White Lotus

by John Hersey

  We howled when Fish Bait and Nose pushed dignified Lapdog (Gabe shoving our irreproachable Mayor Jencks!) to the edge of the dangerous circle, and Nose and Chao-er made this man, who had a towering character among the yellows for fawning on them, swear to burn their homes and kill their persons.

  Eventually even I, my shoulders shaking with laughter intermixed with coughs, swore to burn and kill, and helpless Pearl, weeping with soggy laughter, swore at my side.

  Our oath to act stood surrogate for the violence; as soon as we were sworn we felt as if we had already done what we had contracted to do. We were masters and mistresses now. The rooms rang with our happiness.

  Then we heard Nose announce in the yellows’ language: “When we are done, I will be Emperor and Chao-er will be Generalissimo of the Armies. We’ll make a new Forbidden City for Emperor Nose and General Chao-er.”

  But it seemed that mild cobbler Chao-er wanted to be Emperor, not General. We began by laughing at the argument that arose between the men, but the laughter quickly died out. Nose’s hoarse voice and Chao-er’s tenor cries were deadly serious.

  Chao-er almost shrieked, “No, you son of a turtle! I’ll be Emperor, Nose. I am the yellow man here.”

  Someone, having to run home, had opened the tavern door. Icy air flowed around our ankles. The door slammed.

  Nose Climbs a Wall

  Gull’s counter to the master’s power was to make accidental noises. In the kitchen, bowls leaped from her hand and shattered on the floor as if inspirited by her touch, pans banged, the pothook clattered, the poker drummed on iron kettles. She never looked angry, she laughed and hummed, but some days it seemed as if the master’s house would collapse around his ears from her catastrophic clumsiness.

  It was one of the yellows’ religious holidays. We had had a thaw; the day was foggy. My cough persisted, and I sat hugging myself by the oven as Gull tried to teach me the yellows’ calendar, with its animal years and local five-day market weeks, profoundly confusing, frightening, and depressing to me.

  I said I thought I would run over to Chao-er’s.

  Gull said I was going there too much.

  I had a coughing fit, and finally managed to ask why too much.

  Gull was a cautious woman. To tell the truth, I had begun to despise her, for it seemed to me that she was finished with life; resignation clung to her like a layer of fat. She did not know she banged the pots…. She said the mistress was commenting on how long it took me to run errands.

  I coughed until there was a knife in my chest; then, feeling very low, I bundled myself and went out. The streets were muddy. I was suddenly in a panic about the dislocation of time that I felt the yellows’ calendar entailed. Was I swept up in it? Would I evaporate like the two days from the week?

  There was a queer still air in the tavern; only half a dozen whites were there, and I sensed that whispers were in order.

  Stocky Cassia Cloud decided to befriend me, or perhaps to try me out. She beckoned me into the room with the crap table, where we were alone, and pressing down her chunky hands on the edge of the table, she leaned her unhappy face, whose once golden complexion had gone doughy and erupted into ranges of livid pimples, over the baize surface at me, and she spoke in a hoarse whisper. “Chieh-chieh,” she said, calling me, with obvious sarcasm, her old sister, “you are a friend of Nose, yes or no?”

  I hesitated. I supposed Cassia Cloud’s eyes saw everything in the tavern; that she had seen Nose lead me across the courtyard that time.

  “You are a good girl, Chieh-chieh,” she said, in an affectionate tone that put me on guard. “You have the air of a guest.”

  I felt I had to say something hostile, but what came out was petulant. “Nose takes care of himself.”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “But perhaps he’s been trotting too fast for one pair of legs. Perhaps he has tied himself to Wolf and some of those other pigs with too tight a knot, huh? Ayah!” She leaned a few inches closer to me. “Nose has robbed again. Yesterday in the night. Ayah, the bastard. He climbed the rear wall and took the things into Peach Fragrance’s room. I saw him there. I have no grudge against Peach Fragrance. I carry wine to her to open her eyes in the mornings. I carried the bowl in to her at dawn, and I found Nose naked there.” Cassia Cloud’s pink tongue shot out and back several times, like a lizard’s. “How he boasts! He says, ‘Come here, Small Cassia Cloud’—he speaks to me as if I were a dirty white sow—and he tosses me a piece of silver, and he says, Teach Fragrance,’ he says to that drab, Teach Fragrance,’ and waves a hand as elegant as a Big Venerable, ‘cut the girl a gown from the cloth.’ Ayah! I see this bolt of Honan linen on the bed.”

  Alarmed, I said, “You should be careful how you talk.”

  Cassia Cloud said, “Maybe Nose should be careful how he acts, yes or no?”

  “What do you want to say?”

  “You know soldier Ch’en? From the guard at the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City who comes in here?”

  I shook my head.

  “You wouldn’t. Not a white, him, he’s a big flatnose—one of us.” She laughed a deep-throated contemptuous gargle and pounded herself on the chest. “I will tell you. This fellow, soldier Ch’en, he played at dice with your Drum Tower Boys under the tower, and he lost a trouserful, but he didn’t have it to pay. You hear? So he told them how to rob Mother Feng’s shop and get plenty. He had seen it there in a chest, these silver pieces. There is a postern gate to the compound, never used, you hear, on Dried Fish Hutung, a simple bolt, you hear, and if three-four went in there to Mother Feng, some of them could keep her busy while one of them sneaked off and slipped the bolt from the inside. Then they could come back by night.”

  Cassia Cloud scanned my eyes for anxiety. I tried to hide everything.

  “Which he did. Nose. With Wolf and those other hogs. You hear what I want to say, small girl? Nose came over the wall and slept with Peach Fragrance. He had nothing but cool air on his bare behind, this morning.”

  The lizard’s tongue peeped out quickly twice. The whisper grew faint.

  “You know what the bastard did? He gave the Honan linen to Mother Chao-er. She’s keeping it for him. Behind the beam under the eaves at the kitchen end. I tell you, small girl! Old Chao-er, he took the silver pieces to the storage room, he has this hole to hide what those dirty white pigs forever steal, behind a cask, covers it over with a flat stone there. Ayah, the pricks, those men!”

  Whom did Cassia Cloud hate the most, I wondered: her indenture-master Chao-er the cobbler, or Nose surprised with no clothes but complacent, or the man who had wrinkled his nostrils over her charms, or the long procession of disappointed whore-jumpers who must have preceded that one? “Those men!” I felt a new pain in my chest. I wanted to go back to Gull.

  But Cassia Cloud would not let me go. She took my forearm in her callused hand. “Those devil bannermen were here an hour ago,” she hissed. “Those devils know where to look.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Our flatnose, our soldier Ch’en. You hear? Mother Feng remembered his eyes like two lanterns when he got a glimpse of those silver bits in the chest there when she was making him change there. They fetched him from the Meridian Gate, and he says to them, ‘Small Wine Mouth, he did it.’ Know who that is, Chieh-chieh?”

  “Yes, mistress,” I said. I knew that this was a name Nose called himself at the Drum Tower. All the men slaves had off-hour aliases for the avoidance of trouble.

  “Those devils came in here, and Nose sat in the stove corner like a lazy big dog, and those devils went around. ‘Is there a pig named Small Wine Mouth here?’ Nose—ai, he’s a cock, all right!—he says, ‘I am Wu’s Nose,’ he says. ‘All these people know me. Wine Mouth, you say, big masters? I don’t know anyone called Wine Mouth. Thank you, big masters,’ he says. The devils walked out of there!”

  Cassia Cloud laughed again, but there was
something besides laughter in her eyes.

  I was suddenly in a fury. “You bitch turtle, Cassia Cloud, leave Nose alone,” I burst out. I thought she might tell the authorities some story. Then suddenly I realized the danger I put myself in by cursing this sullen girl, who was yellow even if indentured and little better than a slave.

  “Who wants to get that pig in trouble?” she said with an air of innocence that covered a malicious delight she obviously felt at my loss of control. “Not I, Chieh-chieh!”

  The tongue shot out at me, and I was afraid there might be more, so I turned away, ran to fetch my cloak and foot rags from their shelf, and hurried home more dejected than ever, and thoroughly frightened besides.

  Nose Thumbs His Nose

  Now I learned what speed whispers can have, for when I reached home I found Gull in the kitchen carrying on her usual cannonade of awkwardness but also looking uncommonly wise and tickled, and she pushed me onto the ovenside bench and told me that Sun’s Mink had come to the slave gate and informed her that my friend Wu’s Nose had stolen from a yellow woman and given to a yellow woman I pretended to know nothing about it.

  Sun’s Mink was a short, stooped young slave with something wrong with his spine—how cheaply he must have been bought!—who was said to be crafty at cards and dice. He was a member of the slaves’ gang known as the Coal Hill Boys, who gathered occasionally at Chao-er’s tavern; I had seen Mink there. He had a habit of appearing at our slave gate, and I wondered if he had some byplay going with Gull—for our chubby cook, who was so cautious, so accommodating to our mistress, would slip away to our sedan-chair shed and storage house for long unexplained afternoon sessions. Bow stayed away from his beloved Flying Commode then, I noticed, and I never followed Gull; I did not want to know her business.

  “Mink says”—Gull spoke in the yellows’ language with Mink’s chopped style—“ ‘Any white man who gives stuff to a yellow whore that he stole from a yellow bitch, he has a stout heart—yes or no?’ ”

  “Ayah, rich,” I said.

  “Mink says”—and now Gull seemed to shrink, and she hunched her shoulders, and she became Mink, with his demons of pain and malice in her flashing eyes—“Nose knows how to thumb his nose at the slantheads.”

  “He knows,” I said.

  Gull’s mock Mink became even more deformed and said, “If a big master begins to worry whether he is master of his mistress, he is no master at all.” Gull straightened up and was herself again. “Mink, he says that.” She was obviously proud of the twisted slave. “They say Nose’s Big Madame covets something about Nose besides his name-part. Once when all her maids were out on errands she had him carry in her bath water and made him scrub her back! He boasts about it. Says she has a body like a frog’s. That’s what Mink told me.”

  After the evening meal Big Venerable Shen told me that he and Big Madame would be pleased to receive the slave force in the Peony Study at once.

  I led the way and lit lanterns, then ran out back to call the others.

  As we marched in to audience, Gull had a streak of flour across one cheek, Bow limped on a winter-joint in his right knee, Bean and On Stilts and Cock rubbed their hands in an absurd unanimous humility, and I pretended to search the floor for some clue to my unworthiness. The yellows sat, the whites stood. We slaves hung our heads in the approved manner.

  Master wished to know, were we acquainted with one Nose, small slave to Wu, mandarin of the Board of Revenue, in the hutung diagonally across from ours?

  Bow answered, falsely, “Small slave called Nose, Big Venerable? No, Big Venerable.”

  How could we not know a slave of such a near neighbor? Slaves were forever banging at the gate and sneaking in to the quarter past Bean.

  “We have seen them saw timbers over in the other hutung there. Maybe that was the small slave called Nose we saw there with the other sawyer. Maybe he was one of those fellows who was sawing.”

  The master turned to Gull. Had she ever talked with this small Nose?

  She said, “No, Big Venerable. I never.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Gull swore an earnest peasant-slave oath which made Big Venerable’s lips purse in an ill-suppressed smile. “Let all the gods and devils listen to what I say and afflict me with incurable fungus scabs on my scalp if I lie.”

  The master glanced at me, as if pondering whether it was worth his breath to ask a question of such an ignorant white sow as I; he finally brought himself to do so. Had Small White Lotus ever spoken to the man?

  It came to me, as sharply as a knock on the head, that Nose’s trivial misdemeanor had been blown up by the yellows into a grave affront precisely because he had stolen from a yellow matron and given to a yellow whore. And I realized that by now a good part of the slave population of the capital had already heard whispers like Mink’s, with a garlic whiff of sex on them, and that to a man the slaves would lie, pretend, go mute, be foggy, on Nose’s behalf, if any questions were asked—for, as we had used to say at home in Arizona, if God gave the swallow no riches, He at least gave it swiftness in turning.

  I said, “I know a small slave named Nose, he belongs to Magistrate P’an in Seventh Hutung, Big Venerable.”

  “No! No! No! The revenue mandarin Wu’s, in the hutung right across the way.” Yes, my stupidity really impressed the master. But now he threw a stone at us. This slave, he said, had been arrested late in the afternoon by the bannermen for robbery.

  I am sure my face showed nothing, though the thoughts were running like a pack of wonks in my mind. The bannermen must have gone back to Guardsman Ch’en; perhaps they had taken him with them to Chao-er’s. I was glad I had left the tavern. What would they do to Nose? Would they break his legs? This was not the first offense; I remembered the day we had seen him tied to the tail of a cart.

  “This is not the first time for this slave,” the master heavily said, and I inwardly laughed that my stupid white childish mind—as he considered it—had beaten him to the words.

  We got off with a short lecture on thievery. The gate must be securely barred with double beams every night, our master said.

  On the way back to our quarters I had a feeling of being hunted so queer and so strong that I felt compelled either to burst out the locked gates and flee through the icy streets or else to try to ease the sensation by confessing it to Gull and Old Bow. I managed to tell them about it. I started by saying that slaves were often caught stealing. Why were the masters so excited this time? Then I blurted out what had seized me: this hunted feeling. Gull, as sweet as she had been during my fever, put her arms around me and said that whenever the masters became over-exercised about a slave’s wrongdoing, she, too, had the same feeling, and Bow did—didn’t he?—and so did every slave in the city, because the whites knew that one day their yellow masters might not be able to contain their thrill of anger at us for daring to be their slaves, and suddenly a bolt of Honan linen would become a matter of life and death, of many more-or-less lives and unmistakable deaths.

  I could not sleep at all that night. I coughed and rolled on my blanket pad. I had a sort of half dream of protecting Nose. The oven of my k’ang cooled fast, and chill drafts ran like rats’ breathing around me.

  Nose’s Sighs

  Two days later, in the afternoon, I heard that Nose had been given thirty strokes of the heavier bamboo and had been released by the banner corps and been sent home, but that he was on some sort of parole. At a risk of appearing a fool in eyes where I would rather not, but unable to stand off the risk, I took time to run to the mansion of Wu, his owner, and there in the kitchen I found Nose propped in a corner, shivering in a Tartar cap with the ear flaps down, with a running catarrh and a bad cough, and nowhere to be seen was the proud, powerful leader of the clay-pit work gang he once had been; perhaps concentrating on pulsating bruises on his back and ribs, he seemed absentminded, and far from feeling me a fool for s
eeking him out, he appeared to think nothing one way or another about my being there.

  For two days and nights I had had a childish idea of helping Nose somehow—of protecting him from his own badness—but all that was vague, and really illusory, for he cared no more for me than for half a bowl of lukewarm wine.

  To Wu’s Moon Pot, Gull’s friend who cooked at the house, I said, “I cannot sit still. Staying home day and night makes my feet jumpy.”

  Nose said nothing.

  Moon Pot said, “Now that they’ve beaten him, the whole thing will blow over.”

  “What about his parole? Other times when the masters have gotten excited, have they calmed down right away?”

  Nose stirred and grunted.

  “What’s itching your skin, you little piglet?” Moon Pot asked me.

  I told her I wanted to know how the yellows had come to identify Nose as the robber and arrest him—how they knew about his giving the stolen goods to Peach Fragrance; that was what really bothered them, wasn’t it?

  “The other fox told on him. Told the bannermen.”

  “Cassia Cloud?”

  “That her name, Nose?”

  “Yes.” This was the first word out of Nose, and it was spoken listlessly.

  “Did she tell the part about Peach Fragrance?”

  “Why are you sniffing around that part of the story? Huh, you piglet? You wouldn’t care what fox old Snot Nose here slipped in with, would you? Hah! Look at her, Nose, look at that pretty blush! Why, you bad little piglet! Hah hah hah hah.”

  “I care about my own back—it’s the bamboo I care about,” I said sharply. “That Cassia Cloud provoked me just after the robbery, and I gave her the dirty end of my tongue, and I don’t want trouble. This isn’t my trouble.”

  “Oh, baby,” Moon Pot said, “you’re wrong. This is pig trouble.”