White Lotus

by John Hersey

  Whir. Tall bannermen were beginning to thread through the crowd; their faces were grim, they would brook no trouble.

  For some reason the sight of the bannermen caused me to break into tears, and I heard myself saying that I would ask Benign Warmth’s permission to work in and live out.

  Rock patted me on the shoulder and said, “You won’t be sorry.”

  A bannerman, passing, jostled me hard. Rock’s hands flew out and shoved him away. It then appeared that the one thing a white man may not do is to lay a finger on a bannerman. In an instant four of them were closing in on Rock, their jaws pushed forward like steel wedges.

  Here was a ring of demons. We needed and hated these Imperial guardsmen. I knew how Rock despised them. They were the only force for order in the city, and in many a scrape they were the only ones who would stand up for our rights—or, rather, make up for our lack of rights. But they were yellow men, and they clearly loathed their stinking duty of taking the part of whites, and whenever one of our race was in the wrong he caught ten times his share of the cruelty of those who had the power to keep the so-called peace.

  I saw Rock hold firm. Then, as the four uniformed men pushed their net of ribs closer and closer to him, I saw a white man’s pain-learned patience seep into Rock’s stance. A slight shift, a giving of a toe’s length. A sheepish grin that I knew he did not like to wear. A mumble about clumsiness—his own. An acknowledgment, by a dipping of the head, of yellow power. A spendthrift honorific title offered to all. A blush seen by them as shame, but by me, Rock’s new concubine, as no more than a hot-skinned concession to time.

  The Cubicle

  To my surprise, Benign Warmth made no difficulty about my sleeping outside the orphanage.

  He was a practical man. “You have a lover?”

  “Yes.”

  “If I refused,” he said, speaking as if chewing hot rice, “you would bribe the gate man and sneak out nights.”

  He was right about that.

  “Be here no later than the crows’ cawing in the mornings.”

  So I moved into Rock’s cubicle. This dark box of squalor and filth proved to be the happiest home I had ever had. We lay together, lanternless, on mats of woven reeds in moldy-smelling quilts, and we gorged ourselves on each other’s desires like famished wolves. This man, so pusillanimous by daylight, made aggressive demands in the dark which ripened me, in a few short nights, from a cautious used girl into a wanton. There was no mention of marriage; I had tried that, and so had he. Except when I sensed that he needed to stretch his wits, we seldom quarreled, for I think I was the first girl he had had who saw some sense in the marvelous tension in him, and he was the first man—or white person of either sex, for that matter—whom I had ever known whose anger at the yellows was hitched to steep demands on the self. With all his growling he expected a great deal of his own whiteness. I came to see this. Perhaps exposure to this bitter optimism in a white gave me my first taste of freedom as a white, of inner freedom. We shared our miserable pasts, and he told me to beware: Often he had had this apparent harmony with a sow, such as he had with me, only to have it slip away into dreary bickering, discontent, and finally staleness like that of hard old bread. “I’m never satisfied to leave a stone where it is,” he said, “or a flower on a branch, maybe I should say,” and with that he grasped my chin and held it for the longest time, as if suddenly afraid of losing me. He would not say that there was anything different about me from the others, but as weeks passed I could feel our love holding ground from night to night to night. That was enough.

  The Date Is Announced

  Rock was working at odd jobs, mostly ugly and menial, and his summer days were full of conflict; he quit often and was dismissed more often. The irregularity of his life, which he liked, meant that he was usually able to be free when I had a day off, and we began to move around the city together.

  One day while we were walking I had a thought. “What about Bad Hog?”

  Rock had forgotten all about the fighting cock, he started as if he had been poked with a camel herder’s prod. “We must go and see that turtle Groundnut.”

  So we did, late in the day, at Dowager’s. We reached the fat woman’s hovel before Groundnut arrived home from begging.

  The cotes were still full, but pigeon droppings were scarcely to be seen. Dowager told us that Groundnut had found he could sell the dung to a vintner, and that in the courtyard he constantly carried a basket and a spoonlike scoop with a long handle; she showed these implements to us.

  I was fearful of a tongue-scourging from Dowager for not having paid what I owed her.

  All she said was: “Ayah, you little whore, you’re like all the other whites, aren’t you?”

  “I have it saved up,” I lamely said. “I’ve been meaning to bring it down.”

  “Too late, too late!” she said, dismissing me with a dimpled hand. And that, I knew, was the last of the debt; I would never pay her.

  Groundnut came in encrusted in his vile disguises, and Rock embraced him. It was as if the two men had never quarreled, never parted. At once they were on their old footing—conspiratorial, full of whispers, muted chuckles, mysterious frowns.

  And what about the cockerel?

  At this question Groundnut croaked with excitement: Splendid! A real dragon! Almost ready!

  Groundnut fetched Bad Hog’s ample cage from beside the cotes. Between the spindles the bird blinked at Rock an eye like an ember.

  “Ai,” Rock said, “the bastard looks love-starved. I’ll have to come over and shake some of those dummies at him. See if he thinks they’re hens.”

  “He’ll tear your dummies to pieces,” Groundnut said.

  So Rock began to visit Dowager’s nearly every day to resume his part in Bad Hog’s training, and when I could I went with him. The bird had grown into a prodigy of pure meanness, and it did in fact destroy Rock’s dummies, one by one. How Rock’s eyes lit up at the white bird’s burning viciousness!

  One day on the way home to the lamasery from a training session we noticed that a new Gazette—the vehicle for Imperial proclamations—had been posted on billboards scattered throughout the city, and I read the announcements to Rock; the first of which was:

  Drawings from the Number Wheel will commence on the morning of seventh month, eighteenth, the day following the Spirit Festival.

  Rock was much distressed. This was bad, he said, this was very bad. This might lead the judge of the cocking mains to refuse to allow a white-trained bird, and especially a white white-trained bird, to enter the pits.

  Ai, how I laughed at Rock!—and wanted to weep. This was an edict that would change the basis of our lives, and he fretted about Bad Hog’s credentials!

  Fowl-Soup Fight

  Rock and Groundnut decided to risk Bad Hog at once, for we could feel a rising surge of rage among the yellows after the announcement of the date of the drawing.

  On the next market day we took the bird in a cloth-covered basket to the mains. In the oval pit in the mat-shed hall I saw more than the usual number of whites in the crowd; our boys had passed the word about their white wonder, it seemed.

  The judge, a wrinkled autocrat, Old Hsing, whose decisions at every step of wagering and of the fights themselves could not be questioned, unless at a risk of permanent banning from the premises, was at first scornful of my friends. He waved them and their hooded basket aside. Did I imagine that there was anger in his look—Number Wheel anger?

  But when Rock tilted the lid of the basket and Hsing saw the glistening creature within, flashing its never-to-be-cuckolded eyes, the old judge nodded.

  This nod produced an inexorable sequence. Keepers plucked Bad Hog from the basket and weighed the bird; an official measured the steel spurs that Groundnut produced from a velvet-lined box; the cock was held aloft and announced; his adversary was displayed and announced—an Eastern Shawlne
ck named Odor of Gunpowder Smoke; the betting clerks began shouting back and forth with wagers and tossing their small bamboo tubes to gather and hold the cash of those who accepted the offered odds, which were, it goes without saying, insulting to our bird.

  The betting was closed. The cocks were held at opposite sides of the pen. I had never felt such silence in the bowl. We were, for once, in the front row.

  The cocks were introduced. Old Hsing tossed them a few grains of incitement. Then hackles went up, a moment’s incredulous staring passed, and the cocks flew into a death struggle—over a half dozen miserable seeds.

  Hock started to bounce about as if manipulating his pigeon-feather dummies, and I heard beside me the falsetto commands that Groundnut had devised. I felt, myself, a deep, inexplicable sadness.

  After the first few flumes I wanted to look away. It seemed to me that Bad Hog was being overpowered—how could my friends have miscalculated so badly?—and that if I watched I would only see a re-enactment, in a swift sharp-spiked dance, of our lives as the outmatched of the world.

  I was dimly aware that my two friends were not discouraged. But it was clear that the white cock had been early and badly hurt, and that it was merely carrying on in the grip of an automatic process—an unswerving, mechanical, instinct-fueled fury.

  Once the Shawlneck had gained an advantage, it seemed that there could only be one course: a widening of its advantage. And so it happened, but with an agonizing slowness. Rock and Groundnut gradually became less animated, as the roaring among the yellows in the crowd grew triumphant.

  Then, as sometimes happened, the almost beaten cock, enraged perhaps more by his down-dragging pain than by his opponent, staged a rally. With a series of flapping leaps Bad Hog rose higher and higher, until the Shawlneck was kicking from beneath. In a single flashing stroke of steel the white cock put out one of his enemy’s eyes.

  The Shawlneck in his turn climbed to a new ledge of rage, and once again the white cock appeared to be getting the worst of it.

  But the gap had been narrowed, perhaps even closed, and I could feel the hope flooding into Rock and Groundnut again. Yes, we could see the white cock, grown crafty, saving its strength, evading, pouncing only when it could strike. It was gaining. I remembered reversals of this kind that had proved decisive. Shrilly I shouted.

  Then Old Hsing pulled back a sleeve and made a chopping motion with his right hand. Two attendants with sacks leaped out and captured the birds. In a cracking voice the judge declared the contest at an end, the Shawlneck the winner. Bettors on Odor of Gunpowder Smoke would be paid. It was, he ruled, a “fowl-soup fight”—one bird had an advantage so decisive that it must lead in the end to the death of the other, but the inevitable might take long to unfold; this would curb the program of fights to follow; it was the judge’s right to end the match; the losing bird must be destroyed—hence, “fowl soup.”

  Rock and Groundnut stood with mouths gaping. They looked as if they were roaring, but no sounds were emerging. Then at last the protests did leap out, like water gushing from culverts.

  Twenty white men were suddenly clustered around us.

  Old Hsing stood up. This was the peremptory command from the ruler of the pit for silence. But a hush did not ensue. My two friends kept shouting, and an ominous, low, humming, stuttering growl began to come toward us from the yellows massed in the bowl.

  Next I saw that the whites had gathered about us for a purpose quite other than I had thought. They laid hands on my friends, and on me, and they dragged us out of the pit into the street. All the while Rock and Groundnut bellowed.

  In the street those who had hauled us away from the yellows, to save their own skins as well as ours, now flailed around us shouting their remonstrances against the obvious unfairness of Old Hsing’s judgment. Then, when everyone’s breath gave out, we disbanded in silence and went our ways.

  Rock’s Ambition

  Rock was not easy to live with in the days that followed. Unfairness! This was almost a new idea to us. When we had been slaves the question of equity had never arisen. Rock was exhilarated by the concept of unfairness, and, as always, high spirits produced in him a torrent of rudenesses; he set about cheating the yellow cheaters in every way he could, and if frustrated by them he turned on me, whom he loved. Our close box of a home resounded with his bad temper and my (I must say) bold self-defense. Rock had another bitter squabble with Groundnut on the topic of beggary—and now Rock’s motive for urging Groundnut to give it up, accounting for his peculiar manner when he had told me of his earlier break with his friend, came out for me to see: He had all along wanted Groundnut to cease begging in order to join him in a pickpocketing team. Begging, even with its guiles and disguises, was a cause for shame; jostling yellows and slitting their purses would be a matter of high honor! So Rock argued. And so I began to understand the source of the dim, shapeless optimism I had always felt under Rock’s rough manner: His ambition was to be some kind of hero, even if a fumbling one, or indeed a criminal one, of whiteness.

  Groundnut, however, was unshakable. He said he had a pot of good money buried in the earth under the pigeons, and was filling another. He was proud of his talent. He was never in trouble with the bannermen. And, he argued, what better way than begging of reminding yellow men of their guilt toward our people?

  “No! No!” Rock shouted. “You disgust them.”

  The Eve of the Drawings

  In most years the Spirit Festival yielded an evening of magical beauty, honoring and appeasing the spirits of the dead. Benign Warmth, corked in his bottle of pomposity, was vapidly unaware of the stirrings in the city over the coming conscription, and he decided to allow the older children, the tens and elevens, to march out as usual and watch the spectacle on the banks of Ten Temples Sea in the northern part of the Tartar City. I had been assigned to their escort. For two reasons I could not bear to be separated from Rock on that night: because I wanted to share the famous sight with him, and because I was apprehensive over the yellows’ ugly arousal; and departing for work that morning I had asked him to meet me at the orphanage gate at the time of the Drum Tower signal of the delaying, for this evening, of the curfew. He had agreed.

  So now we set out, forty-odd children, half a dozen matrons and attendants, and incongruous Rock, just at dusk. Each of the children carried a homemade lantern that was capable of floating. We had spent days fashioning these lights in the shapes of boats, lotuses, fish, water lilies. In the streets were many yellows carrying such lanterns.

  Rock walked beside Tiger Ears.

  “What’s your lantern?” Rock asked.

  “A lantern,” the boy said.

  “Yes, but what’s it supposed to be?”

  “A duck. Are you blind?”

  “Why a duck?”

  “Because it’s a spirit.”

  “A spirit? A spirit of what? Of a person?”

  Long pause. “Of air.”

  “How can there be a spirit of air?”

  “Where else would a duck fly?”

  “Why a duck?”

  “You’re an old stupid.”

  Rock liked that frank non-answer, and he laughed with his head thrown back.

  After a time Rock said to me, “Ayah, I wish I were an orphan.”

  “Aren’t you?” I said.

  When we reached the shore of Ten Temples Sea a crowd of several hundred had already come. Our children launched their lanterns on the still water. All around the lake a border of floating lights—which in time became thousands—was drifting out from the banks. Most of the lanterns were in the form of lotus leaves and blooms. “It’s all for you, White Lotus,” Rock said, on an unexpected note of gentleness. I noticed drawled shouts and slurred laughs; many men in the crowd seemed to be drunk. Sometimes I felt Rock beside me stiffen. The dreamlike beauty of the scene—the sparkling luminosity of the lantern-spangled lake, the child
ren’s eyes like tiny skies of stars: the sights seemed the more lavish because of the tautness, the expectant and reckless mood, of the yellow crowd.

  All this broke open when a force of the Blue Banner Corps, garrisoned in that part of the city, carried to the edge of the lake a huge papier-mâché junk, thirty paces in length, with a full complement of paper crewmen, and with rows and rows of lighted candles. They launched this vessel. Drums, gongs, cymbals, and flutes played music expressive of a grateful Emperor’s pride in the spirits of those who had died in battle for him—the many candle flames. At first the crowd greeted this ship, reminding them of the war and of the drawing on the Number Wheel to come the next day, with silence. Then a murmuring began, a desolate low sound.

  After the vessel, which capped the breathtaking scene on the lake, had drifted about for a time, a bannerman rowed out to it and set it on fire, in order that the spirits of the dead might return to their dwelling place by the light of the lotus lanterns. As the flames grew into a floating bonfire whose reflections made the water itself seem to be on fire, the grumbling of the crowd grew into an angry babble.

  We were suddenly conscious of a pressure of yellow men around our island of white children. Above the mob-noise we heard abusive shouts aimed at us. What were these little pigs doing here? What right had they to praise the war dead?

  We were surrounded—in a pigpen of mad drunks.

  Then I heard some of the men railing at Rock, who was one of the very few white men by the lake.

  Rock firmly told the senior matron to start the children away from the shore, and then he did something so wise, for him so controlled, that I, though my heart was freezing, almost wept with surprise, gratitude, and love.

  He moved to the center of the clump of children. By this act he isolated his own provocative anger from that of the shouting yellows, and he made himself a stone pillar of the greatest strength of all, which is restraint, in the middle of our flock of now bewildered children. We women pressed at the crowd, which uttered fumes of millet liquor in our faces, and gradually, with painful patience, inspired by Rock, we managed to drift our charges away from the lake and out of the crowd and into the streets. We fled to the orphanage.