André Aciman - Harvard Square

When we parked the car outside Café Algiers, I hinted that the interview with his lawyer had left me feeling very worried.

“I know. But I don’t want to think about it now.” He had a date with his Pléonasme in half an hour and had no room for more bad thoughts in addition to those she’d probably stir in him tonight. “Trust me,” he added. I assumed things were in a rocky phase.

“Did you have to go through one-tenth of what I’m going through for a green card?” he asked once we ordered coffee.

“No. I had a green card more or less waiting for me when I arrived, courtesy of my uncle in the Bronx.”

“What did your uncle in the Bronx have to do?”

“My uncle was a Freemason. He asked a Freemason to write a letter to a congressman who was also a Freemason, and from one Freemason to the other, someone finally allowed me to become a legal resident.”

“Just like that.”

“Masons are very powerful people.”

“Like Jews?”

“Like Jews.”

In less than ten days, Kalaj had not only managed to get himself invited to join a Masonic lodge, but had placed glossy stickers bearing the Masonic square and compass all over his cab — on the hood, on the dashboard, on the front and back fenders. He had even snuck two discreetly beneath the armrests right under the ashtrays.

Someone he had recently taken to the airport happened to be a Freemason who happened to have a Freemason friend who—

“You’re a genius,” he said to me.

ONE NIGHT, AFTER a heavy meal at High Table at Lowell House, I was awakened by a sharp pain on my right side. I waited for it to pass. It didn’t. The Persian curse, I immediately thought. I took some Alka-Seltzer and went back to sleep. But sleep didn’t come. The pain intensified and kept growing worse. By five in the morning I decided to call Kalaj. But he wasn’t answering. I put on some clothes, and unable to find a taxi on Concord Avenue, I had no choice but to walk all the way to the student infirmary. If I got sick I’d have a good excuse for putting off work on my comprehensives. Then the thought occurred to me: if I died, I wouldn’t have to take my exams at all. Clearly, the shot in the arm after my meeting with Lloyd-Greville had worn off.

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.