White Lotus

by John Hersey

  Now Big Madame Shen spoke to her friends in a murmur. I was standing directly behind her and could not but overhear—though “overhear” may be wrong, since to her I was not there, no more endowed with ears or sense than a rake handle, or a pole for bean vines to climb on. Can a broom standing in the corner overhear?

  “There will be more beheadings, take my word,” she confided. “So I am informed by your esteemed friend Shen.” She passed a fan across her face with a sensuous look—which, though it may have had to do with her pleasure at being a knowledgeable insider rather than with the substance of what she was saying, was nonetheless disgusting. “He tells me they have tried the tavern-keeper Chao-er, and his wife, and this man Wolf’s yellow mistress, Peach Fragrance, who also calls herself Hsia T’ai-t’ai—says she was married, but no husband has put in an appearance, as you can imagine—they have tried this miserable household—how could they be so enamored of white people?—for having a part in the slaves’ plot, and they will lose their heads, too. Yellow examples, you see. To let our poorer sort of yellow people understand they had best not mix with whites. So Shen Lao-yeh tells me.”

  Friend P’an’s delight at this news took the form of a stern, deploring expression.

  “And after that, many whites besides. Many.”

  Nose! Nose! My rage now was at myself—that I could stand on the solid ground with a mask on my face and do nothing, nothing, nothing. The sighing of the crowd around us sounded all at once like the roar of the smoking breakers on the shoals of Santa Barbara where the slave ship waited, and I thought I might faint.

  I fastened my eyes, to steady my head, on a side view of curio dealer P’an’s wrinkled neck and face, as he digested what Madame Shen had been saying. Suddenly I had to fight down a crazy laugh. He was so tickled by my mistress’s promises of more beheadings that his face had grown gray with a conscientious severity.

  These people thought that we slaves comprehended little or nothing, but I could see all I needed to see; my fury, outgoing again, subdued my fears again.

  P’an said to his slaves, “Now pay close mind, Goose! Hairy! I want you to learn a lesson today, and learn it well.”

  A small procession had appeared from our left hand and was now approaching the platform and the mat sheds along a roped-off passageway. Two mandarins led the way, in scarlet cloaks with voluminous cowls which were pulled up over their official hats; they had a strange, sinister appearance. Then, surrounded by a handful of guards and four executioners dressed in funereal white, came Wolf and Fish Bait, bare to the waist in the cool spring air—but what could a chill matter to them? Their forearms were tightly bound together behind their backs, and strips of paper three feet long, with large characters describing their crime, hung down their backs from their necks.

  The party proceeded to the mat sheds, where the mandarins sat behind tables arranged in the shade. The condemned men kneeled. I saw some officials talking to Wolf, occasionally pointing up at the platform, and I supposed that they were trying one last time to extract from him, in the face of death, a full confession of the slave plot.

  I saw Wolf clearly; we were no more than forty paces away. He kneeled upright and silent, not refractory or heroic in bearing, merely sullen—true to himself.

  The palaver ended. Neither Wolf nor Fish Bait would open his mouth. With formalistic flourishes one of the mandarins wrote some large characters in vermilion ink on the papers hanging on the prisoners’ backs—authority for the executioners to proceed.

  Two of these white-clad men led the condemned pair up onto the platform, placed them on their knees, and began arranging rope headstalls under their chins, while the other two, wearing bloodstained yellow leather aprons, went to an altar beside the mat shed and took up swords, centuries old, having broad, short blades, like those of cleavers, fixed on long wooden handles carved with grotesque heads at the ends. They climbed the platform steps.

  I had a shuddering moment of imagining Nose in Wolf’s place, as an executioner began to stretch Wolf’s neck by pulling on the rope halter.

  “Eyes ahead, Goose. Sharp eyes, Hairy.”

  My mistress, falling back a little, reached for my hand, ostensibly to press home the teaching, as P’an was so boomingly doing, but actually, I judged by the fervor of her damp grip, to rally my sympathy for her—poor lady, so sensible of pain!

  I could not watch. I dropped my eyes and studied the figures of peonies woven into Venerable P’an’s sea-gray gown.

  I heard dull blows, almost simultaneous, I heard the executioners each roaring, “I have killed!” Then I heard the spectators all shouting, “Good swords! Good swords!”—a superstitious warding off of the touch of those blades on their own necks.

  When I looked up, the executioners were already placing the two heads in small wooden cages to be displayed at the tops of high poles at the gate of these grounds, to remind whites of their mortal duties to yellows.

  My heart, though it pounded, was safe. I felt again a surge of that indignant fury which seemed to flow into a sense of moral advantage. Not we but these masters and mistresses were the transgressors—the mandarins in splendid crimson cowls, the magistrates, the men in yellow leather aprons freshly covered with blood, the crowd of spectators, these whispering yellow people. Not Wolf, with his drunken eyes and bird-wing hands, not stupid Fish Bait dogging his thick torso wherever Wolf might lead; not the slaves, not the white slaves. Merely being slaves gave us the advantage, though it might also give us pain, weariness nearly to death, and violent death itself.

  I even felt that I was getting a little audacity, but I was unable to imagine what to do with it.

  Yet…

  There was a blaze of sunlight in my tight-shut eyes on my rotten mat that night. I was walking along an out-of-the-way goat path in the wilderness of chaparral and rabbit brush and greasewood at the far end of the village at home, daydreaming, and I was squirrel-small, no more than six or seven, I think. Turning a bend in the path dotted with goat droppings, I came on a group of older boys, over ten, becoming hunters, of lizards at least, and I could see that they had stolen a stray pullet and thought themselves brave, and they were secretively preparing to cook it over a small fire. There was a clamor among the boys at my arrival along that unfrequented path, for fear I would give them away and they would be whipped every one, and shy, gentle Wesley Bane—I saw him decapitated outside our compound wall —was among them, and he urged them to give me a taste of the pullet to glue my tongue to the roof of my mouth, but Gabe, sticking out his chest, came toward me with deer eyes and told me that I had not walked on that path at all, I had seen nothing, I should run directly to the First Methodist Church and get on my knees and pray to God asking Him to forget that foolish girls sometimes straggled into the underbrush where dangerous hyenas and man-eating bears lived. I turned to flee….

  I heard Gull sigh on her k’ang. I was awake. But had I been remembering? Had Gabe, now Nose, denied me beside the path in that way? Had he really turned me back, made me run? Or had this simply been a dream?—a reinforcement of that sweet self-preserving feeling I had had earlier in the day: that I was not involved, that the happenings all around me had nothing to do with me? I could turn and run away!

  A Walk with Mink

  In the following days Big Madame Shen was unusually gentle with me, and my audacity, such as it had been, sickened and turned into bitterness, which I hid.

  The mistress told me one day that she intended to pay me a compliment: to show her trust in me she was going to leave Big Young Venerable, of whose person she was wildly jealous, in my charge, while she and the master went on an outing to Jade Springs Hill with their friends the P’ans and the Suns. This, she said, would leave Gull, who usually nursed the boy when the mistress was out, free to prepare a meal against the party’s return.

  So I saw that the mistress’s “trust” was simply her convenience.

  M
y show of pleasure at this announcement of hers was one of my best bits of acting, and my pretense filled me with as much laughter as the news itself.

  The day was dry and mild, and I took the child for a walk. We headed southward. Something perverse in me wanted this bloodthirsty child to feast his eyes on Wolf’s and Fish Bait’s heads in their wooden cages; perhaps he might learn an unexpected lesson.

  Spring had fully come. Fragrant white blossoms like bunches of grapes hung from the locust trees that lined Hata Gate Street, and plane trees here and there were spreading out their shiny leaves, bigger than human hands, which filtered a shimmering light on boles mottled with browns, reds, and greens. The boy skipped ahead of me, and I recklessly let him run. At Sun’s house I paused, knowing that the yellows were away in the hills, and Sun’s Mink, seeing me from the gate shield where he was lounging, came out to me. I asked him to join me in a stroll, and, grinning, he did.

  He walked slowly beside me with his tense stooped-over carriage.

  The boy came panting back and, seeing me with Mink, he said, “I shall tell my mama that you have been idling.”

  Mink said, “Do, and I’ll skin you like an eel, Big Young Venerable.”

  The boy ran away with big eyes, laughing but scared. He began to throw stones, with a great show of bravery, at tree trunks.

  I felt ashamed of my notion of taking the child to see the heads on display, and we bore right, toward the gates of the Forbidden City.

  Mink said with a gentleness that startled me almost as much as the suddenness with which he brought the subject up, “Nose is as good as dead.”

  Did Mink, too, know about those few minutes in the dark room at Chao-er’s?

  Mink asked me if I had heard what Cassia Cloud had been doing. There was a lot of talk among the slaves, he said, about that bitch fox.

  “I know that she told the magistrates about the ‘plot,’ as she called it.”

  “Worse than that,” Mink says. “She has gone mad. She is telling them new things every day. She’s inventing. The magistrates are off their heads, too. They keep asking her for more, more, more, so we hear, and she can’t help herself—she has to give it to them.”

  At the Board of Punishments, the day before, Cassia Cloud had given a deposition which, in short, accused Nose of having enlisted a slave named Weasel to help set the fire in the Forbidden City; Weasel’s wife was said to be a slave to certain yellow members of the Imperial household, and was supposed to be a cook within the Forbidden City, and was to be the men’s accomplice, according to the whore.

  Mink squatted in the dust to draw me a diagram of some of the palaces in the Forbidden City—the fires were here, Weasel’s wife was said to have her kitchen here; then, half rising, Mink crouched partway between his tracings in the gutter and what passed with him for being erect, and he vehemently said, “Weasel is one of our Coal Hill Boys, and Nose belongs to the Drum Tower Boys, and you know, White Lotus, you aren’t going to see any two such men whisper together. Milk and vinegar don’t mix.”

  Cassia Cloud’s whole tale had been a lie. Mink was in a fury, which had grown on him as he had paid out the account of Cassia Cloud’s informing. He looked up at me from his stooping position…. Weasel had been taken up by the bannermen—good as dead. He had not been anywhere near the Forbidden City the day it burned, he had alibis that would stretch to the Western Hills. He and Nose hated each other—could not have plotted together.

  “What do you suppose is the matter with her?” I asked.

  “Some of the men say she’s got ice at the root of her belly, and that’s why they want to set fire to her down there to punish her.”

  “It can’t be just that,” I said. “She hates everybody—white and yellow.”

  “Maybe the bastard magistrates are paying her. Maybe she’s doing it for money.”

  “Ai, no. Look, Mink. She has mandarins listening to her with their mouths sagging open. Don’t forget she was trash—indentured for slitting a purse, wasn’t it?”

  “I think she wants to get back at our boy Weasel—he probably had her for a few coppers over there at Chao-er’s. He’s a brave boy with the pants-sword, I know that.”

  “What about Nose, then?”

  “Maybe she wants to get back at him for not taking her.”

  “He wouldn’t want her,” I said, trying to be careful how my voice sounded.

  “That’s the point,” Mink said.

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “It’s more than that. It’s a chance for her. It’s a big chance to be somebody.”

  The little yellow boy in my charge came running back to me on the dusty street. Something along the way—perhaps a snarl from a slave pulling a water cart along the street, across whose path the boy may have run—had frightened him. He clung to my gown and looked up at me, weeping, and my heart, racked beyond bearing, suddenly melted for him, for his childish terror of nothing at all, and I ran my fingers tenderly through his hair and began to sing a home song.

  A Nest of Wasps

  A woman slave we did not know came one morning to our gate (harmony in all the courtyards!) saying she belonged to the widow Fan, in Sixth Hutung close to carpenter Kao, and that Kao’s Old Pearl was lying badly sick on her brick bed in the shed off the carpenter’s kitchen insistently calling out for Shen Ch’ing-wu’s White Lotus.

  When Bean, the gateman, reported this to us in the back courtyard, Gull dropped a ladle on the floor and said I had best not go.

  This made me angry, and I said, “Best for whom? Best for you?”

  Gull said with a calm that enraged me even more, “Good time to lay quiet, girl.”

  “When your friend calls your name?”

  “Kao’s Old Pearl is not a good slave. I saw her drunk in the market.”

  Then I said bitterly in English, “Watch out! A witch is passing! A witch!—But if you aren’t a witch yourself, you don’t turn your eyes to look.”

  I left with the widow Fan’s slave, having urgently asked my mistress’s permission to go. “For a very few minutes,” the mistress had said. “You have the Autumn Retreat to clean.”

  Old Pearl was lying on a straw tick on her brick bed, talking wildly in our old white tongue. Her skin hung like dewy cobwebs on her bones. When I touched her and spoke to her, her eyes glittered and with a rattling voice she said in the yellows’ language, “Fetch Shen’s White Lotus. Shen Ch’ing-wu’s Small White Lotus for me. White Lotus! White Lotus!”

  I spoke loudly, “Old Pearl! I am White Lotus! I’m here.”

  But she looked through me and asked for me. I had a moment’s irrational fear that just as I often seemed nonexistent to the yellows I might now be fading from the sight of my own kind. I shook Pearl’s shoulders. She groaned and closed her eyes. Soon she began to ramble again in our flat Arizona accent—gobbets of supernatural tales, bits of magic recklessly jumbled—until there began a series of deep coughs that seemed to shake the whole flimsy lean-to. Then she lay still, and I knew she was dead.

  I ran into the shop to tell the terrible carpenter Kao. Without emotion he told me he had already made a box. Would I get some men slaves to carry her remains in this box to the whites’ burying ground? Then suddenly, to my astonishment, I saw grief on his face, and he said the woman had cost him a hundred and eighty taels and he had never got a decent copper’s worth of work out of her.

  I went home and got the mistress’s reluctant permission to round up some slaves to bury my friend. I ran to Sun’s for Mink’s help. On Stilts borrowed a two-wheeled cart from a vendor of baskets he knew. Mink conscripted three ragged white men, strangers to me, and got some shovels somehow, and in the afternoon our little procession went down Hata Gate Street, into the Outer City, beyond the built-up section, past the farms and ponds at last to the slaves’ ground in the farthest corner of the southern city walls, with a cluster of potters’ sheds and kiln
s at the center and the many haphazard mounds now mostly covered with knee-high grass and weeds. In two hours we put Pearl down. The three ragged men spoke only in the yellows’ tongue. I had suffered agonies of superstitious fear and remorse at being unable to prepare the body properly for its passage to the company of our white-faced God, and again and again, as the strangers dug—talking loudly, cursing the hardness of the dry clayey ground, and even laughing, for none of them had known, or cared about, the dead woman—I remembered the firm voice of our minister, Reverend Honing, as the body of old Joshua Benton was lowered into the ground, with the preacher’s assurances of rest, peace, quiet unto the day of the sorting of souls for salvation. All that could now keep me in one piece, as the dry clods thumped on the box after it had been roughly dropped in its narrow hole, was the memory of the certainty in Preacher Honing’s voice. What was the good of life if this barren field was to be its goal? Looking around at the hummocked field, open to the sun except for one pool of shade under a single ancient pine, I shuddered at the sight of the crowded graves, unmarked conical mounds, like yellows’ graves but very small, in order to stress at the very last our utter insignificance—a nest of hundreds of poor white souls whose fleshly housings had been thrust underground without a single word of prayer to God for repose, so that the spirits were undoubtedly restless, damned, at large, and—remembering their lots on earth—furious. I sensed their flying about me like angry wasps.

  Names

  In the following days, as Nose’s trial approached, I thought I might be losing my mind—such strange stories came to my ears.

  Item. Peach Fragrance, the yellow fox from Chao-er’s, who, so far as we had heard, had been loyal to her white friends, suddenly, stirred no doubt by envy of Cassia Cloud, vomited out to the magistrates a weird story of another plot, sworn at another tavern run by another cobbler, Han, who in a room with ten or eleven whites, one night, with wine cups going around, said Peach Fragrance, had churned the slaves up, observing how well the rich yellow people lived in the Northern Capital, and advising the slaves to lay hands on the money. “But how?” asked Wu’s Nose, according to this bitch. (This was a lie, a lie! I knew of Han’s inn; slaves did go there. But Nose was a Drum Tower boy, a Chao-er man. He never went to Han’s.) “Why, well enough: Start a fire, burn the houses of those with the most money, and kill them all,” says Han. “We’ll do it,” says Nose, according to her. “Yes,” Han says, “we’ll do it well enough. We’ll send into the countryside for more slaves, and they’ll support us. The sun will shine brightly, by and by, never fear, my smallies. But if you tell any of this to the Emperor’s men, I shall leave you here to be beheaded, I’ll run away to the seashore, or into the loess country; I used to live by the sea. Anyway, no one can touch me, I have friends, important men know me. The best among the Emperor’s household will stand behind Han.” So Han said, according to the yellow bitch we thought we loved. Peach Fragrance named names. Besides Wu’s Nose, Tu’s Sheep had been there, she said, and Cheng’s Spade, the late Wang’s Monkey, Ma’s White Scholar, Chu’s Spear, Ts’ao’s Braveboy. There seemed no reason in her list; it was sheer caprice and malice; these were not friends. All were jailed.