The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

by Dinaw Mengestu

  For Judith, a book. Something rare and remarkable. It would have to be historical. It would have to be about America and politics, and it would have to have at least a touch of poetry to it. After our first dinner together, I had searched for her name at the local library and then again at the Library of Congress. Judith McMasterson. Author of one book, America’s Repudiation of the Past, and several dozen scholarly arguments that had titles such as “Tocqueville’s Legacy on American Poetics,” “Writing Against History,” “Nineteenth-Century American Writers Search for Place,” “Silencing America’s Poets,” “The Grammar of Poetic History.” I read fragments from each one, including several chapters from her book. She was a harsh, passion-filled academic. She often wrote in the first person. She filled her arguments in with personal narratives and opinions. There was something even slightly pompous to her arguments, as if what she really wanted to say about American history through the course of all those pages was, “None of this is good enough.” She had a fierce loyalty to Emerson, and to the nineteenth century in general. My favorite passage was at the end of the book. After four hundred pages of dissecting Emerson’s essays and Democracy in America, Judith dedicated her closing chapter to an obscure French author, Gustave de Beaumont, whose greatest public legacy was as Tocqueville’s literary executor.

  Beaumont never achieved the fame and recognition of his longtime friend Tocqueville. He published only one novel to be translated into English, Marie, or Slavery in America. There is a fragmentary, discursive quality to the narrative that to my mind seems more fitting of the American literary spirit than anything captured by Tocqueville. Beaumont may not have even known just how radical his narrative was. The central questions of racial identity and women’s role in society lie at the heart of Beaumont’s troubled novel, as if he had divined the next one hundred years of America’s future and written this book as an explanation to those who would someday dare ask, “How did we end up here?” History, all too sadly, often works that way. The first creative spirits of a generation are often forgotten, or neglected by time.

  Since meeting Judith I had read Democracy in America, a collection of Emerson’s essays, and even Marie, a novel I had to search through three libraries to find. I can’t say that I understood America any better for having done so. What I did understand was just how seriously Judith took all of America’s failures, and just how much she loved its heroes. She may not have said it, but I think a few thousand lines of poetry and a handful of novels redeemed the entire country for her.

  Inside an old used-book store in Georgetown, I found a 1928 edition of Emily Dickinson’s collected poems. Buying the book meant skipping out on that month’s gas and electric bills and crossing my fingers and hoping for a steady flow of business through the rest of the winter. But it was a beautiful book. A hard red cover, and a spine that had held up perfectly over all these years. It had only a fraction of the poems found in a modern collection of Dickinson’s poetry, but that seemed all the better. Each poem had its own page, a few of which were dog-eared and lightly written on. I didn’t think I could have done any better.

  I saved Naomi’s present for last. It was going to be a journal. I knew that from the start. I wanted it to be a grown-up journal, the kind that came with nice unlined pages and a hard leather cover that would fade and soften with time. I imagined it would be the type of journal that would carry her through adolescence and straight into adulthood. She would guard it zealously. She would carry it from home to home, hide it under her bed, and carry it in her book bag whenever she knew she was going to be away from home for more than a night. I didn’t know how to tell her that she should put everything into it, but it had to be said. All of this was going to pass so quickly that if she didn’t begin to record it now, it would be impossible to do so later.

  I found the journal and a nice fountain pen to go along with it. I went to a French café off the main road and tried out my inscriptions.

  Dear Naomi,

  I wanted to give you this journal for a number of different reasons. I had heard from Henry, my chauffeur, that you were looking for the perfect journal in which to record your thoughts.

  Dear Naomi,

  I wanted to give you something that you could keep for the rest of your life.

  Dear Naomi,

  As the smartest eleven-year-old in the world, I wanted you to have someplace where you could write down all of those brilliant thoughts of yours. This can be your secret place to say and write everything.

  I settled on that last one, although before I wrapped the journal, I would white out the word “Dear” and replace it with a simple dash: “—Naomi.”

  When I returned home from my Christmas shopping, armed with my bags of presents, I found a note waiting for me on the landing to my apartment.

  Dear Sepha,

  Thank you for the letter. It was very nice of you to think of us. Unfortunately, Naomi and I are leaving early this evening to spend the holiday with my sister and her family in Connecticut. I’m sure we will see you again shortly after we return. I hope you have a merry Christmas.

  I’m sorry.

  Best,

  JM

  I brought all the presents into my living room and laid them out on the floor one at a time. I didn’t know what to do with them now. I had bought wrapping paper just before coming home. It was a last-minute decision. I was passing a pharmacy, and there in the window I saw the usual display of trees and lights and presents and fake snow with elves and a sleigh resting around it. I went in and wandered aimlessly through the aisles, listening to the Christmas music and watching people buy bottles of perfume and bags of candy. I don’t know if there really are general moods of joy and happiness that can come with a season, but if I had been left all alone, I could have danced through those aisles for hours. It was only when I noticed that the security guards were beginning to lower the grates to the door that I settled on a package of wrapping paper to take home. It came in a pack of three. One was red, with images of Santa Claus on his sleigh, another was green with mistletoe, and the last, a medley of green, red, and white pinstripes. The saleswoman threw in a free box of bows to stick on top. She smiled cheerfully at me as she threw them into the bag, and again I felt the same way as I had in the aisles.

  I sat on the floor and ripped open the wrapping paper. I decided that red was for Naomi, green was for Judith and Dawit, and the pinstripes were for my mother. I had never wrapped a present before, and now, I decided, it was time I learned to do so. I wanted each of the presents to come out looking like the boxes under Judith’s tree, but the more I cut and contorted the paper to try to fit it around the hard edges of each box, the more I realized that was never going to happen. But I tried. For nearly four hours I tried. I went through the first two rolls of wrapping paper in just over an hour. A few times I came close to achieving the effect I wanted, but it wasn’t enough for me anymore. I wanted smooth, flawlessly wrapped presents, just like the ones Naomi’s father had sent from Germany. I had begun with the bottle of perfume for my mother. It was small, just barely larger than my palm, but that, I decided, was the problem. It was too small. I went through the presents one at a time and found the flaws in each. Judith’s book was too thin. Naomi’s journal was too squat and with a pen wrapped on top formed an unnatural bulge that could never be wrapped properly. Dawit’s box was simply too big. I spent most of one roll on his present alone. None of them fit the wrapping paper the way I needed them to. I tried measuring out pieces of wrapping paper to fit each individual side of each box. There was always something a little off: a corner would be showing, or another corner would have too much paper. If I clipped the extra piece of paper protruding from the edge, I would suddenly have too little, or I would find a sharp jagged edge sticking out. The edges were always the problem. Every flat surface was perfect. It was only when I tried to get around the corners that I got stuck.

  By the time I ran out of wrapping paper, it was a few minutes past one in the morning
. It didn’t matter. The presents weren’t going anywhere. If I had enough wrapping paper, I could have toiled away on my floor for another week, and there wouldn’t have been any consequence. No one expected anything of me.

  I tried stacking the boxes on top of one another in the hope that, taken together, they would lose some of their tattered, deformed quality. I set them on top of the coffee table and took a few steps back. Distance did nothing to redeem them. They looked nothing like the presents under Judith’s tree. They looked as if they had been wrapped by a blind, one-armed man who had torn away at the wrapping paper and tape with his teeth.

  Before going to bed I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood. I walked past my store and a few blocks farther south where there were still boarded-up buildings and glass-strewn sidewalks. A few people were out, mainly bored teenagers who sold drugs out of abandoned buildings and alleyways during the day. I wondered if the Christmas season was as good for their business as it was for mine.

  It seemed like an appropriate night for walking down the middle of the street. I used to be afraid of this part of the neighborhood. As bad as things may have been around the circle when I first moved in, they paled against these blocks. Few people lived here. Half of the block was entirely burned out or boarded up. There was a unique fear that came with feeling that it was the inanimate objects around you that frightened you most. The crumbling brick façades streaked with black from fires that had raged decades ago didn’t need rumors of violence to intimidate. They were frightening enough on their own. Like anything, they had softened with time. All I saw now was how sad and empty they looked—how sad and empty all of these blocks looked.

  I cut through the circle before returning home. I sat on one of the brightly lit benches nearest the street and waited for the few women who still hung around the circle late at night to come by. This time it took only a few minutes of waiting before two walked by together. They slowed down as they neared me; one of the women recognized me from the store. There were familiar faces everywhere I went today. They drew nearer, and the woman I knew asked me if I could use a “special Christmas date.”

  “What do you say?”

  I didn’t hesitate. I stood up and said, “Yes.” The other one walked away. I decided to go back to my apartment. It was late enough at night that I wouldn’t have to worry about Mrs. Davis or any of my other neighbors watching me. Judith and Naomi had gone to Connecticut. I had nothing to lose.

  We lay down on the couch first, and then later the bed. I wanted to be more than just half-present, which is to say I wanted to see myself fully and honestly, naked in my bed with a woman whose real name I would never know. I took pleasure in feeling another body under me and on top of me. I buried my head in her chest and treated her as if she were someone I loved. It was purely the context of the evening that mattered. It gave a certain weight and substance to what we were doing, so that when we were done and lying on my bed with the orange glow of the streetlamp as the only light in the room, neither one of us moved or rushed to get up.

  Before she left, she asked me who the presents were for.

  “I’m not sure anymore,” I said.

  “Nice wrapping job you did there.”

  The living room was littered with scraps of wrapping paper. I hadn’t bothered or tried to clean any of it up before I left, and could have cared less about it when I returned.

  I separated Dawit’s present from the other three.

  “Pick one,” I told her.

  “You don’t care which one?”

  “No. You can have any one of them.”

  She considered each box thoughtfully, without touching any. She pointed toward the bottle of perfume.

  “Can I have that one?”

  “Of course,” I told her.

  “What is it?”

  “Perfume.”

  “I don’t wear perfume,” she said. “Gives me a headache.”

  “That’s okay,” I told her. “Just give it to someone you know.”

  13

  I decide to take the bus from my uncle’s apartment to see Joseph at his restaurant. There are buses constantly coming and going from in front of the complex, each one as crowded as the one behind it. Today it’s standing room only on all the buses. The crowd is my consolation for not walking. The bus I’m on is the M28, while behind us is the M34 and in front of us is the M19. I may marvel at the trains, but it’s the buses that have my heart. The trains speak to that part of me that craves to know that there is an unseen hand into which I can place if not my life, then at least my ability to move from one location to the next in the dark; the buses are a test of my faith in man. They go into the neighborhoods the trains don’t dare to touch, sneaking down narrow side streets, squeezing in between cars and buildings. I was never allowed to ride the buses in Addis until I became old enough to do so without my parents’ knowledge, but the city and country fell apart shortly after that, and so all I have are a handful of memorable rides taken alone through the city’s haphazardly carved streets, past the tin-roof shantytowns that adorned everything but the richest neighborhoods. My mother, brother, and I were always carted from home to school to whatever event my father might have planned for the evening in a simple black sedan driven by either my father or, when he was away at work, the guard who always stood in front of our house while we were there. Inside our quiet car was a family, properly restrained, with music playing softly from the front. Occasionally my father whistled along to one of the sad Ethiopian pop songs that I still listen to. His tune filled the car to the exclusion of any other sound that might have tried to interfere, while outside on the bus a small, chaotic world orbited around the city. Compared to the crowded city buses that rolled through downtown Addis, my empty backseat seemed like such a hollow and lonely existence. Each window had a half-dozen faces pressed against it. Old women with their heads wrapped in a thin white cloth and children with their dirty rags and mud-stained faces stared at me through the windows, while standing above them were the faceless shirts and pants of men who eyed one another suspiciously and kept their money tucked into their hands. They hardly had space enough to breathe, much less move, and that was what I envied most. While I sat comfortably alone in the backseat of my father’s car, there was an entire city moving together, block by city block, with every curve and bump the bus took through the pothole-riddled streets of the capital, like marionettes attached to the same piece of string being orchestrated by the bus driver’s hands. I imagined the crowd exiting the bus through the windows and doors like water spilling out of a jar full of holes, and I imagined them entering much in the same way, except in reverse. I wanted to be with them. I would have given anything to have disappeared into one of those buses, swallowed whole by the crowd, my face and limbs so thoroughly merged into theirs that the words “I” and “alone” could never be uttered again.

  When the revolution came the buses emptied out. During those first few months I would sometimes see one trolling down the street, empty with the exception of the driver and a few soldiers who stood near the windows, their guns pointing out. Later, the buses were used to carry hundreds of boys to one of the new prisons built on the outskirts of the city. I remember thinking that I couldn’t understand how a city that had demanded so much intimacy could turn on itself. It was the thought of a childish, privileged young man, but that didn’t make the disappointment hurt any less.

  When I lived in Silver Rock with my uncle, I often spent my free Friday and Saturday nights hopping from one crowded bus to the next. I rode the buses until the crowds began to thin out, and then I would get off and take another crowded bus back in the same direction. Eventually I came to know which buses were the busiest at which times of day, which buses could be counted on to always arrive on time or full to the brim, and which ones always left me wanting more. It was enough to feel that for twenty or thirty minutes I had locked myself into the same fate with dozens of people who, like myself, could barely move their hands out of
their pocket or shift their weight from one foot to the other without pressing against someone else. To me, the buses were the benchmarks of civilization, although at the time I would haven’t known to describe them as such. Instead, I would have said that I felt safer on those buses than I did anywhere else in this city.

  I have at least another hour before Joseph gets off work. Joseph was proud of this job when he first started, although he could never have admitted it. Yes, he was still a waiter, but instead of working at a decent restaurant in a nice hotel, he was working at the “premier eating establishment of the District’s elite.” Those were his words: “This restaurant is the premier eating establishment of the District’s elite.” And it is. The Colonial Grill is where senators and lawyers and lobbyists go to dine for lunch and dinner. The restaurant is wrapped in glass and looks onto one of the busiest intersections of the city, so that at any given moment during the workday it’s possible to spy on the city’s “elite” conducting their affairs and those of the country over three-course lunches served on white tablecloths under crystal chandeliers and plastered ceilings. Joseph was forced to learn the names and faces of every regular politician who ate at the restaurant. He knows all one hundred senators and close to half of the House by sight alone. His first year at the restaurant, he reported to Kenneth and me at the end of each week whom he had served and seen. He always added a slight conspiratorial note to each narrative, convinced, as he was, that everything of any import happened with secret whispers and handshakes.