At half-past six I quietly turned the sign to “Closed” without dimming any of the lights or locking the door. I took my place behind the counter. Judith suggested that we take turns reading.
“You read one page,” she said. “And then I’ll read the next.”
“And what about Naomi?”
“She can pretend she’s still paying attention.”
We read back and forth for half an hour that night, until all the tea had been drunk and Naomi had taken to swirling her finger in the bottom of her cup. For those thirty minutes I had it all, and perhaps if I had been a wiser man I would have been content with just that.
9
By the time the train pulls into the Silver Spring station, I am one of only four people left in the car. We’re spread out evenly between the rear and the front, as if we have chosen sides in some childish debate and are refusing to meet in the middle. I wish empty trains inspired more recklessness in the people forced to share them. There’s a solitude and isolation that come with knowing that out of everyone you had begun your journey with, only you and the few faces across the aisle are left. That alone seems enough to make a connection, but as it stands, the opposite is always true. The empty space, whether it’s only a few feet or the entire car, becomes impassable. Perhaps it’s the embarrassment of being alone, the fear of being exposed, and the risk of losing one’s anonymity that make us shy away from one another precisely when we should feel emboldened. I can’t even bring myself to look at the woman facing me from the other end of the car. That’s how naked a nearly empty train can make me feel.
It’s still the middle of the day, and despite the growing heat I’ve decided to walk to my uncle’s apartment. The walk to the apartment complex is a hostile one. The sidewalk narrows to a silver streak of cracked concrete that runs adjacent to a four-lane road densely populated with extended city buses and a continuous stream of cars. I always feel like a sad, pathetic creature while walking along this road. The world seems entirely unfit to handle my skinny, long-legged body, and the curious, often hostile glares of the drivers in their cars confirm it. Today, though, I’ve decided to seek pleasure wherever I can, which means finding comfort in the exhaust-choked air, and in the strain I feel while struggling up the steep incline that leads to the Silver Rock complex where my uncle lives.
I can imagine his surprise and gratitude at my unexpected visit. He will want to make tea for the both of us. He will insist on feeding me whatever he has in his refrigerator, even though he won’t have anything to offer besides leftovers from whatever Ethiopian restaurant he ate at the night before. Before I can tell him anything about my life, he will want to hear everything he can about my mother and brother. He will want the details of their health and about my brother’s plans for the future now that he has graduated college. When I tell him that they are both doing well, he will kiss the air and thank God, at least twice, for His grace. I know that he will reprimand me gently, and with good humor, for not having visited him sooner. He will shake his head, rub his hand across his nearly bald head, and then blame himself for being guilty of the same crime. When he speaks, he will do so slowly and deliberately, carefully choosing each word because he is nothing if not an exceptionally thoughtful man. I will assure him that the absence is entirely my fault; that I’ve been distracted with work, which is still going okay (another kiss to the air and a single “thank God”). Regardless of what I say, he will stomp one foot firmly on the ground and in the end insist that no, I am his responsibility, and therefore I can claim none of the guilt for my own. Ever since I dropped out of school, he has tried hard to hide his disappointment. He worries about my future, and yet he’s always played a part in reassuring my mother about the quality and state of my life. When he asks me about the store, I will tell him that I have plans for selling it. Or I will tell him I’ve already looked into selling it. Or that I already have someone interested in taking it off my hands. Anything to reassure him.
I’m covered in sweat when I reach the apartment complex. I catch my reflection in the building’s door. Sweat is streaming down the side of my face. I look exactly like what I am: a desperate man, on the verge of middle age, with only the money in his pocket to spare. I have dark rings under my eyes, a nose and forehead damp with sweat. My shirt collar has an old coffee stain on it, and the sides of my pant pockets have a streak of dirt running down the side. I take a second to tuck in my shirt, pat down the edges of my hair, and wipe the sweat off my brow with the edges of my sleeve. I pray that I don’t run into anyone I know.
There are twenty-eight floors to the building, and of those twenty-eight floors, at least twenty-six are occupied exclusively by other Ethiopians who, like my uncle, moved here sometime after the revolution and found to their surprise that they would never leave. Within this building there is an entire world made up of old lives and relationships transported perfectly intact from Ethiopia. To call the building insular is to miss the point entirely. Living here is as close to living back home as one can get, which is precisely why I moved out after two years and precisely why my uncle has never left. Hardly a word of English is spoken inside of these doors. The hallways on every floor smell of wat, coffee, and incense. The older women still travel from apartment to apartment dressed in slippers and white blankets that they keep wrapped around their heads, just as if they were still walking through the crowded streets of Addis. The children keep only the friendships sanctioned by their parents. There are a few families who occupy entire floors. They run them like minor villages with children, grandchildren, grandparents, and in-laws all living within shouting distance of one another. There is a beauty and a terror to those floors. Only once did I ever step onto one of them and see it firsthand. When I got off the elevator, I was met by a row of open apartment doors, each one guarded by a young woman who stepped into the doorway and stared at me with more apprehension and fear than I’ve ever been greeted by. I turned back to the elevator immediately, feeling as if I had intruded onto something sacred, something that I had no right to witness or speak of again.
My uncle stands out from the rest of the building. That he is only one man, with no wife, mother, or children, gives him an independence and peculiarity that no one here is comfortable with. He is respected because of the money and power he once had in Ethiopia, because his name was once associated with the cabinet members and princes of the old empire. He is also mocked now by some for exactly the same reason. Berhane Selassie. It’s a beautiful name. Translated into English, it means Light of the Holy Trinity. He no longer has his money or his prestige, but he has his reserve, and his corner apartment on the twenty-fourth floor. For Silver Rock, it’s a beautiful apartment. I believe he took as much time preparing its rooms as he did studying the design for the house he built for himself. It no more fits in with the dilapidated exterior—the dimly lit hallways, crumbling paint, and broken elevators—than he does.
Only one of the elevators is working today. A line builds up in front of it, forcing a round of general greetings with people whose faces, much less names, I can hardly recall. I know that there’s a curiosity surrounding me. There’s an upturned glance behind every salaam and tadias that I exchange. I’m being measured for everything. For my clothes, hair, shoes, for my readiness to offer a proper greeting and good-bye. Sometimes I think of my decision to leave this building as an escape, while at other times it seems more like an abandonment. I try not to take the thought too seriously, but when every eye you catch seems to hold an accusation or question behind it, a decision has to be made. Either I left to create a new life of my own, one free from the restraints and limits of culture, or I turned my back on everything I was and that had made me. Each familiar face waiting for the elevator seems to want to ask the same questions: What have you done with yourself, where have you gone, and who do you think you are? I know there would be a fair amount of pleasure behind the pity that would greet me if my life were ever laid bare before this crowd.
I’m pressed
into the back of the elevator with at least fifteen other people. There’s a joke waiting to be had here. How many Ethiopians can you fit into an elevator? All of them. What do you call an elevator full of Ethiopians? An oxymoron. Once the elevator begins to move, the gossip begins. It’s disguised as innocent conversation between two women. Speaking much louder than necessary, one woman claims to have seen Dr. Negatu’s daughter getting out of a cab by herself at sunrise. To make matters worse, she was sitting in the front seat. The news is followed by the customary tsking of sound judgment being passed. It’s soon followed up with the other news of the day. Those who don’t join in on the conversation simply stand quietly like myself, complicit and greedy. In one protracted elevator ride there are rumors of infidelity, abuse, drugs, unemployment. It all amounts to one thing: proof of a vanishing culture. Time, distance, and nostalgia have convinced these women that back in Ethiopia, we were all moral and perfect, all of which is easier to believe when you consider the lives that most of us live now. With our menial jobs and cramped apartments, it’s impossible not to want to look back sometimes and pretend there was once a better world, one where husbands were faithful, children were obedient, and life was easy and wonderful.
With enough time, one woman says in Amharic, there won’t be any Ethiopians. They’ll all become American.
I can’t help but smile whenever I hear that line. By even the most liberal standards, I would easily stand convicted of the same crime. I can count the number of Ethiopian friends still in my life with two fingers. I go out of my way to avoid the restaurants and bars frequented by other Ethiopians of my generation. My phone calls home are infrequent. I eat injera only on social occasions. I consider the old emperor to have been a tyrant, not a god. When I try to pray, it’s only to ask God to forgive me for not believing in Him in the first place. And of course there had been Judith and Naomi, who alone could have set every gossiping tongue on fire for months.
I still have keys to Berhane’s apartment, but I’m reluctant to use them right away. It’s been too long since I’ve lived here, and I can’t help but feel like a stranger every time I enter this apartment. I knock nearly a dozen times before accepting the fact that he’s not home. Only then do I let myself in.
My uncle’s apartment hasn’t changed in the slightest detail since I moved out. I’m grateful to him for this small measure of consistency. He’s kept all of the furniture exactly the same, even though he’s been talking of buying a new couch or dining-room table for years. He’s attached to the old ones. He can’t help but be. I’m not sure what else in the world he has to believe in if not the couch and table that have stayed with him for the past nineteen years. That’s the same couch I slept on, the same one I made every night and unmade every morning before dressing up to begin my day as a student or bellhop. At night, I slept on that couch and relived old fantasies and memories. I thought of my father. I remembered the way he cried at funerals, baptisms, and weddings, how any form of joy or pain seemed to always be too much for him to bear. I remembered him, a tall, slight, discerning man, in his suits and ties and in the long-gaited walk that I struggled to keep pace with. I saw the corpses that lay rotting on unpaved dusty roads with the words “traitor” or “Communist” written in blood on the chest, and the furious mobs that roamed the streets at night. I saw my father’s face just before three soldiers in tattered uniforms escorted him out of our house. I never saw what death did to his face, whether or not it aged it, or perhaps even restored it to some long-vanished peaceful state. I did imagine it involuntarily while lying awake and staring across the living room to the glass doors that lead out to the balcony I sometimes imagined leaping off. In my mind, his face was untouched, free from any bruises or scars the soldiers might have left, his eyes, nose, and mouth impossibly perfect. I gave him a wonderful funeral, complete with all of the rites the dead deserve: a body, casket, and flowers, along with a priest and a cast of mourners who followed him all the way to his family’s burial ground just outside of Addis. All of that happened on that couch.
I take a seat on the couch, slide off my shoes, and rest my tired feet on the coffee table. I’m not surprised to find that the springs have all held up, and that even the cushions are hardly any worse for wear. Preservation comes naturally to my uncle. It’s part of what made him so diligent and devoted a caretaker to me. When I came home from school or work in the evenings, I often found him sitting on the recliner facing the couch, mending a pair of my socks or removing the stains from one of the two white shirts I had to wear as part of my work uniform. He could have easily been someone’s grandmother with the way he rocked silently in that chair tending to the needs of his nephew. We barely spoke during the few hours we managed to share with each other every evening. Nothing more than a few tender kisses on the cheek followed by some generally insignificant statement about classes and work. He never tolerated any diversion into his own life. In the mornings he worked as a cabdriver and in the evenings he worked as a parking attendant at the Capitol Hotel. His life was determined by cars, tips, and making change. For a man who before coming to America had rarely ever driven his own car, the role reversal was always noted with his customary irony. “Perhaps,” he would say, “if I went back to Ethiopia I could get a job driving the general now living in my house. Although I would kill the both of us on our first trip out.” Any questions I may have had for him about his day or his fares were always met with a stern grin and a reminder that a man his age didn’t have to answer any questions from a man of mine. On particularly good days, though, he would come home grinning and when pressed for a reason, he would respond enthusiastically, “Gas is so cheap!”
His mouth stretches to the limits of his face whenever he repeats that line, and in his eyes you can still see remnants of the humorous, snobbish young man he had once been. He still drives his cab, but not as frequently. The car and the license to operate it are entirely his now. What he makes from his fares he splits into two: one half is tucked away into a silver lockbox, the other half is wired back to Ethiopia at the end of every month. There was never much money in this apartment. Between the two of us we made just enough to cover our bills and pay my school fees. Like anyone who is poor, we each learned to find some small pleasures wherever we could. In the summertime we slept on the floor with the balcony doors pulled wide open. We slept with one thin blanket and a small fan that blew down on us from the coffee table. I remember those nights as being the best nights of sleep I had in that apartment. They were dreamless nights, free of memories, and I was grateful for that. My uncle said once that he often thought of his time in Sudan when he lay sleeping on the floor next to me. “The only difference,” he said, “was that there were ten to fifteen of us sleeping on the floor together. We had pooled our money to pay for one room away from the refugee camp. The room wasn’t any bigger than this one. The floor was made of dirt and clay that kept it cool at night. I remember trying to lift my nose above the feet in front of me to smell the wind.” Before reaching Sudan, he had spent nearly a month walking through the countryside at night. He slept in the bush during the day and walked constantly through the evening. Half of the group of people he had met along the way perished somewhere in the desert, their bodies prayed over briefly before being left behind as carrion. He remembers those scorched summer nights spent pressed against the ground and someone’s feet as the best nights of sleep he has ever had.
The silver lockbox where he keeps his money hidden is in his bedroom closet behind a stack of cardboard boxes full of letters and newspaper clippings that he’s been saving for years. For as long as he has been living in the United States, he’s been writing letters to the government. Every cabinet secretary from education to the interior has received a letter, along with the National Security Agency, the Congressional Budget Office, the various speakers of the House along with the Senate minority and majority leaders, the chairs of every major congressional committee, the White House chiefs of staff, the heads of the Republican an
d Democratic National Committees, and every senator or congressperson who has ever sponsored a bill he was even remotely interested in. The letters were all neatly typed and printed out in duplicates on his Brother electronic typewriter. Each response he’s received he has stapled to his own letter and filed away. Taken all together, they form a running dialogue between one man, himself, and an indifferent, if not wholly silent, partner.
One of those boxes contains only the letters he has written to the presidents of the United States. Those letters, unlike any of the others, are personal, although they grow increasingly distant with time. The ones written in the past five years are simply the letters of a concerned and active citizen (Berhane is not, in fact, a citizen—only a permanent resident, which he will remain until he dies, because in his heart, he will always be in Ethiopia). In tone and in content, they are no different from any of the other letters concerning policy that he has written to other government officials, great and small alike.
These early letters to Presidents Carter and Reagan are my favorite items in this apartment. If he were to die tomorrow, they would be the only things of his that I would want to keep. My uncle doesn’t even know that I’m aware of their existence. He has them stored at the bottom of his closet in a blue-and-white box, unmarked, out of embarrassment or pride, I’m not quite sure which. When I lived with him I read through them every day while he was at work. I memorized passages and then later puzzled over the man who had written them. They were unlike any other part of his personality: open, emotive, and free. They are deeply personal, but they are not crazy. Like any letter, they are a plea to be heard. I’m not sure who else my uncle could have spoken to about such things when he first came here. There was no one who could bear to hear his story about what he had lost and suffered. He was surrounded by other war-torn refugees, none of whom had achieved any measure of peace with their own past.
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears Page 11