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steal food when the owner isn’t looking, finally taking on NATO, UNESCO, Nabisco, Ceauşescu, Tabasco, Lambrusco, you name it, all of them big, shameless signs of a world gone completely mad and ersatz. I had never heard such abominable agitprop in my life. The American president he renamed le Boy Scout . “The Italians are rotten thieves. The French will always sell their mothers, throw in their wives, then their sisters; but their daughters they’ll sell you first. As for Arabs, we were infinitely better off as colonies. The only one who understood history was Nostradamus.”
    “Who?”
    “Nostradamus.” No sooner named, than out poured a litany of quatrains predicting one catastrophe after the other. “Nostradamus and the myth of the eternal return.”
    “You mean Nietzsche.”
    “Nostradamus, I said.”
    “How do you know about Nostradamus?”
    “How do I know!” he asked rhetorically. “I know, OK?”—which he pronounced oké ?—“Must I teach you everything I know?”
    I couldn’t tell yet whether this was amicable sparring or comic banter about to turn ugly, or if they were engaged in the besotted ramblings of Vladimir and Estragon. But the louder of the two was definitely a cross between Zorba the Greek on steroids and Rameau’s nephew on speed.
    At some point I could no longer resist. I stood up and headed to his table. “I couldn’t help overhearing you. Are you students here?” I asked in French.
    No answer. Just a dismissive shake of the head, immediately followed by that sinister gimlet stare of his, which seemed to ask, And if we are, what business of yours is it, anyway?
    I wanted to say that I hadn’t spoken to a single person, much less in French, for two days, and with Apartments 42, 21, and 43 I traded nothing but distant glances, and frankly this sitting on the roof terrace every day was not good for my soul, and eating by myself was no better, to say nothing of the watered-down swill they called coffee here. But the silence between us was hard to take, because it came with a decidedly hostile stare. I was already preparing to apologize and bow out, saying that I hadn’t meant to interrupt, thinking to myself that I should have known better than to barge in on perfect strangers and expect to make small talk with a street ruffian and his acolyte.
    Before I returned to my table, the words slipped out of my mouth:
    “Sorry to disturb. I just felt like speaking to a Frenchman.”
    Again the stare.
    “Me, French? What are you? Blind? Or is it deaf you are? With my Berber skin? Look here.” And with this he pinched the skin of his forearm. “This, my dear friend, is not French skin.” As though I’d insulted him. He was obviously proud of his Berber skin. “This is the color of wheat and gold.”
    “Sorry, my mistake.”
    I was determined to step back to my table and pick up Montaigne where I’d left him face down.
    “How about you, are you French?” he asked.
    I couldn’t resist.
    “With my nose?”
    He was playing with me. I knew he wasn’t French, just as he must have immediately guessed I wasn’t either. Each was basically letting the other think he could pass for French. A tacit compliment that hit the mark in both of us.
    “How come you speak French if you’re not French?”
    Anyone born in the colonies would have known right away the answer to that. He was definitely playing.
    “For the same reason you speak French,” I replied. He burst out laughing. We understood each other perfectly.
    “Another one of us,” he explained to Young Ernest, who was still trying to sort out what possible importance Nostradamus could have in today’s complex geopolitical conflicts.
    “What do you mean one of us ?”
    “ Il ne comprend rien du tout celui-là, this guy doesn’t understand a thing,” he said, with typical mock hostility prickling his voice.
    We exchanged names. “You can call me Kalaj,” he said, as though yielding to a public nickname he preferred to his own