The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

by Dinaw Mengestu

  I stared at the boxes and tried to guess their contents. It was obvious just from looking at them that whoever Naomi’s father may have been, and regardless of how far away he may have lived, he had me beat.

  “And what about you?” I asked Judith. “What do you like?”

  “I prefer simple and elegant.”

  “I like small and cheap,” I said.

  “That’s too bad,” Judith said. “It looks like you’ve gone and picked the wrong family.”

  She said it without thinking, which I suppose was precisely what made it even worse. As soon as she said it she caught the look on my face and tried to take it back.

  “Why did you say that?” I asked her.

  “It was a joke,” she said. “You know what I mean.”

  And I believed her; it had been a joke, but whether or not she meant it with the lightest intentions didn’t matter. I could see myself trying to measure up at family dinners and cocktail parties, and as a result, always falling short. How many times would I have to stare into a mirror and compare myself against Judith? I could go on second-guessing myself forever, and perhaps even find some consolation to the routine, but I saw now that all it would take was one fleeting moment of skepticism on her end to confirm all of my inadequacies, validate all of my doubts, and send me running back to the corner I came from. Our insecurities run far too deep and wide to be easily dismissed, and Judith, without knowing it, had hit that central nerve whose existence I was reluctant to admit, but that when tapped, sent a sudden shock of shame and humiliation beneath which everything else crumbled.

  She tried again to recover. “Come on, I’m kidding,” she said.

  Regardless of how hard she tried, there was no way she could take it back completely. I turned my head away from her. Naomi came up to me and led me by the hand to her presents.

  “In here,” she said, pointing to the green box, “is a TV for my bedroom. And in here is a dollhouse from Germany. I don’t know what’s in the white one because that’s supposed to be a surprise.”

  “Germany?” I said.

  “That’s where he is right now,” Judith responded. “He’s teaching economics at a university there. Last year it was Greece, and the year before that Nairobi.”

  “So he’s a professor?”

  “That’s how we met,” she said. “He was a visiting professor from Mauritania.”

  The picture was complete now. I could see him, Judith’s former husband and Naomi’s semiabsent father. I imagined a tall, sandy-skinned man with oval wire-rim glasses and smart, well-tailored suits like the ones my father used to wear. Someone who spoke with a crisp accent, whom women described as being gorgeous. I imagined academic conferences, family vacations on windswept beaches, and late-night dinner parties. A confident and assured voice that knew how to order wines, talk to salesclerks, and command the attention of a room. Someone I knew I could never stand against.

  I took another look around at Judith’s living room, with its oversize Christmas tree and absurdly lavish presents. If what Judith wanted was another African to substitute for the one who had left her, then she was right, she had chosen poorly. I was not that man.

  The teakettle began to whistle in the kitchen. It had a distinctive whistle to it, a singsong quality that was supposed to resemble, I imagine, an early morning birdsong.

  “The tea’s ready,” Naomi said.

  Judith walked over to her daughter and wrapped one arm protectively around Naomi’s neck. Naomi clasped her mother’s forearm to keep her from holding her too close.

  “I think I should leave now,” I said.

  Judith tried to hide her shock but a fraction of it was still there, if not entirely in her voice, then at least in the way she quickly turned her head up to look at me.

  “You just got here. What about the tea?” she asked me.

  “Maybe another time.”

  I hated every word I said. Even as I spoke them I began the long process—one that would continue throughout the rest of that evening—of creating a series of different scenarios, ones that had me drinking tea on the couch and kissing Judith in the hallway. I couldn’t bear being in that living room any longer, stuffed as it was with relics of Judith’s former life, all of which pointed conclusively to distances too great to be crossed by a couple of dinners and over-the-counter banter. I wanted to take it back and start all over again, just as we had that evening in my apartment, but I knew that we had run out of roles to play.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But it’s getting late.”

  “It’s only nine o’clock,” Judith pointed out.

  “I know. But I have to wake up early tomorrow.”

  “Okay, then. If that’s what you want.”

  Judith was not one to beg, but of course I wish she had. Perhaps then I could have set aside enough of my injured pride and self-pity to stay. I picked my coat up off the couch. The teakettle whistled on. Judith stopped watching me. She focused all of her attention on her daughter. I put my coat on quickly. How were we supposed to say good-bye now? With a hug or handshake or a quick wave like casual acquaintances? Judith settled the question by sticking her hand out. I took it, and in doing so learned what it meant to feel your heart break.

  “Good night,” she said.

  “Good night,” I replied. “Good night, Naomi.”

  “Good night, Mr. Stephanos.”

  I let myself out. I walked down the steps, straight toward the circle. I took a seat on a bench across from General Logan. It was cold and only a few people were out. A group of teenage boys walked past me. They turned their attention to me briefly, but once they recognized me for the harmless man I knew myself to be, they moved on. Finally, after close to thirty minutes of sitting in the cold, a group of women in short black miniskirts and stiletto heels walked by. I had never cared too much which of the women on the circle I went home with. I don’t know how many women there had been over the years. I imagine it was somewhere between six or seven a year. Given the neighborhood and the location of my store, there was a simplicity and convenience that made each encounter seem almost logical, if not inevitable. I had slept with almost every prostitute who had come into my store. I did so by refusing to take their money when they came to the register to pay for their candy bar or can of soda. I would tell them that if they were free, they should come back alone just before I closed. When they did, I turned off all the lights, locked the door, and for a half hour tried to forget everything about myself. It was easy enough.

  I stood up from my bench across from General Logan. I had settled on the woman walking closest to me. As soon as the women saw me standing up, they banded together. It was a small, protective act, just enough to make me sick of myself.

  “Looking for something tonight?”

  The voice that asked the question remained faceless in the dark.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was just walking home.”

  I turned around and walked away in the opposite direction. The last thing I wanted to do now was scare anyone. I walked quickly, and had the streets been entirely empty I would have run away from the circle as fast as I could.

  11

  When I first came to this apartment, my uncle sat me down on the couch in the living room and proceeded to lecture me about what I could expect to find now that I was in America.

  “Everything that is in this apartment,” he said, “belongs to you as much as it does to me. Outside of this apartment, though, you have nothing. Nothing is yours. Nothing belongs to you. Take nothing for granted. No one here will give you anything for free. There is no such thing as that in America. People will only give you something because they think they will get something in return.”

  I remember there was absolutely no passion or conviction to his words. He seemed to be reading them off an invisible monitor lying just before his eyes, aimed toward the ground as they were. I don’t know if he saw in me a flicker of ambition or desire, but he need not have worried. I didn’t want anything fro
m America. In those days I believed it was only a matter of weeks or months before I returned home to Ethiopia. I spent all my energy and free time planning for that. How was I supposed to live in America when I had never really left Ethiopia? I wasn’t, I decided. I wasn’t supposed to live here at all.

  I nodded my head obediently as he spoke and pitied him for not understanding just how temporary all of this was.

  For the first three weeks I was here in this apartment I didn’t speak to a single person besides my uncle, and even then our conversations were brief and strained. I rarely left the apartment, nor did I want to. Any connection, whether it was to a person, building, or time of day, would have been deceitful, and so I avoided making eye contact with people I didn’t know, and tried to deny myself even the simplest of pleasures. I refused to acknowledge the charm of a sunset or the pleasure of a summer afternoon. If possible, I would have denied myself the right to breathe another country’s air, or walk on its ground.

  My uncle and I lived off the divide that separated our life in this apartment from everything that occurred outside of it. I ate his food. I slept on his couch. For two months this was all I did. At the end of the second month he came into the living room while I was getting ready to sleep, and said in that always whispering voice of his, “Buka.”

  I knew what he meant immediately: enough. And he was right, it had been enough. No one but he would have said it so gently, or granted me so much license.

  I nodded my head in agreement. I was ashamed of myself and would have done anything he asked me to.

  “Come with me to work tomorrow and I’ll try to find you a job,” he said.

  That was how my life in America started. It seems a shame we don’t know these things at the time. My first day of work at the Capitol Hotel, I was escorted by my uncle to the manager’s office. My uncle introduced me as his nephew, Sepha Stephanos, although he told the manager he could call me Sepha, or even Steven for short, if he found that more convenient. The two men discussed my background while I stood there, mute. The manager, a solid, squat bald man whom I had been told to refer to only as “sir,” didn’t believe that I could speak English. He pointed to my skinny arms and asked my uncle if I had any problems lifting heavy objects, if I had any objections to working late-night shifts, if I could be trusted, in general, not to steal from the hotel or its clients. “No, sir,” my uncle replied for me, “he has no problems. Perfectly honest. He has no objections to anything.” The manager decided that I should begin that day so that he “could see what I was made of.” He squeezed my right bicep once for good measure, and then held out his hand for me to shake. I remember wishing I had the courage and strength to crush every bone in his hand. After we walked out of the office, I heard my uncle mumble under his breath just loud enough so only I could hear, “Fucking bastard.” Yes, it was a show of pride, halfhearted, but necessary nonetheless. It was one thing for him to “sir” his way through the day on his own, and an entirely different matter to have me there as a witness to it.

  We rode the train back to Maryland together. We spoke as little as possible until we reached the apartment. When we reached home, I wanted to ask him if this was worth it: this one-bedroom apartment in a dilapidated building on the edges of a city. Our rent was only several hundred dollars a month, but look at what it took to earn that money. My uncle turned himself off every morning the moment he left the apartment for work. He didn’t turn himself back on until ten or twelve hours later when he returned home. “Nothing” was the right word for the way he lived, and so was the vacancy with which he had said it.

  I worked at the job my uncle found for me, and later on I attended the school he had picked. I hardly remember making any decisions of my own, until one night, three years later, when I realized I couldn’t continue living like this any longer. The choice became clear to me as I walked alone along the banks of the Potomac after working two shifts at the hotel. My arms and legs were numb from thirteen hours of lifting luggage and bending at every moment to someone else’s needs. It was too late at night to be walking alone along the empty riverbank, but there was nothing at that point that I cared for or worried about losing. Life could come or go and it wouldn’t have made a difference. I walked miles that night, under the willow trees that had just begun to bloom. Lincoln’s and Jefferson’s memorials stood to my right, casting a distant pale glow over the river. I followed the Potomac to the Memorial Bridge and stood in the center, D.C. to one side, Virginia to the other. I leaned my body over the edge and stared down into the water wondering what, if anything, I had to live for. I couldn’t believe that my father had died and I had been spared in order to carry luggage in and out of a room. There was nothing special to death anymore. I had seen enough lifeless bodies by that point to know that. I thought long and hard about what it would be like to simply step off the edge. I didn’t know how to swim, nor would I have tried.

  The next day I quit my job at the Capitol Hotel. I left my uncle’s apartment less than a year later. They were the first real decisions I had made on my own since coming to this country. I loved them. Their impracticality made me love them even more. When I first told Joseph and Kenneth that I was leaving the hotel, they looked at me dumbstruck for a few minutes until Joseph finally leaned over and smacked my hand high in the air.

  “You see, Stephanos? I always knew you had more in you. Soon we will all leave this place and the next time we come back, they will be carrying our luggage up the stairs.”

  Finding an apartment in Logan Circle was easy enough at the time. There was a “For Rent” sign in just about every building I passed. As for the store, that had been Kenneth’s idea. “Be your own boss, man. That’s the only way to get anywhere in this country.” And so with Kenneth’s help I got a small-business loan from the government. I opened my store in a space that had once been a liquor store. As far as I know, it was the first liquor store in the neighborhood to have gone out of business. Kenneth taught me how to keep track of my accounts, make lists, order supplies and goods, and balance my budget. I used to think he would have made an exceptional father, patient as he always was with me, and who knows, perhaps someday he will. In the meantime those fatherly instincts of his have led him into countless hours of tedious arithmetic, most of which I failed to learn properly. Joseph, for his part, came up with the name: Logan’s Market. I’ve never heard anyone but him refer to it as such. For the store opening, he insisted on designing leaflets to pass around the neighborhood.

  Logan’s Market. A New Community Store to serve all of your needs. Carrying freshly stocked produce, canned goods, and general household needs at GREAT PRICES!

  In his usual fashion, he toiled over those two sentences for an entire afternoon in my apartment.

  “What do you think about this, Stephanos? Logan’s Market, a leader in top-quality produce. Or better yet, Logan’s Market, serving you and your family with only the freshest ingredients for the best prices.”

  His ideas only grew larger as he spoke.

  “Logan’s Market, an internationally recognized leader in top-quality products.”

  When I pointed out to him that his last suggestion might be taking it a bit too far, he responded with one of his twists of logic.

  “Where are you from?” he asked me.

  “Ethiopia.”

  “And what about me? Where am I from?”

  “Zaire, Congo. Take your pick.”

  “Well, then. That settles it. If you ask me who has the best products, I will tell you Logan’s Market. I am international, and so are you. That means the store is internationally recognized. It’s all about marketing,” he said. “You have to learn to think now like a businessman.”

  I let him scribble away in my apartment until he settled on something that matched the eloquence he knew he was capable of. By the time the store opened, Joseph and Kenneth had put as much energy and thought into it as I had. Kenneth was waiting for me in front of the store with a bottle of champagne the morning I
opened.

  “Don’t you have work?” I asked him.

  “I took the day off,” he said. “I wanted to be here for this.”

  We drank the bottle later that evening once Joseph got off work.

  “This is the beginning,” Joseph said. “Today, right here with Stephanos’s store. We begin new lives. No more of this bullshit. Right?”

  We were all guilty of hyperinflated optimism and irrational hope at that point. But how could we not have been? You should have seen us then. Joseph was right, you wouldn’t have believed your eyes. We were young, and we were skinny, and in our eyes beautiful. Joseph and Kenneth were both still working at the Capitol Hotel as waiters in the hotel’s main restaurant, and the opening of my store—“our store,” as we referred to it that night—was supposed to signal a departure from frustrating, underpaying jobs and unrealized ambitions. As that first night in the store wore on, our conversation grew increasingly grand, our ambitions and desires for the world limited only by imagination.

  “You know, Stephanos, together we could be onto something.”

  That’s Kenneth speaking now. He’s raising his glass in the air, as if he’s about to toast the sky, leaning back in his chair with the same repose that I’ve now come to know as intimately as my own gestures. In his own particular way, he could be just as hyperbolic in his speech as Joseph, even if he has a hard time accepting it. Now when he speaks it’s always with an overly deliberate reserve and skepticism. He says it’s because he’s an engineer, but I know that’s not it. I spent two months living in his oversize, barely furnished apartment when the heat in mine broke during the middle of a winter storm three years ago. I tried not to be around when he came home from work. I couldn’t bear the sight of him sitting frozen and lifeless in a plastic lawn chair by the patio windows drinking beer after beer, wiggling his toes in his expensive wool socks. I came home one night and found him laughing hysterically to himself. The only light in the apartment came from the streetlamp that hung just a few feet away from the porch windows. It wasn’t enough light to see him by, which was fine because I could hear him laughing and arguing with himself and I wouldn’t have wanted to know what his face looked like while he was doing that. All of this would come about years later, of course, leaving that first night in the store to sit and burn in my memory.