Harvard Square: A Novel

by André Aciman

  By the time I was seen by the doctor at the infirmary, the pain had subsided. Probably trapped gas, the doctor said. What had I eaten for dinner? Harvard’s Dining Services, I explained. Figures, he replied.

  This reminded me of the time a few weeks earlier in September when a wasp had stung me in my sleep and the pain was so excruciating that I put on my clothes and rushed myself to the infirmary convinced I was poisoned. They applied a few drops of ammonia where the wasp had stung me, and the pain was instantly gone. I had never seen Harvard Square at four in the morning before. It felt like an abandoned lunar station. Empty but sealed.

  In both cases, as I walked out of the infirmary and felt a fresh morning gust course along the totally deserted Square, I suddenly could see how, bare of people and its usual bustle, this town couldn’t have been more foreign to me than it was at dawn, and that I was living a totally foreign, mistaken life here: this wasn’t my home, these weren’t my streets, my buildings, my people; and the hollow bland-speak spoken by the head nurse and reiterated by the attending night doctor to lift my spirits came in a language that my mother wouldn’t begin to fathom. Curses I understood. But Try to feel better, OK? and other honeyed mièvreries, as Kalaj called them, seemed to isolate me even further. I was already isolated as it was. Get sick and you realize you are a scuttled boat in a maelstrom.

  To think that a few days earlier in the North End of Boston I’d been making fun of Sicily when I’d give anything to be there right now, strolling along the dank, ugly, bracken docks of Syracuse. Harvard wasn’t me, even Café Algiers wasn’t me. Nothing was me here.

  I thought of Kalaj as well: he was more alone than I was: he didn’t have the illusion of an institution behind him—he barely even spoke English. All he had was his camouflage jacket, his sputtering bravado, his zeb, and his rickety man-of-war mottled all over with ridiculous Freemason stickers.

  After the infirmary, I didn’t go back to sleep. I went straight to Cambridge’s only twenty-four-hour deli and ordered a full breakfast, sausages included. I took the day’s newspaper from the counter and read it. Then after Cambridge’s notorious bottomless coffee, instead of going home, I headed to my office at Lowell House. I wanted to see people. But the courtyard was entirely deserted. I was the only one alive at Lowell House. If a student happened to cross me on my way to my study, he’d probably suspect I’d spent the night with someone and was making a discreet exit before daybreak. I liked stepping on the dewy grass. I could live here, I thought. I couldn’t wait to see everyone up. How I liked the beginning of the school year, with its busy ferment of people rushing up and down Mass Ave when the town was abuzz with students winding up for a busy day. I loved Harvard Square in the fall.

  There, I’d said it.

  I did love it.

  The feeling would go away. I knew it. It would peter out the moment I asked myself if it was possible to have a home somewhere and never belong to it.

  I was the first in the dining hall for breakfast that morning. I neared the half-open window to the kitchen area where the cooks were still setting up the food and managed to send a heartfelt greeting to Abdul Majib, the kitchen attendant who wore a white uniform and always recited a beautiful, long-extended morning or evening greeting each time he saw me. It put me in a good mood. Then some students began to arrive. I sat down with two of them. Others were just waking up and stumbling in like sleepwalkers in a rush, their hair still dripping from showers taken minutes earlier. There was talk of heading out by car to see the leaves that weekend, miles and miles of leaves blazing through the landscape like wildfire over New England. Would I like to come? I didn’t care about the leaves. A wealthy producer had arranged for a private screening of Saturday Night Fever in Boston—did I care to join? I didn’t care for disco either, I’d said. It took me a few moments to realize that I was sounding exactly like Kalaj. Had I always been this way or was I learning to ape his hostility about everything whenever I felt uneasy with others. “He hates everything,” someone said about me. “No,” said a girl, who seemed to be coming to my defense, “he just doesn’t like to say he likes things.” I paid her no heed, didn’t even know her name. But I knew she’d read me through and through.

  I excused myself and went back to my study, where I burrowed for hours. Could an American really see through other human beings with such uncanny insight? I had never bothered to ask myself such a question in the past. Obviously, I must have never thought that Americans understood human nature, much less had a human nature—otherwise, why would I be asking the question? Still, I admired her insight and the forthright aplomb with which she had spoken.

  By noon I felt I needed to escape to Café Algiers, my base away from my base at Lowell House. Kalaj was there. I would have been perfectly happy to be by myself: corner table, smoke, read, lift my head up occasionally, order another cup, watch the people come and go. But his presence changed this. I seldom went there at lunchtime and was startled by how different the place looked, especially on a sunny weekday. Even Kalaj’s behavior seemed different at that hour, more relaxed, as though he had dismantled his Kalashnikov and was leisurely oiling and cleaning part after part. He was happy to see me too. Things must have worked out well with Léonie. Yes, they had. He asked me what I was doing that day. I was planning to head back to my office at Lowell House. Then at five I had to go to the Master’s Tea at Lowell House, followed by a cocktail reception at Lowell House. “Je me fou de ton Lowell House, I don’t give a fuck about your Lowell House,” he finally blurted. Lowell House had become my Lowell House. “You and your Lowell House.” He disparaged it and seemed to wince each time I mentioned the word. I learned to avoid speaking of it.

  In fact, Kalaj never asked, and I never explained what Master’s Tea was, but it was a weekly reception that I happened to like because there were always people I enjoyed meeting and chatting with. It was, it occurred to me, the exact opposite of Café Algiers, a touch ceremonial, quite Anglo, yet never stuffy.

  He said he had a few minutes to kill before picking up his girlfriend and the boy; they were going for a picnic at Walden Pond with a Romanian au pair and the boy she babysat. Did I want to join? I thought about it for a while, wondering all along if it wasn’t going to be a bit cold for swimming. But then, it was an intensely sunny day and I had already removed my jacket and was indeed sweating. Kalaj was wearing a T-shirt only. He too had removed his jacket.

  “I’ll come,” I said, “but I have to be back at Lowell House in time for dinner.”

  When I explained that as a tutor I was given free meals at Lowell House he almost fell from his seat. “Free food, for an entire year!” he said, amazed at the munificence of American institutions. “What’s the catch?” There was no catch, I said, just sit and talk with students. I told him that I was hoping to be appointed a resident tutor the coming February, which could mean that the same institution would throw in not just food but two free rooms for what amounted to mere talking. “If they’re willing to give you room and board just for yaking with strangers—and, let’s face it, you and casual chitchat aren’t good together—what would they give me, then? Harvard Square? Boston? The world?”

  We stopped the cab to pick up Léonie and her boy, and a few blocks farther down stopped by a private house on Highland Avenue where Ekaterina, the Romanian au pair, and her five-year-old ward were waiting for us. The women had brought wine, cheeses, lots of food—French country style. The two boys wanted to sit on the old jump seats, but Kalaj said the seats were unsteady and dangerous. On our way, I asked him to stop at one of the supermarkets and, five minutes later, returned with a huge watermelon that made everyone crack up laughing. “And how do you plan to cut this giant gourd? With karate chops?” he asked. I’d thought of everything, I said, and produced a super-cheap Japanese steak knife that I’d seen advertised time and again on television. Everyone was overjoyed.

  Kalaj decided to take the scenic route to Walden Pond. On the way, we couldn’t agree which song to sing to
gether because no one knew the songs the other wanted to sing. The only songs we all knew, including Ekaterina who had learned them from her parents in Romania, were French songs from our parents’ generation. So we started with these, and in the Checker cab headed to Walden Pond, here we all were, like two couples with their children headed for a Sunday picnic in July somewhere in the French countryside, singing Aznavour, Brel, and Bécaud songs, which the younger ones mimicked, just as all four of us had mimicked them in our childhood. Everything seemed right with us. It was a Monday, not a Sunday, and it was October, not July, and this was Massachusetts, not Provence. Details!

  No one knew what Walden Pond was famous for. I didn’t want to break the spell by playing Mister Learned Professor. But I couldn’t resist telling everyone there used to be a time when investors would harvest the iced water of Walden Pond and ship it to India.

  “You mean to the Indians of Arizona.”

  “No, to Indians of the Ganges.”

  Kalaj was totally nonplussed. “But that would be like selling sand to the Arabs,” he added, “or ice to Eskimos, or cloth to your people.” We all burst out laughing.

  When we arrived, we parked the cab in a sodden, narrow alleyway in between a row of trees. We got out, took off our shoes, rolled up our pants. Not a soul in sight. The pond was entirely ours. “So what does one do here?” Kalaj finally asked, already feeling awkward.

  “You swim. You picnic. You relax.”

  Kalaj refused to swim. Too cold, he said. Plus he didn’t want to change. Then he looked around and said, “Tall cypresses and bathing water. They don’t mix for me.” He began describing Sidi Bou Saïd, just south of Pantelleria. Now there was a heavenly spot! “One day, we’ll all have to go there, you, me, the children. And all our friends.”

  On second thought, it was peaceful here. The air felt clean, he said, and there were no people, and he liked walking along the shore on bare feet. And yet, as though catching himself, Tout ça ne me dit absolument rien, all this means absolutely nothing to me, he added once he spotted row upon row of thick, drooping tuft fringing the water, every clump of trees already looking glum, autumnal, and bereaved. This was no beach.

  He played with the children. Then he said he’d take care of cutting the watermelon. It took him back to his catering days. “Is the water cold?” he asked.

  “No, you can swim in your undies if you want,” said his girlfriend.

  “And what do I wear afterward?”

  “You’ll find something. You’ll wear your trousers only. Or swim naked.”

  “He’s really a prude, didn’t you know,” said Léonie.

  The babysitter Ekaterina took out a large tablecloth and laid it out on the grass and asked Léonie to watch her boy. She had, it took me a moment to realize, the awkward, boyish walk of dancers, a sort of flaunted waddle that was not unattractive to look at. Then she leaned down with her back completely straight, spread her thighs on bended knees, and began to undress. To my surprise, underneath her shirt, her bra, and blue jeans she wore no bathing suit at all. She was getting naked. “I’m going for a swim. Coming?” I said yes before realizing that what she meant was completely naked. I liked the way she waddled into the water, noticing for the first time that with her dancer’s walk came the perfect legs of a dancer. I took off everything and jumped in after her, not realizing that the water was freezing. “This is the most wonderful place in the world,” she said as we treaded water away from the others, “even if it’s totally American.”

  “You’re starting to sound like him,” I said.

  “Jumbo-ersatz, jumbo-ersatz,” she began to mimic, pointing her wet index finger at me in an imitation machine gun, rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat. We laughed out loud: “The water is ersatz, the plants are ersatz, even the fish are ersatz—there are no fish. I hate fish.” We both took turns imitating his rants when he harangued the human race and damned every man, woman, species, child, fish, tree, vegetable, mineral, rat-tat-tat. To imitate her final round of bullets she splashed me in the face, once, twice, three times.

  We swam farther out where the water felt yet more chilly. Then we swam underwater, came up to breathe, then back under again. I hadn’t swum naked in years. Eventually, we saw people on one of the shores and decided to swim back. “Turn around, everyone,” she said as we came rushing out of the water. “You too, iepuraşul meu, my bunny,” she said to the five-year-old who couldn’t help staring, as I couldn’t help staring at her legs, wondering all along whether God had made her thighs or whether they were the product of some strict Eastern European ballet school regimen. “And don’t stare,” she said. Even her cagey bantering felt familiar, warm, intimate, as though something of hers had touched my hand and then held it and didn’t mean to let go. I wondered if this was because we were all speaking in French or just simply because Kalaj, as usual and without knowing it, had been stoking everyone’s libido and we were all playing by his rules, where contact among humans was easy, natural, untrammeled, and necessary. Or maybe, in the end, we were all four of us truly happy to be together and no longer felt like stranded members of a disbanded company who’d given up on themselves in a Lotusland called Cambridge. The pond wasn’t exactly ours to claim, but it let us play there, the way an empty tennis court can be yours for a day when the owners are out of town. Mild-mannered poachers trying to catch a few hours in the sun, not rogues or squatters. We were borrowing America, not settling in. The diffidence and haste with which we kept throwing the watermelon rinds in plastic bags so as not to attract bees or litter the grounds told everyone we were determined to keep a low profile. I said nothing, but I realized I was the only one among them who had a green card. Léonie plopped herself right next to Kalaj, and they embraced.

  Later, during the picnic, when Ekaterina produced some Cheerios for the children, Kalaj, who had never seen the likes of Cheerios in his life, asked to taste one. Before he had put it in his mouth, she silently mouthed the words jumbo-ersatz, jumbo-ersatz, meaning: You watch, he’ll start. The square container was immense, the food was totally artificial, nature never spawned these flavors—Kalaj was starting to load his Kalashnikov. When Ekaterina took out a Ziploc bag with five large, juicy nectarines, he exploded. “You should never buy nectarines. Nectarines are totally ersatz . . .”

  “Like mules,” she said.

  “Yes, exactly,” he said, missing the joke at his expense. “Sesame Street is all ersatz too. It teaches people to be ersatz. Just listen to the voices of each character. Not one has a human voice.”

  “But children like it, and children like nectarines, and I like nectarines. Do you want one?” she asked.

  “Yes, I do,” he conceded.

  Her two little packs of Twinkies produced the same outraged response. Abject scorn followed by stoic acquiescence. “So, let’s see what this Twinkie thing is,” he finally said.

  Then he got up and took a short stroll along the shore, dipping his toes in the water again, staring at the tops of the trees in the distance. He was enjoying Walden Pond, even America.

  And right then and there I finally understood Kalaj. Behind his wholesale indictment of America, he was desperately struggling not to give in in case America decided not to yield to him first. The lawyer had mentioned the word deportation, and both of us had winced. Kalaj preferred to turn his back first, in the hope that America might ask him to look more favorably on her and give her a second chance. He was, without knowing it, doing what he’d always done: flirting . . . but this time with a superpower. America, as far as he was concerned, had not really put a penny on the table, and he was getting tired of staying in the game. America was busy stacking up its chips, while he—anyone could tell—was obviously bluffing.

  Perhaps, also, by degrading America and nicknaming amerloque everything that was wrong with the world, he was forging for himself an imaginary Mediterranean identity, a Mediterranean paradise lost, something that may never have existed but that he needed to believe was out there in some imaginary ot
her shore because otherwise he’d have nothing and nowhere to turn to in case America turned its back on him.

  When it was time to fold everything back into the car and throw the garbage out in the appropriate bins, we looked at each other and realized that we had all taken more sun than we had hoped. It gave us a sort of heady good cheer, as if we’d finally caught up with a summer that had slipped us by.

  Before entering the car, Kalaj asked everyone to clear their feet of any sand or mud, especially you there in the back, meaning me. Then he said he needed to piss. “So, pee,” said Léonie, who was already sitting in the seat next to his. He looked about him uneasily, slightly at a loss, then headed back to the shore, and, with his back to us, as he stared into the quiet expanse of water, started to pee. He took his time, but the idea of someone pissing so irreverently into Thoreau’s hallowed pond seemed too comical not to be put into its historical context. So when he returned to the car I explained to them the importance of Walden Pond in American literature. They all listened, attentively. “And I who simply needed to go,” he finally said after mulling the matter a while and bursting out in loud guffaws, as we all joined in, the children included, all of us breaking into song as we rode back to Cambridge, swearing we should do this again in a few days.

  I was the first they dropped by car, just in time to take a very quick shower and head to Lowell House on foot. All through cocktails, though, I had one thought in mind: I wanted the day to start all over again. Just as I wanted it never to end. If I did not know in whose camp I belonged—with Lowell House or with Kalaj—what I did not mind was oscillating between the two, with one foot in each, because I belonged to both, and therefore to neither—like having a home without belonging to it. Like staring out the window of my twenty-four-hour deli early in the morning after spending the night at the infirmary and feeling a rush of love, loathing, and bile.