The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

by Dinaw Mengestu

  “You know who came in on Tuesday? The president’s chief of staff. And you know who he was eating with? That senator from Mississippi that no one likes. They were the only two at the table. I watched them. Neither one of them laughed or smiled the whole time. That can’t be good for things.”

  His interest in the city’s politics lasted only as long as it took him to know the faces behind it. Once he accomplished that, there was no more mystery or surprise. Politicians came and went. They ate their lunches. They tipped generously. They demanded to be treated like royalty, and that was it. Perhaps Joseph had believed that his physical proximity to power meant great things were in store for him. That was what the Colonial Grill was supposed to have meant—a step up in the world, a sign of progress, advancement, promotion. When he first came to D.C., he had worked as a busboy, and then as a bellhop, and now as a waiter. We all have measures by which we gauge the progress of our lives. Joseph has been generous with his. It’s been nineteen years since he came to America, and he has tried to see each and every one of those years in the best possible light. Michigan and the PhD are now the idle dreams of a restless young immigrant.

  “You don’t need a PhD anymore,” he said to me once. “Anything you want to learn in this world, you can learn in this city for free.” We were walking back from the Library of Congress, where we had spent most of an afternoon looking for the poems of an obscure Congolese poet Joseph remembered reading as a teenager. In his rare and sober off hours from work, he was working on his own cycle of poems, ones that would trace the history of the Congo from King Leopold to the death of Patrice Lumumba and the rise of Mobutu Sese Seko.

  “The poems,” he said, “are like the Commedia, except there is no heaven. They begin in hell, they come out for just a moment, and then they return.”

  Once, in his underfurnished and oversize studio, he read to me the last few lines of the first section, the one that ended with the departure of Belgium from the Congo and the rise of Lumumba as prime minister. The scene was his equivalent of Dante’s “Some of the beautiful things that heaven bears.”

  We have come this far, to find we have even further to go

  The last traces of a permanent twilight have faded and given way

  To what we hope is nothing short of a permanent dawn.

  “Those lines still need some work,” he said. “I haven’t quite captured the mood I want. I want the reader of this poem to know what it felt like to be in the Congo in nineteen sixty. It was more than just a new beginning. It was a brand-new world. It was like everyone in the country became a new mother and father at the same time. But I can’t say that. Can I? No. I need something more subtle, less direct, but without losing any of the feeling.”

  As far as I know, Joseph is still working on those three lines two years later. Occasionally, when drunk, he brings them back up again.

  “I think I’ve got them now, Stephanos. They came to me last night like a line from heaven:

  Let us stop. Let us begin again.

  Let us clean the blood from the rubber fields

  And do what we promised to do.”

  Each incarnation has had a different theme and point of departure. One version of those lines was directed toward King Leopold. Another was told in the voice of a mutilated plantation worker staring at his severed hands lying in a basket already full of hands. And yet another was in the voice of an orphaned child witnessing the birth of a new nation. The last version he read to me was the sparest of them all. It simply went:

  Patrice.

  Are we ready?

  The problem, Joseph said, was that he wanted to tell the entire history of the Congo, from the rubber plantations to the first coup. “Nothing can be left out,” he said. “The poem must be able to contain it all. Anything short of that is a failure.”

  Those early lines of poetry gave Joseph just enough romanticism to make it through his years at the Capitol Hotel, and now the Colonial Grill, but they were losing their power. Now, when he talks about the restaurant, it’s exclusively as a joke or sarcastic comment. He refers to it as the Colony. He talks about it only when he’s sitting back comfortably in a chair, his legs crossed, preferably with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

  “It was terrible at the Colony today. Absolutely terrible. The natives went crazy. We ran out of the risotto. The women were tearing off their pearls. The men were spitting in their wine. We almost had to teargas the place.”

  It’s only a few minutes after five o’clock by the time I reach the restaurant, and already it’s crowded. The Colonial Grill hasn’t changed at all since I last saw it. I used to walk past it every day when I worked at the Capitol Hotel. Joseph and I would sometimes take our lunch break together, and when we did, we would walk past the restaurant and stare in through the huge glass windows that wrapped around the sides of the building and exposed it to everyone who stood or drove by the corner it sat on. Our translucent reflections were shot back to us as we watched the finely dressed men and women inside sip their water. Occasionally we mimicked the conversations that we imagined were going on inside.

  “You know, Stephanos,” Joseph would say, “this steak is rather dry for my taste.”

  “You don’t say, Joseph. I was just thinking the same thing.”

  “This place is not what it used to be.”

  “No. You’re quite right. But what can you do? The whole country is going to hell.”

  “Not just the country, Stephanos. The whole world is falling apart around us.”

  I spot Joseph from outside as he rushes back to the kitchen with another order waiting on his lips. I’ve never seen him fully dressed for work. Whenever he comes to the store, he always takes off his shirt and bow tie in exchange for the Michigan sweatshirt he wears on all but the warmest days.

  On his way back to a table with three elderly white women situated around it, Joseph catches me staring at him through the windows. Our eyes meet, and for a few seconds neither one of us moves. He stands there frozen in the middle of a busy restaurant designed to look like a nineteenth-century English dining room, complete with enormous crystals chandeliers and red velvet drapes swooping in the corners of every window, while I’m fixed to my own stretch of the sidewalk, framed by the glass office towers behind me. We’re both aware of the rush and noise surrounding us. Behind me is a line of cars waiting for the light to change and a steady flow of people walking to and from their offices, while surrounding him are tables full of people ordering their food and scraping clean their plates. Another waiter nearly collides with Joseph as he rushes by with his arm stacked with empty coffee cups and dessert plates. We could be old lovers reuniting the way we stare at each other, but instead we’re two old friends who’ve known each other for years and yet can’t seem to make sense of the image staring back from only a few yards away. Joseph barely looks anything like the man I know. It’s not just the tuxedo that changes him, it’s the context and the expression on his face. Despite what he may have said in the past, I’ve always known that he has never wanted Kenneth or me to set foot inside that restaurant while he was working there. I had never guessed that perhaps it was even too much just to see him. He tries to smile at me but the look comes across as forced. It’s a grimace, not a smile, the type of expression you would give to someone whose offensive remark you try to go along with.

  Another waiter deliberately nudges Joseph gently on the shoulder as he passes. He sets off for the table that had been his original destination, but he never takes his eyes off me and I never take mine off him. There is no denying anymore who we are and what we’ve become. I give him a simple wave good-bye just as he approaches the table of women, who are all looking at him, somewhat confused. He nods his head once toward me and then turns to the women. I watch him for just a second longer before rounding the corner and disappearing from his sight.

  There are fewer than twenty blocks now separating the Colonial Grill from my store in Logan Circle. I know these blocks as int
imately as I know any other streets in this city. While so much has changed, these twenty blocks have remained obstinately the same. So, this is the city that I’ve made my life and home. It seems important now to think of it in that way. To consider it not in fragments or pieces, but as a unified whole. As a capital city, it doesn’t seem like much. Sixty-eight square miles, shaped roughly like a diamond, divided into four quadrants, erected out of what was once mainly swampland. Its resemblance to Addis, if not always in substance, then at least in form, has always been striking to me. As a city, Addis wasn’t much larger. Ninety square miles, most of which was a vast urban slum built around the fringes of a few important city centers. The two cities share a penchant for circular parks and long diagonal roads that meander and wind up in confusion along the edges. Even the late-afternoon light seems to hit D.C. the same way. Right now it’s a soft, startling pinkish hue folded into a few large clouds building up along the western horizon. In two more hours, it will dissolve into long, dark red tendrils of light that will stretch across the sky, and this day will have finally ended.

  The office towers fade quickly. They stop at a specific point, leaving the rest of the blocks ahead to the houses and stores that are neither completely run down nor well maintained, but somewhere perfectly in between, as if whoever lived in them had been asked by some higher power never to stray too far from their starting point.

  I can’t help but think of what I’m doing as going home. “I’m going back home.” I say the words out loud as I turn left on Massachusetts Avenue, leaving the last of the city’s downtown towers to itself. The sidewalks and street are thick with traffic. There is a simple and startling power to that phrase: going back home. There’s an implied contradiction, a sense of moving forward and backward at the same time, but there’s no tension in the phrase. Instead, the contradiction gives in to something else: an understanding, perhaps, that what you’re returning to can never be the same as what you left. I understand now that distant, faraway look I’ve seen in other immigrants when they talk about returning to wherever it was they first came from. I can see my store exactly as I left it this morning. I can remember the exact location of my chair behind the counter, the amount of change in the cash register, the look of the aisles, and the way the light hit the windows. I can see all of that just as clearly as I can still see the look on my mother’s face as she handed me all of her jewelry in a red cloth sack and begged me to leave. There she is with deep bags under her eyes, her long black hair tied in a loose bun, the white blanket she’s wrapped herself in rising up and down with her deep breaths. It was less than twelve hours since my father had been taken away, and there we stood at the front of our house in the near perfect predawn blackness testing the merits of certain words over and over.

  A trail of fire engines are stalled in the traffic on Massachusetts Avenue, their sirens wailing uselessly over and over as the cars in front of them search in vain for an inch of space in which to move. What will be waiting for me when I return? The cynic in me has already altered everything into an unrecognizable, chaotic mess. I picture my store burned to the ground, its contents looted. I imagine a crowd gathered around the charred remains of the building, shaking their heads silently in sympathy, in pity. Cans of Campbell’s soup are rolling down the sidewalk and street. The air smells of melted plastic, and no one can do anything because the trucks sent to save my store are here in front of me moving at roughly the same pace that I am.

  It would be so much easier never to return, wouldn’t it? To just keep walking down this road until I hit the city’s edge. And from there I could hop on a bus or train and make my way farther south, or north, and start all over again. How long did it take for me to understand that I was never going to return to Ethiopia again? It seems as if there should have been a particular moment when the knowledge settled in. For at least the first two years that I was here, I was so busy passing my mother, brother, father, and friends in the aisles of grocery stores, in parks and restaurants, that at times it hardly felt as if I had really left. I searched for familiarity wherever I went. I found it in the buildings and in the layout of the streets. I saw glimpses of home whenever I came across three or four roads that intersected at odd angles, in the squat glass office buildings caught in the sun’s glare. I found a small measure of it in the circles and in the beggars who slept under the office towers at night. I used to let my imagination get the best of me. My hallucinations of home became standard. I welcomed them into my day completely. I talked to my mother from across the bus; I walked home with my father across the spare, treeless campus of my northern Virginia community college. We talked for hours. I told him about my classes, about Berhane and our little apartment together and my job carrying suitcases at the Capitol Hotel. I explained to him the parts of American culture that I had never heard of before. “There’s no respect here,” I told him. “The students in my class call our teacher John. They dress like they’re coming from bed and then sleep through class.”

  I couldn’t have asked for a better listener than my father. We talked and saw more of each other during my first two years here than in all of the years we spent living under the same roof. It was so easy to slip him into my day. All it took was a passing thought of him in his impeccable white shirt and pinstriped suit, and there he was. Does any of this make sense to you, abaye? I know you wouldn’t have had much patience for these conversations with the dead. That would have never been your style. You would have simply asked that I remember you fondly. But it’s nice having you here with me for just a little while as we near 13th Street. You would have loved this city on a day like today. You used to stretch open your hands and crane your neck back so you could feel the wind wrapping around you, a gesture that I can’t help but mime every time a warm breeze blows by. Perhaps you would have thought, as I always do, that the portrait of Frederick Douglass painted onto the back of that red building on the corner bears, from the right angle, a striking resemblance to one of the pictures of Haile Selassie that used to adorn the walls of the capitol. I was saying earlier that I couldn’t remember at which point I understood that I had left home for good. I can’t seem to remember, either, when we stopped having these conversations. The two are connected, aren’t they? I never understood that until right now: that everything went with you.

  14

  Christmas morning I went back to my store. I took down the “Closed” sign that I had put up the afternoon Naomi came to the store, and placed a chair in front of the register so I could read The Brothers Karamazov and stare absently out the window. I had decided to open up again out of a sense of obligation. Christmas, after all, was not a holiday that immigrant storekeepers were permitted to take. The world depended on us to work on Christmas day to provide last-minute supplies of groceries for dinner and batteries for new stereos and radio-controlled cars, not to mention the extra cases of beer and wine I always purchased just before the holiday season began. Christmas day was my favorite day of the year to work. Once I learned to forgive the faith, I began at least to appreciate the general effect the holiday had on people. There was a quietness to Christmas that I loved, an absence of sound that fell on Logan Circle with the force of a finger being pressed against a child’s lips. On warmer and sunnier Christmas days, I would spend most of the afternoon standing right in front of the store, leaning back against the wall, just staring vacantly into the emptiness. There were no cars. There were no people on the sidewalk or in the circle. It felt as if the world had been abandoned by the people who had been busy making it and destroying it, and now the only ones left were timid shopkeepers like myself. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth, if not for eternity, then at least for a few hours once a year. The customers who came to the store that day generally came in high spirits, filled to the brim with the Christmas mirth and alcohol that would keep them beaming for at least a few more hours. I met their high spirits with equally high spirits of my own, delighted, as I was, to have a day that could pass so p
leasantly. I didn’t worry about how much the store made that day. If it made nothing at all, I couldn’t have cared less.

  This was exactly the type of Christmas I loved the most. Sunny, slightly warmer than usual, with a few thin clouds to drift lazily over the sky for contrast. Perhaps it was the weather that brought out the steady stream of customers into my store over the course of that morning and afternoon. They came every ten to fifteen minutes for several hours. A few were from the neighborhood, but most were people passing through on their way to Christmas dinners with aunts, uncles, and in-laws they tried to avoid for most of the year. Aluminum foil was important that year. I must have sold as much of it in that one day as I had in the previous six months combined.

  At six o’clock I called Joseph to see if he and Kenneth had any plans for the rest of the day.

  “I thought you might be spending the day with your new lady friend.”

  “She’s in Connecticut.”

  “I see.”

  “There’s nothing to see.”

  “Don’t be angry at me, Stephanos. I’m not in Connecticut. I’m here sitting by myself just like you.”

  “Where’s Kenneth?”

  “At work. Can you believe that? He said his boss asked him ‘to take one for the team’ and come in today. He was happy about it, though. He said it showed that they trusted him. Engineer or not now, he’s a damn fool.”

  Joseph and I made plans to meet at our damp, sometimes crowded bar on the edge of the city in an hour. I would close the store early, while he would call Kenneth at his office and talk him into meeting us there. If all went well, the three of us would spend yet another Christmas night together, laughing at our isolation, mocking one another and ourselves for all we were worth until the night faded into a blurry, indistinguishable memory.