André Aciman - Harvard Square

Christmas I spent alone in Cambridge. I read more in those three weeks than I’d done since meeting Kalaj almost five months earlier. In January, I re-took my comprehensives. I passed, and four days later I was allowed to take my orals. I passed those too. On February 1, I left Concord Avenue and moved to Lowell House.

THERE WAS A period after Kalaj’s departure when I’d occasionally spot his old Checker cab around Cambridge, being driven by the Moroccan. Each time I saw it, I’d feel a sudden throb, part dread, part joy, followed by instant guilt, and then the unavoidable shrug. Sometimes I’d bump into the Moroccan, and at first we’d greet each other, and then, when it was clear that all we had to say was Did you hear from him? followed by a hasty Me neither , we began to look the other way. The Moroccan spoke French with a different accent, was timid, and couldn’t ruffle anyone’s feathers if he tried. At Café Algiers, where I saw him quite frequently at first, he spoke meekly, in whispers, like a conspirator. Something told me that Moumou the Algerian had warned him of Kalaj’s impending deportation and told him that all he needed was to wait things out till Kalaj was forced to sell at a very low price. It made me angry.

And yet, each time I spotted the cab, I’d remember that clear, sunlit morning when Kalaj had stuck his head out of his window as he drove around Harvard Square and volleyed a jaunty greeting that tore me out of my torpor and brought me back to the here and now. I was glad that day that there was someone like him in my life, but I was also glad he was stuck in traffic and wasn’t going to join me. Those contradictory impulses never resolved their quarrel and were still tussling within me long after he was gone, for I kept wanting to seek him out all the while hoping I’d never find him. Seeing his old cab on Mass Ave or parked along Brattle Street stirred feelings and questions I didn’t care to tackle any longer; no sooner had they risen to consciousness than they were whisked away, unanswered, unheeded. One day, I kept telling myself, I’ll hail his cab and take a ride in it. But I never did, partly because cabs were never in my budget, and partly because I knew that after merely opening the door, I’d find what I’d come looking for: a whiff of the old cracked leather upholstery that always reminded me of a shoe store, a view of the tilted jump seats he’d cautioned the two boys against sitting in on our way to Walden Pond, the indelible scent of trapped cigarette smoke which, now that I think of it, was perennially wrapped around him. And besides, taking a cab would be all wrong: I had never ridden in the back. When we hopped into the car or when he drove me back home or took me late one night to Brookline because I craved sleeping with a girl who lived there, I always rode next to him. One day, eventually, I’d hail his cab, perhaps just weeks before leaving Cambridge. But I always forgot. Then the car disappeared. And then I did.

AFTER MY SON AND I LEFT THE OFFICE OF ADMISSIONS, I suggested we walk to my old house on Concord Avenue before returning to the Square. It was a short distance from the patio and was going to be the last place I’d revisit with him. I’d saved it for last.

The front door to the building was locked as usual. But someone was just coming out and let us in with a quick nod-hello. The mailboxes had not changed, the smell of the lobby had not changed, the buzzer was still the same, and there was still no elevator. Nothing had changed.

I looked at the list of names on the buzzer: the couple in Apartment 43 had disappeared, Linda’s was gone too, and mine — as if this should have surprised me — had disappeared as well. Someone else was being me at Number 45. I pointed out the names to my son as if still looking for a trace of myself here. He must have thought I was losing my mind.

I felt as awkward as an organ donor who comes back to see, just to see, whether that organ that was once his still ticks the way he remembered in someone else’s body. But I could have rung the buzzer and I could have gone upstairs, and maybe later I’d explain to the police when they handcuffed me and took me to the precinct station for trespassing that I’d come back to take a look, Officers, just to take a look. But I wasn’t even really up for taking a look. Whatever I’d come looking for I’d either found or didn’t really care to find, or time had simply squandered the whole thing and I was just not willing to face that I’d grown numb to it.

The same had happened at Café Algiers the day before. I’d stopped first outside the Harvest and noticed without going in that it had altogether changed. The horseshoe bar where I’d had my last drink by myself thinking of him had been dismantled. The spot where he’d stood that night when I pretended not to see him, and he knew, just knew, had also disappeared. Instead, I opened the door and asked the maître d’ to let me take a copy of that day’s menu. “Voilà,” he said.

“What are you going to do with it?” asked my son, who all along had been humoring our amble down memory lane.

I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. Leave it in our hotel room most likely. Or toss it somewhere. But I didn’t let go of it. The menu sits framed against my wall today.

We walked back to Café Algiers and stood outside as we’d done the day before, staring at the menu’s familiar green and white logo.

“Are you going to ask for their menu here as well?” he asked.

But here I caught myself hesitating just as I’d hesitated the day before. Perhaps I shouldn’t go in at all. Better than recognizing things I hadn’t thought of in years or remembering those I hadn’t entirely forgotten, I wanted to imagine them, keep stepping back till I saw what was inside me, not what was out there. As if in order to experience this thing called the past, I needed distance, temperance, tact, an inflection of sloth and humor even — because memory, like revenge, is best served chilled.

Ersatz stuff, Kalaj would have said.

Suddenly, I wanted to imagine him still sitting there, as always happy to see me, still rolling his cigarettes, still lambasting the world for being the dirty, grimy, insipid, shallow cesspool it was. He’d have just about finished reading yesterday’s paper, and he and the Algerian would have sparred a tiny bit already, just enough to get their day started. I’d be on my way to the library or to meet students and had scarcely time for a cinquante-quatre . Now a cinquante-quatre would probably cost six times as much, more perhaps. I imagined the corner table where I used to like to sit and where I’d once promised myself to finish reading the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, which after all these years, I still hadn’t finished.

They were good times. But I wouldn’t want to relive them. Nor did I want to step inside Café Algiers. I wanted to imagine that his portrait now hung framed right next to the image of a deserted beach in Tipaza. I could just imagine him scoffing at both, with a rhyme: Kalaj à la plage , Kalaj at the beach. What idiots, he’d have said. Then he’d pick up his things, which were always scattered on his table, and say he’d drive me to my class, Let’s go! How much time do you have? Fifteen minutes, I’d say. Good, we’ll do a tour by car and talk a bit, I need your advice on something.

That’s when I wished his old cab would suddenly emerge on Brattle Street. My son and I would hail it, tell the new cabbie that we needed to be driven back to the Office of Admissions, and could he please step on it.

“And take Memorial Drive, would you?” I’d say.

“But that’s ridiculous,” the cabbie would object, “we’re just three blocks away.”