The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

by Dinaw Mengestu

  His first letter was to President Carter. Despite the effort it takes to find it, I search through the box, skimming past the letters he wrote to Reagan in his second term (frustrated and disappointed), and the ones written during his first (desperately optimistic). The letter is near the middle of the stack. He hasn’t forgotten about it any more than I have.

  Dear President Carter,

  I am writing to you as a recent immigrant to the United States. I have come here from Ethiopia, where I’m sure you know there is currently a bloody war happening. I am one of those people for whom nothing is left of their home country. Everything I have has been taken away from me. For many ages, the United States and Ethiopia have been close allies. There is a deep friendship between our two countries. Therefore, it is imperative that the United States, along with Ethiopia’s friends in Europe, come to her aid at this critical juncture in her history. I am confident that with U.S. assistance, Ethiopia will be able to return to her former state immediately.

  I think it’s the naïveté of that letter that keeps us returning to it. I’ve never seen my uncle’s expression while he reads it, but I imagine that there’s at least a faint smile spread across his face. I think he would be amused, as I am now, at that sentence, “There is a deep friendship between our two countries.” The sentiment is somewhere between schoolyard logic and the type of alliances you see only in movies that take place in galaxies far, far away. The awkward sentence, the one that is still difficult to read, happens near the very beginning: “I am one of those people for whom nothing is left of their home country.” You can hear the syntax twist and strain as the sentence tries to make clear, without revealing too much, its full intention. I love the opening of that sentence, “I am one of those people…” From that point, the sentence could have gone in an infinite number of directions. I am one of those people who always cry at weddings. I am one of those people who’s always late for meetings. I am one of those people who always look good in red. Losing a country seems like such a casual and mundane affair when introduced that way.

  My uncle is a quick learner. Soon, he shed his innocence. He learned to write sentences that were sparer and more detailed. He clipped articles out of the New York Times and Washington Post and included them with his letters.

  Dear President Carter,

  You may have read yesterday’s New York Times article on the current crisis in Ethiopia. The newspaper says that there are widespread reports of arrests and disappearances throughout the country. I want to tell you personally that these disappearances are in fact executions. This month alone I have learned of the death of at least ten friends of mine. There are many more, I am sure, that I have yet to learn about. Those that died were all taken from their homes, in front of their wives and children. My brother-in-law, Shibrew Stephanos, was one of those men. He was beaten in front of his wife and two sons by government troops and then carried out of the house. The soldiers who arrested him said he was an anti-revolutionary because they had found some flyers in his office. Shibrew Stephanos was a good man and an excellent father. I implore you not to let his death, and the death of so many others like him, pass in vain.

  He was wrong on two counts in that letter. My father was not carried out of the house. He walked out on his own. He was insistent on that point. It was the one thing he begged the troops for. They had beaten him nearly unconscious in our living room. Blood from his nose and eyes dotted the yellow walls and streaked the chair he used to sit on when he came home from work. Still, he begged them: “I will walk out on my own two feet. That is it. That is all I want from you.” The second thing: the flyers they found did not belong to my father; they were mine. They were not found in his office, but in his bedroom, where he had taken them the night before, after he had found them in my room. That was partially why the soldiers beat him so thoroughly. He had refused to tell them where the flyers had come from. Eventually he said they were his. Of course they didn’t believe him, but that was never really the point anyway. The flyers were inconsequential. All they had was an acronym, SFD (Students for Democracy), and a time. There wasn’t even a location on the flyer. When my father said the flyers belonged to him, my mother made a desperate attempt to throw her body over his, but the soldiers were well practiced in handling situations like this. I remember the studied, almost bored air in which they conducted the whole affair. They saw her coming long before she even took her first step. One of them simply raised the butt of his gun and leveled it directly at her chest. He didn’t even have to turn around to see her coming. When she fell, it was as if someone had lifted her legs from under her, and then pushed her backward while she was in midair. She seemed to float across the living room, light as air, and just as inconsequential. And me? Where was I during all of this? Standing in a corner holding my seven-year-old brother’s head against my body. As soon as the soldiers entered the house, my father had made a point of telling them that they lived there alone with their two sons, ages seven and twelve. I was small for my age back then. Small and skinny, without even a trace of facial hair, and a voice that still broke, especially when I was frightened. I had volunteered to pass out flyers to people I could trust. I was only sixteen at the time. I didn’t believe in consequences yet.

  The bedroom is a wreck now. I’ve forgotten the importance of maintaining order. The letters are scattered around me in a semicircle that begins chronologically and dissolves into carelessness. Hasn’t this always been my problem? My uncle would say yes. He would say that I lack the ability to maintain structure and order. Begin from the beginning, he would say. Begin there, and then you can move on with your life point by point. That’s why he has boxes full of letters, neatly arranged and tucked away, while I don’t have so much as a picture of my own that dates back more than ten years. I never could find the guiding principle that relegated the past to its proper place. I can step in at any moment and see the house exactly as it looked that day, with the midafternoon sun spilling in through the front windows. My father has already seen and heard the soldiers coming and is waiting for them in the doorway. “Stay right here in the living room, together,” he says. “Don’t make them go looking for you. I’m sure everything will be fine.” The guard who used to sit at the front gate of the house has already quit (as have all the other servants, and so maybe I should start there, with the day they emptied out their quarters and begged my mother and father to forgive them for having to leave). The truck carrying the soldiers simply rolls past the open gate and pulls up in front of the house. My father tries to greet them courteously. Unfortunately for him, he’s wearing a suit that morning. He hasn’t gone near his office in two weeks, but today he’s decided to go and see what’s become of it. Of course he knows already that all the windows have been smashed in, and that his files, or what remains of them, are littering the floor. (Or is this where the story begins, with my father’s work as a lawyer?) Only three soldiers get out of the truck. There are at least four more waiting in the back. The lead soldier has a mustache, just like my father’s. Neat, well trimmed, it arcs around his fat upper lip and stops just an inch above his pointy, hairless chin. He pushes my father into the living room with one hand. It’s an important gesture, and in its own way could signal the start of an entirely different approach to this story. He already considers my father weak, vulnerable. The two soldiers behind him are carrying their rifles over their chest. They both have faint traces of facial hair, but they’re still too young to grow a complete mustache. They can’t be more than a year or two older than I was. My father tries to mention the names of high-ranking army officials he’s known his entire life: Colonel Getachew Woldermarian, Captain Sisay. (That would be the wrong story, my father’s early disillusioned days in the military. He was too slight and soft-spoken a man to have ever made a proper soldier.) The lead soldier sneers at the names (my father doesn’t know yet that these men are all already dead or in jail). Then he spits onto my mother’s carpet. That’s the breaking moment. Regardless of ho
w I get here, everything unfolds straight from that point, with no room for deviation or digression. As soon as he spits, one of the soldiers steps to the front and, with the butt of his rifle, knocks my father across the head. Is it possible that they practiced this routine before coming over? Or is it something that’s grown organically out of their previous experiences? Spit and then hit. The two soldiers take turns kicking my father in the head and ribs. When my mother begins to cry out, the lead soldier draws his pistol and orders her to stop. She does so immediately. She’s a strong woman, and nothing I ever say or do could describe or match that strength. He returns his gun to his holster and goes searching through the bedrooms. He’s learned this from experience. Bedrooms are where people hide the things they want no one else to know of. We can hear him opening drawers. Glass shatters uselessly, unnecessarily, from somewhere in the house. It doesn’t take him long to find what he’s looking for, if in fact he’s come looking for anything. (I know now that they would have taken him regardless, but things weren’t so clear then.) When he returns with the flyers, my mother, who is now standing next to me in the corner, whispers one word to me: “Zimbe.” Shut up. Close your mouth. Don’t speak. It all comes to the same thing. The lead soldier taunts my father, who is now sitting up against the wall, with the flyers. He knows that they cannot have anything to do with a man my father’s age, but he berates and hits him nonetheless. Where is this meeting and Who gave you this and Who are these people and What is your role with this organization and Who do you think you are and Who else is helping you and What are their names and What do you hope to accomplish with your meetings and Don’t you know that this is a time of revolution and that there can be no room for dissension? My father’s left eye has already swollen shut. He is struggling to keep his head from falling. He barely responds to the smacks that follow each ridiculous question. He begins to declare over and over that the flyers are his. The first tears are beginning to fall down his face. I found them and brought them home to throw away, he says, his voice cracking as he struggles for breath. Of course his pleas lead to more kicking, but at this point, my father has resigned himself to everything except claiming ownership of those flyers. He doesn’t speak again until one of the soldiers bends down and reaches for his legs. It’s only then that he begins to demand that they take their hands off him, as if somehow he had sanctioned everything they have done to him thus far. He lifts himself off the ground by bracing his back against the wall and climbing up with his entire body, inch by inch. His effort to stand on his own invites the mockery of the two young soldiers. They applaud sarcastically. They encourage him to go on. I pray to God, with as much conviction and faith that I have, for their deaths. I beg Him silently to kill them right then and there. I implore Him. I demand it of Him. If He cannot give me their deaths alone, though, then I ask Him to take all of us together. I pray for the roof of the house to cave in, for the ground to open up and swallow us whole, anything to end this moment.

  I’ve never felt a disappointment so close to hatred again.

  It takes my father at least ten minutes to stand. In what could pass for an act of mercy, the lead soldier tells his men to leave my father alone as he lurches his way off the ground. Of course, my father looks back one last time at my mother, brother, and me before he’s escorted at gunpoint out the door. I’m not even sure how much he was able to see at that point—whether our faces were distinguishable from one another, or if through the haze of tears and blood the three of us merged into one indeterminate figure. I like to think that’s the way he saw us, his family, not as individual people, but as a world, one that he could faithfully claim to have created. He couldn’t have seen Dawit’s face. It was buried entirely in my chest. Or my own, as most of it was hidden behind my mother’s back. All of that is irrelevant, though. He didn’t turn around so he could see us, but so that we could see him. He always believed in making a lasting impression.

  The next day, at my mother’s insistence, I left home. I took nothing with me but a small red cloth sack stuffed with all of the gold and jewelry my parents owned. I pawned and traded each item in order to make my way south to Kenya. By the time I crossed the border, the only I item had left were my father’s cuff links.

  10

  The day after our evening tea session, Judith brought dinner to the store—a rosemary lamb roast with baby potatoes that we ate on paper plates with our hands, and a bottle of red wine that we drank out of six-ounce clear plastic cups. Looking back, it’s possible to parcel our relationship out into distinct phases, the last of which began with that dinner. We had fumbled our way around each other long enough, and that meal was, I know now, our last opportunity to get it right.

  Judith came to the store early that morning with Naomi, and this time she was the one who asked me what my plans for dinner were later that evening.

  “If you’re not doing anything,” she said, “I could make dinner and bring it to the store. It’ll be like a picnic, except of course it’s winter, and we won’t eat outside, but other than that…”

  “I can’t imagine anything better,” I told her.

  That was the only time either one of us spoke directly to the other about what we wanted. I almost regretted being so up front until I saw her smile at my response. There’s something physical that changes with a person’s appearance when they suddenly open up to you. For Judith, that change occurred almost exclusively in her eyes, which generally never rested for too long on any one person or object, unless it was Naomi. Now, though, she met my eyes with hers and did not back down.

  I closed the store early for the third time so that we could eat our food before it got too cold. I pulled down the metal grate and turned the blinds and shut off the fluorescent lights. We used the lamp that I kept behind the counter and lit a row of tea candles that until then had been covered in dust. The light gave the store a warmth and glow that I had thought of as being reserved exclusively for homes.

  We talked about Dostoyevsky and The Brothers Karamazov over dinner. Naomi and I spent a few minutes working out the pronunciation of the characters and author.

  “Fee-a-door,” I told her. “Like Theodore.”

  “Or fee at the door,” Naomi offered.

  “Yes. As in, from now on you have to pay a fee at the door before you can come and read in my store.” Naomi shook her head and tried not to smile at my terrible joke, but I stared at her with my arms open until finally she relented and laughed even as she continued to shake her head.

  “He was in jail once, wasn’t he?” Judith asked me.

  “Briefly,” I told her. “After he was arrested he was carried into the city square, where he was supposed to be executed. They had the nooses all set, and it wasn’t until the last moment that it was revealed to be a hoax. He spent four years in jail after that.”

  Naomi had a hard time understanding that story. She asked us why the government would do that to someone. Judith tried to explain to her that governments were no different from people, and that what they wanted, more than anything else, was to protect themselves. “Dostoyevsky,” she said, “was a threat to them, and they wanted to get rid of him without having to kill him.” Naomi couldn’t understand that either, though, how one man could threaten an entire government just by writing.

  “Maybe he couldn’t,” I told Naomi. “But somebody out there could, and until you know who it is, it’s better just to scare everyone.”

  Our answers still weren’t enough. There was a logical “why?” that could be attached to every response we came up with, and it seemed too harsh to say that terrible things happen to people for no reason other than they have to happen to someone. Finally Judith gave in and admitted what we had both been thinking.

  “I don’t ultimately know why,” she said. “It’s just one of those things about life.”

  Naomi accepted this answer, I suspect in part because she had heard it before. There was enough resignation in Judith’s voice and enough resilience and determination in
her daughter’s to arrive at the truth, to make it clear that they had had conversations that ended like this one before.

  After dinner we drove to the Mall in Judith’s car to see the National Christmas Tree. It was Judith’s idea. She said she wanted to see something that reminded her that Christmas was just a little more than a week away. There were hundreds of spectators surrounding the tree when we arrived, as if they were all expecting it to do something more than just stand there and twinkle in the darkness. I lifted Naomi into the air a few times so she could get a better view. Judith slipped her arm into the crook of my elbow and the three of us circled the tree once, and then twice.

  When we returned home from the Mall, Judith invited me in for one last cup of tea. Naomi still had at least another hour before she had to go to bed and so she tugged on my arm and said in her high-pitched, pleading voice, “You have to come and see our tree.”

  Judith had gone out of her way to create an elaborate Christmas pageantry in their living room for her daughter. The dining-room table had been pushed to the side to make way for a seven-foot tree that glittered obscenely in white lights. Two stockings with embroidered names were nailed to the mantel. More lights framed the back window, and stacked under the tree were three enormous boxes. Each was elegantly wrapped in green, white, and red, with a huge red bow tied to the top.

  “Those are all from Naomi’s dad,” Judith said, pointing toward the boxes. “He likes his presents to be…ostentatious.”