compare to other schools? And then more broadly, how did American and French educations compare; and yes, please—because it really does help—another glass of red would be lovely … And then, bit by bit, it got less stiff. Sirena talked about her schooldays in Milan, and then Skandar spoke of his education in Beirut, at a French-language college, and how his parents had sent him to boarding school in Paris for the last two years (it was, he said, like something out of an old French movie, brutal and competitive and austere, with students flipping out left and right from the pressure, and horsemeat for supper. “Stray cats picked through garbage and howled in the alleyway outside the kitchens, and we used to joke that they were in the casseroles”) and how this had altered forever the course of his life without him even knowing it at the time. “Half of my friends from home—maybe more than half—went instead to the American University there, in Beirut; and then they ended up coming here, to the States, for graduate school or whatever. Which means their lives are in English, at least, or are American—all the way, in some cases.” He paused. “A couple are in Canada. In Montreal, you can eat your cake and have it too—speak French and English and Arabic also, because there are so many Lebanese there now.”
“And how’s it different for you? You’re in America now—you’re at Harvard. You can’t get closer to the American establishment than that.”
Behind his glasses he opened his eyes wide in an ironic gesture that made his eyebrows dart up his forehead. “Yes, I suppose,” he said. “But that isn’t my point, really. There’s a way of being in exile, for the educated of any non-European country, that can be very comfortable in its worldliness …”
“The land of silly accents,” I said aloud, without quite meaning to.
“What do you mean?” Sirena frowned.
“Something a friend once said. She worked in radio, but somehow she was invited to an academic dinner, all these old professors at Princeton, and she said half of them had won the Nobel Prize, and that not one spoke English without a silly accent. She said she felt like she’d taken a plane to the land of geniuses with silly accents.”
Skandar smiled vaguely.
“Not that I’m saying you guys have silly accents.”
“But it’s quite so, your friend is exactly right. In this country, there are pockets like this, almost like low-lying clouds. We’re in one here. They are in America, or on it, but they have very little to do with it, and we—the brown, the black, the yellow, the Jews and Arabs from all over—we congregate, each in our diaspora, and make a world of familiar conversation, a small life in our ivory towers. And we bark at one another in our silly accents, in what is to most of us a foreign tongue. I always marvel that we manage to communicate at all. But maybe we manage to say more than we think—or maybe less. I’m not sure.”
“English is the tyranny,” Sirena put in, looking cross, as if the language itself could be blamed.
“But isn’t it similar in France? You were saying the other day that you don’t feel really at home there, either.”
“In France,” she said dryly, “people speak French rather than English.”
“But also now more English.” Skandar was highly amused. “And sometimes even German. It’s not uncommon to encounter colleagues with whom one might speak all three languages, in different moments. There, you are in Europe, not floating on top of it like an alien body.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
He paused, drank. From his eyes I could tell he was ironic and serious at the same time. “In Europe, for good or bad, history is always there, the context is always present. When I say I’m Lebanese of Palestinian extraction, from Beirut, that I’m predominantly a Christian by heritage, and then that I went to university in Paris, that I teach at the École Normale, a great deal is immediately known about me—of what I am and what I am not. Still more can be gauged by my clothes, my demeanor—and I will be placed by these things. Not only by my fellow professors with ‘silly accents,’ but by the greengrocer or the taxi driver also.”
“What’s so great about that? Especially if they’re wrong?”
“I’m not saying that it’s good or bad. I’m just explaining how it’s different.”
“You mustn’t be defensive of your country,” Sirena chided. Her irritation