Harvard Square (25 page)

There was something so irreducibly earnest and guileless between us that I was perfectly happy to spend the rest of the night in that area with the head nurse sitting next to me in the dimmed lights of the emergency room. “Maybe I should let you rest a while,” she said. But she didn’t move. Perhaps all she meant was there was no need to talk.

Toward dawn, they decided to admit me to an upper floor. By then they’d had a chance to look over last week’s test results. The head surgeon was going to speak to me. He was an early morning type, so I shouldn’t get too comfortable, said my new nurse.

The doctor knocked at my door around seven in the morning, carrying a manila envelope with the X-rays sticking out. He slipped them under the glass panel with the gliding, effortless grace of a man who does this thirty times a day, lit the panel with a cavalier flick of the switch, and after musing a while at what looked like an off-gray paisley design called my inner organs, said that I had gallstones. The Jewish organ par excellence, I jibed. The tall WASP gentleman stared at me with a quizzical look, more amused perhaps by my attempt to be funny than by the joke itself. “I thought Jews were obsessed with another part of the male anatomy.”

The man had a sense of humor.

He sat on my bed, crossed his legs, dangling his top leg up and down, while his penny loafer hung from the tip of his toes, exposing his entire sock.

“Anyone else in the family with gallstones?”

“All of them.”

“On both sides?”

“All four of my grandparents.”

What had I had for dinner last night?

I said, Maison Robert, as though that offered explanation enough.

A long silence elapsed between us.

“Is this going where I think it is?” I finally asked.

He bit his lower lip, looked at me, and said, “What do you mean?”

“Knife?” I asked.

He liked my joke.

“Well, we don’t like to say ‘knife.’ The dictionary is full of friendlier terms—but the long and short of it is probably
yes
.”

The operation was not urgent. But I had to watch my diet. No fats, no alcohol, no coffee. Meanwhile, they wanted to run a few more tests, so I should stay in bed and eat the bland food they fed me on the house.

“May I ask a question?” I finally said.

“It won’t hurt,” he answered. Apparently everyone asked that same question.

“No, that was not my question.”

“Yes?”

“How long after the operation can I have sex?”

He smiled.

“You will be very tired afterward.” And to send the message home, he let his head slump down to his chest.

I called no one. I wanted to be alone. I was ashamed of being stricken with an old man’s ailment. Might as well have the ague or the gout. By around two that afternoon, I heard a timid knock at the door. It was Allison. How on earth had she found me here? My phone wasn’t answering. She’d been ringing all morning. Rather than suppose I never wanted to see her, or had spent the night with someone else, she’d assumed the worst and checked with the hospital. What amazing confidence in herself, in people, in the power of truth and candor. In her place, the first thing I would have imagined was that I had disappeared—or, better yet, absconded with her father’s twenty-dollar bill. If only all humans were like her and thought her way, there wouldn’t be an oblique ripple left on earth.

She sat next to my bed and we spoke. She held my hand. By the way, she had some bad news. What? Chlamydia.

“Not—” I started.

“No, from me,” she said.

“Does that mean I have it too, now?”

“Yes.” The good news is that her parents loved me. They thought I was funny. They loved the way I’d complained there were no fish knives at Maison Robert. It was typical of them to have noticed this.

Later that afternoon, one or two students straggled into my room, then a few teaching fellows, colleagues. Professor Lloyd-Greville dropped in to say hello. He too, apparently, had heard. Then my entire sophomore tutorial. There were about sixteen of us in the room, the hospital staff came and complained there was too much noise and that no one was allowed to smoke.

“But I smoke,” I protested.

“Well, you can, but no one else can. And, by the way, you shouldn’t either.”

Mrs. Lloyd-Greville showed up with a tiny pot of verbena from her garden and a box of chocolates. “They’re not for you, of course, but for your guests.” It was a double-decker box with a transparent parchment sheet placed above the chocolates indicating the intricate ingredients of the equally intricate assortment. The box was being passed around the crowded room when the unthinkable finally occurred. Kalaj walked into the room, bearing three porno magazines. I wanted to disappear under my bed covers. By eight-thirty, long after official visiting hours were over, I heard the loud voice of a woman. It was Zeinab, who had heard the news through the grapevine on Harvard Square. Then, minutes later, Abdul Majib, the old Iraqi kitchen attendant from the Lowell House kitchen, decided to make an appearance as well.

So here I was in bed, trapped and helpless, in a universe where all my clever partitions had totally collapsed.

Kalaj and Allison, my students, the department head, Cherbakoff, who came by on cat’s paws, then Zeinab the waitress, my colleagues, everyone, careerists and lowlifes, were thrown together as in a Fellini movie or a clambake on Cape Cod.

I knew that, with the exception of those in the room who’d had to recobble their lives and reinvent themselves to live in the States, very few would understand that no human being is one thing and one thing only, that each one of us has as many facets as there are people we know. Would it upset Allison to discover that the person I was with Zeinab couldn’t ever be who I was with her, and that this was my unspoken reason for keeping Kalaj away from her—because I showed him far more facets than the one or two I felt laid-back enough to share with her?

I could tell Allison seemed ill at ease. She sat on a chair in a corner, silent and remote, waiting for everyone to leave, not sure whether she should be my student or my girlfriend. Kalaj, who must have originally assumed I’d be alone, leaned against one of the walls with his camouflage jacket, his beret, his gunner’s scowl, and the three porno magazines rolled into the shape of a rain stick picked up on some guerrilla expedition in the Amazonian hinterland. If you didn’t know, you’d think he was a foreigner on some Third World scholarship who’d spent all-nighters working in a soup kitchen.

He had already put one of my students in his place by saying that the Marquis de Sade disgusted him. With another he insisted that all American writers were no better than rock ’n’ roll con artists, including those he hadn’t read and wasn’t likely to start now, ending his after-hours, sotto voce shoot-out-with-silencer by reminding everyone in the room, including the nurse who came to remove my tray, that hospitals, like courthouses—including doctors and lawyers—were put on this planet to beat down your soul till it was flattened into toilet paper—and of souls, ladies and gentlemen, we were each given one only, and it had to be returned, when we were well and done with it, intact and as good as new for the next person. As Nostradamus says— And he began quoting quatrains.

In the space of five minutes, after an initial period during which he had intrigued and charmed all those in the room, he eventually managed to scare everyone away. “Who was that crackpot?” someone asked weeks later.

EVERYTHING I FEARED
since school had started was beginning to happen. From a traveling companion picked up in an oasis during my lonely summer days in Cambridge, Kalaj had become a deadweight that was impossible to shake off. After my release from hospital, there was nowhere to go in Cambridge without running into him. I could not sit with anyone in public without being joined by him or, as was more often the case, without being invited to join him at his table, or, worse yet, constantly having to dream up new excuses to explain why I couldn’t talk to him just yet. In the end, I grew tired of dreading to bump into him or of running out of excuses. I was crammed with emergency excuses and white lies the way people with runny noses stuff their pockets with too many handkerchiefs. I hated myself both for being too weak to fend him off and for worrying about it all the time.

I tried to avoid the bars and coffeehouses where I was likely to bump into him. Once, at the Harvest, I was sitting with two colleagues, and there was Kalaj at the bar, drinking his usual
un dollar vingt-deux.
I’ll never forget his eyes. He had seen me of course, as I had seen him, but he was allowing a glazed look to settle over his eyes, as though distracted by troubling, faraway thoughts—the Free Masonry, his cab, his long-term projects in the U.S., his father, the green card, his wife. Five minutes later, I heard his explosive, detonating, hysterical laugh in response to one of the bartender’s jokes. He was sending me a message. It was impossible to miss.
I don’t need you. See, I can do better.
There was something overly histrionic about his laughter that reminded me of the first time we’d met.
You’re trying to be like these friends of yours,
he seemed to say,
but I know you’ll stiff the tip when no one’s looking.

I’ll never forget that vacant look on his face. He wasn’t pretending he hadn’t seen me. He was pretending he hadn’t seen me pretending not to see him. He was letting me off the hook.

A few days later he was waiting for me outside Boylston Hall. He needed two favors. “I’ll walk with you,” he explained.

His landlady was remodeling the house, and God only knew when she’d be able to let him have his room back. She was therefore
giving him fair notice
.

It didn’t sound very convincing. Had he done something wrong, tried to bring women into his bedroom? I asked. “Me, soil my sheets, when I could dirty a woman’s instead? Never.”

He wanted me to go with him to help find another bed-and-breakfast. But as we knocked at door after door and were already approaching Porter Square, the old, prim ladies on Everett, Mellen, Wendell, Sacramento, and Garfield Streets took one good look at him and had no vacancies. “Can you put me up for a few days?” he finally asked me. The question had never occurred to me and I was totally unprepared for it. I was surprised by my own answer. Of course I could, I said. All he needed, he said, was a sofa to sleep on, a quick shower in the morning, and he’d be out of my way till nighttime. Maybe he’d arrange to sleep at his current girlfriend’s, though he didn’t want to push things with her right now. “I promise I won’t be in your hair.”

I was a good soul, helping a friend in need, opening my place up to someone who’d be on the street otherwise. But as I was telling him that he should make himself at home except in the afternoon and early evenings (Allison), we passed by Sears, Roebuck, which immediately made me think that perhaps it was time to start planning to install a lock on my door in a few weeks.

Midway back from Porter Square, he bought me a warm tuna fish grinder at a Greek sandwich shop. While we were eating, he told me the next news item: because of a minor infraction, they’d revoked his driver’s license for a month. With all my contacts, he began—this was his typical phrase—couldn’t I help him find a job.

I thought for a while. The only jobs I knew anything about were in education.

“I’ve taught before.”

“I mean university education.”

“Teaching is teaching.”

I’d see what I could do. Instead of going to my office, I decided to pay my chairman a brief visit.

“But has he ever taught in an American institution?” Lloyd-Greville asked, when I finally brought up Kalaj’s predicament.

“He barely speaks English—which is exactly what you’ve always said we needed in a French teacher.”

Professor Lloyd-Greville concurred and asked me to speak about the matter to Professor Cherbakoff.

“And he speaks real, live French, the kind students are likely to speak when they land in France next summer,” I explained.

Cherbakoff also concurred.

As it happened, he said, there was a slot open for a part-time French-language instructor. One of the teaching fellows had had to resign owing to a complicated pregnancy that required extended bedrest.

Ten minutes later, I was back at Café Algiers telling Kalaj to go and see Cherbakoff right away.

I could tell he was nervous.

“Kalashnikov meets Cherbakoff,” taunted the Algerian, who’d overheard the conversation. Everyone laughed. Cherbakoff,
Cutitoff
, Cherbakoff,
hadenough
, Cherbakoff,
Jerkhimoff.
Parodies came breezing in from the kitchen area as almost everyone in Café Algiers clapped.

An hour or two later, Kalaj walked into the café bearing a large teacher’s edition of
Parlons!
with accompanying teacher’s manual, exercise book, reader, and lab book.

“Tomorrow at eight o’clock, Lamont 310.”

He looked at me more puzzled than ever. What was Lamont? The name of a building, I explained. He had never heard of it. Corner of Quincy Street and Mass Ave. He knew exactly what I meant. I explained to him that there was a periodical room in Lamont. After teaching, he could read all the French newspapers and periodicals he pleased without having to pay a cent. He liked the idea of reading newspapers and periodicals after teaching.

Where was he going to hold his office hours?

He thought about it.

“Here,” he said. “This way they’ll get a taste of French cafés.”

He said that Cherbakoff had mentioned something about an ID card, but Kalaj figured it would take too much time. He’d simply borrow mine when he needed it. It was useless arguing how this would have complicated matters for the two of us. I let him borrow mine. He said he had to prepare for his class tomorrow morning.

Had they suggested how they wanted him to teach French?

“I told them I already knew,” he replied.

This was not boding well at all. Suddenly I imagined a small village school outside Tunis where a local teacher, brandishing a long stick, walked around a classroom filled with cowering frock-clad boys. When one of them hesitated with the answer,
whack!