Harvard Square (22 page)

I still had no idea what he was getting at or what was eating him.

“In exactly a year’s time I will not be here. Each and every one of you will be here, but I won’t be among you. I will miss all this so terribly, that I don’t even want to think beyond this minute. You see now? Has anyone thought about me?”

I was dumbfounded. Silence was my only way of agreeing with him and of saying what I would never had had the courage or the cruelty to say to his face:
You are right, my friend, we completely failed to think of you, we do not see your hell, you are all alone in this, and, yes, you may be right about this too: you may not be among us next year, may not even be in our thoughts next year
.

“Now you see?” he asked.

“Now I see,” I said, meaning:
There is nothing, nothing I can say to buoy your spirits.
I was helpless. I felt like the captain of a cruise ship who shouts “Man overboard . . . but, ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing we can do, it’s time for lunch, and the food is waiting.” To say anything so as to say something would have forced me to utter fatuous palliatives, and I had drunk too much already to lie persuasively.

But I suddenly realized one thing very clearly in this dark bedroom. By looking at him I was almost looking at myself. He was the measure of how close I might come to falling apart and losing everything here. He was just my destiny three steps ahead of me. I could fail my exams, be sent packing to New York, and in a year from now, no one would recall this dinner party, much less remember to think of me.

“See? I’m like someone who prepares a whole feast knowing he is dying, and everyone is happily eating and drinking away and forgets that the cook will be carried away by the end of the meal. I don’t want to be the dying cook of the party. I don’t want to leave and be elsewhere. I need help and there is no one, no one.”

I heard the catch in his voice.

“So, what about me?” he asked, as though coming back to a nagging question that hadn’t just cropped up because of this evening but that he’d been brewing perhaps since childhood, since forever, and the answer was always going to be the same; there is no answer.
“Et moi?”
he repeated, feeling desperately sorry for himself, while I still stood there, unable to say or do anything for him.

And, for the first time that evening, I saw that this short mantra of his also had another meaning, which had simply eluded me all the time I’d been standing there in the dark listening to him. It didn’t just mean
And what about me?
but spoke an injured, hopeless
What happens to me now?

He wasn’t asking me for an answer, or invoking my help, or even pleading with the god of fairness and forgiveness overseeing his affairs in North America; he was just groping in the dark and repeating words of incantation that would eventually lead him out of his cave in the only way he knew: with tears. With tears came solace and surrender, pardon and courage.

That night as I watched him cry, you could almost touch his despair and its ephemeral balm, hope. When, seconds later, he actually started to sob as he’d done on the day he heard of his father’s sickness in Tunis, I knew that here was the loneliest man I’d ever known in my life, and that anger, sorrow, fear, and even the shame of being caught crying were nothing compared to this monsoon of loneliness and despair that was buffeting him every minute of his days.

A part of me didn’t want him to know that I could see he was crying, so I made to go back to the living room and attend to the guests.

“Don’t go yet. Sit down. Please.”

It’s what one said to a nurse when one didn’t want to be alone once they’d turned off the light in your room and dimmed those in the corridor. But all the chairs were in the living room and there was nowhere to sit except on the bed, so I sat on the edge, next to him. He wasn’t speaking and he was no longer crying, just breathing and smoking.

When, a minute or two later, after thinking his crisis had subsided, I made a motion to leave again, he said, “Don’t go.”

I wanted to reach out to him with my hand and touch him to comfort him, maybe even to show compassion and solidarity, but we’d never touched other than fleetingly, and it felt awkward doing so now. So, instead, I reached for his palm but found the top of his hand and held it, gently at first, then more firmly. This was not easy for me, and I suppose it was not easy for him either, because he did not respond or return my grasp. For two men who claimed to be so inveterately Mediterranean we couldn’t have been less expressive or more inhibited. Perhaps we were both holding back, perhaps he was thinking the exact same thing, which is why, in an unexpected gesture, instead of standing up again, I lay down right next to him, facing him, and put one arm across his chest. Only then did he reach out to hold my hand, and then, turning to me, put a leg around me and began to cradle and hug me, both of us entirely silent except for his muted sobbing. We said nothing more.

Shortly after, I got up and told him, “Pull yourself together and let’s step outside.” I did not shut the door behind me.

WHEN I RETURNED
to the living room, I noticed it right away though I thought nothing of it at first, and perhaps didn’t want to register it. Léonie was sitting on the sofa and Count was sitting on the floor, his neck resting against her knees while the back of his head lay flat against her thigh. Frank had put on more music by Callas. The others were busy cutting the two desserts Zeinab had brought.

Catching my glance in his direction, Count stood up and said he was going to buy cigarettes around the corner. Claude immediately offered him his. But Count smoked Dunhills only. “I should have known,” said Claude, “you always pick the very best, Piero.” A matter of minutes, said Count, trying to justify his brief exit. Léonie looked up and said she’d walk him downstairs and, seeing Kalaj entering the room, asked to let her have the keys to the car to get her sweater.

He gave her the keys.

“You should learn to roll your own,” said Kalaj to Count.

“I don’t need to,” replied Count as he let Léonie out the front door, then discreetly shut the door behind him.

“Nique ta mère,”
muttered Kalaj under his breath.

We carved the cakes in long wedges and served dessert on paper napkins, and because there weren’t enough clean forks, we ate with our hands. Pecan pie is the best thing since the invention of the telephone. No, cheesecake, said someone else. Cheesecake too, said Kalaj. We opened more wine, there was even talk of finally finishing the gallon of vodka I had appropriated along with the Beefeater gin from the departmental party last April. We passed the freezing cold vodka around, everyone agreed it was stupendous, so that a second round was
de rigueur
, and I was just on my way to the kitchen to start the coffee when I saw Kalaj bolt out of the living room, tear open the front door, and rush down the stairs.

The rest of us looked bewildered and exchanged panicked glances. “What got into him tonight?” asked Ekaterina.

Zeinab, who knew him better than any of us, simply said, “He’s always a pill when everyone else is having a good time.”

Ten minutes later he was back upstairs. Not a word. He headed directly into the dark bedroom again and slammed the door shut once more. Everyone looked at one another very puzzled. Zeinab said she’d seen him upset before, but never like this.

The rest of the evening seemed to last forever. We wanted to put a happy face on things, but everyone’s thoughts were turned to the man who’d locked himself in my bedroom. No one, not even I had the courage to go inside to look in on him. To kill time, we cleaned up, put things away, washed dishes, wrapped everything, and everyone was asked to take something home. I’d take care of the garbage, my mind already thinking of the trash container on the service door landing. It seemed to me that Linda and Ekaterina, for all their newly sprung friendship, were perhaps vying to see who of the two would outstay the other. Part of me wanted them to sort it out among themselves; the other part began to hope they’d both come up with a better plan.

Kalaj came out only after most of the guests had left. Someone had dropped a strawberry from one of the cakes on the carpet and then stepped on it. It was impossible to remove the stain. Ekaterina said it was Count. A friend had lent me this antique Persian Tabriz because my living room was larger than his. One day, though, he’d want it back exactly as he had lent it to me.

Kalaj said he’d clean the rug. He knew how to remove stains. But by then I had scraped the strawberry with a sharp knife and then poured stain remover on the rug.

“I wish I had thrown gasoline on her face. And on his.”

“What happened?” we asked.

“What happened? What happened? Couldn’t you hear?”

None of us had heard a thing.

“I beat them up. That’s what’s happened. Now you know.”

“What do you mean you beat them up?” I asked, unable to believe the obvious.

“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?