Harvard Square A Novel

1




CAMBRIDGE WAS A DESERT. IT WAS ONE OF THE HOTTEST summers I’d ever lived through. By the end of July, you sought shelter wherever you could during the day; at night you couldn’t sleep. All my friends in graduate school were gone. Frank, my former roommate, was teaching Italian in Florence, Claude had gone back to France to work for his father’s consulting firm, and Nora was in Austria for a crash course in German. Nora wrote to me about Frank, while Frank wrote about Nora. He’s losing all his hair and he isn’t even 25. She, he’d write, was a jittery flibbertigibbet who should be flipping burgers instead. I was trying not to take sides, but I found myself envying their love and fearing its dissolution, sometimes more than either of them did. One would quote Leopardi to me, the other Donna Summer. Both had sprouted quick romances abroad.

My other friends who had stayed in Cambridge to teach summer classes had also left. Postcards trickled in from Paris, Berlin, Bologna, Sirmione, and Taormina, even Prague and Budapest. One of my fellow grad school friends was doing the Petrarch route, from Arquà to Provence, and wrote that, like Petrarch himself, he was about to ascend Mont Ventoux with fellow medievalists. Next year, he added on his postcard with his stingy, minuscule script, he was planning a climb up Mount Snowdon in Wales; I should come, since I loved Wordsworth. Another friend, a devout Catholic, had set out on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Both were to meet in Paris and come back on the same plane before we’d all start teaching this fall. I missed my friends, even those I didn’t like very much. But I owed them money and didn’t mind their extended grace period.

All the summer school kids were gone, as were the foreign students who flocked to take classes at Harvard every summer. Lowell House was empty and its gate padlocked and strapped with a chain. Sometimes, just the thought of stopping by and standing in its main courtyard, flanked by a row of balusters, was sufficient to stir the illusion of Europe. I could knock at the window and ask Tony, the gatekeeper, to open the gate for me, say I needed to get to my office. But I knew that my visit might take no more than a minute or two, and I’d hate to disturb him.

This was a different Cambridge.

As happened every year once its students and most of its faculty were gone by midsummer, Cambridge began to acquire a different, gentler, working-class character. The pace slackened; the barber would stand outside his shop to smoke a cigarette, salesclerks at the Coop would be chatting it up among themselves, the waitress at Café Anyochka would still not have made up her mind whether to leave the glass door open or if it was time to turn on their rickety air conditioner. Cambridge in early August.

I was staying the whole summer, holding a very part-time summer job in one of the Harvard libraries. The job paid a puny sum per hour. To make ends meet I tutored French. Money went toward rent. Other priorities were: food, cigarettes, a drink whenever possible. When money ran out, which it inevitably did by the end of each month, I’d put on a shirt, a jacket, and a tie and have lunch at the faculty club, where, amidst the established Harvard faculty and visiting dignitaries, I would eat on credit. I had failed my comprehensive exams in January, which left me just one more chance to retake them. I was reading books for my second try, scheduled for early in the new year, always lugging books wherever I went. Inside me I had the sinking feeling that graduate school would wear on and on with no end in sight till, before I knew it, I’d turn thirty, then forty, then die. Either this, or I’d flunk my comprehensives again, and they’d find out what they probably suspected all along: that I was a fraud, that I was never cut out to be a teacher, much less a scholar, that I had been a bad investment from the get-go, that I was the black sheep, the rotten apple, the bad seed, that I’d be known as the impostor who’d hustled his way into Harvard and was let go in the nick of time. All I’d been doing these past four years was hide from the merciless world outside the academy, burying myself in books all the while resenting the very walls that sheltered me and made it possible for me to read more books. I hated almost every member of my department, from the chairman down to the secretary, including my fellow graduate students, hated their mannered pieties, their monastic devotion to their budding profession, their smarmy, patrician airs dressed down to look a touch grungy. I scorned them because I didn’t want to be like them, but I didn’t want to be like them because I knew that part of me couldn’t, while another wanted nothing more than to be cut from the same cloth.

When I was not working at the library, I would go upstairs on the roof terrace of my building to sunbathe—with my folding chair, my bathing suit, my cigarettes, my books, and an endless string of watered-down Tom Collins which I dutifully replenished every two hours or so in my apartment, situated right under the terrace. I had taken the magnum bottle of Beefeater gin at the end of a departmental party in late spring; the bottle had a long way to go yet. I liked to read while listening to music. Often a couple sat next to me, reading and drinking as well. One of them, in a bikini, liked to chat every once in a while. She introduced me to John Fowles. I introduced her to Tom Collins. Sometimes she brought cookies or sliced fruit. On that terrace above the fourth floor overlooking Cambridge, all I had to do was stare at my book, smell the suntan lotion around me, and, in the silence of a weekday morning right there on Concord Avenue, drift away and think I was finally lying by some beach on the Mediterranean, or my long-lost Alexandria which I knew I would never again set eyes on except in sleep.

Sometimes I would offer to fill an iced drink on my next trip downstairs for another neighbor who like me was also reading for her orals. She’d accept, and for a few seconds we would talk. I loved her glistening tan shoulders and slim, bare feet. But before I was able to have a conversation with her, she’d be back to reading. Was my music too loud? No, it was fine. Sure it wasn’t bothering her? It didn’t. Apartment 42 was clearly not interested. Apartment 21, who also came up to sunbathe sometimes, was a bit more talkative, but she lived with her twin sister, and there were times when I could hear them go at each other, some of the vilest insults I’ve ever heard flung between two humans. Better stay away—though the idea of twin sisters in the same bed at the same time never failed to arouse me. Apartment 43, who lived next door to me, already had a boyfriend, which explained why she was so seemingly forthcoming. Like me, they were both in their mid-twenties. In the morning, they would leave the building together, the spitting portrait of the world’s healthiest relationship. She’d accompany him to the Square, where he’d catch the train to Boston and she’d turn around with their collie and come back by way of the Cambridge Common. We shared the same service landing, their kitchen door facing mine. They liked pancakes in the morning. Sometimes, the smell of their breakfast wafted into my kitchen, especially when I opened my service door and they left theirs open for cross-ventilation, which is when I’d catch them in boxers and pajamas. On weekends they cooked French toast and bacon. I loved the smell. It stood for family, hearth, friendship, domestic bliss. People who cooked French toast lived with people, liked people, understood why people needed people. In three years, tops, they’d have children. On Saturdays sometimes he would head off to work. Later she’d come upstairs on the terrace in her bikini, eager to make small talk, carrying a towel, suntan lotion, and always something by a British author. Did she know I could hear her passionate cries at night? I was sure she knew.

When she stepped onto the roof terrace on Sunday mornings carrying her folding chair, she’d beam a smile at whomever was lounging there, amused, sly, and self-conscious. She wanted me to know she knew I knew. But it stopped there. When I would take a break and offer to bring her a Tom Collins, she’d decline with a smile—as always amused, sly, and self-conscious. She knew what I was thinking.

On weekday mornings, I loved to look down from my window and watch them leave. Their life was perfectly rounded. Mine had transcendental homelessness written all over it. They headed out and came back, while I stayed put, getting progressively more tanned, more bored. There was nothing to do but read all day. I was not teaching, barely tutoring; I was not writing; I didn’t even own a TV. I would have loved to drive out somewhere. But no one I knew had a car. Cambridge was a fenced-in, isolated strip of parched land.

Upstairs, on the terrace, is where I had decided to reread in the space of six months everything I needed for my comprehensive exams on seventeenth-century literature. Mid-January was far off yet, but in the middle of the night it felt like minutes away. Every time I was done reading a book, I’d discover many more I needed to read or reread. I’d budgeted two books a day. When it came to French prose writers I’d read three a day. The Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Restoration prose writers, definitely two a day. But then came the picaresque writers of Spain, and the prose writers of Italy, one adulterous tale after the other until the whole history of European fiction seemed written by P. G. Wodehouse on steroids. And finally German and Dutch authors. Here the solution was very simple: if I hadn’t already read them, they were never written. Ditto with some of the great French gossipmongers of the royal court: if I couldn’t remember them, they were not important. Meanwhile, I’d reread The Letters of a Portuguese Nun and Don Carlos many times and was still awed by their brilliance, which gave me hope. I was slashing my way through a jungle of books, constantly finding clever ways to assuage the pangs of conscience each time I realized I’d omitted an important work. Not exactly scholarship—but under the blazing summer sun and the near-hypnotic scent of suntan lotion around me as I watched so many thighs lounging about on tar beach, no one could ask for more.

My dissertation advisor, Professor Lloyd-Greville the redoubtable seventeenth-century scholar, had admitted me into the department with high hopes. He had always tried to throw a few financial-aid dollars my way, and he had once expected me to pass my comprehensives with cutlass and steed, like the caliph Haroun al-Rashid jumping over impossible human hurdles. He always brought up Haroun in my company, either because Haroun, like me, came from the Middle East, or because, in addition to being a great soldier and statesman, Haroun was also a patron of the arts and sciences, all of which Lloyd-Greville aspired to. But I couldn’t begin to know what he thought of me or of Haroun. Born, bred, and blooded at Harvard, Lloyd-Greville was a paragon scholar who also happened to be an authority on Yeats. I could just picture myself knocking at his door after taking my exams a second time and hearing him say, with his courtly smile followed by that unmistakable little cough that cleared his throat before he’d utter one of his lapidary pronouncements, that this time, he was so very sorry to say, I’d definitely missed the boat to Byzantium. “Even third-class passage?” I’d ask. “Even third-class passage,” he’d say. “How about the bilge area, there are always ex-convicts and stowaways in bilge class.” “Even bilge class,” he’d declaim, as he’d put on a strained much as we regret to announce smile and screw in the cap of his Montegrappa pen that had just signed my death warrant.

My other advisor, Professor Cherbakoff, was more lenient but would never deign sign off on my exams if Lloyd-Greville demurred. He liked me, I knew, but his paternal concern for me had grown downright oppressive. He too came from a Jewish family that lost everything in France owing to war and politics. His return to France after the war as a student had filled him with such horror that a few years later he was lucky enough to find a position in the United States and put France behind him. His was a sobering reminder that France, the France I dreamed of when there was no other place left to dream of, either had never existed or might never open its doors to me.

Lloyd-Greville, by contrast, worshipped France. He owned a sixteenth-century mansion in Normandy. A legendary leather-framed picture of it, which was always the talk of the department, sat in his office: wife, two daughters, maid, cook, gardener, dog, and two to three de rigueur cows sprawled in the distant fields. “Yes, it is perfect,” he once said when I sat in his office and, to soften him up after staring at the picture, said that his house, his life looked perfect. Cherbakoff would never have had the nerve to agree with me, at least not so readily. He knew exactly what I was going through, knew how self-doubt scrapes down the soul, till all that’s left is a flimsy sheath as thin as a sliver of onion skin. He wanted me to follow in his footsteps, which is also why I avoided him.

Usually by one o’clock on the rooftop, I had enough energy to read for at most an hour or so in my apartment. I liked when it was dark and cooler inside. After that came the small library where I worked and where I’d read some more. Then I’d wander about Harvard Square in search of another place, preferably an indoors café, after which there’d be another place, and maybe another, before I turned in.

RIGHT NOW, BETWEEN me and the elements stood a blow fan at Café Algiers, just as between me and my rudderless summer sat the two volumes of Montaigne’s Essays which I’d been promising Lloyd-Greville to comb through, essay after essay. Pascal I’d promised to reread afterward. As for all the short novels ever penned by Europe’s middlebrow hucksters, I’d just have to do what they themselves claimed they did: wing it.

One could spend an entire day at Café Algiers. It was a tiny, cluttered, semi-underground café off Harvard Square that held no more than a dozen tiny, wobbly tables and that looked like a miniature Kasbah about to spill on the floor. How they managed to stuff so many tiny, rickety tables, chairs, and a giant antique espresso maker, plus a whole kitchen area in one-tenth the space needed was beyond me. The owner must have been an engineer by training who doubled as part-time cook, cashier, waiter, and busboy. They served coffee, juices, sandwiches, and cakes. Weather permitting, Algiers boasted a tiny alfresco area on what could have passed for a terrace but was really no more than a narrow passageway between Brattle Street and the bar Casablanca on the way to Mount Auburn Street. People parked their cars in a lot right behind the bar.

I hadn’t spoken to a soul all weekend. It was Sunday, everything was closed, and I’d been roaming from one coffeehouse to the next. It was now late in the afternoon. Another scorching weekend like this and I’d wilt, no one would miss me, no one would even know. I found myself thinking of the young couple in Apartment 43. They were having people over for dinner, she told me. Gazpacho and lamb chops and God knows what else—wine, always wine. He liked to cook. She liked books. After dinner, they’d wash and dry the dishes in the kitchen, and he’d playfully bump her hips with his, as I watched him do once downstairs when he stood by her while she took forever to empty their mailbox. Had he bumped her ass in jest, or simply to mean Will you hurry? They had two names on their mailbox. Soon they’d have just one.

I was reading Montaigne’s Apologie de Raimond Sebond that afternoon, and was sitting in a relatively quiet corner of Café Algiers drinking an iced coffee that was to last me at least two and a half hours. Nursing a drink is one thing. But watching your ice cubes melt and turn the watered-down brew into clear soup and still pretend that your glass is half full was like trying to preserve the polar icecaps with a paper fan.

Then I heard him. He was sitting at a table not far from mine, speaking French. Correction: he wasn’t speaking. He didn’t speak; instead, he rapid-fired machine-gun style, in bursts and sputters. Rat-tat-tat, he took down civilization, Western and Eastern, no difference, he hated them both. Cranky, jittery, crazed, strafing his way from one subject to the next—it didn’t matter which—he’d mow it down. Rat-tat-tat, like shattered glass spun in a blender. Rat-tat-tat, like a jackhammer, like a chainsaw, like a power drill, every syllable spiked with venom, vengeance, and vitriol.

I had no idea who he was, what exactly he was talking about, or why he kept raising his voice, but in this underground café on a quiet midsummer Sunday afternoon, his was the only voice you heard.

Oui, oui, oui—rat-tat-tat. Bien sûr, bien sûr—rat-tat, rat-tat. Et pourquoi pas?—rat-tat-tat-tat? Long sentences, spoken with spitfire accuracy, while all around him sat cigarettes, napkins, matches, a cheap lighter, home keys, car keys, leftover change from his previous coffee before he’d decided to order a second and then a third—debris strewn helter-skelter about his table like the spat-out bullet shells of his hysterical prattle. Rat-tat-tat, down with capitalists, communists, liberals and conservatives, Old World, New World, the League of Nations, the Arab League, the League of Women Voters, the Catholic League, the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, down with them all! Whites, blacks, men, women, Jews, gays, lesbians, rich, poor, cats, dogs—a flint storm of curses as unmistakably North African French as the cicadas on sleepy Mediterranean afternoons when they drown out every other sound with the raspy musketry of their hindquarters.

At that moment he was fulminating against white Americans, les amerloques, as he called them. Americans loved all things jumbo and ersatz, he was saying. As long as it was artificial and double the value if you bought five times the size you’d ever need, no white American homemaker could 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 refilled mugs of all-you-can-drink coffee, their faux-mint mouthwash with triple-pack toothpaste and extra toothbrushes thrown in for the value, their cars, their malls, their universities, even their monster television sets and spectacular big-screen epics, all, all of it, jumbo-ersatz. American women with breast implants, nose jobs, and perennially tanned figures—jumbo-ersatz. American women with smaller breasts, contact lenses, mouth spray, hair spray, nose spray, foot spray, scent spray, vaginal spray—no less ersatz than their oversized sisters. American women who were just happy to have found a man to talk to in a crowded café on a midsummer afternoon in Cambridge, Mass. would sooner or later turn out to be jumbo-ersatz all the same. Their lank, freckled toddlers fed on sapless, bland-ersatz, white-ersatz bread and swaddled in ready-to-wear, over-the-counter, prefab, preshrunk, one-size-fits-all, poly-reinforced clothes couldn’t be more bland-ersatz than their big, tall, fast-food lumbering football giant daddies with outsized shoes, penis enlargers, and sculpted, washboard, eight-pack abs who personify the essence of all that was ever jumbo-synthetic on God’s ill-fated, jittery little planet.

This, I would soon find out, was standard fare whenever he found someone to buttonhole. He’d start with the First World, work his way down to the Second, then to the Third, till he’d wipe out every visible bare-bottomed savage in the rain forest and thrown the hapless survivors to the Huns, where they all belonged anyway, or to the Ottomans, who’d know what to do with them, or worse yet, to the Jesuits who’d sing a prayer before burning them alive and making missionaries of their children.

He couldn’t have been older than thirty-four, wore a faded army fatigue jacket with many pockets, and was speaking in a Maghrebi accent to a bearded American college student who was clearly trying to look like Hemingway. The American occasionally dared to interrupt with tepid pieties in decent enough French, while Machine Gun Mouth was catching his breath to take lingering sips from his coffee cup, which he held from the rim, as if its handle were missing. “But you can’t generalize about all Americans,” said Young Hemingway, “nor can you say all women are this or that. Every human being is unique and different. Besides, I don’t agree with what you say about the Middle East, either.”

Machine Gun reclined on his seat as he rolled his nth cigarette, licked the glued end of his cigarette paper after filling its midsection with tobacco, and like a cowboy who’d just spun the cylinder of his revolver after carefully reloading its chambers, pointed a stiffened forefinger that almost touched the temple of the startled young American, who had clearly never had a finger, much less a loaded pistol, pointed at his head: “All you know is what you learn from newspapers and your boolsheet television. I have my own sources.”

“What sources?” asked the bearded American, who was beginning to look like a timid prophet about to bicker with the Lord God Himself.

“Other sources,” snapped the North African. And before the young man had a chance to cross-examine him, there it was again, as good as new, oiled, rammed, reassembled, and reloaded, louder and more articulate yet: rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.

I knew I’d heard his voice many times before at Café Algiers, but on that late Sunday afternoon, the hammering staccato of his words was impossible to ignore. I could tell he knew people were looking over in his direction. He pretended not to notice, but it was clear he was picking his words and buffing his performance, like someone who while speaking to you is looking over your shoulder at the mirror behind you to make sure his hair is well combed. His speech was growing a touch too studied, as were his gestures and the exaggerated pitch of his explosive, out-of-control laughter. Obviously, he liked people to wonder about him. And I was—there was no doubt—wondering about him. I’d never come across anyone like this before. Primitive, yet completely civilisé. He crossed his legs in a very distinguished manner—but the look, the clothes, the hair were a ruffian’s.

Suddenly I heard him again. Rat-tat-tat.

“American women are like beautiful manor houses with lovely rooms and lavish art, but the lights are switched off. Americans are not born, they are manufactured. Ford-ersatz, Chrysler-ersatz, Buick-ersatz. I always know what Americans will say, because they think alike, speak alike, f*ck alike.”

Young Hemingway was listening to this tirade, trying to sneak in a few words edgewise to draw some sense from the diatribe; but there was no stopping the string of invectives that came rattling forth like pellets fed on a bullet belt. Rapid-fire Kalashnikov stuff, G.I. Joe ducking in the trenches with bullets whistling overhead and mud-buried mines exploding underfoot, and all about him senseless strafing and detonations. No sooner had he lambasted the female sex than he took a swipe at human greed, at Mormons, at underpaid Mexican waiters who steal food when the owner isn’t looking, finally taking on NATO, UNESCO, Nabisco, Ceauşescu, Tabasco, Lambrusco, you name it, all of them big, shameless signs of a world gone completely mad and ersatz. I had never heard such abominable agitprop in my life. The American president he renamed le Boy Scout. “The Italians are rotten thieves. The French will always sell their mothers, throw in their wives, then their sisters; but their daughters they’ll sell you first. As for Arabs, we were infinitely better off as colonies. The only one who understood history was Nostradamus.”

“Who?”

“Nostradamus.” No sooner named, than out poured a litany of quatrains predicting one catastrophe after the other. “Nostradamus and the myth of the eternal return.”

“You mean Nietzsche.”

“Nostradamus, I said.”

“How do you know about Nostradamus?”

“How do I know!” he asked rhetorically. “I know, OK?”—which he pronounced oké?—“Must I teach you everything I know?”

I couldn’t tell yet whether this was amicable sparring or comic banter about to turn ugly, or if they were engaged in the besotted ramblings of Vladimir and Estragon. But the louder of the two was definitely a cross between Zorba the Greek on steroids and Rameau’s nephew on speed.

At some point I could no longer resist. I stood up and headed to his table. “I couldn’t help overhearing you. Are you students here?” I asked in French.

No answer. Just a dismissive shake of the head, immediately followed by that sinister gimlet stare of his, which seemed to ask, And if we are, what business of yours is it, anyway?

I wanted to say that I hadn’t spoken to a single person, much less in French, for two days, and with Apartments 42, 21, and 43 I traded nothing but distant glances, and frankly this sitting on the roof terrace every day was not good for my soul, and eating by myself was no better, to say nothing of the watered-down swill they called coffee here. But the silence between us was hard to take, because it came with a decidedly hostile stare. I was already preparing to apologize and bow out, saying that I hadn’t meant to interrupt, thinking to myself that I should have known better than to barge in on perfect strangers and expect to make small talk with a street ruffian and his acolyte.

Before I returned to my table, the words slipped out of my mouth:

“Sorry to disturb. I just felt like speaking to a Frenchman.”

Again the stare.

“Me, French? What are you? Blind? Or is it deaf you are? With my Berber skin? Look here.” And with this he pinched the skin of his forearm. “This, my dear friend, is not French skin.” As though I’d insulted him. He was obviously proud of his Berber skin. “This is the color of wheat and gold.”

“Sorry, my mistake.”

I was determined to step back to my table and pick up Montaigne where I’d left him face down.

“How about you, are you French?” he asked.

I couldn’t resist.

“With my nose?”

He was playing with me. I knew he wasn’t French, just as he must have immediately guessed I wasn’t either. Each was basically letting the other think he could pass for French. A tacit compliment that hit the mark in both of us.

“How come you speak French if you’re not French?”

Anyone born in the colonies would have known right away the answer to that. He was definitely playing.

“For the same reason you speak French,” I replied. He burst out laughing. We understood each other perfectly.

“Another one of us,” he explained to Young Ernest, who was still trying to sort out what possible importance Nostradamus could have in today’s complex geopolitical conflicts.

“What do you mean one of us?”

“Il ne comprend rien du tout celui-là, this guy doesn’t understand a thing,” he said, with typical mock hostility prickling his voice.

We exchanged names. “You can call me Kalaj,” he said, as though yielding to a public nickname he preferred to his own name, but also because there was a vague suggestion in his voice that one could call him Kalaj “for now”—until, that is, he got to know you better.

He’d been here for six months only. Before that Milan. This was home now.

He threw out a word in Arabic at me.

I threw back another.

We laughed. We were not testing each other; more like feeling the ground for how to improvise a tentative pontoon bridge.

“Perfect accent,” he commented, “even if it is Egyptian Arabic.”

“Yours is difficult to place.”

“I seldom speak Arabic,” he said, then asked, “Jewish?”

“Moslem?” I replied.

“Just like a Jew: always answers with a question.”

“Just like a Moslem: always answers the wrong question.”

We were both laughing, while Young Hemingway stared uneasily, thrown off as he was by our chaffing and mock-religious slurs.

“Why did the Arab store owner buy fifty pairs of jeans from the Jew?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because Isaac promised Abdou to buy them back at a higher price.”

Laughter.

“But why did Isaac buy them back in the end?”

I didn’t know the answer to this either.

“Because the Arab agreed to sell them at half price.”

“Did the Arab ever buy blue jeans from the Jew again?” I asked.

“All the time! You see, the jeans were made in Egypt and cost the Arab a fraction of what the Jew paid for them to begin with.” We laughed heartily.

“The Middle East!” he said.

“What do you mean the Middle East?” asked bewildered Hemingway.

Kalaj ignored the question.

“Were you waiting for someone?” he asked.

“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 had been aware of me all along. He told me about his taxi cab. I told him about my forthcoming comprehensives. We were talking. Talking is what humans like to do when they’re together, talking is natural. On Sunday afternoons, people talk, laugh, drink coffee. I had almost forgotten that people did this. Before I knew it, he ordered a round of coffee for the three of us. “Talk is good, but someone needs to order coffee,” he said.

He was, with this round of coffee—and it happened so fast I almost didn’t notice—celebrating me. This blustering volcano is probably kind, I thought. But crafty, ill-tempered, and mad. Stay away.

I was the exact opposite. Interest in other people came naturally enough; but it came the long way around, with so many bends, hurdles, doubts, and deferrals that halfway toward a friendship, discouragement and disappointment would invariably settle in, and something in me would simply give up.

Once again, Kalaj ranted against American women. He told us an obscene joke about an Arab who is arrested and beaten by the police for jumping a naked blond woman sunning herself on a deserted beach in North Africa. As they shackle him and pound him with more blows and accuse him of defiling a dead body—“Can’t you see she’s dead?” shouts one of the policemen—all the Arab could do in his defense was to shout back, “But, officers, I thought she was an American.”

Kalaj pointed to the various women sitting in the café. This one over there wouldn’t speak to him again because he’d refused to use protection. This other one sitting with her beau had turned him down once by saying “I think I’m going to take a pass.” He had never heard such insipid ersatz-speak before, and he repeated the words to us as if he were mouthing a ritual incantation spoken by extraterrestrials: I think I’m going to take a pass. In his rudimentary English the sentence was suddenly exposed for what it was: bland treacle-speak that sounded as artificial and no more capable of passion and arousal than a linoleum tile or a Formica tabletop. He pointed to a tall, slender, model type with a stunning figure. “She thinks I’m about to speak to her, but I’ve seen her come in and out of the bathroom too many times already. She has bathroom problems. Not for me!”

“What do you mean, not for you?” interjected Young Hemingway, who by now was utterly outraged by such unmitigated misogyny.

“I mean I wouldn’t neek her with your zeb.”

He was, as always, aware of every woman in the café. “They’re here for one reason only, and that reason is us three.” Young Hemingway asked him why he didn’t make a move if he was so sure. “Too soon.” The only people I’d heard speak this way were 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 had just cast a look at our table. With absolutely no discretion, Kalaj began to chuckle out loud, “She looked!” We caught a smile ripple on her face.

There are two kinds of men about town in France: flâneurs and dragueurs. As becomes obvious in no time, la drague—cruising—is not a hobby, not a science, not an art, not even a question of odds and probabilities. With him it was the perfect alignment of will with desire. His desire for a woman was so relentless that it would never cross his mind that a woman might not desire him back. He never doubted that a woman wanted him. They all did. As far as he was concerned, all women wanted all men. And vice versa. What stood in the way between a man and a woman at Café Algiers was a few chairs, a table, maybe a door—material distance. All a man needed was the will and above all the patience to wait out a woman’s scruples or help her brush them aside. As in a game of penny poker, he explained, all that matters was simply the will to keep raising the pot by a single penny each time; a single penny, not two; a single penny was easy, you wouldn’t even feel it; but you had to wait for her to raise you by a penny as well, which is when you’d raise her by another, she by yet another, and so on. Seduction was not pushing people into doing things they did not wish to do. Seduction was just keeping the pennies coming. If you ran out, then, like a magician, you twirled your fingers and pulled one out from behind her left ear and, with this touch of humor, brought laughter into the mix. In the space of fifteen minutes one morning, I saw him offer a woman a cinquante-quatre—a fifty-four-cent cup of coffee, tax included—put his arm around her each time he burst out laughing, and be off with her.

“But don’t get me wrong. In the end it’s always the woman who chooses you, not the other way around—always the woman who takes the first step.”

“What about all this bit about raising them with a penny each time?” asked Young Hemingway.

“That was bunk,” Kalaj replied.

“And Nostradamus, then?”

“Bunk too.”

His friend stood up to go to the bathroom, huffing, “Nostradamus—really!”

No sooner has he left our table than Kalaj said, “I can’t stand this guy.”

“I thought you were friends.”

Dismissive smirk again. “With that face of his? Are you serious?”

Suddenly, Kalaj put on a pouting face, stared intently at his cup, meditated on its shape, and began spinning the cup ever so slowly on its saucer. It took me a moment to realize what he was doing. He was mimicking Young Hemingway’s way of pondering every syllable coming out of Kalaj’s mouth. I burst out laughing. He laughed as well.

AT CAFÉ ALGIERS, people dubbed him Che Guevara or el révolutionnaire, but mainly they called him Kalaj, short for Kalashnikov. “Have you seen Kalaj?” they’d say. Or: “Kalaj is haranguing the brotherhood of man over at Casablanca.” It meant he is arguing about politics in Cambridge’s most popular bar. Or: “Kalaj shouldn’t be long, it’s almost l’heure du thé, teatime,” some of the regulars would say to make fun of how ill-suited he was for anything resembling the ritual civility of five o’clock tea. Sometimes you could even hear him arguing with someone on his way to the café, always loud and contentious. “Our soldier approaches,” one of the waitresses would say. Told he shouldn’t argue so much, he’d snap back and say “I wasn’t arguing.”

“Then what would you call it?”

“It’s how I talk. I can’t change how I talk. It’s who I am.”

And out sputtered louder protestations yet: he was no hush-hush, privacy-enamored ersatz American. Nor was he the simpering, self-effacing, you do your thing, I’ll do mine, and let’s all get along fine type who thronged the bars and coffeehouses of Harvard Square. Not who I am, he’d repeat, emphatically, as if this were the simplified version of a complicated syllogism he’d picked up years ago in a crash course on identity, chatter, and wit in some working-class café on rue Mouffetard in Paris where your nickname is branded on your forehead, your clothes, and your feet. Everything I am and everything I feel is written on my face. I am a man—you understand?

He excelled at tawdry existential fluff and superannuated clichés pawned off like darned-up hand-me-downs that had just enough bluster to spirit another generation of deadbeat combatants from who knows what battlefield—anything to impress a woman listening in on his conversation at the moment.

And listen in is what most women did. They were there at Café Algiers that first day I saw him, listening at every corner. But it took me weeks to realize that everything he was, said, and did was intended to accomplish one thing only: to rouse a woman’s interest—any woman’s. Everything was show, everyone knew it, and everyone fell in with it. Identity as performance, courtesy Café Mouffetard. Sometimes a costume was all the identity you needed. Anger itself, like passion, like laughter, like his most ineradicable beliefs, was, when all was said and done, for show.

Sometimes.

Sometimes, after a near squabble had been averted between him and Moumou, an Algerian regular at Café Algiers, I’d draw my chair closer to his and try to tidy things over by saying something as hackneyed as “He didn’t mean a thing by it.” “He meant every last word of it,” he would say, raising his voice as though about to start an argument with me now. One had to be patient with him, yield a bit, reason a bit, give him the breathing space he needed to let off steam, because steam, vapors, fumes he had plenty to let off. Zeinab, the waitress who was also Tunisian and who had a temper of her own, especially with customers when they didn’t tip well or asked for too many refills or more variations on the café’s bare-bones menu than she wished to remember, would become sweetness itself when she saw him flare up with one or another regular there. “Oui, mon trésor, oui, mon ange, yes, my treasure, yes, my angel,” she would whisper, and whisper again, as if smoothing down the ruffled hair on a cat that had just seen a mean dog. You didn’t argue with him when he got that way; you simply said something sweet and soothing. “I know exactly how you feel, I know, I know,” I’d say, until it was time to speak reason, “but how do you know he meant what he said?” I’d whisper. “I just know, oké ?” Oké here meant, End of argument. Go no further. Get it? I didn’t always know how to tame his temper. Oké was his way of nipping what could easily erupt into a squabble between us as well. “Why be so sure?” I’d whisper, all the while trying to press the point and show there was no risk of our ever getting into an argument but also to make him see things from what the rest of the world calls another perspective—a totally foreign concept to him. In his world, there was not and was never going to be another perspective. When we couldn’t arrive at a consensus, he’d look away from me and say, “Leave it alone, I said.” Silence. And he’d right away order a fifth cup of coffee. “Leave. It. Alone,” he’d repeat.

To emphasize the silence that had dropped like a deadweight between us, he’d quietly pick up the emptied cup before him, remove the spoon, which he’d always leave inside when drinking coffee, and place it neatly and deliberately on the cup’s saucer, as if trying to straighten things up and bring order in his life. It was his way of saying See, you’ve upset me, I’m trying to compose myself. You shouldn’t have said what you just said. A moment later, he’d be all laughter and jokes again. A woman had walked into the café.

Kalaj’s place at Café Algiers was always the same. Center table—not just to be seen, but to know exactly who was coming in or stepping out. He liked to sit inside, never outside, and, like almost everyone born and raised on the Mediterranean, preferred the shade to sunlight. “This is where Kalashnikov takes position, aims, and fires,” said Moumou, who, like Kalaj, was also a cabdriver and loved to tease him, the way an Algerian and a Tunisian like to chafe at each other before their taunts degenerate into a full-fledged tussle of words—which invariably happened when one or the other or both lost their tempers. “Either he sits there with his Kalashnikov between his knees waiting for you to make a false move or he’ll smoke you out, pin you down, and then, when you least expect it, bellyache you to death about his women, his visa, his teeth, his asthma, his monk’s cell on Arlington Street where his landlady won’t allow him to bring women upstairs because he makes them scream—did I leave anything out? A Kalashnikov with perfect night vision. You name it, he shoots it down.” Their arguments and taunts were legendary, epic, operatic. Kalaj would say, “I’ve got the eyes of a lynx, the memory of an elephant, the instincts of a wolf . . .” “. . . and the brain of a tapir,” would interrupt his nemesis, the Algerian. “You, on the other hand,” Kalaj would retort, “have the looks and sneaky bite of a scorpion, but you’re a scorpion without a tail, a tail without venom, a quiver without arrows, a fiddle without strings—shall I go on, or do you get my drift?” he’d say, alleging the Algerian’s notorious failure to achieve an erection. “At least this scorpion here will take anyone to the top of the mountain—ask around!—whereas with you, they’ll barely scale a tiny molehill, give out a courteous little yelp to torment the old lady’s sleep, and seldom come back. I can go on if you wish . . .” would come the Algerian’s not so oblique reference to Kalaj’s marriage that scarcely lasted a fortnight. “Yes, but during those few moments up that tiny molehill I’ve done things you can’t even remember doing since you were twelve years old, despite all the horse pills I hear you take four times a day that will do more for your bunions than for the little pinkie the good Lord gave you and which you wouldn’t know what to do with except put it in your ear.” “Shush, everyone,” the Algerian would interrupt when the place was more or less empty in the early morning and their jibes were not likely to disturb customers, “Monsieur Kalashnikov is going to impugn my manhood—speak to him if you dare, but wear a bulletproof vest.” “Oh, it’s our Arab comedian coming out of his magic lamp, fart end first,” Kalaj would retaliate, putting down yesterday’s Le Monde, which he picked up every day for free from the international newspaper stand on Harvard Square because it was already twenty-four hours old and no one else wanted it.

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 before 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 f*ck,” 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.

I envied him. I wanted to learn from him. He was a man. I wasn’t sure what I was. He was the voice, the missing link to my past, the person I might have grown up to be had life taken a different turn. He was savage; I’d been tamed, curbed. But if you took me and dunked me in a powerful solvent so that every habit I’d acquired in school and every concession made to America were stripped off my skin, then you might have found him, not me, and the blue Mediterranean would have burst on your beach the way he burst on the scene each day at Café Algiers.

In another country, another town, other times, I would never have turned to him, or he given me the time of day. I was not in the habit of approaching a complete stranger, would never have done so had I not seen something of me in him, something muted and forgotten in me that I recognized right away when it flared in his speech. His rants, for all their distorted, senseless dyspepsia, spoke to me, took me back to my past, the way Café Algiers took me back to something distant, unnamed, and overlooked in myself.

He, I would soon find out, was the only other human being in Cambridge who not only had not seen Star Wars but who refused to, who deplored it, who scorned the cult that had suddenly sprouted around it that summer. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker were on everyone’s lips as though they were familiar characters in a Shakespeare play, with R2-D2 and C-3PO trailing like minor fools and obsequious courtiers. But for Kalaj, it stood for all that was jumbo-ersatz.

ONE OF THE things that drew me to Kalaj at first had nothing to do with his mischievous sixth sense, or his survivor’s instincts, or his cantankerous outbursts that had strange ways of wrapping their arms around you till they choked you before they turned into laughter. Nor was it the mock-abrasive intimacy which put so many off but was precisely what felt so familiar to me, because it brought to mind those instant friendships of my childhood, when one insult about your mother followed by another about mine could bind two ten-year-olds for a lifetime.

Perhaps he was a stand-in for who I was, a primitive version of the me I’d lost track of and sloughed off living in America. My shadow self, my picture of Dorian Gray, my mad brother in the attic, my Mr. Hyde, my very, very rough draft. Me unmasked, unchained, unleashed, unfinished: me untrammeled, me in rags, me enraged. Me without books, without finish, without a green card. Me with a Kalashnikov.

If I liked listening to him, it was not because I believed or even respected the stuff he mouthed off every day at Café Algiers, but because there was something in the timbre and inflection of his words that seemed to rummage through a clutter of ancestral fragments to remind me of the person I may have been born to be but had not become. If I didn’t take his daily rants against America seriously, it was because it was never really America he was inveighing against, nor was his the voice of a bewildered Middle East trying to fend off a decaying and implacable West. What I heard instead was the raspy, wheezing, threatened voice of an older order of mankind, older ways of being human, raging, raging against the tide of something new that had the semblance and behavior of humanity but really wasn’t. It was not a clash of civilizations or of values or of cultures; it was a question of which organ, which chamber of the heart, which one of its dear five senses would humanity cut off to join modernity.

Which is why he said he hated nectarines. Brugnons, in French. People were being nectarized, sweet without kindness, all the right feelings but none of the heart, engineered, stitched, C-sectioned, but never once really born—the head part plum, the ass part peach, and balls the size of Raisinets. The nectarine didn’t have a single living relative in the kingdom of fruit. It was all graft.

“Grafted like us, you mean?” I said to him one day at Café Algiers after I’d heard him go on and on about President Carter’s nectarined face, to say nothing of his smile. The face, I agreed, was pure nectarine. But were we any better? We were no more authentic than anyone else, and we, having lived on three continents, were pure graft.

“Yes, I suppose like you and me,” he conceded. But a moment later: “No, not like you and me. The nectarine thinks it is a fruit. It doesn’t know it’s not natural and won’t believe it however hard you argue. And to prove it, it can even have children, the way robots too will have children of their own one day.”

He suddenly looked pensive, almost sad.

“You don’t know you’re human until you have children.”

Where did he come up with such notions?

“Do you have children?” I asked.

“I don’t have children.”

“Then?” I was teasing him

“I have my skin. That’s all.” And again, as he had done the first day I met him, he pinched the skin on his forearm. “This. This is my proof. The color of the ground in my country, the color of wheat. But,” he added as though on second thought—because there was always a second thought to everything he said—“I would have liked a child.”

All this was spoken out loud in French the better to intrigue a woman sitting next to our table who was probably wondering whether she was a nectarine herself, hoping that she wasn’t, all the while trying to guess what kind of a lover this strange rogue-preacher was in bed.

Which was exactly the purpose of the whole diatribe.

And yet, what finally cemented our friendship from the very start was our love of France and of the French language, or, better yet, of the idea of France—because real France we no longer had much use for, nor it for us. We nursed this love like a guilty secret, because we couldn’t undo it, didn’t trust it, didn’t even want to dignify it with the name of love. But it hovered over our lives like a fraught and tired heirloom that dated back to our respective childhoods in colonial North Africa. Perhaps it wasn’t even France, or the romance of France we loved; perhaps France was the nickname we gave our desperate reach for something firm in our lives—and for both of us the past was the firmest thing we had to hold on to, and the past in both cases was written in French.

Every night, in the bars and coffeehouses of Cambridge, we’d seek each other out, sit together, and for an hour or so speak in French of the France we’d both loved and lost. He was in Cambridge because he was running away from debt, from alimony, from who knows what ill-fated scrapes and illicit ventures he’d gotten himself mixed up in in France. I was in Cambridge because I still hadn’t found the courage to pack up and try to make France my home. We were, when we eventually ran into each other every night, the closest the other would ever get to France. Even the skittish intensity of his tidbit notions plucked from working-class cafés on rue Mouffetard and transposed to the dim-lit bar Casablanca kept the illusion afloat. Until last call. Last call made things more urgent, more desperate, for when they turned on the lights and we finally walked out of the bar to face a deserted Brattle Street, we already presaged the sobering realization yet again that night, as always at night, that this was not France, was never going to be, that this was all wrong, would always be, that France itself was just as wrong, because we were wrong everywhere, here, as in France, as in our respective birthplace that no longer was our homeland. We blamed Cambridge for not being Paris, the way over the years I’ve blamed many places for not being Cambridge, which is like blaming someone for not being someone else or for not living up to who they never claimed they were.

All that echoed in our minds as each said goodbye and finally made his way back to a place neither could in good conscience call a home was the evening’s attempts at French wit in a language we spoke with joy and bitterness in our hearts, because we spoke it with the wrong accent, because it was our mother tongue, but not our native tongue. Our native tongue—we didn’t even know what that was.

A Berber by birth, Kalaj had grown up to love France in Tunis, while I, since childhood, had worshipped Paris in Alexandria. Tunis had no more use for him when he jumped a navy ship in Marseilles at the age of seventeen than Egypt had for me when it expelled me for being Jewish when I was fourteen. We were, as he liked to boast when we’d run into women at a bar, each other in reverse.

He had as little patience for Islam as I for Judaism. Our indifference to religion, to our people, to the never-ending conflict in the Middle East, to so many issues that could easily have driven a wedge between us, our contempt for patriotism, for flags, for causes, or for any of the feel-good ideologies that had swept through Europe since the late sixties, left us with little else than a warped sense of loyalty—what he called complicité, complicity—for anyone who thought like us, who was like us. There was, however, no one else like us. I’m not even sure we knew what “being like us” meant, since we were so different. We adhered to nothing, nothing clung to us, nothing ever “took.” Our capital was an imagined Paris. Our country the two of us. The rest was bunk. De la merde. Passports were bunk. Newspapers were bunk. Cambridge was bunk. My exams were bunk. The books I was reading were bunk. The massive Checker cab he drove every day, which his nemesis called le Titanique, was bunk, his women, his green card application that never seemed to be headed anywhere, his lawyer, Casablanca, his impacted wisdom teeth, his first wife, his second wife, his marriage to the second wife before he’d divorced the first and whom he’d grown to hate no less than the first, because both, in the end, had kicked him out of their lives, because everyone was always kicking him out of their life, all, all was bunk. Even the personals, which he loved to read on the day they were published in the Boston Phoenix, were bunk, just as his replies, which I had to write for him in English, were pure bunk. He contradicted everyone and everything because in contradiction he heard his own voice, but no sooner had he heard it than he’d turn around and contradict himself and say he was as full of bunk as the next fellow. In the end, even France, when we’d talked long and hard enough about it, was bunk. The only exception, he said, was family and blood. His youngest brother, his mother, even his sister who ran away with an Algerian in Paris and whom he refused to have anything to do with though he kept sending her occasional care packages from America. And perhaps, in the end, he included me as well in his tiny clan. For us he’d have laid down his life. He must have known, as I’d always known, that for him I probably lacked both the courage and commitment to risk a thing.

If I did help him, as I did when I spent hours coaching him for his interview with Immigration Services, it was probably either without thinking or because I couldn’t come up with a good enough excuse not to. Or maybe I did it to take my mind off my own work, to feel that I was doing something worthwhile besides reading all these books I knew I’d probably never reread. He thanked me profusely and said that help came so seldom in his life that he knew how to value those who had any to give. I dismissed the whole thing and said it was nothing. He insisted I was wrong, that a sure sign of being a good friend was the inability to see how good a friend one was. I knew better than to start arguing the point. My gesture had come too easily, carried no risk, no obligation, no scruple, no hesitation or difficulty to overcome. I knew the difference between a good deed and instant charity tossed like a cheap coin on a salver. “Let’s just say it made you happy to help me,” he added to cut short our discussion as we left Café Algiers one day after consuming five cups of coffee. His profuse thanks was probably meant to veil what he’d always suspected: that for me he was no more than a buddy in transit, while I was the long-lost sibling he never knew he had until we’d crossed paths in Café Algiers. “One day you’ll have to tell me why you’ve allowed me to be your friend,” he’d say, “and then I’ll tell you why as well. But you’ll have to speak first.” When he said things like this, I’d always throw him a vacant Come again? What are you talking about? stare. “One day,” he’d repeat after sizing up my intentionally blank gaze that hadn’t fooled him.

If we read each other so well it was also because the other thing that bound us was our very peculiar scorn for everything and everyone. Our scorn expressed itself differently, but it must have flowed from the same wellspring of self-hatred. Mine was a festering boil filled with bile and muted resentments; his erupted with rage. No one starts as a self-hater. But rack up all of your mistakes and take a large enough number of wrong turns in life and soon you stop trying to forgive yourself. Everywhere you look you find shame or failure staring back.

He had that. I had it too. Blunders everywhere, each damning in its small, insidious way. Blunders and bunk. Bunk was our protest, our way of talking back. He shouted bunk and boolsheet the way you pour alcohol over a wound you hoped wouldn’t grow worse. You said bunk to deal the first blow. To have the last word. To show there was more where that came from. To check out so you wouldn’t have to fold in front of the others. We shouted bunk at ourselves as well. Bunk was the last thing you said to shore up your pride, the last stop on a shaky landfill called dignity. After that, you wept.

I saw him weep twice. The first time was when he learned that his father in Tunis had been rushed to the hospital with peritonitis. After that, no letters, no phone calls, complete silence from Tunis. Meanwhile, here he was, holed up in far-flung Cambridge. He was, like a character in Casablanca, a stranded soul waiting for letters of transit that never came, striking up all manner of friendships in dubious establishments. Why was he in Casablanca? Well—as Bogart says in the film—he’d been misinformed. He should never have come here. But here he was, like a lone gunrunner in a world that had grown tired of galled, self-hating anti-heroes, because anti-heroes themselves had long become bunk and passé.

He was not crying for his father only. He was crying for himself, because he couldn’t take the first flight out to Tunis, because he couldn’t go back poorer than when he’d left seventeen years earlier, because leaving now meant he’d never be allowed back to the U.S., because he was ashamed of who he’d become. He was trapped. I had never seen someone pound his head with both fists before. But pound it he did, until I clenched his fists and told him, “Stop, stop, for the love of God stop hitting yourself.”

Neither of us believed in God. I put my arm around him. I had never done this before. He continued to sob against my shoulder, I could feel his chest heaving, and heaving again, then he burst out laughing. Twenty minutes later he was telling everyone in the café that he had sobbed in my arms like a woman, just like a woman, he repeated.

I knew what he was doing.

Behind his rage, his volcanic eruptions, and hyperbolic indictments of mankind whole, he had never grown up. He thought or pretended he had. The worst you could do to him was to spot the boy of seventeen. This is where his life had stopped. All the rest was error and bunk.

The second time I saw him weep came much later.

“I’M HUNGRY. HAVE you eaten?” Kalaj asked at Café Algiers, that day we first met.

“No.”

“Well, let’s get a bite for free.”

He looked so grubby and unkempt when he stood up, that I imagined he must have meant something by way of a soup kitchen. There was clearly a first time for everything, and, given my cash flow, I’d been sacrificing food for too many cigarettes. I was ready to admit defeat and head out for a free bowl of chicken broth or whatever was the pauper’s fare on the menu that Sunday.

“They’re serving ’appy hower at Césarion’s.” He pronounced happy hour as the French do: ’appy hower, by eliding h’s where they belong and inserting them where they don’t.

I had no idea what happy hour was. He looked totally baffled. “It’s when you buy a cheap glass of pale red wine for a dollar twenty-two and have as many petits sandwiches as you can eat,” he explained. Why hadn’t I known about this?

We walked out of Café Algiers, then made our way through the narrow corridor leading to the tiny makeshift parking lot that stood in front of the Harvest. This was where he liked to park his cab.

He entered Césarion’s with all the poise and self-assurance of someone who’s been a longtime friend of the owner, the manager, the headwaiter. “Frankly, I’m sick and tired of Buffalo wings,” he said as soon as he spotted a large ceramic bowl filled with the greasiest fried wings that had ever been mired in bogs of sauce. We ordered two glasses of red wine. You took a little plate comme ça, like that, he explained, and you filled it with petits sandwiches or brochettes or wings, comme ceci, like this.

Soon, some of the same faces I’d observed at Café Algiers began to straggle downstairs into Césarion’s. I had always thought it was an expensive establishment. Yet, here, half of Cambridge’s riffraff was busy stuffing itself on larded wings and petits sandwiches. I’d been living in this town for four years, and yet someone who had landed at Logan Airport six months ago already knew all the ins and outs of every Sunday freebie around town. How and where did one pick up such a skill?

“See this guy?” Kalaj pointed to a bearded man wearing a large leather-brimmed hat. “He was here yesterday too. And the day before. He comes in here like me: to eat for free.” Kalaj wedged himself to where the cheeses were. I followed. He pointed to a woman holding a glass of wine. “She was at Café Algiers too this afternoon.” I gave him a blank stare. “You don’t remember? She was sitting right next to you for two hours.”

“She was?”

“Franchement, frankly . . .” Exasperation speaking. “Now watch this guy.”

I watched this guy. Unlike Young Hemingway, he had a studiously stubbly unshaven beard. There is nothing to watch, I finally said. Of course there was, snapped Kalaj. “Learn to see, can’t you!” He took a breath. “He’s just spotted the woman at the corner and is going to try to pick her up. He never succeeds.”

Sure enough, the studiously unshaven young man sidled up to a woman in a paisley summer dress, and without looking at her, muttered something. She smiled but didn’t say anything. He muttered something else. Her smile was more guarded, almost forced. Anyone could tell she was not interested just by the way she leaned against a pillar. “He never learns.” But I admired the man’s courage, his persistence, I said. “Courage he has lots of; persistence also, and certainly no shame. Desire too he’s got. But it’s all in his head—not here. Which is why he’s never convincing, because he isn’t very convinced himself. He’ll wake up one day at the age of fifty and find he’s never liked women.”

“How do you know all this?”

“How do I know! Easy. He’s going through the motions, but you can tell he’s hoping she’ll ask him to stop. Either this, or he’s decided it’s a loss but keeps at it to prove that at least he tried. And besides, there’s another reason.” Here, with his back leaning against the wall, he finally lit the cigarette he’d been dangling from his lips ever since rolling it at Café Algiers. “The fact is he’s ugly, and he knows it. All that stubble on his face is intended to make him look cool, but it doesn’t work.”

I was beginning to wonder what he thought of me. Had he already figured me out? I was not sure I wanted to know.

One of the waiters came and asked if we wanted another glass of wine. “In a moment,” said Kalaj, almost offended that management was trying to push drinks now. “Can’t he see I’m still drinking?”

Meanwhile another waitress had removed the empty bowl of chicken wings only to return moments later and put down another bowl brimming with more of the same. “A few more bites won’t hurt us,” he said.

Soon, the friend he had left behind at Café Algiers also stepped in. “There he is again. Let’s leave.”

I was just starting to like Césarion’s. I had grown to like the petits sandwiches, and the chicken wings weren’t so bad either.

“There’s nothing happening here tonight.”

“What do you mean?”

“The women are taken.”

“What about the one leaning on the pillar,” I pointed out, if only to persuade him to stay a while longer.

“She works here.”

I didn’t have to leave or follow him, and yet I walked out with him. As we stepped out into the early evening light, he muttered, “Je déteste ’appy hower.”

It was nearing sunset. I never liked sunsets around Harvard Square, never liked Mount Auburn Street, especially late on Sunday afternoons when its tired, declining light and its shuttered, old New-England-town look suggested a mix of lingering wealth, incipient decrepitude, and the stealthy patter of movements in quiet nursing homes where early supper is being served as soon as Sunday’s visitors have left. Mount Auburn had always stood for the grungy backside of Cambridge, and now that the students were gone, its deserted sidewalks and ugly post office looked as gray and wretched as an aging dowager sans makeup.

I was growing restless and needed to get back to my reading. Besides, Kalaj was beginning to buttonhole me, and I didn’t like it.

Suddenly, as we were still on the stairway leading up to the street, he gave me his hand and shook mine. “Time went by faster than I thought. I must drive my cab.”

He must have read what was going through my mind. It would be just like him to end a conversation abruptly. It made saying goodbye easy. “Maybe we’ll see each other another time. Bonne soirée.” Snap!

Before going home, on impulse, I headed back downstairs to Césarion’s. I had always been a light eater and what I’d seen during happy hour there could easily pass for tonight’s fare if I managed to wolf down more wings. Yet after only a few moments downstairs by myself I couldn’t have felt more out of place. Not my crowd, not my scene. Without Kalaj and the unreal France he projected on everything around us that afternoon, I felt awkward, exposed; everyone seemed to be an habitué here, whereas I needed to be seen talking to someone, someone who knew his way around this strange ritual called happy hour and who had lived long enough on the fringe of things not to feel uncomfortable or even louche when caught slumming for more than five minutes. I couldn’t even find the gumption to pick up another chicken wing. So, before daring to touch the food, I hesitated, then finally managed to order another glass of wine. By the time the bartender served me a glass of red, the big bowl of chicken wings had disappeared. Perhaps they would replenish it soon. But the large bowl of petits sandwiches had also been taken away. It took me a while to realize that happy hour was over and that the price of wine, when I finally asked how much I owed the bartender, had doubled.

Crestfallen, I walked back to the Square and headed toward Lowell House. The locked gate made me feel more lonely and homesick. But if Kalaj were sitting in his cab near the Square and happened to spot me on my way to Lowell House, I wanted him to know that the world I was headed back to right now was the furthest thing from the greasy-fingered warren of shabby happy-hour scavengers who’d champ down whatever was dished out with a cheap glass of pale red wine for a dollar twenty-two. I was angry. I wanted him to envy me, perhaps because I needed another’s gaze to help me look more kindly on my life and not see that, like so many left over in Cambridge this summer, I too was reduced to slumming. Perhaps I wanted to prove to him, and to myself through him, that I hadn’t sunk so low, that however privileged my life had once been in Alexandria, I had found ways to put both the Middle East and Europe behind me now and discovered, if not a new home, at least a new place in the world that could, to anyone who didn’t know better, pass for a baronial estate. I could never allow myself to think this was a home, because I knew that the precarious smidgen of privilege that Harvard doled out to people like me could, at a moment’s notice and with little more than a few scratches from Lloyd-Greville’s vintage Montegrappa pen, be readily taken away and put me back on the street by mid-January.

As I walked on the quiet cobbled sidewalk that led up to the locked gateway of Lowell House, I knew I was momentarily allowing myself to slip into the comforting childhood memory of erstwhile summers back in Egypt where you showered just before dinnertime, put on clean clothes after spending the day at the beach, and awaited whatever life might throw your way that evening. I peered through the locked gate entrance and spied the entirely deserted grassy courtyard where, months earlier that year, I’d sat and taught my class after students had begged me to hold the class outside. Now students and teachers were summering at places that weren’t necessarily far from Cambridge but whose whereabouts along the eastern seaboard I knew nothing of. I envied them their beaches, their summers.

Maybe Kalaj and I were not so different after all. Everything about us was transient and provisional, as if history wasn’t done experimenting on us and couldn’t decide what to do next.

But there was a difference: he was the control in the experiment; I the experimented-on. He was given the placebo, I the real medicine. I had witnessed the effects of the new drug, while he couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working. Neither of us belonged, but he was still the nomad, I had a ground to stand on. I had a green card, he a driver’s license. He saw the precipice every day of his life, I never had to look down that deep. There was always a fence or a hedge to block the view; he had run out of all partitions. But there was another difference between us: he knew how to wiggle his way around the precipice; I, however, put him right between the precipice and me. He was my screen, my mentor, my voice. Perhaps his was the life I was desperate to try out.