had a new entrance underground. Casablanca too hadn’t budged, but they’d gutted and truncated it. And finally Café Algiers had moved from downstairs to upstairs, though its green logo hadn’t changed. I stood outside the old coffee shop where I’d spent years reading and where, one summer long ago, I’d run into someone who came so close to altering the course of my life that today I might not even be my son’s father.
“What do you mean ‘not my father’?” asked my son, who’d never heard anything like this before and was more than mildly miffed by what I’d just said.
I didn’t want to answer, partly because I wasn’t sure I knew the answer, but also because I wanted to spare him the thought that so much of who he was depended on tangents and the whims of fate.
“There were days when I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay here any longer—when I too wanted to split.” I wanted him to know I was using his word. “And I don’t mean just from Harvard, but from the United States.”
“And?”
“I wasn’t even a citizen in those days and a side of me, just a side of me, craved to move back somewhere on the Mediterranean. This fellow was from the Mediterranean as well and he too longed to go back. We were friends.”
I was still staring at the emblem of Café Algiers and, without even trying, could almost heed the loud slap of backgammon chips summoning me from decades back. I used to hang around here to put off heading home, to find light and fellowship in my evenings, because there were days when nothing else promised light or fellowship.
“Why did you want to leave?”
“Many things. I had failed my comprehensive exams. They said I could take my exams a second time, but not a third. I just wanted to leave before they’d throw the book at me if I failed again.”
But these were all words. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to share any of this with someone who was himself already having a hard time making up his mind about Harvard.
“I passed,” I finally said. “Harvard was generous, magnanimous even.”
But I couldn’t forget my days and evenings at Café Algiers where I’d come because that small underground café at the time was the only place this side of the Atlantic I could almost call home. The smell of Turkish coffee, the French songs they played here, the verbal fireballs of a Tunisian nicknamed Monsieur Kalashnikov and the chatter of the men and women who’d gather around when he presided, down to the clammy, wooden dampness of my tiny square table next to which hung a makeshift poster of a deserted beach in a coastal town called Tipaza, its turquoise sea forever limpid and beckoning, everything in this small coffee shop reminded me of a Middle East I thought I had lost and put behind me and suddenly realized I wasn’t ready to let go of. At least not just yet. Not for Harvard, not for America, not for anyone, not even for the children I wished one day to be a father to. I was not like everyone else in Cambridge, I was not one of them, was not in the system, had never been. This wasn’t really my home, might never be. These weren’t my people, were never going to be. This wasn’t my life, wasn’t my birthplace, wasn’t even me, couldn’t be me. This was the summer of 1977.
1
CAMBRIDGE WAS A DESERT. IT WAS ONE OF THE HOTTEST summers I’d ever lived through. By the end of July, you sought shelter wherever you could during the day; at night you couldn’t sleep. All my friends in graduate school were gone. Frank, my former roommate, was teaching Italian in Florence, Claude had gone back to France to work for his father’s consulting firm, and Nora was in Austria for a crash course in German. Nora wrote to me about Frank, while Frank wrote about Nora. He’s losing all his hair and he isn’t even 25. She, he’d write, was a jittery flibbertigibbet who should be flipping burgers instead. I was trying not to take sides, but I found myself envying their love and fearing its dissolution, sometimes more than either of them did. One would quote Leopardi to me, the other Donna Summer. Both had sprouted quick romances abroad.
My other friends who had stayed in Cambridge to teach summer classes had also left. Postcards trickled in from Paris,