André Aciman - Harvard Square

We all have our phantoms, and I was seeing Kalaj’s for the first time, perhaps because, for the first time, he wasn’t able to shoo them away by shouting.

Something very serious was troubling him. Was he missing someone, was this reminding him of something somewhere else, were his problems catching up with him — the green card, money, solitude, divorce, deportation? “No, nothing, nothing ,” he replied. I made a motion to leave the bedroom to let him be by himself, since it was clear he didn’t want to speak. When I was about to open the door, he simply asked me to stay.

“What is it?” I asked. “Tell me.”

He caught his breath. “I cooked this whole dinner for everyone and everyone is having a great time, but, you see, what about me?” He hesitated a moment, “ Et moi?” he said. “Et moi?” “I don’t understand,” I said, “everyone is happy because of you. Everyone is grateful. And no one is ignoring you or has even done or said anything to slight you.”

“That’s because you see the surface, but you don’t look underneath. But what about me?”

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.