The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

by Dinaw Mengestu

  “The French or the Africans?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  We spend the next two hours alternating between shots and slowly sipped glasses of Kenneth’s scotch. Inevitably, predictably, our conversations find their way home.

  “Our memories,” Joseph says, “are like a river cut off from the ocean. With time they will slowly dry out in the sun, and so we drink and drink and drink and we can never have our fill.”

  “Why do you always talk like that?” Kenneth demands.

  “Because it is true. And that is the only way to describe it. If you have something different to say, then say it.”

  Kenneth leans his chair back against the wall. He’s drunk and on the verge of falling.

  “I will say it,” he says.

  He pours the last few drops of scotch into his cup and sticks his tongue out to catch them.

  “I can’t remember where the scar on my father’s face is. Sometimes I think it is here, on the left side of his face, just underneath his eye. But then I say to myself, that’s only because you were facing him, and so really, it was on the right side. But then I say no, that can’t be. Because when I was a boy I sat on his shoulders and he would let me rub my hand over it. And so I sit on top of a table and place my legs around a chair and lean over and I try to find where it would have been. Here. Or there. Here. Or there.”

  As he speaks his hand skips from one side of his face to the other.

  “He used to say, when I die you’ll know how to tell it’s me by this scar. That made no sense but when I was a boy I didn’t know that. I thought I needed that scar to know it was him. And now, if I saw him, I couldn’t tell him apart from any other old man.”

  “Your father is already dead,” I tell him.

  “And so is yours, Stephanos. Don’t you worry you’ll forget him someday?”

  “No. I don’t. I still see him everywhere I go.”

  “All of our fathers are dead,” Joseph adds.

  “Exactly,” Kenneth says.

  It’s the closest we’ve ever come to a resolution.

  It’s a few minutes past midnight when Joseph and Kenneth stand to go home. They both live in the suburbs, right outside of the city, in nearly identical, fully carpeted apartments with hardly any furniture besides the oversize televisions that they leave on even when they’re not home. They both hate the city now.

  Joseph kisses me once on each cheek before leaving. Kenneth slaps me on the back and says one more time, for good measure, “Keep fighting the good fight, Stephanos.”

  They pull away in Kenneth’s badly worn used red Saab. Buying that car was Kenneth’s first entry into a long-awaited form of American commerce that I think he imagined would lift him above the fray. Three years ago I went with him to a used-car dealership on the outskirts of a distant Virginia suburb to buy that car. He picked me up early on a Saturday morning when business was already slow and a few lost hours in the store didn’t amount to much. He had rented a car for the occasion, a midsize sedan that placed him squarely in the middle class, of which he had just recently become a member. He wore a suit for the occasion, one cheaper than the ones he wears these days, but a suit nonetheless. He pulled the car up to my house and waited for me downstairs while leaning coolly against the passenger-side window, legs crossed. I wish for his sake there had been more people out there to see him because he looked wonderful. It wasn’t just the clothes and the rented car, but an unadorned confidence that I had never seen him with before.

  “How do I look, Stephanos?” he asked me as I walked out the front door. “Good, no?”

  He had a habit back then, only recently abandoned, of ending his sentences with a question. He lifted his arms just high enough to reveal that the cuffs on his jacket were almost half an inch too short.

  “Top class,” I told him.

  “You mean that, no? I really look good?”

  “Of course you do.”

  Our drive to the dealership was a slow one. He eased his way prematurely into fading green lights, and took a slow, extended route around the neighborhood to reach the expressway. I didn’t mind any of it. We had all suffered enough mockery and humiliation to last us well beyond our lifetimes, and if my role now was to serve as a blind, unflaggingly devoted cheerleader through whatever challenges and victories lay ahead, then I was all the happier for it.

  We pulled into the dealership cautiously, as if every minor gesture of ours were being judged. We got out of the car, and rather than walk around the lot or enter the main office, Kenneth grabbed me by the wrist and said, “Wait, Stephanos. Let them come to us.”

  He resumed the pose he had taken in front of my house, except now, with the sun a little higher, he put on a pair of sunglasses to complete the portrait. As we stood outside and waited against the hood of the car, middle-aged American men in white short-sleeve shirts came in and out of the main office, walked leisurely through the aisles of cars, dabbed their brows with handkerchiefs that they then refolded back into their pockets, and never once passed anything more than a brief, one-eyed glance in our direction. We waited ten and then twenty minutes before we finally realized that no one was coming to us, regardless of what we wore or how long we stood there.

  “Come on, Stephanos. Let’s go,” Kenneth finally said. “They don’t have what I want.”

  Kenneth showed up at the store three days later in the red Saab. He came near the end of the day and dropped the keys on the register as if he had just plucked them from one of the aisles.

  “Look at the label,” he said.

  There was a red-and-blue Saab key chain, and the heads of the two keys were each wrapped in rubber and stamped with the company logo.

  “A Saab?” I asked him.

  “Not bad, no?”

  “Where is it?”

  “Right out front. Go see for yourself.”

  Kenneth stayed in the store while I went to inspect his car. There were webs of rust along the rear tires, a dented front fender, and patches of faded paint along the passenger-side door. When I went back into the store I gave him a high-five. I lied and told him that the car was beautiful.

  “Really? Beautiful?” he asked me.

  “Beautiful,” I told him.

  I watch the car through the windows as Kenneth and Joseph miss their turn off the circle and have to drive around it again. The second time, they honk just for me as they pass by.

  2

  When Judith bought the house next door to mine early last September it was an event that had once seemed so impossible that when I mentioned it to Joseph and Kenneth one night, it sounded more like a knock-knock joke than any plausible version of reality we had ever imagined. We were sitting at our table in the store, the doors and windows open so that we could hear the chatter of the kids in the street as we played cards and drank beer wrapped in brown paper bags, in homage to the men doing the same on the corner.

  “Guess what?” I asked them.

  “What?”

  “Some white people just moved in.”

  “Where?”

  “Next door.”

  “Next door to who?”

  “Me.”

  “He’s lying.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Next door to you.”

  “Yes.”

  “In that house.”

  “I think they’re going to fix it up.”

  “Why would white people want to live next to you?”

  “I don’t think they know I live here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw them.”

  “And what did they look like?”

  “Tall. White.”

  “How many?”

  “I only saw one.”

  “Well then, that proves nothing.”

  “She was searching in her purse for keys.”

  The house Judith was moving into was a beautiful, tragic wreck of a building and had been for years. A four-story brick mansion, it could have played the
role of haunted house in any one of a hundred movies or books. Its elaborately tiled roof, flaking like dried skin, was echoed in the shutters that still clung out of stubbornness to the delicately molded windows arched like a pair of cartoon eyes on both sides of the house. The brick was almost obnoxious in its bright shade of red, redeemed at the last minute by the house’s stature as the only one with color left on Logan Circle. There was a sad patch of grass in the front, and a rusted metal fence with a gate just barely hanging on to its hinges. The house had been abandoned for more than a decade, occupied briefly over the years by homeless men, crack addicts, and a small band of anarchists from Portland.

  There were at least two dozen other houses like Judith’s and mine surrounding Logan Circle. Four-and five-story mansions that had once belonged to someone of great import—a president’s cousin, or aunt, or maybe nephew—but that over the years had been neglected, burned out, or in my case, divided into cheap, sometimes cockroach-infested, apartments. The houses cast long shadows over the circle and street, their rooftop shadows converging on the statue of General Logan, perched high on his horse in the center of the circle. When I moved into the neighborhood I did so because it was all I could afford, and because secretly I loved the circle for what it had become: proof that wealth and power were not immutable, and America was not always so great after all. The neighborhood, and by extension the city, had fallen, and every night I could see and hear that out of my living-room window.

  Within a week of Judith’s arrival an army of men descended on the house in squadlike formations. There were the plumbers, the electricians, the heating guys, the painters, the roofers, and the architect, who always came dressed in a well-tailored suit and stood leaning against the side of his silver Mercedes with a yellow hard hat on. Almost all of the men who worked on the house came into my store during their lunch breaks to buy a few dollars’ worth of junk food. They were as reliable as the Jehovah’s Witnesses who still made their weekly rounds across the neighborhood. And while I knew the workers would come and go, I took their presence at the time as a sign that things were improving, that the neighborhood was getting better and life was on the verge of changing. It was partly because of them and what they did to the house and others in the neighborhood that I added the deli counter to my store in January, hoping that perhaps I, too, could profit from the houses that gleamed with their newly restored glory.

  It was from the construction workers that I first found out some of the details of Judith’s life—details that could, of course, come only from people who know your home so intimately they inevitably believe they’ve come to know something of you as well. Through them I learned that the woman was a lesbian bitch with too much money on her hands. She was fucking the architect on the side (you could tell by the way they always went off to some room when she came by), which explained why he was such a bastard himself and why he probably got the job. She wanted a bathroom on every floor of the house, which made no goddamn sense because why the fuck would she need four bathrooms when only two people would be living there? Her library was an entire floor and she wanted the whole thing with built-in bookcases and sliding doors to cover them. What kind of fucking person needed doors to cover their books? And her bedroom? It was half of the third floor. A whole fucking family could live in a room that size. There was no husband, boyfriend, or girlfriend, but she was a lesbian, you could bet on that. All you had to do was look at that short hair and nearly flat chest to see it.

  It wasn’t until the end of that September that I finally met the woman I had described to Joseph and Kenneth as tall and white. Until then I had seen her only once, in passing, out my bedroom window as she stood on the steps of the house and stared up at the roof. At first I had assumed that she was an agent of some city bureaucracy, assigned to the neighborhood to report on the condition of its aging buildings, to determine whether they were in need of repair or demolishment. Before Judith, these were the only reasons white people had ever come into the neighborhood: to deliver official notices, investigate crimes, and check up on the children of negligent parents. It wasn’t until she began to rub her hand along the banister and chip away at the crumbling black paint that I realized her interest in the house was purely personal. She foraged through her purse, pulled out a set of keys, and nudged the door open with her shoulder: irrefutable signs of ownership.

  Judith was sitting on the bottom steps of the house on an early fall afternoon with a little girl leaning back in between her legs when I came out of my house. I was dressed for a wedding, and as I turned to lock the door behind me, I heard her say, “What a beautiful garment.” Her use of the word “garment” struck me most—it was polite, almost formal, as if the word had been inserted into her sentence at the last possible moment out of an instinctive sense of cultural diplomacy. I was dressed entirely in white. I had on white pants, with a white shirt that had a crucifix embroidered down the middle, over which I wore a finely woven shroud of white cotton. It was an outfit that meant nothing here, stripped as it was of all context. On the rare occasions that I still wore it, I did so expecting the taunts and stares of my neighbors and their children.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “What’s it made of?”

  “Cotton.”

  “Special occasion?”

  “A wedding.”

  “Not your own, is it?”

  “No. A cousin’s.”

  She introduced herself by pointing to the house behind her and telling me she had just moved in. Her name, Judith—Judy—was the English counterpart to my cousin’s name—Yodit. When I pointed that out she shook her head, bit down on her lower lip, and said, “No, no. That’s much prettier than Judith. Much prettier.” She was tall and narrow, with skinny arms and short brown hair cut just above her shoulders. She had a slightly crooked mouth and full lips that marked her face in a peculiar way. They made her mouth seem too large for her face, and her face too small for her head, so that there was something almost doll-like about her.

  “You’re right,” I said. “It is.”

  We both pretended to laugh, after which she introduced me to her daughter, Naomi, a small, pretty girl with a skin tone closer to mine than her mother’s.

  “She’s beautiful,” I told her.

  “Yes. You’re right. She is,” she said. She rubbed her hands over her daughter’s head and then whispered something into her ear. The girl leaned her head back, looked up at her mother, and smiled. I could see the resemblance then. It was in the narrow angle of their faces, both of which sloped down into a smooth, pointed chin. When the girl turned back around and faced me I felt a hint of embarrassment and shame come over me. I knew I was being judged by this child as she refused to avert her gaze from mine.

  The cab I had called to take me to the wedding pulled up then. It was an expense that I couldn’t afford, but one that had nonetheless been demanded of me by the occasion. Judith and I said good-bye, it was nice to meet you, and then I was off to my cousin’s wedding—a woman ten years younger than me, and of no real relationship to me beyond an affinity that our fathers had shared for each other in Ethiopia. After the wedding the photographs were taken at the National Botanical Gardens, most inside the greenhouse, in the shadow of yellow, purple, and red flora so large as to seem comical. There my cousin and her new husband met another newlywed Ethiopian couple also posing for pictures. They took three together, the two brides and two grooms standing on opposite sides of a blooming purple bush. And later that evening, during the reception, we heard that the same groom who had been standing on the opposite side of that bush only two hours earlier had died in the middle of his own reception.

  Everyone grew somber when they heard the news whispered at their table. If there was one thing we all knew how to do, it was pay our respects to the dead. We all shook our heads, mumbled parts of the same prayers we had used for our fathers and friends, and then moved on, grateful in the way only other people’s tragedies can make you.

  Once cons
truction on Judith’s house had progressed far enough for her to move in near the end of October, I began to see her around the neighborhood more often. I often saw her reading on one of the benches across from General Logan on a late fall afternoon, undisturbed by the drunk men sleeping or stumbling around her. A whirlwind of fallen leaves and trash would occasionally rise around the base of Logan’s statue and flit about in the air as if deliberately calling attention to itself. Judith, however, looked as indifferent to her surroundings as General Logan did on his horse, her legs properly crossed, one shoe dangling just slightly from her foot as she turned her head with the flip of each page. I admired her from a distance; the way she sat, confident and oblivious to the world, her hair sometimes caught in a gust of wind to reveal the long, elegant lines of her neck. She would sweep her hair back with one clean gesture that suggested unbroken concentration on whatever was in front of her.

  She began to stop by the store on random afternoons to pick up a carton of milk or a piece of candy for her daughter, and we would chat briefly about the weather, the neighborhood, children.

  “Do you have any?” she asked me once.

  “None that I’ll acknowledge. But I’m working on it.”

  “Too bad. It’s easier if you know them.”

  “I’ll try and remember that next time.”

  We waved to each other from across the circle and extended our conversations with each other whenever our paths crossed coming in or out of our houses. I wasn’t the only one in the neighborhood to notice her. Of all the white people who had moved into Logan Circle over the past six months, she was the most visible, and not just because she spent her afternoons reading in the circle, or because she occasionally shopped in my store. It was Naomi, with her lighter than black but darker than white skin, sitting next to her on a bench, or walking with her hand in hand, who made people notice.

  Mrs. Davis, who lived alone one floor below me, was the first to say something. It was the beginning of November and Judith had fully settled into her new home and become a fixture around the neighborhood. Her routine was familiar to those of us who watched. She was prone to midafternoon runs and reading in her living room with the curtains pulled back. The house looked beautiful now, especially at night with the single porch bulb shining down on the steps, which had also been smoothed out and worked over.