that what it is? Now you’ve just made things ten times worse,” I told Claude.
“How could I have made things worse if Piero says he won’t file anything with the police.”
“Count won’t?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“No, Piero considers Kalaj a wretched marocchino who’ll soon enough get himself deported one way or another. Besides, this is his last year in Law School and he wants to put last night completely behind him. He’s already made an appointment with a famous dentist in New York and is flying there this afternoon to be seen on Sunday. Then he comes back and wants nothing to do with your friends, or my friends, which means you, of course, and that poor woman.”
“Count gets new teeth and she goes back to babysitting. Count was right about women seldom getting a second chance,” I said, trying to underscore the irony of the situation.
“Your problem is you lost someone who could have been an important friend to you.”
Claude, a social climber? I’d never seen that side of him before.
I WAS SO happy to hear that Count was not going to go to the police that I immediately called Léonie and told her the news. She was not happy to hear that Count had buckled, but she was relieved. Things would get back to what they’d been before Kalaj. This, I felt, was perhaps the story of his life. No matter how long you knew him, and how he disrupted the world of those around him, eventually he’d be out of your life and things would go back to being what they’d been before him. Despite his dogged efforts to recast the world in his own image, he made no impact, changed nothing, left no mark. In fact, he’d already walked out of history and the family of man long before he or any of us knew it. He reminded me of a mythological beast that the earth sprouts forth on some demented whim and that wreaks great harm on earthlings, ravages the countryside, and then, without explanation, is suddenly swallowed back up by earth. The dead are forgotten, the wounds heal, people move on.
Eventually I did arrange for Kalaj and Léonie to meet. Perhaps they should not have met, for both managed to unearth a demon neither probably suspected they had in them. When they met in public a few days later, things seemed to go very well. Kalaj took Austin under his wing again and was kinder than any father could be to the boy. But one evening, he showed up at Café Algiers with scratch marks streaked all over his neck. When he rolled up his sleeves, I saw that his right forearm was full of bruises. “What on earth is going on?” I asked.
He smiled it off.
“Do you guys beat each other up now?” I asked, trying to make light of it. Had I suspected the truth, I would never have asked.
He didn’t answer. Then, a few seconds later, as if out of nowhere, he said, “Sometimes.”
“Sometimes?”
“We like it.”
“You what?”
“Some people need drugs. Others alcohol. She likes to slap me.”
“Do you really like it when she slaps you?”
I couldn’t believe my ears.
He thought about it as though the question had never occurred to him before. Who in his right mind would dare ask such a question of a Berber?
“I don’t mind,” he said.
“You’re both sick.”
“We are.”
Had he pushed his self-destructiveness so far?
It couldn’t last. Léonie broke up with him one evening at Café Algiers. She dashed in through the back door, walked up to our table, told him “Écoute, c’est fini,” gave him a plastic bag in which some of his things were folded, and walked out.
“Everyone does this to me,” he said. “Either they shut their door to me or they bring me remnants. As if I needed remnants and underwear.” And with all his might and all his rage, he hurled the plastic bag into the kitchen area. The owner of the café came out of the kitchen, walked to our table, and said, “If you go on like this, you won’t be able to come here.”
“What did I tell you?” Kalaj turned to me without even looking at the owner. “Everyone shuts their door in the end.”
The whole scene put me in a terrible mood, because it did not just make me think of the numberless times I too had promised to shut my door at him and have no more to do with him, but of how close I myself had