The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

by Dinaw Mengestu

  Since it was Christmas, I decided to take cab rides for the rest of the night as a present to myself. For most of the ride there, my cab was the only one on the road. The driver blew through traffic lights and stop signs, and he and I didn’t say a word to each other. It was exactly the way I wanted it.

  I beat Joseph to the bar, which was already half full by seven o’clock, a horseshoe of men perched on their backless stools around a wooden bar covered in alcohol. By the time he arrived, I was already several drinks into the night.

  “You’re drunk, Stephanos,” was the first thing he said to me.

  “Maybe a little.”

  “It doesn’t fit you. You’re too skinny. You look like you’re about to fall asleep. It’s those big eyes of yours.”

  “You should catch up.”

  “I’ve already had a bottle of wine. It was my Christmas present from work. Two bottles of cheap red wine that no one ever orders.”

  “But you drank it anyway.”

  “Of course. I’m a man of taste, not means. I drank it and read Rilke in German.”

  “You don’t speak German.”

  “No. But I love the sounds. All those harsh verts and gerts. It’s absolutely beautiful.”

  “Everything is beautiful to you.”

  “Not everything.”

  “But damn close.”

  “You just have to have the right perspective.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Indifference. You have to know that none of this is going to last. And then you have to not care.”

  “And then the world becomes beautiful.”

  “No. It becomes ridiculous. Which is close enough for me. So what happened to you today?”

  “Connecticut.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That she would want to spend Christmas with you in that neighborhood? The three of you crowded in your apartment singing Christmas carols? Come on, Stephanos.”

  “Is it that ridiculous?’

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Then you understand.”

  By the time Kenneth joined us, Joseph and I had been sitting at the bar for nearly two hours. He arrived dressed in his usual work suit, his tie loosened just beneath the collar. He was tired. His shoulders were hunched just slightly. His eyes had a weariness and vacancy to them that reminded me of the look you sometimes see on an injured child who has just caught a glimpse of something cruel and unfair happening to someone he loves. It was almost nine o clock. He had worked at least a twelve-hour day entirely alone.

  “Look,” Joseph said. “The man even wears a suit when he’s the only one in the office. You’re the perfect immigrant, I tell you. The INS should make a poster out of you, Kenneth. You could even be their spokesperson.”

  After a bottle of wine and half a dozen drinks, Joseph had finally managed to get drunk. He had grown practically immune to alcohol between the weight he had put on over the years and all the wine he drank during the off moments at his job. He was yelling and wagging his pudgy fingers at Kenneth as he spoke.

  “I tell you, Kenneth. Ken. Had this been the eighteen hundreds, you would have been the perfect house nigger.”

  “Which one is it, Joseph?” Kenneth shot back. “The perfect immigrant or the perfect slave? You can’t have it both ways.”

  “Says who? The engineer? Maybe in your world you can’t. But in mine, everything is that way.”

  Kenneth turned his back on Joseph. He placed his arm on the bar to create a wall between Joseph and the two of us.

  “How are you, Stephanos?”

  “He’s terrible,” Joseph responded. “He wishes he were singing carols and celebrating Christmas in Connecticut.”

  “That would be better than listening to you right now. What happened? I thought you might be with that woman and her daughter.”

  “Judith and Naomi, you mean.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. Judith and Naomi.”

  “They went to Connecticut,” I said.

  “Without you?”

  “Yes. Without me.”

  “You ever find out about the little girl’s father?” Joseph interrupted.

  “He’s a professor from Mauritania.”

  “Ah. Mauritania.”

  There was a wistful tone to Joseph’s voice when he said that. Ah, Mauritania. The words had a certain rhythm to them, just like celebrating Christmas in Connecticut and the verts and gerts of German poetry that he claimed to find so beautiful.

  “They were French too, you know,” Joseph continued. “I once had the pleasure of being told by a Mauritanian that he couldn’t understand my Negro French. That’s okay, I told him. Ce n’était jamais à moi.”

  He paused for a second and smiled to himself as he admired his own wit. These were the parts of our conversations that he loved the most. I could see Kenneth preparing another question about Judith, Mauritania, and Naomi. Joseph caught the expression as well, and before Kenneth could press the matter any further, Joseph said, with a sly, ironic smirk, “Shall we begin?”

  “I think we already have,” I said.

  “You’re right. We have. Fine, then. Who do we have in Mauritania, Kenneth?”

  “I don’t consider Mauritania a part of Africa,” Kenneth said. “To me, they are Arabs. They belong to the Middle East.”

  “So you don’t know, then?” Joseph asked.

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “Stephanos?”

  “Ahmed Taya.”

  “Not bad, Stephanos. And the year?”

  “Nineteen seventy-eight?”

  “Wrong coup. Try again.”

  “Nineteen eighty-one?”

  “Wrong one again. One more try?”

  “I give up,” I said.

  “Nineteen eighty-four. Just like the Orwell novel.”

  “Taya was the head of the army?” Kenneth asked.

  “No. Just a colonel,” Joseph said. “All the best dictators are colonels. Qaddafi. Taya. Both are still going. You have to respect that. A general would have never lasted as long. Even your Mengistu, Stephanos. He was a colonel.”

  “But he’s gone now either way,” I reminded him.

  “The point is he did well for himself. You have to admit.”

  “You’re right,” I acknowledged. “Seventeen years isn’t so bad. He even managed to kill a few generals along the way.”

  “You see? That’s the thing about these colonels. They get just far enough to think they deserve it all. A general has already been close to the top. They become lazy lions up there. The colonels, on the other hand, never rest. They’re too impatient. They know they don’t deserve it. And so they last. Name me one colonel removed by his own army.”

  After a few moments of silence, Joseph declared triumphantly, “Exactly.”

  “How many does that make now?” Kenneth asked.

  “At least thirty,” I said.

  “I wonder what we’re going to talk about when we run out.”

  “We’re never going to run out,” Joseph said. “Having a coup is addictive. Look at what happened after Idi. Yusufu Lule, Godfrey Binaisa, the return of Obote, and then Tito Okello. One after another. Why would anyone want to stop? I wish I had been there to see Mobutu go. I would have been one of those people you saw dancing in the street. I would have carried Kabila on my shoulders straight to the president’s palace if I were there.”

  Joseph finished his speech by leaning over the bar and snapping his fingers for another drink. As he leaned too far over the counter to catch the attention of the bartender, Kenneth abruptly stood up.

  “Where are you going?” I asked him. “You just got here.”

  “Sorry, Stephanos. I’m tired of these conversations. I’m going to go home and sleep. I have to be back at work tomorrow.”

  “Let him go, Stephanos,” Joseph said. “The Big Man is tired of our African talk. He wants to go home and dream of his new suit.”

  “What was your f
ather, Stephanos?” Kenneth asked me.

  “A lawyer.”

  “That’s right. A lawyer. And you, Joseph?”

  “You know what he was.”

  “A businessman.”

  “Yes. A businessman.”

  “And what was mine?”

  Kenneth looked over at Joseph, and then me, knowing that neither one of us knew how to answer his question.

  “Come, Joseph. I’ve told you this before.”

  “He was illiterate,” Joseph responded.

  “What else?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Exactly. That’s it. That’s all he ever was. A poor illiterate man who lived in a slum. And you know what that makes him in Africa? Nothing. That’s what Africa is right now. A continent full of poor illiterates dying in slums. What am I supposed to miss? Being sent into the street to beg white tourists for money? If I die today, my sister in Nairobi will get one hundred thousand dollars. Someone would have to come and move the furniture out of my apartment. My suits will be shipped back to Kenya for my cousins. You, Joseph, would get my car. The only thing my father owned when he died was a picture of Jomo Kenyatta. His great leader. From the day I was born, there have been only two leaders of Kenya. The first was terrible, and now the second is even worse. That’s why I’m here in this country. No revolution. No coup.”

  Kenneth slipped into his gray wool overcoat. He took a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet and left it on the bar to pay for the one drink that he had ordered but never finished. Joseph and I said nothing to stop him as he walked out of the bar.

  15

  For the rest of December I watched Judith’s house for signs of life. I expected her and Naomi to return from Connecticut at any moment, and so every day I eagerly awaited their arrival. In the morning, on my way to the store, and again at the end of the night, and on occasion during the day, I stared into the house, hoping to see the flutter of a curtain or a passing shadow in the window. Without her and Naomi, the nights were suddenly hard. I found that it was difficult to sleep. I paced around my apartment and stayed up late listening to the BBC’s reports on Eastern Europe and the Middle East. I decided it was going to be a bloody, terrible winter. Back at the store I finished reading The Brothers Karamazov by myself. I came back to the final pages with Alyosha and the young boys gathered around him, the death of the innocent Illusha adding a certain touching sentimentality to the scene, which continued to bring a few tears to the corners of my eyes regardless of how often I read it. I read out loud to the shelves and empty aisles my favorite passage:

  People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.

  I memorized the passage by reciting it on my way to work. I highlighted it in the book for Naomi, knowing even then that it would never make its way back to a shelf. Remember this, I wrote in the margins.

  I filled in my afternoons by making a list of aphorisms, some new, some borrowed, that I wanted to tell her.

  Never trust anyone who says “Trust me.”

  Try to find high places to look down from.

  I wanted to give her a catalogue description of the world, a list of rules by which she could live her life and spare herself the same disappointments that I had already suffered.

  On New Year’s Eve I sat on a bench in the circle and toasted General Logan with the same stale bottle of scotch Judith and I had shared. I got drunk and then walked home alone. Two days later, I went to pay my rent and found that I barely had enough money to get through the month. Business had steadily slowed down since the neighborhood first began to change, but the last four months had been the quietest since I first opened the store. A month before Judith moved into the neighborhood a single six-story brick housing project that sat on the edge of Logan Circle had been declared uninhabitable and was torn down. At least half the people who lived in it had been regulars at my store, and when the building went, they and their small daily purchases went with it. More dramatic departures had been happening all around me as well, but I had tried hard at first not to give them too much weight. Moving vans were showing up around the neighborhood again, but these were leaving, not coming. They were short and shabby, stacked from the ground to the roof with half-packed boxes of clothes and dishes, mattresses tied in pairs to the roofs. Rents had been on the rise for over a year, but it was only now, in the past six months, that you began to see the effects. Evictions had become common. I often overheard Mrs. Davis standing in front of our house complaining about them and the rent increases. A name or address would float by—

  “You know the Harris family.”

  —and instantly I would turn a deaf ear to the rest of what she had to say.

  On the few occasions she had tried to grab my attention, I had simply stood there, mute, nodding my head as need be. She always said the same thing every time.

  “It’s not right. These people coming in like that and forcing us out.”

  I was in no position, though, to say what was right or wrong. I was not one of “these people,” as Mrs. Davis had just made clear to me. I hadn’t forced anyone out, but I had never really been a part of Logan Circle either, at least not in the way Mrs. Davis and most of my customers were. I had snuck into the neighborhood as well. I had used it for its cheap rent, and if others were now doing the same, then what right did I have to deny them? At first I had even believed that the steady stream of new, affluent faces moving into the neighborhood would eventually more than make up for the loss. With the exception, though, of a few things here and there—trash bags, laundry detergent, candy bars, and of course, bottled water—most of these people wanted nothing to do with my little run-down store.

  The prostitutes, and the line of cars that came with them, had also thinned out as the neighborhood moved from decay to respectability. I had stopped staying open late; there was almost no one left to cater to. All of that, along with those days in December when I couldn’t find the energy or courage to face my store, had taken their toll on what little money I had. Life was precarious. I had always been willing to admit that. I lived on a fine line with poverty on one side and just enough extra money for an occasional beer on the other. In January I slipped off that line, and after that, it was all but impossible to get back on.

  “You have to change with the times, Stephanos.”

  That was Kenneth’s advice when I showed him my accounts for November and December. I was never good with numbers. He didn’t have the heart to say it, but I knew he was thinking it: it was amazing that I had lasted this long.

  “You can’t rely on a bunch of kids and prostitutes to make your living anymore. A year from now this could be one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the city, and you have to be ready for that.”

  “How?” I asked him.

  “By investing. By preparing for the future. You can’t stay still, man. You have to move on. That’s the way the world works. I’ve been telling you and Joseph this for years, but you never listen.”

  It was Kenneth’s suggestion that I put a deli counter inside of the store.

  “Americans love sandwiches,” he said confidently.

  I paid for it with a credit-card offer that came in the mail. I ordered the best meat that I couldn’t afford and arranged it neatly behind the glass case. I bought a stand-alone chalkboard sign that I placed in front of the store. For the first time, I used the name that Joseph had given me.

  Logan’s Market

  Now Offering Freshly Made Sandwiches to Order!

  I began to work longer hours again. I opened the store at six a.m. and closed it at ten on most nights. On the days that I couldn’t bear the thought of returning to my apartment, I kept the store open until midnight, hoping, however irrationally, for the remaining trace of the
late-night crowds that used to keep my store afloat. At the end of that first week in January, I figured out how much extra I was earning by keeping my store open for four to seven hours longer. The grand total averaged out to twenty dollars a day. I ate sandwiches three to five times a day. Deducting for the food and the extra cost of electricity, I was earning approximately three dollars an hour.

  On January 7, I called my mother and brother as soon as I woke up to wish them a merry Christmas. They had received the presents I mailed them.

  “What made you think of giving me a book of poems?” my mother asked me.

  I told her that the poems in the collection reminded me of her.

  “Read the one that begins, ‘For each ecstatic instant.’ You’ll see why.”

  I told her what I knew about Dickinson, about her lonely, unmarried life in rural Massachusetts and the drawers full of poems found after her death. My mother took the story personally, as she took every story she ever heard.

  “Betam asazinya,” she said when I finished.

  “It is sad. But it’s wonderful at the same time.” I tried to explain to her the beauty of living such a solitary and lonely life. “She wrote all of those poems entirely alone. She was able to live on just that.”

  She asked me if I had received the present she had sent me. I was too ashamed to say yes. That money order was the only reason I could afford the phone conversation I was having right then.

  “Did Dawit like the shirt?” I asked her instead.

  “He loved it,” she said. “It fit him perfectly.”

  I smiled when I heard that. Of course it fit, I wanted to tell her. I already knew exactly what he was made of.

  That was the last quiet week in January. The next morning, the only family living in a run-down, three-story house one block away from my store was evicted. An angry crowd gathered outside to watch. The police were called in. From my store I could hear the barrage of shouts and threats volleyed back and forth. More sirens followed, until eventually the entire block was cordoned off. I stepped outside of my store once to see what was happening, but I knew my place. It was behind the counter, not in the middle of a dispute in which I had no part to play.