White Lotus

by John Hersey

  But I said to him, “Be careful, Rock. That arm they talk about is long.”

  Rock said, “What can anyone do to me? I have no work. By this afternoon I will have no money—and what I pretend I have is yours anyway. I have nothing to do with my days. I’m nobody. I’m really as hollow as a bamboo stick—nothing there, nothing at all.” Rock uttered these self-negations with the greatest of good cheer.

  As the hour of noon approached, when the first lottery drawing would be made, we decided to go back to the basket to find Mink.

  Beggars swarmed around the gate of the amusement ground, and one of them came up to me and spoke my name. O-mi-t’o-fu! It was Jug, the young Yen’s body servant, who had been a handsome house slave, a mirror to his epicene master. Horrible! Now he was a leper. The disease had not progressed far, but the skin about his nose was discolored, and pits and nodules had formed on his nostrils and lips. How he had used to swagger! I told him I had encountered both Duke and Top Man, but Jug was not interested in anything outside himself. Rock gave him a large part of our remaining wealth—two coppers—and we hurried away, both from him and from thoughts of him.

  Rock strode into the back room of the lottery basket with a sneer and an extruded jaw, as if expecting, and half hoping, to be thrown out again, but a drawing was imminent, and the room was packed, and when Rock deliberately forced his way to the table of Weasel Number One and asked for Mink, the clerk appeared not even to recognize him, and with the sweet, courteous tone of his first answer to Rock said that Mink had, yes, come in, and he was probably with the numerous chit boys squatting in the tea corner.

  So we found him. Though pale, he was alert and cheerful, for he had high hopes that with this drawing he would scoop up money enough for a year of pipes. He recognized me at once and seemed glad to see me, though he was undemonstrative.

  We waited for the drawing. Mink’s numbers were worthless, and he suddenly went almost limp with moroseness. Rock persuaded him to come to our puzzle box and spend an hour with us.

  At the house we went to Moth’s compartment, where we found her “living the lids’ life,” as whites called idling, with Old Boxer and Ox Balls, and with the street-waterer from upstairs-lower-right-front, named Round Knees, and his girl, a hard little piece, Trumpet Flower. With our arrival, we were eight bodies in the stuffy cubicle, and there was barely room for us to lounge about the floor.

  Moth was exercised about a woman downstairs who had been arrested for whoring. “It isn’t as if she were just an ‘easy time’ ”—the phrase for amateur street pickups, bed-mat enthusiasts of the Enclave, who, having given themselves at no charge to men, would graciously accept tidbits of money from them as “gifts” of appreciation. “She makes a full-time career of it. She practically lives in Old Barrier. They had her in there for a month, and the day she was released she went out soliciting again, and now she’s back in. She’s really shameless. Works alone, doesn’t even work under a whore matron. I think she needs a tai-fu, too—she has some queer-looking pimples. Dirty thing! Why does she do it? I wish she’d move out of this puzzle box. She’s always stumbling in here at any hour of day and night with some clappy ricksha boy.”

  How prim was Little Moth, mistress to two tigers! I suspected her of wanting to seduce my Rock, and the only thing that protected and comforted me, on this point, was that Rock thought her a female clown. Moth was not quite an “easy time”; she was just a natural girl. In her, generosity and selfishness were indistinguishable, for they worked toward the same delightful end, where men were concerned.

  Now she fetched a garlic bud and a knife and with deft strokes of her petal hands she diced it, and she passed the bits around, and we all took some. Thus did Moth act the hostess. Garlic! How raw and hot our pleasures had to be! Some whites considered garlic healthful—ward against head colds. I believe, though, that Moth thought it aphrodisiac, and considered that, sweet hostess, she was dispensing, in those burning little white cubes, good times for the very near future, which she might happily share with one candidate or another.

  The street-waterer, Round Knees, began to rail against a yellow shopkeeper in an Enclave food store who had, Round Knees felt, pushed his prices beyond the boundaries of fairness and reason. The man was, of course, a Moslem. Three quarters of the merchants in the Enclave were yellow Moslems, and much as the minority of white storekeepers railed against whites’ buying “sheep-eaters’ stuff,” the population kept on going to Moslem shops; and now Round Knees was complaining of this. “They think it’s chinkty to buy from a yellow man, they want to feel important. Lots of them go in there because it makes them feel big to have a yellow man wait on them. But all the time he’s giving them the old turtle head right between the legs. Ayah, I hate those yellow mutton-eaters.”

  Mink sat leaning his twisted back against a wall, and now and again tears came in his eyes, possibly when he thought of the unreasonableness of the lottery; he slaved for it day after day, and it would not give him a grand reward. Or perhaps he was feeling the pain of his need.

  Rock, who was beside him, asked Mink if he had been nearby on the wharves when the killing had taken place, and Mink replied in a meandering yet alert and pointed way, going straight to the center of Rock’s unbending position.

  “You whites,” Mink began, as if he were not one, “do you think you’re going to get out of this turtle-screwing Enclave by complaining about Old Arm? That he pretends to be a simple dock-man, and he’s ten other things? I know what you say! That he’ll put you down like a mandarin at the Jade Table or any other restaurant or teahouse? That he’s ruthless—that he didn’t weep like a woman this morning when they knocked Gentle over like a bale of goods? Who else is there to help us? Who else is working for us? Who else cares? Who else cares what happens to a useless chit-trotter who’s on the pipe?” Tears were suddenly dribbling once more down Mink’s nose. He paused. “Yes, I was nearby—at the next hong’s wharf. But I didn’t see anything, until a crowd gathered, and I didn’t think much of that, either. There’s always some argument or accident that will draw eyes. But then I saw Old Arm walk over to the group—someone was with him who had run to fetch him—and I made my way over there. I never found out what the argument had been about, but it must have been some money problem: a dirty yellow comprador wouldn’t kill a wharf coolie over anything but money. The compradors all along the line knew Gentle very well. Anyway one blow had done it. And I saw Old Arm stand there as if he were looking at a dead wonk. All right, Rock, I grant you: that turtle is a cold one, he won’t let anything get in his way, least of all loyalty to a friend. But what of it? He’s for us. That’s the way I see it. Well, Old Arm didn’t try to get the police after the comprador, I guess he knew what a farce that would have been. He just told some of the white coolies there to heave Gentle’s body out on the Bund roadway, so that a benevolent burial society would find it and cart it away. And he went back to work. That was all there was to it. But within an hour we began to hear definite reports that Old Arm was putting out instructions to get everybody ready for the rice-bowl campaign.”

  “When is the campaign supposed to begin?”

  “Ai, I should think it would take two or three months to get the whole Enclave worked up. Sometime in the summer, I guess.”

  Then Rock—casual Rock!—spoke in a way I had never heard from him before. “I agree with Mink, that Old Arm seems to be for us, and that there doesn’t seem to be anyone else. But listen: while I was working the docks I sat with him. He talks reason but he has blood in his eye. You know me, Mink, well enough to know that I won’t hold back from a quarrel or even a real fight over something that matters, but I don’t think Old Arm has the right way. When it comes to the lids his way won’t work—his way, as I see it, being to ask for what we want and then, when they don’t give it to us, as they certainly won’t, to resort first to strikes and then to letting things just get out of hand, in rioting and running wild. But the
y can run, too. Remember the Number Wheel, Mink? Ask White Lotus here sometime about Peace’s revolt—it takes more forethought than Old Arm has in his head to organize for blood, because when bloodshed is in prospect, men start behaving in unexpected patterns, brothers go back on brothers, and the ones who have been brave talkers suddenly turn into bad-breath informers. But it’s more than that that worries me. Something happened to me on the docks, at the hands of this very fellow Gentle, because I was indiscreet enough to speak out against Old Arm, and that experience made me realize that what Old Arm wants more than anything—more than jobs for white men—is power for himself. I tell you, Mink, I’m ready to try to do something about being a hog in a lid world, but I have to be shown a selfless white leader, a man who lives with all his heart for the race and for that alone. And one who has a better way than Old Arm’s, though I’ve no idea what that could be.”

  During this speech of Rock’s, Mink seemed to fall farther and farther into the agony of his craving for a pipe; his face became pasty, he began to perspire. And all he said when Rock had finished was: “You’ll never find such a man.”

  He left to return to the wharves.

  Later Rock and I decided to go out for a walk. Ai! Strolling in evening streets! This was what it was to have a good time. We sauntered along through the shopping areas of the Enclave, stopping now and then at a buzzing, chuckling group where I might spot an acquaintance from the filature or Rock a wharfman he had met; and there we would become friendly at once with other strangers. Flirtation was open, and one had a sense of adventure, as if taking a trip far from one’s dull home. We would move on, stop while I read aloud to Rock the bill of fare of a restaurant out from whose swinging gates savory smells would float, and then we would find another group and pause to joke and to appreciate handsome faces and flashing eyes. Gradually with a queer sensation of wading into deeper and deeper waters, we wandered into the more pretentious quarter of the Enclave, where the chinkties lived behind high walls in wide streets. And here, walking in the evening shadows airing a siskin in a bamboo cage, came Top Man alone. He did not seem displeased at meeting us, and I made a good start with him by saying that we had encountered Duke that morning at Silverfinger’s, and that we had found him just as Top Man had advertised; I said he looked “too fat for satin and too sleek for silk.”

  Then Rock joined in, saying he had been exposed to Top Man’s “other dear friend” about whom he’d spoken to us—Old Arm. Top Man snorted. Rock then openly told what had happened on the wharves. Top Man was delighted. He raised the birdcage to his face and made kissing sounds and said to his pet bird, “Did you hear that, darling, about that turtle Old Arm? What did you think of that?” I could see on Rock’s face that he was already wondering why he had confided in this foolish shroff, and rather mischievously I said, “After his job campaign, we’ll all be testing coins, Top Man! You’ll have to look lively to keep your position.”

  The shroff humorlessly said, “Nonsense. The campaign will fail. I’ll tell you something. The white race will never get anywhere by forming mobs. Individual effort—that’s the only way. Each man must set himself a goal—as I did, mind you: I practiced ten hours a day, and it wasn’t easy for me to get the coins to practice with, I’ll tell you that. I had to get my hands on perfect coins and defective ones, too. It wasn’t easy. And shroffing itself isn’t so easy—though I won’t complain, it’s a good rice bowl. Every white man for himself, I say, but it takes work. Patience, silence, swallowing puke. It takes time and work. And I don’t know whether your typical white scum can ever bring himself to work hard enough. He’d rather sit around and listen to Old Arm and dream about great days to come….”

  We parted on better terms with Top Man than we particularly wanted. As we walked home, Rock said, “I can’t stand doing nothing.”

  A Story of Sleeping Birds

  One evening when I returned home from the filature Rock was not at the puzzle box. I saw that he had not brought in the day’s rice allotment—for as an unemployed male he was on the municipal rice lines and was entitled to one tenth of a catty of cooked rice a day, which he and I stretched to serve two. There was no stigma attached to being on the lines, but Rock, whose only wealth in those days was time, hated the cost of a half afternoon he had to squander getting through the long line. I reasoned that he must have been out most of the day, at least since noon, and as I had lately been worrying about what he would begin to do in his idleness, it was with an anxious mind that I set about stripping a head of white cabbage for frying. I did not cook it. Rock still did not come in. I looked in at Moth’s compartment, but he was not there. I went back to wait for him. Tired and finger-sore from my day at the boiling basin, I began to doze, struggling against my weariness and having a feeling of being jostled by whispering figures in crazy half dreams.

  Then I heard a clatter in the puzzle-box stairwell, an every-night sound of homing drunks, but as Rock had not touched spirits for a long time (for he had not the money with which to buy them), I sighed and turned on my side on my mat.

  Our door, bursting open, struck my foot, and I started up into sitting position to see two big men looming over me. One had his arm flung over the other’s neck.

  “Hey, you bitch fox, look what I found!”

  O-mi-t’o-fu! It was Rock and Bare-Stick!

  I jumped to my feet and, in my surge of relief at the thought that Rock had not killed a man, I flew into a smothering hug of both men.

  “Want to see my scars?” Bare-Stick asked in the friendliest way.

  “No no no no!”

  Bare-Stick, pummeling Rock for my benefit, said, “I love the son of a turtle. I’ve forgiven him.”

  And Rock said, “But I haven’t forgiven him. I told him that if he laid one night-soil-filthy finger on my woman again I’d inscribe him again with a pork knife—only this time I’d do the job right.”

  Rock protecting me! Was he being ironical? I chose to think not.

  Rock had forgotten, or anyhow failed, to get the rice ration, so we had nothing to eat but white cabbage. I commandeered a brazier and fried some, searing the pale chunks swiftly in hot oil and turning them out into bowls crisp and underdone.

  Bare-Stick had been in the city only two days, and he was still in that bemusement of the first exposure that we had also felt. Freedom! Superior hogs! He had his little bag of copper coins, just as Rock had had, and they were going fast.

  As Bare-Stick asked questions about the city, I watched Rock for signs of the immense relief I supposed he must be feeling at the knowledge that he was not a murderer. Instead I saw shortness of temper, irritability, and hints of a greater frustration than ever, until—

  We asked about Groundnut, and Bare-Stick told this strange story:

  Provisioner Lung was the scourge of the lower hand of every village in the Box River valley. Whenever tenants fell behind in the payment of their extortionate rents, they would be tormented by visitors from The Hall, and at last their homes would be stripped, as ours had been, and Bare-Stick’s, too. When he had recovered from the stabbing, Bare-Stick had made an entirely fresh start—had reborrowed and rebuilt, and had quickly fallen behind again in his debt to Provisioner Lung. Indignation grew among the whites at Provisioner Lung’s ruthlessness and the severity of all the yellows in “keeping the pigs penned,” as they put it, but at the decrepit temple Groundnut and his new colleague, Runner, kept cautioning against attempts at overt revenge. “They are more cunning than we are,” Runner said. “They are cats, and we are thrushes.” The two priests talked much this way, of thrushes, and pipits, and magpies, for they seemed to have the winged creatures of the region under a spell. The temple had become an aviary. Groundnut was a natural warden of wild birds; Runner seemed to be profoundly their companion, directly in touch with them. A wild bird, a palpitation of color, was always to be seen on Runner’s shoulder or perched on a forefinger; the flocks of heaven had white
washed the temple roofs with their droppings. Runner and Groundnut had come to be known throughout the valley as the Bird Priests, and now it was that Runner drew an inspiration from his air-beating friends. News came one day of the final, insupportable hardship: Provisioner Lung had announced that he was raising all his rents, of every sort, by five per cent. A crowd of white villagers swarmed to the temple, and it appeared that this time there would be no way to curb their rage. Runner spoke to them, with blackbirds circling around overhead unafraid of the grumbling people, and said he would like to lead a troop—a “flock,” he called it—of ten men to go to Provisioner Lung to try to make him change his mind, and when Runner said he wanted ten of the strongest men in the valley to go with him, the mob cheered, because it seemed he had come round, at last, to the use of force as our only means of defending ourselves. Bare-Stick volunteered, but Groundnut rejected him, as not yet fully mended from the “inscription” Rock had incised in him. Off Runner and Groundnut went with their sinewy delegation, early the following morning, and with many others Bare-Stick waited at the temple for the group’s return. But they did not come back all day, and those who waited feared that they had been killed by yellow gendarmes or by The Hall. At the last of dusk those at the temple saw the “flock” winding its way back down the valley road, and when the strong men arrived at the temple it was nearly dark, but it was easy to see that they had not been in even the slightest physical scuffle. They were in a daze of weariness and befuddlement, as if the priests had them, like their wild birds, under a charm. Runner announced that the flock would return to Provisioner Lung’s at dawn; then he sent everyone home. What buzzing there was in all the lower hands that night! It came out that Runner and Groundnut had led their men to the gate of Provisioner Lung’s great commissary palace in Wang Family Big Gourd Village, and Runner had directed them to “perch” in a group, each man to stand on one leg, with the other leg drawn up, “like a bird asleep.” It had been painful work to stand that way, the men of the “flock” reported. Provisioner Lung’s gates had remained barred all day. No one had emerged; no one had entered. The villagers were astounded by this account. How had the men allowed themselves to be used in such an absurd way? “Wait,” the members of the flock stubbornly and repeatedly said. “Let’s see. Give it some time.” They were certainly hypnotized. And indeed the curiosity of the villagers was powerfully aroused. The next morning several additional men pressed Runner to allow them to join the delegation; they wanted to see for themselves. Runner took them, and the flock swelled to nineteen. All that day the men stood in silence, each on one leg, outside the merchant’s gate. A handful of yellows came to stare at the sleeping birds for a time, laughing at the idiotic behavior of the whites, and once Provisioner Lung himself came to the gate and peered out and slammed it shut again. On the third day, still more lower-handers volunteered, and this time Runner accepted Bare-Stick among others. Nearly fifty men “perched” that day. Yellows came to watch, and this time they did not laugh; Provisioner Lung’s gate remained locked. On the sixth day, Runner allowed some women to go. By the tenth day a crowd of three hundred poverty-stricken white tenants went to stand, each on one leg, outside Provisioner Lung’s compound, and a large crowd of yellows, too, turned out, and by this time the upper-handers were surly and disapproving. The Provisioner’s gate remained closed. By the fourteenth day the yellows were openly angry. Runner had daily instructed his flock what to do under every circumstance, and on the fifteenth day the sleeping birds were tested. A ceremonious troop of five masked men of The Hall rode up. They asked who the leader was. Silence; perching. Runner was buried in the flock. They repeated their question loudly several times. No response. They rode into the flock, which simply parted; those who were jostled put down their raised legs and moved aside and then resumed their perching. One of the masked men, in a fury, dismounted and began rushing at sleeping birds at the edge of the flock, pushing them, and knocking them down. Quietly those who were felled stood up and perched again. The men of The Hall rode off; their fiction may have been that they had not lost face because they were masked, but all the same they slapped their horses’ reins and kicked their ribs. The next day a large mob of yellows, risking bitter loss of their bare faces, rushed the flock, hurling stones and swinging staves. Several of Runner’s by now faithful followers were badly bruised and cut, but with a courage bred of lifelong suffering they managed to repress every sound and sign of pain, to recover balance, and go on and on and on and on with their quiet perching. The fury of the mob broke into shame. One could see the effect of years of mouthing the precept “Hurt no living creature.” These pliable one-legged things were as helpless as wingless birds—shame! shame! The yellow mob ebbed in silence. Afterward Provisioner Lung came out and glared at the big flock for a long time. Once he croaked, “Go back to work. You’re all getting farther and farther behind.” The flock perched silent; many of the sleeping birds had closed their eyes.