Harvard Square (29 page)

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.