by André Aciman
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.”
“I always like it when you cook bacon in the morning.”
Perhaps it was our way of saying we had been keeping secret tabs on each other and that we hoped neither suspected we did until that time when we’d both feel a special thrill in finally admitting it to each other. “We never invited you,” she finally said, something like apology and regret underscoring her words.
“And I never invited you,” meaning we were even, no harm done, no offense taken. “It’s just that you guys keep to yourselves a lot, and I didn’t want to be the pushy-neighbor type.”
She thought about it. “You’re really wrong about us,” she said.
When the water boiled, I showed her how to turn the coffeemaker upside down. I dragged out the whole process a bit, if only to show her something she’d never seen before. “The coffee comes out milder though still quite strong,” I said.
Then we listened to the Brahms. We drank lattes. “Brahms is so autumnal.”
“Yes,” she said, “Brahms is so autumnal.”
It was the sound of the clarinet, almost keening with melancholy while trying to seem serene, that made the music so suitable for the two of us on this late, late fall afternoon.
And all along I was thinking: Would it be crossing a line to kiss her now?
And something told me that it would be.
And I didn’t have it in me to argue.
My dynamo had run cold. Kalaj would have called her la quarante-trois.
I so envied the life in Apartment 43.
I SAW KALAJ at the Harvest a few nights later. I was with another woman. She was one of my students at the Harvard Extension School. She was older than I was and was an actuary taking my Italian class in preparation for her trip to Italy the following summer. She herself was a third-generation Italian, dark hair, swarthy skin, and beautiful lips over which she tended to use too much lipstick. One evening after class she had waited until everyone had left the classroom to ask me if I would consider having dinner with her. “Why not,” I said, trying to conceal my surprise.
“When would be good?” she asked.
“I am free tonight,” I had said, to make her feel at ease, seeing she seemed slightly uncomfortable.
This was our second date.
What happened to Allison? he asked merely by arching an eyebrow. 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 just hopeless. That was a serious mistake. I tilted my head in a resigned: Well, what can we do? C’est la vie. While we were exchanging gestured messages, he was charming my new friend. “No, not Saudi Arabia—with my skin? No, not Algeria either, not Morocco, but a little place called Sidi Bou Saïd, the most beautiful whitewashed town on the Mediterranean south of Pantelleria . . .”
She was won over. For a second I saw us having dinners together, rides to Walden Pond next spring, Sunday evenings Chez Nous 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,” he said, “because I may never see you again.”
Blank stare. Why?
“I’m leaving.”
“For how long?” she asked.
“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, he abruptly wished us bonne soirée and walked away. He figured I needed to be alone with her.
I watched him walk around the horseshoe bar on his way out of the Harvest, then, once he’d stepped outside, stop, cup his hands around his mouth, and light a cigarette. Having lit it, he ambled out toward Brattle Street, pacing his way ever so slowly, pensive and hesitant, as though unsure whether to go to Casablanca or just linger a while longer and take in this spot for what could very well be his last time.
“Strange character,” she said.
“Very strange.”
“Friend?” she asked.
“Sort of.” I caught sight of him once again, as he turned around the patio on his way to Casablanca, and from there most likely heading back to Café Algiers. Something told me to take a mental picture of him threading his way through the back courtyard toward Casablanca. Then I forgot about the mental picture. I was thinking of other things when it occurred to me that perhaps I’d been spared tearful goodbyes, the hugs, the flimsy jokes to undo the knot in our throats. It felt like giving a dying friend massive doses of morphine to avoid a mournful and conscious farewell.
Why had I said sort of when it should have been clear to me that he was the dearest soul I’d met in all my years at Harvard?
HE CALLED ME three days later. I was in my office with a student discussing her paper. 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?” This I certainly wanted to discourage. “No.”
“I’ll call you later tonight then.”
When he called me that evening, he told me that earlier in the day he had needed an interpreter for an interview with Immigration Services. Why hadn’t he told me so? “You couldn’t talk, remember?” At any rate, it didn’t matter, since Zeinab had gone downtown with him and served as his interpreter. Except he would have preferred a man from Harvard. Going with a woman who also happened to be an Arab might have sent the wrong message, what with his annulment and all that. It turned out to be a perfunctory meeting. They were closing his case.
“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. I pretended to miss the passing allusion to farewells.
“Then it’s possible I may not see you. I may have to leave tomorrow. But it’s not certain.”
“Did they give you a plane ticket?”
“Immigration is not a travel agency.” He laughed at his own joke.
“But why won’t those bastards tell you when you’re leaving?” I was making it seem that my suppressed anger was directed at the immigration folks, and that I needed to confront their outrageously incomprehensible behavior before dealing with the lesser matter of bidding a friend farewell forever. All I was doing was making noise to prevent him from asking me once again to join him for drinks with his friends.
He knew. He was far better at this than I.
It took me a few moments to face the terrifying fact that what I wanted to avoid at all costs was tearful goodbyes. I did not want him crying. I did not want to cry myself. No hugs. No effusive promises. No languid words that spoke more sorrow than either knew he nursed. No messy feelings. Just a clean break. I was totally and irredeemably ersatz.
“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 every phone. It was high time I started making notes of the things I needed to spill back during my comprehensives.
Later that afternoon when I got home, a piece of torn paper was stuck into my mailbox. I thought it was from Ekaterina. “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 goodbye for him. Zeinab.”
All I remember feeling at that moment was a pang of something I could never name, because it hovered between unbearable shame and unbearable sorrow. I had done this. No one else. Never had I sunk so low in my life. I felt like someone who has been putting off dropping in on a dying friend. Each time the dying person calls him and asks him to
come by for a few minutes, the friend, on the pretext of trying to lift up the sick man’s spirits, makes light of his worries. I’ll try to come tomorrow. “There may not be a tomorrow,” the dying man says. “There you go again. You watch, you’ll outlive us all.”
And yet, no sooner had I felt this burst of shame than it was immediately relieved by an exhilarating sense of lightness I hadn’t felt since walking out on Niloufar that night—freedom, joy, space, as though an oppressive worry, which had been haunting and weighing and gnawing at me for months, had suddenly been lifted. I was soaring, as light as a kite racing through the clouds.
On impulse I wanted to seek him out and tell him about this strange, uplifting feeling—as though it were a startling revelation about a person we both knew, or a truth about human nature that I couldn’t wait to share, because he, of all people, understood all about these hidden mainsprings in the twisted gadgetry of the soul.
Yet now, I could head back to Harvard Square and not think twice about running into him. I could walk through Café Algiers and never worry he’d be there, go to Casablanca and no longer prepare to listen to yet another tirade, or expect to be unavoidably interrupted, or rehearse a new litany of excuses. Instead, I could sit at a table without talking to anyone, just as I’d done that Sunday in midsummer while reading Montaigne. Simply sit, mind my own business, be alone, and keep that door shut, which I’d accidentally flung open one hot Sunday when I’d walked up to a complete stranger and found someone who, but for incidentals, could have been me, but a me without hope, without recourse, without future.
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, and the sorrow is always genuine. But by the evening of a tyrant’s death, cars begin to honk, people suddenly shout hurrahs, and soon enough, the whole city, which only this morning was bathed in stupor and trembling, feels like a carnival town. Someone steps on top of a bus waving a forbidden pennant and everyone clamors back, dying to embrace him. The squares are filled with people. Everyone is partying.
I felt terrible for him, and I ached for him, thinking how he must have turned around at the airport and taken a last, long, languorous look at Boston, defeat and betrayal and the things he feared and hated most in life souring the ever-renewed sting of exile in his life. How many times must he have driven passengers to the airport and thought: One day, one day it will be me.
But I was forcing myself to feel sorry for him. I knew, as I prepared to head out to Café Algiers that night, already feeling something like a blithe sprint in my gait, that even as I might go searching for his shadow and pay homage to it the way people do penance at the shrine of a saint they may have helped to murder, I was also going to see whether I really missed him as much as I hoped I would. I knew the answer. But I wanted to make sure. Plus, I wanted to see with my own eyes that he had indeed left town and was never coming back. I wanted to preview life without Kalaj. Part of me wanted to celebrate but wasn’t going to until I was sure.
Just as I was growing to accept his departure, I caught myself thinking that he could easily be back, telling us it was all a mistake, that they’d taken him to the airport, but at the last minute, a reprieve had come down from the governor’s office. “I’m back, Kalaj is back,” he’d shout, big bear hugs to everyone in the coffeehouse.
I knew what I was doing. I’d allowed myself to fantasize his dreaded return not only to pay lip service to my nobler instincts, but also to relish the jolt of waking up from this short-lived fantasy to realize that no, he wasn’t coming back, that he was once and for all gone for good. Cambridge felt freer, quieter, and, on this late December evening, there was even a hint of something tolerably chilly that agreed with me. Yes, I felt free, the way the world must have felt infinitely freer when the last Titans were soundly beaten and sent packing.
When I arrived, his seat was indeed empty. None of the regulars who had known Kalaj wanted to sit there. It was their silent tribute. This is where the king sat, this is where he had said goodbye to everyone. “I’ve got a knot right here,” said Sabatini, pointing to his throat. Zeinab’s mascara had bled all over her eyes. “I am glad you came,” she said, as she hugged me in the kitchen where I’d gone to look for her. “You were the one he trusted.” I said nothing. “Unlike any of us, you were the one who never needed a thing from him.”
I didn’t know how to take this but decided to let it pass. I also knew that by not saying anything I was giving every indication of agreeing. On the wall she had Scotch-taped the sketch of his face done by the woman with bathroom problems. It still bore the marks from when he kept it folded in one of the many pockets of his camouflage jacket. Even the round coffee stain left by his damp saucer was still visible, bringing me back to that summer morning when he was filled with rage against a woman who had taken him in and been kind to him.
After Café Algiers, I went to Casablanca. Even the barman and some of the waiters knew he’d left. As did the barmen at the Harvest. I ordered a glass of wine and stood at the horseshoe bar of the Harvest, pretending I was waiting for him and that at any moment now he’d show up. But all I could remember was the evening when I’d watched him leave the bar area and then suddenly stop outside to light the cigarette he’d been rolling while talking to us. I’d watched him hesitate a while and finally walk into Casablanca’s back door, and through the back door presumably wander into the bar itself and then onto the back entrance of Café Algiers. 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, which was always tinged with good fellowship, best wishes, and a flash of naughty sport. His fingerprints were all over Cambridge.
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 still wanted to see if I missed him. I ended up drinking four glasses of wine. Then I began to miss him in earnest, knowing all along, though, that it was probably the wine, not me.
When I was just about to leave the Harvest, I turned around 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 Bonne soirée to the maître d’, who was French, and then, like Kalaj, abruptly walked out. I repeated the words up Brattle Street and into Berkeley Street, until I realized that what I was really doing was bidding farewell to Café Algiers, to all the people I’d befriended there, to Zeinab and Sabatini and the Algerian and Moroccan cabdrivers, to everyone I’d met because of him, to the Harvest and Casablanca and the Harvard Epworth Church on Sunday evenings, to our little lingo we’d improvised from the very start and to the fellowship that had blossomed because of it. Bonne soirée to so many new things he’d brought into my life, to our dinners with friends, to our dinners alone together, to happy hour, to the spirit of complicity that had been missing from my life and helped us find a common ground together during those hours when his worries over his green card and mine over my career cast a pall that nothing could dispel except the women who drifted into our lives and couldn’t make us happier than when we were talking about them after we’d been with them. Bonne soirée to our small oasis, to our imagined Mediterranean alcove, to our little corner of France immediately following last call, to the illusion of myself as a lone holdout stranded in a large, cold, solitary, darkling plain that had become my American home. I was one of them now, perhaps had always been, was always going to be but had never known it or was reluctant to own up to it until I’d met Kalaj and then lost Kalaj.
Christmas I spent alone in Cambridge. I read more in those three weeks than I’d done since meeting Kalaj almost five months earlier. In January, I re-took
my comprehensives. I passed, and four days later I was allowed to take my orals. I passed those too. On February 1, I left Concord Avenue and moved to Lowell House.
THERE WAS A period after Kalaj’s departure when I’d occasionally spot his old Checker cab around Cambridge, being driven by the Moroccan. Each time I saw it, I’d feel a sudden throb, part dread, part joy, followed by instant guilt, and then the unavoidable shrug. Sometimes I’d bump into the Moroccan, and at first we’d greet each other, and then, when it was clear that all we had to say was Did you hear from him? followed by a hasty Me neither, we began to look the other way. The Moroccan spoke French with a different accent, was timid, and couldn’t ruffle anyone’s feathers if he tried. At Café Algiers, where I saw him quite frequently at first, he spoke meekly, in whispers, like a conspirator. Something told me that Moumou the Algerian had warned him of Kalaj’s impending deportation and told him that all he needed was to wait things out till Kalaj was forced to sell at a very low price. It made me angry.
And yet, each time I spotted the cab, I’d remember that clear, sunlit morning when Kalaj had stuck his head out of his window as he drove around Harvard Square and volleyed a jaunty greeting that tore me out of my torpor and brought me back to the here and now. I was glad that day that there was someone like him in my life, but I was also glad he was stuck in traffic and wasn’t going to join me. Those contradictory impulses never resolved their quarrel and were still tussling within me long after he was gone, for I kept wanting to seek him out all the while hoping I’d never find him. Seeing his old cab on Mass Ave or parked along Brattle Street stirred feelings and questions I didn’t care to tackle any longer; no sooner had they risen to consciousness than they were whisked away, unanswered, unheeded. One day, I kept telling myself, I’ll hail his cab and take a ride in it. But I never did, partly because cabs were never in my budget, and partly because I knew that after merely opening the door, I’d find what I’d come looking for: a whiff of the old cracked leather upholstery that always reminded me of a shoe store, a view of the tilted jump seats he’d cautioned the two boys against sitting in on our way to Walden Pond, the indelible scent of trapped cigarette smoke which, now that I think of it, was perennially wrapped around him. And besides, taking a cab would be all wrong: I had never ridden in the back. When we hopped into the car or when he drove me back home or took me late one night to Brookline because I craved sleeping with a girl who lived there, I always rode next to him. One day, eventually, I’d hail his cab, perhaps just weeks before leaving Cambridge. But I always forgot. Then the car disappeared. And then I did.