by John Hersey
“Ha ha ha ha ha! I knew you had no money, child. Dowager sets limits on her generosity. Listen. Wait a few minutes. Rock meets me here. We’ll go home to our palace together.”
It was Groundnut! I had never seen him go off begging. He always left before dawn, to be at the gate for its opening rush. What a foul mummery!
At last I could speak. “Groundnut! How disgusting you are!”
“Am I not a masterpiece?” he said, as if my revulsion were the sweetest of compliments. Then, to frighten me further, he resumed his mendicant groaning. “T’ai-t’ai. T’ai-t’ai. My hunger burns. It’s like fire. Ayah. Ayah. Help me!” He laughed then. Even though I knew that all his agony was just as counterfeit as my gate chip, and that his diseases were disguises, I could not look at him for fear of becoming sick to my also-hungry stomach.
“Come over here, pretty flower. We can sit on these kegs while we wait. There! Don’t look at me. Watch the camels going through. Now. Did you find a food bowl?”
I told him about my day. Groundnut was gentle and solicitous, and soon—being careful not to look at him—I was comfortable in his company.
“Your friend—what was his name—Mink?—with that lovely twisted back—it’s like a whirlpool dragon’s back: I could make a Hata Gate beggar of him.”
It seemed that the Hata Gate beggars were the aristocrats of the profession.
“Speak to him,” Groundnut said. “I’ll be his teacher.”
“He’s too proud,” I said, though I was not really sure that was true.
“What does a white man have to be proud of?”
“What is the matter with Rock,” I said, “if not pride?”
“Ayah, Rock!” Groundnut said. “He has a snake in his guts.”
I found that I wanted to talk about Rock—that my desire to talk about him amounted to a kind of vehemence, and that it was somehow connected with the new feelings I had had after watching the white men playing toss-stone.
“Really,” I said, “what’s wrong with him?”
“Wrong with him? He’s argumentative. Anyone can see that.”
“I don’t mean that.”
“What, then?”
“What’s the name of the snake?”
“Who knows? Maybe it’s Envy.”
Hooo! I felt something like a tug of desire at that word. Yes! Envy! Sometimes known as a yearning for their freedom. Real freedom—which means: mastery, power. I laughed aloud at the knowledge that we whites were far from “free.” Only the powerful are “free.”
From where we sat we could see the sun being shut out of the inner capital. Just as the teeth of the distant city wall began to bite into the orange circle, a single deep clang sounded overhead. I jumped in alarm away from the kegs.
“It’s the closing gong,” Groundnut said. “Come and watch.”
He led me a few steps away from the gate and pointed up to the lip of the wall beside the Fox Tower. There stood four huge Tartars with heavy wooden mallets. After the last of the reverberations from the great gong had died away, one of the giants swung his maul. Clong! So the strokes followed one another, at first with massive deliberateness, then merely slowly, then gradually pulsing faster, until, when the sun was down and the clashing had gone on for nearly a quarter of an hour, the pounding of the four hammers made one long sound. It was the sound of power, a clanging indistinguishable from what we used to hear in slave days. Suddenly the hammers stopped. In the tunnel of the gate four other bannermen now began a series of warning cries. The sleeping beggars stirred—a rush of last-moment squeaking of barrows and carts, a bedlam of brayings, carters’ shouts, and gate guards’ commands. Groundnut looked about anxiously for his friend. The gates began to close with orotund groans from the old ironbound timbers.
At the last moment Rock came running up, and showing our chips on the trot we slipped through the closing gap.
“The turtles!” Rock said, cursing the guards and yellows in general.
I remembered the white men standing in a circle arching the heavy stone and the feather-tailed cork bird, and now my own spirits soared again in response to Rock’s incautious vitality. Envy! Yes!
Up on the walls bannermen hooted a chorus of long-drawn howls, expressive of the yellow power we hated and envied, meaning, “The city is safe! Safe! Safe!”
Thieves of the Sky
The moment we reached Dowager’s courtyard Groundnut began to shed his loathsome gear. In one sweep he tore off the scab of fungus from his crown; he scooped the pus from his eye—it was all makeup. Beeswax, silk, suet, pigment. Dowager had a wooden bucket of hot water waiting for him in the yard, and splashing and blowing he made himself over into a sound young man. He changed from his tatters into decent padded cotton clothes.
The pigeons in their cages of bamboo wattles welcomed Rock and Groundnut—filled the air with their purring, jumped like impatient children, beat up a rustling storm of feathers. While Groundnut cured himself of his beggary, Rock went to the cotes, lighted several lanterns against the dark that had not yet come, and busied himself with the birds.
Knock at the gate. Groundnut ran and opened it to a yellow man in good dress who appeared to be a merchant—in fact, a collector for the beggars’ league to which Groundnut belonged. Hayah, even white beggars were under the thumbs of yellow profiteers.
Groundnut undid the cinch of his voluminous trousers and pulled out, from within, a cloth bag of coins. The collector slipped an abacus from under his gown, and the two squatted on their hams and counted, with clinks and clicks, the day’s take and the league’s squeeze—forty per cent, Groundnut told me later, a standard rate, he said, for self-respecting extortionists. Fifty per cent meant insult; thirty per cent meant something too easy like kinship. The two men had a brief argument, wild and scurrilous, a matter more of ceremony, I gathered, than of substance; then the collector left, and Groundnut, rubbing his hands with satisfaction, joined Rock at the cotes.
The dusks of those dry early-summer days in the Capital lingered on and on with a kind of reluctance in the pure sky, like a glow of youth in a happy woman’s skin. The bamboo tower stood stark against the pale-peach-colored expanse, its segmented round legs and braces gleaming like gold tubes lighted from every side.
As Groundnut and Rock bustled, the pigeons grew more and more eager to be on the wing in that lambent air.
The men threw up the lids of the cotes—what an uprising! I could feel the wind of the wings on my cheeks. The flock circled once and flew off northeastward.
Walking home from the Hata Gate the pair had told me that they would show me this evening “the secret of the pigeons.” Now, eyes sparkling with mirrored lantern flames, they whetted my curiosity by unfolding to me one phase of their secret—told me they had, with patient work over months, enlarged the crops of their pets by forcing marbles down their throats and later causing them to vomit the crop-stretchers by manipulation. Rock ran inside to fetch these objects for me to see: marbles such as boys had used back in Arizona, glassies, agates, sparklers, tiger’s eyes, twisties, steel bombs!
The pair spread a sheet of cotton cloth on top of the cotes, and they filled several shallow bowls with water and placed them at intervals on the cloth. I saw Rock sprinkle some kind of powder in the bowls. Every bird would drink on the flock’s return, Groundnut told me; the pigeons had not been watered all day.
We waited. Light ran down the sky’s drains. The two men climbed the tower, Groundnut carrying his pole, at the end of which, in place of the pennant, he hung a flickering red paper lantern; Rock took up a flute.
The lantern began to fly in circles, and I heard from the flute a low, mournful, steadily repeated figure, in tone halfway between pigeons’ speech and the sound of the sad whistles I’d heard these birds sometimes carry on their tails.
Soon: the fuffuffing of wings. Around and around till the men were satisfied
that all had come home. Down men and birds came then.
By lanterns the pigeons drank up. The powder, Rock whispered, was alum. The birds began to throw up what was in their crops.
Rice! Surprisingly large piles of rice from those marble-enlarged crops.
Now it was Groundnut and Rock who behaved like excited pigeons. As each bird emptied itself a white hand would gently lift it and put it in the cotes by lower doors. Soon all were unloaded. The men lifted the ears of the cotton cloth. With frugal care they transferred the rice to a basket, and weighed it. Nearly twenty catties! They washed the grains by dipping the basket over and over in a large tub, and they took the haul to Dowager, who had a caldron boiling and something savory sizzling in oil.
We had a feast of carp, stolen one night by Rock from the sacred fishponds near the Temple of Heaven, and of rice—stolen, I was finally told, by our heavenly thieves from the Imperial granaries in the Tartar City, near the Gate of Unmixed Blessings, where they had hungrily gorged themselves on the wastage in the yards, among the wicker scoops, in the carts, from the weighing sheds, from stored baskets, and had brought it all home to vomit out for us.
Over this repast Rock and Groundnut openly expressed their delight at cheating, with this beautiful ruse, the most powerful yellow creature of all, the Emperor. How grandly they masticated their sweet little sample of revenge!
Dowager, promiscuous in her jollity, laughed hard (watch out!) over the idea of our kind besting her kind.
Groundnut said, “Dear pigeons! Could there be anything freer than one of these birds going up there? Think of these friends of ours shooting up to the granaries. Or a hawk! I wish I were a hawk, to soar and soar. I wouldn’t even object to being a crow. Ai, I’d flap over this city shouting filth at those turtles down on the ground. Cawr-r-r! Cawr-r-r!”
But, I thought, you’ve made slaves of these pigeons you say you love so much.
It was Rock who, after our rollicking supper, took heaping bowls of cooked rice out to reward our providers. I heard him clucking over them. Where was the brutal arguer?
Registration
“Hai! Hai! Hai! We must see the fun,” Dowager cried, waving her great arms helplessly, to indicate that she wished to be cranked to a standing position.
The enrolling officers for the Number Wheel had come to our alley.
Rock and Groundnut grappled at Dowager’s vast armpits, and with curses, groans, and laughter assisted her to her poor little feet.
Out we went, and we found an unpleasant scene. A squad of bannermen backed up with matchlocks a white-button who, at a table straddling our vile street gutter, was setting down the names of men eligible for enumeration.
From a hard pack of yellow men of the rottenest sort the white-button was receiving a shower of abusive language.
The bannermen, huge fierce Tartars, made sallies into the crowd and hauled men forward one by one. The white-button asked each a series of questions.
We had been watching only a few minutes when the Tartars, skidding aside, as it were, suddenly seized Rock and began hauling him out.
What an uproar of arms, legs, and maledictions! I heard Rock spew out a series of foul objections to the Number Wheel. Why, I don’t believe he had thought that whites were to be registered at all—this was a yellow man’s war. I felt that I heard the sound of tearing in his voice, of some fabric in him being ripped—his feelings about the Mercy Errand, about a war that was “for” faraway whites, his being roughed by the yellow soldiers, his hearing obscenities hurled at him now by the yellow men in the alley.
The white-button quietly persisted, the Tartars held his arms, and to get out of their hands Rock gave a fictitious name and a false address.
Groundnut, with much less fuss, did the same when he was taken out.
How Dowager’s laughter pealed out as we went back to our pigeon-muted yard!
Bad Hog
That same afternoon they spiraled up a plan, Rock and Groundnut—to buy and train a fighting cock. More than that: a white cock. Show the yellow bastard bettors in Fighting Cocks Pit Lane that the color white was not to be given laughable odds. How they savored this scheme!
They began independently to scour the city, and a few days later Rock found a healthy yearling white-pile cockerel, which had a few yellowish-red feathers in its hackle and tail but otherwise was white all over. Groundnut, who had an earthenware crock of cash buried in the ground under one of the dovecotes, approved the bird and bought it. They named it—to lengthen the betting odds—Bad Hog.
Now serious training began. Groundnut, with a genius for making birds understand his wishes, instilled in Bad Hog an obedient ferocity, while Rock invented clever hobbles and hindrances, little weights and clumsy shapes, which, when fastened to the rooster’s legs, wings, or head, helped to strengthen the muscles of self-assertion. They fed the cock, besides regular millet feed, helpings of cooked rice and chopped hard-boiled pigeon eggs. They even bought and gave it what we never ate ourselves, bits of mutton and beef. They plucked every off-white feather; trimmed the slope of the wings; reduced the rump and hackle; inhibited the comb. They massaged it under the feathers—summit of self-denial!—with baigar, the liquor they loved, to toughen the skin.
When we could, we three went to the cocking mains to pick up pointers. Rock and Groundnut were expert to a degree, having long been devotees of the fights, as were many of the harder sort of whites. These whites attended, I suppose, in order to experience, now and then, vicarious revenge; they invariably bet on the less-favored bird, and if it lost they shrugged, but when, as sometimes happened, it killed the stronger bird they took their money silently and left, and then, having put a distance between themselves and the cocking yellows, hooted in the streets, danced about on light feet, pounded each other with fervid congratulations, and got weepingly drunk—over such trivial, if rare, victories. This kind of pleasure was not for me—women prefer genesis to cockfights; I went only to be beside Rock.
White-owned birds always lost. Why? We saw that they were deprived, by tacit agreement among the yellow trainers, of at least two stages in preparation for the fights: Yellow trainers were given time and place in the pits to hold almost-ready birds within close sight of each other, goading them to fury so that their maddened efforts to get at each other would add extra strength to their muscles and wills; and later yellow-owned birds actually sparred, with leather caps on their spurs. Birds belonging to whites were denied these refinements.
To compensate for these denials, Rock made, with great patience, realistic dummies of adversaries for Bad Hog, mainly from pigeon feathers which he dyed various colors, to simulate, in the finished models, some of the famous breeds: Soochow Duns, Southern Capital Topknots, Supreme Black-Reds, Red Quills, Tartar War Ponies. These dummies could be attached to a long bamboo pole with levers which tucked under the wings, so, hidden behind a screen, Rock could enliven the pretense and fill the air with flaps of his own suppressed anger. Bad Hog was white and reacted to these machines with a frustrated rage that we, being white also, understood all too well.
Dutiful Beneath the Skin
Mink came to see me from time to time, and during one visit he said he knew of a food bowl that I might get, in the Tartar City, as an attendant in an asylum for abandoned bastard white children. He had worked there awhile and knew the superintendent, and he said he would take me to see the man.
A few days later, when Mink had time off, we set out together. Summer was on us; the air was like goose down.
On the way Mink said, “When I was a slave my curvature had a definite value, because, you see, I knew I had been bought and could be sold for very little money, ayah, I was a bargain, and so whatever value I gave in work was a kind of quick profit—I was always able to give my master a pleasant surprise. But now my cheapness belongs to no one but me. Hail I’m no bargain to myself.”
I remembered how Gull had seeme
d to adore Mink—for his bitterness, his wit, and for a piquant force in him that lured her to the sedan shed those many afternoons; and I recalled, too, the electric bolts of his cynicism with which he kept trying to shock Peace, and the dead aim of his hard little eyes. This new note of self-pity repelled me; I had to remind myself that he was being kind.
I noticed also that Mink was obsequious to yellows; he craved their love, it seemed.
A stately gateway in a hutung in the eastern part of the city. This was, Mink told me, the former mansion of a young Imperial favorite who had had his head cut off. In a decade this young man had built himself a huge fortune and vast power in the Court, and then, in one instant of one evening, under moonlight, on the Pavilion of the Soaring Phoenixes on the bit of land called Posturing Terrace Island, in a lake of the winter palaces, he had made his fatal move. Conversing with the Emperor’s then third-favorite concubine, Round-faced Beauty, this glorious youth, intoxicated by brazen advances that she was unmistakably making, and forgetting that some women have a forked need—to be fondled and to talk about it later—surreptitiously and ever so fleetingly pressed his hand into the soft Y at the lower front where her influence with the Court lay sweetly couched. Thus his estate became available for an orphanage.
The gateman knew Mink and let us in at once. He told us that the superintendent would be found in a side chamber of the second courtyard.
All about me within these walls I heard, like a delicious rain, the splashing laughter of children. In the second courtyard we saw a score of white boys about ten years old walking on tall stilts—their feet were above my eye level. Some had drums attached to their belts and were beating out martial rhythms as they marched on their heron legs. Others had gongs. One was hopping on a single stilt, holding the other upright behind his back. A pair was running a race. The boys’ faces expressed a perfect tension between gravity and joy—mouths twisted in concentration, eyes like wealthy mandarins’.