The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

by Dinaw Mengestu

  Judith handed me the box. It was heavier and felt more expensive than I had expected.

  “Are you going to tell me what it is?”

  “Go ahead and open it.”

  I put the box down on the stairwell and untied the ribbon for the second time in that present’s life. Judith had even gone to the trouble of putting new packing paper inside the box.

  “It’s a typewriter.”

  “Not just a typewriter,” she said. “Look closely at the keys.”

  Each key was a different animal, and each animal was framed by a different color. I looked closely and counted one animal for every typing finger. There was a bird, a bear, a dog, a duck, a pig, an elephant, a mouse, and a cat. A procession of increasingly large elephants lined the space bar. It was a beautiful typewriter; antique, in perfect condition, solid black with the word “Corona” etched elegantly in gold in the center, and again at the top.

  “They made it in the thirties to teach kids how to type. That’s what the animals and colors are for. The bird was the pinky finger, the elephants the thumbs. You get the picture.”

  It was a perfect present for a child like Naomi.

  “I don’t think I can take this,” I said.

  “I know. But I promised Naomi that I would at least make the offer. Someday I hope she’ll want to look back and remember her father for something more than his bad breath, but she was very fond of you.”

  There it was again. Judith’s use of the word “fond,” echoing her “sweet” from a month ago. It was the sensitive, proper word in both cases. Naomi was fond of me, just as she was fond of her stuffed animals and bedroom and some of her teachers. I realized, however touched I might have been by her presence in my life, just what an insignificant role I had played in hers.

  “I was fond of her too. She’s the only child besides my little brother that I’ve ever been attached to.”

  “She wants you to write her at school. I think that’s why she wanted you to have this typewriter. It would have obligated you to write her. She said, ‘Tell Mr. Stephanos that he has to write me while I’m away.’”

  “I would have written her anyway.”

  “I know. That’s what I told her.”

  We both began to miss Naomi in our own possessive and competitive way, and had I not changed the subject, we could have just stood there awkwardly staring down at that typewriter until we couldn’t stand to be near each other.

  “I’m sorry about what happened at that meeting,” I said.

  “Don’t apologize,” she said. “I know how these things go. You didn’t do anything.”

  She didn’t mean it as an attack, but it felt like one anyway.

  “I could have said something.”

  “And what do you think that would have done? If I had lived here as long as they had, I’d be angry too. What I couldn’t do was sign that petition. That would have been the definition of hypocrisy, don’t you think? I’m embarrassed to say what I paid for this house. Even after all the repairs. I can’t pretend that there’s anything just to it, but there’s nothing evil to it either.

  “I saw the new sign in front of your store. It looks good.”

  “You should come in and have a sandwich. They’re the best in the neighborhood. I make my own bread. Slaughter my own deli meat in the basement.”

  “Sounds tempting.”

  “Good. Come by tomorrow and see for yourself.”

  I couldn’t hide the eagerness in that last line. I hadn’t even known it was there until there was enough space for it to appear.

  “Maybe,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll see you around regardless.”

  The next day a brick was planted in Judith’s car, her white Volkswagen Cabriolet with Virginia license plates and a troop of stuffed animals pressed against the rear window. The brick shattered most of the windshield and landed squarely on the driver’s seat. There were flecks of glass all over the interior of the car and sidewalk. They were the first things that caught my eye when I walked out of my house early in the morning to head to work. They sparkled the way I imagined crystals or diamonds would have in the sun.

  The other cars—a bright red Monte Carlo sedan with white seats, and a baby-blue Chevy Impala—parked behind and in front of Judith’s were untouched. I walked closer to Judith’s car so I could peer inside. There was a stack of books still sitting on the passenger seat next to a haphazard pile of CD cases and a few envelopes bearing Judith’s name. Whoever threw the brick through the car had no intention of stealing it. All they had wanted was to shatter the windshield, and having done that, were happy to walk away.

  I rang Judith’s doorbell to tell her what had happened. It was only a few minutes past seven in the morning. The sun had been up for less than a half hour. It was going to be a cloudy, cold day: the definition of a winter morning. The only people out were the new early-morning joggers, who seemed to increase in number by the week. I wondered, briefly, how I could get them into my store before or after their runs.

  It wasn’t Judith who answered her door that morning. I rang the doorbell at least three times before a sleepy man wearing a long white terrycloth robe answered the door. I saw his figure and his color through the glass. I thought briefly of running away, and had I more time between my first impression of him and his opening of the door, I would have. He had a face like an eagle, a soft brown muddled skin tone that suggested multiple ancestries: part black, part Arab, with perhaps even a touch of the French colonist. This was the face of the celebrated economist who had cigar-tinged breath, lived all over the world, and sent home typewriters to his daughter. A handsome, even beautiful face defined by a long, thin nose and thick, wavy black hair that had streaks of gray so perfectly placed that they could have been artificial.

  There was a defensive, guarded look to his face when he opened the door and found me standing on the porch. I knew that look all too well. It was the same one I employed whenever someone entered my store with the obvious intention of begging. Had it been later in the day, he would have tried to shoo me away with a quick flick of his wrist.

  “Judith’s car,” I said, “has been broken into.” I said the words with an obviously forced elegance, a touch of Kenneth’s fake English accent lurking behind my words, as if what I had really wanted to say from the moment I opened my mouth was, “The tea is ready.”

  Before the man could respond, Judith’s voice appeared from somewhere in the house. It called out: “What is it? Who’s down there?”

  I had never thought of her voice as being shrill, but at that moment it seemed to be the epitome of the word.

  The eagle spoke. It turned its head back slowly to face the steps. It said in French: “There’s a man saying your car has been broken into.”

  Judith ran down the steps. Her first words, the moment she saw that it was me the man had been referring to, were those of an introduction. Her instinct for diplomacy couldn’t be matched. For a second she seemed to have completely forgotten why she had come down the steps in the first place, but as soon as she saw me she slowed her steps to a crawl and braced herself. I half-expected her to open her arms and bellow my name from above.

  “Sepha, this is Ayad. Ayad, Sepha. He’s my next-door neighbor.”

  She made the introductions casually, as if we were acquaintances meeting at a dinner party being thrown in her honor. Ayad couldn’t help but lean out the door to look at the dilapidated buildings on either side of Judith’s house for comfort. There was a barely repressed smile behind his face when he faced me again. He seemed to want to apologize for having overestimated me from the beginning.

  “I’m terribly sorry to disturb you so early in the morning,” I said again in my exalted Cambridge-touched tone. “But I noticed as I was leaving my house that your car had been broken into.”

  Judith grabbed a long, black wool coat hanging in the hallway and slipped on a pair of worn tennis shoes that could have dated back to her years as a graduate student. They had that soft worn look
, the kind that breeds unnecessary, sentimental attachments. She walked down the steps of her house and over to her car. She stared at the shards of glass crunching under her steps. She walked around to the front of her car. As soon as she saw the gaping hole in the windshield, and the brick lying innocently on the seat, she gasped audibly. She held her right hand over her mouth, as if she wanted to cry or scream but had suddenly forgotten how to do either.

  Ayad and I watched her from the porch. I wanted him to do something dramatic, something uniquely French, like shrug his shoulders casually and whisper in a raspy voice, “C’est la vie,” or pull a cigarette from the pockets of his white robe and smoke with a world-weary indifference. Instead, he just leaned against the doorway and watched Judith mourn her broken car, just as I did.

  I walked away from the two of them, touched by the casual, even cruel way they must have treated each other. I walked all the way around the circle to reach my store so I would be less tempted to turn back and see whether Judith was still standing in the street by herself. It didn’t work. I turned back anyway, and when I did, I saw that she was still standing there alone, arms folded, as if she had been here and done this before.

  There was talk of Judith’s car all morning in the store. The police were called in, and inevitably their whirling lights drew a small crowd. I didn’t hear any speculation as to who could have done it or why. But still people talked. They said things like: “You know that woman who owns that house on the circle…that big red one with all the windows.” I realized after overhearing a few of these conversations that what stood out the most, more than Judith and her car, was the house. The formerly rundown, four-story brick mansion that had been abandoned for as long as I had lived here. Look at it now. It was shining. I actually heard someone use that word. That shining big house. There was more than just a sense of mystery to its transformation. There was something that bordered on the miraculous, the impossible. Less than a year ago, no one who lived in this neighborhood would have ever imagined such a feat was possible, but here it was. Mixed in with the pride that inevitably came with living in such close proximity to a house as grand as Judith’s was the unshakable faith that there was something not quite right to the whole affair. We expect the things that are dead or dying to remain so. But what happens when they refuse to stay that way?

  Business continued to boom and people continued to talk and speculate about what happened. By noon, the brick had moved from Judith’s car to her living room. By midafternoon, there was a note attached it to. By four or five in the afternoon, the note had been deciphered. It said: Get out. Or: Move out. Somehow the event had been transformed. It had grown in weight and stature. It had become political. One drunk old man who lingered around the circle and my store claimed to have seen the whole thing. He reported seeing a group of young men dressed entirely in black throwing the brick through the car or the house (it didn’t really matter which anymore) in broad daylight. He said they threw the brick and walked away, cool as ever.

  Mrs. Davis made her way into the store near the end of the day.

  “I bet you already know what happened to that woman’s car,” she said to me as soon as she walked in.

  “I do,” I said. “I was the one who first saw it this morning.” (Yes, I was guilty too of wanting to claim my own minor role in what was happening.)

  “They towed that car out of there pretty quick. I never even got the chance to see it. What did it look like?”

  “It looked like a car that had been broken into.”

  My answer wasn’t enough for her. Perhaps I could have done more to clear the record, but people have to want to know the truth before they can hear it, and who could possibly care for simple facts when the myths being spun did so much more?

  The next brick found a home less than twenty-four hours later. This time it wasn’t a car but a building. The Hampshire Tower, situated right on the corner of New Hampshire Avenue and 12th Street, just a block and a half away from General Logan and his horse. I knew practically nothing about the building, only that it had been built in the 1920s in the midst of that decade’s great economic boom, and that more recently, the bushes surrounding the building were used by prostitutes and their johns for quick late-night ventures. The brick shattered the glass windows of the lobby and landed in a fake potted plant near the elevators. The Hampshire Tower wasn’t a particularly nice or expensive building, but that hardly seemed to be the point. What mattered was the repetition, and just as important, the increase in scope, from a car to a building.

  After that second brick was thrown I began to hear rumors in my store all afternoon. A Mercedes parked on 13th Street had its tires slashed the same night. There was a note attached to the Hampshire Tower brick that claimed the shattered windows were payment for an evicted family of six. There were more stories of men dressed entirely in black seen walking past the building late at night with a casual, defiant ease, vigilant and heroic.

  I kept my store open until close to midnight that night. Customers came in and out until nearly eleven. For a late January night, the weather was exceptionally mild, even remarkable. Every time the doors to the store were opened, a breeze that seemed better suited to April or May would blow in. Outside of my store was a mixed crowd of old and young men making the most of the temporary reprieve from winter. Fragments of their conversation drifted in and out. I couldn’t imagine any of them marching down the middle of the street armed with bricks. We all essentially wanted the same thing, which was to feel that we had a stake in shaping and defining what little part of the world we could claim as our own. Boys even younger than the ones standing outside had fought and killed one another all over Addis for that exact reason, and they were at it again now throughout more of Africa than even Joseph, Kenneth, and I cared to acknowledge. At least here, in America, they had this corner to live their lives as they pleased, and if a few of them took to throwing bricks through windows, then we could not judge them.

  When I finally returned home I saw that every light in Judith’s house had been turned on. I thought of the Christmas tree in her living room, and then of Gatsby and his corner mansion all lit up. There was no party or music, and as I neared her house, I heard her voice yelling at what must have been close to the top of her lungs. Most of the words were indistinguishable. All I could make out was the profanity: fuck you and so on. Her voice came in and out as she walked through her house cursing away at Ayad, whose figure I could make out from behind the living-room drapes.

  I sat down on the steps outside of my house and listened to them scream and curse at each other. I wondered whether I would catch a glimpse of the rumored black-clad men if I waited there long enough. Anything seemed possible at that point. It was fifty degrees and it was January.

  I found a brick in front of my store the next morning. It was lying right in front of the door, as harmless as a fallen branch or leaf. The windows and door to my store had metal grates too thick and close together to have let anything as large as a brick go through them. I checked all the grates and found hardly any signs of damage.

  I opened my store as usual. I used the brick that had been given to me to prop the door open. The warm weather had held through the night, and I didn’t want to miss any of it.

  Judith was my first customer that morning. She came in with heavy bags under her eyes, her hair tied up in a sloppy bun that left loose strands to fall around the sides of her face. She was wearing the same tennis shoes she used to walk to her car that morning, along with a pair of faded jeans and a thick University of Connecticut sweatshirt.

  She came in and handed me a letter.

  “It’s from Naomi,” she said. “It came in the mail the morning you stopped by the house. I meant to give it to you that day. And to tell you thank you for coming by and letting me know about the car, but somehow all of that got lost.”

  She looked up at me and I could see that she wanted some form of consolation. There was the same shame and embarrassment I had seen in her
face when Naomi made her first escape from the house, and Judith returned to my store to apologize for her frightened, hysterical behavior. Last night, I had listened to her and Ayad fight until nearly four in the morning. At some point they took their fight to the bedroom. I opened my window, which meant that I could hear nearly everything they said to each other over the course of the evening. Judith had accused him of being cruel and indifferent, a self-absorbed asshole who had used her as a prop to feel better about himself. She told him that his daughter could barely stand to be around him. She said that he was ashamed of his own daughter, which made him the worst possible type of father. Ayad was no less harsh. In a mixture of French and English, he reminded Judith of the role she had played in seducing him. He told her she was just like all of the American women he had met: willing and all too eager. Look at where she was living now, he pointed out. In a shitty slum of a neighborhood where people throw bricks at your car. He told Judith the only part of his daughter he was ashamed of was the part that came from her.

  There was no address on the envelope. Just my name, properly spelled, in Naomi’s elegant, childish handwriting.

  “Do you have an address?” I asked her. “There’s not one on this envelope and I’d like to write Naomi back.”

  Judith pulled a pen out of her pocket and wrote Naomi’s address at school on the envelope. Her hand shook with every turn of the pen.

  “Ayad left this morning,” she said. “He came back with me from Connecticut. It was a terrible mistake. One I know never to make again. I’m sorry you ever had to meet him.”

  “You don’t have to apologize to me,” I told her.

  “Let’s have dinner soon,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow if you’re free.”

  Our emotions do get the best of us. Whether they’re valid or genuine in the end is irrelevant when all you want is a kind gesture or word to redeem you.

  “Yes. Let’s do that,” I told her.