White Lotus

by John Hersey

  After dinner on the third night Daddy Chick entertained the household and its official guest with tunes on the Tartar fiddle. The recital over, I withdrew to the work space to puff up and spread out Salt Inspector Feng’s quilts and to set his tea water on the fire. He talked awhile with the Huas and drank some wine which Hua’s wife warmed for him. I heard his vulgar outbursts and Hua’s deferential guffaws.

  When Salt Inspector Feng came in to me he was flushed and seemed drunk. With a clatter and a fuss he pawed over his heap of paraphernalia—his scales, weighing baskets, official weights, sampling bottles, and all the gear for his inspections—to make sure nothing had been stolen. He spoke not a word while I undressed him. My hands trembled with both nervousness and, I must admit, curiosity. Beneath his official uniform his underclothes were elegant and expensive; he was a young yellow man with a soft body—I was used to slave flesh. He was careful to be modest. His night robe bore an exquisite peony blossom embroidered over his heart.

  He sat cross-legged on his crude bed on the loom. I gave him a bowl of tea and bowed to him. He startled me by bursting out in his ugly loud voice, which could easily be heard by the Huas at the opposite end of the house, “Bring me paper, brushes, and an inkstone. I want to write today’s reports. Hurry up, you sow.”

  Had I been so badly mistaken? Had he found Jasmine attractive (her serenity in the morning!), and was he finding me just the opposite? I hastily dug out the writing materials he wanted.

  “Turn up the lamp, you little fool, or I’ll go blind.”

  I placed the coal-oil lamp beside him on his board bed.

  He hawked and spat on the dirt floor—and then was suddenly transformed. He looked at me with a puzzling sweetness and silently he beckoned to me. I warily approached. He began to write, and with a pointing finger he directed my attention to the characters he drew. He had a hasty hand; the strokes were slurred, but I could easily read them:

  “I know that you can read and write. Read this carefully. I want to play a game with you. Get up and sit beside me. When we have finished writing, turn out the lamp and lie down beside me.”

  I boldly reached to his hand and took the brush from him, and in my precise, rather tight characters I wrote: “A game is for two or more. Your game can only amuse one person.”

  He took the brush and wrote: “Except for your face I will not touch you.”

  Then I wrote: “A young boy’s promise.”

  He wrote: “That is not the game I meant. Let us play conundrums. I want to see how clever you are. I will start.” He took a fresh piece of paper and wrote:

  He contains the thread that will contain himself.

  See! I SET HIM FREE in order to contain myself.

  I seized the brush and wrote: “Silkworm.”

  My heart was beating hard, because there could be no doubt that Salt Inspector Feng had written four characters deliberately larger than the others.

  Salt Inspector Feng took the brush again and wrote: “Excellent. You are quick. Another.” He wetted his brush on the inkstone and wrote:

  Pine seeds in his beak; a bamboo prison.

  If he is heartbroken, how can he sing so sweetly?

  This time my hand was certainly shaking as I took the brush and wrote: “Finch”

  Salt Inspector Feng then wrote: “You are too quick. Why are you not afraid of me? Now do what I wrote at first.”

  Why was I not afraid? Was it because I could be excited and not care at the same time? Was curiosity all that mattered to me now? I took the lamp off the bed and turned down its wick until it gave off only the dimmest glow. Then I climbed up on the quilts and stretched out on my back beside the now reclining man. In a moment I felt his warm breath at my ear, and he began to whisper.

  “Listen carefully to what I say. You are a wonderful woman—just a child—so quick. Do not be afraid of me. Trust me…. I know about your husband—where the dogs caught him, how he looked. He only made twenty-seven li in three nights. Why did he try to go alone, without help? I have selected you. I am going to open the cage and show you how to fly. Your man was a fool—he must not have really wanted freedom. Listen carefully to everything. I am to be here nine days more, all the details will be arranged. Our people will see to you…. You lie very still. Are you not thrilled? You will need steady nerves. Are you wondering why I do this? Have you wondered that?” A tension had come into his whispers, a tremor. “Perhaps I do it”—I felt his lips against my ear—“just to be able to breathe into an ear like yours.” Suddenly he blew gently into my ear, tickling me; but I was horrified and rather than laughing I lay limp and waited. There was something disgusting in this strange, tense playfulness—maybe Moth had not been self-glorifying, after all, in her giggling hints at perversion. This man was yellow. Why did he do what he was doing? Could he be trusted? Was he only playing with me, like a kitten—or a pet finch? I remembered the trained bird on a string at the New Year party at Sun’s. Perhaps these thoughts produced a coldness in me which Salt Inspector Feng could actually feel; he changed his tone just then, at any rate. “Tell no one. You must not trust your best friends here. No one must know. The woman who was here last night—Jasmine?—she may seem sound to you, but she might tell her husband. You must tell no one—especially not that first girl, who is really broken-spirited. Do you want to know how it’s done? Why don’t you respond? Aren’t you excited?” That tremor again.

  Placing one of my hands under Salt Inspector Feng’s chin I turned his head, lifting his lips away from my ear, and I twisted myself and whispered to him, “If you blow in my ear again I will tell Hua that you are a member of the Uncage-the-Finches, that you have been trying to get me to run away. I’ll tell him.” Then I resumed my former position and waited for his whispers.

  “Ayah! You chilly little sow. But don’t bother yourself…. Usually, you know, we take men out. I have to work then through their women. Do you think I could do that and offend the women?…Never mind…. You’ll have to be patient—wait a month after I leave. We don’t want them to see a pattern. We will set your leaving in the night before a temple day—perhaps double eleven—that usually gives a night and a day and a night for a start while everything official is closed. Do you want to know these things? What is the matter with you? You’re like a dead fish in a market stall. Was I wrong to choose you? Do you have the white man’s dead-head?”

  My heart began to pound at this last question. Was my intermittent numbness a slave’s well-known failing, illness, corruption, surrender? Again I exchanged our ears and mouths, and I whispered: “Yes! Sometimes I do! Will you let me go anyway? I want to go.”

  When we had re-turned, Salt Inspector Feng sighed into my ear and whispered, “That’s better, child. I’m glad to hear a little eagerness. Only, be on guard. When you have the dead-head you must fight every minute to hold your tongue…. Listen. There are two most dangerous parts: the first three days, till you get out of range of the wonks, and two days beyond the border in the first core province, because of the Clip-the-Wings Edict. You’ll be in a party of four: three men and you. For the first three days a wild boar will lead you. Then you’ll be in charge of a yellow man—he’ll be your ‘master,’ going home from a pilgrimage. Beyond the border the moles will pick you up and pass you along…. We’ll have plenty of time to plan…”

  The Pilgrim

  Our “master,” the pilgrim, boldly set out with us in broad daylight. How frightened I was! Everything was so bewildering: We were traveling away from the sacred mountain, T’ai Shan. Our pilgrim was ostensibly returning home, but I could not tell whether he had actually been to the mountain. He seemed truly holy, steady-eyed, stringy, and quite sure of himself. My companions—three strong white men named Bang, White, and Horsehoof, all freed by Salt Inspector Feng—and I were dazed with exhaustion and fear; we had had four moonless nightmare nights, led by a ragged, hairy, amber-eyed boar from filthy temple haven to d
amp cave to hollowed kaoliang rick to burrow under a pagoda, following Tou Mu, the North Star (how glad I was I had always bowed to her idol!), now through a country of estates, now through a region of scrubby farms and poor people in the dusty bed of the former course of the Yellow River, famished, with the tracking cry of wonks (or imagined barking) ringing in our ears, not even daring to pause to steal raw turnips still left in the ground, afraid to drink from wells at night because of a terror of killing the well-guarding frog and therefore going blind, too excited to sleep as we hid pressed to each other by day, nourished only by the wild-animal nerve and the unbearably sweet and civilized selflessness of our tattered guide, the boar.

  Our new “master” had met us at the pagoda platform before dawn, as the boar disappeared wordlessly in the shadows; “Master” had fed us and cleaned us up as best he could, and now we were making our way along a sunken country road (we might have arrived right back at Hua’s for all the countryside showed) in a party of two great-wheeled north-country wheelbarrows propelled in rotation by Bang, White, and Horsehoof. “Master” rode one and I was carried on the other; I felt a heavy burden to my fellows.

  These three men, sampling brief tastes of a freedom they had as yet by no means attained, asked our “master” forward questions, and we began to learn things about him which, far from pleasing us, had us by the first nightfall thoroughly alarmed.

  He was a dealer in provisions for poultry. Nothing wrong with that.

  He had promised his life to the cause of freeing slaves. “I am,” he said, with a strange vehemence, “ashamed of my yellow skin.” He said he felt the burden of the cruelty of his race.

  When we stopped under a willow tree for a frugal noon meal, it came out that he was a convinced vegetarian. More than that. It trickled forth that he was a member of the Total Abstinence Society, offshoot of the White Lily Sect; he had never in his life touched alcohol, tobacco, ginseng, pepper, ginger, mustard; he had never watched a theatrical troupe, he had never played at cards or jumping sticks; he had never burned incense or offered sacrifices; he had never owned a dog, or a cat, or a chicken. I felt my first real lick of fear of him when, with an eye which burned for all the world exactly like that of our perfect sweet-hearted life-lost wild boar who had led us past the wonks, “Master” said he had never read a poem, because poetry was “lasciviousness.”

  Tucked in a sleeve he had a Buddhist prayer wheel, and before he set out he uttered prayers which we clearly heard.

  One of them went like this: “Patient Buddha, gird us all to do valiantly for the helpless and innocent. Bless those who die in the harness of a mule and are buried on the plowed field or bleach there.”

  Bang, gripping the handles of “Master’s” barrow, heaving, with the shafts hanging from a white cotton hauling strap slung over his shoulders, grunted out a question we all wanted answered. “Will we reach the border? Isn’t this a dangerous way to travel?”

  “Son,” our “master” said, “there are dangers all about us: less for you than for me. They would simply take you back—for me, much worse. I forgive in advance yellow men for their curses and stones; I am ashamed.”

  At the same time, he voiced a genuine humanitarianism—a decent pity and concern for us.

  But in the afternoon I saw “Master” reading a book. He had no way of knowing that I could read, and during a halt, while Horsehoof was relieving Bang, I, on a pretext of stretching my legs, approached closely and saw the cover: Book of Martyrs: How One Thousand Stepped Lightly to Death.

  I need not, it turned out, have sneaked to find out the tide, because before long, in answer to Horsehoof’s (by now rather anxious) question, “Why do you do this for us?” he openly said, “I am ashamed, I have told you that. I must purify our record. I have had to settle with myself: Can I clasp the faggot, dear friend? Can I lie and have my legs cut off without flinching?”

  And later he said, “I am reading a book here about men who suffered that their stories might move others. Shen of Plum Garden who gave his life to save a temple from the army of the Western Kingdom. Heroic names, fiery names. Fu. P’an. K’ung. Kao. Many, many. Our yellow race must cleanse itself. P’an said, ‘The blood of martyrs is the wine of serenity.’ ”

  To rescue us—or to risk us? We began to see the chances “Master” took. He had us wheel our tiny caravan straight through the gates and through the heart of a district town; with the gendarmes at the gates he was haughty, reckless, and stingy in his squeeze money. “Those guardsmen,” he later said, “are my tormentors. I pray for them.”

  It began to seem to us that he was taking chances with us that he need not have taken. After each narrow-eyed scrutiny by tollhouse guards or by Imperial cavalrymen at yamen gates, he seemed to be transported into an almost trancelike religious ecstasy.

  At other times he was considerate, gentle, solicitous of our weary bodies and frayed nerves.

  With glances—easily understood—Bang, White, Horsehoof, and I agreed among ourselves that this man was extremely dangerous to us; at the same time, no one else could save us.

  Thus we traveled for three days in constant and extreme anxiety. On the third day “Master” indicated to us that we were approaching the Wei River at the point where it crossed into the core province of North-of-the-River, and that here for six hours we would pass through a border area teeming with adventurers, slave chasers, guards, corrupt revenue agents. “Master” was exhilarated. At every challenge he shouted and arrogantly waved his credentials as a pilgrim. We kept going after dusk. It was quite dark when we turned off into a deeply rutted side road. “Master” kept praying in a low voice. “Give me strength, Buddha, not to run until I have been beaten with the heavy bamboo as often as K’ung—eight times.” Then at length he had us hide the wheelbarrows in a hazel thicket and we went on, walking. It was the dark of the moon—an inkblock night.

  At our sides, the tremolo call of an owl! Ah, it was “Master.”

  Another owl answered in the distance. We stumbled forward. I felt mud sucking at my feet.

  A loud whisper: “What do you say?”

  “Master”: “O-mi-t’o-fu.”

  At this password a shadow materialized. There were whispers. The shadow embraced “Master.” A hand took my arm. Something hard—gunwale of a sampan. A grating sound as the men pushed off; dripping of a single oar. Why did I feel so light of heart? I had escaped from “Master”! That was all!

  A sheet of stars on which we glided.

  In the distance, ahead, a lantern.

  The Kingdom of the Mole

  We had reached, in dead-fiat country, “the mountain.” We were now in a core province, where slaves were supposed to be free, yet we were told that we were in the zone of maximum danger. This was on account of the Emperor’s Clip-the-Wings Edict, which His Sweet-Smelling Sublimity had promulgated for reasons no one seemed able to understand—perhaps to appease the powerful landowners of the slavery provinces, in order the more easily, one day, to swallow them whole. We were told that he was preparing a war against them. At any rate this edict levied an Imperial fine of two hundred taels—several times the price of a prime hog—for harboring escaped slaves or preventing their arrest. A “master” or his “agent” could seize a runaway and procure from a magistrate a chit proclaiming the chattel’s return. Proof: the “master’s” word. The danger zone near the border was accordingly filled with shiftless flesh-speculators, armed to the ears, who pounced on any white-skinned creatures they saw, dragged them to magistrates, and obtained papers of extradition. White skin must not be seen.

  Bang, White, Horsehoof, and I were in firm hands. We were hidden by day in “burrows”: in packing boxes in a godown, in a rail pen covered with straw, in a cellar connected with a root cellar. We were moved along “the mole run” both by day (in a train of four carts with false bottoms, in a load of kaoliang fodder) and by night (afoot, reverting to the nightmare time wit
h our boar guide). Some of our guides were yellow, some white. One night, in a dark back room of a rich farmer’s compound, we had a glimpse of “the Queen of the Moles,” a former slave woman, tiny and frail, said to suffer from dizzy spells, who, we were told, had returned into West-of-the-Mountains Province seventeen times to lead out fellow slaves, and who was now on her way back yet again.

  Through all this I felt, above all, a great uneasiness. What made these yellow people kind to such worthless white nonentities as we? What caused that sickish sweetness in their behavior—the insatiable suffering in their eyes as they looked at us? What did they really want of us?

  Later, as we moved out of the danger zone, we traveled more freely, on our own, and my lungs filled up with air that tasted like something I had read about in one of the books Old Uncle had given me: perfect thirst-slaking nectar that had been made by melting a queer late snow from the petals of peach blossoms. There really did not seem to be any slavery here.

  The “moles” gave us directions. I carried a note: “Rap at the gate of the first house after passing a place where pomace is sold from a large cart in the street.”

  BOOK SIX

  The Number Wheel

  An Elegant Life

  FREEDOM! We four furnished our minds, Horsehoof, Bang, White, and I, as we trudged towards Peking, with all the joys of our new state. Remembering the Shen mansion, I told my friends of the elegant life ahead: carved marble spirit screens, goldfish drooping with shot-silk veils, chopsticks tipped with filigree. Which of us would be the first to ride, one day, in a mandarin’s green sedan chair borne by four yellow men? Horsehoof kept saying, “I have a friend. Wait and see. He’ll set us up.” This friend, a runaway slave named Jumping Stick now living in the Northern Capital, was going to be our patron, with nothing to do but show us the way to satin, and in truth as we walked and talked he developed magical powers.