that echoed in our minds as each said goodbye and finally made his way back to a place neither could in good conscience call a home was the evening’s attempts at French wit in a language we spoke with joy and bitterness in our hearts, because we spoke it with the wrong accent, because it was our mother tongue, but not our native tongue. Our native tongue—we didn’t even know what that was.
A Berber by birth, Kalaj had grown up to love France in Tunis, while I, since childhood, had worshipped Paris in Alexandria. Tunis had no more use for him when he jumped a navy ship in Marseilles at the age of seventeen than Egypt had for me when it expelled me for being Jewish when I was fourteen. We were, as he liked to boast when we’d run into women at a bar, each other in reverse.
He had as little patience for Islam as I for Judaism. Our indifference to religion, to our people, to the never-ending conflict in the Middle East, to so many issues that could easily have driven a wedge between us, our contempt for patriotism, for flags, for causes, or for any of the feel-good ideologies that had swept through Europe since the late sixties, left us with little else than a warped sense of loyalty—what he called complicité , complicity—for anyone who thought like us, who was like us. There was, however, no one else like us. I’m not even sure we knew what “being like us” meant, since we were so different. We adhered to nothing, nothing clung to us, nothing ever “took.” Our capital was an imagined Paris. Our country the two of us. The rest was bunk. De la merde . Passports were bunk. Newspapers were bunk. Cambridge was bunk. My exams were bunk. The books I was reading were bunk. The massive Checker cab he drove every day, which his nemesis called le Titanique, was bunk, his women, his green card application that never seemed to be headed anywhere, his lawyer, Casablanca, his impacted wisdom teeth, his first wife, his second wife, his marriage to the second wife before he’d divorced the first and whom he’d grown to hate no less than the first, because both, in the end, had kicked him out of their lives, because everyone was always kicking him out of their life, all, all was bunk. Even the personals, which he loved to read on the day they were published in the Boston Phoenix , were bunk, just as his replies, which I had to write for him in English, were pure bunk. He contradicted everyone and everything because in contradiction he heard his own voice, but no sooner had he heard it than he’d turn around and contradict himself and say he was as full of bunk as the next fellow. In the end, even France, when we’d talked long and hard enough about it, was bunk. The only exception, he said, was family and blood. His youngest brother, his mother, even his sister who ran away with an Algerian in Paris and whom he refused to have anything to do with though he kept sending her occasional care packages from America. And perhaps, in the end, he included me as well in his tiny clan. For us he’d have laid down his life. He must have known, as I’d always known, that for him I probably lacked both the courage and commitment to risk a thing.
If I did help him, as I did when I spent hours coaching him for his interview with Immigration Services, it was probably either without thinking or because I couldn’t come up with a good enough excuse not to. Or maybe I did it to take my mind off my own work, to feel that I was doing something worthwhile besides reading all these books I knew I’d probably never reread. He thanked me profusely and said that help came so seldom in his life that he knew how to value those who had any to give. I dismissed the whole thing and said it was nothing. He insisted I was wrong, that a sure sign of being a good friend was the inability to see how good a friend one was. I knew better than to start arguing the point. My gesture had come too easily, carried no risk, no obligation, no scruple, no
A Berber by birth, Kalaj had grown up to love France in Tunis, while I, since childhood, had worshipped Paris in Alexandria. Tunis had no more use for him when he jumped a navy ship in Marseilles at the age of seventeen than Egypt had for me when it expelled me for being Jewish when I was fourteen. We were, as he liked to boast when we’d run into women at a bar, each other in reverse.
He had as little patience for Islam as I for Judaism. Our indifference to religion, to our people, to the never-ending conflict in the Middle East, to so many issues that could easily have driven a wedge between us, our contempt for patriotism, for flags, for causes, or for any of the feel-good ideologies that had swept through Europe since the late sixties, left us with little else than a warped sense of loyalty—what he called complicité , complicity—for anyone who thought like us, who was like us. There was, however, no one else like us. I’m not even sure we knew what “being like us” meant, since we were so different. We adhered to nothing, nothing clung to us, nothing ever “took.” Our capital was an imagined Paris. Our country the two of us. The rest was bunk. De la merde . Passports were bunk. Newspapers were bunk. Cambridge was bunk. My exams were bunk. The books I was reading were bunk. The massive Checker cab he drove every day, which his nemesis called le Titanique, was bunk, his women, his green card application that never seemed to be headed anywhere, his lawyer, Casablanca, his impacted wisdom teeth, his first wife, his second wife, his marriage to the second wife before he’d divorced the first and whom he’d grown to hate no less than the first, because both, in the end, had kicked him out of their lives, because everyone was always kicking him out of their life, all, all was bunk. Even the personals, which he loved to read on the day they were published in the Boston Phoenix , were bunk, just as his replies, which I had to write for him in English, were pure bunk. He contradicted everyone and everything because in contradiction he heard his own voice, but no sooner had he heard it than he’d turn around and contradict himself and say he was as full of bunk as the next fellow. In the end, even France, when we’d talked long and hard enough about it, was bunk. The only exception, he said, was family and blood. His youngest brother, his mother, even his sister who ran away with an Algerian in Paris and whom he refused to have anything to do with though he kept sending her occasional care packages from America. And perhaps, in the end, he included me as well in his tiny clan. For us he’d have laid down his life. He must have known, as I’d always known, that for him I probably lacked both the courage and commitment to risk a thing.
If I did help him, as I did when I spent hours coaching him for his interview with Immigration Services, it was probably either without thinking or because I couldn’t come up with a good enough excuse not to. Or maybe I did it to take my mind off my own work, to feel that I was doing something worthwhile besides reading all these books I knew I’d probably never reread. He thanked me profusely and said that help came so seldom in his life that he knew how to value those who had any to give. I dismissed the whole thing and said it was nothing. He insisted I was wrong, that a sure sign of being a good friend was the inability to see how good a friend one was. I knew better than to start arguing the point. My gesture had come too easily, carried no risk, no obligation, no scruple, no
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