ready and everyone was urged to sit down around a table that could handle no more than four persons. People sat on the sofa, on the floor. We improvised a chair by using a tiny stepladder I’d found on the street; Zeinab could use it as a stool. I had an impulse to go downstairs and invite the twins from Apartment 21, but then thought better of it. As for the neighbors across the service entrance, I had no doubt that they knew a party was going on. Had they wanted to, they could have invited themselves. We drank lots of wine, and thank goodness Frank had prepared enough baked lasagna for a regiment, because we would have moved from the beef and the chestnuts and vegetables to the breads and cheeses without much of anything else in between. Kalaj was ecstatic and kissed Frank on his shimmering bald pate. “One doesn’t sit around a table for the food only. Food is there to feed friendship,” he said. I don’t think any of us understood the wisdom of the saying, but it sounded good, and perhaps we were all in the mood to believe just about anything that spoke well of friends and good fellowship. Count had brought many goodies from some hilly area in Umbria, and no one doubted that this had turned into a feast far, far superior to the tiny supper originally planned.
At some point, a song I had long ago taped on a tiny cassette came on, and Kalaj immediately pricked up his ears and asked us to be quiet for a moment because he wanted to hear the words. He hadn’t heard the song in a very long time, he said. “A very long time,” he repeated. Then, having caught the right words and synced his lips to the singer’s as he sometimes would with Om Kalsoum at Café Algiers, he began to whine the words ever so softly, as though he was ashamed of being seen singing, because for all he knew, he was just singing to himself because he needed to hear the words from his own mouth for him to feel them. The song was about a man thinking of a woman he hasn’t seen in a very long time but whom he knows he’ll meet again when their paths cross. The path to each is crooked and filled with detours—she’s met other men, and he’s met women too—but he knows that eventually they will meet and make love and speak of the incidental lovers each had loved along the way.
“This is not necessarily about a man and a woman,” said Frank, “It could be about a man who’s lost his way and decides to give his homeland a woman’s name. The woman is just a metaphor for home.” Kalaj listened attentively. Had Count said such a thing he would have strafed him with a machine gun filled with ire and contradiction, but coming from Frank, the comment seemed to placate something very deep in Kalaj. “The woman is a metaphor for home,” he said, echoing Frank’s impromptu remark, “the woman is a metaphor for home,” he repeated. Then he asked me to play the song again. But before the second stanza started, he suddenly rushed out and headed straight into the kitchen.
When he came back and Zeinab had started serving the Armenian desserts and the mousse, Léonie could still be heard carrying on about the woman who had sacrificed her life for a man who’d outgrown her too soon.
Léonie and Count agreed that the issue wasn’t as simple as all that. Kalaj disagreed. Why they had resurrected the topic wasn’t clear at all, especially after the song we’d heard had put him in so contemplative a mood. But as soon as it became obvious that Count had joined forces with Léonie, Kalaj left the table, went into the bedroom, and slammed the door behind him. Maybe he was making a phone call, maybe the food wasn’t agreeing with him. Zeinab seemed perplexed but didn’t say anything, and the Armenian girl and Frank kept exchanging mystified looks, all the while determined to sample their desserts and stay out of the Tunisian’s bad temper. Something was definitely wrong. A few moments later, I opened the door slowly and stepped into my bedroom. He had not only shut the door but had turned off the lights and was lying on my bed in total darkness, smoking.
We all have our phantoms, and I was seeing