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A boyfriend she had and who she referred to that way though they’d never discussed it and she didn’t feel like anyone’s girl, but she called him her boyfriend because he acted so much like a boyfriend that not calling him so, at least to herself, would have been like denying him something written all over his face.
he had touched her with such reverence that it must have been smoldering inside him for ages.
Makina could never be sure of what she’d dreamed, in the same way that she couldn’t be sure a place was where the map said it was until she’d gotten there,
Not even in make-believe did she get her hopes up too high.
Makina had never seen snow before and the first thing that struck her as she stopped to watch the weightless crystals raining down was that something was burning. One came to perch on her eyelashes; it looked like a stack of crosses or the map of a palace, a solid and intricate marvel at any rate, and when it dissolved a few seconds later she wondered how it was that some things in the world—some countries, some people—could seem eternal when everything was actually like that miniature ice palace: one-of-a-kind, precious, fragile.
Do you like it? Tsk, me, I’m just passing through. How long you been here? Going on fifty years … Here we are.
They are homegrown and they are anglo and both things with rabid intensity; with restrained fervor they can be the meekest and at the same time the most querulous of citizens, albeit grumbling under their breath.
She’d witnessed other ways to love … and now they were acting just the same. She felt slightly let down but then said to herself, what did she know. It must be, she thought, that they know other marriages, good ones where people don’t split up, where fathers don’t leave and they each keep speaking to the other. That must be why they’re so happy, and don’t mind imitating people who’ve always despised them. Or perhaps they just want the papers, she said to herself, any kind of papers, even if it’s only to fit in; maybe being different gets old after a while.
Still, you know: if tears are gonna fall, better their house than mine …
There wasn’t any land to claim. Course you already know that, he said. So I was left hanging. He stopped and reflected for a minute. I guess that’s what happens to everybody who comes, he continued. We forget what we came for, but there’s this reflex to act like we still have some secret plan.
