White Lotus

by John Hersey

  We climbed into the upper part of the Race Club stand and sat on satin-cushioned, squarish chairs. There were several white women with young yellow men in the crowd near us, and I recognized a number of white men, too, in a large all-male party—they were the “bigs” of the Forgetfulness Hong whom Lacquerer had pointed out to me the night of the reception for Dogtooth.

  Before us spread the great irregular curve of the track, which was pear-shaped rather than oval. The dusty bed of the track had been sprinkled by water carts and leveled with harrows; the fragrance of the damp earth rose to our level, and the pattern of the running harrow teeth was sharp in the sunlight. A gentle breeze. The wafted colors of silk gowns, the lazy flags of the stable owners, the sweet undulations of the chartreuse skirts of the weeping willows beyond the course!

  The first race, Han told me, was to be a mile-and-a-quarter run for griffins—untried, newly broken Mongolian ponies that had never raced before. How jolly these griffin races were, Han said. These ponies were immensely strong. Sometimes they swerved and bolted. Threw their riders. Could not be stopped and ran round and round the track for twenty miles while everyone laughed his head off!

  Now the nervous ponies—shaggy, short-legged, round-bellied beasts with powerful shoulders and thighs—were being walked out on bridles held by riders on lethargic lead horses. The jockeys, all yellow boys, were dressed in silk tunics and trousers exactly like some of the old-fashioned slave uniforms of the Northern Capital. The Race Club’s gambling brokers, in crimson gowns piped with black, circulated in the crowd taking bets, and Han put down five taels on a chunky filly named Water Song. The colors, Han’s flashing eyes, the murmur of anticipation all around—how lucky I was to be alive at precisely this place and time!

  The ponies, shying and snorting, were held at the starting post by grooms. Water Song—the brown-and-white one, third from the right; the rider’s colors, silver and blue.

  The starter’s banner drops! The pack leaps forward. One pony rears high, spins around, and runs the wrong way. The jockeys’ glistening tunics flap in the wind of speed. Water Song is caught in a press of the leaders. Leather Fetlocks is ahead. Han is holding both my hands. Ha, the crowd shouts!

  At this moment I have a wish, the burning intensity of which is as powerful as the most urgent wishes of my childhood: that all this could stop exactly where it stands, be frozen in its uttermost brilliance, never change, never fade—an eternity of beating heart and tingling skin. Ayah, I wrench my hands away from Han’s and close my small fists and beat against the speed of the race, try to stop it, stop it, stop it. But the ponies fly, the breeze snaps the flags, the throat of the crowd roars for victory….

  It was all over before my wish had time to fade. How did it come out? What horse won, Han? Where was Water Song?

  Han was disgusted. His filly had finished in the ruck.

  A laugh from the crowd: Here at last came the horse that had caracoled and started in the wrong direction.

  But my wish had been denied me, and I did not feel like laughing. I began to see certain things with a sunstruck clarity—that there were upper and lower sections in the Race Club pavilion, divided by a wide aisle, and that there were distinctly two qualities in the crowd. Below the aisle, not a single white. There below the aisle were the really rich, dressed in perfection of the sort that only good money could buy, the owners of ponies, the owners no doubt of filatures, too. Up here was a shadier class. I could see that. I recognized Snow Pollen, known to me as a prostitute, with a young yellow man, not far away. And there in the distance was Duke—where was his haughtiness, as he played lapdog to some underling of the Forgetfulness Hong, running here and there to place a bet and buy a bowl of tea for the man? And Han?—a discarded son of a powerful father who was above going to the Race Club. Ai, ai, why had everything not stopped in all its vividness in the midst of the race?

  After the second race the entire pavilion emptied as the crowd went out for a ritual of leg-stretching. While we were descending the Race Club steps I began to hear a wild altercation ahead and below. A white ricksha boy, who had brought a latecomer to the races, was raising the usual howl for more money. This was standard practice. There were no set fares, there were not even “understood” fares, for ricksha rides in Up-from-the-Sea. The passenger merely gave the ricksha boy as much, or as little, as he thought he should, or could. The coolie always cried out, with a show of outrage, for more, trying to shame or embarrass the client into a grudging extra copper or two.

  There was a raw stridency to the ricksha boy’s protests that troubled me. I looked away but could not shut out the disturbing sound. I felt, for a moment, mortified at the thought that a white was making such an unseemly racket at this of all places; then I was angry with myself for wanting the white man to be satisfied with the cheating pittance he had doubtless been given, for it was well known that the richest yellows paid the meanest fares. How, after all, did the rich get rich? I saw the ricksha; it was a brown beauty with highly polished brass fittings—suitable for dignified entry to the Race Club steps. How that voice haunted me! The coolie was following the passenger up those steps, plucking at the man’s gown, calling out in an appalling wail against callousness, unfairness, inhumanity.

  Then my heart plummeted. I looked right at the ricksha-puller for the first time and saw that sweat was pouring down his face, and that he was Rock.

  At that moment I saw where I was. I saw that I had been dragged down to the lowest class of human beings, the class of the scum of the Enclave, of the dirty shop-back temples, of secondhand stores, taverns, cheap theatricals, boiled hands, overcrowded puzzle boxes, the class—ah, yes—of pimps, cutpurses, pipe addicts, and whores. How was I not a whore? Did it make any difference whether Han paid me in cash or in Lin Yi gowns? Snow Pollen and I at the races!

  I turned, fearful that Rock, even in his furious preoccupation, might see me, and walked up the steps again. I held myself back from running; he would be all the more apt to see me if I ran. Han hurried up after me, and when we were safely out of sight, and when at last Rock’s abusive, whining shouts ceased, I turned. Han’s kind face was drawn, and he gently said, “Is something wrong? Did I say or do something wrong?”

  I put a hand on his arm and said, “No, Han, I just wanted to get out of the sun.”

  “But I have the parasol. Why didn’t you tell me the sun bothered you?”

  The Uses of Selfishness

  At the filature the next day I had a feeling of coming back from the moon. My little colleague Pigeon, beyond the wire mesh from my basin, suddenly seemed the truest person I knew, and when I thought of her stanch fidelity to her worthless mother, who was fast wasting on the pipe, and her adoration of her older brother, the chit-sorter, Little Lizard, and her endurance and unwavering courage and astonishing accommodation to me—always standing there, frail stalk, respectfully waiting for me to make my mood felt before she would form her own for the day—I wanted to ask her forgiveness for my folly of recent weeks, my unfaithfulness to all that she meant to me, and was in me. I had tried to lead two lives. That was over. I had vomited all night. I had spit up salted food, spit up gentle Han, spit up Lacquerer, spit up pretending to yellow standards. And I knew what I must do at once, that very day if I could find a way: I must go to Runner.

  “Tell me another story about Little Lizard.”

  With what clarity Pigeon responded to my revived interest in her life—and, it must have seemed to her, in my own! For a long time I must have been taciturn and moody at work. Off she brightly rattled:

  Ai, the other day Little Lizard had told a falsehood in the form of a maze. It seemed that he was a master liar. It was a commonplace thing to deceive the lids—every white had to do that every day. But Little Lizard even loved to lie to his own kind. On a sharp-breezed occasion a few days before, he had wanted to take a part of the afternoon off to go with a friend to the piglets’ kite ground, a barren
field beyond the ricksha-pullers’ mud city, and he was obliged to lie himself away from work at his basket. Little Lizard worked at one of the larger baskets, and his job was to count the blocks of not-yet-sold chits as they arrived from the Forgetfulness Hong printeries; at this basket were eight clerks, three counting boys, and twenty chit-runners. Seeing the wind whirl the dust off the bricks in the courtyard of the basket, Little Lizard could not wait any longer to fulfill his desire, and he went to the Number One Clerk and told with prodigious rapidity a lie that, being a puzzle and offering numerous alternative paths to solution (and escape), was actually a maze.

  “My count is off. On this afternoon’s goat block the count is off by nearly forty chits. Maybe I’ve counted wrong, but I’ve counted four times. It’s possible that part of this pad of the goat block was put in the wrong consignment at the printery, because when my first count was wrong I asked the printery cart boy, and he said the sorter over there—this sorter’s wife has a wen on her neck, and the cart boy says he’s worried, makes all sorts of mistakes—the sorter might have confused goat and lamb; but the cart boy said his donkey was bitten on the ham by a mule fly, on Southern Capital Road this side of the granery, and the ass kicked the cart and some of the chits might have been shaken right out of the box, though he doubts it, but when I came in this morning I saw one of the runners, I don’t want to name him to you, Old First, because I might be wrong about this, but I know what district he works—I thought he was fumbling around the new consignment while the cart boy was unloading it; you know how they’ll steal chits if they can. When the consignment was divided for delivery to the sub-baskets and for doling out to the runners, this part of this pad might have been sent over to the sub-basket at Hat-head the carpenter’s, or it might have been sent back to the printery by mistake with the unsold returns, and the sorter with a wife with a wen might have caught it and set it aside, but this pad is double-inside, so the chits are highest value—you follow me?—and so they should have been stacked at the left rear of the locked room, but I remember when I came in this morning that you told me to take the front right-hand stack—do you recall? So maybe…”

  On went the swift flood. I was giggling. Pigeon’s eyes flashed as she told about her brother, the genius at twisting his tongue. At last the chief clerk had started flapping his hands and Little Lizard had begun asking what, beyond one further recount, the clerk wanted him to do—run to the printery and check up on the sorter?—search Hat-head’s basket?—find the suspected runner in his district and see whether he had any of the missing chits?—find the cart boy to see if they were still on his cart? There were a dozen ways to turn in the maze.

  In short, Little Lizard went kiting.

  (He enjoyed it, too, complacent in the knowledge that all the time the count had been square; the chits were in the locked room; he would turn them up, triumphantly, on his return.)

  The value of this story to me was that it made me realize I must lie to Old Frog by midafternoon, in order to have time to go to Runner and Groundnut. I could not wait ten days, for my next holiday, to see Runner. I must he well, too—well enough so Old Frog would keep my basin for me overnight and not hire another woman to take my place at once.

  Over the weeks I had come to see that despite her bluster and primitive cruelty Old Frog had a picture of herself as a sentimental matron; the little girls standing at the long row of dissolving basins were all her dear children. Every stroke of Old Frog’s harsh discipline was followed by a series of loving pats; the time for me to catch her for my purpose was right after one of her shocking punishments. Fragile Pigeon was one of her special favorites. I had watched the shrewd child, more than once, ask Old Frog for advice on some matter having nothing to do with the work at the basins, some home crisis; Old Frog had responded with an excess of feeling, a grotesque yet touching mock motherliness.

  So I asked Pigeon’s help and made a plan with her.

  Old Frog gave us our chance in due course. Near us she slapped a careless child, then made her way toward us.

  What a little devil of an actress Pigeon was! By the time Old Frog reached our basins Pigeon had somehow worked herself into tears. She turned her streaked face to Old Frog, who put a hand on her shoulder and asked whatever the matter was. With a catch in her throat, Pigeon pointed to me and asked Old Frog to talk to me.

  Old Frog leaned forward to the mesh and asked me what Pigeon’s trouble was.

  Pigeon’s mother, I said (knowing that Old Frog knew she was a hopeless pipe case), had been evicted from a hut in the ricksha mud city. Pigeon must find another hut for the family before dark; I wanted to help her do it. Pigeon was loyal to her basin—she had been at the same basin for more than a year—and she hesitated, I said, to ask Old Frog for the rest of the afternoon off for the two of us. Could she let us go?

  Old Frog gave me a piercing look, but a well-timed sniffle from Pigeon drove thoughts of possible deceit from Old Frog’s mind. She said we could go.

  I cleared my throat. (We needed insurance against Old Frog’s regretting her softness and giving our basins, forever, to others.) Even in ricksha town, I said, the landlords demanded key money. Not much. Usually thirty to thirty-five coppers. I said I had promised to give Pigeon my wages for this day, but my twelve and her seven would not be enough. Would she be an old good and let us each have the next day’s wages in advance, to piece out the key money?

  I believe my saying that I was giving my pay to Pigeon was what pushed Old Frog over the edge, against her natural feelings, into generosity. She was a little jealous I She not only excused us; she let us have the advances.

  Ai, this was splendid: I was free to go to Runner; Pigeon had the rest of the afternoon off; and Old Frog, having staked us to the next day’s pay, was committed to keeping our basins for us.

  I told Pigeon, as we parted outside the filature, not to throw her coppers away; there’d be no more the next day. And I asked her how she managed to cry so easily at a moment when tears had such value.

  “By imagining that what you were going to say was true,” she said. “It was easy to believe, you know.”

  I feelingly thanked her, and she, using the genteel yellow formula, told me not to behave like a guest.

  I hurried to the Enclave, to the shoe shop behind which Runner and Groundnut had their temple. I went around back, through filthy alleys. There was no mistaking the postern gate of the temple, for it was surrounded by a swarm of beggars. Ai, yes, Groundnut the beggar, the beggars’ patron! Jug was there, the leper. He approached me, whispering. I remembered, in the Northern Capital, Groundnut’s scabrous crown, his oozing eye—but Jug’s disease was surely not a sham; one could add to his face but he could not take away from it. I drew back from Jug in revulsion and guilt, for I had two days’ pay in my purse, and I dared not give Jug a copper for fear of showing the other beggars how much I had.

  As I turned away I heard Jug murmur, “Ayah, I was a house slave and you were a field slave”—meaning by this to ask me: Are you so hard that you can’t forgive the distant past? Hooo—I did remember the ugly way the dandy Jug had teased Moth and me by the stone washtubs in the house slaves’ compound that day long ago at Yen’s. How hard was I?

  The temple within was just as Round Knees had described it: shabby, unkempt, in tune with the sorriest puzzle boxes. Birds were nesting among the idols in the first room I entered; a few ragged women were worshipping—as well as, to my surprise, a trio of glossy-coated tigers, who laughed between kowtows in a merriment of embarrassment and ill-hidden hope.

  I found Groundnut in the second chamber. He gave a kind of bounce at seeing me, folded me in an unpriestly hug, and led me for a private talk to the tiny room where he slept—a barren bed and a score of cages. He lived, no doubt of it, in utter simplicity. I found the many birds oppressive: the chippering, the odor, the click of claws on perches, the many glittering eyes.

  He asked me why I had
come. Bare-Stick had told him about his chats with me.

  I said I wasn’t sure what had made me come.

  “Are you looking for Rock?”

  “No. Why? Is he looking for me?”

  “He’s looking for trouble, if you ask me. He came in here one day—low.”

  There were pouches under Groundnut’s eyes; he moved his hands to a cage and adjusted a cuttlebone. Something languid had crept into him—perhaps it was the seriousness of which Bare-Stick had spoken—and I felt that a scrofulous beggar was no longer cringing and whining so close beneath the cheerful skin. He began to talk about Runner and “the method,” and Groundnut’s pomposity that had so crushed Rock in those last days in the village seemed quite gone. “Look at the whites here in this Enclave. They’re never going to get any betterment that they don’t win for themselves.” He gave me an extended narrative of the flock perching at Provisioner Lung’s gate. He was sincere, to be sure. I remembered the single-mindedness with which, upon taking up priesthood, he had carried on his blatant drive for edible offerings, his “Keep them ignorant,” his essential selfishness. Now his tone was altruistic and brotherly—for the race, for the poor, for the helpless beggar, for the workman without work, for the lame and weak—and I had a strong sense of his moral debt to Runner.

  I asked if I could talk with Runner, and Groundnut took me to the entrance to the courtyard beyond, and there I saw the other priest airing a pair of pipits. He was holding the cage high and getting the birds in a mood to sing by making a squeaking noise with pressed lips. The birds flashed from perch to perch. Runner’s face, tilted up to the cage, had that look of inner quiet I had seen on our first meeting, the after-waves of which had come over me, from time to time, ever since. He opened the door of the cage and the birds darted out, and up, and climbed into the sky on the delicate spiral silver ladders of their joy, and Runner gazed up at them, as if the notes of song condensed in the air as the birds uttered them and fell back in a cool rain on his face.