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

village knew him his singular offices were much in demand, his technique of the “Devil’s Leap”, and in particular the “Breaking of Pregnancy”. This term was used by the inhabitants of this part of Shantung for a strange custom. When old men or sickly children were seen in the vicinity of a pregnant woman it was feared they would enter the woman’s body, perhaps to make themselves well and young again. In such emergencies Wang Shen in his tiger mask stamped about the room while the woman squatted, charmed her body while flagellating it with rushes, and sweating uttered unrecognisable syllables. Sometimes he brought home a thousand cash from these operations.
    But once he came back from an exorcism walking gingerly with the mask pulled crooked over his face, down the street, into his yard, up to the door, where he collapsed. His wife tore the wooden mask from his leaden face. He wheezed. A whistle came from his chest; he twisted his body and his hands grabbed about him. His wife ran for herbs, heated up two tiles for his feet. She despatched a small child. Since it had no cash it had to beg the money to buy a bamboo fortune slip in the Medicine Temple. The village shopkeeper and apothecary administered the decoction indicated on the slip. Wang spat it out.
    Then in the afternoon a babble of many voices grew outside the house. Gongbeat after gongbeat, ceaselessly; bells, shouts from afar. Heavy steps stumbled from the yard into the stuffy sickroom. The God of Medicine, a redpainted pillar of wood, had come himself to his pupil to make the diagnosis, bring healing. The woman shouted into her sleeping husband’s ear, “Show yourself, come, show yourself!” She supported the half blind man, who mumbled and gaped. It was quiet in the room.
    Out the god stepped to the apothecary’s. The bearers swayedinto the shop with their poles, the god’s staff pointed to the lowest corner of the shelves. Secretly and in horror the young apothecary’s assistant with his back turned made the protective sign of the tiger: the staff had pointed to the Draught of Black Water.
    And nothing more could be done.
    The god was back alone in his mean, dilapidated dwelling at the end of the village. Darkness had fallen. His fat pupil, the bold coercer of demons, turned quickly onto his back during the third night watch. His wife asked what he wanted. She could only pull on the shoes that would carry him over the River of Death, the shoes embroidered with plum blossom, toad and goose, and with a white unfurled waterlily.
    Old Wang had wanted Lun to prepare for the first examination. But his talents lay elsewhere and were quite special. Already when his head was first sheared and shaved a long black-brown mark had been noticed on his right temple, and identified by his father as the Pearl of Perfection.
    Wang Lun grew apace, clever and with a giant’s strength.
    Mules, dogs, fish and people all suffered under his roughness and his practical jokes. As a six year old he had been introduced to thieving by his own father, in a remarkable manner. It was the villagers’ custom, at the time of the Spring Festival, and in particular on the fifth day of the first month, to steal vegetables from each other’s gardens and fields, because such vegetables bring luck. No trespasser, as long as he belonged to the locality, was allowed to be driven off that day; the owners themselves made sure to put aside and conceal all produce of any value.
    When Wang Lun accompanied his father and brother to try his luck on one such sanctioned thieving expedition, he fared badly: a couple of dried-up peanuts was all he scraped from the mud. Hetrotted away from the others in a rage, ran home, sat quietly sucking on a salt crab in the low parlour beside his mother, who praised him for not joining in such foolishness.
    But it was for another reason that he sat quietly there. He had reached a very simple and brief conclusion: if you want to steal something nice, the fifth