One day, as I walked into Café Algiers, I noticed a girl reading a book at what was my usual corner table. The table next to hers was unoccupied. So I walked over to the free table, put my book down, and sat down. She was reading Melville. I was rereading Spenser. When eventually she lifted her head, I caught her gaze and asked where she was in
Moby-Dick
. She told me. I made a face. She smiled. She looked over at my book and said she’d studied Spenser the previous year. The two of us were reading impossible English, I ventured. “It just takes getting used to,” she said sweetly. We continued to talk. About the teachers, about our books, about other books. She liked many authors. I wasn’t so sure I liked so many. Then, with the conversation drying up, I let her go back to her reading, and I picked up mine. Not long afterward, she stood up, left some change on the table, and was about to leave the café. “Maybe you should reread Melville,” she said before walking out.
“Maybe,” I said.
I felt I had made an enemy.
“Couldn’t you tell she wanted to keep talking?” Kalaj said when he walked up to my table. I hadn’t noticed he’d been watching me all this time. He asked what we’d spoken about.
“So you spoke about books. Then what?”
I didn’t know that there was a
then what
.
“You could have said something about her, or at least said something about yourself. Or the people around us. Or tea leaves, for the love of God. Anything! You could have asked questions. Helped her answer them. Suggested things. Made her laugh. Instead you told her you hated things. You’re a champion—seriously.”
“It’s where the conversation went.”
“Because you let it go there.”
“Because I let it go there.”
“Exactly.”
“What will you do the next time you speak to a woman in a café?”
My silence said it all.
“Do you not understand women or are you just inept?”
I looked at him in dismay.
“I suppose both,” I finally said.
The two of us burst out laughing.
He knew the whereabouts of everyone, understood why and how things worked, trusted no one, and at all times expected the worst from each and every one. He foresaw what people might do or say, figured things out even when he couldn’t understand the first thing about them, and sniffed out deceit and shortcuts most mortals were simply unaware even existed. In this, as in so many other things, he belonged to another order of beings. Gods, heroes, and monsters hadn’t been invented when he burst in on the fifth day of creation all wired up and set to go. Mankind would arrive much, much later.
Kalaj also remembered faces. While walking with him one day I ran into a Syrian fellow I knew and said, “He’s a good guy.” “He’s a sick fuck,” Kalaj replied, and right away related how, a few weeks earlier, he’d seen this exact same man argue with his girlfriend and slap her across the face outside a nightclub in downtown Boston. “Actually, of all the people I know here, he is the only one I fear. He could stab you in cold blood, bugger you afterward, then run you over with his car. I’ll bet you anything he’s a spy.”
I didn’t believe Kalaj at the time, but years later, I heard that this same man, after disappearing in the Massachusetts penitentiary system for assault, rape, and battery, resurfaced as a book dealer in the West.
Kalaj had another gift. He not only remembered faces, he saw through them as well.
Your friend So-and-so, I don’t trust him. Your other friend Such-and-such, he hates you
. The list was endless. So-and-so always sits sideways so as never to look you in the eye. Such-and-such seems kind, but only because she’s scared to tell you she dislikes anyone. As for this guy over there, he is not intelligent, just crafty. She is not happy, just laughs a lot. She is not passionate, just restless. He is not wise, just bitter. Hysterical laughter means nothing—like bar chatter, like telephone intimacies, like saying I love you instead of a plain goodbye. He hated people who said I love you before hanging up. It meant they didn’t. He mistrusted people who cried easily at the cinema. It meant they felt nothing in real life. So-and-so always affects to be giddy, but it’s only to avoid telling you the truth. So-and-so says he has a great sense of humor. But he never laughs. It’s like saying one’s aroused without getting hard.
So-and-so this, So-and-so that.
Rat-tat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat-tat.
Did I want to know why Young Hemingway has a beard? he once asked.
Why?
To hide he has no chin.
Did I know why So-and-so covers her mouth when she laughs?
Why?
To hide her big gums.
Did I know why people say So-and-so is smart?
Because everyone else says it.
Did I want to know why So-and-so complains that things are so expensive?
Because his father is wealthy and he doesn’t want you to think he’s a daddy’s boy.
Did I know why he claims he should stop buying expensive clothes?
Because he wants you to know he was born with a taste for them.
On and on and on.
He measured everyone on a Richter scale of either passion or authenticity, usually both, because one invariably implied the other. No one passed. His universe thronged with people who were never who they claimed to be. Where had he learned to think this way? Was any of it real? Or was it all arrant nonsense spewed out of a private Aladdin’s lamp fanned by nightmares and demented demons? Or was this just one very unlucky man’s way of staying afloat in a New World he couldn’t begin to fathom except by thinking he was onto all of its mean and cozy little tricks, that he could read the face behind the mask, that he knew which way the world turned because it had turned on him so many times?
In the end, all he was left with was guesswork and rapid-fire Third-World bluster and paranoia—the perfect cross between desert seer and street hustler.
“Did you notice how you always cross the street on the slant?” he asked me one day.
“Because it’s the shortest distance,” I replied, thinking hypotenuse.
“Yes, but that’s not why you do it.”
I had never considered this before and tried to give it no thought. But I knew he’d seen right through me: I did things on the sly, I was born oblique—read: disloyal.
I pretended not to hear.
He probably saw through this as well.
I was shifty, he was up-front. I never raised my voice; he was the loudest man on Harvard Square. I was cramped, cautious, diffident; he was reckless and brutal, a tinder box. He spoke his mind. Mine was a vault. He was in-your-face; I waited till your back was turned. He stood for nothing, took no prisoners, lambasted everyone. I tolerated everybody without loving a single one. He wore love on his sleeve; mine was buried layers deep, and even then . . . He was new to the States but had managed to speak to almost everyone in Cambridge; I’d been a graduate student for four years at Harvard but went entire days that summer without a soul to turn to. When he was upset or bored, he bristled, fidgeted, then he exploded; I was the picture of composure. He was absolute in all things; compromise was my name. Once he started there was no stopping him, whereas the slightest blush would stop me in my tracks. He could dump you and never think twice of it; I’d make up in no time, then spite you forever after. He could be cruel. I was seldom kind. Neither of us had any money, but there were days when I was far, far poorer than he. For him there was no shame in poverty; he had come from it. For me, shame had deep pockets, deeper even than identity itself, because it could take your life, your soul and bore its way in and turn you inside out like an old sock and expose you for who you’d finally turned into till you had nothing to show for yourself and couldn’t stand a thing about yourself and made up for it by scorning everyone else. He was proud to know me, while, outside of our tiny café society, I never wanted to be seen with him. He was a cabdriver, I was Ivy League. He was an Arab, I was a Jew. Otherwise we could have swapped roles in a second.
For all his wrath and dislodged, nomadic life, he was of this planet, while I was never sure I belonged to it. He loved earth and understood people. Jostle him all you wanted, he would find his bearings soon enough, whereas I, without moving, was always out of place, forever withdrawn. If I seemed grounded, it was only because I didn’t budge. He was temporarily unhinged yet forever on the prowl; I was permanently motionless. If I moved at all, I did so like a straddler standing clueless on a wobbly raft in the rapids; the raft moved, the water moved, but I did not.
I envied him. I wanted to learn from him. He was a man. I wasn’t sure what I was. He was the voice, the missing link to my past, the person I might have grown up to be had life taken a different turn. He was savage; I’d been tamed, curbed. But if you took me and dunked me in a powerful solvent so that every habit I’d acquired in school and every concession made to America were stripped off my skin, then you might have found him, not me, and the blue Mediterranean would have burst on your beach the way he burst on the scene each day at Café Algiers.
In another country, another town, other times, I would never have turned to him, or he given me the time of day. I was not in the habit of approaching a complete stranger, would never have done so had I not seen something of me in him, something muted and forgotten in me that I recognized right away when it flared in his speech. His rants, for all their distorted, senseless dyspepsia, spoke to me, took me back to my past, the way Café Algiers took me back to something distant, unnamed, and overlooked in myself.
He, I would soon find out, was the only other human being in Cambridge who not only had not seen
Star Wars
but who refused to, who deplored it, who scorned the cult that had suddenly sprouted around it that summer. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker were on everyone’s lips as though they were familiar characters in a Shakespeare play, with R2-D2 and C-3PO trailing like minor fools and obsequious courtiers. But for Kalaj, it stood for all that was jumbo-ersatz.
ONE OF THE
things that drew me to Kalaj at first had nothing to do with his mischievous sixth sense, or his survivor’s instincts, or his cantankerous outbursts that had strange ways of wrapping their arms around you till they choked you before they turned into laughter. Nor was it the mock-abrasive intimacy which put so many off but was precisely what felt so familiar to me, because it brought to mind those instant friendships of my childhood, when one insult about your mother followed by another about mine could bind two ten-year-olds for a lifetime.
Perhaps he was a stand-in for who I was, a primitive version of the me I’d lost track of and sloughed off living in America. My shadow self, my picture of Dorian Gray, my mad brother in the attic, my Mr. Hyde, my very, very rough draft. Me unmasked, unchained, unleashed, unfinished: me untrammeled, me in rags, me enraged. Me without books, without finish, without a green card. Me with a Kalashnikov.
If I liked listening to him, it was not because I believed or even respected the stuff he mouthed off every day at Café Algiers, but because there was something in the timbre and inflection of his words that seemed to rummage through a clutter of ancestral fragments to remind me of the person I may have been born to be but had not become. If I didn’t take his daily rants against America seriously, it was because it was never really America he was inveighing against, nor was his the voice of a bewildered Middle East trying to fend off a decaying and implacable West. What I heard instead was the raspy, wheezing, threatened voice of an older order of mankind, older ways of being human, raging, raging against the tide of something new that had the semblance and behavior of humanity but really wasn’t. It was not a clash of civilizations or of values or of cultures; it was a question of which organ, which chamber of the heart, which one of its dear five senses would humanity cut off to join modernity.
Which is why he said he hated nectarines.
Brugnons
, in French. People were being
nectarized
, sweet without kindness, all the right feelings but none of the heart, engineered, stitched, C-sectioned, but never once really born—the head part plum, the ass part peach, and balls the size of Raisinets. The nectarine didn’t have a single living relative in the kingdom of fruit. It was all graft.
“Grafted like us, you mean?” I said to him one day at Café Algiers after I’d heard him go on and on about President Carter’s
nectarined
face, to say nothing of his smile. The face, I agreed, was pure nectarine. But were we any better? We were no more authentic than anyone else, and we, having lived on three continents, were pure graft.
“Yes, I suppose like you and me,” he conceded. But a moment later: “No, not like you and me. The nectarine thinks it is a fruit. It doesn’t know it’s not natural and won’t believe it however hard you argue. And to prove it, it can even have children, the way robots too will have children of their own one day.”
He suddenly looked pensive, almost sad.
“You don’t know you’re human until you have children.”
Where did he come up with such notions?
“Do you have children?” I asked.
“I don’t have children.”
“Then?” I was teasing him
“I have my skin. That’s all.” And again, as he had done the first day I met him, he pinched the skin on his forearm. “This. This is my proof. The color of the ground in my country, the color of wheat. But,” he added as though on second thought—because there was always a second thought to everything he said—“I would have liked a child.”
All this was spoken out loud in French the better to intrigue a woman sitting next to our table who was probably wondering whether she was a nectarine herself, hoping that she wasn’t, all the while trying to guess what kind of a lover this strange rogue-preacher was in bed.
Which was exactly the purpose of the whole diatribe.
And yet, what finally cemented our friendship from the very start was our love of France and of the French language, or, better yet, of the idea of France—because real France we no longer had much use for, nor it for us. We nursed this love like a guilty secret, because we couldn’t undo it, didn’t trust it, didn’t even want to dignify it with the name of love. But it hovered over our lives like a fraught and tired heirloom that dated back to our respective childhoods in colonial North Africa. Perhaps it wasn’t even France, or the romance of France we loved; perhaps France was the nickname we gave our desperate reach for something firm in our lives—and for both of us the past was the firmest thing we had to hold on to, and the past in both cases was written in French.