by André Aciman
Kalaj wanted to find a man who was bien (right) for Zeinab, so I thought of Claude. But just in case things didn’t work out between them, I invited a young Hungarian who had studied in Turkey. And then there was the Count. “I can just see them,” said Kalaj, “Zeinab and the Count discussing Balzac on a park bench in the sixteenth arrondissement, he with an umbrella and a tennis racket between his knees, and she with a broomstick and a mop. Lovely couple!”
The evening started on the wrong foot. Earlier, while Kalaj was busily cooking the meat with all manner of diced vegetables, and Ekaterina was helping with the salads and the vegetables, we heard the voice of Maria Callas on the radio singing one aria after the other. This was quite unusual until the announcer said what I was beginning to dread. Maria Callas had died that day in Paris. It put a damper on everything. My ex-roommate’s girlfriend and I were both fans. Count, as Kalaj suddenly dubbed him, thinking it was his first name even though he’d introduced himself as Piero, was beside himself, since his father had been a lifelong friend of hers and had her signed portrait in his office. The talk turned to Callas, and because I owned a few recordings, I decided to play two to three arias, trying as best as I could to explain why she was prima donna assoluta. A comparison of a few arias sung by other sopranos was meant to drive the point home.
Kalaj, who had nothing to say on the subject, was unusually quiet for a man used to brandishing his loud weaponry wherever he went. Asked by Léonie why he wasn’t speaking, he simply put on an affected simper that was meant to call attention to its contrived character. “Me, I’m listening,” he replied. “I like to listen.” But I could tell that he was seething inside and, without instant recourse to his Kalashnikov, had lost his ability to say anything. This was probably not the scene he had imagined, and he must have felt like an outsider at his own dinner party. Ekaterina began to talk to him, trying to draw him out, but he’d lapse into silence as soon as he uttered a few words. Something was clearly bothering him. Zeinab finally put her arm around him: “Tu boudes, are you sulking?”
“I am not sulking,” he said, shrugging his shoulders to free them of her arm. “Just leave me alone, will you?” We left him alone.
We changed topics and someone spoke of a movie he had just seen called The Lacemaker about a humble, self-effacing apprentice who works in a beauty salon and who becomes the mistress of an intellectual who soon tires of her and ends up dropping her. This was more to Kalaj’s liking, and right away, he had loaded and cocked his gun, ready to aim and fire, and was soon inveighing both against all women for wanting to rise in the world by exploiting men and against all young men for exploiting the women who exploited them. There were no prisoners, everyone was being mowed down.
Kalaj and Léonie, however, disagreed. Claude, clearly happy to have brought along a count and still eager to shine in his eyes, said this was a circular argument and was headed nowhere. But Count was willing to be more indulgent and said that history was filled with similar instances and that it was no longer possible to take sides, but if sides had to be taken, he’d side with the woman. “Why with the woman and not the man?” Rat-tat-tat-tat. Because in the end men are frequently given second chances, women seldom are. “Are you so sure that men get second chances—are you so sure?” Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
“I think everyone in this room will agree with me.”
“And what about the men who always give women a second chance but are never given a second chance, what about them?” Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
“I am not competent to comment on this, sorry.”
“Not competent, not competent, I’ll tell you why you’re not competent. Because you’ve never really had to help anyone, man or woman. What do you know about poor girls from the country or from another country who land in strange, big cities and whose last recourse is always the same—le trottoir, the sidewalk—what could you possibly know except as a consumer, and even then, what does a consumer know about the exploitation of women after he’s said au revoir et merci, or of the exploitation of men, because, yes sir, there are men who exploit men in that very same way among the dockers in Marseilles.”
“How do you know?” asked Count.
“I know, and how!”
The skirmish between the two men would have devolved into something ugly if the large pot with the meat didn’t require Kalaj’s attention. Moments later, the food was ready and everyone was urged to sit down around a table that could handle no more than four persons. People sat on the sofa, on the floor. We improvised a chair by using a tiny stepladder I’d found on the street; Zeinab could use it as a stool. I had an impulse to go downstairs and invite the twins from Apartment 21, but then thought better of it. As for the neighbors across the service entrance, I had no doubt that they knew a party was going on. Had they wanted to, they could have invited themselves. We drank lots of wine, and thank goodness Frank had prepared enough baked lasagna for a regiment, because we would have moved from the beef and the chestnuts and vegetables to the breads and cheeses without much of anything else in between. Kalaj was ecstatic and kissed Frank on his shimmering bald pate. “One doesn’t sit around a table for the food only. Food is there to feed friendship,” he said. I don’t think any of us understood the wisdom of the saying, but it sounded good, and perhaps we were all in the mood to believe just about anything that spoke well of friends and good fellowship. Count had brought many goodies from some hilly area in Umbria, and no one doubted that this had turned into a feast far, far superior to the tiny supper originally planned.
At some point, a song I had long ago taped on a tiny cassette came on, and Kalaj immediately pricked up his ears and asked us to be quiet for a moment because he wanted to hear the words. He hadn’t heard the song in a very long time, he said. “A very long time,” he repeated. Then, having caught the right words and synced his lips to the singer’s as he sometimes would with Om Kalsoum at Café Algiers, he began to whine the words ever so softly, as though he was ashamed of being seen singing, because for all he knew, he was just singing to himself because he needed to hear the words from his own mouth for him to feel them. The song was about a man thinking of a woman he hasn’t seen in a very long time but whom he knows he’ll meet again when their paths cross. The path to each is crooked and filled with detours—she’s met other men, and he’s met women too—but he knows that eventually they will meet and make love and speak of the incidental lovers each had loved along the way.
“This is not necessarily about a man and a woman,” said Frank, “It could be about a man who’s lost his way and decides to give his homeland a woman’s name. The woman is just a metaphor for home.” Kalaj listened attentively. Had Count said such a thing he would have strafed him with a machine gun filled with ire and contradiction, but coming from Frank, the comment seemed to placate something very deep in Kalaj. “The woman is a metaphor for home,” he said, echoing Frank’s impromptu remark, “the woman is a metaphor for home,” he repeated. Then he asked me to play the song again. But before the second stanza started, he suddenly rushed out and headed straight into the kitchen.
When he came back and Zeinab had started serving the Armenian desserts and the mousse, Léonie could still be heard carrying on about the woman who had sacrificed her life for a man who’d outgrown her too soon.
Léonie and Count agreed that the issue wasn’t as simple as all that. Kalaj disagreed. Why they had resurrected the topic wasn’t clear at all, especially after the song we’d heard had put him in so contemplative a mood. But as soon as it became obvious that Count had joined forces with Léonie, Kalaj left the table, went into the bedroom, and slammed the door behind him. Maybe he was making a phone call, maybe the food wasn’t agreeing with him. Zeinab seemed perplexed but didn’t say anything, and the Armenian girl and Frank kept exchanging mystified looks, all the while determined to sample their desserts and stay out of the Tunisian’s bad temper. Something was definitely wrong. A few moments later, I opened the door slowly and stepped into my
bedroom. He had not only shut the door but had turned off the lights and was lying on my bed in total darkness, smoking.
We all have our phantoms, and I was seeing Kalaj’s for the first time, perhaps because, for the first time, he wasn’t able to shoo them away by shouting.
Something very serious was troubling him. Was he missing someone, was this reminding him of something somewhere else, were his problems catching up with him—the green card, money, solitude, divorce, deportation? “No, nothing, nothing,” he replied. I made a motion to leave the bedroom to let him be by himself, since it was clear he didn’t want to speak. When I was about to open the door, he simply asked me to stay.
“What is it?” I asked. “Tell me.”
He caught his breath. “I cooked this whole dinner for everyone and everyone is having a great time, but, you see, what about me?” He hesitated a moment, “Et moi?” he said. “Et moi?” “I don’t understand,” I said, “everyone is happy because of you. Everyone is grateful. And no one is ignoring you or has even done or said anything to slight you.”
“That’s because you see the surface, but you don’t look underneath. But what about me?”
I still had no idea what he was getting at or what was eating him.
“In exactly a year’s time I will not be here. Each and every one of you will be here, but I won’t be among you. I will miss all this so terribly, that I don’t even want to think beyond this minute. You see now? Has anyone thought about me?”
I was dumbfounded. Silence was my only way of agreeing with him and of saying what I would never had had the courage or the cruelty to say to his face: You are right, my friend, we completely failed to think of you, we do not see your hell, you are all alone in this, and, yes, you may be right about this too: you may not be among us next year, may not even be in our thoughts next year.
“Now you see?” he asked.
“Now I see,” I said, meaning: There is nothing, nothing I can say to buoy your spirits. I was helpless. I felt like the captain of a cruise ship who shouts “Man overboard . . . but, ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing we can do, it’s time for lunch, and the food is waiting.” To say anything so as to say something would have forced me to utter fatuous palliatives, and I had drunk too much already to lie persuasively.
But I suddenly realized one thing very clearly in this dark bedroom. By looking at him I was almost looking at myself. He was the measure of how close I might come to falling apart and losing everything here. He was just my destiny three steps ahead of me. I could fail my exams, be sent packing to New York, and in a year from now, no one would recall this dinner party, much less remember to think of me.
“See? I’m like someone who prepares a whole feast knowing he is dying, and everyone is happily eating and drinking away and forgets that the cook will be carried away by the end of the meal. I don’t want to be the dying cook of the party. I don’t want to leave and be elsewhere. I need help and there is no one, no one.”
I heard the catch in his voice.
“So, what about me?” he asked, as though coming back to a nagging question that hadn’t just cropped up because of this evening but that he’d been brewing perhaps since childhood, since forever, and the answer was always going to be the same; there is no answer. “Et moi?” he repeated, feeling desperately sorry for himself, while I still stood there, unable to say or do anything for him.
And, for the first time that evening, I saw that this short mantra of his also had another meaning, which had simply eluded me all the time I’d been standing there in the dark listening to him. It didn’t just mean And what about me? but spoke an injured, hopeless What happens to me now?
He wasn’t asking me for an answer, or invoking my help, or even pleading with the god of fairness and forgiveness overseeing his affairs in North America; he was just groping in the dark and repeating words of incantation that would eventually lead him out of his cave in the only way he knew: with tears. With tears came solace and surrender, pardon and courage.
That night as I watched him cry, you could almost touch his despair and its ephemeral balm, hope. When, seconds later, he actually started to sob as he’d done on the day he heard of his father’s sickness in Tunis, I knew that here was the loneliest man I’d ever known in my life, and that anger, sorrow, fear, and even the shame of being caught crying were nothing compared to this monsoon of loneliness and despair that was buffeting him every minute of his days.
A part of me didn’t want him to know that I could see he was crying, so I made to go back to the living room and attend to the guests.
“Don’t go yet. Sit down. Please.”
It’s what one said to a nurse when one didn’t want to be alone once they’d turned off the light in your room and dimmed those in the corridor. But all the chairs were in the living room and there was nowhere to sit except on the bed, so I sat on the edge, next to him. He wasn’t speaking and he was no longer crying, just breathing and smoking.
When, a minute or two later, after thinking his crisis had subsided, I made a motion to leave again, he said, “Don’t go.”
I wanted to reach out to him with my hand and touch him to comfort him, maybe even to show compassion and solidarity, but we’d never touched other than fleetingly, and it felt awkward doing so now. So, instead, I reached for his palm but found the top of his hand and held it, gently at first, then more firmly. This was not easy for me, and I suppose it was not easy for him either, because he did not respond or return my grasp. For two men who claimed to be so inveterately Mediterranean we couldn’t have been less expressive or more inhibited. Perhaps we were both holding back, perhaps he was thinking the exact same thing, which is why, in an unexpected gesture, instead of standing up again, I lay down right next to him, facing him, and put one arm across his chest. Only then did he reach out to hold my hand, and then, turning to me, put a leg around me and began to cradle and hug me, both of us entirely silent except for his muted sobbing. We said nothing more.
Shortly after, I got up and told him, “Pull yourself together and let’s step outside.” I did not shut the door behind me.
WHEN I RETURNED to the living room, I noticed it right away though I thought nothing of it at first, and perhaps didn’t want to register it. Léonie was sitting on the sofa and Count was sitting on the floor, his neck resting against her knees while the back of his head lay flat against her thigh. Frank had put on more music by Callas. The others were busy cutting the two desserts Zeinab had brought.
Catching my glance in his direction, Count stood up and said he was going to buy cigarettes around the corner. Claude immediately offered him his. But Count smoked Dunhills only. “I should have known,” said Claude, “you always pick the very best, Piero.” A matter of minutes, said Count, trying to justify his brief exit. Léonie looked up and said she’d walk him downstairs and, seeing Kalaj entering the room, asked to let her have the keys to the car to get her sweater.
He gave her the keys.
“You should learn to roll your own,” said Kalaj to Count.
“I don’t need to,” replied Count as he let Léonie out the front door, then discreetly shut the door behind him.
“Nique ta mère,” muttered Kalaj under his breath.
We carved the cakes in long wedges and served dessert on paper napkins, and because there weren’t enough clean forks, we ate with our hands. Pecan pie is the best thing since the invention of the telephone. No, cheesecake, said someone else. Cheesecake too, said Kalaj. We opened more wine, there was even talk of finally finishing the gallon of vodka I had appropriated along with the Beefeater gin from the departmental party last April. We passed the freezing cold vodka around, everyone agreed it was stupendous, so that a second round was de rigueur, and I was just on my way to the kitchen to start the coffee when I saw Kalaj bolt out of the living room, tear open the front door, and rush down the stairs.
The rest of us looked bewildered and exchanged panicked glances. “What got into him tonight?” ask
ed Ekaterina.
Zeinab, who knew him better than any of us, simply said, “He’s always a pill when everyone else is having a good time.”
Ten minutes later he was back upstairs. Not a word. He headed directly into the dark bedroom again and slammed the door shut once more. Everyone looked at one another very puzzled. Zeinab said she’d seen him upset before, but never like this.
The rest of the evening seemed to last forever. We wanted to put a happy face on things, but everyone’s thoughts were turned to the man who’d locked himself in my bedroom. No one, not even I had the courage to go inside to look in on him. To kill time, we cleaned up, put things away, washed dishes, wrapped everything, and everyone was asked to take something home. I’d take care of the garbage, my mind already thinking of the trash container on the service door landing. It seemed to me that Linda and Ekaterina, for all their newly sprung friendship, were perhaps vying to see who of the two would outstay the other. Part of me wanted them to sort it out among themselves; the other part began to hope they’d both come up with a better plan.
Kalaj came out only after most of the guests had left. Someone had dropped a strawberry from one of the cakes on the carpet and then stepped on it. It was impossible to remove the stain. Ekaterina said it was Count. A friend had lent me this antique Persian Tabriz because my living room was larger than his. One day, though, he’d want it back exactly as he had lent it to me.
Kalaj said he’d clean the rug. He knew how to remove stains. But by then I had scraped the strawberry with a sharp knife and then poured stain remover on the rug.
“I wish I had thrown gasoline on her face. And on his.”
“What happened?” we asked.
“What happened? What happened? Couldn’t you hear?”
None of us had heard a thing.
“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.