by André Aciman
Sometimes, to quell the rising storm between the two, the owner of the place, a Palestinian, would put on an album of Arabic songs, usually Om Kalsoum. Within seconds, the battle of wits came to a complete standstill, and the plangent voice of the Egyptian diva would fill the hushed four corners of Café Algiers. “Play it louder, play it louder, for the love of God,” Kalaj would say. It was always the same song. “Enta omri,” you are my life. If Kalaj was having breakfast with a woman in the morning, he’d interrupt whatever they were saying and translate the lyrics word for word in his broken English—“your eyes brought me back to our long-gone days”—pointing to his eyes, then to her eyes. “And taught me to regret the past and its wounds”—and with the palm of his hand draw a gesture signifying the sweeping, painful passage of time.
If we were together having coffee and a croissant, he’d translate the words for me as well, word for word, though I remembered enough Arabic from my childhood in Egypt not to miss the general tenor of the song. If he was sitting by himself and the song was being played, he’d hold his cup by its rim in midair and, caught in a spell, murmur the diva’s words aloud and then translate them back to himself in French.
It was not always easy to step out of Café Algiers after such an interlude in our imaginary Mediterranean café by the beach and walk over to Harvard, which was right across the street. But, on those torrid mornings with the blinding sun in our eyes, it seemed constellations and light-years away.
I still remember the morning smell of bleach and lye with which Zeinab would mop up the floor of Café Algiers while the chairs sat upturned on the café’s minuscule tables. The place was closed to customers, but they’d let a few of us in—regulars who spoke Arabic and French—and allowed us to wait for the coffee to brew. One look at the poster of Tipaza and your body ached for sea water and beach rituals you didn’t even know you’d stopped remembering. All of Café Algiers took me back to Alexandria, the way it took Kalaj back to Tunis, and the Algerian to Oran. Perhaps each one of us would stop by Café Algiers every day to pick up the person we’d left behind in North Africa, each working things back to that point where life must have taken a wrong turn, each as though trying to put time on splints until the fracture and the cracks and the dislocations were healed and the bone finally fused. Sheltered from the morning sun and wrapped in the strong scent of coffee and of cleaning fluids, each found his way back to his mother.
Mornings, however, exerted a second-tier magic all their own because they reminded the three of us of Paris, our halfway home, and of French cafés we’d known at dawn, when waiters are busy setting up the place and exchange pleasantries with the street sweeper, the newspaper vendor, the delivery boys, the baker next door, everyone dropping in for a quick coffee before heading out to work. Kalaj had gotten into the habit of a very early coffee in the cafés of rue Mouffetard. Drop in, greet the regulars, speak, snipe, gripe, and take up this morning where you left off late last night.
At Café Algiers he was almost always the first to arrive in the morning. Like Che Guevara, he’d appear wearing his beret, his pointed beard with the drooping mustache, and the cocksure swagger of someone who has just planted dynamite all over Cambridge and couldn’t wait to trigger the fuse, but not before coffee and a croissant. He didn’t like to speak in the morning. Café Algiers was his first stop, a transitional place where he’d step into the world as he’d known it all of his life and from which, after coffee, he’d emerge and learn all over again how to take in this strange New World he’d managed to get himself shipped to. Sometimes, before even removing his jacket, he’d head behind the tiny counter, pick up a saucer, and help himself to one of the fresh croissants that had just been delivered that morning. He’d look up at Zeinab, brandish the croissant on a saucer, and give her a nod, signifying, I’m paying for it, so don’t even think of not putting it on my check. She would nod back, meaning, I saw, I understood, I would have loved to, but the boss is here anyway, so no favors today. A few sharp shakes of his head meant, I never asked for favors, not now, not ever, so don’t pretend otherwise, I know your boss is here. She would shrug: I couldn’t care less what you think. One more questioning nod from Kalaj: When is coffee ready? Another shrug meant: I’ve only got two hands, you know. A return glance from him was clearly meant to mollify her: I know you work hard; I work hard too. Shrug. Bad morning? Very bad morning. Between them, and in good Middle Eastern fashion, no day was good.
Later in the afternoon, when he’d return to Café Algiers, he was a different man. He was back in his element, all pumped up and ready to fire—this was home base, and the night was young.
I would eventually find that Kalaj was gifted with 360-degree eyesight. He always knew when someone was watching, or eavesdropping, or, like me that first time, simply wondering. He’d sit in his center position—what his Algerian nemesis called Kalaj’s état major, his headquarters—and would instantly recognize people by their footsteps. If he hadn’t turned to say hello when he heard your footsteps, it was because he wanted to avoid showing he was aware of you. Or because he was too busy talking to someone else. Or because he never wished to see your face again. He’d scope a situation in a millisecond. He’d walk into a crowded bar and moments later say: “Let’s leave.” “Why?” I’d ask. “There are no women here.” “How about those two over there?” I’d say, pointing out two beautiful women he’d obviously overlooked. “The one in black is crazy.” “How can you tell?” “I know, that’s how I can tell,” he’d repeat, impatience, sarcasm, exasperation bristling in his voice, “I can always tell—oké? Let’s. Just. Go.”
Or with his back still turned to the door, he’d say, “Don’t look now, but there’s someone making his way toward us.” When had he seen him walk in? How had he noticed? And where does one pick up such skills? “He’ll buy me coffee, then a pastry, and then he’ll want to tag along.” Of course, no sooner had he told me not to look than I’d already turned my head to see who it was. “Didn’t you hear me say don’t look now?” “Yes, I heard you say don’t look now.” “Then why did you look?” All I could do was apologize, say I’d always been slow on the uptake. “But this slow?”
Sometimes there’d be a woman he was trying to avoid. Big embrace if he couldn’t duck in time, big introductions, kiss-kiss, and kiss-kiss again, then immediately turning to me, “Is he here?” “Is who here?” I’d ask ingenuously. “The immigration lawyer we’re supposed to meet?” he’d hiss, brandishing his stiletto grin, ready to hack at me for lacking the remotest sense of man-to-man complicity. It would take me a moment to understand. “No,” I’d reply, “he said he’d be waiting at the café across the street.” “Waiting at the café across the street, waiting at the café across the street,” he mumbled under his breath as we’d rush out of Café Algiers. “How long must it take you to come up with something as stupid as waiting at the café across the street?” “Why was it stupid?” I’d protest, knowing that it was completely stupid. “Because she could have easily asked to join us!” Never had I felt so useless and callow in ordinary day-to-day affairs. I was a flea tagging after a titan.
One day, as I walked into Café Algiers, I noticed a girl reading a book at what was my usual corner table. The table next to hers was unoccupied. So I walked over to the free table, put my book down, and sat down. She was reading Melville. I was rereading Spenser. When eventually she lifted her head, I caught her gaze and asked where she was in Moby-Dick. She told me. I made a face. She smiled. She looked over at my book and said she’d studied Spenser the previous year. The two of us were reading impossible English, I ventured. “It just takes getting used to,” she said sweetly. We continued to talk. About the teachers, about our books, about other books. She liked many authors. I wasn’t so sure I liked so many. Then, with the conversation drying up, I let her go back to her reading, and I picked up mine. Not long afterward, she stood up, left some change on the table, and was about to leave the café. “Maybe you should reread Melville,” she said befor
e walking out.
“Maybe,” I said.
I felt I had made an enemy.
“Couldn’t you tell she wanted to keep talking?” Kalaj said when he walked up to my table. I hadn’t noticed he’d been watching me all this time. He asked what we’d spoken about.
“So you spoke about books. Then what?”
I didn’t know that there was a then what.
“You could have said something about her, or at least said something about yourself. Or the people around us. Or tea leaves, for the love of God. Anything! You could have asked questions. Helped her answer them. Suggested things. Made her laugh. Instead you told her you hated things. You’re a champion—seriously.”
“It’s where the conversation went.”
“Because you let it go there.”
“Because I let it go there.”
“Exactly.”
“What will you do the next time you speak to a woman in a café?”
My silence said it all.
“Do you not understand women or are you just inept?”
I looked at him in dismay.
“I suppose both,” I finally said.
The two of us burst out laughing.
He knew the whereabouts of everyone, understood why and how things worked, trusted no one, and at all times expected the worst from each and every one. He foresaw what people might do or say, figured things out even when he couldn’t understand the first thing about them, and sniffed out deceit and shortcuts most mortals were simply unaware even existed. In this, as in so many other things, he belonged to another order of beings. Gods, heroes, and monsters hadn’t been invented when he burst in on the fifth day of creation all wired up and set to go. Mankind would arrive much, much later.
Kalaj also remembered faces. While walking with him one day I ran into a Syrian fellow I knew and said, “He’s a good guy.” “He’s a sick fuck,” Kalaj replied, and right away related how, a few weeks earlier, he’d seen this exact same man argue with his girlfriend and slap her across the face outside a nightclub in downtown Boston. “Actually, of all the people I know here, he is the only one I fear. He could stab you in cold blood, bugger you afterward, then run you over with his car. I’ll bet you anything he’s a spy.”
I didn’t believe Kalaj at the time, but years later, I heard that this same man, after disappearing in the Massachusetts penitentiary system for assault, rape, and battery, resurfaced as a book dealer in the West.
Kalaj had another gift. He not only remembered faces, he saw through them as well. Your friend So-and-so, I don’t trust him. Your other friend Such-and-such, he hates you. The list was endless. So-and-so always sits sideways so as never to look you in the eye. Such-and-such seems kind, but only because she’s scared to tell you she dislikes anyone. As for this guy over there, he is not intelligent, just crafty. She is not happy, just laughs a lot. She is not passionate, just restless. He is not wise, just bitter. Hysterical laughter means nothing—like bar chatter, like telephone intimacies, like saying I love you instead of a plain goodbye. He hated people who said I love you before hanging up. It meant they didn’t. He mistrusted people who cried easily at the cinema. It meant they felt nothing in real life. So-and-so always affects to be giddy, but it’s only to avoid telling you the truth. So-and-so says he has a great sense of humor. But he never laughs. It’s like saying one’s aroused without getting hard.
So-and-so this, So-and-so that. Rat-tat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat-tat.
Did I want to know why Young Hemingway has a beard? he once asked.
Why?
To hide he has no chin.
Did I know why So-and-so covers her mouth when she laughs?
Why?
To hide her big gums.
Did I know why people say So-and-so is smart?
Because everyone else says it.
Did I want to know why So-and-so complains that things are so expensive?
Because his father is wealthy and he doesn’t want you to think he’s a daddy’s boy.
Did I know why he claims he should stop buying expensive clothes?
Because he wants you to know he was born with a taste for them.
On and on and on.
He measured everyone on a Richter scale of either passion or authenticity, usually both, because one invariably implied the other. No one passed. His universe thronged with people who were never who they claimed to be. Where had he learned to think this way? Was any of it real? Or was it all arrant nonsense spewed out of a private Aladdin’s lamp fanned by nightmares and demented demons? Or was this just one very unlucky man’s way of staying afloat in a New World he couldn’t begin to fathom except by thinking he was onto all of its mean and cozy little tricks, that he could read the face behind the mask, that he knew which way the world turned because it had turned on him so many times?
In the end, all he was left with was guesswork and rapid-fire Third-World bluster and paranoia—the perfect cross between desert seer and street hustler.
“Did you notice how you always cross the street on the slant?” he asked me one day.
“Because it’s the shortest distance,” I replied, thinking hypotenuse.
“Yes, but that’s not why you do it.”
I had never considered this before and tried to give it no thought. But I knew he’d seen right through me: I did things on the sly, I was born oblique—read: disloyal.
I pretended not to hear.
He probably saw through this as well.
I was shifty, he was up-front. I never raised my voice; he was the loudest man on Harvard Square. I was cramped, cautious, diffident; he was reckless and brutal, a tinder box. He spoke his mind. Mine was a vault. He was in-your-face; I waited till your back was turned. He stood for nothing, took no prisoners, lambasted everyone. I tolerated everybody without loving a single one. He wore love on his sleeve; mine was buried layers deep, and even then . . . He was new to the States but had managed to speak to almost everyone in Cambridge; I’d been a graduate student for four years at Harvard but went entire days that summer without a soul to turn to. When he was upset or bored, he bristled, fidgeted, then he exploded; I was the picture of composure. He was absolute in all things; compromise was my name. Once he started there was no stopping him, whereas the slightest blush would stop me in my tracks. He could dump you and never think twice of it; I’d make up in no time, then spite you forever after. He could be cruel. I was seldom kind. Neither of us had any money, but there were days when I was far, far poorer than he. For him there was no shame in poverty; he had come from it. For me, shame had deep pockets, deeper even than identity itself, because it could take your life, your soul and bore its way in and turn you inside out like an old sock and expose you for who you’d finally turned into till you had nothing to show for yourself and couldn’t stand a thing about yourself and made up for it by scorning everyone else. He was proud to know me, while, outside of our tiny café society, I never wanted to be seen with him. He was a cabdriver, I was Ivy League. He was an Arab, I was a Jew. Otherwise we could have swapped roles in a second.
For all his wrath and dislodged, nomadic life, he was of this planet, while I was never sure I belonged to it. He loved earth and understood people. Jostle him all you wanted, he would find his bearings soon enough, whereas I, without moving, was always out of place, forever withdrawn. If I seemed grounded, it was only because I didn’t budge. He was temporarily unhinged yet forever on the prowl; I was permanently motionless. If I moved at all, I did so like a straddler standing clueless on a wobbly raft in the rapids; the raft moved, the water moved, but I did not.