Free The Three Leaps of Wang Lun by Alfred Döblin Page A

AND WATER
. After night fell, six days later, he fetched the gleaming plaque—black characters on a raspberry-red ground, blue-edged—with his eldest son, climbed onto the roof of the house, with two ropes taken from his boat attached it to the projecting ridge beam while his wife slept, so that there over the doorway a plaque hung down:
WANG SHEN, PUPIL OF THE RENOWNED SORCERER KWAI-TAI OF LIU-CHIA-TS’UN, MASTER OF THE WIND AND WATER
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    Next morning his wife, when she saw the splendid plaque and had woken up her still sleeping husband, suffered the first recurrence for years of her nervous attack. Back then, when one of the arsonists had demanded through the window whether there was anyone apart from her in the house, in her terror she had concealed both one year old boys by gripping them in the folds of her wide trousers, and as she replied “No” had jerked her head sharply to the right. Now something green surged through her head, the two ropes holding the plaque grew as broad as leaves, sawed between her eyes; a blue unjointed arm reached out intermittently, a hand sent fingers streaming towards her. Rhythmically the woman threw her head from left to right, from right to left, her legs knocked together, she danced like a figure in a puppet show; the children hid from her on the brickbed.
    And they screamed out loud and ran into the village street among yapping little dogs when Wang, the great elephant-legged clod, burst into the smoky room from the yard, stumped up and down with a tiger mask on, sang wheezily over his wife who was now prostrate, stroked, whispered. Half an hour later the woman was asleep. A crowd of children and women stood at the door, stood silently in the yard, scattered gabbling when the tiger mask came near.
    That day was a turning point in Wang Shen’s life. His wife said not a word about the red plaque, indeed became sparing of words in dealings with her husband, kept out of his way.
    Now he no longer passed himself off as a mere casual teacher. In the yard under an alder he set to studying peculiar signs on a bamboo tablet he had brought back from the sorcerer, walked back and forth between midden and tackle shed with his head in the air, recited out loud: “Eight times nine is seventy-two. Two rules the Pair. In the Pair is united the Unpair. The Unpair rules the Zodiac. The Zodiac holds sway over the Moon. The Moon holds sway over hair. Therefore hair grows in twelve months.” He referred from time to time perplexed to the bamboo tablet; pondered, ashamed of himself, freed himself with a quick rejecting gesture. He walked, brow wrinkled, among the busy fishermen on the beach of an evening, gazed raptly at the purple cloud masses, stopped for a long time lost in thought in front of a basket maker’s little poodle, said dreamily, as if talking to himself, “Seven times nine is sixty-three. Three rules the Pole Star. The star of dogs. Therefore dogs are born after three months.”
    They laughed behind his back only at first; then the view took hold that he truly did have the makings of a Taoist savant, this former village clown. He knew so much: that swallows and sparrows dive into the sea and become lizards; he could name the thousand year old fox demon, the nine-headed pheasant demon and the scorpion demon; and no one could understand what he said about Yin and Yang, the bright Masculine and the dark brooding Feminine.
    He went out to sea. When he made the experiment one morning of not going down to the junk, his wife stood silently beside the brickbed. He could see through flickering eyelids that she was going to wake him as usual with a punch in the ribs, but then she turned and went to wake fifteen year old Lun and his brother. And every morning before sunrise she woke the two lads; he snored snugly on in a half sleep.
    Wang Shen went in the mornings to meditate in the littletemple of the God of Medicine, the last building but one in the village. Since everyone in and around the