The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

by Dinaw Mengestu

  We had all of our conversations in front of Naomi, with Judith on one side of the counter and me on the other, Naomi sitting on a stool somewhere in between the two of us. She was looking through the real-estate ads in the back of the Washington Post’s Sunday magazine while Judith told me about the incident.

  “I would have kicked him where it counts,” Naomi said, her eyes still supposedly focused on the ads.

  “I don’t doubt for a second that you would have, honey.”

  “Why did he say that to you?”

  “I don’t know. I think he thought it was all just a joke.”

  Judith leaned over and caressed her daughter’s hair. “We should go. It’s getting late,” she said.

  “You want me to walk you home?”

  “No. We’re fine. Plus, I got my little kickboxer with me.”

  Naomi let her mother pick her up off her stool, and she even let her hold her for almost a minute before she wriggled herself free. It was six-thirty on a Friday night—late and dark enough to have brought out a few of the kids who would settle onto the corner for the rest of the evening. The two of them walked out of my store hand in hand, past a few snickers and “Psssssts” and “Heys” as if they were oblivious to everything besides each other.

  3

  Kenneth calls me at home early the next morning just as I’m about to leave my apartment.

  “Why aren’t you at the store yet?” he asks me. It’s the first thing he says, and the only reason he called to begin with. He’s been calling me at least once a week since April. He calls me at home early in the morning, or at the store in the middle of the day to see if I’m performing my shopkeeper duties, first and foremost of which is to be open. Now that it’s May, he seems determined to let me know that I can expect more of the same from him. In the background I can hear other phones ringing and a low rumble of indistinguishable voices. I’ve never been to Kenneth’s office, but I imagine a busy row of men in identical suits picking and hanging up their phones in unison.

  “I was on my way there,” I tell him.

  “It’s almost nine,” he says. I look at the clock hanging on the wall across from me. I hadn’t considered the time yet. There are already too many hours in the day; to worry about any one in particular is pointless.

  “I know what time it is.”

  “Joseph and I were planning on coming back to the store tonight,” he tells me.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I know.”

  He hangs up abruptly then. This is what he believes men in power can do. They can dismiss with a wave of the hand and never think twice about it. There are those who wake each morning ready to conquer the day, and then there are those of us who wake only because we have to. We live in the shadows of every neighborhood. We own corner stores, live in run-down apartments that get too little light, and walk the same streets day after day. We spend our afternoons gazing lazily out of windows. Somnambulists, all of us. Someone else said it better: we wake to sleep and sleep to wake.

  I leave for the store half an hour later, hoping, however foolishly, to catch what’s left of the morning rush-hour crowd. The sidewalks and street are practically deserted; everyone but me and a few morning joggers has already reached their destination. The emptiness is nice, though. As I walk through the circle I decide to stop and take a seat on one of the new benches across from General Logan to listen to the birds chattering away loudly in the trees. There’s an arc of benches on either side of the statue. The benches have new black lacquer paint, and behind the benches are thick layers of startlingly fresh green sod where only dust and scattered clumps of crabgrass and weeds used to grow. When I opened my store ten years ago, Logan Circle was still predominately poor, black, cheap, and sunk in a depression that had struck the city twenty years earlier and never left. Most of the streetlights that surrounded the circle were burned out, leaving the neighborhood perpetually pitched into a strange half-darkness more frightening than pure black. Before the newly formed General Logan Circle Statue Association restored the statue last month it was chipped, defaced, and smeared with human, dog, and bird shit. Drunk old men, their foreheads wrinkled, their pants barely buckled around their waists, rambled around the statue’s benches in the afternoon and evening muttering to themselves and one another. The benches smelled of urine, and even the pigeons that strolled around the grass in search of thrown-away chicken bones and bread had a sad, desolate look to them, as if they knew by instinct that this was where their breed belonged. The old men have mostly shuffled on. A few, on occasion, still stumble around the circle, and even though I’ve never looked at any of their faces up close, I imagine there’s something approaching shock and wonder as they look up at General Logan, whose bronze exterior is now clear enough for me to see my reflection in, and who looks down on all of us with the glimmering sheen of a privately funded cleaning job. I think if he were alive now he would have to say this is progress; that a society that fails to properly remember its dead and fallen heroes is a society not worth remembering at all.

  The birds cackle away in their treetops, and after watching them hop idly from branch to branch for another half hour, I finally decide it’s time for me to rise and join the forces of the working world. I take my time cutting through the circle. It’s a few minutes after ten by the time I finally reach my store and lift open the metal grate that covers the front door. There’s a morning ritual that comes with opening a store. I lift the metal grates, and then tug down the white plastic blinds that block out all light until they spring back up. I turn on the lights and wait for their mechanical hum to fill the room. I make a general assessment. Shelves, windows, cash register are all in place. The ceiling remains, the tiles on the floor have held. Everything is precisely as it should be. Even now, after all these years, this continues to amaze me. It seems as if time stands completely still at the close of each day, and is resumed only by my return. Sometimes I like to think that if I waited ten or twenty years before opening my store, I could return to find it completely unchanged.

  Today I swing the front door wide open and let the wind make a mess of the papers still sitting on the counter. It’s May 3, and purchase orders still unfulfilled from the previous month are piled a few inches high, along with a stack of receipts and bills that I can’t afford to pay. It will rain today. You can smell it in the air, a midmorning spring shower that will last at least into the afternoon.

  I gather the dust from the four corners of the store and usher it out the door. It erupts into a brief plume that’s dissolved by the wind as soon as it hits the open air. The morning is quiet. The rain comes and fills the gutters and makes a puddle out of the patch of grass next to my store. Women trickle in, armed with their first-of-the-month government subsidy checks. They shop in small quantities: a few individual rolls of toilet paper; small bags of diapers; and can after can of processed soup. Until recently, most of my customers were teenagers on their way home from school, and on Friday and Saturday nights, single men browsing through the aisles of prostitutes who surrounded the circle after dark. The teenagers bought the chips and candy; the men bought the condoms behind the counter. More often than not, both opened them right after leaving the store, leaving a trail of candy wrappers and condom boxes on the sidewalk out front. A social worker who used to come through the neighborhood on the weekends told me the men did that to save time, and that if I ever stepped into the alley behind the store, I could see them putting the condoms on. She always bought a dozen candy bars for the women when she came in. They needed it, she said, to keep up their blood-sugar level.

  Most of the women who worked on the circle also came to my store at one point or another. Those who came regularly flirted and shoplifted a bag of chips or a can of soda, knowing all along that I could see them but didn’t care. They had names like Chocolate and Velvet, always things that you could touch or taste because the imagination is nothing if not tactile. On summer nights, traffic backed up for blocks leading into and o
ut of the circle as a uniquely democratic blend of cars—Mercedes, Volvos, rusted Plymouths, and boxcar Chevys—lined up to choose from the women who ringed the circle in their bright neon outfits like a cheap, tawdry crown. If I stayed open late on the weekends back then, I could make as much in one night as I do in one week now. The men buying the diapers, ice cream, and tampons they had supposedly left home for, and the women, newly minted but still with only enough money to buy another can of soda to keep them awake, all came together for just enough hours every week to make me a living that I no longer judged as honest or decent, but accepted as a matter of standard fact somewhere in between yes, we all must die, and the sun is ninety-three million miles away.

  There are hardly any women left on the circle now. They have vanished not into thin air, but into a different space or reality, as if they had all collectively taken flight and migrated to another climate. Around the circle, the question is still asked, although not as frequently: what happened to all the hos?

  In the afternoon a short line of kids on their way home from school jostles to get in. The children fill the store with their outsize presence, shouting and screaming at one another because everything to them is urgent and desperate. One of them, a bald-headed boy with wide, emphatic eyes that remind me of Naomi’s when she wants something from me or her mother, picks up a candy bar and slides it into the sleeve of his puffy coat, where it disappears into the warm nook of his bent wrist. He looks up at me for a second to see if I’ve caught him. His eyes say it all. They say, “This is what I want. All you have to do is let me have it.” I agree, and with a smile and a simple nod of my head, he walks off. He’s happy, and for a few seconds I’m happy for him.

  Just as quickly as the crowd of children appeared, it vanishes, disappearing into the neighborhood in discrete clumps of twos and threes, with a few children wandering alone in the rear, their trail suggestive of a hierarchy of social order that leaves some muttering songs and games to themselves and others basking in the glow of friends and admirers. I’m left alone; the rest of the afternoon is so quiet that I can finish reading the paperback novel I checked out from the library the day before. From the first day I opened the store, I’ve kept a book close at hand so that every hour of even the quietest days has been filled with at least one voice other than my own. My first, a present from Joseph, was a paperback copy of a V. S. Naipaul novel. On the inside he wrote in his usual overstated manner: To a new beginning, Stephanos. The journey is not over yet. It was a not-so-subtle reference to my similarity to Saleem, the store owner in the novel, but more important, one of the few openly hopeful and enthusiastic remarks ever to come from Joseph’s lips or hand. For that reason alone I’ve kept the book prominently displayed behind the counter all these years, and while Joseph and I have never talked about the book, every now and then he’ll enter the store with his arms open and declare, “Saleem, you’re both still here.”

  “Of course we are,” I always tell him. “Where else do we have to go?”

  Over the years I’ve read roughly one book every two days, few of which I have ever owned. No one tells you this at the beginning, but the days of a shopkeeper are empty. There are hours of silence punctuated briefly with bursts of customers who come and go within the span of a few minutes. The silence becomes a cocoon in which you can hear only your voice echoing; the real world in which you live begins to fade into a past that you have tried to put to rest. I began to check books out from the library in groups of four in order to make sure I had more than enough to read for the week. I knew I had time, and on particularly slow days, I had more of it than I knew what to do with, a problem that posed a risk greater than I was willing to bear. I felt it especially in the early days of the store. Left alone behind the counter, I was hit with the sudden terrible and frightening realization that everything I had cared for and loved was either lost or living on without me seven thousand miles away, and that what I had here was not a life, but a poorly constructed substitution made up of one uncle, two friends, a grim store, and a cheap apartment.

  When asked by my uncle Berhane why I had chosen to open a corner store in a poor black neighborhood when nothing in my life had prepared me for such a thing, I never said that it was because all I wanted out of life now was to read quietly, and alone, for as much of the day as possible. I left him and his modest two-bedroom apartment in the suburbs in order to move to Logan Circle, a decision he has yet to understand or forgive me for, despite what he says. He used to have the grandest ambitions for me when I first arrived from Ethiopia. “Just wait and see,” he would tell me in that soft-spoken, eloquent voice of his. “You will be an engineer or a doctor. I only wish your father could have lived to see it.” Tears would well up in his eyes sometimes as he spoke about the future, which he believed could only be filled with better and beautiful things. Here in Logan Circle, though, I didn’t have to be anything greater than what I already was. I was poor, black, and wore the anonymity that came with that as a shield against all of the early ambitions of the immigrant, which had long since abandoned me, assuming they had ever really been mine to begin with. As it was, I did not come to America to find a better life. I came here running and screaming with the ghosts of an old one firmly attached to my back. My goal since then has always been a simple one: to persist unnoticed through the days, to do no more harm.

  In my monthly letters and phone calls to my mother and brother in Ethiopia, I tell them only that I own my own business, and that business is okay. Never good. Never bad. Simply okay. Could be better. Grateful it’s not worse. I send them money once every few months when I can afford to, even though I know they don’t need it. I do it because I am in America, and because sending money home is supposed to be the consolation prize for not being home. For Christmas last year my mother sent me a money order worth three hundred dollars more than all of the money I had ever sent. I still have the receipt in the nightstand next to my bed from when I cashed it.

  At six p.m. the temperature is still hovering near eighty, a definite sign of an impending hot and brutal summer. The few people who pass through at this time of day come in with their faces red and shiny with sweat. They stock up on bottled water before returning to their early-evening strolls and centrally air-conditioned homes. I make a mental note to myself: if possible, buy more water. I watch an old, beat-up Chevy drive around the circle three times, looking for something or someone that is no longer there. The sun makes the leftover rain on the roof sparkle as it winds around the block. There is a slow, lumbering quality to the day. I keep the air conditioner off and the door open.

  Joseph and Kenneth come to the store together this time. They arrive almost an hour earlier than usual. Kenneth is still dressed in his suit and Joseph’s wearing jeans with a University of Michigan sweatshirt that’s far too heavy for the warm May night. Joseph kisses me once on the cheek. With the store still open, Kenneth has nothing to say, so he shakes my hand vigorously while trying out his new English accent.

  “How you doing, ol’ chap? Life treating you well these days?”

  The two of them stand on opposite sides of the counter, leaning against the glass panes while flipping through the day’s newspapers. By most accounts, it has been a decent day for the world. Inflation is low. Countries all across the globe are negotiating deals, hammering out truces, while their leaders shake hands on the cover of the Washington Post under headlines of restored hope and promises of cooperation. Even Africa has done well for itself today.

  “Look,” Kenneth calls out, holding open a copy of the newspaper so we can see the picture of Laurent Kabila that he’s tapping proudly. “Laurent is coming through.” He reads the brief article with an ironic enthusiasm. There are only a hundred and fifty words to the entire piece.

  “You could learn something from him, Jo-Jo. That Kabila’s a good man. A role model for all you Congolese.”

  “You said the same about Mobutu,” Joseph says.

  “That was just a joke. It was only because I
liked his last name. Sese Seko. Sese Seko. I could say it over and over. But Kabila’s a man of his word. He’s the future of Africa’s leaders.”

  “He will be dead within a year. Or he will never leave. It is always one or the other.”

  Kenneth leans his elbows back against the counter and stretches out his long lanky legs. “Help me out here, Stephanos.”

  “Dead within two years,” I tell him.

  At seven-thirty I close the doors to the store. Neither Joseph nor Kenneth asks me why I’m closing early, or whether it’s been a good day, since no one has entered since they arrived. I don’t add up the register because I’ve already done the math in my head. I know just how little I’ve earned. I pull a handful of bills out of the drawer and stuff them into my pocket, as if they were inconsequential.

  Kenneth throws his arm around my shoulder and says, “Come on, Stephanos. It’s time to leave.” He squeezes my shoulder once, firmly, for encouragement.

  Without asking or worrying about where we’re going, I get into Kenneth’s car with the two of them and we pull away from the store. We drive past my house, and what’s left of Judith’s, without pausing at the stop sign on the corner. The idea is to leave this neighborhood and store as quickly as possible, to rush headlong into the sun, which is just now setting. The entire flat skyline of the city is tinged with a pinkish hue that hardly seems real. We roll our windows down. In the backseat, Joseph puts his feet up and closes his eyes as the wind whips over his face. We all breathe in deeply. Kenneth cuts down one narrow side street after another to avoid traffic; the trees, flowers, and bushes are all in bloom. There is something unsettling about spring in D.C., a cautionary tale of overindulgence and inflated expectations that seems embedded in the grass and in the trees. I thought I had long since learned to keep those expectations in check, but it happens anyway, doesn’t it? We forget who we are and where we came from, and in doing so, believe we are entitled to much more than we deserve.