and suddenly realizing that perhaps she’d been trying to tell me something I had failed to hear. “Was she ugly?” he asked. “No. Despite the voice, quite sexy.” He made me imitate her voice, her manner of speaking, her gestures, finally bursting out laughing when I consented to imitate her French accent.
“They’re put together differently, these women,” he finally said, and right away launched into his sermon on nectarines.
Two minutes.
Anyochka’s was totally empty that night, its large glass door wide open. The AC was broken. We ordered two croque monsieurs, a luxury in my budget, but it was summer vacation, and I felt like spoiling myself. Amid the dimmed lights and the whir of an old ceiling fan, he told me all about his childhood in Tunisia and about his studies in France. His specialty: informatique. He explained what precisely a byte was, 1’s and 0’s. I couldn’t understand a thing. He explained again. Still couldn’t understand. He tried a third time. Then he let the matter drop. “You’re simply incapable, hopeless.” Seeing no immediate future in informatique, he became a self-employed caterer. He married his sous-chef, though it became obvious enough by the rest of the tale that it was her money that had set him up in business. “She betrayed me. She destroyed me. And she ruined me.” He was now married to an American.
“Where is your wife?” I asked.
“No idea.”
“Does she travel a lot?”
“I told you I have no idea. Don’t you understand when I speak?”
Rat-tat-tat, but aimed at me this time. What was I even doing having dinner with this creep? I was about to explain my question.
“No need to apologize. I don’t give a damn. Well,” he changed his mind, “let me explain.”
Five minutes.
They met in an underground station in Boston. He had just missed the train to Park Square and, without thinking, had muttered a curse in French. You seem upset, the woman on the platform had said. I am upset. She thought he was speaking to her. No, he wasn’t. He was just cursing out loud. But one thing led to another. Things invariably did with him. Within days they were married. Soon after their wedding he filed his application for a green card.
What had made him come to the States?
“Let me explain.”
Four minutes.
And how did he come to be interested in computers?
“Well, you see—”
Four more minutes.
The tales were gnarled together and could take forever to sort out, but I listened because they had all the makings of a latter-day picaresque novel. After his French wife had abandoned him—she had kicked him out, actually—he befriended an Italian businesswoman who was staying in Paris and who had hired him as her personal chef. From cook he became her driver, then her social secretary, till he graduated to a more meaningful occupation and was invited to live with her in Milan while her husband was away. The husband returned, heard all he needed to hear, and threatened to come after Kalaj. That is when Kalaj believed it was time to flee, and through her contacts, ended up in, of all places, Harvard Square, to stay with her best friend, who was an Italian graduate student at Harvard and whom, it happened, I knew quite well and I liked. “Like her all you want,” was his reply. After about two weeks, the graduate student and her live-in boyfriend took Kalaj aside and informed him that perhaps he should start thinking of moving elsewhere.
Perhaps you should start thinking of moving elsewhere, he mimicked, making fun of their couched language. He moved out that same afternoon. Better a park bench. Better the grimy floor in a soup kitchen. Better a public bathroom. They needed space! Space was a concept that was totally foreign to him—as though humans had suddenly become galactic mutants in need of huge magnetic shields. “Me, impose on people?—God forbid.” In fact, he had just been kicked out from his newer digs when he missed that underground train to Park Square. This time last year, he finally said, he had never even heard of Cambridge, much less of Harvard Square. Now he knew more than he’d ever wished. He and his amerloque wife had split up. Actually, she too had kicked him out. She was a lay analyst. Shelley. Very rich parents. Jewish.
“Probably didn’t like having an Arab taxi driver for a husband,” I threw in.
“No, that wasn’t it.”
“She didn’t know French and you didn’t know English well enough?”
“No, not that either.”
“What, then?”
Out poured yet