The Meagre Tarmac Read Online Free PDF Page A

without a wick. Of course, Borya’s Jewish, so the shape’s a little off. “It makes you sleepy,” I say and Tiff nods, “that’s what I thought.”
    Maja Skojewska was Maja Pinska. “I grew up in a very liberal Jewish family,” she told me, in our informal Russian “classes”, and when I’m her age I’ll probably be saying, “I grew up in a Hindu family.” Madame’s idea of Russian lessons is to talk of her life, in Russian, interjecting Polish and English and before too many weeks she says, “See? You just asked me that in Russian!”
    Her father was a schoolteacher, a great admirer of India. That’s why she and her sister, Uma, have Indian names. When the Germans came to the school to get him, the priest said, we already turned him over. And there he was all along, working in the same school, only sooty black from shoveling coal. The Germans couldn’t imagine a Jew working like a Pole, dirtying his hands like a Pole. Her husband-to-be was also a schoolteacher, a Polish Catholic (not to be redundant) but after the war he went to university, then to Moscow State for more study and after two books, he was invited to Oxford, and that’s when they made their escape. The idea that little Maja Pinska would be eighty years old and tending her garden in California is testimony, she says, to a kind of stubborn life force.
    On her table are bananas so unblemished that I thought they were wax. “That’s the first thing I noticed when we got to England,” she says. Bananas! And the thrill of peeling a banana has never left her, after fifty years. And we sit a few minutes in silence, and she leans towards me and says (I’m sure it’s in Russian, but it’s as clear to me as English), “You know, Borya will drop you.”
    â€œI know,” I say.
    â€œI don’t approve of what he does, but then I say, it’s better you learn from him than from these boys I see on the streets.”
    â€œYes,” I say.
    Sometimes I think of Madame’s life, and mine, and that it’s all a kind of trigonometry of history. Her life is a skyscraper, mine is just a thimbleful of ashes, but our angles are the same. My adjacent side is just a squiggle, and my opposite side barely rises above the horizon. But the angle is there. I feel that I can achieve monumental things if I can just live long enough.
    Even with all his money, it took Al and Mitzi fifteen years to leave their cottage in Cupertino and splurge on a 23rd-floor apartment in downtown San Francisco. It’s all glass, 360° panoramic views of the city, the Bay, the bridges, the Marin Headlands, Berkeley and Oakland. No interior walls, but for the bathroom and two bedrooms. They also have a country estate in Napa. Some evenings when the fog rolls in, we’re suspended in a dream, disrupted only by bridge-table small talk. Other nights, the city sparkles. Al pours me a small glass of plum wine. Tonight, my father complains of his job. He’s in nanotechnology, and his responsibilities are shrinking fast.
    â€œHave you thought about something new?” Al asks. “I mean really new.”
    â€œYes, I have,” His Lordship responds. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard such a thing. He always defends continuity. His father spent forty years in Maharashtra State Government service. What really new thing could he possibly do?
    Every now and then, when Mitzi and Her Ladyship are out of the room, Al Wong will say, “What do you hear from our old friend?” He’s got a needle, and he uses it. I can tell it’s a jab to my father’s self-esteem, but I don’t know what it means. I think there’s a lot of sado-masochism, not nostalgia, in their friendship. Sometimes it’s good to be a quiet, studious, Indian daughter; I’m just furniture. Except for Borya and Madame, I’m accustomed to being ignored.
    Most of the