White Lotus

by John Hersey

  The magistrate was now addressing Nose: “…You, and the rest of your color, though called slaves in this country, yet you are all far, very far, from the condition of other slaves in other lands; no, your lot is superior to that of thousands upon thousands of yellow people. You are furnished with all the necessities of life—meat, drink, shelter, clothing—without charge or care, in a much better manner than you could provide for yourselves, were you at liberty. What then could prompt you to undertake so vile, so wicked, so monstrous, so execrable, so vicious…”

  Nose’s head was bowed, and my dread of the sword’s blow on it grew and grew, until I heard the chief magistrate say: “…the sentence I am now to pronounce, which is: That you be carried from this hall to the place from which you came here, and from there, on the fourth day of the sixth moon, between the hours of noon and curfew, to a special place of execution upon the side of the Coal Hill, where you shall be chained to a post and burned to death, being paid for fire with fire, according to the explicit wish of the Merciful Dragon Countenance, and may your wretched soul go promptly to its destination.”

  The Lists

  In the days following Nose’s trial I was gripped every moment by a feeling of hollowness. Twice at night, as I tried to flee into sleep, there flashed into my mind vivid pictures of the column of ants, a dark, seething stripe on the uneven ground, advancing toward me. My feet were rooted like cactus columns. If anything was fearful, it was that I felt no fear. I simply stood there….

  One morning after breakfast, the master, who looked more and more gaunt each day, as if his devout sweetness were gnawing at his vitals like a cancer, called Old Bow into the parlor and told him that the palace was to issue a proclamation that day promising the Emperor’s pardon to anyone who confessed a part in the slaves’ plot to burn and kill, and who named his confederates. Gently Big Venerable Shen advised Old Bow to take full advantage of this offer.

  Old Bow was outraged. “I have been at home,” he vigorously said. “Every night of my life. I never swore the plot. With my bad knee I don’t run around. I never join those tavern lice. Big Venerable, you are talking to Old Bow!”

  The master said, “I know you, Bow. You are a loyal man. I know you, and I think you are. I am only trying to say to you, it would be best for you to confess, be pardoned in the Emperor’s behalf, and have a clean name.”

  “Big Venerable, I never swore!”

  “I understand, Old Bow, I understand. Please open your ears. It is too dangerous otherwise.”

  “Are you saying, Master, that I should confess to something I never did?”

  At this our master blurted out what may have been an involuntary truth; a reflex of his own guilty doubts: “It is better to confess a lie and live than be accused by a lie and die.”

  Old Bow, his dignity falling off him like a husk from a seed, dropped to his knees and said, “Big Venerable, what must I do, Big Venerable?”

  The master said he would tell him what to do. He should wait two or three days; the master would advise him.

  When Old Bow told Gull and me in the kitchen of this scene, we wept—for him, for ourselves, for every slave; though for me the crying was dull and scant relief. Since Nose’s trial everything had been flat, my emotions had seemed to evaporate away, I felt like a skinful of dust. Nothing mattered, and I was scarcely capable of indignation, sorrow, or even self-pity. I still had a withered bit of misery in me, though, and now I felt some of it for this crepitant, misanthropic Old Bow, whose only wrongdoing in life had been his keeping to himself.

  That afternoon we heard of a public report of the proclamation, and within a couple of days we heard of its consequences: a rash of confessions, name-naming, and arrests. Women were now being named in large numbers. The slaves of the city were stampeding to save their own white skins at any cost.

  Now each evening we had grim visiting to do at neighbors’ gates: passing on lists. A slave would come to our kitchen and recite several times the lists of names—confessed, informed upon, on trial, arrested—and we would have to listen with utmost care, in order to memorize, to be able to spread the word.

  Mink came to us one evening, and as he stood by the brick oven reciting the lists his round shoulders on his tiny torso seemed more stooped than ever; his look of craftiness and mischief had given way to a stare…into the pit of nonsense; at the dangerous absurdities through which we daily moved, waiting for worse.

  “Confessions: Wei’s Water Chestnut, Kuo’s White Prince, Wang’s Fortune, Chu’s Mink—he’s no Mink!—Cheng’s Spade, Ma’s White Scholar, Sung’s Cabbage or Soldier, Tu’s Sheep, and Yüan’s Whitehair, some call him Ticklebowl. On trial today: Ts’ao’s Braveboy—you know him, don’t you, Old Bow?”

  “He didn’t swear,” Bow said. “The turtles! Braveboy never swore the plot.”

  “Widow Kuo’s Card, T’ang’s Money…”

  Mink broke off. He would not look at me. He said, as if to Gull, “Here’s a list of names the bastard Ticklebowl gave them: Su’s woman Snow Fig, Tung’s Chairboy, Sun’s woman Courteous Poppy—I think the turtle just wants some girls to play with in the jail there—Feng’s Drum, Lü’s Tallboy, and he gave Shen’s White Lotus.”

  I was still trying to fix the names in my memory when I found myself in Gull’s arms, realizing.

  But why Ticklebowl? He was nothing to me, or I to him. He had seen me at Chao-er’s, but I could not remember that we had ever even spoken to each other.

  “The authorities gave the list to that bitch Cassia Cloud,” Mink told us, “and she said, ‘Yes, Masters, all of them were in it except Lü’s Tallboy,’ and she said, ‘Shen’s White Lotus was one of the first to swear in the chalk circle, and she slept with Wu Li-shih’s Nose in one of the rooms in Chao-er’s tavern.’ ”

  So now. So now the minutes in the dark room belonged to whoever wanted to listen.

  Old Bow said, “They’ll come to get you, small girl.” I heard contempt in his voice.

  Gull said to Bow, “You’d better go spit it out, Old Bow, the way the master told you to. They’re going to chop off all our heads, every one.”

  I could not tell at dinner that night whether the master and mistress had heard that I had been named. Big Venerable Shen’s eyes were like attic windows back in Arizona—dusty, glassy, opening on an empty place. He was short-tempered, and the mistress apparently got hurt feelings over something and slammed her mouth shut. I made a hundred mistakes, and no one seemed to care.

  A Demonstrative Parting

  It turned out that my owners did not know about my having been named, because when the bannermen came for me the next morning Big Madame had a wholly unrehearsed attack of crying, with some laughter intermixed, and she tore her hair and undid her coiffure without hope of my restoring it, for I was going to jail. It would do no good to try to hold off until the master returned from the Board of Punishments. The men had an Imperial order with a score of official chops on it. “Hooo!” the mistress wailed, with an underpinning of gasping that sounded like giggles; she was near breaking some things.

  I went as I was. The mistress embraced me and, in a paroxysm of her avowals of love for me and dependence on me, scratched my neck with her fingernails. And then, as we were parting, I saw a secret in her perfectly dry eyes. It was only a glint, but I saw it. She was terrified of me. She was glad to have me taken off. She wanted me locked away. I was very much afraid myself, but I walked off between the constables with a feeling of exultation mixed with my dread. I was fifteen years old, and I was an object of great fear.

  A Game of Dice

  I was marched up Hata Gate Street between two tall bannermen carrying staves, and I must admit I felt important. Scarce anyone looked at us, for an arrest of a slave was by no means a scandal any more, but I do believe my two powerful escorts wore a foolish look complementary to my youthful swagger. So much brawn to fish for this tiny carp!

&n
bsp; All my feeling of grandeur and jauntiness blew away like summer smoke the moment the elephant door banged shut behind me.

  The thick-walled chamber had been a pen for a pair of elephants. Some twenty paces wide and thirty long, it contained two platforms, three paces by six, raised knee-high from the floor, on which the elephants had stood, chained by the legs to pairs of stone pillars. Tiny high openings gave scant light and air.

  Men and women slaves were mixed together in the pen; there were about a dozen women among a hundred men.

  These prisoners were sitting, squatting, and lying in tangled clusters on the brick floor in clothes for the most part rendered filthy by the dust of elephant dung clinging to the ill-swept bricks. The odor was foul, the air dark, the mood—despite a buzz of chatter and occasional hoots of loud laughter—was one of dejection and corruption more soul-drowning even than that of the women’s hold on the East Garden.

  I stood alone. My eyes swept the pen for a sight of Nose. I saw him at last, sitting against a wall with his forehead down on his drawn-up knees; I recognized his shoulders—in the tunic I had brought him. I wanted to go over and touch his back, let him know I had been taken up, but I did not.

  A woman, Sun’s Courteous Poppy, beckoned to me, and I went and crouched beside her, but soon I found her garlicky breath and simpering unbearable.

  Near us on a corner of one of the elephant platforms four men were setting trained crickets to fight each other and betting on the outcome, and their group was the rowdiest in the pen, and thinking that Nose must rouse himself at some time, and that gaming and callousness would surely draw him, I crawled on hands and knees toward the men, watching them. These four—Lu’s Beetle, Widow Kuo’s Card, Ma’s White Scholar, and Yüan’s Whitehair, or Ticklebowl, who for reasons I could not fathom had named me to the magistrates—immediately haled me in and adopted me as a kind of mascot. They kept to their corner of the platform and made much of me. They ordered me to tend their little bamboo fighting-cricket cages, tiny jails within the jail, which had been smuggled in to them somehow, and they had me record in my head their complicated debts to one another, a reckoning that gave them an illusion of a future.

  Gradually I felt, like a blast of damp cellar air, the real chill of the pen: a bitterness among the prisoners, not merely against the whites, but against each other. Within a few hours I saw the whole depressing picture. Each was for himself. So many slaves—at least a score—had now been condemned to death that a panic was on. The thing to do was to save one’s own skin, and that meant confessing and denouncing in exchange for an Emperor’s pardon. White was informing on white—yet ironically there was a currency passing around that one had to pick up, by guile or by goodness, before one could make a viable confession: the agreed circumstances. The slaves counseled together on the story they should tell and then used it to save themselves severally even if that meant abandoning each other to the sword. A detailed myth of the plot had been evolved for confessional purposes, and no one could safely go before the magistrates with admissions that did not interlock with the myth. Enmities were being paid off, but friendships were not being rewarded. The deadly game was disgusting and compelling, I could see that I had better busy myself at it.

  The sight of Nose sickened me—so dreary, motionless, limp—though I kept up with my four patrons a show of wild cheerfulness. Once Nose raised his head, and he looked in the general direction of our noisy corner, and I was on the point of jumping up and threading my way across the crowded floor to speak to him, when down the head went again. His face—an old man’s!

  Bit by bit my four men endowed me with the great myth: who was supposed to have met whom by what slave postern to plan which fire, about the supposed meeting in Big Venerable Ma’s kitchen, and how Yeh’s Heavenly Spirit was supposed to have pulled out the two strings of cash he had earned fiddling and showed them to Tu’s Sheep to urge the man to let him into the plotting….

  We slept curled on the bricks. We were like a pond of frogs at night; we put up a racket of groaning, unhealthy snorts, snoring, and starts from bad dreams, with cries.

  For my part I fell into a deep sleep in the first hours but I awoke drenched in sweat and convinced that the end of the world was coming. I remembered, with a terrifying vividness, a half-mad, long-haired, barefooted Californian would-be prophet who had come to our village when I was seven or eight and had stood outside our village hedge screaming for three days and nights about the beast of the sea, marked with the number six six six, with seven heads and ten horns, and the angels pouring out the vials of wrath like the blood of a dead man, and men gnawing their tongues for pain, and the woman arrayed in purple and scarlet, the mother of harlots and abominations, and Babylon the cage of every unclean and hateful bird—and on and on to the binding of Satan for a thousand years. Finally someone threw a silver dollar over the hedge, and he stopped screaming and went away.

  All through this night I yearned to be beside Nose. He was the one who was condemned, but I needed his comfort!

  My second day in jail the weather was hot. A yellow doctor visited us; Ma’s White Scholar said the masters were afraid we might die of some pestilence rather than by chopper or torch; hence their solicitude. Of course the yellows were obsessed with smallpox, which would not discriminate between the classes of men, slave and owner, and which might start in our filth and spread to the town. They did not clean our pens, however.

  That day Old Bow appeared with a gloomy face, resigned to confessing lies. I tried to urge my quartet of rapscallions to take him in, but Old Bow was much too mechanical for their disenchanted club. He sat alone, staring. He would have a long wait, for since the Emperor’s proclamation the list of applicants for confession had grown exceedingly long.

  Nose remained listless, melancholy; I stayed away from him.

  I laughed often, I must admit—what else could one do? The staple in our circle for crazy laughter was Cassia Cloud: how a confessor would think up a new detail to add to the myth, and she would follow with a grave confirmation, Oh, yes, just so! I did indeed see Cheng’s Spade there, gone soldierly on three bowls of wine and swearing to stab his big master in the liver. Lu’s Beetle was in particular a ready laugher. He would pummel his thighs and hoot with his head thrown back and his teeth gleaming like the rows of ivory “stones” in the game the Shens played often at night on an inlaid board.

  For some reason I thought of Kathy Blaw’s raucous shout in the coffle, long ago, that the yellows would devour us all. She had not been so far wrong at that.

  On an oppressive night as I lay on my back awake, unable to sleep in the fetid, motionless air, I felt a hand grope on my thigh, then my dirty gown was pulled up to my hips, and some man took me quickly, entering with difficulty into my indifference and driving at my vitals, with what must have been a pent-up hatred of all mankind. For a moment, while it was happening, I had a wild hope that it was Nose—that he had crept across the room to me; but I knew that this was an absurd idea, for Nose was unaware of my presence in the pen, so far as I knew, and this man’s importunity was different from his. I did not know which man it was, though by his goings-on next day, his plaguing me for his cricket-fighting standings, humming, assuming tigerish poses, I thought perhaps it was Widow Kuo’s Card.

  Every night after that at least one man, and sometimes two or three, mounted my fifteen-year-old body. I did not take to it. I did not feel either useful or desirable, and I did not offer myself to Nose.

  One morning I saw five men led out of the pens to be beheaded: Fang’s Old Hammer, the harmless old drunk, who had been condemned despite a dutiful confession, Hsü’s Quack, Captain Su’s Jumping Stick, Wang’s Fortune, and Tung’s Chairboy; and so I knew that despite the proclamation there was no hope for Nose. The magistrates were going ahead with the executions they had already decreed.

  In callous voices some of our prisoners threw remarks at the suffering men as they were l
ed out, all silent and compliant save one, Jumping Stick, who fought, dragged his feet, scratched, and pleaded.

  My patron Lu’s Beetle shouted, “This will pay you back, you turtle Chairboy, for giving my name and all.”

  Ma’s Stupid, one of eight men in the pens who had been condemned to be beheaded a week later, lounged loose-hipped against a stone pillar and called out, “See you in the Buddhists’ heaven, Fortune! Keep me a good place there, friend!”

  Toward evening that same day, the warder called my name at the gate of our pen. Was I to go before the magistrates? I tried to neaten myself. Ticklebowl said, “Don’t invent anything, small child. Except—try to give those crows some new names. They love new names. They’re weary of those old stale names.” Was this why Ticklebowl had given my name—for novelty’s sake?

  But my call was to talk with Big Madame Shen, who had come to see me, bringing clean underlinen and a pretty castoff day gown.

  A warder put me in a cubicle, chained to a post, for our chat, and the mistress was tender with me. How she missed me!

  But after a bit I saw an irrepressible excitement creep into her eyes, and she lowered her voice almost to a whisper. She had not gone herself to the beheadings that afternoon, but P’an, the curio dealer, had. “A miracle has happened, White Lotus,” she said. “Chao-er and Shih’s Wolf, or their heads, at least, in cages as you know—they have exchanged skins! Chao-er has turned white, Wolf is yellow. Venerable P’an saw it himself. When they put up Tung’s Chairboy’s head in a cage beside Chao-er’s they saw that Chao-er—his face, the skin of his forehead and cheeks—was whiter than Chairboy’s who was a pale man, they said, and Chao-er’s hair has become brown and curly, and his nose has gone sharp and narrow, the mouth wide, the lips thin; and Venerable P’an heard about how the other one had changed, and he joined a big crowd around the post with Wolfs cage on it, and truly, White Lotus, he says that Wolf, who was lifted earlier, is exactly the color of one of us, and his nose broad and flat, and his lips full. Some people believe they took a powder or potion before they were beheaded, by agreement between them, and that did it; some think it’s the sun; some swear it’s a sign. What do you think?”