André Aciman - Harvard Square

I watched him leave.

The munificent dinner sold him on the wonders of America. He never ate pork, but the sight of the juicy roasted ham with pineapple slices and cloves, coupled with the most oversized shrimps he’d ever seen elsewhere in his life, were simply too much for him to resist. And the best part of it was that every time he thought it was time for dessert, something would always remind him that this was only the beginning. He ate things he had never seen alive and couldn’t recognize if you whispered their name to him, but they tasted of heaven, and there was so much of it that part of him kept looking for a paper bag in which to put extras either for me, or for his friends at Café Algiers, or to remember the evening by. The American paradise was an inexhaustible PX of all that was ever jumbo and ersatz on earth. He loved it. “When we have a party we must cook roasted ham with pineapples.”

Then he mused a little while.

“I must tell you, all evening long I was thinking of one thing and one thing only.”

“What?”

“You must marry Allison.”

“Why?”

“If you won’t do it for you, do it for your children, do it for those you love, and do it for me too, because this country is ersatz-fantastic.”

AS SOON AS he was hooked, he became weak. Until then, he had flaunted his hatred of America because it dignified his pariah status. He could survey the New World from a quarantined balcony, but he couldn’t get near, much less touch it, so he shouted curses at it. But being invited in, if only to take a tiny peek for an evening, made an instant convert of him. In his heart of hearts, I am sure, he couldn’t wait to say the Pledge of Allegiance. I asked him what did it — the opulence, the abundance, the sheer self-satisfaction of the rich? “Actually,” he said, “it was the ham. And maybe the fact that their red wines put to shame our measly un dollar vingt-deux .”

He began to like his students and to have lunch at some of the houses that were willing to offer him a free meal if he sat with students and chatted in French with them. He discovered the wonders of Harvard’s French Tables where students gathered for dinner in smaller dining rooms where only French was spoken and for which he was asked to purchase the wines and cheeses every week. With students, he never spoke about politics or women. Instead he spoke about computer syntax. They all listened with rapt faces that reminded me of how his lawyer had gawked at him on hearing him list all the heavyweight champions. But after the famous dinner party, after his first and only football game, after all those eager students who had never known a man like him before and who’d timidly step into Café Algiers to meet him during his office hours and sip a Turkish coffee instead of conjugate verbs, his resistance began to flag. Even when he was allowed to drive his cab again, he continued to wake up earlier than usual to teach his eight o’clock class. Sometimes he worried. “One Friday night one of my students will leave an after-hours club, hail a cab, and it will be mine. What do I tell them then?”

“You tell them the truth.”

“Do you tell them the truth?” he asked. I was going to say that I seldom did. Instead, I suggested he dodge the subject altogether and say that there is little he loved more than listening to jazz en sourdine on Storrow Drive.

Harvard sucked him in during the fall semester. His crowning moment came when he was invited to two Thanksgiving dinners, one in Connecticut, the other in Boston. Same suit, same tie, same shoes, he joked. He opted for the Boston dinner. For the lady of the house he had purchased roses that cost him close to half a day’s worth of fares. “No speeches, no screeds, no jumbo this, ersatz that,” I told him. Zeinab, who was present during my short exhortation, added, “And no talking about asses and pussies, Back Bay is not Café Algiers.” America had embraced him. He embraced it. It was a fairy tale.

Being the superstitious Middle Easterner that he was, he kept waiting for the other shoe to fall. What he wasn’t prepared for was how brutal American doors can be when they suddenly shut you out. By early December, just when he was preparing to savor his first Christmas in America with some of his students who weren’t going to be traveling back home, he received a letter from Professor Lloyd-Greville sent in care of my home address, thanking him dearly for stepping in when they needed his help … Too many adjunct teachers at this time … Wishing him the best for his career.

Kalaj was not surprised. “For the past few days every time I crossed Lloyd-Greville in the corridors, he looked away.” He knew that look. “It’s the look on cab passengers who, even before opening their wallet, have already decided not to tip. The look of people who have already signed your death warrant and can’t look you in the face. The look of a wife who kisses you as you head out to work at seven in the morning but has already scheduled the movers for ten.”

He’d seen that look in women many times. The look of treason, not after it happens but while it’s still incubating. “I don’t make these things up,” he said, in case I wanted to warn him against paranoia. I suspect he was also referring to that moment at the Harvest when I tried to avoid speaking to him because I was with friends. But Lloyd-Greville’s letter made him more desperate. I had to write to Lloyd-Greville and explain that Kalaj was very important to his students, that the sudden departure of a teacher would demoralize the entire class, that in good conscience he, Kalaj, could never allow this to happen.

I tried to explain that such letters never work and very often backfire, turning you into more of a pariah, a pest, especially if your boss must continue to see you until next January. But he wouldn’t hear of it. “It’s a matter of my dignity,” he finally explained.

Instead of the long letter he wished me to write, I wrote a short acknowledgment, thanking Lloyd-Greville for his letter… It disappointed him no end that adjuncts were no longer needed… It had been a rewarding experience… He would treasure it for life. Etc.

He thought I was yielding too easily—“It’s because you don’t want to get your hands dirty,” he said.

It had nothing to do with my hands. What he wanted never worked — not here, not in France, not in Tunisia, not anywhere.

He accused me of being a coward, an apologist, un réac, a reactionary.

If I thought it would help to write the three pages that I know no one will read, I would write the letter. But it will do nothing. Protests are pointless, reasoning is pointless, guerrilla tactics serve no purpose, especially when you’ve lost.

“So what do we do then? Surrender?”

“You’re starting to sound like the Che Guevara from Porter Square. There is nothing you can do.”

He did not take it well.

“I must resign effective immediately.”

“You will do no such thing. You will teach till the end of your term, and when you look back on it, you’ll have nothing to reproach yourself with.”

He listened. “I won’t be able to hold myself back.”

I wanted to tell him that Harvard was no Italian Count. No threats, no broken teeth, not even as a joke!

And then it hit me: he couldn’t face his employer, he couldn’t face his students, he wouldn’t even know how to face the people at Café Algiers who had been watching him sit next to one or two students and go over the agreement of the past conditional with the pluperfect in counterfactual clauses, and never once raise his voice, always positive and upbeat, and in the end always throwing in a cinquante-quatre to make them feel better about themselves.