The Three Leaps of Wang Lun

by Alfred Doblin

  Wang put on his blue smock, hung the sword around his neck. They’d better run, fetch their begging bowls and stuff; they must leave the camp together. As he walked slowly beside them, sparing his knee, he didn’t say why he had to leave so stealthily or where they were going.

  He wandered for three weeks through central Chihli, sent emissaries into many of the larger settlements and towns, which had already received news from Shantung that the Wu-wei under Wang Lun from Hunkang-ts’un belonged to those friends of the motherland the White Waterlily, and should be supported by every conceivable secret means. Wang’s emissaries went as fig sellers; in their long narrow box between layers of figs lay the sword, Yellow Leaper, Ch’en Yao-fen’s heirloom, with a letter from Wang in the prearranged cipher of the White Waterlily whereby, starting with a character to be communicated only by mouth, only the third and then the seventh word were to be read, then from another specified character every second and fourth word. The secret aid of the White Waterlily was quickly mobilized; there was complete trust in the committee in Shantung.

  At the same time Wang amended his rules governing the way the brothers and sisters lived; in the poorer districts he tolerated and desired the complete dissolution and dispersal of the brothers and sisters in settlements, villages, towns. In this Wang was yielding to the wishes of two members of the Pailien-chiao, who told him they did not favour the strict isolation of the Truly Powerless, their owl existence; an alliance needed more than a letter; actually there wasn’t any sword under the sweetness of the figs. But Wang gave secret instructions to the precentors of every group to warn the brothers and sisters before they entered human society that they were the equals of the brothers of the White Waterlily. Patriots they all were, but only the Wu-wei in peace and toleration, truest children of their poor race that none could truly entangle in a war, since it flowed forever like water and assumed the form of every vessel.

  After these efforts to secure the safety of the brothers and sisters in central Chihli, Wang Lun should have been able to retire and devote himself to his own preparations for the great heavenly voyage. But a horse cannot graze with an arrow in its shank, and a wind that rushes against a flagpole cannot be silent. There were evenings for Wang that summer when, sitting in a forsaken teahouse, on a woodland path, he was ambushed by thoughts of Ma No and laid low by them. One day he conquered his feelings and sent a messenger, a swift young man, with a letter for Ma No, in which he asked him to forget their meeting and to deliver up to him the souls that were now befuddled, and to come himself with them. Not even the messenger returned.

  It happened as Ma No said: there had never been among the brothers and sisters a devotion more intense, feelings more tender, a sweeter sense of life than since that morning when they confessed themselves out loud to be Broken Melons. A few months later none of them lingered this side of existence; wherever they had passed they left a soft buzz of talk: that theirs had been the greatest happiness.

  Even before the Broken Melon reached the foothills of the T’aihang-shan, north of Shunte, a robber band fell on the endless column of brothers and sisters. They were straggling one rainy afternoon through a monotonous loess landscape. There was a baggage train of carts, wide wagons. The armed ruffians, eighty of them, fell on these, thinking to make a haul. When they found only boards, beans, a little rice and water together with a considerable number of invalids they overturned the wagons, polluted the water barrels, took the sacks of provisions. Most of the brothers in the rearguard fled; six braver ones, wanting to carry away the invalids, were driven off with kicks and with blows from the flat of sword blades. One who tried to remonstrate with the criminals had his tongue cut out and tied to his forehead, to general laughter. The robbers, who now realized who they were dealing with, had great fun chasing after some of the sisters. Under the rousing chorus of a pious hymn that a sister struck up in her deadly terror when they threw her to the ground, they made off with eleven tighttrussed disrobed girls.

  The sectarians meanwhile crowded round Ma No and the elders at the front of the column. A massing of confused cries, of clueless grimaces, knocking knees. They tried to surround the leaders from behind and bring them to a stop. The leaders slipped free, forcibly knocked away arms that stretched out to them, shook their heads, pressed on, shrugged hands from their shoulders and backs.

  What did the brothers and sisters want. Didn’t they know the precious teaching of their sect? To be unresisting. Didn’t they know that?

  Only now did the frightfulness, the terrible solitude of their doctrine swoop down upon the chalkwhite men. They flapped round one another, dragged tormented eyes from the rear of the column, forced their feet into Ma No’s tracks. Writhing under the screams they skirled a cracked song meant for their ears alone. They called on secret spirits, consoled each other.

  Ma No walked slowly with the elders in the dripping rain. The elders wrung their hands whispering, glanced at each other, stood wishing the earth would swallow them. Ma’s eyes opened wide; an outburst of tense fury. Why hadn’t they seized daggers and knives? The difference between this suffering and any other, come, what was it? How was it different? Yes, you had to force yourself to see this as good, as very good, to worship it, for this was fate. Exactly. Fate.

  And he forced them and himself to turn around, watch there over the loess landscape the depredations of the robbers on the brothers and sisters and swallow this poison. He silenced the brothers’ brazen stupid singing. They threw themselves to the wet ground, were hacked to pieces by what they heard. The sectarians flocked about the grimly kneeling, agonizing leaders.

  Breathless calm. Open stage. Screams from the trussed-up sisters, stripping of tender bodies, clubs ringing on the skulls of brothers, roaring, trampling horses, timid whimpering of the sick, empty plain, rain.

  Everything agglomerated round the wreckage of the wagons. When the drenched invalids began to yammer the brothers couldn’t look them in the face. When the tongueless man rasped and gaped his bloody mouth they turned their backs.

  At discussion near a market town that evening Ma No was unshaken. No one said much. They separated groaning, expressions paintight. Dull seething unease among the brothers and sisters.

  Fifty brothers came together in the night, searched through the market town for the robbers. They learned that the robbers had their lair in a village some distance back from the town, that neither authorities nor private citizens had been able to dislodge them. Some locals also brought news that three of the abducted girls had been carried off right away to Shunte; eight were being held in the village.

  That night the brothers burst into the houses pointed out to them in the village, fought with the robbers, who assumed it was a military raid and made haste to escape. The sisters were found and freed, two criminals and three brothers lay dead in the moonlit village street.

  The brothers grew so bold now that next day they sniffed out the whereabouts in the town of the other girls, who were lodged in an obscure house of pleasure. At evening they visited the place in groups of three and five, enjoyed themselves until the third night watch, then without difficulty broke down the doors, lay low for a whole day among the beggars of the town, a week later by roundabout means gained Ma No’s camp on the flowery slopes of the T’aihang.

  Ma No, alerted to these events, considered expelling them. A majority of the sectarians had already reverted to the notion that Wu-wei was the core and the salvation, must remain core and salvation. The liberators hung their heads. Where sorrow appeared genuine Ma forgave. Five who had been unwise enough to boast were turned away.

  A bitter secret struggle developed between Ma No and his antagonists in the league. Ma’s victory, which soon became apparent, demonstrated the enormous power at the disposal of this utterly changed man.

  In the fertile populous region at the foot of the T’aihang holy prostitution emerged from the bosom of the league.

  Ever since their sojourn by the swamp of Talu the sisters had acquired
the habit, whenever men approached as they wandered in lonely regions, mountain paths, woods, of going up to them and exchanging friendly words; even caresses were hard to slip away from without risk. After the attack near the T’aihang-shan this practice became general.

  The sisters mobilized to erect a dike of gentleness around the Broken Melon. They no longer went about in ragged beggar’s traps; sought with help from the brothers to acquire bright clothing, lovely painted parasols, fine combs. They congregated every day at evening, and the more experienced taught them seductive love songs from the pleasure houses, how to strum the p’ip’a. They no longer hurried anxiously past labourers repairing the Imperial highway, peanut gleaners grubbing in the fields; they fought with feminine weapons, glided past. Among the almost five hundred women there were ten who saw the situation of Ma No’s group clearly, who joined their destiny to that of the Broken Melon, brought intelligence and determination to the strengthening of the league. It was the younger beauties who established holy prostitution. No one, they said, should hinder them in smoothing a path to the Western Paradise, now that they shared everything, everything with everyone.

  Something distasteful happened in the T’aihang-shan, something magical, ingenuous as in a song. The beggar camp was struck, the men went into the mountains where settlement clustered by settlement. The girls tripped arm in arm across the chequerboard of fields. They separated along the narrow paths between fields of rice and wheat. Soft muddy ground dented under the light feet of the joybringers. Amid the green of stalks a vivid red shone out, upright spherical flowers on childhigh stalks, shimmering silky purple: poppies. The girls’ fringes stuck to low foreheads. At their bright girdles they carried an alms bowl. Here and there one of them, not used to walking, brandished a brasshung stick, a rattlestick.

  When a bringer of joy met a labouring woman or girl, the painted beggar girl would greet her, give her own name, say she belonged to the league of the Broken Melon, tell stories, pitch in, on leaving present a little cloth bag with ashes or a paper amulet with characters.

  A labourer asked her about the district, about the direction of the ground’s spiritual pulse; she accepted presents from the respectful man, sat with him on a fieldbank, under a pagoda tree, ate what he gave her, and while he gazed at her entranced told him of the pious miracle workers who were her companions, of the difficult fate they’d endured. And then she tripped away, turning frequently and bowing greetings. When the holy prostitute saw trembling nervous glances at her side she was consoling, sat apart from him and sang a few strange little songs. She aired the neck of her loose gown, pulled out a red cloth, wound it around her face. Behind the cloth her laugh rang out, and then she granted the lucky man his will. Took the path again until she disappeared from the district.

  Reports of this new league sped swiftly through the towns, the pleasure quarters, theatres, teahouses. Slaves of both sexes, actor lads and painted women slipped away. In vain proprietors appealed with one voice to the authorities, withheld licence fees to exert pressure.

  On all lips was the story of young lady Ch’ai from Ch’ienling and how she escaped. She’d been sold very young to a house of low repute.

  When she had reached the position of catering manageress within the house and as a result of her incessant enjoyment of hot wine—wine spiced with aphrodisiac ingredients—had fallen prey to chronic stomach pains, she considered one sober moment whether it mightn’t be better to hunger and freeze than be constantly sick, beaten by the proprietress and perform transactions of love with coolies, oil sellers, boat haulers.

  Abused in every way, feeling herself completely ruined, she jumped from her uncurtained sedan chair, whose bearers she had liberally bribed, into the magistrate’s yamen where she was at once detained and taken, after the sentencing of her vicious mistress, to the House of Salvation which the town maintained next to the prison. She learned useful things in the course of her short weeks there; her picture was hung in a glass case at the entrance to the house for men who came looking for a wife.

  As soon as her picture was hung up someone went to report to the chastised mistress, still recovering from a hundred strokes of the bamboo. She engaged a nephew of hers, a layabout that she supported, to present himself to the director of the municipal House of Salvation, hand over false references as to his character and request the girl for his wife. After the fellow had hypocritically assured himself of the good qualities of his future bride he declared for her, fetched her away for a couple of weeks to a rented lodging and then took her back to his aunt.

  The unlucky girl racked her brains how to inform the police of this deception. She was constantly watched, every bit of money was taken from her, she was locked up, beaten daily by the woman until she yielded and promised to behave. The ruinous drinking began again, the girl went about with bloodshot eyes, completely subdued, bowing low whenever she saw the mistress, glad that her hands and the soles of her feet were being left to heal.

  Then one day a newly arrived inmate of the house who had no relish for this kind of life told her she’d got to know a melonseed seller who loved her and wanted to help her. The tormented girl was half unwillingly persuaded; together with three other girls that they brought into their confidence they set out a long petition of complaint against the mistress and her nephew. The new girl undertook to pass the petition to her admirer; he was to submit it by the usual channel to the authorities. The melonseed seller did in fact deliver the letter to the proper place; but before officials could come to investigate the affair, the nephew, via a minor functionary of the yamen who had charge of the correspondence, got wind of the complaint.

  One evening the frightened girls listened through the floorboards to his agitated debate with the mistress in the reception lounge below on the measures that had to be taken. Then the five compromised imperilled creatures steeled themselves to an act of violence: they tied up the woman who watched their room from the corridor, having first stopped her mouth with paper; let themselves down, by means of false queues and their own which they quickly cut off and knotted together, at the back wall of the house, ran pellmell through the streets, hid until morning under the town wall; after exchanging their elegant costumes for the rags of beggar women who passed the night in covered burrows by the wall, slipped one after the other through the gate and away.

  They had no need to hurry so, for after the first shock the mistress and her nephew were glad the five complainants had disappeared, and sent many a good riddance after them. But deathly fear goaded the flanks of the five girls; they ran mindlessly li after li, at every sound from behind threw themselves flat on the ground. Finally, having clambered up a mountain and sat down on an untrodden waste of stones, they wept themselves calm together.

  Further developments in this very commonplace affair lacked for nothing in banality. At the end of the first day two of the girls, unable to continue for excitement, hunger and fear, separated from the rest and stayed behind for several days at the magistracy of a village to which they came, waiting for the alerted mistress to fetch them. But she accused the girls of theft and slander. The benignly disposed magistrate reproached them with this for a few more days in the village and advised them, since they had in fact misappropriated some clothing, to give up all thought of a return to town. And so the spoilt young things worked for scanty wages in the fields and sties, cursed the whole business.

  The other three girls caught up with Ma No’s band, after five days of uninterrupted wandering, freezing and thirst that left them almost dead from exhaustion. They were welcomed with open arms. But two of them couldn’t take to the strict quiet life. Their talents and their beauty weren’t sufficiently noticed. The mentality of the brothers and sisters struck them as boring and comical. One of them married a brother who felt the same way. The other, a clever young thing, studied a few of the favourite Court dances from an absconded Imperial actor, mugged up phrases and Court arcana from him and was soon engaged as an important acquisition by the
proprietor of a teahouse with cabaret. To promote his find, he started rumours circulating about intrigues at the Imperial Court of which she was the victim, and so on.

  Only the destitute, the tormented who had let themselves be carried along barely knowing their own mind bloomed among the Broken Melon. They’d never dreamt such happiness was possible. For the first time something like hope gleamed again from sunken eyes. But they were the least fitted to such a life. A stray Shih, as the knowledgeable among the sectarians put it, had pierced their skin and entrails. They vomited blood and could go no farther. A village apothecary concocted rejuvenating pills for them from the placenta of a primigravid bitch. But they lay dead in the lovely summer fields and were free of their wretched existence.

  The fame of the holy prostitutes spread far across the countryside. Perhaps nothing served so well to make the sect known. The authorities and the harrassing literati in the Confucius temples, though under no inhibitions, could come to no agreement on measures to adopt. They couldn’t permit many hundreds, among them depraved scions of the oldest families, to be massacred by constables and provincial troops; none dared risk the spectacle of a slaughter of madmen who wouldn’t lift a finger to defend themselves.

  Efforts were made through mildness and gentle force to move the sectarians on, to scatter them. As every attempt met with a flat refusal, the Prefects banned every village and settlement which the sectarians approached from supplying them with food and drink. Individual Prefects, on their own initiative and with the support of their officials, initiated action against the league. They made use of popular superstition, spread rumours that the sectarians abducted pretty women from lonely villages, that they had in their possession a life-prolonging powder which they kept for themselves. On the basis of such rumours minor assaults ensued on sectarians who were found some distance from the camp. They were stripped naked, beaten. The secret instigators of such attacks hoped this would reduce the flow of adherents to the league and put fear into the sectarians. The calm of the Broken Melon was undiminished, unchanged the suggestive power of the Western Paradise that was promised to all who followed the Tao, free from unease and troubled by no desires. Only they knew the true pure Tao, and they would attain mastery of the powers sung of in the ancient odes.