by John Hersey
The five bosses of the Syndicate were seated under a purple awning appliquéd with silver devices, on ornate gilded sofas that were placed on a carpet of deep blue silk. Each of the five rested one foot on the back of a crouching woman, and a woman in a long silk gown held a golden spittoon for each, and other women in diaphanous pantaloons, with silver manillas all up their arms, fanned them, and still others kept flies away with long horsehair whisks that moved like curling smoke.
I wondered: Was this really what the yellows were like? Could they be so vulgar, so pretentious, so cruel?
I was astonished, daring at last to look at Themselves, to see that they were just men. Four out of five bald.
Of course I knew them from pictures in the papers: Gruenkopf, Shannon, Bink, Sammerfield, Rune. Bink, yes, pock-marked. Gruenkopf, Shannon, and Sammerfield sucking on cigars. All in business suits and horn-rimmed glasses—frightful crooks in respectable guise.
My alarm was intensified now by the entrance of Mort Blain, with his huge adviser, his lawyer, his bodyguard, and several of his dark-suited raiders, for their approach to the quintumvirate of the Syndicate was so abject that one could not help dreading the capabilities behind those five sets of heavy horn-rims. These raiders, so awesome in recent days to us their captives, crawled literally on their bellies the whole breadth of the paved patio, pinstripe and Palm-Beach no better than mop-rag and dustcloth, until they lay directly before the bosses of the Syndicate. At a snap of Bink’s fingers they rose to a kneeling position, and attendants gave to them and, later, to others, including our own Kid Schlepp and Johnno Pye, who had served as all too willing guides, rich gifts as rewards for their roles in these raids.
Next, to a continuous tattoo of snare drums, raiders entered the patio carrying the heads they had brought back with them, to claim bounty, and at the sight of the first grisly burden I felt as if the heat of the sun were pressing on my own head like a flatiron; I thought I would die. I looked fixedly at the swollen feet of the woman kneeling before me; dust lay in cobweb lines in the wrinkles of her soles. The transactions seemed to take forever; I heard the telling out of dollars to each decapitator. I could think of nothing but my solid-hearted father, his broad benign face, his smile like food to me, and I wanted the sun’s iron to press me into oblivion.
Now we went through a new sorting. We were driven on our knees in our filthy, dusty nightgowns and pajamas up a channel formed by lawyers on one side and raiders on the other, and we passed in review before the five men, one or another of whom occasionally raised a finger, at which a captive was set aside in a group destined, I guessed, for the farms of the Syndicate. Our thin newsdealer was taken out of the line just ahead of me. Poor, sleepy Plimpton!—would they send him to work on a farm?
The roll of the drums had now ceased, and there was no sound at all, except once when a small boy from our village whimpered with fear till his mother clapped her hand over his mouth.
I was unchosen. So was Agatha. We were driven back to our crowded corner.
When the selection was over, a noisy argument broke out among the five in the silky pavilion. I saw the mighty Sammerfield rail against Bink like a garage mechanic in a village row. Suddenly the great Mort Blain was thrust forward by soldiers, was stripped of his pinstripe and all his clothes but his one-piece shoulder-strap B.V.D.’s—presumably to reduce him to our level of shame—and he was unceremoniously thrust along on hands and knees, with a yellow-style sword pinking his Pierce-Arrow-softened buttocks, into our captives’ corner.
Then we were led away to the movie-theater parking lot where we had been penned to pass the previous night under the open sky. Raiders who had leaped at Mort Blain’s slightest whisper along the road from our village now treated him with no less, but no more, contempt than they bestowed on common captives. We settled down for the night. Agatha and I lay in each other’s arms, exhausted with our daylong fright. We were told nothing.
The March of the Coffle
We arose with the sun, and some of us were strung in a coffle to march we knew not where. We were two hundred seventy-five captives, more or less, with a company of the Syndicate’s special “police”—in robin’s-egg blue and Sam Browne belts—to guard us, and a man, to whom the cops referred as Mr. Slattee, in charge.
The coffle was a series of strings of captives in single file, men first. I saw Gabriel in the line, his weight on one leg, a hip slung out, with his air of scornful indifference, his left ankle made fast by a length of chain to the left leg of the man ahead of him, his right foot fettered to that of the man behind. We women followed, tied to each other, a long pace apart, with leather thongs around our necks. My mother was left behind; we had no chance to say goodbye. Kathy Blaw was just ahead of me, Agatha next after me. Each of us, man and woman alike, was given a burden—some item of plunder for trade. Each man, besides, had to keep one of his loops of chain off the ground to make walking possible. Two Ford pickup trucks were loaded with foodstuffs for our journey.
As we were driven out of the Syndicate’s winter resort I felt a sadness and fear deeper than anything I had known in the previous days, and I was forced to realize that despair is not like a well, which has a hard bottom at last. All my family ties—my living links with the golden Prewar Epoch—were torn away from me.
The citizens of Palm Springs scarcely glanced at us as we walked along, our only music now the rhythmic clinking of the men’s chains, for the men were forced to keep in step in order to move at all. The festive feeling Agatha and I had had, the excited curiosity of our march toward Palm Springs, when we had had with us the Pierce Arrow cabriolet, the Packard as fecund with tunes as a jukebox, the raiders in their sinister suits—these, with their particular horror and thrill, were gone. Our guards, on incessantly puttering motorcycles with sidecars, were—robin’s-egg blue be damned—surly men who did not hesitate to use their nightsticks; Mr. Slattee was a hard veteran who rode atop the cab of one of the pickup trucks surveying our line with jackal eyes.
Mort Blain, chief raider emeritus, who had ridden in curtained splendor to Palm Springs, was in B.V.D.’s and chains. His little melon belly bulged under the netlike material of his underwear. In the movie parking lot the night before, a report had hissed about that Blain’s crime was that he had forgotten to film the beheadings in our village; this had caused Sam Sammerfield’s peasant rage. The great Mort looked not only undistinguished now, but cowardly, servile, and unable to care for himself. He seemed disgusting. One of our desert proverbs said, “When children see an eagle draggled by the rain, they say it’s a vulture.”
Agatha would not speak; she seemed like a plant wilting of thirst.
Her father, the mayor, was with us; in the parking lot we had looked to him to procure some word of our fate, even perhaps some amelioration of it, but he had stared at the ground like a sick dog. He walked now with listless steps.
Beyond the outskirts of the town we tried to learn from the cops where they were taking us, but they, steeped in the prudent secretiveness of all of our people since the defeat—“never tell more than half that you know,” said the gopher in one of Kathy Blaw’s tales—would only say that we were going to have “a healthy walk.”
Kathy Blaw called out in the raucous voice she had sometimes used at the climax of a story, chilling us to the marrow, that we were going to be slaughtered and minced and eaten with chopsticks in a sweet-and-sour sauce by men with yellow skins. A cop slapped her hard with the flat of his hand. Kathy Blaw glared at him.
We walked all that day, and all the next, past peaceful California hamlets, along the sun-drenched valley, with the San Jacinto range on our left and the San Bernardinos on our right. At night the soldiers chained the men’s hands to necklaces of fetters. We slept in the open.
On the third day we left the highway—apparently our captors did not want the coastal Californians to see human beings in chains and thongs—and followed an unpaved truck tra
il into tiers of hills on the northern side of the valley. We left behind all signs of men. Over the clank of the chains and the muttering of the motorcycles we heard faraway barking—coyotes?—and now and then, during halts, we heard distant crashing in the underbrush—wildcats? mountain lions? Horrible lizards and toads abounded. That night we camped in a glade, with the terrors of the wild hills all around us. I tried in vain to shut out of my mind Agatha’s constant babbling about hairy spiders and rustling scorpions. I clutched tight to my locket of the martyr of Guevavi, lest it be stolen from me. Many of the women, with sunburnt shoulders and lacerated feet, moaned awake and asleep.
Suddenly, in the dark, a flash of communal panic roused us all, and there was a hysterical chattering among our whole coffle, for the bizarre announcement Kathy Blaw had made from out of our postwar folklore (it couldn’t be true but it could), that we were to be devoured by yellow-skinned people, caught among us, all at once, like a telegraphic epidemic sickness. The women all began to weep. We were desperately afraid because we felt we had no means of seeking safety through worship: our faraway churches were burned down, and we had no priests or preachers. Who could efficaciously lead us in prayer? The cops tried to whack us into silence, but our fears were not easily stilled in this hollow surrounded by looming shoulders of pinyon pine.
The next day was hard. We had slept little. The men were beginning to limp, lamed by their irons, even though the fetters were alternated from ankle to ankle each night. Now that we were in wild country Mr. Slattee removed the thongs from the necks of the women, for we were so fearful of our surroundings that we kept in a tight band anyway.
Here Kathy Blaw—such an irritable, sharp, and frightening woman back at home, the more terrifying to us who were young because she carried in her head the whole of the mythlike past from before the Yellow War—turned her reluctant attention to Agatha, who was so weak that Mr. Slattee had excused her from carrying a packet. My friend, who had always been so wily, mischievous, and self-interested, grew empty-eyed and pinguidly limp. Mrs. Blaw and I walked on either side of her, trying to support her while carrying loads of our own.
At dusk—and all through the night, I suppose—Agatha lay with her eyes open. At dawn she refused to eat. Halfway through the morning, as we began to descend from the hills through a fertile canyon in which ash-willows, stunted sycamores, and gnarled live oaks at least gave us shade, we women were attacked by a swarm of bees, and Agatha, indifferent to her surroundings, too feeble to dart away through bushes as most of us did, to get away from the frenzied insects, was severely stung. The coffle halted while Kathy Blaw picked out the stings and poulticed Agatha with the old remedy of cigarette tobacco, grudgingly granted by Mr. Slattee, and spit. Agatha refused to go on. She said with a sudden flaring up of spirit that she would never stand up again.
Mr. Slattee ordered soldiers to apply willow switches, and Agatha, though accustomed to the frequent disciplinary whippings that had been the lot of every post-defeat child in our village, soon could stand no more, and she struggled to her feet, and we moved on.
In the afternoon, when we had reached more level ground, Agatha uttered a single cry, as of surprise, and tried to run away into the undergrowth, but she was too weak, and she fell not far from the path. She was punished again, but this time she did not react. Mr. Slattee, who could not order Agatha to be carried on one of the pickups, because a dozen older women needed to ride nearly as badly as the fat girl and would surely have malingered if they had seen a single rider, ordered a stretcher made of willow splints, to which Agatha’s body was lashed with some of the leather thongs, and she was carried by pairs of male prisoners in relays. Even this caused groans, feigned collapses, and exaggerated limps among the weaker women, but willow withes kept them moving.
At dark we reached a small clear stream at the floor of a pretty canyon. We had had a heavy forced march that day, under a hot sun, with only some dry biscuits to eat since dawn. Our people, even the strong men, were exhausted and demoralized, and some of the more desperate ones began to whistle in unison “The Drinking Song” from The Shores of Barbary. This gang whistling had a macabre effect of false cheerfulness and bravado that expressed, under the circumstances, a most insulting attitude toward Mr. Slattee. He ordered the men’s hands bound, and he separated the most despondent a good distance from the rest of us. Agatha refused food. Lulled by the sound of the stream, I slept like a stone.
Most of us awoke with recovered spirits, but Agatha, who was roused with difficulty, was stiff in all her joints and could not, if she would, have moved. Mr. Slattee ordered her carried again on the stretcher, but our men grumbled at this, because the burdens of each pair who carried her had to be put on the litter along with Agatha’s limp body, and we were still in hilly country where the trail was rugged.
When the sun leaned on our shoulders one of the men who was then carrying the stretcher shouted, “Cut her throat! Cut her throat!”
This cry was soon taken up all along the foresection of the coffle. How the Yellow War, the humiliating defeat, and the barren years of the New Era had debased us all! It was one thing for strangers to care nothing about a girl they did not know, but it seemed that our villagers remembered now only Agatha’s spitefulness, vanity, and malicious gossip at home, and none protested the repeated shout. I myself made no sound, and though I suffered agonies of shame, kept saying to myself, “I’m tired, I’m tired, I’m tired.” Even Agatha’s father held his tongue.
Mr. Slattee off-loaded Agatha from the stretcher and tried to make her walk, but she fell more than once to the trailside and at last could not be stirred. Mr. Slattee ordered the coffle forward. As we moved away we heard him arguing with a cop over Agatha’s prostrate form on the ground. In a few minutes Mr. Slattee caught up with us and mounted a pickup truck.
Later the cop came running up with Agatha’s nightgown over his shoulder. He told some of the women at the rear of the column that he had refused to kill her. His pistol was in its holster; we had heard no shot. He had left her in the shade of a thornbush, he said. I wondered only: Was she too far gone to be in terror of creeping things?
Kathy Blaw walked the rest of that afternoon with a hand on my shoulder—as if to suggest that I was the strong one supporting her.
Three days’ march was blank to me. I dimly remember from our heights a view of a sloping plain, distant towns, a more verdant countryside.
Then we came down through the hills into a misty afternoon, and our guards, alarmingly compassionate all of a sudden, said that we were coming into the northern outskirts of Los Angeles, and that our fate would now be in the hands of a certain man on the Syndicate’s payroll, known as the Executive Agent for Outgoing Personnel.
Each His Price
This Agent, a man of sycamore stature and arrogant bearing, in a pongee shirt, light tan slacks, and open-toed sandals, wearing large-lensed dark glasses, appeared before us the next afternoon in the grounds of the abandoned Hollywood film lot where we had been billeted for the night. The Agent had with him two dozen men in white jackets with little black bags. We were lined up in squared formations, a pace apart each way, forty to a square. We were ordered to remove our pajamas or nightgowns, and when we had pulled them off, these filthy rags were collected by workmen with wheelbarrows. As we stood utterly naked in the great yard, the Agent’s followers in white jackets, who proved to be barbers, came along the rows and shaved every hair from our heads and bodies. What a feeling of degradation! The Agent stood on the steps of what may formerly have been the set for some quiet Town Hall, and once, while we were being depilated, he sneezed, and all the barbers shouted blessings. He waved good-humored thanks. The barbers finished their work, and hoses were run out by companies of men who seemed to be firemen, and the desert dirt was emphatically washed off us. Then Syndicate “police” came along with buckets of vegetable oil and laved us from shiny crowns to the soles of our sore feet. We were dismissed. We we
re astonished, then outraged: No clothes, no covering at all, had been issued to us!
The following morning we were led, naked and freshly oiled, bald males and bald females together, the men’s chains clinking but otherwise in total silence, to a walled-in area in an adjacent lot. At one side we saw men—and the sight stirred our deepest apprehensions—standing guard over a mass of Oriental treasures: Coromandel screens, stacks of scrolls, carved ivory and ebony balls-within-balls, little horses of stone in glass cases, fans, cloisonné vases, and many bolts of brilliant silks. We were told to kneel; the men were unchained.
The Agent was present, with a party of lawyers; he was in white flannel trousers, a blue blazer with black braid at the cuffs of the sleeves, and a yachting cap, and his eyes were again invisible behind dark glasses under the cap’s patent-leather visor.
Suddenly through a gate across from us came a man in a long gown and a round black cap, his hands hidden in long sleeves that met in front of him at his waist, and at once we all began to chatter in terror, to bow our foreheads to the ground, to tremble, and to weep.
The skin of the man’s face was a sickly jaundice-brown color, like the underside of the stretching foot of a desert snail.
I was flooded with feelings completely new to me. The thought crossed my mind that this was a monstrosity, some creature of frightful sickness, but I knew, of course, that I was having my first sight of a yellow man.
At once three more of the apparitions came through the gate. They filled me with fear and nausea at the same time. To be naked before them! They would eat white human beings—Kathy Blaw had said so. They were ugly: besides their sallow skin they had wide bulbous noses and eyes pulled down at the inner corners and long black hair gathered behind in braided queues, and one had a disgusting thin beard of no more than a hundred filaments hanging down like a moth-eaten billy goat’s whiskers.