by André Aciman
“They were in my cab. Together. Neeking.”
Ekaterina exclaimed What!
“Well, she’s a woman, so I slapped her a bit. But he’s a man. So I punched him in the face.”
Kalaj didn’t have a scratch on him.
“Where are they now?”
“They ran away, both of them.”
I looked at him.
“Let me call her and make sure she’s all right,” said Ekaterina.
“Don’t you dare.”
Ekaterina quickly picked up the receiver and called her friend.
There was no answer.
“I know what she’s doing.”
“What?” I asked.
“I already told you. They’re neeking.”
“You should never hit anyone.”
“Pummel her, that’s what I should have done.”
He picked up his fatigue jacket and turned to Ekaterina and said he was driving her home.
“I’m staying,” she said, “or I’ll walk. I don’t know, I’ll see. You go home.”
With that he uttered his usual “Bonne soirée” and was abruptly gone.
All three of us sat on the same sofa dazed and immobilized. As I awoke to the reality of the night’s events, I made my mind up never to have anything to do with Kalaj again. Enough was enough. “That’s the end of that friendship,” I said. “And I’m never speaking to him again,” Ekaterina said.
But none of us budged from our spot on the sofa. Perhaps we needed to seem more dazed than we really were. Perhaps we wished to stay dazed, for all three of us had a good inkling of where things were headed tonight, though neither would do anything to bring them about or interfere if they happened. I turned off all the lights and in the dark brought out the big bottle of vodka and poured a generous amount for each in three plastic glasses. This, whatever spell we were under, needed booze. I knew I’d start with Linda’s shoulder. I wanted Ekaterina to kiss her other shoulder.
IN THE MORNING, my buzzer rang.
It was Léonie. When she appeared on the landing of my floor, I couldn’t believe my eyes. She had a big bruise on her cheekbone and red blotches all over her face. “And that’s nothing,” she said, once she realized how shocked I was. “Feel my head.” She grabbed my hand and let me feel under her hair. Her scalp was full of lumps and bumps.
“And he pulled out my hair. And tore my clothes too.”
She had no one to turn to except me, she said. Her employer, Austin’s mother, wanted to report the incident to the police. But Léonie said she needed to see me first. Why? I asked. Because it was complicated, she said.
She sat down in my kitchenette area while I started to boil some water for tea.
First of all, was she in pain? I asked. And Count, how was he?
“He too wants to report it to the police. Kalaj broke two of his teeth, and to top everything Count is furious with me. He says I should have told him I was with Kalaj. I told him we were over quite a while ago.”
“I didn’t know. You seemed so lovey-dovey at Walden Pond.”
“By then it was long over. We were just friends.”
I was surprised.
“So what are you going to do now?” I asked, like a lawyer opening a file with a new client. All I needed was to take out a yellow legal pad, intersperse my questions with a few nods, and light a giant meerschaum pipe.
“If you report him and file a complaint,” I finally said, “they’ll deport him. Even a restraining order will get him deported.”
I didn’t know a thing about the legalities of what I was saying, but what I said seemed to make sense.
“I know,” she said, “but what do you want me to do? He’s crazy. He’ll kill me. I don’t want him near me. I was so scared last night that I ended up calling my mother in France. I was almost ready to go back, but I love Austin and Austin loves me, and I love the family also.”
“Perhaps too much,” I threw in.
“So he’s told you about that too—of course!”
“Yes. It upset him a lot.”
“Everything upsets him a lot.”
“So what do you want to do?” I asked, nodding, meaning: Let’s get down to brass tacks.
“If Austin’s mother reports him to the police, Kalaj will let her know that I’ve slept with her husband. I know he’ll tell her, I know him. If I file a report, he’ll still tell the wife. If Count goes to the police, he’ll right away tell Austin’s mother. If they could deport him this afternoon without giving him a chance to call anyone, I would do it. He is the worst mistake of my life, and I’ve made huge ones before, which is why I came to the States. Better yet, if he could disappear somewhere in the Midwest I’d be perfectly happy, because then I won’t even have it on my conscience that he was deported because of me.”
I had every sympathy for Léonie. But, without knowing why, I wanted to prevent Kalaj’s deportation.
The best thing I could do was, first, to persuade her not to file a complaint and, second, to make sure they made up, or at least had a talk—in my presence if they wished. I’d seen it done in movies. People airing their differences, their grievances. “Very ersatz,” I finally said.
She laughed. Then, seeing herself laugh, she began to cry. It was the first time she was crying about this, she said. She’d held up well enough until now. No one had ever beaten her before, not even raised their hand against her. And now this fellow, this convict wanted to lord it over her? Who did he think he was?
The big question was how to prevent Count from going to the police. “He’s vindictive. You saw how he argued with Kalaj last night. Plus he probably feels mortified for getting beaten up without putting up a fight, not even to protect me. He doesn’t want to see me again.”
The first thing I did after she was gone was to call Claude. Claude was aware of what happened to his friend, whom he refused to call Count, as we all did to make fun of him. “Piero knows some very powerful people in Italy. They could cause Kalaj serious problems. He could also make things difficult for you for hosting the brawl and for me as well for bringing him to it.”
“Plus Count has two broken teeth,” I said.
“Plus Piero has two broken teeth,” he corrected.
We had to come up with a plan.
I told Claude not to do anything. I would rush over to his house and together we’d work out some sort of plan to discourage Count from filing with the police.
When I arrived at Claude’s house, nearby, he’d already had a conversation with Count.
“But I thought you were going to wait for me?”
“Well, I had an idea and I called him right away.”
“Were you afraid I might insist on talking to him first—is that what it is? Now you’ve just made things ten times worse,” I told Claude.
“How could I have made things worse if Piero says he won’t file anything with the police.”
“Count won’t?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“No, Piero considers Kalaj a wretched marocchino who’ll soon enough get himself deported one way or another. Besides, this is his last year in Law School and he wants to put last night completely behind him. He’s already made an appointment with a famous dentist in New York and is flying there this afternoon to be seen on Sunday. Then he comes back and wants nothing to do with your friends, or my friends, which means you, of course, and that poor woman.”
“Count gets new teeth and she goes back to babysitting. Count was right about women seldom getting a second chance,” I said, trying to underscore the irony of the situation.
“Your problem is you lost someone who could have been an important friend to you.”
Claude, a social climber? I’d never seen that side of him before.
I WAS SO happy to hear that Count was not going to go to the police that I immediately called Léonie and told her the news. She was not happy to hear that Count had buckled, but she was relieved. Things would get back to what they’d been before Kalaj. This, I felt, was perha
ps the story of his life. No matter how long you knew him, and how he disrupted the world of those around him, eventually he’d be out of your life and things would go back to being what they’d been before him. Despite his dogged efforts to recast the world in his own image, he made no impact, changed nothing, left no mark. In fact, he’d already walked out of history and the family of man long before he or any of us knew it. He reminded me of a mythological beast that the earth sprouts forth on some demented whim and that wreaks great harm on earthlings, ravages the countryside, and then, without explanation, is suddenly swallowed back up by earth. The dead are forgotten, the wounds heal, people move on.
Eventually I did arrange for Kalaj and Léonie to meet. Perhaps they should not have met, for both managed to unearth a demon neither probably suspected they had in them. When they met in public a few days later, things seemed to go very well. Kalaj took Austin under his wing again and was kinder than any father could be to the boy. But one evening, he showed up at Café Algiers with scratch marks streaked all over his neck. When he rolled up his sleeves, I saw that his right forearm was full of bruises. “What on earth is going on?” I asked.
He smiled it off.
“Do you guys beat each other up now?” I asked, trying to make light of it. Had I suspected the truth, I would never have asked.
He didn’t answer. Then, a few seconds later, as if out of nowhere, he said, “Sometimes.”
“Sometimes?”
“We like it.”
“You what?”
“Some people need drugs. Others alcohol. She likes to slap me.”
“Do you really like it when she slaps you?”
I couldn’t believe my ears.
He thought about it as though the question had never occurred to him before. Who in his right mind would dare ask such a question of a Berber?
“I don’t mind,” he said.
“You’re both sick.”
“We are.”
Had he pushed his self-destructiveness so far?
It couldn’t last. Léonie broke up with him one evening at Café Algiers. She dashed in through the back door, walked up to our table, told him “Écoute, c’est fini,” gave him a plastic bag in which some of his things were folded, and walked out.
“Everyone does this to me,” he said. “Either they shut their door to me or they bring me remnants. As if I needed remnants and underwear.” And with all his might and all his rage, he hurled the plastic bag into the kitchen area. The owner of the café came out of the kitchen, walked to our table, and said, “If you go on like this, you won’t be able to come here.”
“What did I tell you?” Kalaj turned to me without even looking at the owner. “Everyone shuts their door in the end.”
The whole scene put me in a terrible mood, because it did not just make me think of the numberless times I too had promised to shut my door at him and have no more to do with him, but of how close I myself had come to seeing Harvard’s door shut in my own face.
6
I BEGAN TO AVOID KALAJ. PERHAPS MY TEACHING obligations, now that the semester was in full swing, took me away from him. Perhaps I felt I belonged to Harvard more than I had allowed myself to believe. At a meeting of the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature, I had made a proposal pertaining to the quality of senior theses. Someone objected to my proposal, I began to explain its merits, there was a vote, and my proposal was approved. I felt validated and vindicated. All it took was a near-unanimous show of raised hands, and suddenly I loved Harvard, loved rubbing shoulders with the brotherhood of Americans.
There was also the possibility of a new woman in my life, Allison, though I still wasn’t sure which way things were headed. I didn’t want Kalaj to see us together, nor did I want him to see who I became, or how I behaved or even spoke when I was in her company. He would undoubtedly have dubbed me affected, precious, no less a social climber than Claude was in my eyes—and perhaps I was. But the irony is that I was probably no less affected as a Mediterranean among the habitués of Café Algiers than I was among WASPs at Lowell House.
But then something else was troubling me, and Allison’s presence made me see it more clearly. It’s not just that I did not want Kalaj to see me with her; I didn’t want her to see me with him. She was candid, bold, straightforward, and freethinking in so many unforeseen ways, willing to try many things that were not part of the immediate world she’d been brought up in. Nor was she a snob, though some might have thought so, if only because she moved in circles where everything was rarefied and where you never had to think of cost, even when you felt you needed to pretend to. She knew the things she liked and was used to and was seldom aware of their far inferior and cheaper version everyone else in the world purchased. Her family always traveled first-class; it would never have occurred to her that one could also travel coach. She had never in her life seen the back of an airplane or thought it possible to sit in the cramped spaces everyone else flew in. But she was discreet in everything. She never ordered more than two drinks because she didn’t like being sloshed; I never ordered more than two drinks because I’d have no money left for dinner. It would never have occurred to her that buying four drinks each, three days in a row, could mean my financial ruin. But she had perfect judgment, and once she was told about the rest of mankind and its strapped budgets, she made all the necessary adjustments with the surefire ease with which a rich person knows how to dress down when visiting poor relatives in the suburbs. Above all she was a very canny reader of people and could instantly have distinguished an uncommitted truant like me from a confirmed vagrant like Kalaj.
Allison had come to my apartment on Concord Avenue early on the afternoon of Yom Kippur. Not intentionally of course, and not that it bothered me in any way, since I had never observed Kippur in my life. But it was emblematic of how far apart our worlds were. When she buzzed me early that afternoon, I told her to come right upstairs; I’d recognized it was a woman’s voice but couldn’t make out whose. When she walked in wearing her orange dress I was totally surprised. I was wearing a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and had just come back from a jog. I was also sweating. I must have looked a mess. I told her to please sit on the sofa, to pick something up to read, and that I’d take no time to shower and get dressed.
She was unfazed by this. Perhaps, in her mind, she was not visiting me at home; she was just visiting a Lowell House tutor in his off-campus digs, hence the relaxed drop-by-and-show-up-whenever-you-please informality of her visit and the ease with which she adjusted to everything.
“Tell you what, do you know how to make espresso?” I asked in my distracted and flustered state.
She loved espresso but didn’t know how to make one.
“Five minutes,” I said. I’d make us two terrific lattes.
I was trying not to allow myself to get aroused by the situation.
She must have taken a good look at my bookcase and, before I’d even started the water running, shouted that she was amazed I had the complete first edition of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Had she read the whole thing yet? I shouted back behind my closed door, feeling that if she didn’t feel uncomfortable shouting back and forth with someone she scarcely knew while he was in the bathroom, who was I to quibble.
“Yes,” she replied.
Then came total silence. Was she going to undress and step into the shower with me? The thought gave me a sudden thrill that was difficult to restrain but that part of me did not wish to temper. Would I come out of the shower and expose myself? Or would she have already snuggled in my bed, naked under my sheets, her clothes dropped on the floor along the way to my bedroom as a preamble to what lay in store for us? I didn’t want to say or shout anything for fear she’d make out the arousal in my voice. All I knew was that in Kalaj’s book of rules, if I was as aroused as this, so was she.
When I came out of the shower in my bathrobe, she was lying flat on her stomach on my living room floor leafing through my diary.
“W
hat on earth are you doing?”
“Reading,” she said, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Where did you find it?”
“In your bedroom, on your desk.”
I was speechless. So she’d gone into my bedroom, seen my totally unmade bed, rifled through my things, found the diary, what else?
“Do you really, really mind?”
I thought about it.
“No, I don’t mind really, really mind,” I said. “Actually, it thrills me.”
“Thrills you? How, actually?” she said, echoing my own word.
I had no idea where this was going—was she a total ingénue or did she know exactly what she was doing, which could be exactly why she showed up in the first place.
They always know. I could just hear Kalaj’s voice.
“I’m going to get dressed and make coffee.”
“Why don’t you do that.”
I’d never in my life uttered a sentence like “Why don’t you do that” to mean yes. Who knows what these words implied or meant in her world.
Naturally, I banged the espresso filter against the garbage container as loud as I could, left the door wide open for the time it took to boil the milk, then closed the door again.
Allison had come to talk to me about her senior thesis on Proust after I had encouraged her to look me up. She was working with another tutor at Adams House, she said, but was intrigued by our brief conversation outside my office. Someone else had mentioned my name to her. She wished she had known earlier, but it was too late to change tutors, she said. Now, as we both stood in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to brew, she gave no sense of being interested in discussing Proust. She had brought my diary into the kitchen and continued poring over it as we stood silently by the gas range. For someone reading someone else’s diary without asking permission to do so, she didn’t seem in the slightest bit ill at ease. What did ersatz mean? she asked. I told her. Who was K. then? I explained, without giving away the seamy underside. What about Walden Pond? Skip that part, I said. “So tell me about N. You wrote about her less than three weeks ago,” she said.
