The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

by Dinaw Mengestu

  “I mean, if we look at this store as the first step to an even greater venture…This neighborhood has potential, man. I tell you. We should begin thinking about expanding. In a year or two, you could have an entire grocery store. Start your own franchise.” Kenneth sketched out some numbers on the back of a notebook. What did the numbers mean? Nothing, but they were nice to look at.

  Joseph laid out his plan that night for getting his college degree and then his PhD from the University of Michigan.

  “It’s all very simple,” he said. “I have talent, and top universities need talent. When they see what I can do they will beg me to come. I’m certain of it.”

  “And why Michigan?” Kenneth asked him.

  Joseph scratched the bottom of his chin.

  “Because it’s a top-notch school. I knew a woman who went there once. She was a teacher. Smartest woman I ever met. She told me I was brilliant. ‘Joseph,’ she said. ‘You are one of the smartest men I have ever met.’ She told me I should go there someday, and that is what I am going to do.”

  Kenneth, for his part, was going to get his engineering degree and then a master’s.

  “Only then,” he said, “will I go back to Africa. I will go to Nairobi in the finest suit and everyone will say, ‘Look at him. That is someone important. That is someone special.’ I’ll build them buildings that will blow them away. No one will have seen anything like them.”

  As for me, I was going to sit in my high-backed chair behind a counter and read as silent as a god until the world came to an end.

  How did I end up here? That seems like an appropriate question to ask after seventeen years in a country. How is it that I came to own and run a store in the center of a blighted neighborhood, and how is it that now as my store, or what’s left of it, is about to be taken away, that I can do nothing but sit on the floor of my uncle’s apartment and run through the past? Narrative. Perhaps that’s the word that I’m looking for. Where is the grand narrative of my life? The one I could spread out and read for signs and clues as to what to expect next. It seems to have run out, if such a thing is possible. It’s harder to admit that perhaps it had never been there at all. Do I have the courage to explain all this away as an accident? “Do something,” Kenneth admonished me earlier. That’s precisely the problem, though, Kenneth. Once you walk out on your life, it’s difficult to come back to it.

  I wonder what’s left of the store now. Two hours have turned into nearly five. The morning is gone, and so is the afternoon. Had I still been behind the counter, I would have been hoping for a rush-hour crowd that would never come. Yes, a handful of steady and loyal customers would have stopped by, as much to say hello and chat for a few minutes as to buy anything, but in another hour or two they would have gone as well, and I would be faced with the prospect of staring into an empty store, as poorly stocked and nearly as dirty as the day I found it.

  I pick up the phone sitting next to the bed and call my store one more time. I dial the first four numbers and hang up. I pick the phone back up a few seconds later. I remind myself that I have nothing to lose anymore.

  “I have nothing to lose,” I tell myself.

  I dial the numbers once more. The space between the last number punched and the first ring is the hardest. Each ring seems elongated, and yet each pause isn’t long enough. There are three, and then four rings. On the fifth ring someone picks up.

  I hear a man’s voice laughing in the background. It has an old, gravelly quality to it, the kind that comes with age and poor health. Another voice, younger, feminine, asks, “Who you talking to?”

  It’s one of those simple questions that at the right moment hits too hard. I hang up before whoever is holding the phone to the air can answer.

  I scoop all of my uncle’s letters off the floor and lay them back into the box in as close to the order I found them as I can manage. I take the lockbox, with all of the money he has saved, out of the closet and place it gently onto the floor. I lift open the lid, which is flimsy and serves no purpose at all. There is more than a thousand dollars in here—enough money to pay one month’s rent on the store, buy a ticket home to see my mother and brother. It would be so simple to take the money, which is stacked in three clumps a few inches high and wrapped tightly in rubber bands. I could leave a note in its place, one that would explain, in as few words as possible, my reasons and failings. The note could say simply, “I’m sorry,” or, “Forgive me.” If I did that, I wouldn’t even have to go through the trouble and disgrace of lying for it. I could simply take the money and run.

  I shift the clothes on the floor of the closet back into place and return the lockbox delicately back to the corner I found it in. The thing to do now is to remove any trace of my having been here. My uncle will come home soon, and he will look around, never knowing that just a few moments earlier I had been here ready to take him for everything he had.

  12

  I couldn’t bear to open the store the morning after I abruptly left Judith’s house. That night after I left, I dreamed of standing side by side with a faceless woman whose name I never knew. We were on top of a hill, and she had her back to me, but we were together, at least that much was clear. There was a moment near the end of the dream when I nervously put my arms around her waist, and she leaned back into them. I woke up then with an overwhelming sense of loss, and I knew exactly where it came from. Instead of opening the store I stayed in bed until noon with the shades tightly drawn.

  Mrs. Davis came to my apartment early that afternoon to check on me. She knocked on the door and called my name—“Mr. Stephanos, Mr. Stephanos”—until I answered.

  “Why aren’t you at the store?” she asked me. “I went to go get some milk and it was closed.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Davis,” I said. “I didn’t know. I have some that you can have.”

  I walked to my refrigerator and gave her the only carton I had. My sense of obligation to the store and the people who shopped in it hadn’t quite died yet then, although I could begin to feel it slip away. I hadn’t thought of the store once that morning since I made the decision not to open it, and if I had considered it then, I would have realized that had never happened before.

  Mrs. Davis put her hand on my forehead and took the milk with the other.

  “You sick?” she asked me.

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  She offered to bring me tea and then soup, but I refused, first gently, then adamantly. I told her I had other things I needed to get back to. As soon as she left I returned to my bed and picked up my fantasy where I had left off. Any moment now Judith was going to ring the doorbell and I was going to apologize, and she was going to apologize. Soon, we were going to laugh the whole thing off as a terrible but minor misunderstanding. Greater and more unlikely things happened every day. People won the lottery. Trains jumped off tracks. Missing children were discovered. Why not this?

  The next morning I opened the store a half hour late for no reason other than that I could. When I arrived I found Naomi sitting outside waiting for me.

  “What are you doing out here?” I asked her.

  “Where were you yesterday?” she asked me.

  “I was sick,” I said.

  She was sitting on the one tiny step in front of the store with her chin resting in the palm of her hand.

  “I waited for you,” she said. “For a long time.”

  I knelt down in front of her. There seemed to be no end to the disappointment I could cause.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again for the second time in as many days. “I didn’t know.”

  “Are you feeling better?’ she asked.

  “A thousand times better,” I said.

  I opened the store for the both of us. Naomi piled her coat and scarf and sweater in the corner and pulled her seat up to the counter.

  “Can we read for a little bit?” she asked me.

  “Of course,” I said.

  That morning I gave her the best performance I cou
ld muster. When someone came into the store, I stayed in character. In the shrill old voice of the monk, Father Zossima, I asked a woman I had never seen before for “Threeeee dollllars. Seventy-one cents.” I even hunched my back to heighten the effect. Naomi sat on her stool and chuckled in delight.

  We stopped reading shortly before noon. I went to the back of the store and pulled out a long string of Christmas lights and a miniature plastic tree. For the next two hours, we decorated the store. I climbed onto a stepladder and Naomi handed me the lights in stages. We wrapped them around the store and then turned our attention to the tree.

  “It needs some ornaments, don’t you think?” I said.

  “Yes,” Naomi agreed. I gave her some markers, colored paper, scissors, and glue, and she went to work making stars for the tree. Finally the school supplies I had bought years ago found a purpose, and perhaps so would have everything in the store if given enough time. Naomi cut and colored a dozen stars of various shapes and colors while I sat next to her and watched. I put on a tape of Christmas songs, and when the right song struck us, we sang along.

  When Naomi finished making the stars we decorated the tree with the few lights we had left. We placed it on the counter next to the register and then stood in the middle of the store so we could enjoy the view.

  “What do you think?” I asked her.

  For my sake, she looked up at me and said, “It’s wonderful.”

  That settled it for me. I wanted to give her more than just a plastic tree and a store ringed with lights. I took a colored piece of paper and pen and wrote a note to Judith.

  Sorry for leaving before tea the other day. I wasn’t feeling too well. I have some Christmas presents I want to give you and Naomi. Maybe I can drop them by your house later this evening?

  Yours,

  Sepha

  I folded the note twice and slipped it into an envelope. I wrote Judith’s name across the front.

  “Here,” I said to Naomi. “Give this to your mother when you get home. I have a surprise for you later on.”

  “What does it say?”

  “You’ll see,” I told her. “First, though, I have to close up and run some errands. I’ll see you later this evening. I promise.”

  I didn’t try to hide my excitement. I knew exactly what I was going to do now. Christmas was imminent, and this year, for the first time in many years, I was going to make it something special. I didn’t know what I was going to get Judith and Naomi yet, but the fact that I was going to get them anything was enough. I counted the money I had in the register and in the safe I kept under the counter. It wasn’t much, just a couple of hundred dollars that I had been saving for some indeterminate event. Still, I felt flush, not only with money, but with an overwhelming desire to participate in all of the rituals the holiday invited. I suddenly wanted to know what it felt like to be one of those shoppers who ambled from store to store in search of the perfect presents, the ones who would say, this is how much I care about you, and, this is how thoughtful I am. It wasn’t a new year quite yet, but I thought of what I was doing as the start of a new tradition.

  The only presents I had bought in the past seventeen years had been for my brother, Dawit. I had stopped sending him toys years ago, though, once I realized he was no longer a child but a teenager, and a stranger. I imagined my presents being received in Addis with a certain justified contempt, and so instead of packages stuffed with toy soldiers and robots, I sent Christmas cards full of empty promises to come home one day soon. Christmas was still three weeks away in Ethiopia. I wouldn’t receive a call from my mother until then. Normally by that point, any possible nostalgia for the holiday would have long since passed. It had been easy to continue living on the Ethiopian calendar at first. I could still remember that Christmas fell twice a year, once in December and again in January, but as the years accumulated, it became harder and harder to remember that there were two halves to the narrative. Last year, I didn’t remember to call home until it was already late into the evening. My mother sighed heavily into the phone when she heard my voice.

  I thought you had forgotten, she said.

  No. I was just tied up at work. No one here knows it’s still Christmas.

  I only have two sons.

  I know.

  And you only have one mother.

  I know.

  Then don’t tell me what other people know.

  This year was going to be different. I was going to celebrate Christmas twice, properly on both occasions. I had something in America that I had never planned or thought I would have before: the beginnings of a life.

  I still had enough time to buy something for Naomi and Judith and to send presents home for my mother and brother. Everyone would be surprised by my thoughtfulness and consideration. My mother and brother would forgive me for my years of neglect and distance. In the card sent with the presents, I would tell my mother that if she needed anything, she could count on me. As for Dawit, I would tell him that too much time had passed, and that I was ready to do now what I should have done years ago, which was to be a brother to him. For Judith, I would purchase something simple and elegant. For Naomi, something that would encourage her already grown-up spirit, something better than a dollhouse from Germany.

  I planned my afternoon excursion into the city. I had at least five hours until the stores closed. I wanted crowds, lights, and decorations, Christmas music piping through intercoms. I wanted to lose myself in aisles of clothing and furniture.

  There were buses and trains that went to the massive shopping malls just outside of the city limits, but by habit I had become a walker now. There would be lights strung along the trees in Georgetown, and as I walked, I could watch the city fade into darkness and emerge on the other side of the night still alive and vibrant with last-minute shoppers like myself. If I was lucky, perhaps another light snow would begin to fall, something that would add a touch of ambience to the evening. Of course I thought of Dickens’s Scrooge, coming to Christmas at the last minute after having seen the horrors of his life laid before him. I even allowed myself to think of Naomi as my own angel, if not of Christmas past, then at least of present and future. I was going to buy her something wonderful, something that neither her mother nor father would have ever thought of. It would have to be something that would last her a lifetime.

  As I walked up P Street, toward Georgetown Mall, I was aware of the light spring in my step. It wasn’t going to snow as I had hoped, but that was all right. I was enjoying the brightness of the day for what it was worth. It added a touch of warmth to the air: a crisp, fresh winter air perfectly suited to a brisk walk. There were crowds and traffic the entire way. I could keep pace with the G2 bus, which every few feet was forced to a grinding halt by a passenger or traffic light. I could make out the faces of every person in every car. None of them were going to arrive at any destination soon. They were going to be late for their dinners and their meetings. If I could have, I would have told each of them that it was okay. There was nothing to be done. This was the way the world worked. Some days you floated through, others you merely had to endure. P Street. Poor, narrow P Street. It was stretched to the point of breaking today. Even the sidewalks were crowded. People were spilling out of every store the street offered. Madame X’s bookstore had a line at the register. The grocery store was being robbed of its carts by people who refused to carry their bags of food home. It’s not often you have this vision of your world. Once, maybe twice a year, you see it only for its sheer, simple beauty. For a few blocks at least, I knew almost every person I passed. Familiar faces, all of them. This was one of time’s quieter tricks. It slowly, but surely, sheered off the unfamiliar edges of your life. A couple of people said hello to me as we passed on the sidewalk. Most, however, walked quickly past without ever meeting my eyes. That was okay, though. They wouldn’t have recognized that they were looking at a new man.

  By the time I reached the stores of Georgetown, I had finished making a mental list of what I
was going to buy for everyone. For my mother, a bottle of perfume. If she hadn’t changed too much, she still had at least a dozen bottles lined up on her dresser like toy soldiers, and was still searching for the perfect one. I was going to find it. For Dawit, a crisp button-down white shirt. He was a university graduate now. He had, as our father would have said, to play the part right. The last photograph of him that I had seen came in the mail last year. He had the same build as our father. He already looked more like him than I ever would. It was as if nature had split our features in half so that I would grow up to inherit my mother’s high cheekbones and petite nose, while he would have the bolder and stronger features of our father. He had a full, solid head, with the same thick, wavy black hair that my father had said made him a favorite of all the women. Whereas my chin rounded off delicately at the bottom, Dawit’s was defined by clear, hard lines. I hoped that his chin would serve him well later in life. For our father, it had ensured a certain level of respect from people who might have otherwise tried to take advantage of his soft demeanor. I wondered if Dawit was as gentle as our father was. There was something to his eyes that suggested he had the potential to be. I wondered if he would whisper as our father did when he was angry, or if he would become the type of man whose eyes would well up with tears whenever he was overcome with emotion. Our father loved white shirts. His closet was full of them. If they were still there, then Dawit could add this one to the collection, and if they were gone, then I hoped he would consider starting his own.