World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) by Mason Richard

Author:Mason, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2012-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

IV

And so it was not that night but the next that we walked together along the water front to the Nam Kok to become lovers. We had been to the cinema, and afterwards had walked back along Hennessy Road under the arcades, past the crowded cafes and electric-lit shops, and down Lincoln Street with the hissing of pressure lamps in the food stalls and the men squatting like chimpanzees along the benches noisily sucking at soup, and along the water front past the workshops and the mah-jongg rooms and the naval tailors and “WELCOME TO ALL MEMBERS OF H.M.S. Athene,” and through the shadows at the edge of the quay; and then I had stopped, my heart in my mouth, to watch a drunken man tottering up the gangplank of a junk, sprawling headlong on the narrow plank but somehow not falling in, then picking himself up and lurching onward, like the circus clown on the tightrope when he pretends to miss his footing to scare you and saves himself by a hairsbreadth. I watched until he had gained the deck and sprawled out of sight into safety, then turned away to rejoin Suzie, but stopped as I caught sight of her—and stood rooted.

For she had paused to wait for me a few yards along the quay in a pool of pale livid light from an electric street lamp—a light that had the same mysterious quality as the shaft of light that thrusts like some heavenly illumination through a gap in a thundercloud, and that, shining on her face and hands and her legs below the skirt of her cheongsam, invested her with a complete unreality; and the sight of her provoked in my mind some shadow of a memory, like a flitting bird that for a moment or two I could not catch to identify. Then all at once I trapped it: it was the memory of a picture from my childhood—a rather sickly colored plate in the illustrated Bible that I had been given when I first went to school, showing a miracle performed in a street of Jerusalem. In the foreground was the shoulder and lifted hand of Jesus, and beyond him a white wall with a barred window, with two ragged lepers squatting at its foot, their bodies disfigured and eaten away by disease, and in front of them a third begger who a moment ago had been like them, but who now stood straight and whole—and illumined by this same livid, unearthly light in which Suzie stood under the street lamp.

And I was momentarily seized by the fantastic notion that another miracle had occurred; that Suzie, who had wanted to love as a virgin, had had her innocence restored, that she now stood there in perfect purity, miraculously cleansed of her uncle’s rape and the contamination of her trade as the leper had been cleansed of disease. For her face was luminous, it shone with a virginal beauty; and she seemed to wear that same

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