History and Literature majors were unusually bright and well read, and most spoke at least one foreign language. Students were in the habit of waiting for me outside my study after lunch. We discussed the books they wished to read, drew up lists, chatted, talked about life, which invariably meant sex, or the absence of sex. With yet another student, I discussed the topic of her senior thesis, things we had more or less already agreed upon before she’d left for Europe in early May. Now, five months later, she wore a tan, had perfected her French, couldn’t wait to be back in Paris for Christmas. I hadn’t seen Christmas in Paris in at least a decade. Sometimes I held tutorials in my office, or I’d invite someone over for coffee after lunch, and liked nothing more than to feel back on track with everyone else in Cambridge, liked the view into the main courtyard where students and younger tutors alike seemed to lounge about for hours on beach towels in the early afternoon, reading and studying, without another care in the world, graced by the towering, watchful presence of the blue-domed belfry and the protective manor-house gaze of this spot of paradise called Lowell House. For a few years in everyone’s life here, Harvard cordoned off the world, was the world.
Kalaj didn’t have a place in this world, and yet I knew that he’d barge himself in one way or another.
A few days after my meeting with Lloyd-Greville I ran into Kalaj at the café. He still couldn’t sleep, he said. He was, once again, as he so often was these days, in a foul mood, worse even than the last time. Could I do him a favor? Of course. He needed me to go with him to visit a lawyer. Tomorrow morning? Yes, I could do it, I said. Did he have an appointment? What for?
“You can’t walk right in to see your lawyer, you need to make an appointment.”
“So? Call now and make an appointment,” he said.
But it was past six o’clock; the lawyer had probably left already.
“Call anyway,” he said, producing the phone number from his tiny notebook after removing the rubber band. We called, or rather I called.
The lawyer picked up the phone himself.
I hadn’t had a chance to ask for an appointment when Kalaj interrupted me in French to ask if the lawyer could see him now.
“Can we come over now?”
“Now as in right now?” he asked, raising the pitch of his voice, as if the idea seemed totally outlandish.
“Maintenant?” I asked Kalaj, hoping he’d change his mind.
“Oui, maintenant,” he answered.
“Now.”
The voice at the other end of the line hesitated. “Frankly, I was getting ready to head home.”
I whispered the message to Kalaj. He immediately put an index finger to his lips, meaning say nothing. It was the equivalent of a fermata in music, the strategic prolongation of a sound, except that the sound here was silence, the deliberate silence of someone who has just plopped down a penny on the table and is waiting for you to do the same before raising you with yet another. This was the very essence of lingering. Once you’ve asked your question do not say a thing more; when you’ve put your one chip on the table don’t add a second simply because the other person is hesitating or because the silence between the two of you has become unbearable.
“How long will it take you to get here?” the lawyer asked.
Once again I whispered in French: how long did he think it would take?
“Ten minutes.”
I was baffled. It usually took almost three times as much to get there from Cambridge.
“Quick,” said the lawyer.
Standing up, Kalaj gulped down the remainder of his coffee, left some change on the table, picked up his things, and off we went. We hopped into his car and right away, after a few awkward turns through narrow alleys to the river, his huge Checker cab—the tank, the Titanic, the armored vehicle and intrepid war machine—was zipping its way at breakneck speed on Memorial Drive with the wonky grace of an aging dowager on wheels.
In my life I had never traveled so fast. We were begging for an accident. Why had I ever befriended such a nut?
“Where did you learn to drive?” I said, my way of asking him to slow down.
“In a driving school owned by a Tunisian Jew in Marseilles. That’s why we make the best pilots in the Israeli air force,