Kalaj’s for the first time, perhaps because, for the first time, he wasn’t able to shoo them away by shouting.
Something very serious was troubling him. Was he missing someone, was this reminding him of something somewhere else, were his problems catching up with him—the green card, money, solitude, divorce, deportation? “No, nothing, nothing,” he replied. I made a motion to leave the bedroom to let him be by himself, since it was clear he didn’t want to speak. When I was about to open the door, he simply asked me to stay.
“What is it?” I asked. “Tell me.”
He caught his breath. “I cooked this whole dinner for everyone and everyone is having a great time, but, you see, what about me?” He hesitated a moment, “Et moi?” he said. “Et moi?” “I don’t understand,” I said, “everyone is happy because of you. Everyone is grateful. And no one is ignoring you or has even done or said anything to slight you.”
“That’s because you see the surface, but you don’t look underneath. But what about me?”
I still had no idea what he was getting at or what was eating him.
“In exactly a year’s time I will not be here. Each and every one of you will be here, but I won’t be among you. I will miss all this so terribly, that I don’t even want to think beyond this minute. You see now? Has anyone thought about me?”
I was dumbfounded. Silence was my only way of agreeing with him and of saying what I would never had had the courage or the cruelty to say to his face: You are right, my friend, we completely failed to think of you, we do not see your hell, you are all alone in this, and, yes, you may be right about this too: you may not be among us next year, may not even be in our thoughts next year.
“Now you see?” he asked.
“Now I see,” I said, meaning: There is nothing, nothing I can say to buoy your spirits. I was helpless. I felt like the captain of a cruise ship who shouts “Man overboard . . . but, ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing we can do, it’s time for lunch, and the food is waiting.” To say anything so as to say something would have forced me to utter fatuous palliatives, and I had drunk too much already to lie persuasively.
But I suddenly realized one thing very clearly in this dark bedroom. By looking at him I was almost looking at myself. He was the measure of how close I might come to falling apart and losing everything here. He was just my destiny three steps ahead of me. I could fail my exams, be sent packing to New York, and in a year from now, no one would recall this dinner party, much less remember to think of me.
“See? I’m like someone who prepares a whole feast knowing he is dying, and everyone is happily eating and drinking away and forgets that the cook will be carried away by the end of the meal. I don’t want to be the dying cook of the party. I don’t want to leave and be elsewhere. I need help and there is no one, no one.”
I heard the catch in his voice.
“So, what about me?” he asked, as though coming back to a nagging question that hadn’t just cropped up because of this evening but that he’d been brewing perhaps since childhood, since forever, and the answer was always going to be the same; there is no answer. “Et moi?” he repeated, feeling desperately sorry for himself, while I still stood there, unable to say or do anything for him.
And, for the first time that evening, I saw that this short mantra of his also had another meaning, which had simply eluded me all the time I’d been standing there in the dark listening to him. It didn’t just mean And what about me? but spoke an injured, hopeless What happens to me now?
He wasn’t asking me for an answer, or invoking my help, or even pleading with the god of fairness and forgiveness overseeing his affairs in North America; he was just groping in the dark and repeating words of incantation that would eventually lead him out of his cave in the only way he knew: with tears. With tears came solace and surrender, pardon and courage.
That night as I watched him cry, you could almost touch his despair and