André Aciman - Harvard Square

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.