Harvard Square: A Novel

by André Aciman

  “I’m going to drive back home now. I’ll call you tomorrow. If you can’t tell me the truth, then I’ll know, and I swear I’ll never bother you again.”

  She did as she promised. She called me once the next day. And then never again.

  To Kalaj, when I told him what Allison had said, hers was all corporate ersatz-speak. But it was, and I knew it even then, the most honorable and most tactful behavior I’d witnessed in any woman in my life. She’d been candid and bold from start to finish. She knew what she wanted. I didn’t even know how to want, let alone what I wanted. I admired her.

  As we said good night that evening, I caught myself already wishing she’d never call me the next day. I didn’t want to have the one-on-one postmortem I knew awaited us tomorrow. If to avoid that call I’d have to lose her to a fatal car accident on her way back to her parents’ house that night, so be it. I was ashamed of myself. But shame was just a metaphor, a word, nothing. In the large exchange house of the soul, it was another bankrupt word that didn’t help me get any closer to what I was feeling.

  On my way to the fourth floor that night, my heart almost sank: I remembered that Kalaj would be upstairs. I caught myself making the same wish for him as well. If only they’d deport him tonight so that I wouldn’t have to explain why I wanted him out of my life. And if he and Allison were to crash into each other tonight, so much the better.

  Kalaj was not upstairs. I felt for him as I pictured him cramming for his first day of teaching. I felt for Allison too, weeping, or perhaps not, as she drove all the way back to Newton tonight. And for her parents, rich and self-satisfied as they were, I felt for them too; they worried over their daughter’s crush on a man who kept ducking and slipping and leading people on like a fish who nips but never bites.

  7

  I WAS NOT READY FOR THE COLD WEATHER OF LATE fall in Cambridge. Usually I welcomed that time of year, with its early twilight and the look of bare trees against the sky and the lull that hovered over Cambridge past seven in the evening. But the late summer had been so intense that I was reluctant to see it go. Kalaj, however, fell in love with the colder weather. He put on a heavier jacket, wore a gray scarf around his neck, and would frequently walk with his hands dug deep in his coat pockets. This would be his first winter in Cambridge, and the prospect thrilled him.

  In the darkening days before Thanksgiving, Kalaj would come over to consult my dictionaries and correct sheets of homework, staying up till two in the morning. It made him feel as though he too were a graduate student and that we were roommates living it out in some sort of American Bohemia. He took whatever extra jobs he could find to tide him over. Money was always scarce. But somehow we always managed, and there were days when, by one miracle or another, we could always arrange to head out to the North End and bring back food to organize a few intimate dinners with friends. When we felt we had more women than men and needed an extra male, we’d always say, by way of a joke, why not invite Count? Someone always ended up making a joke about Count Dracula and his two missing teeth.

  Late that fall a group of us got together one Sunday evening to see a double feature at the Harvard Epworth Church. We paid a dollar each and saw an old film called Desire. It left us indifferent. Then we went to Casablanca, had a glass of wine each, then went home our separate ways. If Kalaj wasn’t dating someone, he’d walk back home with me. Once home he knew I’d have to read, so he made no noise whatsoever.

  We each had our students. On occasion we’d compare notes. He liked that. I helped him compose his first grammar test. I then taught him how to print and collate his exams. Then I helped him determine an A from a B– from a C+. This was an altogether new world to him, and part of him, you could tell, was starstruck and awed, like an immigrant who, on board a steamship at the break of dawn, suddenly spots the first glimmers of Manhattan’s skyline. Kalaj liked the new rhythm his life had taken.

  A week or so before Thanksgiving, one of the greatest shocks in his life occurred. A student had submitted Kalaj’s name to the administration. The letter arrived in care of my address. He was being invited to a teacher-student dinner at one of the river houses. What was that? Had a student lodged a complaint against him? No, it was an honor, I explained. A student invites a teacher and has a formal dinner with him, one-on-one. He thought about it for a long time. “Can I go dressed like this?” he asked. “No, you need a jacket and a tie.” He listened, all the while rolling a cigarette, staring at the tobacco without saying a word. “Oké, oké.” I felt for him. “I’ll lend you any tie you want, but my jackets won’t fit you.”

  On the evening of the dinner, he knocked at my door wearing a double-breasted gray flannel suit with a light blue shirt and a dark blue tie. I recognized the Charvet tie. He saw me admiring it. “Courtesy Goodwill,” he said. But the suit was French. As was the shirt. Either he already owned the suit, the shirt, the black shoes, or he’d gone out and bought them in Boston for the occasion. Che Guevara wearing a bespoke suit. Kalaj had shaved off his mustache, combed his hair with a touch of brilliantine and looked at least seven years younger. He made me think of someone who was going to the opera for the first time. “I’ll call you when it’s all over. Maybe you’ll meet me for a drink at Maxim’s. We’ll find new women.”

  I watched him leave.

  The munificent dinner sold him on the wonders of America. He never ate pork, but the sight of the juicy roasted ham with pineapple slices and cloves, coupled with the most oversized shrimps he’d ever seen elsewhere in his life, were simply too much for him to resist. And the best part of it was that every time he thought it was time for dessert, something would always remind him that this was only the beginning. He ate things he had never seen alive and couldn’t recognize if you whispered their name to him, but they tasted of heaven, and there was so much of it that part of him kept looking for a paper bag in which to put extras either for me, or for his friends at Café Algiers, or to remember the evening by. The American paradise was an inexhaustible PX of all that was ever jumbo and ersatz on earth. He loved it. “When we have a party we must cook roasted ham with pineapples.”

  Then he mused a little while.

  “I must tell you, all evening long I was thinking of one thing and one thing only.”

  “What?”

  “You must marry Allison.”

  “Why?”

  “If you won’t do it for you, do it for your children, do it for those you love, and do it for me too, because this country is ersatz-fantastic.”

  AS SOON AS he was hooked, he became weak. Until then, he had flaunted his hatred of America because it dignified his pariah status. He could survey the New World from a quarantined balcony, but he couldn’t get near, much less touch it, so he shouted curses at it. But being invited in, if only to take a tiny peek for an evening, made an instant convert of him. In his heart of hearts, I am sure, he couldn’t wait to say the Pledge of Allegiance. I asked him what did it—the opulence, the abundance, the sheer self-satisfaction of the rich? “Actually,” he said, “it was the ham. And maybe the fact that their red wines put to shame our measly un dollar vingt-deux.”

  He began to like his students and to have lunch at some of the houses that were willing to offer him a free meal if he sat with students and chatted in French with them. He discovered the wonders of Harvard’s French Tables where students gathered for dinner in smaller dining rooms where only French was spoken and for which he was asked to purchase the wines and cheeses every week. With students, he never spoke about politics or women. Instead he spoke about computer syntax. They all listened with rapt faces that reminded me of how his lawyer had gawked at him on hearing him list all the heavyweight champions. But after the famous dinner party, after his first and only football game, after all those eager students who had never known a man like him before and who’d timidly step into Café Algiers to meet him during his office hours and sip a Turkish coffee instead of conjugate verbs, his resistance began to flag. Even when he was allowed to drive
his cab again, he continued to wake up earlier than usual to teach his eight o’clock class. Sometimes he worried. “One Friday night one of my students will leave an after-hours club, hail a cab, and it will be mine. What do I tell them then?”

  “You tell them the truth.”

  “Do you tell them the truth?” he asked. I was going to say that I seldom did. Instead, I suggested he dodge the subject altogether and say that there is little he loved more than listening to jazz en sourdine on Storrow Drive.

  Harvard sucked him in during the fall semester. His crowning moment came when he was invited to two Thanksgiving dinners, one in Connecticut, the other in Boston. Same suit, same tie, same shoes, he joked. He opted for the Boston dinner. For the lady of the house he had purchased roses that cost him close to half a day’s worth of fares. “No speeches, no screeds, no jumbo this, ersatz that,” I told him. Zeinab, who was present during my short exhortation, added, “And no talking about asses and pussies, Back Bay is not Café Algiers.” America had embraced him. He embraced it. It was a fairy tale.

  Being the superstitious Middle Easterner that he was, he kept waiting for the other shoe to fall. What he wasn’t prepared for was how brutal American doors can be when they suddenly shut you out. By early December, just when he was preparing to savor his first Christmas in America with some of his students who weren’t going to be traveling back home, he received a letter from Professor Lloyd-Greville sent in care of my home address, thanking him dearly for stepping in when they needed his help . . . Too many adjunct teachers at this time . . . Wishing him the best for his career.

  Kalaj was not surprised. “For the past few days every time I crossed Lloyd-Greville in the corridors, he looked away.” He knew that look. “It’s the look on cab passengers who, even before opening their wallet, have already decided not to tip. The look of people who have already signed your death warrant and can’t look you in the face. The look of a wife who kisses you as you head out to work at seven in the morning but has already scheduled the movers for ten.”

  He’d seen that look in women many times. The look of treason, not after it happens but while it’s still incubating. “I don’t make these things up,” he said, in case I wanted to warn him against paranoia. I suspect he was also referring to that moment at the Harvest when I tried to avoid speaking to him because I was with friends. But Lloyd-Greville’s letter made him more desperate. I had to write to Lloyd-Greville and explain that Kalaj was very important to his students, that the sudden departure of a teacher would demoralize the entire class, that in good conscience he, Kalaj, could never allow this to happen.

  I tried to explain that such letters never work and very often backfire, turning you into more of a pariah, a pest, especially if your boss must continue to see you until next January. But he wouldn’t hear of it. “It’s a matter of my dignity,” he finally explained.

  Instead of the long letter he wished me to write, I wrote a short acknowledgment, thanking Lloyd-Greville for his letter . . . It disappointed him no end that adjuncts were no longer needed . . . It had been a rewarding experience . . . He would treasure it for life. Etc.

  He thought I was yielding too easily—“It’s because you don’t want to get your hands dirty,” he said.

  It had nothing to do with my hands. What he wanted never worked—not here, not in France, not in Tunisia, not anywhere.

  He accused me of being a coward, an apologist, un réac, a reactionary.

  If I thought it would help to write the three pages that I know no one will read, I would write the letter. But it will do nothing. Protests are pointless, reasoning is pointless, guerrilla tactics serve no purpose, especially when you’ve lost.

  “So what do we do then? Surrender?”

  “You’re starting to sound like the Che Guevara from Porter Square. There is nothing you can do.”

  He did not take it well.

  “I must resign effective immediately.”

  “You will do no such thing. You will teach till the end of your term, and when you look back on it, you’ll have nothing to reproach yourself with.”

  He listened. “I won’t be able to hold myself back.”

  I wanted to tell him that Harvard was no Italian Count. No threats, no broken teeth, not even as a joke!

  And then it hit me: he couldn’t face his employer, he couldn’t face his students, he wouldn’t even know how to face the people at Café Algiers who had been watching him sit next to one or two students and go over the agreement of the past conditional with the pluperfect in counterfactual clauses, and never once raise his voice, always positive and upbeat, and in the end always throwing in a cinquante-quatre to make them feel better about themselves.

  He wanted to hide. He didn’t even have it in him to mention the matter to Léonie, who, even after they were finished, still came around to Café Algiers to have a cinquante-quatre with him. “Do you still pummel each other?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

  “No, we stopped that nonsense long ago.” Then after thinking: “Can I stay at your place for one more night?”

  Of course he could.

  When it got very cold and I had no more blankets, I explained to him that there were people in America who slept under electric blankets.

  “What do you mean?”

  I explained. He’d never heard of such a thing. He was horrified. “No wonder it’s a nation of vibrators and electric chairs.”

  The next morning I made coffee and eggs for the two of us. I wanted to make sure he was on a full stomach. Then he went to teach.

  It was only later in the day that I learned what had happened. He’d gone to class, distributed the homework he had meticulously corrected the night before, told everyone in class what the department had done to him, and right then and there walked out of the classroom, not before dropping his copy of Parlons! and his other textbooks along with the teacher’s manual into the garbage bin. He knew he’d be forfeiting his monthly paycheck but it gave him no end of satisfaction. “I have three things: my cab, my zeb, and my dignity. Without one, the other two are worthless.” On his way out of the building, he happened to cross none other than Professor Lloyd-Greville, who was walking with visiting scholars, and, miming the gesture with his hand, told Lloyd-Greville to beat off. Kalaj had socked it to him, and in front of everyone. Lloyd-Greville retaliated by saying he would report him to the dean of the faculty. “The who?”

  We laughed about it. He wanted to cook dinner for the two of us. Then, as if it came as an afterthought, “I think I’ll sleep here tonight also,” he said.

  I could see this was going to become a pattern. Without knowing it, I caught myself wondering how long it had taken poor Lloyd-Greville to write his letter to Kalaj. When was I going to break the news to Kalaj and prove to him yet again in his life that the world was made of two-faced people? I thought of his wife and of Léonie, and of his first wife in France, and of the U.S. government—everyone had had to battle with the same thing, how to tell poor Kalaj that he wasn’t loved, wasn’t wanted.

  The matter reached a point when Lloyd-Greville, who had always been a friendly mentor to me, particularly after our Chaucer interlude, began to shun me in the corridors. It was not Kalaj who had overstepped the line now; it was I. He greeted me hastily, obviously feeling very angry but also somewhat guilty of the bad thoughts he’d been nursing about me. Eventually, I figured I had to repair the damage before I too was cast out as a pariah.

  “I had no idea what Kalaj was capable of,” I told Lloyd-Greville when I stepped into his office. I’d thought him an overeducated man from the colonies who had run adrift and needed to be gently nudged back into the world of the academy. But I had very recently discovered from his wife that he had a very, very serious problem.

  “What problem is that?” asked Lloyd-Greville, clearly impatient with my visit and not looking me in the eye as he shuffled a few papers in an effort to seem busy tidying up his desk. I looked at him and lowered my voice.

&n
bsp; “Drugs.”

  A rooster should have crowed at this very instant.

  Lloyd-Greville said he would report him to the police.

  “No, he’s already in a program now.” I said. “But these things take a very long time. And his wife says he’s doing much better than when he first started.”

  “I never knew he was married.”

  “Yes, they have a lovely little boy too.”

  The cock would have crowed a second time, a third, and a fourth. It helped buttress the impression that I too, like everyone else, including his wife, had been taken in, but that deep down he was a good family man with good values and well on his way to recovery, slow and treacherous as such recoveries always were—unfortunately.

  “Poor fellow.”

  “Poor fellow indeed.”

  Then upon reflection.

  “He made fun of me to the students.”

  And well he should have, I wanted to say.

  Lloyd-Greville added: “Even though he is married I have a suspicion he was crossing certain lines, if you know what I mean.”

  You don’t say!