The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (21 page)

It would be so much easier never to return, wouldn’t it? To just keep walking down this road until I hit the city’s edge. And from there I could hop on a bus or train and make my way farther south, or north, and start all over again. How long did it take for me to understand that I was never going to return to Ethiopia again? It seems as if there should have been a particular moment when the knowledge settled in. For at least the first two years that I was here, I was so busy passing my mother, brother, father, and friends in the aisles of grocery stores, in parks and restaurants, that at times it hardly felt as if I had really left. I searched for familiarity wherever I went. I found it in the buildings and in the layout of the streets. I saw glimpses of home whenever I came across three or four roads that intersected at odd angles, in the squat glass office buildings caught in the sun’s glare. I found a small measure of it in the circles and in the beggars who slept under the office towers at night. I used to let my imagination get the best of me. My hallucinations of home became standard. I welcomed them into my day completely. I talked to my mother from across the bus; I walked home with my father across the spare, treeless campus of my northern Virginia community college. We talked for hours. I told him about my classes, about Berhane and our little apartment together and my job carrying suitcases at the Capitol Hotel. I explained to him the parts of American culture that I had never heard of before. “There’s no respect here,” I told him. “The students in my class call our teacher John. They dress like they’re coming from bed and then sleep through class.”

I couldn’t have asked for a better listener than my father. We talked and saw more of each other during my first two years here than in all of the years we spent living under the same roof. It was so easy to slip him into my day. All it took was a passing thought of him in his impeccable white shirt and pinstriped suit, and there he was. Does any of this make sense to you,
abaye
? I know you wouldn’t have had much patience for these conversations with the dead. That would have never been your style. You would have simply asked that I remember you fondly. But it’s nice having you here with me for just a little while as we near 13th Street. You would have loved this city on a day like today. You used to stretch open your hands and crane your neck back so you could feel the wind wrapping around you, a gesture that I can’t help but mime every time a warm breeze blows by. Perhaps you would have thought, as I always do, that the portrait of Frederick Douglass painted onto the back of that red building on the corner bears, from the right angle, a striking resemblance to one of the pictures of Haile Selassie that used to adorn the walls of the capitol. I was saying earlier that I couldn’t remember at which point I understood that I had left home for good. I can’t seem to remember, either, when we stopped having these conversations. The two are connected, aren’t they? I never understood that until right now: that everything went with you.

14

C
hristmas morning I went back to my store. I took down the “Closed” sign that I had put up the afternoon Naomi came to the store, and placed a chair in front of the register so I could read
The Brothers Karamazov
and stare absently out the window. I had decided to open up again out of a sense of obligation. Christmas, after all, was not a holiday that immigrant storekeepers were permitted to take. The world depended on us to work on Christmas day to provide last-minute supplies of groceries for dinner and batteries for new stereos and radio-controlled cars, not to mention the extra cases of beer and wine I always purchased just before the holiday season began. Christmas day was my favorite day of the year to work. Once I learned to forgive the faith, I began at least to appreciate the general effect the holiday had on people. There was a quietness to Christmas that I loved, an absence of sound that fell on Logan Circle with the force of a finger being pressed against a child’s lips. On warmer and sunnier Christmas days, I would spend most of the afternoon standing right in front of the store, leaning back against the wall, just staring vacantly into the emptiness. There were no cars. There were no people on the sidewalk or in the circle. It felt as if the world had been abandoned by the people who had been busy making it and destroying it, and now the only ones left were timid shopkeepers like myself. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth, if not for eternity, then at least for a few hours once a year. The customers who came to the store that day generally came in high spirits, filled to the brim with the Christmas mirth and alcohol that would keep them beaming for at least a few more hours. I met their high spirits with equally high spirits of my own, delighted, as I was, to have a day that could pass so pleasantly. I didn’t worry about how much the store made that day. If it made nothing at all, I couldn’t have cared less.

This was exactly the type of Christmas I loved the most. Sunny, slightly warmer than usual, with a few thin clouds to drift lazily over the sky for contrast. Perhaps it was the weather that brought out the steady stream of customers into my store over the course of that morning and afternoon. They came every ten to fifteen minutes for several hours. A few were from the neighborhood, but most were people passing through on their way to Christmas dinners with aunts, uncles, and in-laws they tried to avoid for most of the year. Aluminum foil was important that year. I must have sold as much of it in that one day as I had in the previous six months combined.

At six o’clock I called Joseph to see if he and Kenneth had any plans for the rest of the day.

“I thought you might be spending the day with your new lady friend.”

“She’s in Connecticut.”

“I see.”

“There’s nothing to see.”

“Don’t be angry at me, Stephanos. I’m not in Connecticut. I’m here sitting by myself just like you.”

“Where’s Kenneth?”

“At work. Can you believe that? He said his boss asked him ‘to take one for the team’ and come in today. He was happy about it, though. He said it showed that they trusted him. Engineer or not now, he’s a damn fool.”

Joseph and I made plans to meet at our damp, sometimes crowded bar on the edge of the city in an hour. I would close the store early, while he would call Kenneth at his office and talk him into meeting us there. If all went well, the three of us would spend yet another Christmas night together, laughing at our isolation, mocking one another and ourselves for all we were worth until the night faded into a blurry, indistinguishable memory.

Since it was Christmas, I decided to take cab rides for the rest of the night as a present to myself. For most of the ride there, my cab was the only one on the road. The driver blew through traffic lights and stop signs, and he and I didn’t say a word to each other. It was exactly the way I wanted it.

I beat Joseph to the bar, which was already half full by seven o’clock, a horseshoe of men perched on their backless stools around a wooden bar covered in alcohol. By the time he arrived, I was already several drinks into the night.

“You’re drunk, Stephanos,” was the first thing he said to me.

“Maybe a little.”

“It doesn’t fit you. You’re too skinny. You look like you’re about to fall asleep. It’s those big eyes of yours.”

“You should catch up.”

“I’ve already had a bottle of wine. It was my Christmas present from work. Two bottles of cheap red wine that no one ever orders.”

“But you drank it anyway.”

“Of course. I’m a man of taste, not means. I drank it and read Rilke in German.”

“You don’t speak German.”

“No. But I love the sounds. All those harsh
vert
s and
gert
s. It’s absolutely beautiful.”

“Everything is beautiful to you.”

“Not everything.”

“But damn close.”

“You just have to have the right perspective.”

“Which is what?”

“Indifference. You have to know that none of this is going to last. And then you have to not care.”

“And then the world becomes beautiful.”

“No. It becomes ridiculous. Which is close enough for me. So what happened to you today?”

“Connecticut.”

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know.”

“That she would want to spend Christmas with you in that neighborhood? The three of you crowded in your apartment singing Christmas carols? Come on, Stephanos.”

“Is it that ridiculous?’

“Yes.”

“Okay. Then you understand.”

By the time Kenneth joined us, Joseph and I had been sitting at the bar for nearly two hours. He arrived dressed in his usual work suit, his tie loosened just beneath the collar. He was tired. His shoulders were hunched just slightly. His eyes had a weariness and vacancy to them that reminded me of the look you sometimes see on an injured child who has just caught a glimpse of something cruel and unfair happening to someone he loves. It was almost nine o clock. He had worked at least a twelve-hour day entirely alone.

“Look,” Joseph said. “The man even wears a suit when he’s the only one in the office. You’re the perfect immigrant, I tell you. The INS should make a poster out of you, Kenneth. You could even be their spokesperson.”

After a bottle of wine and half a dozen drinks, Joseph had finally managed to get drunk. He had grown practically immune to alcohol between the weight he had put on over the years and all the wine he drank during the off moments at his job. He was yelling and wagging his pudgy fingers at Kenneth as he spoke.

“I tell you, Kenneth. Ken. Had this been the eighteen hundreds, you would have been the perfect house nigger.”

“Which one is it, Joseph?” Kenneth shot back. “The perfect immigrant or the perfect slave? You can’t have it both ways.”

“Says who? The engineer? Maybe in your world you can’t. But in mine, everything is that way.”

Kenneth turned his back on Joseph. He placed his arm on the bar to create a wall between Joseph and the two of us.

“How are you, Stephanos?”

“He’s terrible,” Joseph responded. “He wishes he were singing carols and celebrating Christmas in Connecticut.”

“That would be better than listening to you right now. What happened? I thought you might be with that woman and her daughter.”

“Judith and Naomi, you mean.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. Judith and Naomi.”

“They went to Connecticut,” I said.

“Without you?”

“Yes. Without me.”

“You ever find out about the little girl’s father?” Joseph interrupted.

“He’s a professor from Mauritania.”

“Ah. Mauritania.”

There was a wistful tone to Joseph’s voice when he said that.
Ah, Mauritania.
The words had a certain rhythm to them, just like celebrating Christmas in Connecticut and the
vert
s and
gert
s of German poetry that he claimed to find so beautiful.

“They were French too, you know,” Joseph continued. “I once had the pleasure of being told by a Mauritanian that he couldn’t understand my Negro French. That’s okay, I told him.
Ce n’était jamais à moi.
”

He paused for a second and smiled to himself as he admired his own wit. These were the parts of our conversations that he loved the most. I could see Kenneth preparing another question about Judith, Mauritania, and Naomi. Joseph caught the expression as well, and before Kenneth could press the matter any further, Joseph said, with a sly, ironic smirk, “Shall we begin?”

“I think we already have,” I said.

“You’re right. We have. Fine, then. Who do we have in Mauritania, Kenneth?”

“I don’t consider Mauritania a part of Africa,” Kenneth said. “To me, they are Arabs. They belong to the Middle East.”

“So you don’t know, then?” Joseph asked.

“No. I don’t know.”

“Stephanos?”

“Ahmed Taya.”

“Not bad, Stephanos. And the year?”

“Nineteen seventy-eight?”

“Wrong coup. Try again.”

“Nineteen eighty-one?”

“Wrong one again. One more try?”

“I give up,” I said.

“Nineteen eighty-four. Just like the Orwell novel.”

“Taya was the head of the army?” Kenneth asked.

“No. Just a colonel,” Joseph said. “All the best dictators are colonels. Qaddafi. Taya. Both are still going. You have to respect that. A general would have never lasted as long. Even your Mengistu, Stephanos. He was a colonel.”

“But he’s gone now either way,” I reminded him.

“The point is he did well for himself. You have to admit.”

“You’re right,” I acknowledged. “Seventeen years isn’t so bad. He even managed to kill a few generals along the way.”

“You see? That’s the thing about these colonels. They get just far enough to think they deserve it all. A general has already been close to the top. They become lazy lions up there. The colonels, on the other hand, never rest. They’re too impatient. They know they don’t deserve it. And so they last. Name me one colonel removed by his own army.”

After a few moments of silence, Joseph declared triumphantly, “Exactly.”

“How many does that make now?” Kenneth asked.

“At least thirty,” I said.

“I wonder what we’re going to talk about when we run out.”

“We’re never going to run out,” Joseph said. “Having a coup is addictive. Look at what happened after Idi. Yusufu Lule, Godfrey Binaisa, the return of Obote, and then Tito Okello. One after another. Why would anyone want to stop? I wish I had been there to see Mobutu go. I would have been one of those people you saw dancing in the street. I would have carried Kabila on my shoulders straight to the president’s palace if I were there.”

Joseph finished his speech by leaning over the bar and snapping his fingers for another drink. As he leaned too far over the counter to catch the attention of the bartender, Kenneth abruptly stood up.

“Where are you going?” I asked him. “You just got here.”

“Sorry, Stephanos. I’m tired of these conversations. I’m going to go home and sleep. I have to be back at work tomorrow.”

“Let him go, Stephanos,” Joseph said. “The Big Man is tired of our African talk. He wants to go home and dream of his new suit.”