Harvard Square Read Online Free PDF

name, but also because there was a vague suggestion in his voice that one could call him Kalaj “for now”—until, that is, he got to know you better.
    He’d been here for six months only. Before that Milan. This was home now.
    He threw out a word in Arabic at me.
    I threw back another.
    We laughed. We were not testing each other; more like feeling the ground for how to improvise a tentative pontoon bridge.
    “Perfect accent,” he commented, “even if it is Egyptian Arabic.”
    “Yours is difficult to place.”
    “I seldom speak Arabic,” he said, then asked, “Jewish?”
    “Moslem?” I replied.
    “Just like a Jew: always answers with a question.”
    “Just like a Moslem: always answers the wrong question.”
    We were both laughing, while Young Hemingway stared uneasily, thrown off as he was by our chaffing and mock-religious slurs.
    “Why did the Arab store owner buy fifty pairs of jeans from the Jew?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Because Isaac promised Abdou to buy them back at a higher price.”
    Laughter.
    “But why did Isaac buy them back in the end?”
    I didn’t know the answer to this either.
    “Because the Arab agreed to sell them at half price.”
    “Did the Arab ever buy blue jeans from the Jew again?” I asked.
    “All the time! You see, the jeans were made in Egypt and cost the Arab a fraction of what the Jew paid for them to begin with.” We laughed heartily.
    “The Middle East!” he said.
    “What do you mean the Middle East ?” asked bewildered Hemingway.
    Kalaj ignored the question.
    “Were you waiting for someone?” he asked.
    “No, just reading.”
    “But you’ve been reading for hours. Why don’t you just sit down with us, and we’ll talk a bit? Bring your books.”
    So he had been aware of me all along. He told me about his taxi cab. I told him about my forthcoming comprehensives. We were talking. Talking is what humans like to do when they’re together, talking is natural. On Sunday afternoons, people talk, laugh, drink coffee. I had almost forgotten that people did this. Before I knew it, he ordered a round of coffee for the three of us. “Talk is good, but someone needs to order coffee,” he said.
    He was, with this round of coffee—and it happened so fast I almost didn’t notice—celebrating me. This blustering volcano is probably kind, I thought. But crafty, ill-tempered, and mad. Stay away.
    I was the exact opposite. Interest in other people came naturally enough; but it came the long way around, with so many bends, hurdles, doubts, and deferrals that halfway toward a friendship, discouragement and disappointment would invariably settle in, and something in me would simply give up.
    Once again, Kalaj ranted against American women. He told us an obscene joke about an Arab who is arrested and beaten by the police for jumping a naked blond woman sunning herself on a deserted beach in North Africa. As they shackle him and pound him with more blows and accuse him of defiling a dead body—“Can’t you see she’s dead?” shouts one of the policemen—all the Arab could do in his defense was to shout back, “But, officers, I thought she was an American.”
    Kalaj pointed to the various women sitting in the café. This one over there wouldn’t speak to him again because he’d refused to use protection. This other one sitting with her beau had turned him down once by saying “I think I’m going to take a pass.” He had never heard such insipid ersatz-speak before, and he repeated the words to us as if he were mouthing a ritual incantation spoken by extraterrestrials: I think I’m going to take a pass . In his rudimentary English the sentence was suddenly exposed for what it was: bland treacle-speak that sounded as artificial and no more capable of passion and arousal than a linoleum tile or a Formica tabletop. He pointed to a tall, slender, model type with a stunning figure. “She thinks I’m about to speak to her, but I’ve seen her come in and out of the