Harvard Square (30 page)
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.
AFTER MY SON AND I LEFT THE OFFICE OF ADMISSIONS
, I suggested we walk to my old house on Concord Avenue before returning to the Square
.
It was a short distance from the patio and was going to be the last place I’d revisit with him. I’d saved it for last.
The front door to the building was locked as usual. But someone was just coming out and let us in with a quick nod-hello. The mailboxes had not changed, the smell of the lobby had not changed, the buzzer was still the same, and there was still no elevator. Nothing had changed.
I looked at the list of names on the buzzer: the couple in Apartment 43 had disappeared, Linda’s was gone too, and mine—as if this should have surprised me—had disappeared as well. Someone else was being me at Number 45. I pointed out the names to my son as if still looking for a trace of myself here. He must have thought I was losing my mind.
I felt as awkward as an organ donor who comes back to see, just to see, whether that organ that was once his still ticks the way he remembered in someone else’s body. But I could have rung the buzzer and I could have gone upstairs, and maybe later I’d explain to the police when they handcuffed me and took me to the precinct station for trespassing that I’d come back to take a look, Officers, just to take a look. But I wasn’t even really up for taking a look. Whatever I’d come looking for I’d either found or didn’t really care to find, or time had simply squandered the whole thing and I was just not willing to face that I’d grown numb to it.
The same had happened at Café Algiers the day before. I’d stopped first outside the Harvest and noticed without going in that it had altogether changed. The horseshoe bar where I’d had my last drink by myself thinking of him had been dismantled. The spot where he’d stood that night when I pretended not to see him, and he knew, just knew, had also disappeared. Instead, I opened the door and asked the maître d’ to let me take a copy of that day’s menu.
“Voilà,”
he said.
“What are you going to do with it?” asked my son, who all along had been humoring our amble down memory lane.
I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. Leave it in our hotel room most likely. Or toss it somewhere. But I didn’t let go of it. The menu sits framed against my wall today.
We walked back to Café Algiers and stood outside as we’d done the day before, staring at the menu’s familiar green and white logo.
“Are you going to ask for their menu here as well?” he asked.
But here I caught myself hesitating just as I’d hesitated the day before. Perhaps I shouldn’t go in at all. Better than recognizing things I hadn’t thought of in years or remembering those I hadn’t entirely forgotten, I wanted to imagine them, keep stepping back till I saw what was inside me, not what was out there. As if in order to experience this thing called the past, I needed distance, temperance, tact, an inflection of sloth and humor even—because memory, like revenge, is best served chilled.
Ersatz stuff, Kalaj would have said.
Suddenly, I wanted to imagine him still sitting there, as always happy to see me, still rolling his cigarettes, still lambasting the world for being the dirty, grimy, insipid, shallow cesspool it was. He’d have just about finished reading yesterday’s paper, and he and the Algerian would have sparred a tiny bit already, just enough to get their day started. I’d be on my way to the library or to meet students and had scarcely time for a
cinquante-quatre
. Now a
cinquante-quatre
would probably cost six times as much, more perhaps. I imagined the corner table where I used to like to sit and where I’d once promised myself to finish reading the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, which after all these years, I still hadn’t finished.
They were good times. But I wouldn’t want to relive them. Nor did I want to step inside Café Algiers. I wanted to imagine that his portrait now hung framed right next to the image of a deserted beach in Tipaza. I could just imagine him scoffing at both, with a rhyme:
Kalaj à la plage
, Kalaj at the beach. What idiots, he’d have said. Then he’d pick up his things, which were always scattered on his table, and say he’d drive me to my class,
Let’s go!
How much time do you have? Fifteen minutes, I’d say. Good, we’ll do a tour by car and talk a bit, I need your advice on something.
That’s when I wished his old cab would suddenly emerge on Brattle Street. My son and I would hail it, tell the new cabbie that we needed to be driven back to the Office of Admissions, and could he please step on it.
“And take Memorial Drive, would you?” I’d say.
“But that’s ridiculous,” the cabbie would object, “we’re just three blocks away.”
“Yes, I know.”
My son and I would probably be stifling laughter at this point. And I’d be relishing the prospect of returning late to a nearly empty Office of Admissions, winking at my son and saying to the admissions officer, “Very sorry, most very sorry, we’ve missed the boat to Byzantium, haven’t we?”
No sooner would we have gotten into the cab than I’d be reminded of that summer’s oppressive heat. I’d be back to the books I read each day while drinking Tom Collins up on my roof terrace on Concord Avenue, and to those summer days so hot and so scented with suntan lotion that you’d think you were somewhere on the Mediterranean coastline, not far from Sidi Bou Saïd, south of Pantelleria, which I had still never been to, much less thought of after he’d left Cambridge. I’d be back to the French songs we sang in the car on our way to Walden Pond, or of that French song by an Alexandrian Jew about two friends ending up together after so many detours, and of the way Kalaj, who always talked so much, sat and listened to me when he came to pick me up one night because I needed to run away. I’ll never forget the way his car, like a spy boat entering enemy waters to help a prisoner escape, had edged its slow, silent way from Putnam Avenue and then, with its engine still running, had turned its lights on and off twice, just as in spy movies. I’d ask the cabdriver where he’d purchased this car, who from, and when. And as I’d have him distracted, in the backseat I’d ask my son to look for a Freemason sticker somewhere. Kalaj had ended up with so many round stickers after visiting the Masonic Lodge that, not knowing what to do with the last two, he finally stuck them in the least likely spots—right below the armrests under each ashtray, in case you were a smoker and still hadn’t gotten the point! Had there been such a sticker, I would have unpeeled it without the driver’s noticing, and held it. That sticker would have been his time-delayed message to me—
Thank God you found me. I’m well. I have two daughters. I have good memories. I love you.