Monsieur Kalashnikov
by André Aciman
Issue 181, Summer 2007
He is sitting in a café speaking French. Correction,
he is not speaking. He doesn’t speak. He rapid-fires machine-gun style, in
bursts and sputters—rat-tat-tat—cranky, jittery, crazed, strafing his
way from one subject to the next. Rat-tat-tat, like an electric stapler gone
mad. Rat-tat-tat, like shattered glass spun in a blender. Rat-tat-tat,
like a jackhammer, like a chain saw, like the cicadas on the Mediterranean when
they drown out every sound with the raspy musketry of their hindquarters.
“American women are like beautiful manor
houses with lavish artwork and spacious rooms. But the lights are always out.
Americans are not born; they are manufactured. Ford-ersatz, Chrysler-ersatz,
Buick-ersatz. All exactly alike. I always know what they’ll say next, because
they think alike, speak alike, fuck alike.”
The late seventies café society of
Cambridge, Massachusetts, nicknamed him Kalashnikov. Because of how he argued
and how he laughed and how he rattled short, hardscrabble sentences that mowed
down everything—people, ideas, things, you name it, he’d shoot it down. He stood
for nothing, tolerated no one. I tolerated everyone without loving a single
one.
He was loud; I was quiet. He was impetuous;
I was cautious, guarded, diffident. He was new to the States yet knew everyone
in Cambridge. I’d been a graduate student for five years, yet I went entire
days that summer without a soul to speak to. When he was upset or bored, he
bristled, fidgeted, then exploded; I was composure personified. Once he started
there was no stopping him, whereas the slightest blush could stop me in my
tracks. He was up-front; I was oblique. He spoke his mind; mine was a vault. He
could drop you and never think twice of it; I’d make up with you in no time
then spite you forever after. He was proud to know me; I didn’t want to be seen
with him. For him there was no shame in poverty; for me shame had deep pockets,
deeper even than identity itself, because it could take your life and turn you
inside out. He was a cabdriver; I was Harvard. But we could have swapped roles
in a second.
To understand how a relationship blossomed
between us you have to go back to Le Maghreb café on that August day in 1977.
It feels like one of the hottest summers I’ve lived through in my life. All my
friends in graduate school are gone. Even those who stayed to teach in
Harvard’s summer program have left by now. Most are in Europe. Postcards arrive
from Paris, Berlin, Bologna, Sirmione, and Taormina, even Prague and Budapest.
I am staying put, holding a part-time interim job in one of the Harvard
libraries. It pays two dollars and thirty cents an hour. The money is to help
pay my rent. Other priorities: food, cigarettes, a drink whenever possible. I
am preparing for my orals, lugging books wherever I go, while inside me festers
the sinking feeling that I’m a fraud, that I was never meant for graduate
school, much less for literature, that I’ll be known as the man who hustled his
way into Harvard and was let go in the nick of time. I hate every member of the
department, students and teachers alike, including Professor Cherbakoff, the
man who admitted me with high hopes and who, when he could, would always throw
an extra course my way along with a few financial-aid dollars, but whose
concern for me had festered into downright oppression. He too comes from a
Jewish family that lost everything in the wake of war. He knows exactly what
I’m going through, knows how self-doubt strips down the soul, wants me to
follow in his footsteps, which is why I avoid him.
I haven’t spoken to anyone all weekend.
It’s now very late in the afternoon on Sunday, and I’ve been roaming from
coffeehouse to coffeehouse. I am reading Montaigne’s “Apologie de Raymond
Sebond” and actually enjoying it. I am drinking an iced coffee that will have
to last me at least two and a half hours. Nursing a drink is one thing.
Watching your ice cubes melt and turn your watered-down brew into clear soup
and still pretending that your glass is half full is like trying to preserve
the polar ice caps with a hand fan.
Suddenly I hear him. Rat-tat-tat.
He wears a faded army-navy camouflage
jacket with many pockets and is speaking in a Maghrebi accent to an American
who occasionally dares to interrupt with tepid pieties, but there’s no stopping
the string of invective that comes rattling forth like bullets from an
ammunition belt. No sooner has he lambasted the female sex than he begins
fulminating against America: All blacks eat fried chicken and rice. Whites,
whom he calls amerloques, love all things jumbo and ersatz. As long as
it’s artificial and double the value if you buy five times the size, no white
man can resist. Their continental breakfasts are jumbo-ersatz, their extra-long
cigarettes are jumbo-ersatz, their huge steak dinners with whopping
all-you-can-eat salads are jumbo-ersatz, their mugs of freeze-dried bottomless
coffee, their faux-mint mouthwash bottles with triple-pack toothpaste and extra
toothbrushes thrown in for good value, their cars, televisions, universities,
even Star Wars, all of it, jumbo-ersatz. American women with breast implants,
nose jobs, and perennially tanned figures are jumbo-ersatz. American women with
smaller breasts, contact lenses, diaphragms, mouth spray, hair spray, foot
spray, vaginal spray, vibrators, are no less ersatz than their oversize
sisters. American women who are just happy to have found a man to talk to in a
crowded café on a Sunday afternoon in August will sooner or later turn out to
be ersatz all the same. Their lank, freckled toddlers fed on sapless,
bland-ersatz white bread and swaddled in ready-to-wear, over-the-counter,
prefab, preshrunk, one-size-fits-all, poly-reinforced clothes are ersatz too.
And as for the men, big, tall, fast-food lumbering football giants with outsize
shoes, penis enlargers, and eight-pack abs, they personify the essence of all
that was ever jumbo and ersatz on God’s planet.
“But you can’t generalize about all
Americans,” the American says. “And I don’t agree with what you say about the
Middle East either.” Machine Gun reclines on his seat as he rolls his nth
cigarette, licks the glued end of his cigarette paper, and like a cowboy who’s
just spun the cylinder of his revolver after carefully reloading its chambers,
points a hard index finger that almost touches the chin of the young American:
“All you know is what you learn from newspapers and your bullshit television. I
have my own sources.” “What sources?” the American asks. “Other sources.” And
before the young man has a chance to cross-examine him, there it is again, as
good as new, oiled, rammed, reassembled, reloaded, louder and more articulate
yet: rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
I’ve never heard such an abominable blend
of claptrap, agitprop, and misogyny before. “The Italians are rotten thieves.
The French will always sell their mothers, throw in their wives and then their
sisters; their daughters, however, they’ll sell you first. As for the Arabs, we
were better off as colonies. The only person who really understood history was
Nostradamus.”
“Who?” the American interrupts.
“Nostradamus.”
“How do you know about Nostradamus?”
“How! I just know.”
This is either a
comedy act or the besotted ramblings of Vladimir and Estragon. At some point I
can no longer resist. I stand up and head to his table. “I couldn’t help
overhearing you. Are you a student here?” I ask in French.
No answer. Just a dismissive shake of the
head, followed by a sinister stare that seems to ask, And what business of
yours is it if I am?
The silence is hard to take. I am already
preparing to bow out. “Sorry to disturb you,” I say. “I just felt like speaking
to a Frenchman.”
Again the stare.
“Me, French? With my skin?” He pinches his
forearm. “This is not French skin.” As if I’d insulted him.
“Sorry, my mistake.”
I am determined to step back to my table
and pick up “Raymond Sebond” where I’ve left him face down.
“How about you?” he asks. “Are you French?”
I can’t resist.
“With my nose?”
He’s playing with me. I know he isn’t
French, just as he knows I’m not. Each is basically letting the other think
that he could pass for French. A tacit compliment that hits the spot.
“So how come you speak French if you’re not
French?”
Anyone born in the colonies knows the
answer to that. He’s definitely playing.
“For the same reason you speak
French,” I reply. He bursts out laughing. We understand each other perfectly.
We exchange names. He jokes about his
nickname. “But you can call me Kalaj,” he says. He’s been here for six weeks.
Before that, Milan. This is home now.
He is an Arab; I am a Jew. Actually, he is
a Berber and, like all Berbers, proud of it. The one thing that draws us
together now is our love of the French language.
He grew up to love France in Tunisia, while
I worshiped it all through my childhood in Egypt. Tunis had no more use for him
when he jumped ship and landed in Marseille as a teenager than Alexandria had
for me when it stripped my family of its wealth and then expelled us for being
Jewish. He is now in Cambridge because he is running away from debt, from
alimony, from who knows what other illicit ventures in France and Italy. I am
in Cambridge because I was never bold enough to pack up and make France my
home. We were the closest the other would ever get to France. Each in his own
way was trying to find a new place to which neither really wished to belong. He
was an Arab trying tooth and nail not to give up on the West, I a Westerner
with an Arab past that wasn’t letting me go.
“Were you waiting for someone?” he asks me.
“No, just reading.”
“But you’ve been reading for hours. Why
don’t you just sit down with us, and we’ll talk a bit? Bring your books.”
So he’s been aware of me all along. He
tells me about his cab, the last Checker cab in Boston. I tell him about my
orals. Harvard is all the identity I have, the way his Checker cab is all he
owns. We are talking. It takes me no more than a few seconds to realize that he
is aware of every woman in the joint. “They’re here for one reason only, and
that reason is us three.” His friend asks him why he doesn’t make a move then.
“Too soon,” he says. The only people I’ve heard speak this way are fishermen.
They look at the sky, gauge the wind, the clouds, have a sixth sense about
things, then, when you least expect it, they’ll say, “Now!” The woman with the
slender figure, seated a few tables away, has just cast a look at our table.
With absolutely no discretion, Kalaj begins to chuckle: “She looked!” We catch
a smile rippling across her face.
The next day, Monday, I was once again sitting at Le
Maghreb, unsure whether I was hoping he wouldn’t show up or fearing that he
might. As soon as he arrived, he pulled up a chair and sat at my table, shook
my hand, tousled my hair, scanned the place, and ordered a cinquante-quatre,
a fifty-four-cent cup of coffee. It was stiflingly hot. After a while he gulped
down his coffee and said that he knew of a place where it might be cooler.
Together we walked out to Anyochka’s, a
small French patisserie on Holyoke Street. This was where faculty often had
coffee with graduate students when they wished to seem less formal. That night
it was totally empty, its large glass door wide open. We ordered two croque
monsieurs, a luxury in my budget. Beneath the dimmed lights and a whirring
ceiling fan, Kalaj told me about his childhood in Tunisia and his studies in
France. His specialty: informatique. But seeing no immediate future in informatique,
he had become a self-employed caterer. He’d married his sous-chef, whose money
helped him set up the shop. He was now married to an American.
“Where is your wife?” I asked.
“No idea.”
“Does she travel?”
“I told you I have no idea. Don’t you
understand French?”
Rat-tat-tat, but aimed at me this
time. What was I even doing having dinner with this creep?
I was about to explain my question.
“No need to apologize. I don’t give a damn.
Well,” he changed his mind, “let me explain.”
Five minutes. They’d met in a T station. He
had just missed the train to Park Street and had muttered a curse word in
French. “You seem upset,” she’d said. “I am upset.” One thing led to another.
Within days, they were married. Soon after, he filed his application for a
green card.
What had made him come to the States?
“Let me explain.”
Four minutes. It was because of a beautiful
married woman in Milan that he ended up in Harvard Square, staying with her
best friend who taught at Harvard. That teacher and her lover eventually
informed Kalaj that perhaps he should start thinking of moving elsewhere.
Which he did. They needed space. Space was a strange concept. As
though humans were galactic mutants in need of light-year shields. “Me, impose
on people? God forbid.” It was then that he missed that train to Park Street.
He had never even heard of Cambridge before, much less of Harvard Square. Now
he knows everything there is to know. He and his amerloque wife had
split up. Actually, she too had kicked him out. She was an analyst. Sheila.
Very rich Jewish family. Now the bitch was divorcing him.
He produced a tiny notebook in which he had
written a few words. His handwriting was neat, tentative, timid, the product of
a frightened child in harsh French colonial schools. The handwriting of someone
who had never grown up. It surprised me. “Read,” he said.
Dresser.
Turntable.
Television.
Striped ironing board.
A standing lamp to the left.
A night table to the right.
A tiny reading light clasped to the
headboard.
She sleeps naked.
Cat snuggles on her bed.
The stench from the litter box.
Bathroom door never locks.
Bathroom flushes twice.
Impossible to repair. Shower drips too.
What do you see when you look out her
window in the morning?
I see the Charles. And the Longfellow
Bridge.
Sometimes nothing because of the fog.
What do you hear when you open her
windows?
I hear nothing. Sometimes, airplanes.
No one sleeps in the adjacent room;
It used to be her mother’s.
After all his put-downs, he had written a
poem for his wife in the style of Jacques Prévert. Was he trying to tell me
that he cared for her?
“It’s all true,” he said, taking back the
notebook.
Had he ever shown it to her?
“Are you out of your mind?”
I must have looked totally baffled.
“I
just wrote this because I didn’t want to forget what her apartment looked
like.”
I must have looked even more baffled.
“She claims I married her for a green
card.”
“Well, did you?”
“Of course I did. You don’t think I married
her for her good looks.”
“Then why did you write her a poem?”
“What poem?”
“This thing about the dresser, turntable,
ironing board.”
It was his turn to look baffled.
“What are you, stupid?”
Baffled looks on both our faces.
“Poem? Me? My lawyer gave me a list of the
sort of questions they ask you at Immigration Services. They want to make sure
that you actually live together as husband and wife and that your marriage
isn’t just a ruse. So they ask you to describe the bedroom, the kind of pajamas
she wears, where she keeps her diaphragm.”
Rat-tat-tat.
“Me, write her a poem? You should see her
face first.”
He imitated her mouth by pulling his lower
lip all the way down to expose the roots of his gums. “When she laughs with
these gums of hers your dick goes into hiding. When I kiss her all I can think
of are dentists. As for oral sex!” He feigned a shiver.
“She took away the only roof I had in this
country. The only thing I own now is my cab. That’s it. I sew my own buttons
like a woman, like a fisherman, and I hate fishing, and in my world, a man who
darns his own socks is not a man.”
A woman walked into the café and sat at a
table near ours. She was svelte, beautiful, with lovely skin. “French,” Kalaj
said. “French and Jewish.”
“How do you know?” I whispered.
“Trust me!”
I told him to hush. “She’s looking at us.”
“All the better. She’s looking at us
because she wants to speak to us. Pretty soon,” he said, a little louder,
“we’ll have to go back to listen to Sabatini, the guitarist who’s playing
tonight at Le Maghreb.”
Suddenly, there was a touch of something
sly and velvety in his voice. He didn’t look at her, but his thoughts and
speech seemed aimed at her.
At some point, he could no longer stand the
silence between our tables.
“You’re looking at us because you
understand.”
“Yes, I do,” she said, blushing.
“We didn’t happen to say anything
offensive, did we?”
“No.”
“Unless you’re thinking of eating alone,
would you care to join us?”
It turned out that she had no plans for
dinner and the next thing I knew we were all sitting together. No one had told
her that Boston could get this hot in the summer. She missed home. He missed
home, too, even though it was hotter there. Where was his home? she asked.
Almost reluctantly, he named a tiny town in Tunisia—Sidi Bou Said, the most
beautiful whitewashed town on the Mediterranean, west of Pantelleria. “Ever
heard of it?” “No, never.” There was a reason why most people had never heard
of it. Why was that, she asked? The Tunisian tourism office was even more
incompetent than the Massachusetts tourism office. She laughed. Everyone told
you about Paul Revere, John Hancock, and Walden Pond. The first two were
obvious enough, but who was Walden Pond and what role had he played during the
Revolution—about this not a single guidebook had anything to say. Laughter from
her and from me. The ice was broken.
Her name was Léonie. Léonie Léonard. Kalaj
couldn’t resist. “But it’s a pleonasm.” “Yes,” she said shyly. Pléonie
Pléonasme. Laughter, laughter. In no time we had reinvented France with the
very little we had. Bread, butter, croque monsieurs, a bowl of
vichyssoise soup for her, a green salad to share, cheap red wine, dimmed café
lights, French music. Cambridge was just a detail.
Within minutes, we had her entire life
story. He listened, asked questions, joked, and on occasion, reached out to
touch her hand, her wrist. He had picked up shrink talk from the cafés of
France and understood that once a woman had bared her soul there was little
else she wouldn’t bare. It was just a matter of how you led her there. He
asked, she answered, he asked again, each essentially leading the other on. I
interrupted once or twice, and both times would have ruined their seamless
give-and-take had each not chosen to ignore my intrusion.
Kalaj was available to all women, yet he
always ended up with the same type. They were between twenty-five and thirty.
They tended to be brunettes with curly hair. They had either been married or
just got out of a terrible relationship. All were handcraft artists of one
stripe or another, which meant that they came from money and were all in
therapy. He was after passion, because he had so much of it to give; after
hope, because he had so little left; after sex, because it leveled the playing
field between him and everyone else, because sex was his shortcut, his way of
finding humanity in an otherwise cold and lusterless world. But if you asked
him what he wanted most in life, he’d have said, green card—la green carte,
as he pronounced it. It defined who he was, how he lived, and ultimately what
everything was intended to procure him. I had a green carte. Aysha, the
girl behind the counter at Le Maghreb, had a green carte. As for the
brunettes, who would have done anything for a man who spoke like a Kalashnikov
when he was hot but could reach out and touch their hand, their wrist, they had
probably never even seen a green carte in their lives. They were bona
fide U.S. citizens. Kalaj simply looked on, like a Titan staring at the comings
and goings of lesser divinities from across crags of exclusion.
After Anyochka’s we ambled back to Le
Maghreb, which is when Léonie, on impulse, decided to leave us. “Bonne soirée,”
Kalaj said abruptly, his version of a gallant send-off; it suggested that the
evening was still quite young and that it might take her to wonderful and
unexpected places. “She must have felt the heat,” I said, trying to show I knew
a few things about women myself.
“Maybe. My hunch is that she has a young
child and it’s time for her to get back. There’ll be another time.” He ordered
a cinquante-quatre. “I give her at the most three days—she’ll show up.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“Did she give you a sign?” I said,
emphasizing the word in an attempt to be funny, and to show how baseless his
assumption was.
“No sign at all. I just know.” He looked at
me. “With all your Harvard education, you don’t understand women, do you?
You’re too flustered. So you rush things. In all things, it’s how you manage
time.”
I said nothing. Was I so easy to read?
What was he doing with me if I was such a
bungling hanger-on?
We ended the evening at La Coriandre, on Brattle
Street. We grabbed a table and ordered a glass of red wine each. On my way to
the bathroom I ran into Professor Cherbakoff, who was having dinner with his
wife and another couple in the more expensive and far more glamorous French
part of the establishment. Would I mind coming and saying hello? Of course not.
I knew his wife from departmental parties and had to make small talk. “They’re
coming up soon, aren’t they?” she asked in French, referring to my orals. I
affected a horrified sigh. The professor and his friend recalled how dreadful
oral exams had been in their day—“Remember so and so, and such and such”—then,
with one or two nodding gestures meant to signify something I wasn’t quick
enough to catch, they eventually returned to their oversize appetizers. A
moment of silence passed. Then it hit me: I was being congédié,
dismissed.
I understood suddenly why people brandished
Kalashnikovs, chain saws, jackhammers, and rat-tat-tatted at real or
imagined foes. I was, it occurred to me, no different from Kalaj: a felon in a
finishing school.
Later I walked Kalaj to his cab.
“Everything I owe I’ve put into this monster,” he said proudly. “My life
savings. Here, knock on this hood—knock with your knuckles. Real metal, hear
it? Dong, dong, dong. Like cathedral bells. Now knock on this car,” he
said, as he walked over to the green Toyota parked next to his cab and pounded
his knuckles on the hood. “Hear the ersatz thud? Well, I’m like my cab. I’ll
outlive every one of these spit-glue men and women whose imagination is no bigger
than a condom.”
I met Kalaj over coffee almost every evening the next few weeks, sometimes by
chance, sometimes because neither of us knew what to do when the late summer
evenings wore on long after I’d read myself to exhaustion and before he was due
to start his night shift. At Le Maghreb, we always ordered a cinquante-quatre;
we read, played backgammon, made friends, and on certain evenings sat around
and listened to Sabatini, who would bring his star pupils and show them off in
free, impromptu recitals. On Sundays, we got into the habit of catching an art
film at the Harvard-Epworth Church, for a dollar each. Léonie, who became one
of us exactly as Kalaj had predicted, called it going to Mass.
To celebrate our newfound friendship,
Kalaj, Léonie, and I decided to have a dinner party. Kalaj invited two friends;
I invited two fellow graduate students and an Italian friend who had just
returned from a summer in Assisi.
Kalaj and I met at Le Maghreb as soon as I
was done teaching. We hopped in his cab and headed to the Haymarket to buy fish
and vegetables. He wanted to cook a complicated seafood bisque of his own
devising. He had not used a kitchen in almost six months, so this was something
of a celebration.
But the evening started poorly. While Kalaj
was busily cooking, we kept hearing Maria Callas on the radio sing one aria
after another, until a voice announced what I was beginning to fear: Maria
Callas had died that day in Paris. The mood of the party fell. Because I owned
a few of her records, I decided to play some arias, trying as best as I could
to explain why she was la prima donna assoluta.
Kalaj, who had nothing to say on the
subject, was unusually quiet. When asked why, by Léonie, he simply put on a
contrived simper that was meant to call attention to its forced character. “Me,
I’m listening,” he replied. “I like to listen.” But I could see that, without
instant recourse to his verbal Kalashnikov, he had lost his bearings.
We changed topics and began discussing a
French movie that had just been released in Cambridge about a poor girl who
becomes the mistress of an ambitious young man who ends up exploiting her. This
was more to Kalaj’s liking, and right away he had loaded his gun, wiped its
muzzle clean, and was soon inveighing against all women for abandoning the
simple way of life and against all young men for taking advantage of them.
There were no prisoners. Léonie disagreed, but the bisque was ready and
everyone was urged to sit down around a table that could handle no more than
four people. People sat on the sofa, on the floor.
During dessert, things began to fall apart.
Léonie and Kalaj were still disagreeing about the movie. Why they had
resurrected that subject wasn’t clear, but at some point Kalaj left the dining
room and went into my bedroom to lie down. Then he turned off the lights and
started smoking in the dark.
We all have our phantoms, and I was seeing
Kalaj’s, perhaps because, for the first time, he wasn’t able to shout them
away. Was he missing someone, was this reminding him of somewhere else, were
his problems catching up with him—the green card, money, solitude? “No,
nothing, nothing,” he replied when I asked. I shut the door quietly
behind me.
When I returned to the living room, Léonie
was sitting on the sofa and my Italian friend was sitting on the floor, his
back resting against the sofa, her bare foot under his thigh, the back of his
head almost reclining on her knees. At some point the Italian said he was going
around the corner to buy cigarettes. Léonie looked up and said she’d walk him
downstairs and she asked Kalaj to let her have the keys to the car to get her
sweater.
He gave her the keys. About five minutes
after they’d left, he got up and bolted out of the bedroom, rushing down the
stairs. Three minutes later he was back upstairs. Not a word. He headed
directly into the dark bedroom and slammed the door shut.
He came out only after everyone had left. I
was cleaning the dishes and putting away the food. Someone had dropped a
strawberry on the rug, and then stepped on it. I scraped at the stain with the
knife and then poured stain remover on the rug.
“I wish I had thrown gasoline on her face,”
said Kalaj. “And on his.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“What happened? What happened? I beat them
up. That’s what’s happened. Now you know.”
“What do you mean you beat them up?” I
asked, unable to believe the obvious.
“They were in my cab. Neeking. Or
nearly. Well, she’s a woman, so I slapped her a bit. But he’s a man. So I
punched him.”
Kalaj didn’t have
a scratch.
“Where are they now?”
“They went home.”
I looked at him.
“Let me call her and make sure she’s all
right.”
“Don’t you dare. I know what she’s doing.”
“What?” I asked.
“I already told you. They’re neeking.”
He took a breath. “I can just hear her now. Kalaj do this for me, and Kalaj
do that, and please take care of me, and I have a child, and my husband is
gone, and I can’t work. Whore!”
“You should never hit anyone.”
“Pummel her, that’s what I should have
done.”
With that he uttered his usual “Bonne
soirée,” and was abruptly gone.
The next day my buzzer rang.
It was Léonie. She had a black eye and red
blotches all over her face. “That’s nothing,” she said, once she realized how
shocked I was. “Feel my head.” She grabbed my hand and let my palm feel its way
under her hair. Her scalp was full of lumps and bumps.
“He pulled out my hair. And tore my clothes
too.”
She wanted to report Kalaj to the police.
“He’s crazy. He’ll kill me. I don’t want
him near me. I was so scared last night that I ended up at my husband’s.”
If she files a report, I thought, they’ll
deport him in no time. I tried to dissuade her from doing anything rash. They
had to make up, or at least have a talk—in my presence if they wished. I’d seen
it done in movies. People airing their differences, their grievances, all of it
very ersatz, I said.
She laughed. Then, seeing herself laugh,
she began to cry. It was the first time she had cried, she said. She’d held up
well enough until now.
But the damage was done. When they met in
public a few days later, things seemed to go well. Kalaj put his arm around her
son and was kinder than any father could have been to the poor boy. But they
had lifted their hands, and one evening he showed up at Le Maghreb with scratch
marks all over his neck. When he rolled up his sleeves, I saw that his right
forearm was covered with bruises. “What on earth is going on?” I asked.
He smiled it off.
“Do you guys beat each other up now?” I
asked, trying to make light of it.
He didn’t reply. Then, a few seconds later,
as if out of nowhere, he replied, “Sometimes.”
“Sometimes?”
“We like it.”
“You what?”
“Some people need drugs. Others alcohol.
She likes to slap me.”
“Do you really like it when she slaps you?”
He thought about it as though the question
had never occurred to him before. Who in his right mind would dare ask such a
question of a Berber?
“I don’t mind,” he said.
“You’re both sick.”
“We are.”
I began to grow weary of Kalaj. Summer had turned to fall, and perhaps my
teaching obligations, now that the semester was in full swing, took me away
from him. Perhaps, having passed my orals, I felt I belonged to Harvard more
than I had hitherto allowed myself to believe. There was also the possibility
of a new woman in my life, Heather, though I still wasn’t sure which way things
were headed. She was a student at Harvard, and though I had mentioned her to
Kalaj, I didn’t want him to see us together, nor did I want him to see who I
became when I was in her company. I certainly didn’t want him to see me fumble
and fret in my usual flustered state.
But then something else was troubling me,
and Heather’s presence made me see it more clearly. It wasn’t just that I
didn’t want Kalaj to see me with her. I didn’t want her to see me with
him. It finally hit me one early fall afternoon when she took me to meet her
parents over tea at the Ritz-Carlton, and all I could think of as we parked her
car and walked toward the hotel was, Please, God, don’t let Kalaj’s cab pass by
now, don’t let him pull over and speak to us, because it’d be just like him to
turn up as I’m trying to look dapper at the Ritz-Carlton. I was ashamed of him.
Ashamed of myself for being ashamed of him. Ashamed of letting others see that
what we had in common went far deeper than this surface thing called lousy cash
flow. We were transient, dirt-poor, low-life hustlers. He was my shadow self,
my hidden picture of Dorian Gray, the mad brother in the attic. Me unmasked, me
in rags, me with the stifled rage of the unmoored, uprooted, and marooned. Me
without books, without finish, without a green card. Me with a Kalashnikov.
At the Ritz-Carlton, Heather’s father tried
to impress me with his knowledge of The Odyssey; I told him that I had
studied with Fitzgerald. He spoke of his years in the Middle East; I dropped
all the right names. He listed the spots he loved in Paris; I told him mine. It
was a draw, but it brought us closer.
That evening we had dinner at Le Pavillon
du Roi, a stately French restaurant that suddenly resurrected a world I hadn’t
seen in more than a decade. Waiters, wines, luster everywhere. What did one do
these days with a Ph.D.? her father asked. Well, one could always write, or
teach, I said. I explained that my father had become a wealthy businessman even
though all he’d ever wanted was to write books. Was I amenable to other
professions as well, then—to another career, perhaps? He looked down, toying
with the edge of his knife on the tablecloth. Absolutely, I replied, trying to
sound at once earnest and spontaneous.
Was he going to ask me about his daughter
too? The man was too tactful for that. But he wasn’t going to let me off so
lightly either. He made subtle prods: about my plans, my future, my hobbies,
trying his best to steer clear of the stubbornly persistent if muzzled word intentions
bouncing around our table. I did not come to his rescue.
Kalaj’s thundering advice, repeated every
time I’d spoken to him about Heather these last few days, was never far from my
thoughts. Marry her. Become rich. Buy me a fleet of cabs. I’ll make you a
millionaire. Then, if you have no children and she bores you, dump her.
Father, mother, and daughter saw me to the
cab that would take me back to Cambridge. “When I was your age, I didn’t have a
penny for the bus, let alone a taxi,” Heather’s father said, handing me a
twenty-dollar bill in a clenched fist.
I was caught by surprise and genuinely
refused the father’s money. He insisted. Finally, I relented. Poor people
refused because their pride was at stake. Rich people accepted money because it
was not perceived as charity, but simply as a favor that comes with friendship.
A poor person would make a point of repaying the money. The rich man would
simply forget.
I accepted, hoping he would mistake me for
the second.
But because I was not, I got out of the
taxi two minutes later and took the underground back to Cambridge.
At Le Maghreb that night, I told Kalaj that
Heather’s father had given me a twenty.
“I would have taken the money, gotten out
of the cab, and headed back by train,” he said.
I looked at him and smirked.
“That’s what you did, isn’t it—that’s
exactly what you did—and you weren’t going to tell me!”
I don’t think I ever bought rounds of XO
Cognac with more gusto in my life than I did that evening with Kalaj.
I paid dearly for dinner. In the middle of the night I felt a pain in the
kidney area that extended down my right side. I tossed and turned, thinking of
Heather, who was probably wondering why I hadn’t asked her to drive me back to
Cambridge, especially when it was clear that her parents had liked me and
already knew we were sleeping together.
An hour later, the pain growing worse, I
figured I should go to the infirmary. As it turned out, I had no money to call
a cab. I called Kalaj, but there was no answer. I didn’t dare call Heather.
Sexual intimacy was one thing, but I’ve-got-no-money-for-a-cab intimacy was
quite another matter.
It was cold outside. I walked all the way
down Concord Avenue in cold weather. They took X rays, and I was immediately
admitted. At around seven the next morning, the head surgeon knocked on my
door, carrying a manila envelope with the X rays already sticking out. He
slipped them under the lighted glass panel, and after musing a while at what
looked like off-gray paisley patterns, said that I had gallstones.
“Anyone else in the family with
gallstones?”
“All of them.”
“On both sides?”
“All four of my grandparents.”
What had I eaten for dinner last night?
I said, Le Pavillon du Roi. He pursed his
lips. A moment of silence elapsed between us.
The operation was not urgent. But I had to
watch my diet, he said. No fats, no alcohol, no coffee. Meanwhile, they wanted
to run a few more tests, so I should stay in bed for another twenty-four hours
and eat the bland food they fed me.
I called no one. I wanted to be alone. I
was ashamed of being stricken with an old man’s disease. But around two that
afternoon, I heard a timid knock at the door. It was Heather. How had she found
me? I wasn’t answering my phone. She’d been calling all morning. Instead of
supposing I didn’t want to see her, or had spent the night with someone else,
she had assumed the worst. What amazing confidence in herself, in people, in
the power of truth. In her place, the first thing I would have imagined was
that my lover had disappeared—or, better yet, absconded.
She sat next to my bed and we spoke. Her
parents loved me, she said. They thought I was funny. They loved the way I
complained there were no fish knives at Le Pavillon du Roi. It was typical of
them to have noticed this.
Later that afternoon, one or two of my
students straggled into the infirmary, then a few teaching fellows, colleagues.
Professor Cherbakoff dropped in to say hello. He too, apparently, had heard.
Then my entire sophomore tutorial. There were about sixteen of us in the room,
the hospital staff came and complained that there was too much noise and that
no one was allowed to smoke. “But I smoke,” I protested. “Well, you can, but no
one else can. And incidentally, you shouldn’t either.”
At seven-thirty, Kalaj walked into the
room, bearing three porno magazines. I wanted to disappear under my bedcovers.
At eight-thirty, long after official visiting hours were over, Aysha from the
café appeared. Then, minutes later, Abdul Majib, the old Iraqi dishwasher from
the Freshman Union, decided to make an appearance as well.
I lay in bed, helpless, in a universe where
all my partitions had collapsed. Kalaj and Heather, my students, the department
head, Aysha, my colleagues, everyone, careerists and lowlifes, were thrown
together as if in a Fellini movie or at a Provincetown clambake.
Heather looked totally ill at ease. She sat
on a chair in a corner, silent, remote, waiting for everyone to leave, not sure
whether she should be my student or girlfriend. Kalaj, who must have originally
assumed I’d be alone, leaned against one of the walls with his camouflage
jacket, his beret, his gunner’s scowl, and his three porno magazines, trying
his best to look like an overgrown graduate student who’d spent an all-nighter
working on his dissertation.
He immediately put one of my students in
his place by saying that the Marquis de Sade disgusted him. With another he
insisted that American writers were all ersatz, including those he hadn’t read
and wasn’t likely to start reading now. Then he reminded everyone in the room,
including the nurse who came to remove my tray, that hospitals, like
courthouses, were put on this planet to beat down your soul till it was
flattened into toilet paper—and as far as souls went, ladies and gentlemen, we
each had one only, and it had to be returned when we were done with it, as good
as new for the next person. As Nostradamus said—and he began to quote.
In the space of five minutes, he managed to
scare everyone away. “Who was that crackpot?” someone later asked.
Everything I had feared since the school year had started was now happening. From
a traveling companion picked up in an oasis during my lonely summer days, Kalaj
had become a deadweight that was impossible to shake off. After my release from
the hospital, I could go nowhere in Cambridge without running into him. I
couldn’t sit with anyone in public without being joined by him or, as was more
often the case, without being invited to join him at his table. I went out
equipped with excuses and white lies the way people with runny noses carry a
box of tissues. I hated myself both for being too weak to fend him off and for
worrying about it all the time. I tried to avoid the bars and coffeehouses
where I was likely to run into him. Once, at La Coriandre, I was sitting
with two colleagues, and there was Kalaj at the bar, drinking his usual dollar
vingt-deux wine. I’ll never forget his eyes. He had seen me, of course, as
I had seen him, but he was allowing a glazed look to settle over his eyes, as
if he were distracted by troubling, faraway thoughts—his cab, Léonie, his
long-term projects in the U.S., his father, his green carte. Five
minutes later, I heard his explosive, detonating, hysterical laugh. He was
sending me a message. It was impossible to miss. I don’t need you. See, I
can do better. There was something camp and histrionic about it, which
reminded me of the first time I’d met him. You’re trying to be like these
colleagues of yours, he seemed to say, but I know you’ll stiff on the
tip when no one’s looking.
He wasn’t pretending that he hadn’t seen me.
He was pretending that he hadn’t seen me pretending not to see him. He was
letting me off the hook.
A few days later he was waiting for me
outside of Boylston Hall. He needed two favors. “I’ll walk with you,” he
explained.
His landlady was remodeling the house, and God
only knew when she’d be able to let him have his room back. She was
therefore giving him fair notice. It didn’t sound very convincing. Had
he done something wrong, tried to bring women into his bedroom, I asked. “Me,
soil my sheets, when I could dirty a woman’s instead? Never.”
He wanted me to help him find another
bed-and-breakfast. But when we approached Porter Square, the old, prim ladies
on Everett, Mellen, Wendell, Sacramento, and Garfield streets took one good look
at him and had no vacancies. “Can you put me up for a few days?” he finally
asked me. The question had never occurred to me and I was totally unprepared
for it. Of course I could, I said. All he needed, he said, was a sofa to sleep
on, a quick shower in the morning, and he’d be out of my hair till nighttime.
Maybe he’d arrange to sleep at Léonie’s, but he didn’t want to push things
right now. “Just give me a copy of your keys—I won’t be in your way.” I didn’t
have a duplicate set. Not to worry, we could have copies made on the way to
Harvard Square.
The spare keys cost next to nothing, but as
we stood waiting for the locksmith to grind them I caught myself making a
mental note of the hardware store’s name and address. I was already pricing a
new lock for which Kalaj wouldn’t be given a key.
Halfway to Harvard Square, he bought me a
warm tuna-fish grinder. While we were eating, he told me the next news item:
his driver’s license had been revoked for a month. With all my Harvard
contacts, he began—this was his typical phrase—could I help him find a job?
I thought for a while. The only jobs I knew
of were in education.
“I’ve taught before.”
“I mean university education.”
“Teaching is teaching.”
Instead of going home after lunch, I
decided to pay my chairman a visit.
“But has this friend of yours ever taught
in an American institution?” Cherbakoff asked when I brought up Kalaj’s
predicament.
“He barely speaks English—which is exactly
what you’ve always said we needed in a French teacher.”
Cherbakoff concurred. As it happened there
was a slot open for a French-language teacher.
Kalaj was ecstatic.
“But you can’t yell,” I said, as a way of
telling him that the American teaching methods were entirely different from the
French colonial. “And you can’t—can’t—hit anyone, you can’t even make
them feel bad about themselves.”
“Then how am I to teach them anything?”
I couldn’t stay long with him to
celebrate—I had to be in Chestnut Hill for cocktails at Heather’s parents’, and
all I kept thinking for the rest of the evening was: Now he has my keys. I’d
never felt so weak.
I was furious with myself. For not wanting
to give him my keys and for surrendering them with a smile. For agreeing to go
to the cocktail party at Heather’s parents’, and for taking the long train ride
there. For not wanting to marry Heather and for letting her think I was dying
to. For not wanting to be at Harvard and for not ever finding the courage to leave.
As I watched my reflection on the glass panels of the
Green Line car headed out to Newton, I asked myself: Is this really me? Who am
I when I’m not looking? Or when no one is looking at me? Was I simply a being
without shape, to be molded by circumstances and by what everyone around me
wanted? Or by complying was I simply making up in advance for crimes I knew I’d
never have the courage to commit?
That evening, Heather wanted to drive me
home. I let her, though I would have preferred the train. There was a moment at
the party when I suddenly longed to be alone, to watch Kalaj roll a cigarette
in the corner and make fun of the entire party with its jumbo-ersatz gravity
hanging from its jumbo-ersatz chandeliers and its froufrou guests who kissy-kissied
and huggy-huggied with their jumbo-ersatz show of wealth and plenitude. Amerloques,
I could hear him say. Take this one, he’d point out to a woman in the crowd.
Skin like burlap. Three generations ago she was scrounging turnips out of the
dead land. And as for these two, he’d snicker, they may have come over on a
sailboat, but look underneath and you’ll find the coarseness of a sea dog and
the larceny of stevedores.
I wanted to sit by myself in an empty train
car and let the hypnotic rhythm of the wheels dull the fire inside me. All
these wealthy people who simply belonged. Their large cars. Their large
mansions. Their professed love for the people of the Mediterranean whom they
couldn’t, if you gave them ten lifetimes, begin to understand. Kalaj would
understand, and yet I didn’t want to have anything to do with him either,
because I was tired of him, because however much closer I was to him than to
any of the people at this party, the distance between him and me, for all our
love of France, and our exile, and our longing to hear the loud cicadas of the
Mediterranean, would always remind me that we came from very different worlds.
Heather and I sat in the car outside my
building. “Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong?” she asked. I hoped she wasn’t
going to cry or make me feel sorry for her. I didn’t want to hate myself more
than I already did.
“Sometimes I need to be alone,” I finally
said, not knowing that I was going to say it until it came out of my mouth.
“I thought we were happy.”
“We are.”
“Then what is it?”
I didn’t know. She sat silent for a while.
Then she said it: “Well, if you want me to, I’ll drive back home now. I’ll call
you tomorrow. If you can’t tell me the truth, then I’ll know, and I swear I’ll
never bother you again.”
She did as she promised. She called me
once. And then never again.
To Kalaj, when I told him what Heather had
said, it was all corporate-ersatz-speak. But it was, and I knew it even then,
the most candid and most honorable behavior I’d witnessed in my life.
Kalaj took the job in my department, and in the days that followed he would
come in at odd hours to consult my dictionaries and correct homework sheets. It
made him feel as though he too were a graduate student and we were roommates
living in some sort of American Bohème. I helped him compose his first grammar
test. I took him to the ditto machine and taught him how to fill it with
solvent. Then I helped him distinguish between an A, a B-minus, and a C-plus. This
was an altogether new world for him, and part of him, you could tell, was
starstruck and awed, like an immigrant who, on board a steamship at dawn,
suddenly spots the hazy outline of Manhattan’s skyline.
Two months into the semester, he had one of
the greatest shocks of his life. A student asked the administration to invite
Kalaj to a teacher-student dinner at one of the river houses. What was that? he
asked. Had a student lodged a complaint against him? No, it was an honor, I
explained. A student invites a teacher and has a formal dinner with him,
one-on-one. He thought about it for a long time. “Can I go dressed like this?”
he asked. “No, you need a tie and a jacket.” He was rolling a cigarette,
staring at the tobacco without saying a word. I felt for him. “I’ll lend you
any tie you want, but my jackets won’t fit you.” On the evening of the dinner,
he knocked at my door wearing a double-breasted gray flannel suit with a light
blue shirt and a dark blue tie. “Courtesy of Goodwill,” he said. But the suit
was French. As was the shirt. He would never have admitted it, but I knew that
he had gone out and bought the whole outfit, even the black shoes. He had
combed his hair with a touch of brilliantine and he looked five years younger.
“I’ll call you when it’s all over. Maybe you’ll meet me for a drink at La Coriandre. We’ll
find new women,” he said. I watched him leave.
The munificent dinner sold him on the
wonders of America. The sight of a juicy roasted ham with pineapple slices and
cloves, coupled with the most oversize shrimps he’d seen in his life, was
simply too much for him to resist. He ate things he had never seen alive and
wouldn’t have recognized if you had whispered their name to him, but they
tasted of heaven, and there was so much of it that part of him kept looking for
a paper bag in which to put extras—for me or for his friends at Le Maghreb. It
was an inexhaustible PX of all that was ever jumbo and ersatz. He loved it.
The moment he was hooked he became weak.
Until then, he could survey the New World from a quarantined distance, but he
couldn’t get near to it, much less touch it, so he ranted against it. But
having been invited in, if only for an evening, had made an instant convert of
him. In his heart of hearts, I am sure, he couldn’t wait to say the Pledge of
Allegiance. “What did it?” I teased him. “The Old World opulence, the
abundance, the sheer self-satisfaction of the rich?” “Actually, it was the ham.
The next time we have a dinner party we must cook roasted ham with pineapples.”
He also began to worry. “One day my students will hail a cab, and it will be
mine. What do I tell them then?” “You tell them the truth.” “Do you tell
them the truth?” he asked. He’d seen right through me.
Harvard sucked him in during the fall
semester. He knew it couldn’t last, but he had no idea how brutal doors can be
when they suddenly shut on you. In mid-November, just when he was preparing to
savor his first Thanksgiving in America, he received a letter from Professor
Cherbakoff, sent in care of my home address. The instructor he’d replaced would
soon be returning, and there were no openings for the spring semester.
Cherbakoff thanked him dearly for his help and wished him the best for his
career.
Kalaj was not surprised.
Why, I asked.
“Because for the past few weeks every time
I cross Cherbakoff in the corridors, he looks away.” He knew that look. “It’s
the look on customers who, even before opening their wallets, have decided not
to tip. The look of people who have already signed your death warrant but don’t
want you to know it. The look of a wife who kisses you as you head out to work
at seven in the morning but has already scheduled the movers for ten,” he said.
“I don’t make these things up,” he added, in
case I wanted to warn him against paranoia. I had to write to Cherbakoff, he
said, and explain that he was very important to his students, that his
departure would demoralize the entire class, that in good conscience Cherbakoff
should not allow this to happen.
I tried to explain that such letters never
work and very often backfire, turning you into more of an outcast, especially
if your boss must continue to see you until the end of the semester.
He called me a coward, an apologist for the
system, a réac.
“If I thought it would help, I would write
the letter. But it will do nothing. Reasoning is pointless when you’ve lost.”
“I must resign immediately.”
“You will do no such thing. You will teach
till the end of your term and when you look back on it, you’ll have nothing to
reproach yourself with.”
He listened. “It’s bound to get out.”
And then it hit me: he couldn’t face his
employer, he couldn’t face his students, he didn’t even know how to face the
people at Le Maghreb who had been watching him sit with his students day after
day, going over the agreement of the past conditional with the pluperfect in
counterfactual clauses, and never once raising his voice, always remaining
positive and upbeat, and always throwing in a cinquante-quatre to make
them feel better about themselves.
He wanted to hide. He didn’t even have it
in him to mention the matter to Léonie, who was gradually going back to her
husband. “Do you still pummel each other?” I asked, trying to change the
subject. He looked at me with surprise. “We stopped that a long time ago. We
stopped everything a long time ago as well. I don’t want to go back to her. Can
I stay at your place tonight?”
The next morning I made coffee for the two of us. Then he said he had to go and
teach.
Later in the day he told me what had
happened. He’d gone to class, distributed the homework he had meticulously
corrected the night before, told everyone what the department had done to him,
and right then and there walked out of the classroom, dropping all of his books
into the garbage can. He knew he’d be forfeiting his month’s paycheck but it
gave him no end of satisfaction. As luck would have it, he crossed paths with
Professor Cherbakoff, who was walking with other colleagues to the library and,
miming the gesture with his hand, he told Cherbakoff to go beat off. Kalaj had
socked it to him, and in front of everyone. Cherbakoff retaliated by saying
that he would report him to the dean of the faculty. “The who?”
We laughed about it. He wanted to cook
dinner for the two of us. Then, as if it were an afterthought, he said, “I
think I’ll sleep here tonight.”
I caught myself wondering how long it had
taken poor Cherbakoff to write his letter to Kalaj. I thought of Kalaj’s wife
and of Léonie, and of his first wife in France, and of the U.S. government as
well—everyone had had to battle with the same thing, how to tell Kalaj that he
wasn’t needed, wasn’t wanted, wasn’t loved.
I was beginning to nurse the feeling
myself. When, a few evenings afterward, I suggested we dine at an
all-you-can-eat place near Porter Square, anyone who knew me would have seen
right through my casual air and inferred that what I wanted more than ever was
not to be seen with him around Harvard. We ate a jumbo meal and then walked
back to my home. To my dismay, he came up the stairs with me. I pretended that
things between me and Heather had resumed and that we needed the apartment. “I
promise I won’t make any noise, I’ll come very late, take a shower at dawn, and
be out.” I didn’t have the heart to refuse him. But I asked him not to keep his
things in my home. Heather didn’t like this, Heather might not like that,
Heather gets nervous when—“And who does she think she is, anyway? Your fiancée?
Or the woman you neek at night?”
What saved me were rumors of two robberies
in our building, rumors I built up to justify my putting a new lock on my door.
Kalaj had enough tact not to push the matter when I didn’t offer him a key. He
never told me where he slept when he wasn’t sleeping on my couch. I never
asked. I didn’t go to Le Maghreb for a couple of weeks. When I did go, no one
had seen him in days. Nor was he anywhere to be seen at La Coriandre, or at Cadiz,
or downstairs at Césarion. I decided to go home. But home, when I got there,
was stultifying; there was no one to call. I missed Heather. Everything felt
soulless. I went back to Cadiz, a ten-minute walk. He spotted me before I so
much as started to look for him.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I am. You?”
“Could be better. They took my cab away.
Just like that. The FBI.”
Léonie’s father had a lawyer friend who was
going to try to help.
“And if that doesn’t work,” he said, “well,
you will be able to say that the last Checker cab in Boston was driven by a
pure Berber who was proud of his skin and proud of his friends.”
“We’re going to have to see your lawyer.”
“You know as well as I do that he is a
crook. He’ll end up costing more than the car.”
“But you can’t just let them take your car
away and not try to do something.”
Kalashnikov was in top form. But a chill
had lodged between us and, although I’d long wished for it, I was surprised to
see how easily it had settled.
When he left, a friend of his, a Moroccan
cabdriver, told me the latest: Kalaj was going to be deported. Even the legal
aid society was unable to stop it. The divorce had hurt his chances a lot.
Actually, it wasn’t a divorce. The marriage had been annulled.
“What if he decides to stay as an illegal
and disappears, say, in the Midwest?” I said.
“He doesn’t want to be illegal.”
“What will he do then? Go back to France?”
“He can’t. You see, for him it’s back to
Tunisia.”
But that would be like saying that the past
fifteen years of his life never happened. “It would drive him crazy,” I said,
thinking of what I’d feel if I found myself hurled back to Alexandria. “It
would be like a second death to him.”
Kalaj was not the type to say that
experience is all to the good, that nothing is wasted in life, that everyone we
meet and everywhere we go plays a role in making us who we are. That was ersatz
talk, and Kalaj was too brutal to think this way. There were no second chances.
For him there had been bad turns, and cruel tricks, and terrible mistakes, and
from these there was no coming back, no expiation, no recovery, no turning a
new leaf. To live with yourself you had to cut off the hand that had offended,
amputate yourself from yourself, cut, slice, peel, and tear away till all you
were left with were your stripped-down bones. Your bones gave you away; you
could not hide your bones, nor could you avoid looking at them. All you could
ask was for everyone else to be stripped down like you—lean, intemperate, and
skeletal.
Kalaj had thought me a fellow legionnaire
of the bone, a man who’d stopped at the same watering hole with the same
thirst. I had disappointed him. He’d thought that I might be all human, all passion,
like him. It took someone like him to remind me that, for all my impatience
with life in New England and my yearning for the Mediterranean, I had become a
bit of a New Englander myself. I had probably started the day I landed in
Boston.
I thought of the suit he’d worn to have
dinner with his student. The Satan of ersatz had tempted him that night. Given
the chance, Kalaj would have yielded. Everyone does.
I saw him at La Coriandre
a few nights later. I was with another woman. He arched an eyebrow to say, What
happened to Heather? I shook my head to suggest, Let’s not talk about it. It
didn’t work out. He shrugged his shoulder as discreetly as he could, meaning,
You’re simply hopeless. That was a serious mistake. I tilted my head in a
resigned, Well, what can we do. While we were exchanging gestures, he had
managed to charm the new girl. No, he was telling her, not Saudi Arabia—“With
my skin?”—no, not Algeria either, not Morocco, but a little place called Sidi
Bou Said, the most beautiful whitewashed town on the Mediterranean west of
Pantelleria. For a second I saw the three of us having dinners together on
Sunday evenings at Le Maghreb, listening to Sabatini’s free guitar recitals,
followed by the one-dollar films at the Harvard-Epworth Church.
“I am glad I had a chance to meet you,
because I may never see you again,” he told her.
She gave him a puzzled look.
“I’m leaving.”
“For how long?”
“For good,” he replied.
A quizzical gesture from my eyes meant: When?
“In one week.”
And then, as he’d always done whenever
taking his leave, abruptly he wished us a bonne soirée and walked away.
He never missed a beat.
Once he stepped outside, he stopped, cupped
his hands around his mouth and lit a cigarette. Then he ambled out toward
Brattle Street, pacing his way ever so slowly, pensive and hesitant.
“Strange character,” she said. “Friend?”
“Not really.”
I caught sight of him once again, as he
turned around the patio on his way to Cadiz. Something told me to take a mental
picture of him threading his way through the back courtyard. Then I forgot
about the mental picture. I was thinking of other things. Distantly, I knew I’d
been spared the tearful good-byes, the hugs, the flimsy jokes to undo the knots
in our throats.
He called me three days later. I was in my
office with a student discussing her thesis. He knew the drill. “I’ll ask you
questions, and you answer yes or no.” “Yes,” I said. “Can you see me soon?”
“No.” “Can you see me in one hour?” “No. Teaching.” “Can I come and pick you up
in two hours?” “No.” “I’ll call you later tonight.”
When he called me that evening, he told me
that he had needed an interpreter for an interview with Immigration Services.
Why hadn’t he explained? “You couldn’t talk, remember?” At any rate, it didn’t
matter, since Aysha from the café had gone downtown with him and served as his
interpreter. Except he would have preferred a man from Harvard. Going with a
woman might have given the wrong impression, what with his annulment and all
that.
“Do you have time for a quick drink with a
few friends tonight?” he asked.
It sounded like a farewell gathering.
“Tonight I can’t.” I made it seem I wasn’t
alone.
“Then it’s possible I may not see you. I
may have to leave tomorrow.”
“Did they give you a plane ticket?”
“Immigration is not a travel agency.” He
burst out laughing at his own joke.
“Those bastards won’t tell you when you’re
leaving?” I wanted it to seem that my suppressed anger was directed at the
immigration folks, but all I was doing was making noise to prevent him from
asking me once again to join him for a drink.
He knew. He was far better at this than I
was.
“I’ll call you tomorrow and let you know
where things stand. Bonne soirée.”
I spent almost all of the next day at
Widener Library, away from the phone. I told myself that it was high time I
started working on an article I’d been meaning to write for a year.
Later that afternoon, when I got home, a
piece of torn paper was stuck in my mailbox. “We tried to reach you. Kalaj said
you must have gone to the library. He didn’t want to disturb you there. He
asked me to say good-bye. Aysha.”
All I remember feeling at that moment was a
pang of unbearable shame. I had done this. No one else. Never had I sunk
so low in my life. And yet, no sooner had I felt this burst of shame than it
was immediately relieved by an exhilarating sense of lightness, as though an
oppressive worry, which had been haunting and weighing and gnawing at me for
months, were suddenly lifted. I was soaring as high as a kite reaching for the
clouds.
Now I could head back to Harvard Square and
not think twice about running into him. I could walk through Le Maghreb and no
longer prepare to listen to yet another tirade or arm myself with my litany of
excuses. I could sit at a table without talking to anyone, just as I’d been
doing that Sunday in August while reading Montaigne. Shut my eyes for a moment
and never fret about being caught daydreaming or having him sneak up on me, as
he so often did, uttering his equivalent of “Boo!” I began to feel as certain
countries do when their tyrant dies. At first there’s a hush in the city, and
everyone mourns, partly out of disbelief, partly because life, trade,
friendship, love, eating, drinking seem unthinkable without a tyrant to keep
them in tow. Something in us always dies when the world as we’ve known it
changes. But by the evening of a tyrant’s death, cars begin to honk, people
shout hurrahs, and soon enough the whole city, which only that morning was
bathed in stupor and fear, feels like a carnival town.
When I arrived at Le Maghreb, his seat was
empty. None of the regulars who had known Kalaj wanted to sit there. It was
their silent tribute. This was where they’d all gathered to say good-bye to
him. “I’ve got a knot right here,” Sabatini said, pointing to his throat.
Aysha’s mascara had bled all over her face. Even the Arab owner of the café,
who had grown to dislike Kalaj, was seated at his table silently telling his
beads. “I am glad you came,” said Aysha, as she hugged me in the kitchen. “You
were the one he trusted most. You were the only one of us who never wanted a
thing from him.” I said nothing. Then I caught myself nodding, an ersatz nod
that seemed to underscore everything she was saying to me. I did not disabuse
her. I hugged her again amid the clatter of plates in the kitchen. She rubbed
her eyes with the back of her wrist, giggled, and said she had customers to
attend to.
At Cadiz too, the barman and even some of the waiters knew he’d left. As did
those at La Coriandre. I
ordered a dollar vingt-deux and stood at the horseshoe bar, pretending I
was waiting for him and that any moment now he’d show up. But all I could
remember was the evening when I’d watched him leave the bar and then suddenly
stop outside the door to light the cigarette he’d been rolling while talking to
us. I remember the elusive quiver of a waggish smile on his lips when he caught
my silent signals and how our entire conversation was cut short with his
habitually abrupt bonne soirée that was always tinged with good
fellowship, best wishes, and the glint of irony. His fingerprints were now all
over the bar.
I ordered a second glass of wine before
finishing the first. I wanted the barman to think I was lining them up, but I
did it to nurse the illusion that Kalaj was drinking beside me. Perhaps I
wanted to see if I missed him. I ended up drinking four glasses of wine. Then I
began to miss him indeed, and knowing that it was probably the wine speaking,
not me, I turned around just before leaving and, for the sake of testing the
words in my own mouth, or of hearing the effect they might have on me once I’d
spoken them, I uttered an abrupt bonne soirée to the head waiter, who
was French. I repeated the words up Brattle Street and then on Berkeley Street
until I realized that I was also bidding good night to Le Maghreb, to all the
people I’d befriended there, to Aysha and Sabatini and the Moroccan cabdriver,
to everyone I’d met because of him, to La Coriandre and Cadiz, to our rituals together and
to the fellowship that had blossomed because of it. Bonne soirée to our
dinner with friends, bonne soirée to the spirit of complicity that had
been missing from my life and which told me now not just that I might never
come so close to a stranger again but also that I might never want to. Bonne
soirée to our small oasis, to our imagined France, to the last illusion of
myself as a lone Mediterranean holdout stranded in a large, cold, solitary,
darkling flatland that had become my American home. I was one of them
now, perhaps had always been, was always meant to be.
Story from The Paris Review that was nominated for a 2008 National Magazine Award in fiction.
