White Lotus

by John Hersey

  Provisioner Lung soon returned within. The next day there was a sign on his gate: Who started the rumor that rents were to be increased by five per cent? It is not true! It never was true! Go home!

  Idle Rock

  Rock began to lead an irregular life, independent from mine. This was what I had feared. Sometimes he was missing for two days at a stretch; often he came in late at night, after I was asleep. What strange reactions he was having to Bare-Stick’s return and to the story of Runner’s “perching”! I could tell that he had been stirred by Runner’s bizarre success, if it had been that, against Provisioner Lung; when we were together he kept reminiscing about Groundnut, not the priest but the beggar. Yet in his own life Rock seemed to be moving away from hope and determination.

  One evening I heard quarreling in another quarter of the puzzle box, and among the loud shouts I thought I distinguished the voices of Rock, Old Boxer, and Ox Balls. I was about to investigate when Rock irrupted into our compartment carrying a bundle—a large, dirty piece of coolie cloth slung baglike by its corners, containing a good rounded weight. He put it on the floor and untied the corners and opened out the cloth—a heap, a month’s heap of rice! The grains were dirty. “Wash it carefully,” Rock said. “There may be mule dung in it.”

  “Did you steal it from the rationing godown?” I could put no severity into my question, for I felt a surge of senseless pride in whatever outlawry against the yellows Rock had conspired in, and with the hollow of hunger that seemed always to be in me, I was glad to see the rice.

  “Remember Groundnut’s pigeons?” Rock said, and he gave out a deep-throated chortle that had in it the pleasure of the afternoon’s badness, whatever it had been, as well as an exultation before me, a youthful showing off, and even some of the harsh aggressiveness of the quarrel (the shouting I had heard) over the spoils. “I’ve been thinking about those pigeons—thought about them all afternoon. All that game with the pigeons was Groundnut’s invention, I suppose you knew that. Do you remember, did you ever watch, his hands around the body of one of those birds? Like nothing more than warm air on their feathers, his hands.” And so he went on about Groundnut; he did not speak Runner’s name.

  I asked him where he had stolen the rice, but at first he would not tell me.

  “Wash it and cook it and we’ll eat it. Don’t stint me. There’ll be more.”

  He waked me up in the night, however, to tell me about the theft.

  It had been a so-called sweeping. A group of five had been led by one of the teen-age tigers who lived in upstairs-upper-back-right: the leader, named Storm, and Rock, Old Boxer, Ox Balls, and another youth named Gate Boy, all long-sleevers save Rock. “These young shoats have thick bristles,” Rock said. “They don’t care for or about a single thing in this world. They’re pure city stock of whites—never noticed a leaf, or what’s in a human eye, for that matter. Ayah! What cold little eyes they have—pipe eyes. They’re getting on the pipe; smoke a little but aren’t hopelessly caught yet. But they already have that faraway look that I think of as three-quarters dead, though they speak of hogs who try to live clean as ‘the deads.’ They think they’re the only ones who are alive. And ai! They were alive this afternoon. Made me feel alive!”

  At near midday the five made their separate ways, each by each, Gate Boy alone on a bicycle, the others afoot, to one of the busiest commercial intersections of the Model Settlement, the crossing of West-of-the-Mountains Road and Southern Capital Road. Here traffic from the Bund, cargoes of all sorts loaded onto heavy carts and flatbed motor trucks, was creeping toward shops and godowns away from the river, at cross purposes to a swarm of smaller vehicles, wheelbarrows and donkey carts and rickshas and bicycles, traversing the noonday city. Horns, bells, cries of warning and alarm! On a railed pedestal at the center of the intersection stood a splendidly uniformed policeman with crossed white shoulder straps and three clinking medals. This satrap sawed at the air with his pure-white gauntlets, and made gestures of refusing, punching, tickling, beckoning, swinging as if at enemies, and swatting flies that were not there, all the while twirping at a brass whistle and swiveling on paramilitary hips now to the city’s longitudes, now to its latitudes—ai, dancer of the law! But futile. He made no sense of the onrushing vehicular floods. He was in a bad temper. Coolies, drivers, cartmen, cyclists, ricksha boys—all were in the same vile humor of haste and near-catastrophe.

  Just as the four pedestrians were arriving at the crossing, walking separately on either side of Southern Capital Road, approaching West-of-the-Mountains Road from the direction of the river, and bracketing the main flow of Bund traffic, in the throat of which, just then, there happened to be three large motor vans in tandem loaded with great hills of burlap bags filled with rice—just at that moment there was a tinkling crash on the far side of the intersection, followed by a chorus of abusive shouts and a sharp trilling of the traffic policeman’s whistle. A crowd rallied at once, of pedestrians, drivers, carters, ricksha boys, and passengers. The street was blocked. The shouting rose on a crescendo like that of a quarrel of many curlews. The policeman leaped down from his stand and stormed upstream.

  It seemed that over there a stupid cyclist (our Gate Boy) had cut sharply across the bows of an oxcart, causing it to veer one of its massive hubs into the headlight of a motor truck. The two vehicles were now mated in a shameless public embrace.

  As soon as the policeman was swallowed deep into the swarm of onlookers, the team of four pedestrians on the river side of the intersection darted out into the roadway. Knives twinkled out from beneath their tunics. Five strokes of four blades, twenty slit bags. A pretty rapids and fall of rice onto the street. Now clever Gate Boy, who had taken a moment of wild argument between the drivers of the miscegenating oxcart and truck to duck out through the audience, bike and all, joined the others. Next to where the rice showered two men spread cloths, the other three used the heels of their hands to sweep heaps of grains onto them. They filled five cloths, tucked them up, and scattered swiftly in five directions.

  “Now I know,” Rock said at the end, “why they call themselves tigers. They really are.”

  He stretched luxuriously, yawned, and fell asleep, and I was left awake to think about the direction in which my energetic Rock was moving.

  Rock sold some of the rice, and he hid the money. Said he was going to buy a long-sleeved tunic when he had saved enough.

  Another evening, coming in late again, he was in a talkative mood. “I’m attracted to opium,” he said. “I was with Mink this afternoon. We took a walk down along the Bund. What a crowd of boats in the anchorage I Beggar boats and fishing boats were swarming along the edge of the embankment. Out in the center of the stream the junks were anchored, tier on tier of them. Mink knew them all: The plain ones from right here in Up-from-the-Sea with brown oiled wood. Foochow junks—high sterns with gay paintings in primary colors; they had masses of long poles slung outboard at each side—how could they steer at sea? Ningpo junks, with sinister black hulls, and red and green paintings on the topsides—little eyes painted on the bow. But Mink was taking me along through all this to show me something else farther along: four unsightly dismasted vessels anchored in a row, well out. The opium hulks, he said. They’re a safe place for opium to be kept as it’s imported, registered, taxed, and bonded. The Monkey, the Dart, the Valiant, the Fair Wind. He said the Valiant had been a trading junk that had been dismasted off the Saddles. They had to use hulks, Mink said—if they tried to bond the stuff ashore the customs shed would be burgled, stormed, set fire to! I wish you could have seen Mink’s eyes when he was gazing at the barges. What a look of love! I envy a man with that much passion. How wonderful to believe in one thing, and one thing alone, with every fiber of your mind and being. He told me about what it’s like to get a lamp on—the animation, the sense of kinship with the man on the next divan, the suspension of time, the sweet talk, all pain gone, hunger gone, poverty gone, whitene
ss gone. Mink is thin; the pipe takes the place of food for him. But he has a sweetness in his eye now—he has no shame about foolish things he did in the past, he just floats along from pipe to pipe. His eyes looking at those ugly hulks anchored out there in the brown water! I tell you, I envied him. I’m attracted to it. I am.”

  I had been cooking Rock a late meal, squatting. Now I was on my hands and knees, facing him. “Don’t you dare even try it! Not once! Never! It washes all the guts out of a man. Be like Mink? You’re a man, Rock!” I was screaming at him.

  He spread his hands out to stop my tirade. He was smiling like a grandfather at a grandchild’s tantrum….

  There were nights when Rock did not come home at all. What sleeping I did on those nights was alert; I started up from oblivion at the slightest sound. My worrying and my weariness were at odds all the time.

  Then there came a stretch of several days—no Rock. I had no daylight during which to hunt for him, and I could only wait.

  On the fourth evening when I came home from the filature he was there. His face was a pulp. Both eyes had been blacked. His cheek was bruised. His lip was cut, but he managed to smile, and he said, “What you see isn’t all, little mouse.”

  “Who did it?”

  “Turtle police.”

  I undressed him. There were horrible bruises all over his body. A woman weaver lived in the former kitchen downstairs, and I went down and begged some flax tow from her, and I made several cold compresses for the worst of Rock’s black-and-blue welts. And I felt a familiar anger, and with it the same tender unskilled nurse-love as once long ago—for Dolphin in the slaves’ sick-house, with the ancient swindle of a priest lounging in the shade by the door. I had no time to regret the past; I could only suffer it as a reinforcement of the present: I was most angry now, and most tender.

  It had been folly, Rock admitted—but fun, too, at first. The idea had been Gate Boy’s. It seemed that some gangs of yellow youths, Fukien rubbish who lived near the south flank of the Enclave, had been stealing vegetables from white truckers who had their stands in that quarter of the white section. Gate Boy suggested setting an ambush for one of those raids. Seven tigers, including Old Boxer, Ox Balls, Storm, and Rock (yes, he called himself a tiger now, though he still could not afford a long-sleeved tunic), had picked their station and with the grateful blessings of an often victimized trucker had tucked themselves into blind spots near the open display. They had had to wait overnight. The second afternoon the yellow robbers came—five gaunt, dirty yellow boys, about twenty years old. The tigers jumped too soon, for they could not wait to see the trucker hurt, and the rubbish ran and it was only outside the Enclave that the tigers caught them. They began a thorough dusting. “I cannot tell you,” Rock said, “what the sensation is, exactly, when you smack a yellow face with your fist. It’s very queer. I wonder if this is it?—you’re letting a whole lot of time out through your skin. Not exactly time. Some kind of pressure. Has to do with time, though—something that made you old long before you should have been.” (But, Rock! Rock! Were you not against Old Arm? How did you get into this senseless fight?) Rock said that in the melee he felt twice as strong as ever before. Then—another swarm. Police. An alarm had apparently been raised in the Enclave, because these turned out to be dirt-of-dirt—Enclave policemen. The public show was a model of yellow propriety: the fight was stopped, the tigers were all arrested, the rubbish were all released.

  “They took us to Old Barrier House,” Rock said. “You’ve seen it, haven’t you? No? It’s a bold building made of stone, thick walls—out in the Model Settlement, on their ground—with Moslem arches and a central tower from which guards can watch every wink and gob of spit in the whole compound. They took us in past the iron exercise cages where, it being afternoon, the prisoners—almost all hogs—were being aired; and how they jeered us: for getting caught! Ayah, the turtles ‘questioned’ us. Ayah, yes….”

  But Rock did not describe the beatings, he talked only about one of the policemen who had taken part in them.

  “…For some reason he concentrated on me. He was fattish—but one of those fat men who remain strong without keeping fit; and he had a broad face with beads of sweat popping out on it. The harder he worked on me, the more friendly and merciful he looked. I kept up my courage by thinking about him. I tried to see things his way: ‘Look,’ I said to myself, ‘he’s been brought up to think all whites are swine. He’s had no education. He sees plenty of whites, but they’re all thieves, street vixens, whore matrons, pimps, cutpurses—“that’s what pigs are like”—I can hear him. At best he’s had dealings with some of their “good hogs”—the squealers, the slimy cowards who inform on their fellow whites, and most of them are shadies who trade informing for free passage. “So”—says my friend—“give this pig a pounding: this’ll teach him about crime. This is the only way to keep the pigs in their pen where they belong. Jail,” he says, “won’t correct anything. Ai, pigs like jail. Old Barrier means roof and steady rice and jolly company. So, let me give it to this dirty pig….” ’ But after I tried to see things his way awhile, I thought, ‘Who is this bastard of a turtle? I wonder what made him want to be a policeman in the first place. No doubt he was Fukien rubbish, or the next thing to it, to begin with—listen to the turdy grammar he uses—and now that he’s big he has the authority to swing one of those, one of those…Ai! The bastard is paying off his own fear—that’s what the sweat is about—he’s afraid of me. The miserable son of a turtle. Look, he can’t stop. He’s started on me and he can’t stop. Shall I say something? Threaten him? “I’ll get you when I’m out of here.” No. That would only stretch it out. Look at those pressed lips! Is the bastard trying to squeeze out a smile?…’ ”

  I said to myself: I will have to take Rock in hand. No long sleeves.

  At My Expense

  I held the purse strings. One evening when I came home from work Rock, now recovered from his police markings, was waiting for me, and there was what seemed to me a forced cheerfulness in his greeting.

  “Let’s go out and have some chiao-tzus,” he said. “I could put down some dumplings.”

  His tone made me uneasy, and I had a hunch I should check some coppers I had hidden among folded clothes in the crate we used for a chest, and I said, in a hard voice, “You mean you’re sick of rice and white cabbage, and you’re sick of this flea box. You’re sick of the miserable food I cook after I’ve worked eleven hours at the basins.”

  Then I had a terrible moment of feeling that both he and I barely managed to avoid adding: And he was sick of me.

  “All right,” I said, with a precipitate change of attitude. “I’ll have to get into my gown.”