Harvard Square

by André Aciman

  “Because that’s how she is,” he said. “Because she is selfish. Because of her gums.”

  I looked at him with a puzzled look.

  He pulled down his nether lip and exposed his gums. “Because I hate my wife! Because she wants a divorce. My God, you are really thick sometimes.”

  His lawyer had just informed him that, given their probable divorce, Immigration Services was still not sure they would go ahead with the interview but that he should prepare for it nonetheless.

  He started rolling a cigarette. It was his way to avoid staring me in the face. Then looking up, “I need to find a new lawyer,” he said. Did I know of a lawyer? No, I did not. “With all your Harvard contacts you don’t know a lawyer? This school manufactures the best lawyers in the world and you want me to believe you can’t come up with a single one?

  “Not one,” I replied.

  “You’re definitely the wrong kind of Jew. And I’m definitely the wrong kind of Arab.”

  I laughed. He laughed.

  “So,” I added, taking out the pieces of paper he had given me, “let’s go over some of the questions again.” He ordered coffee, sat back, and began smoking.

  “Have you ever had anal sex with your wife?” I started.

  He was such a good-natured soul that this alone brought a smile to his face. “That’s the kind of thing they might ask,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “How should I know?”

  Then I asked again: “Well, have you had anal sex with your wife?”

  “I don’t think we have.”

  “Yes or no?” I said sternly, mimicking an official of the federal government.

  “Yes.”

  And together that evening we went back and forth with questions and answers. I learned more about his life on that day than anything I’d heard him say out loud when he wished others to overhear. He started life as a deserter. Why? Because two sailors had attacked him on the navy ship. He had just turned seventeen, not a speck of hair on his face, and was too shy to fight them off or tell anyone what they had done. From then on, the mere sight of blood, his own or anyone else’s, filled him with dread and shame, and then rage. In Marseilles he had met a very kind doctor who was also a Tunisian and who had helped him find a job in a bakery, then in a restaurant. When one of the chefs slit his own finger by accident, Kalaj had yelled at him for being careless and was summarily fired. Even now when he shaves, he hates to see blood. Where does he shave? In front of the mirror, where else? Does his wife shave her legs? No idea what she does with her legs. Her underarms? Her pussy? What does she keep in her medicine cabinet? Never looked. “You need to know,” I said. He tried to remember. Aspirin. What else. She jogged and used a muscle pain relieving cream that stinks of camphor and burns your skin so much when you touch her that your zeb is ready to wilt. In Marseilles, he went on, he enrolled in a school to obtain his baccalaureate, but he needed to work and eventually stopped going to school. He never got his bac. Then he moved to Paris where he worked in another bakery, always bakeries, and then a restaurant, then another, and another, until he got tired of working for others. He befriended Tunisian Jews in Paris who needed someone to cook Tunisian meals for them . . . but kosher. How did he know about kosher meals? He knew. Yes, but how? He just knew, oké? Suddenly he burst out laughing. Why was he laughing now? “Because you asked if my wife and I had anal sex.”

  Was I sure I didn’t know any lawyers?

  I nodded apologetically.

  “What kind of a Jew!”

  He was right to be nonplussed. I’d been at Harvard for four years and didn’t know a soul in the professional world. I didn’t even have a doctor outside of the one I saw at the Harvard infirmary each time I thought I was dying of gonorrhea and needed to be told that I wasn’t. As for a dentist, not one either. Psychiatrists, not a clue.

  “Psychiatrists I can find with my eyes closed.” Every woman he’d known in Cambridge was seeing one at least once a week.

  “You’re of no help,” he said. Then, changing topics, he asked: “And how is your work?”

  “My work?” I looked at him, smiled, and said, “Better not ask. Let’s just say that by next year I will probably not even be here.” I already caught myself missing Café Algiers.

  “L’enfer for you as well, then.”

  “L’enfer.”

  This was the first time that I finally understood how terrible my parents’ lives must have been in their final year in Egypt. Waiting to be expelled, hoping they might not be. Waiting for their assets to be seized, waiting for someone to ring their door with terrible news, waiting to be arrested on some trumped-up charge, waiting, waiting.

  A FEW DAYS later I arrived a bit late in the evening at Café Algiers after attending a lecture and a dinner. I had had a bit to drink and was in no shape to study. I wanted company. He was there, looking more glum than ever, sitting by himself, smoking, not even reading yesterday’s paper. Peeking at the bill under his saucer, I could see that he had already drunk four cinquante-quatres. He was fidgety, fussy, ill-tempered, a gathering storm desperately searching for a lightning rod or else it might unleash its fury on the ten to fifteen earthlings minding their own business at Café Algiers. Tonight, he explained, he was driving on the night shift again.

  I’d hate to be a driver on the same road, I thought.

  Then he started sulking.

  We drank our respective coffees in silence. Everyone, it occurred to me, was meant to notice he was brooding. Zeinab was the first. On his way out, even Moumou came and put a hand on his shoulder and asked, “Ça ne va pas?” The answer was curt: “Non, ça ne va pas.” Zeinab brought him a soup. On the house, she said. It was a Tunisian recipe he’d surely recognize. He wasn’t hungry. “I brought it and you’ll say no?”

  He took a spoonful, slurped it, said he liked it very much. It was a good soup—really. But he wasn’t hungry.

  When she went back to the kitchen, he looked at me, put on a wry smile, and said: “What Tunisian specialty? It’s an ordinary chicken soup.”

  A second later he put his jacket on. “Come, I’ll drive you home.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  We walked out in total silence. When we reached Ash Street, there it was, his glinting off-yellow Titan among cars. He might as well have been introducing me to the love of his life.

  “Everything I own I’ve put into this monster. Life savings that started the day I snuck into Marseilles to the moment I arrived in Paris, then to every menial job I held in Paris and Milan. Here, knock on this hood,” he said, clearly proud of the car. “Don’t pat it, knock with your knuckles—real steel, can you hear it? Dong, dong, dong. Like cathedral bells. Now knock on this car,” he said, as he walked over to the first car parked right next to his. Seeing I hesitated to play along, he grabbed my hand and forced me to pound my knuckles on the hood of a green Toyota. “Hear the ersatz dead thud? Hear the hollow rustle of crumpled aluminum foil? Hear?” Yes, I heard, I said. “Well, I’m like my car. I’ll outlive every one of these spit-glue men and women whose imagination is as limp as a used condom.”

  We got into the car. It was my first time. The car was spotless and I liked its smell, the smell of old leather and old steel. When, two minutes later, we reached my building, I began to feel sorry for him but didn’t know what to say or how to help. I was too shy to ask him to open up and tell me about this cloud that had cast such a gloomy shadow over him. Instead I suggested something so flatfooted that I’m surprised it did not irritate him even more than he was already. I told him to head home and sleep the whole thing off, as if sleep could free a castaway from his island. No, he needed to work, he replied. Besides, he was looking forward to driving at night. He loved cruising Boston by night. He loved jazz, old jazz, Gene Ammons—especially played en sourdine, with the volume really low—as the tenor sax invariably blocked all bad feelings and made him think of romance and of sultry summer nights where a woman dances cheek to cheek with you to
the saxophone’s prolonged lyrical strains that made you want love even after you’d stopped trusting love exists on this planet. He loved the music on Memorial Drive and on Storrow Drive as he cruised those large damp thoroughfares watching the tiny lights flicker off Beacon Hill and Back Bay and all along the Esplanade. “I feel American when I drive at night, as in those films noirs where all they do is smoke and drive with their Stetson brim tilted down to eye level.” Once, when a fare asked him to change the music, Kalaj ignored him. When the man repeated his request, Kalaj slammed on the brakes right in the middle of Roxbury and told the pure white gentleman to get out of his cab.

  At another time when a black man told him to turn off the Om Kalsoum tape he’d been playing en sourdine, Kalaj once again screeched on the brakes, and when the man refused to step out of the car and indeed threatened to fight it out, Kalaj simply turned around and shouted, “My ancestors sold yours into slavery—now get out before I do the same to you.”

  Kalaj, who never once said anything against Jews, had told a Jewish passenger, who’d heard him listening to Arabic music and refused to tip him because he was an Arab, that it was a great pity they hadn’t shipped his grandmother and his baby father straight into the gas chambers, because, given the chance, he would have loved to light the ovens himself.

  He knew where to hurt.

  He must have known exactly where I’d hurt. He never touched that spot.

  I MET KALAJ over coffee almost every evening after that, sometimes by pure chance, sometimes because we both happened to be at Café Algiers at the same time, sometimes because neither of us knew what to do when the Indian summer evenings wore on long after we’d worked ourselves to exhaustion. I would read all day, pretend I was elsewhere, and find all manner of ways to avoid worrying that the new academic year was just round the corner. I didn’t want to think of the academic year with all of its attendant duties and obligations: teaching, tutorials, committee of this and that, responsibilities at Lowell House, students to meet and interview, departmental parties and get-togethers—to say nothing of my second attempt at passing comprehensives in mid-January and, if I succeeded, my orals following immediately after. Lloyd-Greville had told all first-year graduate students to read every book in the English Literature library. Was he serious, I had asked a fourth-year graduate student. He never jokes, he replied. The joke was on me. I knew I was allowing Kalaj to distract me from my work; I knew there’d be a price to pay soon enough; perhaps I even wanted to pay that price. But the thought of losing Harvard would wake me up at night and stir up a massive state of panic. There was no sleeping after that. One night, I woke up with such an overwhelming feeling of dread that all I wished to do was write a poem to a woman I had loved years earlier and had completely lost track of. On another night I started writing what I was sure was going to bring me a substantial income: a pornographic tale about two rogue nuns in a convent. Usually, though, all I did was warm up some milk and try to imagine that someone close by had warmed it for me before heading back to bed. I’d eventually fall asleep on my couch. Sometimes watching dawn from my bedroom window overlooking so many rooftops made me think of the beach, and thinking of the beach brought peace in my heart. If you refused to look out to check the window, the illusion of a resort town lingered, and that was good.

  Lloyd-Greville had had Mary-Lou call me to make an appointment. He wanted to discuss Chaucer with me. “Which tale?” I asked her. “All Chaucer,” she replied, as though I’d yet once more forgotten what kind of institution Harvard was. The appointment was set for mid-September, following Lloyd-Greville’s return from Russia. He taught Russian literature to Russians. He was—I should have known—fluent in Russian as well.

  I knew that spending time at Café Algiers was not helping my reading regimen, but Café Algiers helped stave off the many phantoms that seemed to haunt me even during my waking hours. It also occurred to me that, despite having a few friends in Cambridge, I had never been so close or on such intimate terms with anyone else in my life as I was with Kalaj, and I didn’t want to lose this. We had a little world all our own here, a house-of-cards world with its house-of-cards cafés and house-of-cards rituals held together by our house-of-cards France. We called Café Algiers Chez Nous, because it was so obviously made for the likes of us—part North African, part faux-French, part dreamplace for the displaced, and always part-something-from-somewhere-else for those who were neither quite here nor altogether elsewhere. At Café Algiers we always ordered a cinquante-quatre and later a glass of wine with chili at Anyochka’s, which he liked to call la soupe populaire, the soup kitchen. Wine, all wines, he nicknamed un dollar vingt-deux: his girlfriend, when she soon became his girlfriend, mon pléonasme; and Linda from my building, whose name he refused to remember, la quarante-deux. His other recent conquest never got a name: she remained Miss Bathroom Problems. Césarion’s, we both agreed, was le petit trou, the little hole, and the Harvest, pronounced Arvèst, with the accent on the last syllable, became Maxim’s, or sometimes, le grand trou. Casablanca, for some reason, never got baptized and remained Casablanca. Our daily walks usually took us from Maxim’s to la soupe populaire, with an occasional stop back Chez Nous. Chez Nous was where we read, played backgammon, made friends, and on certain evenings would sit around and listen to Sabatini. From time to time, the guitarist would bring his star pupil along who’d know to play the Andante spianato, because Kalaj always begged to hear it. On Sundays evenings, once the school year got under way, we’d always manage to catch an art film at the Harvard Epworth Church, for a dollar each. He called it going to Mass.

  He renamed everything around him to snub the world and show there were other ways of seeing and calling things and that everything had to go through baptismal fire to be cleansed of all cant and pieties before he’d let them into his world. It was his way of reinventing the world in his own image, or in the image of what he wanted the world to be—his way of taking this cold, inhospitable, ersatz, shallow town and bringing it down a few notches to see it turn into a kinder, more intimate, more complicit, sunnier place that would open up a secret passageway for him and ultimately yield to him with a smile—if only, like Ali Baba, he could find the right nickname for it in this French language of his own invention. He defaced the world by applying improvised monikers, leaving his fingerprint on everything he touched in the hope that the world might one day seek the hand that had left such deep scuff marks at its door and pull him in saying, “You’ve knocked long enough. Come in, you belong here.”

  In that huddled, provisional world of his he crammed and made room for everyone at Café Algiers, but to one person he gave the best and the airiest room. And that person was me. He needed an accomplice who was also a blood brother.

  What he did not see is that the more he opened other worlds and kept challenging and pushing Cambridge further away from me to show there were other ways of living and doing things, the more desperately I clung to the small privileges and to the tentative promises Harvard held out for me.

  3

  EARLY ONE AFTERNOON, WHEN I WALKED INTO CAFÉ Algiers with my books and was not expecting to run into him so early, I saw Kalaj sitting with two women. “How wonderful to see you,” he shouted, and right away embraced me. We’d never embraced before. “I’ve been waiting forever.” There was something too garrulous and flamboyant in his greeting. He was up to something. “This is the friend from Harvard I told you about.” I suddenly had a suspicion that he was drawing on my Harvard credentials to boost his own standing and show he had contacts outside of his immediate circle of Maghrebine cabbies and waiters. If he’d only known how thoroughly threadbare my connection to Harvard felt at the time, especially with the threat of catastrophe in mid-January hanging on my mornings like the rancid aftertaste of an undigested meal gulped down with cheap wine the night before.

  But this wasn’t what was going on at all. He was using me as a conversation piece. I didn’t mind. Or, perhaps, I wasn’t a conversation piece at all. He
was basically asking me to help. And help under those circumstances could mean one thing only: relieving him of one of the two women. The question was which of the two.

  As the girls were speaking to one another, he gestured exactly what I suspected: Get them away from each other! But he added something else: Which of the two do you want? Since I was doing him a favor, it didn’t matter—I wasn’t interested in either. Besides, going along with the ploy by pretending to make advances to one of the girls to help his cause with the other seemed a touch too underhanded for my taste. My apparent reluctance to fall in with his plan baffled him. His eyes jumped at me with incomprehension. Not do anything? What an insult to them. And frankly, to him as well. I had to choose. Even they expected it.

  I picked the one sitting next to me.

  She was a Persian girl who had read all of Dante in Italian, then in Spanish, then in Farsi. The other was a curly-haired blonde called Sheila who was, I should have guessed, a physical therapist.

  It turned out that Sheila didn’t interest him. Ironically, Miss Bathroom Problems did. She had disappeared following their first night and it was she, not he, who was being difficult now. I should have seen this coming. He wasn’t very worried, though. Cambridge was smaller than Paris. They were bound to bump into each other again. Hadn’t he taken her phone number? He’d lost it. Didn’t he know where she lived? No. Too dark, too drunk that night, hadn’t paid attention. As for Pléonasme from la soupe populaire—who did indeed turn up on the third day and proved to be, as he’d guessed, French from a Jewish-Moroccan family—he had ended up sleeping with her in his room when his landlady, dubbed Mrs. Arlington of Arlington Street, was already asleep. In no time—three days!—he’d fallen in love with Austin, the boy she took care of as a live-in babysitter. He’d break his day in two to drive her to his school to pick him up at 2:00 p.m., and together they’d drive to Faneuil Hall, park the car, and buy three ice creams. It was all a big secret, as the boy was not supposed to tell his parents that his babysitter’s boyfriend was a cabdriver who would pick them up every day and roam around Faneuil Hall until he found a parking space. He continued to pick up the boy, on his own sometimes, long after discovering that his babysitter was two-timing him with the boy’s father behind the wife’s back.