Free The Three Leaps of Wang Lun by Alfred Döblin

teahouses; once, leaving his bean patch one idle morning, applied at the courthouse for the position of Chief Magistrate, to the wailing fury of his toil-jadedwife who could already hear the mockery he would bring on himself. He liked lying on the sand next to the bucket that his two sons filled with charcoal to dry squid in. If around the time of the ebb tide they lit the bucket on the junk itself he would amble down to the beach and squat on his heels. Empty fish baskets lay there half overturned, the dried creatures spread on the sand colouring nicely in the sun. They felt hot to the touch.
    The bigbellied man poked around in mudholes, pulled long sandworms out, gave half of them to his wife to dry and sell. He kept a great pile for himself, dried them furtively and slurped his delicious hearty soup behind the baskets.
    Then after a while the two boys used to come over from the junk and, as he was sweating, unwind his footcloths. They crouched gravely in front of him with their little rattails of queues, and waited. In a proud, nasal tone loud enough for the neighbours to hear Wang spoke over their heads, flaunting his fat torso, leaning back on his elbows: he called this his lesson time. In fact he knew his primer, the
Book of One Thousand Characters
of Chou Hsingszu; a few mistakes aside he knew it by heart; he seemed to have learnt a few phrases as well from the
Book of Women
. Many times he explained to the children his regret that he was not stricter with them. To be strict with them was his sacred duty, for—and here the boys joined in chanting: “Upbringing without strictness is a father’s laziness.”
    And every few days the future teacher of three provinces heard that joy, anger, grief, fear, love, hate and desire were the seven passions. It was not often the boys could attend to him at leisure. Wang Lun’s face was black-brown and square, broad; strong lines moulded a lively, cunning face. No amount of sea glare darkened the softer, sallower complexion of his brother of the same age: the boy remained suppler, paler and more serious than Wang Lun,whose spiteful tricks earned him little love from his playmates and who showed little understanding of one of his father’s maxims: that among the five supreme moral relationships was brotherly love.
    Lively, inclined more to play than work, they sat redcapped on the sharp stones of the beach by the great fishing net. On a grassy dune behind them ten paces off the shapeless bulk of their father lay, his bare legs, covered in black hairs, arranged one over the other as he picked small embedded mussel shells from horny soles. In his right hand resting on the ground he held one end of the net that the boys were staining with the thick sappy juice of mandarin peel. He hauled himself upright, the children clicked musically, he spat and grunted. Occasionally a teaching droned from his lips; for example: “Since time immemorial the gourd has been a symbol of fecundity.” Until a gust of wind blew gritty sand into his face, he rolled coughing out of his furrow and knocked over their pot of stain. With a doleful, beggarly look he told them they should have found a better place for the staining. And they wound the cloths again about his legs and moved a few paces farther off.
    The greatest event in the life of Wang Lun’s father was the journey he made to his brother’s house for the wedding of his nephew, three hundred li from Hunkang-ts’un. For three weeks he didn’t see the beach or the scrubby bean fields. A barber, who was also a sorcerer on the side, lived in his brother’s house; Wang Shen sat with him a lot in the evenings.
    And the morning after his return he walked with slow steps to a man who knew something of woodworking and promised him a quantity of dried sandworms worth four hundred and fifty cash if he would carve a tall red plaque for him with the inscription:
WANG SHEN, PUPIL OF THE RENOWNED SORCERER KWAI-TAI OF LIU-CHIA-TS’UN, MASTER OF THE WIND