On days few with customers, when the wise maxims flapped aimlessly in the wind, vainly struggling to tarry those rushing past, he’d give the boy a brush and a scrap of scroll off the ground and teach him to draw his first characters. The scribbles that came from the strokes of the reverently trembling, unschooled child’s hand struggled to keep their balance, and soon crumpled into a rubble heap of line fragments.
The child’s wisdom soon grew. His sticks, joined by invisible hinges, held fast: Just try to blow them down! He made a real pagoda with six pillars and a roof, all first rate, held up by one slender leg, keeping perfect balance. Instead of a mysterious, complicated tangle of lines – words. Here – a tree, here – the earth, and here – a man, running, unstoppable, so vigorously the momentum was swinging his legs.
With time it became clear that both words and objects were but appearances. The essence of things was not there, but in the lines. Not in the ones snaking out from under his brush, but in other mysterious and inscrutable ones.
In his many free hours the old calligrapher enlightened his soul by reading the I Ching. Sixty-four lines – the kua – were carved on the shell of a tortoise, and these contained the entire riddle of existence. Nobody had been able to fully decipher them, not the all-knowing Fu Xi, not the enlightened Confucius, not the one thousand four hundred and fifty commentators who had been puzzling over them for centuries. How could our poor calligrapher dream of penetrating the secrets, even if he knew all the combinations of lines by heart, including those that appeared in the sacred patterns of the kua!
Little P’an understood none of this, or rather he understood it in his own fashion. He ran outside of town to catch tortoises, and searched their shells long and hard for the sacred pattern. Not finding it, he would smash the shell with a stone, to see if it wasn’t hidden inside. He found nothing. The all-knowing Fu Xi turned out to be a common swindler.
Returning to town, P’an didn’t share his discovery with his teacher, not wanting to worry him. He struggled with his thoughts in silence. He couldn’t allow his teacher to go on being tricked! He weighed his options for some time and finally decided. When his teacher nodded off in the heat and began snoring soundly in his chair, P’an carefully snatched up the source of all the errors, the holy I Ching, and spirited it off to the riverbank. Waiting for the right moment, he surreptitiously flung it into the water.
The calligrapher couldn’t find his book when he awoke, and he emitted a loud lament. Onlookers surrounded him. Neighbors were found who had seen young P’an hurrying to town with the book under his arm.
P’an was caught. He was flogged long and hard. They wanted him to admit that he had sold the book. Not getting anything out of him, they threw him onto the street, half dead.
Rubbing his bruises, he thought carefully. Fine, they had beaten him – he was used to that. But how could it be that his good calligrapher uncle had stood by and watched everything without lifting a finger? So he was no better than the rest? There was no point in worrying about his mistakes, no point in stealing books. No point in making friends. If you tried to take the smallest bone from people, they bit you like dogs.
But how could you get by without people in the big, crowded city? In the city everything was a riddle. Who would explain things? He would need to make compromises.
He wandered to the east side of town. The streets were wider here. Stone houses piled on either side, symmetrical as boxes. Glass boxcars raced along the tracks, the rumble constantly in the air. But stranger than the houses and the boxcars were the incredible carriages that sped along the streets with no rails, horses, or rickshaw drivers, powered by an incredible wheel hovering in the air, never touching the ground.
One day, passing a warehouse, P’an noticed something: a wagon, loaded with colorful boxes, and at the front, instead of a shaft, there was a large crank. How could he resist turning it? He scanned the street – not a soul in sight. He couldn’t restrain himself. He ran up and turned the crank with all his might. The wagon snarled resonantly, as though a whole pack of dogs were responding from inside.
A man in a greasy leather apron came out of the warehouse. P’an cautiously leapt across the road.
“Was that you, grub-face? You want a ride? Get in, we’ll take a drive.”
The slanted eyes of the man in the apron gave a friendly smile.
P’an tensed his body: “I know that trick! First they get you to come close, then they give you a smack you’ll remember for years!” Nonetheless, he didn’t run away. He studied the owner of the snarling vehicle from a safe distance.
“What are you afraid of, kid? Get in, I won’t eat you. Let’s go for a ride.”
Little P’an obviously did very much want to take a ride. He decided to risk it. If he got a whack on the head, who cares. A bruise or two, big deal. What if he really did get a ride? He inched up to the car.
“Climb in here. Don’t be afraid. Get on board.”
He sat down. The nice guy touched the wheel. The vehicle moved.
On the road, the man in the apron opened up. His name was Chow-Lin. He was from Kouei-Tcheou. He’d had a son there just like P’an, but the boy died in a lean year, during his trip to Europe. His wife died as well. Now he had settled in Nanjing, and he worked as a deliveryman for a big department store.
He was chatty and straightforward. He gave P’an a banana and drove him around till evening, dropping off the colorful boxes at stores around town. He asked about the boy’s parents. He felt sorry for him. When he said goodbye, he slipped him an orange and added:
“Drop by the warehouse tomorrow. We’ll go for a spin.”
That was how they became friends. Every morning, on the very same corner, P’an would wait for the heavy vehicle with the colorful crates, nimbly jump into his seat, take the bunch of bananas waiting for him, sometimes even a piece of sugarcane, and, chewing it slowly, stare at the passersby from above.
The talkative man’s stories about the faraway countries he’d visited in his youth were even tastier than the bananas or the sugarcane. Apparently (according at least to his globetrotting uncle) the Earth wasn’t flat at all, and it didn’t end at the sea – it was round like a ball. A man leaves Nanjing, travels the whole world round, and comes back again to the place he started from. All this struck P’an as strange and improbable. But the man swore it was the truth, and there was no doubting him – he had seen everything with his own two eyes. He said white people had proven all this long, long ago.
Once he even reached into his pocket and pulled out a nicely bound notebook, with a picture glued at the back – not a picture per se, but a map of the whole world. Two round hemispheres, like the shell of a tortoise, and on the hemispheres, like on a shell – an infinite tangle of lines: earth, sea, Nanjing, China, the world.
Yes, this was no doubt the same mysterious kua – the sixty-four holy lines that he, stupid little P’an, had vainly sought on the shell of that treacherous tortoise. The white people had solved the riddle of the wise Fu Xi!
If the old calligrapher hadn’t done him wrong, P’an would have immediately run to share this dazzling discovery. But recalling his bruises and bloody nose, he shuddered. The beatings were still fresh in his mind.
The enigmatic white people, on the other hand, whom everyone hated, including the gentle old calligrapher, grew in his eyes to the proportions of magical, all-wise creatures. Chow-Lin said many incredible things about them.
Somewhere, many, many li away, there are gigantic, monstrous cities, where white people live in multilevel crates, and in those crates, instead of stairs, boxes shuttle up and down, able to lift the residents to the very top in a single instant. Boxcars flash through long underground pipes like lightning, taking travelers dozens ofli in the space of a minute. Giant machines work day and night in factories, spitting out ready-made things for the white man, so that he needn’t wear himself out. You want clothing – you take it and put it on. You want a rickshaw – get in and go. No buggies, no horses. It’s all machines. A strange, heavy word, almost bursting with hot iron. The white people had even apparently come up with special machines for killing their enemies – not one at a time, but by the dozens.