her daughter. But a cheerful lively girl gave the hasten
ing man a deep ch’ing-an on the gong and chanted: The grieving Mistress was grinding medicines by the young illuminary’s brick bed.

  Wordlessly they retraced their steps across the Turfan carpets. Hai-t’ang was crouching on a yellow rush mat beside the k’ang on which Lao-hsü lay delirious. Two Chinese servants, old fat women, sat beside her holding umbrella, fan. A full face: the straight cut fringe of the Cantonese women on her yellowish-white powdered forehead. Red beauty spots over thickly drawn eyebrows. Her eyes were large and almond shaped, almost round. Only when she smiled did they narrow to slits, lines. Irises a satiny brown-black, swimming in little bluetinged whites. The eyes dwelt naked, lidless, in their roomy sockets; the short stiff lashes stood out like thorns above them. The nose was set flat on its broad low bridge, though it ended in a fine surprising upturn. The nostrils as they breathed were incomparably tender and soulful. Brownish-yellow skin of a wilful dullness lay smooth on the soft, well proportioned body, over the roundness of her expressive face, about the very small, broad hands whose well-turned fingers wore silver sheaths over the long nails. When the blood flowed into Hai-t’ang’s face the skin took on a tender olive green hue.

  She bowed to Chao Hui, put down the wooden red lacquered bowl in which she had been working with a thinstemmed pestle, took the paper fan from the servant. With his principal wife Chao Hui, unlike other husbands, did not speak of children, the household, relatives. From the first years of their marriage young Hai-t’ang had won a place beside him. He had in those days been fortunate to use her influence with her father, Huang Tzu-tung, governor of Anhui; his promotion was rapid. In the Lower Reaches, south of the little town of Hsinghua, they acquired large fertile estates on the Chulou canal. Even now the literati there on Mussel Canal under the warm southern sky sang of Hai-t’ang’s intelligence and sweetness, of her refined learning, also of her untamability.