Berkeley Street, until I realized that what I was really doing was bidding farewell to Café Algiers, to all the people I’d befriended there, to Zeinab and Sabatini and the Algerian and Moroccan cabdrivers, to everyone I’d met because of him, to the Harvest and Casablanca and the Harvard Epworth Church on Sunday evenings, to our little lingo we’d improvised from the very start and to the fellowship that had blossomed because of it. Bonne soirée to so many new things he’d brought into my life, to our dinners with friends, to our dinners alone together, to happy hour, to the spirit of complicity that had been missing from my life and helped us find a common ground together during those hours when his worries over his green card and mine over my career cast a pall that nothing could dispel except the women who drifted into our lives and couldn’t make us happier than when we were talking about them after we’d been with them. Bonne soirée to our small oasis, to our imagined Mediterranean alcove, to our little corner of France immediately following last call, to the illusion of myself as a lone holdout stranded in a large, cold, solitary, darkling plain that had become my American home. I was one of them now, perhaps had always been, was always going to be but had never known it or was reluctant to own up to it until I’d met Kalaj and then lost Kalaj.
Christmas I spent alone in Cambridge. I read more in those three weeks than I’d done since meeting Kalaj almost five months earlier. In January, I re-took my comprehensives. I passed, and four days later I was allowed to take my orals. I passed those too. On February 1, I left Concord Avenue and moved to Lowell House.
THERE WAS A period after Kalaj’s departure when I’d occasionally spot his old Checker cab around Cambridge, being driven by the Moroccan. Each time I saw it, I’d feel a sudden throb, part dread, part joy, followed by instant guilt, and then the unavoidable shrug. Sometimes I’d bump into the Moroccan, and at first we’d greet each other, and then, when it was clear that all we had to say was Did you hear from him? followed by a hasty Me neither, we began to look the other way. The Moroccan spoke French with a different accent, was timid, and couldn’t ruffle anyone’s feathers if he tried. At Café Algiers, where I saw him quite frequently at first, he spoke meekly, in whispers, like a conspirator. Something told me that Moumou the Algerian had warned him of Kalaj’s impending deportation and told him that all he needed was to wait things out till Kalaj was forced to sell at a very low price. It made me angry.
And yet, each time I spotted the cab, I’d remember that clear, sunlit morning when Kalaj had stuck his head out of his window as he drove around Harvard Square and volleyed a jaunty greeting that tore me out of my torpor and brought me back to the here and now. I was glad that day that there was someone like him in my life, but I was also glad he was stuck in traffic and wasn’t going to join me. Those contradictory impulses never resolved their quarrel and were still tussling within me long after he was gone, for I kept wanting to seek him out all the while hoping I’d never find him. Seeing his old cab on Mass Ave or parked along Brattle Street stirred feelings and questions I didn’t care to tackle any longer; no sooner had they risen to consciousness than they were whisked away, unanswered, unheeded. One day, I kept telling myself, I’ll hail his cab and take a ride in it. But I never did, partly because cabs were never in my budget, and partly because I knew that after merely opening the door, I’d find what I’d come looking for: a whiff of the old cracked leather upholstery that always reminded me of a shoe store, a view of the tilted jump seats he’d cautioned the two boys against sitting in on our way to Walden Pond, the indelible scent of trapped cigarette smoke which, now that I think of it, was perennially wrapped around him. And besides, taking a cab would be all wrong: I had never ridden in the back. When we hopped into the car or when he drove me back