The Three Leaps of Wang Lun

by Alfred Doblin

  Tall Wang Lun had long since stopped smiling. His face growing ever more agitated he stood by the brickbed. The wide left leg of his trousers was singeing on the grill, but he didn’t notice, paid no attention to the smell of scorching. He went slowly and quite hesitantly from one to the other, pulled each one by the hand into the light, gazed searchingly into his face: “What is it? What is it then? What do you think?” He leaned both hands on the edge of the table, standing behind the table, eyed the bag from all sides, bent down, stroked it fearfully. Then he wrapped his left hand around it, took it into the next room, all the while casting glances at the men left and right as if he thought they might hit him. He left a thin trail of coaldust behind him. Tall Wang bolted the door and squatted down in the little room, which contained only jars, empty barrels and farm tools, turned a hatchet in his right hand, placed it carefully beside him. Then he lifted the almost empty leather bag in his outspread hands up to his sweating face and dropped his head onto his raised knee. He said out loud, through chattering teeth, for them to hear next door, “What is it then, what do you want of me?” His clothes stuck to his limbs. He stood up, noticed the hole in his trouser leg. Such a silent dizzying fear took hold of him that he turned around in circles, stared at the wooden planks under his felt soles, passed his hands over the floor, pressed bent fingers to the wall.

  He stood up, his back slumped into a corner, hugging his arms tight inside the wide long sleeves; considered with staring eyes what had happened to him. Suddenly everything died away in him. He trod calmly through the jumble of implements to the open window. The air was biting. Wang Lun, his head stuck outside in the darkness, didn’t know what he looked at. The little houses over there were far away, the sky’s blackness was no farther. He observed everything with astonishment.

  He pulled his tunic close around him, drew his head down between his shoulders and went back next door where five of the vagabonds sat playing shadows. They noticed how fixed his look was, how expressionless his face. He stood by the table. He said softly to the hunchback, embracing him but not directing his gaze higher than his shoulders, that he was going to walk through the village once more.

  And then he went through the empty street, turned back, went farther up the hill. Ran as he broke through the blackness of the night, skin after skin, shell after shell. Before he realized what was happening his arms had started swinging like clubs, a sickle sprang from his forehead and he was slicing the night with it. He leapt over the cliff known as Shen-yi. His body ran on, already without feeling; he rode breathing gently on feathered shanks. He was glad that something had taken him up and was running away with him. Over the hills, up to the crags. To Ma No, to Ma No. Surely he could hear the chamois leaping towards his hut out of the recumbent night.

  There was still no sign of morning in the sky when Ma No heard his name called, ran down the steps leading to his hut.

  The smoky wick puttered. Silent and mild his Buddhas sat in the background. Earlobes extending down to their shoulders; blue knotted hair; distant gazes; evanescent smiles on protruding lips; squatting on slim round shanks. Wang lay with his forehead before the thousand-armed goddess of rock crystal, accusing, begging, distraught. Willed that he should stay lying here, not go away. Confusedly stammering what had happened to him.

  “What happened to Su-ko is nothing to this. They cut Su-ko down with five sabres by the little wall. They took him prisoner and then sent him over the Nai-ho. I’ve been lured, trapped in their midst, bewitched. They want to charm a demon into my breast, the hunchback wants to, they all want to. I’ve been good to them, stopped all their quarrels. A lot of them wouldn’t be alive but for me. I went down the village street. The bag had coal in it. It’s not my fault it was only coal. And there wasn’t any gold or any seal. How could there be gold, how could the Emperor’s seal have got into the leather bag? Why do they ask that of me? They shouldn’t want it, they shouldn’t want it. They ought to let me go again, I said nothing about the leather bag. I’m Wang Lun from Hunkang-ts’un. I’m a murderer; no mandarin will help me now. I won’t let them set me on. You must help me, you five Fos. Ma No, help me, pray with me, help me persuade them.”

  He raised himself on his knees, held fast to Ma No, who had dropped down beside him. “Or am I already bewitched? Tell me, Ma No. I’ve left it too late, haven’t I, it’s too late now.”

  Turning from the Buddhas he uttered long howling cries, again and again flung his arms wide and smote them together. “What will happen, Ma No? What will happen to Wang Lun? Evil spirits have possessed him. Wang Lun’s been possessed by evil spirits.”

  Ma No prised himself loose from Wang’s clenched fingers, let him slide to the ground, placed a thin yellow redbordered cloak over his patchwork gown, put on the square black cap, the Roof of Life, banged the rattlestick, shook the clappers. The piping words he uttered were drowned in the tinny jangling; and as he invoked with curses the foul snake gods, the Nagas and Lus and their kings, as under the dinning of the clappers the Garuda birds whirred up charmed out of the circle, the green fluttering Garudas with the red breasts of men, white bellies, two horns projecting from their black birdheads, Ma No’s heart trembled with joy. Himself in a dream he danced enraptured around Wang, who bowed his head. He understood everything Wang said. He bent down, stroked his shoulders, his skull, managed to transform his snarling and hissing into laughter. Wang recalled his father and mother, and how his mother fell asleep as his father leapt about in a tiger mask yelping like a dog in front of her and wheezed and whispered over the unconscious body. He felt frozen suddenly under the shoulders, in the knees, the heels.

  He lay dizzy, stretched full length on the floor. Ma heaped covers over him, snuffed out the light. White brightness entered through the pasted-over window. A scraping and scratching at the bolted door, feet and beaks of hungry crows. Then came a soft running over the steps, crawling over the low roof, a weaselish sniffing and snuffling away over the rafters. Every moment there came a crashing from far off; distant shoving, sheering, rumbling followed. Snow masses came with a lurch, plunged into the gorges.

  Ma No in his sulphur yellow cowl with a red border, four-pointed cap on his head, opened the door. The booming of the river surged into the stuffy room where the clapper was now silent. Dazzling white reflected off the snow masses. Ma whistled and ducked. He held the big begging bowl in his hand, full of grains and crumbs. Crows uttered furious cries. He kept the importunate birds back with shrill laughter. Far over the slope, onto the deep snow hiding the road the hard scraps flew.

  Although on the first evening Wang was already anxious to be gone, Ma No detained him on the mountain for three more days. On the morning of the fourth day men knocked at Ma’s door, five robbers from the village. They were looking for Wang; brought news that they’d been betrayed: the previous afternoon thirty horsemen despatched from the sub-prefecture of Chatuo under the command of a gigantic Patsung had swooped on the village. With the villagers’ help they’d driven off the soldiers, lamed a horse, but hadn’t been able to prevent four elderly footpads, one of them a sick man, from being seized and carried off by the soldiers on their horses. By the time they noticed the abduction the horsemen were already at full gallop, shooting arrows behind them. The brothers were all for pulling out, they reported. The well-meaning inhabitants too advised them to leave quickly, otherwise both bandits and villagers were done for. All the roads were easily passable, the weather tolerable, spring was coming early.

  Three of the men sent to the hermit’s lair were close friends of Wang from the stamping mills. They were the most experienced, most dependable men.

  Yielding to Wang’s agitated entreaties they stayed almost half a day together in Ma No’s hut.

  Wang could hardly control himself. He went helplessly in a tumult of feelings across to the low, glowing hearth above which a kettle hung on a rough, badly trimmed oak branch. His broad face shrivelled in the heat. He turned and his flapping sleeves brushed against the golden
Buddhas, whose entrancing, glimmering, iridescent features gazed out at silent Ma No, who tried to catch their eye, at the wanderer Wang, the five squatting vagabonds with their heads together slurping tea, gossiping disparagingly of places round about. They were wrapped in layer upon layer of ragged clothing, were barrels of cloth, barely mobile packages of meat.

  With an unbearable seething welling in his breast Wang staggered down the steps, and his narrow slanting eyeslits blinked, dazzled by the rebounding whiteness. He stood at the side of the mountain road. Shreds of mist slid out of the valley. Caught by an eddying draught they rose swiftly, sinuously and blew in broad veils over Wang and the long mountain road. The booming rapids sounded unbelievably close. The valley boiled cold and was filled with bubbling vapour. Soft unmuscled arms of snow stretched up out of it.

  They took counsel in the barely manhigh hut under the rock. Ma No with his sharp withered face, patchwork gown, tightly wound queue, polite, slightly condescending, strutting inwardly, expectantly excited. Wang, at the hearth with the others, hunched his back; his look wandered from one pair of eyes to another.

  He began to speak, to stretch out his hands, to implore his friends: “The horsemen have taken our four comrades away, they’ll be thrown in prison and have their heads chopped off. They couldn’t run as fast as you. I carried the cripple on my back when we were running down from the mountains. No one will believe them, how wretched we were and the frost was so bad. The cripple believes it, because a boatman broke his leg. What terrible luck, they’ll bury him in an inauspicious place, his spirit will have to beg just as it starved and froze in life. His leg was too short, and the soldiers had horses. They take everything from us. We’re supposed to freeze to death in these desolate mountains, the crows have had their fill of us, no one could survive, there weren’t any caravans for food. They’re taking our poor brothers from us. Oh we are wretched.”

  Thus Wang Lun lamented, looked all of them in their sad downcast faces, and suffered. Suddenly the fear came again, that estrangement from them. He turned away, gulped on the lump at the back of his mouth. He forced it down, held his icy sweating hands over the hearth. They weren’t doing anything to him, they didn’t want anything from him, it was all just talk, he had nothing to ask them. Oh, life was hard. And then it flashed in front of his eyes; now like sparks scattering from the hearth, now merging so quick and sleek, five sabres and a little whitewashed wall.

  A broadshouldered old man, one of the envoys, a peasant whose land and family had been washed away, maintained his resolute expression at Wang’s tremulous words. “We must get our brother back. Since you carried him down into the village, Wang, you must fetch him back again. If we’d had bows and horses like the soldiers, nothing would have happened. The Sub-prefect in Chatuo is supposed to be a clever man from Szechuan. But he’s too well bred for us here in Nank’ou. Come, Chu, Ma No, something must come from all this talk.”

  “Sub-prefect Liu of Chatuo,” interposed a big young man next to him, with a strikingly fair complexion, large sharp eyes, “he comes from Szechuan, but this miserable Hsü knows where he got his taels from. He didn’t pick them out of the canonical books; the songs of the Shih-ching don’t wear gold chains around their throats. I heard of a great city called Kuangyuan once when I was wandering beyond the Tapa-shan. Into the yamen of the magnificent Sub-prefect came a courier from the Viceroy of Szechuan; new taxes must be levied from so and so on such and such, for the war. This miserable Hsü knows what answer the magnificent Liu sent back to the exalted Viceroy, because as a matter of fact I laid the returning courier in the dust in order to secure a few cash for myself before venturing into so great a city. Liu had such a fatherly love for the city he declined to impose the tax on Kuangyuan: ‘The city is too poor, smallpox is raging, the price of rice beyond the means of the common man.’ But when I personally entered those happy gates two days later, struck all of a heap at such humanity, lovely long notices were pasted up on every wall with the stamp of the magnificent Liu and a plain but dignified text. He let the mighty Viceroy have the first word: ‘Son of Heaven, war with so and so.’ And to end up, taxes on this and that, donations from everyone, this guild, that guild. Suddenly the people knew the worth of everything in their city walls, this, that and the other. They were so happy and praised Liu for his noble service in promoting their city so well, praised his parents and grandparents and for three years paid the likin contributions to—Liu, the wise Sub-prefect.”

  The light-complexioned man laughed like a drunkard. Ma looked severely at him; Wang knew there was no holding Hsü. One of those next to Wang jogged his neighbour, whose face glowed from the hot water, whispered to him to speak up; that was better than cursing under your breath outside other people’s windows.

  Wang was gripped by his pain, was being held by iron hands drowning under a thick dark bog. It was all wrong, what they were saying here.

  While the two men next to him gesticulated awkwardly, harangued each other and Hsü launched braggingly into a new story, Wang started to moan, pulled Ma No next to him on the floor. He spoke in helpless gasps, turned his head, his lips quivered: “Ma, sit down here. Don’t be upset, dear brother. Hsü, you’re a good lad, it’s right what you say. I don’t want to weary you, but something came to me as Hsü told us about the Sub-prefect of Kuangyuan in Szechuan, who’s robbed us of our four poor companions. For sure we shan’t let him, dear children. Don’t doubt me on that, dear children. Something just came to me, from Shantung, when I was in the city of Chinan-fu, in that great city, and served a bonze, his name was T’o Chin. You won’t know him, he was a good man, he looked after me well. I want to tell you about Su-ko, that was his name. Then you’ll see why I can’t leave those four poor men in the Sub-prefect’s hands. Not after what happened to me in Chinan-fu, not after they struck down my friend Su-ko. He was a follower of the Western god Allah, who’s said to grant much to his followers. But disturbances broke out in Kansu when these people suddenly wanted to pray aloud, and Su-ko’s nephew was the first to read aloud out of an old book, and they chopped him into pieces with his family. Then they came to look for my friend in Chinan-fu, he was such a grave dignified man, he’d passed the highest examinations. It fell out as it must. They caught him again after I’d already freed him and his two sons. He told them they had no need to worry about him, he was leaving to settle elsewhere, but first he had to pay his debts and sell his house and his priest had to choose an auspicious day for him. But drums came. A lizard, a white tiger, a thinshanked T’ouszu hit him from behind with his sabre pommel, outside his house by a little whitewashed wall. And then when he turned round they hacked him down with five sabres.

  “You mustn’t laugh because I did nothing to help. His spirit must have flown out of his body into my liver, because for days I was possessed. And this happened in Chinan-fu, to my own friend. The T’ouszu is no longer alive, I can assure you of that. But it makes you weep, going unaided across the Nai-ho. They keep coming back and taking something away. They give you no rest and no peace. They want to exterminate me and you and all of us and not let us live. What shall we do, dear children? I, your friend Wang from Hunkang-ts’un, I’m already like trampled flesh, like stinking rags. I can only weep and moan.” Wang had assumed the posture of a sick child before Ma No, and his breast heaved with groans, gasps and sobs.

  Water streamed from his eyes and nose, his broad coarse-skinned face was all small and girlish. He leaned against Ma No in a kind of daze.

  What he said of Su-ko was no lie. In killing Su-ko they had torn a friend from him. Wang the street runner and pious barker of Chinan-fu had met the Mohammedan in his inn. The grave, tranquil being captivated him, attracted him more strongly than he realized in the city’s restless bustle. He suddenly had a quite indistinct feeling of having met here something fateful, something so profound that he had to turn away from it. He seldom came together with Su-ko and his two sons; their talk touched only on everyday matters. Then came Su-ko’s arrest, a
nd the fearsome strength of his relationship with this man revealed itself. Not that he formed any conception of what his contact with the Mohammedan meant: he only noticed his fascination and his complete involvement in Su’s fate. Wang had a leaden feeling that he himself, something horribly secret within him, was being attacked. And it was not the crudity of the attack that alarmed him, but horror at the secret which rose up before his eyes, which he did not want to see, not yet, later perhaps, much much later. The five sabres and the little wall merged before his eyes, always anew, every hour, every minute, it was unbearable, it must be covered over, buried.

  And so vengeance for Su emerged as something thoughtout, forced. Only when he had the stag mask in his hands, in the bonze’s room, and fled at the powerful smell of the mask into the memories that rose up in him of pranks, of careering through market places, balancing across roofs, only then did he know for sure that he would kill the T’ouszu, would use the mask with a quick firm gesture to thrust everything down. At the time this movement made him happy and secure. Thrust down. Once again he wanted to delude himself about the future which he faced with shame and horror. He really did not need to climb out of the wayside shrine that morning and run to the drill square: during the night he had already throttled the captain ten times, fifty times with the mask, it had all happened already. But still he ran; he had to see it for himself, impress it firmly on himself. And so the murder took place, as a sacrifice that he offered to himself. Thus did Wang avenge the Mohammedan, his friend.