by André Aciman
To mend fences, I offered to teach Kalaj’s course until the department could find a replacement before the beginning of spring semester. And if a replacement wasn’t available, I’d be happy to teach his course the coming spring. “I’ve heard rumors his grammar wasn’t what I thought it was,” I said, hoping to seem a judicious and impartial observer who was not about to let friendship stand in the way of my loyalty to my department.
Fifth and final crow of the rooster.
“You’d be helping us tremendously,” said Lloyd-Greville.
“Still, a sad story.”
“Yes, very sad.”
He asked how I was coming along with my preparation for my forthcoming comprehensives. “Well.” I told him I’d finished reading a seventeenth-century author called Daniel Dyke.
Lloyd-Greville winced, then confided he wasn’t sure he’d ever heard of a Daniel Dyke.
“A minor influence on La Rochefoucauld,” I said, as though it were the most obvious truth in the world. That kept him quiet.
To Kalaj I lied no less than I’d lied to Lloyd-Greville. I told him I had tried my very best to explain to the administration how eager he was to continue and how much his students liked him, but there was a quota of graduate students who had to teach, and the preference always went to those who were studying at Harvard—nothing personal.
“But who will teach my course?” he asked.
I had hoped he’d never ask.
“Everyone refused to teach so early in the morning, so I was obliged to say that I would—” This was my evasive spin on the fact that, without intending to, I’d just given my cash flow a thirty-three percent boost.
A FEW EVENINGS later I invited him to an all-you-can-eat place around Porter Square. Ever since he received the letter from the department, I made a point of not being seen with him around Harvard Square. We ate a huge meal and then walked back to my home. To my dismay, I saw him come up the stairs with me. Things with his last girlfriend were obviously not going well at all. That too had cast down his spirits. I pretended that things with Allison 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. Allison didn’t like this, Allison gets nervous when, Allison would much rather—I kept blaming Allison for everything. “And who does she think she is, your Allison, anyway? Your fiancée or the woman you neek every day?”
What saved me were rumors of two robberies on our street, rumors I built up to justify finally putting a lock on my door—exactly what I’d planned to do on the very day I told him he was welcome to stay in my apartment. We’d passed by Sears, Roebuck and I was already pricing locks. Kalaj had enough tact not to push the matter, though I am sure it didn’t go down well with him. He never told me where he slept when he didn’t sleep on my couch. I never asked. I stopped going to Café Algiers or to any of the bars around Harvard Square.
We saw each other a few weeks later. It was his idea. Same all-you-can-eat place off Porter Square. Allison was busy visiting her parents, I said. We stayed out late. Then he dropped me at my door, and I watched him drive his Checker cab toward the river and disappear. Another night with his music en sourdine, I thought. I felt like a shit.
Weeks went by without more than a couple of phone calls. Things were cooling off between us, and perhaps it was better this way, I thought. I was working very hard, knowing that I had slightly more than a month before the dreaded date. There were a few parties to go to. At their early winter get-together, Mrs. Lloyd-Greville took me to “our intimate little corner” at their house where we bandied mock-flirtatious quips. Mrs. Cherbakoff continued to ask about my parents’ health, both to find out if they were still alive and if I planned to pass my exams so that they could continue breathing a while longer. And there were the usual pre-Christmas student parties, to which normal protocol required you bring either a bottle of red or a wedge of Brie.
After the third pre-holiday party, I woke up at night with another attack of gallstones. There had been no warning whatsoever, but this was far worse than the previous two. I could hardly stand up, felt nauseous, and when I finally touched my forehead, knew I had a fever. I dialed Kalaj’s most recent phone number, but the woman who picked up the phone hadn’t seen him in quite a while and said she hoped he’d drop dead.
“I am his friend,” I said.
“And so was I, whoop-dee-doo! Drop dead too.”
“I need to be taken to the emergency room,” I said.
She came to pick me up fifteen minutes later and drove me to the same infirmary. Brunette, curly hair, made and sold her own jewelry, parents lived on the Upper East Side, and, yes, twice a week, when I asked if she was seeing a shrink. I never saw her again.
After walking into the emergency room, I found the familiar gurney, the placid English nurse, the same young doctor who’d been called in for me and who still showed signs of wetness from his 4:00 a.m. shower. Two days later I was operated on and had my gallbladder removed. At the infirmary, as had become routine by then, my room was continuously mobbed. Students and professors dropped in, including Lloyd-Greville, husband and wife, and Cherbakoff, husband and wife. Frank and Nora came together and left together, as did Niloufar, who came, as one does at a funeral, with one flower ready to be tossed at the tombstone of the deceased. Unannounced, even Young Hemingway stopped by. Six months later, in fact, we became good friends. But Kalaj never came, though he must have known, since Zeinab came to see me every day, sometimes twice. I kept fearing he might show up, all the while another part of me wished that he would and that he’d be the last to leave so that we might crack jokes at the expense of all those who had come with kindness in their nectarosyrupy hearts. I would have loved nothing more than to see him tell Lloyd-Greville’s wife, as I’d heard him tell a woman who complained he never helped her achieve orgasm, that she should treasure the memory of her last orgasm, since it probably predated the French Revolution. But having him stand elbow to elbow with my examiner would have been madness, and the last thing Kalaj may have wanted was to run into his old students. Actually, I didn’t want him to run into anyone I knew. I wanted my partitions back up.
Allison had heard about my operation but did not come. Instead she sent me a lavish bouquet of flowers. “I don’t need to say it—my feelings haven’t changed. Please get well. A.”
I wanted to call her on the spot and ask her to come see me right now, even if it was past visiting hours. I wanted her to stay up with me all night and hold my hand over the blanket until, with morphine, the pain subsided and I fell asleep. She’d do anything for me, as I knew I would for her. But I didn’t trust myself, didn’t trust my love, didn’t trust my own promises, much less those who trusted them. Just the memory of how she’d barged into my life and lain down on my carpet and read through my diary without paying me any heed could stir up something like love for her. But it was not love, just love-like. Something in me had withered; soon it would wither in her too. Right now I remained a mystery to her; but this mystery was precisely what stood between us. She was drawn to the foreign inflection in everything I did, thought, and said. Soon she’d spot the bruise behind the inflection. I blamed her for not seeing the bruise so I wouldn’t be blamed for hiding it from her.
THE FIRST PLACE I went when they let me out ten days later was Café Algiers. No one had seen Kalaj in days, I was told. Nor was he anywhere to be seen at the Harvest, or at Casablanca, or downstairs at Césarion’s. When I asked if they had his number, the only number they gave me was my own. I decided to go home. But home, when I got there, was too stultifying; it reminded me of the loneliness I had managed to put behind me ever since meeting Kalaj and that I was convinced was a thing of the past now. There was no one to call. I missed Allison. I missed Ekaterina. Missed Niloufar. Even Linda would have been welcome. Everything felt soulless. By nighttime I began to miss the hasty patter of footste
ps of the night nurses. I went back to Café Algiers, a ten-minute walk. Kalaj saw me before I so much as started to look for him. Actually, he was yelling at me. “Are you out of your mind, are you crazy?” He seemed in a panic. “You should be in bed.” Zeinab, who was nursing a drink between Kalaj and a young Moroccan cabdriver I’d seen only once before, took one look at me and said I should sit down right away. “You’re all white. You’re going to faint.” They brought me a glass of soda water which Kalaj forced me to drink, all the while sprinkling my face with drops from a piece of melting ice. For a moment I felt like a wounded Victor Laszlo stumbling into Rick’s Café Américain in Casablanca and being bandaged by staunch and loyal partisans.
I had not seen Kalaj in weeks. He seemed changed.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I am all right. And you?”
“Could be better.”
Typical strains of veiled sorrow fringing self-pity.
“They took my license away and will never renew it. The FBI. I had to sell the car.”
“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 without trying to do something about it.”
Léonie’s boss had a lawyer friend who might be asked to help. Except that Léonie felt that her ex-lover hadn’t forgiven Kalaj, and might be happier having him totally out of the way.
“And the Freemasons?” I asked.
“The Freemasons, well, we’ll see about the Freemasons.”
Silence.
“And if these don’t work, well, all of you in this bar right now—and that includes you too, Zeinab—will 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.”
Kalaj was in top form.
“If I had a car I’d drive you home right this instant.”
“I’ll take him if he wants,” said the young Moroccan cabdriver.
“How many times do I have to teach you,” said Kalaj, reprimanding the cabdriver who was more my age than Kalaj’s. “Never say ‘if he wants’ with this kind of honeyed, ersatz tone in your voice. Instead, say, ‘I’m taking you home. Let’s go.’ ”
“Well,” said the shy Moroccan, “should we go?”
Everyone laughed.
“They said I could drink if I wanted,” I insisted.
“They said you should go home,” said Kalaj, as patronizing as ever.
I knew that he cared for me. But I could also tell that he was holding a grudge and had finally seen through all of my wiles. A chill seemed lodged between us, and although I’d long wished for it, I hated seeing how easily it had settled, as though reclaiming what had all along been its rightful place.
It was Zeinab who spoke about it as soon as Kalaj said he needed to go to the bathroom.
He was going to be deported, she said. Even the Freemasons, to say nothing of the Legal Aid Society, were unable to stop it. His impending divorce hurt his chances a lot. Actually, it wasn’t a divorce. The marriage had been annulled.
“We’re still going to have to find a way,” I said, feeling that simply resolving to do something was already a way of doing something.
“I don’t think there’s anything he can do at this point.”
“What if he decides to stay as an illegal and disappears, say, in Oregon or Wyoming?”
“I don’t think it will work. He doesn’t want to be illegal.”
“What will he do then?”
“Probably go back. He can’t go back to France. So, you see, for him it’s back to Tunisia.”
But that’s like saying that the past seventeen years of his life—half his life—never happened, I thought. To go back to his parents’ home, to go back to the old bedroom where he’d slept and might still have to sleep with his brothers as he’d done as a child, to go back to a place where he dreamed of a France he had not yet seen only to realize that he’d not only already seen France, but that he’d lived and gotten married there and might never be allowed to set foot again there—“It would drive him crazy,” I said, suddenly thinking of myself hurled back to Alexandria after forswearing it forever. “It would be like being born again into a life one couldn’t wait to escape.”
“Not a second birth,” said the Moroccan. “More like a second death.”
Kalaj had lived with “second deaths” all his life both before and after France. He 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, down to the most squalid, insignificant job we hold, plays a tiny role in making us who we become. This was ersatz palaver, and Kalaj was too brutal with himself to think this way. There were no second chances in his book of life; you simply dipped into yourself and pawned the little that was left from earlier deaths. For him there were bad turns, and there were cruel tricks, and terrible mistakes, and from these there was no coming back, no expiation, no recovery, no turning over a new leaf. To live with yourself you had to cut off the hand that offended, cut, slice, peel, scrape, and tear away at yourself 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 staring at them. All you wanted was for others to be stripped down like you—lean, intemperate, and skeletal—you didn’t need to confide, and they wouldn’t need to confide, because both of you would know, just know, as a parent knows, as a sibling knows, as a lover, a real lover, knows that you were down to your last straw. Meanwhile, his unforgiving private God no longer manned a tablet or a staff. His weapon of choice was rage and a Kalashnikov.
He thought I was a fellow legionnaire of the bone who’d dropped by at the same watering hole with the same empty gourd and the same thirst for more than just plain water. I had disappointed him. He thought that, like him, I might be all human, raw passion. It took someone like him to remind me that, for all my impatience with life in New England and all my yearning for the Mediterranean, I had already moved to the other side.
I thought of him wearing a suit on the evening when his student had invited him to dinner. He’d been tempted by the Satan of ersatz that night, and Kalaj would have yielded. As I had yielded. As everyone does.
When Kalaj returned, he said he would join us in the car. It would give us a few extra minutes together.
It was the first time I’d been in his car with him when he wasn’t driving. Without knowing it, I was making mental notes: the cigarette-rolling trick while driving, the yelling at old Boston as he cut his way through its narrow alleys with bristling rage and scorn in his voice because the streets here were simply stupid and ersatz, the occasional whistle when someone deserved a compliment and he didn’t know enough English other than to just whistle. In the car he reminded me of my father after everything he owned including his car was nationalized by the Egyptian government and he was forced to ride in other people’s cars, looking awkward and uneasy when he didn’t have a steering wheel before him. Kalaj sprawled himself in the back of his own cab, giving directions and shortcuts on our way to Concord Avenue.
When we reached my building, the Moroccan double-parked the old car while Kalaj sprang to help me out of the car. Did I need help going up the stairs?
No. I could manage. But in typical Arab fashion, he did not step back into the car until I disappeared up the stairs to the landing on the first floor. Then I heard the car leave.
TWO DAYS AFTER I’d nearly fainted at Café Algiers, I met the woman from Apartment 43 on the stairwell. She was carrying groceries, I was carrying a light plastic bag from the Coop, so I offered to carry one of her packages upstairs. “Not throwing any more dinner parties?” she asked, that glint of irony always in her eyes.
“No, not recently.” Then I realized I’d never invited her and her boyfriend to our dinner parties when Kalaj used to cook. But I didn’t want to pretend I was planning a dinn
er party anytime soon. I was moving to Lowell House, I said. She looked crushed.
“Why?”
“Free lodging, closer to the Square and the libraries, better deal all around.”
“But no privacy,” she said.
“No, no privacy, that is true.”
Were we speaking in double entendres? When she opened her door, she let me in, and I walked into her apartment, and then into her kitchen, where I deposited one of her bags on the counter. Like Linda’s, her apartment also was mine in reverse. The idea intrigued me, everything about her intrigued me. We talked about apartments; she’d always wondered about my place. Did she want to take a look? I had just bought a recording of Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet. A gift from me to me, I explained. Birthday? No, just came home from an operation two days ago. Gallbladder, I said.
“Ouch!” She had completely forgotten about the night when her boyfriend had driven me to the infirmary. “Are you going to be OK?”
“I think so,” I said. She needed to put some of her food away first, then said she’d drop by.
“Would you care for a latte? I was going to make one for myself on a Neapolitan coffeemaker.”
She had never heard of Neapolitan coffeemakers.
“You’ll see,” I said.
“But are you allowed to drink coffee?” she asked.
“I can have booze, ergo coffee is good.”
“OK,” she said.
I did not leave through the front door but found something thrilling in using the service entrance and then opening my door and walking right into my kitchen, as though we had discovered an undisclosed conduit between us that had always been in place though we’d both chosen to overlook it. I liked the idea of a back door to a back door, of secret passages and hidden trapdoors for quick exits and easy access while her boyfriend was, say, in the shower or about to come in through the front door. I liked coming home to myself through someone else’s home.
“I always leave my door unlocked,” I said.
She walked in when the coffee was already brewing, loved the scent, she said, as she closed first her door, then mine. “I always like it when you make coffee.”