No effusive promises. No languid words that spoke more sorrow than either knew he nursed. No messy feelings. Just a clean break. I was totally and irredeemably ersatz.
“I’ll call you tomorrow and let you know where things stand. Bonne soirée.”
I spent almost all of the next day at Widener Library, away from every phone. It was high time I started making notes of the things I needed to spill back during my comprehensives.
Later that afternoon when I got home, a piece of torn paper was stuck into my mailbox. I thought it was from Ekaterina. “We tried to reach you. Kalaj said you must have gone to the library. He didn’t want to disturb you there. He asked me to say goodbye for him. Zeinab.”
All I remember feeling at that moment was a pang of something I could never name, because it hovered between unbearable shame and unbearable sorrow. I had done this. No one else. Never had I sunk so low in my life. I felt like someone who has been putting off dropping in on a dying friend. Each time the dying person calls him and asks him to come by for a few minutes, the friend, on the pretext of trying to lift up the sick man’s spirits, makes light of his worries. I’ll try to come tomorrow. “There may not be a tomorrow,” the dying man says. “There you go again. You watch, you’ll outlive us all.”
And yet, no sooner had I felt this burst of shame than it was immediately relieved by an exhilarating sense of lightness I hadn’t felt since walking out on Niloufar that night—freedom, joy, space, as though an oppressive worry, which had been haunting and weighing and gnawing at me for months, had suddenly been lifted. I was soaring, as light as a kite racing through the clouds.
On impulse I wanted to seek him out and tell him about this strange, uplifting feeling—as though it were a startling revelation about a person we both knew, or a truth about human nature that I couldn’t wait to share, because he, of all people, understood all about these hidden mainsprings in the twisted gadgetry of the soul.
Yet now, I could head back to Harvard Square and not think twice about running into him. I could walk through Café Algiers and never worry he’d be there, go to Casablanca and no longer prepare to listen to yet another tirade, or expect to be unavoidably interrupted, or rehearse a new litany of excuses. Instead, I could sit at a table without talking to anyone, just as I’d done that Sunday in midsummer while reading Montaigne. Simply sit, mind my own business, be alone, and keep that door shut, which I’d accidentally flung open one hot Sunday when I’d walked up to a complete stranger and found someone who, but for incidentals, could have been me, but a me without hope, without recourse, without future.
I began to feel as certain countries do when their tyrant dies. At first there’s a hush in the city, and everyone mourns, partly out of disbelief, partly because life, trade, friendship, love, eating, drinking seem unthinkable without a tyrant to keep them in tow. Something in us always dies when the world as we’ve known it changes, and the sorrow is always genuine. But by the evening of a tyrant’s death, cars begin to honk, people suddenly shout hurrahs, and soon enough, the whole city, which only this morning was bathed in stupor and trembling, feels like a carnival town. Someone steps on top of a bus waving a forbidden pennant and everyone clamors back, dying to embrace him. The squares are filled with people. Everyone is partying.
I felt terrible for him, and I ached for him, thinking how he must have turned around at the airport and taken a last, long, languorous look at Boston, defeat and betrayal and the things he feared and hated most in life souring the ever-renewed sting of exile in his life. How many times must he have driven passengers to the airport and thought: One day, one day it will be me.
But I was forcing myself to feel sorry for him. I knew, as I prepared to head out to Café Algiers that night, already feeling something like a blithe sprint in my gait, that even as I might go searching for his shadow and pay homage to it the way people do penance at the shrine of a saint they may have helped