had managed to put behind me ever since meeting Kalaj and that I was convinced was a thing of the past now. There was no one to call. I missed Allison. I missed Ekaterina. Missed Niloufar. Even Linda would have been welcome. Everything felt soulless. By nighttime I began to miss the hasty patter of footsteps of the night nurses. I went back to Café Algiers, a ten-minute walk. Kalaj saw me before I so much as started to look for him. Actually, he was yelling at me. “Are you out of your mind, are you crazy?” He seemed in a panic. “You should be in bed.” Zeinab, who was nursing a drink between Kalaj and a young Moroccan cabdriver I’d seen only once before, took one look at me and said I should sit down right away. “You’re all white. You’re going to faint.” They brought me a glass of soda water which Kalaj forced me to drink, all the while sprinkling my face with drops from a piece of melting ice. For a moment I felt like a wounded Victor Laszlo stumbling into Rick’s Café Américain in Casablanca and being bandaged by staunch and loyal partisans.
I had not seen Kalaj in weeks. He seemed changed.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I am all right. And you?”
“Could be better.”
Typical strains of veiled sorrow fringing self-pity.
“They took my license away and will never renew it. The FBI. I had to sell the car.”
“We’re going to have to see your lawyer.”
“You know as well as I do that he is a crook. He’ll end up costing more than the car.”
“But you can’t just let them take your car away without trying to do something about it.”
Léonie’s boss had a lawyer friend who might be asked to help. Except that Léonie felt that her ex-lover hadn’t forgiven Kalaj, and might be happier having him totally out of the way.
“And the Freemasons?” I asked.
“The Freemasons, well, we’ll see about the Freemasons.”
Silence.
“And if these don’t work, well, all of you in this bar right now—and that includes you too, Zeinab—will say that the last Checker cab in Boston was driven by a pure Berber who was proud of his skin and proud of his friends.”
Kalaj was in top form.
“If I had a car I’d drive you home right this instant.”
“I’ll take him if he wants,” said the young Moroccan cabdriver.
“How many times do I have to teach you,” said Kalaj, reprimanding the cabdriver who was more my age than Kalaj’s. “Never say ‘if he wants’ with this kind of honeyed, ersatz tone in your voice. Instead, say, ‘I’m taking you home. Let’s go.’ ”
“Well,” said the shy Moroccan, “should we go?”
Everyone laughed.
“They said I could drink if I wanted,” I insisted.
“They said you should go home,” said Kalaj, as patronizing as ever.
I knew that he cared for me. But I could also tell that he was holding a grudge and had finally seen through all of my wiles. A chill seemed lodged between us, and although I’d long wished for it, I hated seeing how easily it had settled, as though reclaiming what had all along been its rightful place.
It was Zeinab who spoke about it as soon as Kalaj said he needed to go to the bathroom.
He was going to be deported, she said. Even the Freemasons, to say nothing of the Legal Aid Society, were unable to stop it. His impending divorce hurt his chances a lot. Actually, it wasn’t a divorce. The marriage had been annulled.
“We’re still going to have to find a way,” I said, feeling that simply resolving to do something was already a way of doing something.
“I don’t think there’s anything he can do at this point.”
“What if he decides to stay as an illegal and disappears, say, in Oregon or Wyoming?”
“I don’t think it will work. He doesn’t want to be illegal.”
“What will he do then?”
“Probably go back. He can’t go back to France. So, you see, for him it’s back to Tunisia.”
But that’s like saying that the past seventeen years of his life—half his life—never happened, I thought. To go back to his parents’ home, to go back to the old bedroom where he’d slept and might still have to sleep with his brothers as he’d done as a child, to go back to a place where he dreamed of a France he had not yet seen only to realize that he’d not only already seen France, but that he’d lived and gotten married there and might