Читать книгу The Three of U.S.: A New Life in New York - Peter Godwin - Страница 40

Margarita has come to clean, and I am tapping at my keyboard, trying to stay out of the way of her vacuum’s mighty vortex, when a shadow crosses the light, and she approaches, clucking disapproval.

‘Mr Peter, Mr Peter, no thank you,’ she admonishes and, rather than feeling like her employer, I feel like a child who is about to be bawled out by a kindergarten teacher. In her pink dayglo glove she is clutching a pile of discarded mail, which she has retrieved from one of our waste bins. ‘This, Mr Peter, no good. Very bad. No thank you.’

I look down at my desk, inexplicably ashamed of myself, though I am not sure what I have done wrong.

‘Do like this,’ she says, and begins to tear up the old press releases and credit card offers, and other detritus of the junk mail age, into smaller and smaller pieces. Then she deposits them in the bin bag with a flourish so that their individual shards scatter, making it impossible to reconstruct them. I am still uncertain of our sin, though I am beginning to suspect we have breached one of New York’s arcane recycling regulations.

‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Why must we tear up all our old mail?’

‘Why?’ She looks at me as though I am truly to be pitied. ‘Because …’ she struggles to find the word in her slowly improving English vocabulary. ‘Because is dangerous.’ And with that she retrieves some of the intact mail and pretends to be surreptitiously reading it, as though she is a spy. ‘You see?’ she asks. ‘Is dangerous.’

I try to explain that we couldn’t care less if strangers wish to peruse our old mail, but Margarita is unmoved and continues laboriously ripping up the letters. And in the end I cannot bear to witness this time-wasting exercise and I join her at the dining-room table tearing up inconsequential paper. Which is where we are found when Joanna returns from having her hair blow-dried.