The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

by Dinaw Mengestu

  Judith thanked me for being so sweet and understanding before she left the store. She used those words so easily: “sweet and understanding.” She hesitated a moment at the door, but then thought better of whatever else she was going to say. I watched her through the window as she cut through the circle and bounded her way home. I tried to think of what she reminded me of with her quick, long strides somewhere in between a jog and a brisk walk. In the end I decided that it wasn’t the way she moved, but the sense of injury that hovered around her that made me think of a wounded animal.

  Naomi’s letter to me was two pages, front and back, written in purple, blue, and black ink forming carefully scripted letters that were so small I had to hold the paper almost directly in front of my face to read it. Her first few sentences were customary—hi; how are you; I am fine. Every sentence after that was increasingly eloquent. She wrote about her teachers and new friends and the school’s “magnificent grounds.” She closed by saying that she hoped I wasn’t lonely without her. I had always wondered if she was perceptive enough to know how far her presence went toward filling my days. I was relieved to find that she was. She saved the best sentences for last. She wrote them as a couplet:

  There are many nice people here, but none as nice as you.

  Please write me back, because that’s what friends are supposed to do.

  I hid the letter under the cash register. I imagined that if I ever wanted to read it again, it would be while I was standing here, behind the counter.

  16

  There are only three blocks left between General Logan and me. I can just make out the edge of the circle, its empty benches and the trees shaking lightly in the wind. There was a park in Addis that looked just like Logan Circle does from a distance, with a few minor adjustments. That was the other reason I moved into this neighborhood. The first time I saw General Logan riding on his horse, surrounded by his benches and dying clumps of grass, I was reminded of the late-afternoon walks my father and I used to take during the summer, when I spent a part of each afternoon working with him in his office. Near the end of each day he locked up his office doors and together the two of us strolled down the street, past the open-market vendors, through the chaotically jammed roads crowded with cars, buses, and people walking with their small flocks of sheep, everyone fighting for space, until we reached the circle built in the shadows of one of the emperor’s palaces. The park was small, no larger than Logan Circle, but it was enough of a reprieve from the city to achieve the intended effect, which was to block out the world in order to live quietly for a half hour or so with our thoughts. My father walked with both hands clasped behind his back and ran silently over the day. Sometimes his thoughts took him even farther back in time, and when they did, he walked around the park talking quietly to himself. He whispered the names of dead relatives—his mother and father, both of whom had died long before I was born. We almost never spoke to each other during those walks. That would have betrayed the lesson he was trying to teach me. It wasn’t enough to be comfortable with silence. In order to truly understand it, you had to welcome it and invite it into your life. And so that was what we did. We walked in silence around and around that park until it was time to return to work or home. The last walk we took around that park was on January 23, 1977, less than six months before he was killed. We had just entered the park grounds when we saw the first of seven bodies neatly lined up in the center of the grass. They were lined up in a row, their feet bare, just inside the entrance. They were impossible to miss or avoid. Hung around each of their necks was a crudely made cardboard sign that simply read “Traitor.” A lone sentry, no older than the boys lying on the ground, guarded the bodies. He stood to the side so as not to interrupt the view, a rifle slung lazily over his shoulder. It would have been easy enough to turn around and walk back out of the park. With the exception of the guard and the bodies, no one else was there. Instead of leaving, my father pulled me around to his side and placed one arm over my shoulder and led me forward, around the same path that we had always walked on, as if the bodies and the guard assigned to watch them had never been there. It was the simplest act of defiance my father could think of. An arrogant, almost blind refusal to give in to the self-proclaimed terror of the revolution. It was only a few weeks earlier that Mengistu Haile Mariam had declared the start of the Red Terror in a crowded city square by throwing to the ground bottles filled with red ink to represent the blood of the revolution’s enemies. And here they were now, lined up like matchsticks on the grass, the soles of their muddy feet exposed to my father and me as we circled the grounds of the park.

  Rather than go directly to my store, I turn right at the corner and head toward home. I can see pieces of my store from here. From the corner of 13th and Rhode Island Avenue, I can catch a glimpse of the store’s blue and white façade. I can see the outline of my stand-alone chalkboard sign advertising a lunch special that doesn’t exist. A turkey and cheddar sandwich on a roll with a complimentary bag of potato chips and a can of soda for $4.50. From here, there is no sign of chaos or destruction. It looks just like any other corner store: humble, well maintained. For a few seconds I imagine that it belongs to someone else. Another immigrant, one who looks much like I do, who right now is standing behind the counter bantering casually with one of his regular customers on a spring day that is all but perfect.

  It’s almost six o’clock now. The sunlight is hitting the top of the trees. Here is the usual parade of commuters returning home marching around the circle. I find myself walking slowly behind an older black woman dressed far too warmly for the day. She’s wearing a heavy, full-length black coat that wraps around her broad, hunched back. She’s pushing a red plastic cart in front of her, its contents wrapped in plastic piled to the very top. I walk behind her slowly, admiring the deliberation that seems to come with every step. I can only guess at the effort it takes for a woman like this to make her way through the city every day. I wonder if the world slows down to match her understanding of it, if the mind doesn’t catch each passing image and hold it for a second longer in order to compensate for the extra energy each step takes. I wish this day had passed at this pace, that I hadn’t run from one end of the city to the other. Despite how hard I may have tried, there is still so much I missed. I should have visited the market by my uncle’s house and talked to the old Somali man who used to sell me injera and berbere when I was still a teenager. I should have taken the time to stand outside of the Capitol Hotel’s palatial entrance and marvel at the disappearance of time.

  The woman and I part ways in front of what remains of Judith’s old house. On the night of the fire, Joseph, Kenneth, and I were sitting in my store. The three of us were sitting around our table eating turkey sandwiches and drinking a cheap bottle of wine Joseph had stolen from his restaurant. I remember I was telling them about what had been happening, beginning with the brick that had been thrown through Judith’s car. I told them about Ayad and his eaglelike face, and the rumors of marauding men in black touring through the neighborhood.

  Kenneth shook his head in disappointment when he heard the news.

  “None of this will be good for business,” he had said. “Having bricks thrown through windows is a bad sign.”

  I told him that business had been better the past week than it had been in months.

  “That’s just temporary,” he said. “Things always go up in times of crisis. People get confused, scared. So what do they do? They spend. If this keeps up, a few weeks from now and this place will be empty.”

  “It’s already empty,” I reminded him.

  “Well. It will be even emptier.”

  “This is how it happened in Zaire,” Joseph said. “One day we heard that some people were beaten up by guys with guns. The next day we had a rebel group walking through the neighborhood saying they had come to liberate us from the government. To prove their point they shot five people in the street who were responsible for our oppression.”

  “You must
have been grateful,” I said.

  “Of course we were. We didn’t even know that we were oppressed. Imagine our surprise and joy to find out that we had been. We gave the rebels all the money we had to thank them. I remember one man was so happy he even gave them his wife and daughter. As an African, you should understand what’s happening here, Stephanos.”

  “And what is that?” Kenneth asked him.

  “That there’s nothing these people can do. Look at this place. All of the marches in the world won’t change anything anymore. We were at our best in the sixties. Africa was free. America was free. Everyone was marching to something. And now look at us.”

  I walked over to the door then and picked up the brick that had been thrown at my store that morning. I had left it lying on the ground in case the weather turned nice again.

  “I found this in front of my store today,” I said.

  Joseph took the brick from my hand and turned it over and over as if he were checking its density and weight. He paused and held it in his lap silently as he thought about what he was going to say next. He wanted to say something important, something worthy of a brick left lying on a doorstep.

  “There’s a great metaphor in this,” he said. He held the brick in the air with one hand. It could have been a poem from Yeats that he was talking about for all of the import and dignity he was attributing to the brick. His words and gestures were borrowed—part academic, part statesman. They were all wrong. Watching him, I couldn’t help but think that in Africa, he could have led a crowd straight to the bush or palace. He had that kind of charisma about him when he spoke.

  “The Palestinians have their rocks. The Rwandans had their machetes. Our weapons aren’t accidents,” he said. “They’re a part of who we are.”

  “It’s just a brick, Joseph,” Kenneth said.

  “That’s exactly my point,” Joseph responded.

  After that we began to catalogue the child wars fought over the last three decades when the roar of the fire trucks and ambulances caught us in midthought. Kenneth was pressing his case that every war in Africa was essentially a war fought by and against children. He was asking us to look at the numbers, at the sum total of children’s lives lost in battle, and just as important, the even greater number lost in the margins of those battles. He was saying, “It’s a simple matter of arithmetic. You can’t deny the numbers,” when I noticed that the sirens and the lights that accompanied them had come to a halt on the other side of the circle. The store was spinning in red and white. Kenneth’s voice was being drowned out by the hard-pressed wailing sound coming from another fire truck that was rounding the corner. His voice trailed off as the three of us looked up from the table and out the window into the indiscriminate glare of the emergency lights twirling like a disco ball around the circle. We have instincts for tragedies. We know when they belong to us long before we understand them. Even before I ran out of the store, across the circle, to the wall of waiting fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars, parked in front of my house, I knew.

  This is how it began, then, with the three of us sitting in my store on a Thursday night listing for the hundredth time the victims of a continent that at times seemed full of nothing else. We were always more comfortable with the world’s tragedies than our own. That night was no different. Coups, child soldiers, famines were all a part of the same package of unending grief that we picked our way through in order to avoid our own frustrations and disappointments with life. It was only inevitable that the two would have to meet at some point.

  The windows to Judith’s house are still boarded up, and you can still see streaks of black around the top. The only part of the house not ruined by the fire is the stone steps leading up to the front door. The last conversation I had with Judith was on these steps. It was almost a month ago to the day, on an early April afternoon touched intermittently with a light, cold drizzle. On the night of the fire, she had been off watching a movie and having dinner with her former colleagues. She didn’t come back home until the last traces of the fire had died down. The front door, and every window in the house, had been broken. Firefighters and a crowd that had come out to watch the spectacle circled the house. When Judith arrived, I was standing directly across the street with Kenneth and Joseph, surrounded on either side by my neighbors, all of whom had run out of their homes. Even before I saw her I already knew she wasn’t in the house. A policeman had told me the moment I approached my building. He said they found the place abandoned when they arrived, and so there had been nothing to do at the time besides stand there and watch the flames burst through the top-floor windows and tear down the molding that lined the roof. Joseph and Kenneth stood close to me as we watched the spectacle and the quickly gathering crowd. The old widows were craning their heads out of their windows, while women and children gathered on the porches, watching safely from a distance. The last time I had seen anything similar was five years ago, when a man was shot and killed in front of General Logan. The line of police cars surrounding the circle had brought out the entire neighborhood then, too.

  It was clear from nearly the beginning that my house was going to be spared, as were all of the others surrounding Judith’s. If there was a theme to the conversations I overheard, it was: Thank God it isn’t us. Grateful, once again, in the way only other people’s suffering can make us.

  When Judith finally arrived to reclaim what was left of her home, there was a simple, almost casual pragmatism that governed her actions. It was as if she had known all along that her time in Logan Circle was only temporary, despite how hard she may have wanted to believe otherwise. That night we exchanged only a few brief, customary words. I told her how sorry I was, and she accepted my apology with as much conviction as she could muster. I think I realized she was already gone. Logan Circle, her beautiful four-story mansion. She began to leave it all behind the moment she saw the firemen walking nonchalantly out the front door. The whole thing could be shaken off as a protracted bad dream, one that had lasted, from start to finish, approximately five months.

  After a brief hug, I left her alone to deal with the firemen and police. Joseph, Kenneth, and I returned to the store.

  “So that’s her?” Joseph asked me once we were situated around the table once again.

  I nodded my head. It would have been too much to have said yes, affirmatively, as if I had ever really known who Judith was.

  Back at the store that night, we joined the rest of the neighborhood in speculating as to whether or not the fire had been an accident. There were the lingering questions provoked by the bricks that had been thrown through Judith’s car and the Hampshire Tower. But those were minor, perhaps even irrelevant, when compared to the sight of Judith’s four-story mansion lit in flames. Joseph insisted that they weren’t.

  “Everything is connected,” he said. “The bricks, this fire. They’re not just accidents, Stephanos. That’s the way these things begin. With a handful of small actions that build and build. A month from now you could be looking at an entirely new neighborhood.”

  In the end, nothing changed, Joseph, as grand an event as it may have seemed to you at the time. It was only one desperate, lonely man, not a marauding group, who threw the bricks and set fire to Judith’s home. His name was Franklin Henry Thomas, and according to the brief article on him in the Washington Post, he had been, until one month earlier, a lifelong resident of Logan Circle. Born just a few blocks away from my store, Frank, as he was known, had lived in the Hampshire Tower for eighteen years with a wife and two children. He worked odd jobs around the neighborhood and city as a handyman. In the summertime, he rode a bicycle around the city offering illegal cable television connections to people on the street. I remember him, but I can’t say that I ever knew him or spoke to him. I used to see him riding his bicycle down the street with a book bag strapped around his chest, his middle-aged body far too large for the child’s bike he was riding. Occasionally I heard him call out to people sitting on their porches, or standing ne
ar their houses, in a high-pitched, singsong voice, “Got cable?” I remember he never paused after he said that, but would continue on down the middle of the street, his oversize body comically cramped onto the seat of his bike, his words left to echo behind him as he zigzagged his way down the road. He was a man who made his living simply hawking whatever meager wares he had.

  According to the article, Franklin Henry Thomas lost his one-bedroom apartment in the Hampshire Tower when his lease expired in December and he was asked by his landlord to start paying nearly a third more than he had previously. In February he moved into a temporary shelter while his wife and children moved into an apartment in Maryland with his wife’s sister. There was a photograph of him next to the article, one that I clipped out and taped to the side of my register so that at almost any given point in the day, I could turn my head and catch at least a glimpse of the man who had burned down Judith’s home. In the picture, Franklin Henry Thomas is bald with an unkempt white beard that looks newly acquired. I was surprised, when I first saw the picture, how closely he and I resembled each other. We had the same narrow face and broad forehead. Had I lost all of my hair and grown a beard, and aged perhaps just a few more years, we could have passed for brothers. Inside my store, with no one around, I said his name often to myself. Franklin Henry Thomas. Franklin Henry Thomas. Sometimes just Frank, sometimes Frank Henry. The name was so decidedly American, so quintessentially colonial in its rhythm and grandeur. I began to think of Franklin Henry Thomas as my coconspirator in life. I even thought briefly of visiting him in jail so I could tell him that I alone understood why he did what he did. He was arrested after the police caught him trying to break into Judith’s old house a week after the fire. He was carrying all of his belongings with him in a black duffel bag. Apparently, he had planned on moving into the burned-out building for the remainder of the winter. In his delusion, he had even begun to imagine that perhaps, with a little time, he could repair the house he had burned down and move his family back in with him. His duffel bag was full of the tools he had used as a handyman. He told the police in his confession that he had made sure no one was home when he lit the book of matches that started it all.