The Luminaries

‘Ah Quee faat sang me si aa?’

Tong Wei, a smooth-faced young man of thirty, was watching him from the other side of the clearing. Ah Sook did not respond. He had pledged not to speak of the council at the Crown Hotel, or the events that preceded it, to any man.

The lad persisted. ‘Keoi hai mai bei yan daa gip aa?’

Still Ah Sook said nothing, and presently Tong Wei gave up, muttering his displeasure, and sloped off in the direction of the river.

Ah Sook sat still for a long while after the lad’s departure, and then all of a sudden he sat back, uttered an oath, and folded his knife away. It was hell to spend his days waiting for her, thinking about her, wondering. He would not endure it. He would journey to Hokitika that very afternoon, and demand an audience with her. He would go at once. He rolled up his pipe and tools, stood, and went inside to fetch his coat.

Ah Sook had only understood part of what was discussed in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel three weeks prior. In his confusions he had received no aid from his compatriot, for Ah Quee’s English was even more severely limited than his own, and none from the remaining men of the Crown, whose collective patience was worn very thin by any request for clarification from Chinese men. Balfour’s narration had been much too swift and poetically accented to be readily understood by a foreign ear, and both Ah Sook and Ah Quee had left the assembly at the Crown with only a partial understanding of all that had been discussed.

The crucial points of ignorance were these. Ah Sook did not know that A

By the time the bells rang out half past three, Ah Sook was mounting the steps to the veranda of the Gridiron Hotel. At the front desk, he requested an audience with A

Clinch, however, only shook his head. He gestured, repeatedly, towards the newly washed Wayfarer’s Fortune, on Revell-street’s opposite side, and spoke a flurry of words; when Ah Sook did not understand, Clinch brought him outside by the elbow, pointed at the hotel opposite, and explained, more slowly, that A

A

Ah Sook was surprised also; for a moment he simply stared. After so many weeks of recalling her shape to his mind—here she was! Was she truly so altered? Or was his memory so imperfect, that she seemed, standing in the doorway, to be a wholly different woman than the one with whom he had passed so many luxurious afternoons, with the cold light of winter falling slantwise through the square of the window, and the smoke winding about their bodies, in coils? Her dress was a new one: black, and cut very severely. But this was not merely a new dress, Ah Sook thought. This was a different woman altogether.

She was sober. Her cheeks held a new lustre, and her eyes were brighter, larger, and more alert. The syrupy quality to her movements was gone—and gone, too, was the slightly dreamy gauze that had always overlaid her features, like a veil of lawn. Gone was the vague half-smile, the trembling corner of her mouth, the awed confusion—as though she were privy, always, to some small bewilderment that no one else could see. In the next moment Ah Sook’s astonishment had given way to bitterness. So it was true. A

A

Ah Sook waited a moment before he made his bow, for he trusted his own first impressions, and he wished to make this impression last. She was much thi

‘Good afternoon,’ he said.

‘What do you want?’ A

He peered at her.

‘Three weeks,’ she added, as if to persuade him. ‘I haven’t had a pipe in three weeks.’

‘How?’ said Ah Sook.

She shook her head. ‘You have to understand it: I’m not the same as I was.’

‘Why you come no more to Kaniere?’ Ah Sook said. He did not know how to say that he missed her; that each afternoon before her arrival he used to arrange the cushions on the daybed just so, and tidy his belongings, and make sure his clothes were neat and his pigtail tied; that as he watched her sleep he had often been near-choked with joy; that he had sometimes reached out his hand and let it hover within an inch of her breast, as though he could feel the softness of her skin in that smoky space between his flesh and hers; that sometimes after she took her pipe he would wait some time before taking his own, so that he could watch her, and fix her image in his mind, to remember.

‘I can’t come to see you any more,’ A

Ah Sook studied her sadly. ‘No more smoke?’

‘No more,’ A

‘Why?’

‘I can’t explain it—not here. I’ve stopped, Ah Sook. I’ve stopped it altogether.’

‘No more money?’ said Ah Sook, trying to understand. He knew that A