The Three Leaps of Wang Lun

by Alfred Doblin

“I never thought, brother, dear brother Wang, that you could wish me so well. Let me just think for a moment. I was talking of the difference, yes, the difference. Let me explain it to you. However bad a way you were in then, I’m dearly in a worse now, but you’ve become happier. You had a choice, you came to a resolution. I’m already beyond that point. I’ve no more choices open to me. Everything’s happened to me already. Everything in and around this city has run its course. All that’s lacking is an external movement, a gesture, a seal. All that can happen here now is a thing of no consequence.”

  “Wang Lun hasn’t yet told his brother why he sought him out in this Mongolian town.”

  “You’re offering us help.”

  “Perhaps help, Ma. I’ve made a pact with the leaders of the army that’s moving against Yangchou and is already surrounding you. For three days there’ll be no direct action against you. For these three days I have a free hand to parley with you and your people.”

  “I’m grateful for this ungrateful task, since it has brought my brother Wang to me.”

  “I won’t allow the executioners and bloodsoaked soldiers to fall on you and sate their bestial cruelty. You were my brothers and sisters, and you, Ma, I mean it sincerely, have again become my brother. You mustn’t fall into their hands. You must scatter. That’s what I have to tell you and advise you. You won’t be angry at what I say. You must go out and have the bell rung and say: Dreadful fate has trapped us till we can only hop like crickets in a jar. No need to judge whether we took the right path. We took the right path. Now we must part, and roam, so that we’re not felled like calves. Then you let them all go; they’ll heave a deep breath when you tell them, and no one will hinder them as they go. And you yourself, brother Ma No, you know now where you must go.”

  Ma No smiled a peaceful smile. “Won’t you ring the bell yourself and speak to the brothers and sisters?”

  “They’re your followers.”

  “Not any more. Just go to the marketplace, call them together, speak, it’ll be a lesson for you. They don’t want speeches, neither do I. They’re lost, plain and simple. Like me.”

  “You’re weary, Ma. All of you seem strengthless, weak. I beg you, implore you, Ma No, dear brother, I lay my forehead on the ground before you: go with me to the marketplace, ring the bell, speak and point to me. I love you all; perhaps my words haven’t been strong enough to show you what you are to me. For all the long months of this terrible year I’ve suffered for you and yearned for you, more than a lover for his little boy. You mustn’t let it hang over me that you sent me away and let it all pass as you know it must, the bestial horde slaughtering the good hopeful brothers and sisters. Are you prepared yet, Ma No, are you prepared? You yourself will be stolen away from me, you the jewel in my soul. You’re sending me forlorn out into the world, and I don’t have enough hands to sacrifice for you all. Don’t stand there so limp, act with me, help me this once.”

  “How you bore into me, Wang. How you honour me. I was never honoured like this as king of my precious, precious isle. To have won you does me a deal of good. But I can’t do anything, Wang.”

  “Why can’t my brother do anything?”

  “The thousand slain brothers and sisters don’t allow it. All of us know that. The cheated ghosts would never give us a peaceful hour. They mayn’t have been prepared; we are. We’ll put everything right again. We’ll draw them on, take them with us from their roamings. And there can’t be any other ending now. I don’t want any other ending. We’re forged into one circle, dear brother Wang.”

  Wang, stunned, threw himself heavily to the ground.

  “What message shall I take from you to the Western Paradise, Wang? That you loved us, that you showed us the Way.”

  “You won’t take any message from me. You must stay here, you must all stay here.”

  “We don’t fear the horde.”

  “The soldiers—!”

  Wang writhed upright; pinpoints flashed in his glaring eyes. He stood, taking deep breaths, staring at the ground. Then huskily he said:

  “I shall go. You may be right. Is my sword there? Where did I throw my Yellow Leaper, dear brother?”

  Ma picked it up, hung it around Wang’s neck.

  “One message I shall not take, brother Wang: that you run around behind a Yellow Leaper.”

  They embraced. Ma still smiled. “And how long will it be before I see my brother Wang from Hunkang-ts’un in the Western Paradise?”

  When Wang stood in the dark marketplace alone and looked about him he knew for sure: soldiers of the generals of the Tsungtu of Chihli won’t storm the walls of the Mongolian town.

  He felt his way along streets until he reached the outer wall. He slunk into the little unroofed yard of a ruined cottage, threw himself down to sleep in a shed. Very early, after a terrible night, he departed the town.

  Among the shrunken population of the erstwhile kingdom that now thronged the Mongol quarter of Yangchou-fu were three hundred peasants and townsfolk. The walls and watchtowers of the town were in a lamentable state, but the people, having enlisted the aid of fellow guildsmen from the Lower Town, set quickly to closing breaches in the stonework, deepening the dried up moat outside the wall and filling it with water, procuring bows, arrows, wooden shields and piling them in the watchtowers. Behind the ironbraced gates they heaped great stone blocks that they dragged from a village one li outside the town, to render the gate impassable in an assault.

  These hardworking, quite unadventurous men and lads were by no means exceptionally fond of fighting; indeed they had no real occasion to be shut up in the town with the sectarians, but they made common cause with them from a certain pious self-interest. That provincial troops should fall upon sectarians seemed to them monstrous: a terrible vengeance was inevitable. To their way of thinking it could only be a matter of time before the brothers and sisters, tormented beyond bearing, unleashed their sinister subterranean powers. Until then it was best to keep in with them, secure for oneself a part of their power. They were spurred on, too, by a feeling of the importance of their role. Often they discussed the chances of gaining back the old kingdom, or a new one. It was only a matter of convincing the Son of Heaven of the Tsungtu’s baseness or of unclogging widespread support among the people. For if the Son of Heaven should look with favour on the Tsungtu’s conduct, the Pure Dynasty’s oft asserted antipathy for the people would become obvious.

  While these men—former salt boilers, carters, coolies—built and dug and by their determined behaviour drew the Lower Town to their side, the brothers and sisters recovered from their terror. Their wounds healed, the paralysis of their desperation wore off. They mulled over the terrible blows they had suffered, strove to regain their feet. Since they could not stray beyond the walls they lapsed into complete inactivity. Sat in the streets, the squares, in a fine large temple to the Pox Goddess, on the earthworks, waited. At morning and evening they gathered in the marketplace.

  Ma No stood before them in a mud coloured gown. The little bent motionless man with the receding forehead. They prayed. The crowd threw an idolatrous reverence around Ma No like a restraining leash. To them he seemed instinct with power, a guarantor of what must come. Wang Lun’s name had a defunct sound; no one knew if he was still alive.

  Lovely Liang-li had survived the rout. Mutely she had long begged Ma’s forgiveness. She strove fiercely to unharness her thoughts from worldly things, to merge completely with the holy. There was always something lurking between, a chasm yawned in her: an emptiness, a constriction of the abdomen, a gagging and choking that sucked her downwards. She thought of holy things only through a human medium. She came to them only on these wheels. She shook herself, ran from herself, struggled with herself about Ma No.

  Suddenly, bewildered and quite uncomprehending, she recalled what had happened before she left home. She could have sworn to herself that it wasn’t her. Her father, child, husband rose dimly before her, memories that might have come from a story book, wer
e it not for the power they had of causing Liang to turn away in dull torment as soon as they appeared. A twinge in her teeth, a bleak scurrying feeling in her jaw warned Liang of their impending appearance.

  Since the days by the swamp of Talu the brothers and outsiders had craved forgetfulness through passion, and she had not drawn back from her holy duty. She possessed no organ of desire. But since the burning of the monastery, when she had ridden together with Ma No, answering some restlessness in her body she often embraced a brother and found transient inward peace. In the Mongolian town her vehemence grew precipitately. She recalled her illness following the birth of her child, was tormented by an urge to weep, flail her arms, groaned and wandered without knowing why. She often hankered after home, spurned it. Prayer formulae, immersion in the prescribed ecstasies disgusted her, as she shamelessly proclaimed a thousand times out loud by day and moaning by night. Potions, ashes, exorcisms were attempted by way of cure. Then a coarse peasant she had taken up with some days past dragged the screaming woman out of the faceloorning night to Ma No. Who succeeded with a few words and handpasses over mouth and breast. She overcame the crisis. Quite soothed, pale and thin she assumed like a physical talisman some of Ma No’s characteristics, his absent gaze, the protecting gesture of the left hand in front of the eyes, his mouth gasping for breath.

  One of the Lius, the elder, was still alive. The sceptical Little Third, in an uncontrollable transport at the festival in the capital, was one of those brothers who had let themselves be butchered by the Manchu prisoners. The tragedy had made a joker of the elder Liu. He still carried his little pot of cinnabar at his belt, showed it to everyone he saw, ridiculed himself. When laughter echoed through the narrow alleys of the Mongol town, there was Liu at a doorway with a dead rat, a discarded felt sole, between his fingers, making comic funeral speeches. Or he would swing himself across the street on a loose overhanging roof beam and pin his portrait on it. This man was certain they’d secure themselves a new kingdom more splendid than the last, and their souls would gain that lofty paradise with one great bound. The persecutions they’d suffered were caused by envy; you couldn’t blame the Emperor for being envious, and the sectarians had no reason to complain: a man who travels with a bright lantern attracts robbers.

  In a corner of the empty marketplace, in the little house, Ma No sat.

  He was completely wrapped up in himself. His arrogance was a blast of trumpets, whose menacing violence shatters the earth. A flapping Imperial banner unfurled within him. Ma strolled around this banner. He let no one approach, for he wanted only to listen to the banner. Wang Lun had believed Ma ready for the hard lessons of fate. But fate did not assail the priest. He himself drew misfortune on with grasping arms, like a madman who no longer knows food from poison. He proudly gulped down a misfortune that could have had no business with him. He did not unravel himself. He was a hunk of meat, and sunned himself. The things that ran past him had no smell and no colour. In the background something tossed and turned: the Western Paradise he stretched his dessicated hand towards. Relentless, smooth, he went to gather in his guilt.

  He stayed there turned to stone. His pride flapped like an Imperial banner. He believed Wang Lun had become his convert. The land within the Four Seas had never seen the like of the Broken Melon.

  Then there howled minutes of terrible self-laceration, when he stood revealed to himself as the errant monk of P’ut’o-shan, the violent ecstatic in need of correction. He peeled away his skin, uncoiled the bundles of white nerves, cut a ghastly resume of his life: standing on an unsteady lurching spot, wallowing around his own skull after security—amidst human sacrifice, the razing of whole cities. Nothing had been accomplished; he was dragging it all down with him to ruin. P’ut’o stood like a fortress he couldn’t take as he panted past it. The horror of this idea swept over him. He had meddled with fate. There was nothing in all that had happened, nothing to find but filth, corruption, a vain gamble. The thousands out there: no end of unfortunates; more beggars and criminals by the thousand in the vast land. And he like them: footing lost, into the cesspit, gulping slime into the lungs—so stupid, so stupid, deserving no sympathy, laughable.

  In such anguish Ma No flung himself about for sweatdrenched minutes. Then his arms and legs came together with a start at a hammering outside, tramping of the gate guard, crackling of fire from the Lower Town. He sighed free of his brooding, slipped off into the marketplace. Sisters sang. The women cast reverent glances: calm trusting eyes. There were no more fine jewels, no bridal flowers. Violins and guitars trampled in the mire. Girls, the poor ones, no longer turned themselves inside out, spread their gospel. They’d kept nothing for themselves, yet the danger was not averted. They’d kept their necks intact; surely they would make it. Such was fate, and therefore good. They were like water, that moulds itself to any jar. Even that wasn’t enough to let them live.

  Ma No slunk past brothers who jumped up from their torpid squatting, turned grubby, emaciated faces to him, surrounded him reverently. What nightshades beset him. P’ut’o with its slavish ideas had worked itself into his brain, after all these decades still wouldn’t let its servant go. Here they followed stricter paths, the hardest path of all. The naked deadly horror of existence had forced itself on them; they’d accepted it without running away, like holy Siddhartha, the Crown Prince, had experienced everything for themselves. If the Western Paradise should open, they and he would enter. The Imperial banner fluttered over their path. They sped to the summit like arrows.

  He sank onto the wide wall, under his shoulders. Somewhere in that plain Wang Lun roamed. Lost to his own teaching.

  Here fire sizzled. They let themselves be driven, couldn’t even swim any more. Wu-wei triumphed.

  Everything heaped up over the Mongolian town. Banner upon banner! Ghostly pulses throbbed through the little town.

  The key to the golden gate was being pressed into their hands. All around bodies sat still as corpses. One puff and they collapsed. Anyone with the Tao in him has no wish to see, to taste, to hear. Churlishly turns his body aside. Flees.

  And really. The Mongolian town lay in a black, hot ecstasy of prayer. Rigid possessed torsoes cringed in alleys, deaf, blind.

  The day after Wang Lun visited the Mongol town two apothecary’s assistants laboured in the long courtyard of their house in a large village south of the town. The elder, nearer the gate, shovelled charcoal into a little iron stove. On it steamed a broad, deepbellied porcelain basin. The thin white fumes of the charcoal escaped through a spout at the side; the medicine stove, smoking, looked like a giant teapot. A finely domed head turned slowly on the assistant’s short, scrawny body. He had thick flabby cheeks, nose sunk between them. Lips strove by their thickness to emerge from under them. He was a close fellow, highly regarded by his master. He was an adherent of Wang Lun’s, but unsuited to the wandering life. His face was stolid, but when he glanced up phlegmatically from his work he betrayed himself: it was evident that something stirred in him that would not let him be, gave no peace.

  Upwind from the smoke the younger assistant sat astride a stool by the wall of the house, trod the wheel of a treadmill. The wheel crushed dried herbs to powder in a flat wooden tray.

  The elder apothecary was trudging into the house to fetch a fine hair sieve—he intended to make from rabbit’s liver a decoction for plethora and irascibility—when the gate opened and a tall beggar stood beside the medicine stove.

  The assistant called, Please to wait outside. The man walked right up to him, pushed back his straw hat, grasped the assistant by the shoulder reassuringly as, recognising Wang, he was about to prostrate himself. They whispered a few words; with loud blessings the importunate beggar thanked the assistant for the cash he drew from his belt.

  An hour later the assistant was walking with Wang over the wild overgrown hills and valleys to the west of the village. Wang left him alone. The apothecary searched.

  The landscape was swampy. Broad peat bogs fringed it
. On the low hills yellowed kaoliang stalks and sprawling ferns. The path over the higher hills was dark, so thickly were the evergreen oaks clustered. Closemeshed shrubbery obstructed progress. This was the domain of the little bright boys, so called from the profusion of gaily coloured mushrooms.

  Between massive trunks, on the ground, lurked the puffball with the greeny-white cap: pretty white ruffs hung about its throat; so as not to touch the oozy damp soil it wore a delicate toecap, a shoe no thicker than skin. The little apothecary, wide blue simple-pouch at his breast, scurried down a slope where red flashed and the fly agaric flaunted its purple pomp. Many caps were dotted with little warts, white dots exuding a viscous, glassy substance. The collector broke off a large number of them, threw them into his pouch. Not far away among the weeds grew the saffron milkcaps, their heads covered with broad brick red depressions; from their caps brown-white veils fluttered, seemingly torn to shreds by the wind. When he snapped the sterns a slimy latex oozed out and stuck to his fingers. He stuffed his oval pouch full, until juice trickled through it.

  Came in the afternoon back to the apothecary’s, where he withdrew to his room. Then with the help of his companion he carried the little stove over the step into the room and set to work with the door closed, the window opened just a little.

  He threw into the seething water in the basin a handful of mushrooms cut into little pieces; after a short time, indicated precisely by an hourglass, lifted the basin using wooden handles, poured the viscous brown brew with the mushrooms through a fine strainer into a wooden pail. He emptied the strainer into a second pail. Again he brought the water in the basin to the boil, poured off the mushroom broth, strained it. When he had boiled up all the mushrooms, he began to pound the retained pieces to a pulp with a wooden mortar, flushed them into the basin, boiled them for a long time and again filtered them. The residue in the strainer he packed into a thin pouch which he squeezed over the big pail containing the liquor. Then he flung the fibrous pulp in the pouch into a rubbish bin.