André Aciman - Harvard Square

So here I was in bed, trapped and helpless, in a universe where all my clever partitions had totally collapsed.

Kalaj and Allison, my students, the department head, Cherbakoff, who came by on cat’s paws, then Zeinab the waitress, my colleagues, everyone, careerists and lowlifes, were thrown together as in a Fellini movie or a clambake on Cape Cod.

I knew that, with the exception of those in the room who’d had to recobble their lives and reinvent themselves to live in the States, very few would understand that no human being is one thing and one thing only, that each one of us has as many facets as there are people we know. Would it upset Allison to discover that the person I was with Zeinab couldn’t ever be who I was with her, and that this was my unspoken reason for keeping Kalaj away from her — because I showed him far more facets than the one or two I felt laid-back enough to share with her?

I could tell Allison seemed ill at ease. She sat on a chair in a corner, silent and remote, waiting for everyone to leave, not sure whether she should be my student or my girlfriend. Kalaj, who must have originally assumed I’d be alone, leaned against one of the walls with his camouflage jacket, his beret, his gunner’s scowl, and the three porno magazines rolled into the shape of a rain stick picked up on some guerrilla expedition in the Amazonian hinterland. If you didn’t know, you’d think he was a foreigner on some Third World scholarship who’d spent all-nighters working in a soup kitchen.

He had already put one of my students in his place by saying that the Marquis de Sade disgusted him. With another he insisted that all American writers were no better than rock ’n’ roll con artists, including those he hadn’t read and wasn’t likely to start now, ending his after-hours, sotto voce shoot-out-with-silencer by reminding everyone in the room, including the nurse who came to remove my tray, that hospitals, like courthouses — including doctors and lawyers — were put on this planet to beat down your soul till it was flattened into toilet paper — and of souls, ladies and gentlemen, we were each given one only, and it had to be returned, when we were well and done with it, intact and as good as new for the next person. As Nostradamus says— And he began quoting quatrains.

In the space of five minutes, after an initial period during which he had intrigued and charmed all those in the room, he eventually managed to scare everyone away. “Who was that crackpot?” someone asked weeks later.

EVERYTHING I FEARED since school had started was beginning to happen. From a traveling companion picked up in an oasis during my lonely summer days in Cambridge, Kalaj had become a deadweight that was impossible to shake off. After my release from hospital, there was nowhere to go in Cambridge without running into him. I could not sit with anyone in public without being joined by him or, as was more often the case, without being invited to join him at his table, or, worse yet, constantly having to dream up new excuses to explain why I couldn’t talk to him just yet. In the end, I grew tired of dreading to bump into him or of running out of excuses. I was crammed with emergency excuses and white lies the way people with runny noses stuff their pockets with too many handkerchiefs. I hated myself both for being too weak to fend him off and for worrying about it all the time.

I tried to avoid the bars and coffeehouses where I was likely to bump into him. Once, at the Harvest, I was sitting with two colleagues, and there was Kalaj at the bar, drinking his usual un dollar vingt-deux. I’ll never forget his eyes. He had seen me of course, as I had seen him, but he was allowing a glazed look to settle over his eyes, as though distracted by troubling, faraway thoughts — the Free Masonry, his cab, his long-term projects in the U.S., his father, the green card, his wife. Five minutes later, I heard his explosive, detonating, hysterical laugh in response to one of the bartender’s jokes. He was sending me a message. It was impossible to miss. I don’t need you. See, I can do better. There was something overly histrionic about his laughter that reminded me of the first time we’d met. You’re trying to be like these friends of yours, he seemed to say, but I know you’ll stiff the tip when no one’s looking.

I’ll never forget that vacant look on his face. He wasn’t pretending he hadn’t seen me. He was pretending he hadn’t seen me pretending not to see him. He was letting me off the hook.

A few days later he was waiting for me outside Boylston Hall. He needed two favors. “I’ll walk with you,” he explained.

His landlady was remodeling the house, and God only knew when she’d be able to let him have his room back. She was therefore giving him fair notice .

It didn’t sound very convincing. Had he done something wrong, tried to bring women into his bedroom? I asked. “Me, soil my sheets, when I could dirty a woman’s instead? Never.”

He wanted me to go with him to help find another bed-and-breakfast. But as we knocked at door after door and were already approaching Porter Square, the old, prim ladies on Everett, Mellen, Wendell, Sacramento, and Garfield Streets took one good look at him and had no vacancies. “Can you put me up for a few days?” he finally asked me. The question had never occurred to me and I was totally unprepared for it. I was surprised by my own answer. Of course I could, I said. All he needed, he said, was a sofa to sleep on, a quick shower in the morning, and he’d be out of my way till nighttime. Maybe he’d arrange to sleep at his current girlfriend’s, though he didn’t want to push things with her right now. “I promise I won’t be in your hair.”

I was a good soul, helping a friend in need, opening my place up to someone who’d be on the street otherwise. But as I was telling him that he should make himself at home except in the afternoon and early evenings (Allison), we passed by Sears, Roebuck, which immediately made me think that perhaps it was time to start planning to install a lock on my door in a few weeks.

Midway back from Porter Square, he bought me a warm tuna fish grinder at a Greek sandwich shop. While we were eating, he told me the next news item: because of a minor infraction, they’d revoked his driver’s license for a month. With all my contacts, he began — this was his typical phrase — couldn’t I help him find a job.

I thought for a while. The only jobs I knew anything about were in education.

“I’ve taught before.”

“I mean university education.”

“Teaching is teaching.”

I’d see what I could do. Instead of going to my office, I decided to pay my chairman a brief visit.

“But has he ever taught in an American institution?” Lloyd-Greville asked, when I finally brought up Kalaj’s predicament.

“He barely speaks English — which is exactly what you’ve always said we needed in a French teacher.”

Professor Lloyd-Greville concurred and asked me to speak about the matter to Professor Cherbakoff.

“And he speaks real, live French, the kind students are likely to speak when they land in France next summer,” I explained.

Cherbakoff also concurred.

As it happened, he said, there was a slot open for a part-time French-language instructor. One of the teaching fellows had had to resign owing to a complicated pregnancy that required extended bedrest.

Ten minutes later, I was back at Café Algiers telling Kalaj to go and see Cherbakoff right away.

I could tell he was nervous.

“Kalashnikov meets Cherbakoff,” taunted the Algerian, who’d overheard the conversation. Everyone laughed. Cherbakoff, Cutitoff , Cherbakoff, hadenough , Cherbakoff, Jerkhimoff. Parodies came breezing in from the kitchen area as almost everyone in Café Algiers clapped.