they were the product of some strict Eastern European ballet school regimen. “And don’t stare,” she said. Even her cagey bantering felt familiar, warm, intimate, as though something of hers had touched my hand and then held it and didn’t mean to let go. I wondered if this was because we were all speaking in French or just simply because Kalaj, as usual and without knowing it, had been stoking everyone’s libido and we were all playing by his rules, where contact among humans was easy, natural, untrammeled, and necessary. Or maybe, in the end, we were all four of us truly happy to be together and no longer felt like stranded members of a disbanded company who’d given up on themselves in a Lotusland called Cambridge. The pond wasn’t exactly ours to claim, but it let us play there, the way an empty tennis court can be yours for a day when the owners are out of town. Mild-mannered poachers trying to catch a few hours in the sun, not rogues or squatters. We were borrowing America, not settling in. The diffidence and haste with which we kept throwing the watermelon rinds in plastic bags so as not to attract bees or litter the grounds told everyone we were determined to keep a low profile. I said nothing, but I realized I was the only one among them who had a green card. Léonie plopped herself right next to Kalaj, and they embraced.
Later, during the picnic, when Ekaterina produced some Cheerios for the children, Kalaj, who had never seen the likes of Cheerios in his life, asked to taste one. Before he had put it in his mouth, she silently mouthed the words jumbo-ersatz, jumbo-ersatz, meaning: You watch, he’ll start. The square container was immense, the food was totally artificial, nature never spawned these flavors—Kalaj was starting to load his Kalashnikov. When Ekaterina took out a Ziploc bag with five large, juicy nectarines, he exploded. “You should never buy nectarines. Nectarines are totally ersatz . . .”
“Like mules,” she said.
“Yes, exactly,” he said, missing the joke at his expense. “Sesame Street is all ersatz too. It teaches people to be ersatz. Just listen to the voices of each character. Not one has a human voice.”
“But children like it, and children like nectarines, and I like nectarines. Do you want one?” she asked.
“Yes, I do,” he conceded.
Her two little packs of Twinkies produced the same outraged response. Abject scorn followed by stoic acquiescence. “So, let’s see what this Twinkie thing is,” he finally said.
Then he got up and took a short stroll along the shore, dipping his toes in the water again, staring at the tops of the trees in the distance. He was enjoying Walden Pond, even America.
And right then and there I finally understood Kalaj. Behind his wholesale indictment of America, he was desperately struggling not to give in in case America decided not to yield to him first. The lawyer had mentioned the word deportation, and both of us had winced. Kalaj preferred to turn his back first, in the hope that America might ask him to look more favorably on her and give her a second chance. He was, without knowing it, doing what he’d always done: flirting . . . but this time with a superpower. America, as far as he was concerned, had not really put a penny on the table, and he was getting tired of staying in the game. America was busy stacking up its chips, while he—anyone could tell—was obviously bluffing.
Perhaps, also, by degrading America and nicknaming amerloque everything that was wrong with the world, he was forging for himself an imaginary Mediterranean identity, a Mediterranean paradise lost, something that may never have existed but that he needed to believe was out there in some imaginary other shore because otherwise he’d have nothing and nowhere to turn to in case America turned its back on him.
When it was time to fold everything back into the car and throw the garbage out in the appropriate bins, we looked at each other and realized that we had all taken more sun than we had hoped. It gave us a sort of heady good cheer, as if we’d finally caught up with a summer that had slipped us by.
Before entering the car, Kalaj asked everyone to clear their feet of any sand or mud, especially you there in the back, meaning me. Then he said he needed to piss. “So, pee,” said Léonie, who