The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

by Dinaw Mengestu

  It takes the train less than fifteen minutes to leave the city limits. That’s the dirty secret about D.C. For all of its stature and statues, the city could just as easily have been one of the grander suburbs of America, an appendix hooked to Virginia or Maryland. As the joke goes, everyone who has lived here long enough suffers from an inevitable inferiority complex, size not being the least of it. When the train rushes above ground, we’ve already crossed into the outskirts of the city. The buildings, old brick factories and warehouses, are all marked with the familiar bright red and yellow bubble letters of Disco Dan. The name is everywhere, tagged onto the side of the tracks, buildings, and rusted water towers. A running billboard competing with the ads for Schlitz malt liquor and used-car lots. Disco Dan—offering nothing but himself and his vanity—has them all beat. For as long as I’ve lived in the city, he has been with me. It’s more than just gratitude that rises up involuntarily when I see his name spread across an abandoned brown factory lot, under the broken windows, layered in multiple colors of red, yellow, blue, and white, each character so monstrously large and bright that all you see for a second is the name. I remember another aphorism of my father’s, one that he used to say whenever we passed someone pissing openly in the street: add color to life when you can.

  8

  I spent the next three days, after she picked it out, reading The Brothers Karamazov with Naomi. With school closed for the holidays, she came to the store every day just shortly after waking up. Her mother would bundle her in way too many clothes for the short walk from their house to the store so that the first thing Naomi had to do when she came in was peel off the layers of clothing, which seemed designed to insulate her from the neighborhood as much as from the cold. I kept the stool waiting for her behind the counter so that when she came in she knew without asking where to sit. She piled her coat, gloves, sweater, hat, and scarf into a corner next to the register and then pulled her library copy off the counter where she had left it the day before.

  On our first morning together Naomi demanded that I be the one who read first. She laid the book on the counter and said, “Here, you start.”

  “Shouldn’t you be the one to start?” I asked her.

  “That’s not the way it works,” she said. “First you and then me.”

  I read forty or fifty pages that first day. Naomi read none. After I read the first page I waited for her to pick up where I had left off, but she insisted, in a voice that bordered on pleading, that I continue.

  “One more,” she said at first. And when that page had been completed, she added another “one more” to that, until eventually there were so many “pleases” and “pretty pleases” and “come on, pleases” that I was left utterly defenseless.

  I looked up every couple of pages to see if Naomi was still paying attention, and of course she was. Her attention, in fact, never seemed to waver. I felt her staring at me sometimes when my eyes were focused on the page, and I realized she was taking it all in, not just the words, but me, and the scene that we had created together. Here we were, an older man and a girl young enough to be the man’s daughter, sitting in a store on a winter morning reading a novel together. I tried not to notice too much, to simply just live, but that was impossible. Every time I looked at her I became aware of just how seemingly perfect this time was. I thought about how years from now I would remember this with a crushing, heartbreaking nostalgia, because of course I knew even then that I would eventually find myself standing here alone. And just as that knowledge would threaten to destroy the scene, Naomi would do something small, like turn the page too early or shift in her chair, and I would be happy once again.

  I had more customers then, and I treated each interruption to our reading as an assault on my privacy. When someone I didn’t know entered the store, Naomi would mark where I had left off so that I could keep my eyes on the person wandering around the aisles. She would take the book out of my hand, put her finger on the exact word or sentence I had just concluded, and hold it there until I returned. I kept one man, who came to the counter with a single roll of toilet paper under his arm, waiting for more than a minute while I finished reading a page I had just started. At first he smiled and was charmed by what he saw. He was one of the new white faces in the neighborhood who bought all of my bottled water. The charm wore off when I refused to acknowledge him. He responded by slamming the roll on the counter, inches away from my face, and storming out. Naomi and I read on.

  I slipped into the characters as I read. I grumbled and bellowed, slammed my fist onto the counter, and threw my arms wide open. I knew this was exactly what my father would have done had he been the one reading. He would have made the story an event, as grand and real as life. He must have told me hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of stories, not just at night, but throughout the course of any given day, over breakfast, during lunch, in the middle of a conversation he might have been carrying on with my mother or friends. There was no wrong time with him, or if there was, he didn’t live long enough for me to see it.

  The stories he invented himself he told with particular delight. They all began the same way, with the same lighthearted tone, with a small wave of the hand, as if the world were being brushed to the side, which I suppose for him it actually was.

  “Ah, that reminds me. Did I tell you about—

  The shepherd who beat his sheep too hard

  The farmer who was too lazy to plow his fields

  The hyena who laughed himself to death

  The lion who tried to steal the monkey’s dinner

  The monkey who tried to steal the lion’s dinner?”

  If I had heard the story before, I let him tell it to me again. His performance was that good, his love of a story that obvious. Henry the chauffeur and his lavish monkey employers had their predecessors here, even though I never told Naomi that part of the story. Instead, when Fyodor Karamazov spoke, I waved my hands wildly in the air. I grumbled in a deep baritone and tried as hard as I could to do my father proud.

  “Ah, you fools,” I shouted out, and Naomi smiled in delight.

  Naomi found each of the characters as real as anyone she met in the street.

  “Oooh, I hate him,” she would cry out after a particularly cruel antic on the part of the elder Karamazov. “He’s such a moron.” When it came to Alyosha, though, the youngest and gentlest of the Karamazov brothers, she was willing to fall completely in love. I read his scenes and lines with all of the aplomb and grace I could gather. Sometimes while I read, Naomi would lay her head against my arm or in my lap and rest there, wide awake and attentive, until forced to move. It was just enough to make me see how one could want so much more out of life.

  The customers who came to the store regularly took to Naomi immediately. She judged them harshly, as I knew she would. The five to eight drunk old men who made their way into the store every afternoon to pick up another bottle of malt liquor were never rewarded with so much as a hello despite their best efforts. “Who’s that pretty young thang you got working behind the counter now, Stephanos? I know she can’t be related to you, not with a face as pretty as that.” “What’s your name, pretty girl? I used to have a daughter that looked just like you. She had the same pretty eyes that you do.”

  Naomi met all of their attention, sincere and good-natured as it may have been, with a fake grin that they took to be a mark of shyness. I knew better. Once, as one of the men was walking out of the store, I saw her roll her eyes and heard her whisper, “Take a bath.” The man, whom I knew only as Mr. Clark, paused just slightly at the door when she said that. Like all of the other men, he was old enough to have been her father or grandfather. He wore thick glasses taped together in the center, and the same pair of rumpled brown pants that hit his ankles just an inch too high. His hair had gone mostly gray, and on warmer days he passed his afternoons sleeping on one of the benches surrounding General Logan. I didn’t know him to be a good, or bad, man. I knew only that every day he chose to lose himself in as
many bottles of alcohol as he could afford rather than waste his energy facing his life head on. When he turned his head toward her, there was a resigned sadness to his expression that neither Naomi nor I could bear to look at. His face seemed to say that if given half a chance, he would have done anything not to be judged by this eleven-year-old girl who wore pink cashmere.

  When we finished reading just after lunch, Naomi refused to go back home. Rather than leave the store she asked, “So what do we do now?”

  It was easy enough to invent small tasks to keep her with me. On the first day of her vacation I gave her a broom that she pushed up and down the aisles. She was meticulous. She swept each piece of tile once, and then twice, as if she were brushing an ancient artifact free of centuries of dust and sand. She swept the floor underneath the lowest shelves, which had rarely seen the bristles of a broom.

  “This place is filthy,” Naomi said. And while I may have been hurt just slightly by her judgment, I also wanted to make it better for her so I could be rewarded with a hundred mornings and afternoons just like this one.

  Judith came as usual to pick Naomi up at five or a few minutes before. On that first day, Naomi saw her mother just before she came in. At the last second, she picked up her copy of The Brothers Karamazov and in that same insistent voice of hers said, “Come on, Mr. Stephanos, one more chapter.” I saw Judith walking across the street, just steps away. I grabbed the book from Naomi’s hands and turned to a random page near the beginning.

  “Fyodor Karamazov,” I continued without looking up as Judith entered the store. She paused just inside the door, while Naomi leaned over the counter with one hand resting on her chin as if she were reading the pages with me. When I looked up I saw Naomi trying as hard as she could to act as if she were listening. We had become accomplices.

  “So,” Judith said after a few seconds of standing in the doorway and watching us pretend to read. “I see she even has you reading to her now.” She had her arms folded over her chest and was leaning slightly against the wall. She hadn’t caught on to the act we were putting on, but she wasn’t completely fooled, either.

  I closed the book and acted as if I were noticing her for the first time.

  “We’ve been taking turns,” I said.

  “Is that true, Naomi?”

  Naomi nodded her head vigorously.

  “Pull up a chair and join us,” I offered.

  “Depends on what you’re reading.”

  I showed Judith the cover of the book.

  “A little dense, isn’t it?”

  “I didn’t pick it out. Naomi did.”

  “Of course she did. How else could she keep you reading to her for hours?”

  I wanted to applaud Naomi for her foresight. Judith and I were both being conned, but neither of us particularly minded. To earn that kind of trust and affection from a child is to find out that you may have just been a better person than you believed all along.

  “So is that why we’re reading this?” I asked Naomi.

  She did what few children could have done. She looked me directly in the eye and said, “Yes.”

  “We have to go now, though,” Judith said. “It’s getting late and we have dinner plans.”

  “One more chapter,” Naomi pleaded.

  “Tomorrow,” Judith said. “Tomorrow you can stay as long as you like.”

  Tomorrow did not come fast enough, but when it finally did arrive after a restless night, I was ready. I had called Joseph as soon as I returned home so I could explain everything that had happened to him.

  “Tell me again now, what did she say when she left the store?” he asked me.

  “She said, ‘You can stay as long as you like.’”

  There was a long stretch of silence on Joseph’s end as he deliberated over the meaning of Judith’s words.

  “What else did she say?” he asked.

  “That was it.”

  “Was she smiling at you?”

  “No. She may have, and I just missed it.”

  I could almost see Joseph shaking his head on the other end of the phone. He breathed in deeply and sighed loudly enough for me to hear him.

  “What do you know about this woman?” he asked me.

  “What do you mean?” I said. “I know plenty.”

  “Don’t get mad at me, Stephanos. I’m just asking you simple questions. Relationships with women are tricky. Trust me. I know about these things. You’ve never dated an American before.”

  Joseph was kind enough not to remind me that since coming to America I had never had a relationship of any kind beyond brief one-night encounters.

  “American women are different,” he continued. “Remember that. You never know what’s in their hearts.”

  He was talking like a scorned lover. I thought of him in his restaurant, as the Rouge that he had known years earlier in a different life sat at a table with a crowd of people eating, laughing, while he sat hiding in the back.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’ll be fine. I know what I’m doing.”

  After we hung up the phone I went back to my bathroom mirror. I stared hard and long at my reflection. I ran my hands through my hair and turned my head from one side to the other. I was determined to find something that someone like Judith could describe as beautiful. It seemed entirely possible if I turned my head the right way, smiled the proper smile, and made sure the light hit my face at the correct angle. I lifted up my chin and turned my head a few degrees to the left. I smiled with only the right side of my face. I washed my face, dried it, and then washed it again. With each blink a new face looked back at me, simultaneously handsome and grotesque and nondescript. Who was I? That was all I wanted to know.

  The following morning I read three chapters to Naomi. Afterward we rearranged all the items on the shelves. We threw away the cans of expired food buried in the back, brushed the dust off the boxes of cereal, and chipped away at the ice in the freezer. After two days of her being there, the store looked better than it had in years. The aisles were clean; each item faced in the proper direction. I swept the old condom and candy wrappers that littered the ground in front of the store and in the alley. I added a touch of white paint to the northwest corner of the store, where the paint had peeled back in long thin strips to reveal an even older coat of faded lime green paint. I tightened the screws on the shelves that had begun to sag from neglect. I even replaced the fluorescent light bulbs that had long since begun to dim. They had given the store a muted, faded look that I had thought of as somehow fitting, but now, with Naomi in the store, I felt eager, even anxious to make it a place that I wasn’t afraid to look at. At the end of the afternoon, when I stopped and looked back on all that we had done, I felt the pride of ownership that Americans always speak of with such reverence.

  At four I started to count down the minutes until Judith arrived. I wanted her to see what I had done with the store, to marvel in approval, to see the hidden potential behind the shabby exterior.

  At four-twenty I began to ask Naomi questions.

  “How is your mother doing?”

  “Fine.”

  “Do you have any dinner plans tonight?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did she say anything to you about it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Can you remember her saying she had anywhere to go tonight?”

  “No.”

  “Think,” I said. “Did she say anything at all?”

  I felt the desperation in my voice and backed down at the last second. Naomi eyed me suspiciously. I paid her back with a candy bar that she hid in the inside pocket of her coat.

  When Judith finally arrived, prompt as usual at five minutes before five, she came bearing tea and hot chocolate. She carried them over in two metal thermoses that came with spill-proof lids and ergonomically curved chrome handles. In her purse, she carried teacups and a little jar of honey. She opened the door with a “Surprise,” and then quickly went to work setting out
the cups and drinks on the counter.

  “What’s the occasion?” I asked her.

  “No occasion,” she said. “But I figured if we were going to read, there was no reason why we couldn’t do it properly.”

  I noted the “we” in her last sentence. I held on to it and told myself that I would use it against Joseph later. “We were going to read,” I would tell him. We.

  Judith poured tea for the two of us, and a cup of hot chocolate for Naomi.

  “I figured you had milk and sugar in the store,” she said. “But I can’t ever remembering seeing any honey.”

  She was right. I didn’t carry any honey. I had sold the last bottle of it three, maybe four years ago and never thought of ordering any more.

  The three of us sipped our tea and hot chocolate just as the sun was setting for the day. The first of the evening commuters were beginning to rush past the store on their way home, traffic was building up along the circle and on Massachusetts Avenue, and the temperature was a moderate 36 degrees, just cool enough to lend a certain urgency to returning home at the end of the day. We had managed to avoid all of that, like three prisoners locked in a comfortable cell that afforded them a view of a world they no longer cared to join. I remember looking out the window of the store and watching men and women walk briskly with their coats and scarves wrapped around their necks and feeling a certain pity for them.

  Business always thinned out shortly after six, when the last of the rush-hour commuters finally made their way home. Rather than try to read through the interruptions, Judith and Naomi simply waited for me around the counter while I tended to the last customers of the day. The two of them sat on opposing silver stools salvaged from the garbage. They even held their cups delicately the same way: with one finger looped around the handle and the other hand used to support the base and side. From the back I watched Naomi as she timed her sips to match her mother’s.