Harvard Square A Novel

7




I WAS NOT READY FOR THE COLD WEATHER OF LATE fall in Cambridge. Usually I welcomed that time of year, with its early twilight and the look of bare trees against the sky and the lull that hovered over Cambridge past seven in the evening. But the late summer had been so intense that I was reluctant to see it go. Kalaj, however, fell in love with the colder weather. He put on a heavier jacket, wore a gray scarf around his neck, and would frequently walk with his hands dug deep in his coat pockets. This would be his first winter in Cambridge, and the prospect thrilled him.

In the darkening days before Thanksgiving, Kalaj would come over to consult my dictionaries and correct sheets of homework, staying up till two in the morning. It made him feel as though he too were a graduate student and that we were roommates living it out in some sort of American Bohemia. He took whatever extra jobs he could find to tide him over. Money was always scarce. But somehow we always managed, and there were days when, by one miracle or another, we could always arrange to head out to the North End and bring back food to organize a few intimate dinners with friends. When we felt we had more women than men and needed an extra male, we’d always say, by way of a joke, why not invite Count? Someone always ended up making a joke about Count Dracula and his two missing teeth.

Late that fall a group of us got together one Sunday evening to see a double feature at the Harvard Epworth Church. We paid a dollar each and saw an old film called Desire. It left us indifferent. Then we went to Casablanca, had a glass of wine each, then went home our separate ways. If Kalaj wasn’t dating someone, he’d walk back home with me. Once home he knew I’d have to read, so he made no noise whatsoever.

We each had our students. On occasion we’d compare notes. He liked that. I helped him compose his first grammar test. I then taught him how to print and collate his exams. Then I helped him determine an A from a B– from a C+. This was an altogether new world to him, and part of him, you could tell, was starstruck and awed, like an immigrant who, on board a steamship at the break of dawn, suddenly spots the first glimmers of Manhattan’s skyline. Kalaj liked the new rhythm his life had taken.

A week or so before Thanksgiving, one of the greatest shocks in his life occurred. A student had submitted Kalaj’s name to the administration. The letter arrived in care of my address. He was being invited to a teacher-student dinner at one of the river houses. What was that? Had a student lodged a complaint against him? No, it was an honor, I explained. A student invites a teacher and has a formal dinner with him, one-on-one. He thought about it for a long time. “Can I go dressed like this?” he asked. “No, you need a jacket and a tie.” He listened, all the while rolling a cigarette, staring at the tobacco without saying a word. “Oké, oké.” I felt for him. “I’ll lend you any tie you want, but my jackets won’t fit you.”

On the evening of the dinner, he knocked at my door wearing a double-breasted gray flannel suit with a light blue shirt and a dark blue tie. I recognized the Charvet tie. He saw me admiring it. “Courtesy Goodwill,” he said. But the suit was French. As was the shirt. Either he already owned the suit, the shirt, the black shoes, or he’d gone out and bought them in Boston for the occasion. Che Guevara wearing a bespoke suit. Kalaj had shaved off his mustache, combed his hair with a touch of brilliantine and looked at least seven years younger. He made me think of someone who was going to the opera for the first time. “I’ll call you when it’s all over. Maybe you’ll meet me for a drink at Maxim’s. We’ll find new women.”

I watched him leave.

The munificent dinner sold him on the wonders of America. He never ate pork, but the sight of the juicy roasted ham with pineapple slices and cloves, coupled with the most oversized shrimps he’d ever seen elsewhere in his life, were simply too much for him to resist. And the best part of it was that every time he thought it was time for dessert, something would always remind him that this was only the beginning. He ate things he had never seen alive and couldn’t recognize if you whispered their name to him, but they tasted of heaven, and there was so much of it that part of him kept looking for a paper bag in which to put extras either for me, or for his friends at Café Algiers, or to remember the evening by. The American paradise was an inexhaustible PX of all that was ever jumbo and ersatz on earth. He loved it. “When we have a party we must cook roasted ham with pineapples.”

Then he mused a little while.

“I must tell you, all evening long I was thinking of one thing and one thing only.”

“What?”

“You must marry Allison.”

“Why?”

“If you won’t do it for you, do it for your children, do it for those you love, and do it for me too, because this country is ersatz-fantastic.”

AS SOON AS he was hooked, he became weak. Until then, he had flaunted his hatred of America because it dignified his pariah status. He could survey the New World from a quarantined balcony, but he couldn’t get near, much less touch it, so he shouted curses at it. But being invited in, if only to take a tiny peek for an evening, made an instant convert of him. In his heart of hearts, I am sure, he couldn’t wait to say the Pledge of Allegiance. I asked him what did it—the opulence, the abundance, the sheer self-satisfaction of the rich? “Actually,” he said, “it was the ham. And maybe the fact that their red wines put to shame our measly un dollar vingt-deux.”

He began to like his students and to have lunch at some of the houses that were willing to offer him a free meal if he sat with students and chatted in French with them. He discovered the wonders of Harvard’s French Tables where students gathered for dinner in smaller dining rooms where only French was spoken and for which he was asked to purchase the wines and cheeses every week. With students, he never spoke about politics or women. Instead he spoke about computer syntax. They all listened with rapt faces that reminded me of how his lawyer had gawked at him on hearing him list all the heavyweight champions. But after the famous dinner party, after his first and only football game, after all those eager students who had never known a man like him before and who’d timidly step into Café Algiers to meet him during his office hours and sip a Turkish coffee instead of conjugate verbs, his resistance began to flag. Even when he was allowed to drive his cab again, he continued to wake up earlier than usual to teach his eight o’clock class. Sometimes he worried. “One Friday night one of my students will leave an after-hours club, hail a cab, and it will be mine. What do I tell them then?”

“You tell them the truth.”

“Do you tell them the truth?” he asked. I was going to say that I seldom did. Instead, I suggested he dodge the subject altogether and say that there is little he loved more than listening to jazz en sourdine on Storrow Drive.

Harvard sucked him in during the fall semester. His crowning moment came when he was invited to two Thanksgiving dinners, one in Connecticut, the other in Boston. Same suit, same tie, same shoes, he joked. He opted for the Boston dinner. For the lady of the house he had purchased roses that cost him close to half a day’s worth of fares. “No speeches, no screeds, no jumbo this, ersatz that,” I told him. Zeinab, who was present during my short exhortation, added, “And no talking about asses and pussies, Back Bay is not Café Algiers.” America had embraced him. He embraced it. It was a fairy tale.

Being the superstitious Middle Easterner that he was, he kept waiting for the other shoe to fall. What he wasn’t prepared for was how brutal American doors can be when they suddenly shut you out. By early December, just when he was preparing to savor his first Christmas in America with some of his students who weren’t going to be traveling back home, he received a letter from Professor Lloyd-Greville sent in care of my home address, thanking him dearly for stepping in when they needed his help . . . Too many adjunct teachers at this time . . . Wishing him the best for his career.

Kalaj was not surprised. “For the past few days every time I crossed Lloyd-Greville in the corridors, he looked away.” He knew that look. “It’s the look on cab passengers who, even before opening their wallet, have already decided not to tip. The look of people who have already signed your death warrant and can’t look you in the face. The look of a wife who kisses you as you head out to work at seven in the morning but has already scheduled the movers for ten.”

He’d seen that look in women many times. The look of treason, not after it happens but while it’s still incubating. “I don’t make these things up,” he said, in case I wanted to warn him against paranoia. I suspect he was also referring to that moment at the Harvest when I tried to avoid speaking to him because I was with friends. But Lloyd-Greville’s letter made him more desperate. I had to write to Lloyd-Greville and explain that Kalaj was very important to his students, that the sudden departure of a teacher would demoralize the entire class, that in good conscience he, Kalaj, could never allow this to happen.

I tried to explain that such letters never work and very often backfire, turning you into more of a pariah, a pest, especially if your boss must continue to see you until next January. But he wouldn’t hear of it. “It’s a matter of my dignity,” he finally explained.

Instead of the long letter he wished me to write, I wrote a short acknowledgment, thanking Lloyd-Greville for his letter . . . It disappointed him no end that adjuncts were no longer needed . . . It had been a rewarding experience . . . He would treasure it for life. Etc.

He thought I was yielding too easily—“It’s because you don’t want to get your hands dirty,” he said.

It had nothing to do with my hands. What he wanted never worked—not here, not in France, not in Tunisia, not anywhere.

He accused me of being a coward, an apologist, un réac, a reactionary.

If I thought it would help to write the three pages that I know no one will read, I would write the letter. But it will do nothing. Protests are pointless, reasoning is pointless, guerrilla tactics serve no purpose, especially when you’ve lost.

“So what do we do then? Surrender?”

“You’re starting to sound like the Che Guevara from Porter Square. There is nothing you can do.”

He did not take it well.

“I must resign effective immediately.”

“You will do no such thing. You will teach till the end of your term, and when you look back on it, you’ll have nothing to reproach yourself with.”

He listened. “I won’t be able to hold myself back.”

I wanted to tell him that Harvard was no Italian Count. No threats, no broken teeth, not even as a joke!

And then it hit me: he couldn’t face his employer, he couldn’t face his students, he wouldn’t even know how to face the people at Café Algiers who had been watching him sit next to one or two students and go over the agreement of the past conditional with the pluperfect in counterfactual clauses, and never once raise his voice, always positive and upbeat, and in the end always throwing in a cinquante-quatre to make them feel better about themselves.

He wanted to hide. He didn’t even have it in him to mention the matter to Léonie, who, even after they were finished, still came around to Café Algiers to have a cinquante-quatre with him. “Do you still pummel each other?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

“No, we stopped that nonsense long ago.” Then after thinking: “Can I stay at your place for one more night?”

Of course he could.

When it got very cold and I had no more blankets, I explained to him that there were people in America who slept under electric blankets.

“What do you mean?”

I explained. He’d never heard of such a thing. He was horrified. “No wonder it’s a nation of vibrators and electric chairs.”

The next morning I made coffee and eggs for the two of us. I wanted to make sure he was on a full stomach. Then he went to teach.

It was only later in the day that I learned what had happened. He’d gone to class, distributed the homework he had meticulously corrected the night before, told everyone in class what the department had done to him, and right then and there walked out of the classroom, not before dropping his copy of Parlons! and his other textbooks along with the teacher’s manual into the garbage bin. He knew he’d be forfeiting his monthly paycheck but it gave him no end of satisfaction. “I have three things: my cab, my zeb, and my dignity. Without one, the other two are worthless.” On his way out of the building, he happened to cross none other than Professor Lloyd-Greville, who was walking with visiting scholars, and, miming the gesture with his hand, told Lloyd-Greville to beat off. Kalaj had socked it to him, and in front of everyone. Lloyd-Greville retaliated by saying he would report him to the dean of the faculty. “The who?”

We laughed about it. He wanted to cook dinner for the two of us. Then, as if it came as an afterthought, “I think I’ll sleep here tonight also,” he said.

I could see this was going to become a pattern. Without knowing it, I caught myself wondering how long it had taken poor Lloyd-Greville to write his letter to Kalaj. When was I going to break the news to Kalaj and prove to him yet again in his life that the world was made of two-faced people? I thought of his wife and of Léonie, and of his first wife in France, and of the U.S. government—everyone had had to battle with the same thing, how to tell poor Kalaj that he wasn’t loved, wasn’t wanted.

The matter reached a point when Lloyd-Greville, who had always been a friendly mentor to me, particularly after our Chaucer interlude, began to shun me in the corridors. It was not Kalaj who had overstepped the line now; it was I. He greeted me hastily, obviously feeling very angry but also somewhat guilty of the bad thoughts he’d been nursing about me. Eventually, I figured I had to repair the damage before I too was cast out as a pariah.

“I had no idea what Kalaj was capable of,” I told Lloyd-Greville when I stepped into his office. I’d thought him an overeducated man from the colonies who had run adrift and needed to be gently nudged back into the world of the academy. But I had very recently discovered from his wife that he had a very, very serious problem.

“What problem is that?” asked Lloyd-Greville, clearly impatient with my visit and not looking me in the eye as he shuffled a few papers in an effort to seem busy tidying up his desk. I looked at him and lowered my voice.

“Drugs.”

A rooster should have crowed at this very instant.

Lloyd-Greville said he would report him to the police.

“No, he’s already in a program now.” I said. “But these things take a very long time. And his wife says he’s doing much better than when he first started.”

“I never knew he was married.”

“Yes, they have a lovely little boy too.”

The cock would have crowed a second time, a third, and a fourth. It helped buttress the impression that I too, like everyone else, including his wife, had been taken in, but that deep down he was a good family man with good values and well on his way to recovery, slow and treacherous as such recoveries always were—unfortunately.

“Poor fellow.”

“Poor fellow indeed.”

Then upon reflection.

“He made fun of me to the students.”

And well he should have, I wanted to say.

Lloyd-Greville added: “Even though he is married I have a suspicion he was crossing certain lines, if you know what I mean.”

You don’t say!

I tried to drop my jaw and put on a startled, disbelieving face.

To mend fences, I offered to teach Kalaj’s course until the department could find a replacement before the beginning of spring semester. And if a replacement wasn’t available, I’d be happy to teach his course the coming spring. “I’ve heard rumors his grammar wasn’t what I thought it was,” I said, hoping to seem a judicious and impartial observer who was not about to let friendship stand in the way of my loyalty to my department.

Fifth and final crow of the rooster.

“You’d be helping us tremendously,” said Lloyd-Greville.

“Still, a sad story.”

“Yes, very sad.”

He asked how I was coming along with my preparation for my forthcoming comprehensives. “Well.” I told him I’d finished reading a seventeenth-century author called Daniel Dyke.

Lloyd-Greville winced, then confided he wasn’t sure he’d ever heard of a Daniel Dyke.

“A minor influence on La Rochefoucauld,” I said, as though it were the most obvious truth in the world. That kept him quiet.

To Kalaj I lied no less than I’d lied to Lloyd-Greville. I told him I had tried my very best to explain to the administration how eager he was to continue and how much his students liked him, but there was a quota of graduate students who had to teach, and the preference always went to those who were studying at Harvard—nothing personal.

“But who will teach my course?” he asked.

I had hoped he’d never ask.

“Everyone refused to teach so early in the morning, so I was obliged to say that I would—” This was my evasive spin on the fact that, without intending to, I’d just given my cash flow a thirty-three percent boost.

A FEW EVENINGS later I invited him to an all-you-can-eat place around Porter Square. Ever since he received the letter from the department, I made a point of not being seen with him around Harvard Square. We ate a huge meal and then walked back to my home. To my dismay, I saw him come up the stairs with me. Things with his last girlfriend were obviously not going well at all. That too had cast down his spirits. I pretended that things with Allison had resumed and that we needed the apartment. “I promise I won’t make any noise, I’ll come very late, take a shower at dawn, and be out.” I didn’t have the heart to refuse him. But I asked him not to keep his things in my home. Allison didn’t like this, Allison gets nervous when, Allison would much rather—I kept blaming Allison for everything. “And who does she think she is, your Allison, anyway? Your fiancée or the woman you neek every day?”

What saved me were rumors of two robberies on our street, rumors I built up to justify finally putting a lock on my door—exactly what I’d planned to do on the very day I told him he was welcome to stay in my apartment. We’d passed by Sears, Roebuck and I was already pricing locks. Kalaj had enough tact not to push the matter, though I am sure it didn’t go down well with him. He never told me where he slept when he didn’t sleep on my couch. I never asked. I stopped going to Café Algiers or to any of the bars around Harvard Square.

We saw each other a few weeks later. It was his idea. Same all-you-can-eat place off Porter Square. Allison was busy visiting her parents, I said. We stayed out late. Then he dropped me at my door, and I watched him drive his Checker cab toward the river and disappear. Another night with his music en sourdine, I thought. I felt like a shit.

Weeks went by without more than a couple of phone calls. Things were cooling off between us, and perhaps it was better this way, I thought. I was working very hard, knowing that I had slightly more than a month before the dreaded date. There were a few parties to go to. At their early winter get-together, Mrs. Lloyd-Greville took me to “our intimate little corner” at their house where we bandied mock-flirtatious quips. Mrs. Cherbakoff continued to ask about my parents’ health, both to find out if they were still alive and if I planned to pass my exams so that they could continue breathing a while longer. And there were the usual pre-Christmas student parties, to which normal protocol required you bring either a bottle of red or a wedge of Brie.

After the third pre-holiday party, I woke up at night with another attack of gallstones. There had been no warning whatsoever, but this was far worse than the previous two. I could hardly stand up, felt nauseous, and when I finally touched my forehead, knew I had a fever. I dialed Kalaj’s most recent phone number, but the woman who picked up the phone hadn’t seen him in quite a while and said she hoped he’d drop dead.

“I am his friend,” I said.

“And so was I, whoop-dee-doo! Drop dead too.”

“I need to be taken to the emergency room,” I said.

She came to pick me up fifteen minutes later and drove me to the same infirmary. Brunette, curly hair, made and sold her own jewelry, parents lived on the Upper East Side, and, yes, twice a week, when I asked if she was seeing a shrink. I never saw her again.

After walking into the emergency room, I found the familiar gurney, the placid English nurse, the same young doctor who’d been called in for me and who still showed signs of wetness from his 4:00 a.m. shower. Two days later I was operated on and had my gallbladder removed. At the infirmary, as had become routine by then, my room was continuously mobbed. Students and professors dropped in, including Lloyd-Greville, husband and wife, and Cherbakoff, husband and wife. Frank and Nora came together and left together, as did Niloufar, who came, as one does at a funeral, with one flower ready to be tossed at the tombstone of the deceased. Unannounced, even Young Hemingway stopped by. Six months later, in fact, we became good friends. But Kalaj never came, though he must have known, since Zeinab came to see me every day, sometimes twice. I kept fearing he might show up, all the while another part of me wished that he would and that he’d be the last to leave so that we might crack jokes at the expense of all those who had come with kindness in their nectarosyrupy hearts. I would have loved nothing more than to see him tell Lloyd-Greville’s wife, as I’d heard him tell a woman who complained he never helped her achieve orgasm, that she should treasure the memory of her last orgasm, since it probably predated the French Revolution. But having him stand elbow to elbow with my examiner would have been madness, and the last thing Kalaj may have wanted was to run into his old students. Actually, I didn’t want him to run into anyone I knew. I wanted my partitions back up.

Allison had heard about my operation but did not come. Instead she sent me a lavish bouquet of flowers. “I don’t need to say it—my feelings haven’t changed. Please get well. A.”

I wanted to call her on the spot and ask her to come see me right now, even if it was past visiting hours. I wanted her to stay up with me all night and hold my hand over the blanket until, with morphine, the pain subsided and I fell asleep. She’d do anything for me, as I knew I would for her. But I didn’t trust myself, didn’t trust my love, didn’t trust my own promises, much less those who trusted them. Just the memory of how she’d barged into my life and lain down on my carpet and read through my diary without paying me any heed could stir up something like love for her. But it was not love, just love-like. Something in me had withered; soon it would wither in her too. Right now I remained a mystery to her; but this mystery was precisely what stood between us. She was drawn to the foreign inflection in everything I did, thought, and said. Soon she’d spot the bruise behind the inflection. I blamed her for not seeing the bruise so I wouldn’t be blamed for hiding it from her.

THE FIRST PLACE I went when they let me out ten days later was Café Algiers. No one had seen Kalaj in days, I was told. Nor was he anywhere to be seen at the Harvest, or at Casablanca, or downstairs at Césarion’s. When I asked if they had his number, the only number they gave me was my own. I decided to go home. But home, when I got there, was too stultifying; it reminded me of the loneliness I had managed to put behind me ever since meeting Kalaj and that I was convinced was a thing of the past now. There was no one to call. I missed Allison. I missed Ekaterina. Missed Niloufar. Even Linda would have been welcome. Everything felt soulless. By nighttime I began to miss the hasty patter of footsteps of the night nurses. I went back to Café Algiers, a ten-minute walk. Kalaj saw me before I so much as started to look for him. Actually, he was yelling at me. “Are you out of your mind, are you crazy?” He seemed in a panic. “You should be in bed.” Zeinab, who was nursing a drink between Kalaj and a young Moroccan cabdriver I’d seen only once before, took one look at me and said I should sit down right away. “You’re all white. You’re going to faint.” They brought me a glass of soda water which Kalaj forced me to drink, all the while sprinkling my face with drops from a piece of melting ice. For a moment I felt like a wounded Victor Laszlo stumbling into Rick’s Café Américain in Casablanca and being bandaged by staunch and loyal partisans.

I had not seen Kalaj in weeks. He seemed changed.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I am all right. And you?”

“Could be better.”

Typical strains of veiled sorrow fringing self-pity.

“They took my license away and will never renew it. The FBI. I had to sell the car.”

“We’re going to have to see your lawyer.”

“You know as well as I do that he is a crook. He’ll end up costing more than the car.”

“But you can’t just let them take your car away without trying to do something about it.”

Léonie’s boss had a lawyer friend who might be asked to help. Except that Léonie felt that her ex-lover hadn’t forgiven Kalaj, and might be happier having him totally out of the way.

“And the Freemasons?” I asked.

“The Freemasons, well, we’ll see about the Freemasons.”

Silence.

“And if these don’t work, well, all of you in this bar right now—and that includes you too, Zeinab—will say that the last Checker cab in Boston was driven by a pure Berber who was proud of his skin and proud of his friends.”

Kalaj was in top form.

“If I had a car I’d drive you home right this instant.”

“I’ll take him if he wants,” said the young Moroccan cabdriver.

“How many times do I have to teach you,” said Kalaj, reprimanding the cabdriver who was more my age than Kalaj’s. “Never say ‘if he wants’ with this kind of honeyed, ersatz tone in your voice. Instead, say, ‘I’m taking you home. Let’s go.’ ”

“Well,” said the shy Moroccan, “should we go?”

Everyone laughed.

“They said I could drink if I wanted,” I insisted.

“They said you should go home,” said Kalaj, as patronizing as ever.

I knew that he cared for me. But I could also tell that he was holding a grudge and had finally seen through all of my wiles. A chill seemed lodged between us, and although I’d long wished for it, I hated seeing how easily it had settled, as though reclaiming what had all along been its rightful place.

It was Zeinab who spoke about it as soon as Kalaj said he needed to go to the bathroom.

He was going to be deported, she said. Even the Freemasons, to say nothing of the Legal Aid Society, were unable to stop it. His impending divorce hurt his chances a lot. Actually, it wasn’t a divorce. The marriage had been annulled.

“We’re still going to have to find a way,” I said, feeling that simply resolving to do something was already a way of doing something.

“I don’t think there’s anything he can do at this point.”

“What if he decides to stay as an illegal and disappears, say, in Oregon or Wyoming?”

“I don’t think it will work. He doesn’t want to be illegal.”

“What will he do then?”

“Probably go back. He can’t go back to France. So, you see, for him it’s back to Tunisia.”

But that’s like saying that the past seventeen years of his life—half his life—never happened, I thought. To go back to his parents’ home, to go back to the old bedroom where he’d slept and might still have to sleep with his brothers as he’d done as a child, to go back to a place where he dreamed of a France he had not yet seen only to realize that he’d not only already seen France, but that he’d lived and gotten married there and might never be allowed to set foot again there—“It would drive him crazy,” I said, suddenly thinking of myself hurled back to Alexandria after forswearing it forever. “It would be like being born again into a life one couldn’t wait to escape.”

“Not a second birth,” said the Moroccan. “More like a second death.”

Kalaj had lived with “second deaths” all his life both before and after France. He was not the type to say that experience is all to the good, that nothing is wasted in life, that everyone we meet and everywhere we go, down to the most squalid, insignificant job we hold, plays a tiny role in making us who we become. This was ersatz palaver, and Kalaj was too brutal with himself to think this way. There were no second chances in his book of life; you simply dipped into yourself and pawned the little that was left from earlier deaths. For him there were bad turns, and there were cruel tricks, and terrible mistakes, and from these there was no coming back, no expiation, no recovery, no turning over a new leaf. To live with yourself you had to cut off the hand that offended, cut, slice, peel, scrape, and tear away at yourself till all you were left with were your stripped-down bones. Your bones gave you away; you could not hide your bones, nor could you avoid staring at them. All you wanted was for others to be stripped down like you—lean, intemperate, and skeletal—you didn’t need to confide, and they wouldn’t need to confide, because both of you would know, just know, as a parent knows, as a sibling knows, as a lover, a real lover, knows that you were down to your last straw. Meanwhile, his unforgiving private God no longer manned a tablet or a staff. His weapon of choice was rage and a Kalashnikov.

He thought I was a fellow legionnaire of the bone who’d dropped by at the same watering hole with the same empty gourd and the same thirst for more than just plain water. I had disappointed him. He thought that, like him, I might be all human, raw passion. It took someone like him to remind me that, for all my impatience with life in New England and all my yearning for the Mediterranean, I had already moved to the other side.

I thought of him wearing a suit on the evening when his student had invited him to dinner. He’d been tempted by the Satan of ersatz that night, and Kalaj would have yielded. As I had yielded. As everyone does.

When Kalaj returned, he said he would join us in the car. It would give us a few extra minutes together.

It was the first time I’d been in his car with him when he wasn’t driving. Without knowing it, I was making mental notes: the cigarette-rolling trick while driving, the yelling at old Boston as he cut his way through its narrow alleys with bristling rage and scorn in his voice because the streets here were simply stupid and ersatz, the occasional whistle when someone deserved a compliment and he didn’t know enough English other than to just whistle. In the car he reminded me of my father after everything he owned including his car was nationalized by the Egyptian government and he was forced to ride in other people’s cars, looking awkward and uneasy when he didn’t have a steering wheel before him. Kalaj sprawled himself in the back of his own cab, giving directions and shortcuts on our way to Concord Avenue.

When we reached my building, the Moroccan double-parked the old car while Kalaj sprang to help me out of the car. Did I need help going up the stairs?

No. I could manage. But in typical Arab fashion, he did not step back into the car until I disappeared up the stairs to the landing on the first floor. Then I heard the car leave.

TWO DAYS AFTER I’d nearly fainted at Café Algiers, I met the woman from Apartment 43 on the stairwell. She was carrying groceries, I was carrying a light plastic bag from the Coop, so I offered to carry one of her packages upstairs. “Not throwing any more dinner parties?” she asked, that glint of irony always in her eyes.

“No, not recently.” Then I realized I’d never invited her and her boyfriend to our dinner parties when Kalaj used to cook. But I didn’t want to pretend I was planning a dinner party anytime soon. I was moving to Lowell House, I said. She looked crushed.

“Why?”

“Free lodging, closer to the Square and the libraries, better deal all around.”

“But no privacy,” she said.

“No, no privacy, that is true.”

Were we speaking in double entendres? When she opened her door, she let me in, and I walked into her apartment, and then into her kitchen, where I deposited one of her bags on the counter. Like Linda’s, her apartment also was mine in reverse. The idea intrigued me, everything about her intrigued me. We talked about apartments; she’d always wondered about my place. Did she want to take a look? I had just bought a recording of Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet. A gift from me to me, I explained. Birthday? No, just came home from an operation two days ago. Gallbladder, I said.

“Ouch!” She had completely forgotten about the night when her boyfriend had driven me to the infirmary. “Are you going to be OK?”

“I think so,” I said. She needed to put some of her food away first, then said she’d drop by.

“Would you care for a latte? I was going to make one for myself on a Neapolitan coffeemaker.”

She had never heard of Neapolitan coffeemakers.

“You’ll see,” I said.

“But are you allowed to drink coffee?” she asked.

“I can have booze, ergo coffee is good.”

“OK,” she said.

I did not leave through the front door but found something thrilling in using the service entrance and then opening my door and walking right into my kitchen, as though we had discovered an undisclosed conduit between us that had always been in place though we’d both chosen to overlook it. I liked the idea of a back door to a back door, of secret passages and hidden trapdoors for quick exits and easy access while her boyfriend was, say, in the shower or about to come in through the front door. I liked coming home to myself through someone else’s home.

“I always leave my door unlocked,” I said.

She walked in when the coffee was already brewing, loved the scent, she said, as she closed first her door, then mine. “I always like it when you make coffee.”

“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.