The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (22 page)

“What was your father, Stephanos?” Kenneth asked me.

“A lawyer.”

“That’s right. A lawyer. And you, Joseph?”

“You know what he was.”

“A businessman.”

“Yes. A businessman.”

“And what was mine?”

Kenneth looked over at Joseph, and then me, knowing that neither one of us knew how to answer his question.

“Come, Joseph. I’ve told you this before.”

“He was illiterate,” Joseph responded.

“What else?”

“That’s it.”

“Exactly. That’s it. That’s all he ever was. A poor illiterate man who lived in a slum. And you know what that makes him in Africa? Nothing. That’s what Africa is right now. A continent full of poor illiterates dying in slums. What am I supposed to miss? Being sent into the street to beg white tourists for money? If I die today, my sister in Nairobi will get one hundred thousand dollars. Someone would have to come and move the furniture out of my apartment. My suits will be shipped back to Kenya for my cousins. You, Joseph, would get my car. The only thing my father owned when he died was a picture of Jomo Kenyatta. His great leader. From the day I was born, there have been only two leaders of Kenya. The first was terrible, and now the second is even worse. That’s why I’m here in this country. No revolution. No coup.”

Kenneth slipped into his gray wool overcoat. He took a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet and left it on the bar to pay for the one drink that he had ordered but never finished. Joseph and I said nothing to stop him as he walked out of the bar.

15

F
or the rest of December I watched Judith’s house for signs of life. I expected her and Naomi to return from Connecticut at any moment, and so every day I eagerly awaited their arrival. In the morning, on my way to the store, and again at the end of the night, and on occasion during the day, I stared into the house, hoping to see the flutter of a curtain or a passing shadow in the window. Without her and Naomi, the nights were suddenly hard. I found that it was difficult to sleep. I paced around my apartment and stayed up late listening to the BBC’s reports on Eastern Europe and the Middle East. I decided it was going to be a bloody, terrible winter. Back at the store I finished reading
The Brothers Karamazov
by myself. I came back to the final pages with Alyosha and the young boys gathered around him, the death of the innocent Illusha adding a certain touching sentimentality to the scene, which continued to bring a few tears to the corners of my eyes regardless of how often I read it. I read out loud to the shelves and empty aisles my favorite passage:

People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.

I memorized the passage by reciting it on my way to work. I highlighted it in the book for Naomi, knowing even then that it would never make its way back to a shelf.
Remember this
, I wrote in the margins.

I filled in my afternoons by making a list of aphorisms, some new, some borrowed, that I wanted to tell her.

Never trust anyone who says “Trust me.”

Try to find high places to look down from.

I wanted to give her a catalogue description of the world, a list of rules by which she could live her life and spare herself the same disappointments that I had already suffered.

On New Year’s Eve I sat on a bench in the circle and toasted General Logan with the same stale bottle of scotch Judith and I had shared. I got drunk and then walked home alone. Two days later, I went to pay my rent and found that I barely had enough money to get through the month. Business had steadily slowed down since the neighborhood first began to change, but the last four months had been the quietest since I first opened the store. A month before Judith moved into the neighborhood a single six-story brick housing project that sat on the edge of Logan Circle had been declared uninhabitable and was torn down. At least half the people who lived in it had been regulars at my store, and when the building went, they and their small daily purchases went with it. More dramatic departures had been happening all around me as well, but I had tried hard at first not to give them too much weight. Moving vans were showing up around the neighborhood again, but these were leaving, not coming. They were short and shabby, stacked from the ground to the roof with half-packed boxes of clothes and dishes, mattresses tied in pairs to the roofs. Rents had been on the rise for over a year, but it was only now, in the past six months, that you began to see the effects. Evictions had become common. I often overheard Mrs. Davis standing in front of our house complaining about them and the rent increases. A name or address would float by—

“You know the Harris family.”

—and instantly I would turn a deaf ear to the rest of what she had to say.

On the few occasions she had tried to grab my attention, I had simply stood there, mute, nodding my head as need be. She always said the same thing every time.

“It’s not right. These people coming in like that and forcing us out.”

I was in no position, though, to say what was right or wrong. I was not one of “these people,” as Mrs. Davis had just made clear to me. I hadn’t forced anyone out, but I had never really been a part of Logan Circle either, at least not in the way Mrs. Davis and most of my customers were. I had snuck into the neighborhood as well. I had used it for its cheap rent, and if others were now doing the same, then what right did I have to deny them? At first I had even believed that the steady stream of new, affluent faces moving into the neighborhood would eventually more than make up for the loss. With the exception, though, of a few things here and there—trash bags, laundry detergent, candy bars, and of course, bottled water—most of these people wanted nothing to do with my little run-down store.

The prostitutes, and the line of cars that came with them, had also thinned out as the neighborhood moved from decay to respectability. I had stopped staying open late; there was almost no one left to cater to. All of that, along with those days in December when I couldn’t find the energy or courage to face my store, had taken their toll on what little money I had. Life was precarious. I had always been willing to admit that. I lived on a fine line with poverty on one side and just enough extra money for an occasional beer on the other. In January I slipped off that line, and after that, it was all but impossible to get back on.

“You have to change with the times, Stephanos.”

That was Kenneth’s advice when I showed him my accounts for November and December. I was never good with numbers. He didn’t have the heart to say it, but I knew he was thinking it: it was amazing that I had lasted this long.

“You can’t rely on a bunch of kids and prostitutes to make your living anymore. A year from now this could be one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the city, and you have to be ready for that.”

“How?” I asked him.

“By investing. By preparing for the future. You can’t stay still, man. You have to move on. That’s the way the world works. I’ve been telling you and Joseph this for years, but you never listen.”

It was Kenneth’s suggestion that I put a deli counter inside of the store.

“Americans love sandwiches,” he said confidently.

I paid for it with a credit-card offer that came in the mail. I ordered the best meat that I couldn’t afford and arranged it neatly behind the glass case. I bought a stand-alone chalkboard sign that I placed in front of the store. For the first time, I used the name that Joseph had given me.

Logan’s Market

Now Offering Freshly Made Sandwiches to Order!

I began to work longer hours again. I opened the store at six a.m. and closed it at ten on most nights. On the days that I couldn’t bear the thought of returning to my apartment, I kept the store open until midnight, hoping, however irrationally, for the remaining trace of the late-night crowds that used to keep my store afloat. At the end of that first week in January, I figured out how much extra I was earning by keeping my store open for four to seven hours longer. The grand total averaged out to twenty dollars a day. I ate sandwiches three to five times a day. Deducting for the food and the extra cost of electricity, I was earning approximately three dollars an hour.

On January 7, I called my mother and brother as soon as I woke up to wish them a merry Christmas. They had received the presents I mailed them.

“What made you think of giving me a book of poems?” my mother asked me.

I told her that the poems in the collection reminded me of her.

“Read the one that begins, ‘For each ecstatic instant.’ You’ll see why.”

I told her what I knew about Dickinson, about her lonely, unmarried life in rural Massachusetts and the drawers full of poems found after her death. My mother took the story personally, as she took every story she ever heard.

“Betam asazinya,”
she said when I finished.

“It is sad. But it’s wonderful at the same time.” I tried to explain to her the beauty of living such a solitary and lonely life. “She wrote all of those poems entirely alone. She was able to live on just that.”

She asked me if I had received the present she had sent me. I was too ashamed to say yes. That money order was the only reason I could afford the phone conversation I was having right then.

“Did Dawit like the shirt?” I asked her instead.

“He loved it,” she said. “It fit him perfectly.”

I smiled when I heard that. Of course it fit, I wanted to tell her. I already knew exactly what he was made of.

That was the last quiet week in January. The next morning, the only family living in a run-down, three-story house one block away from my store was evicted. An angry crowd gathered outside to watch. The police were called in. From my store I could hear the barrage of shouts and threats volleyed back and forth. More sirens followed, until eventually the entire block was cordoned off. I stepped outside of my store once to see what was happening, but I knew my place. It was behind the counter, not in the middle of a dispute in which I had no part to play.

Less than twenty minutes after the first police car arrived, the entire scene was over. The family had packed up what they wanted and left the rest of their belongings either in the apartment or strewn over the sidewalk and street in a block-long trail of clothes, shattered glass, and worthless paper. The crowd moved on, but no one was ready to surrender quite yet. They slowly worked their way over to my store, where they released some of their long-held frustration in a whir of junk food. I knew every face at least by sight, but at that moment no one acknowledged me or said a word in my direction. When the crowd moved on a few minutes later, my register was fuller than it had been in days.

The next three days saw two more evictions. These were conducted secretly, early in the morning, when no one was around to witness them. The crowd came back nonetheless, a blend of middle-aged and unemployed women, men whose careers depended on the odd jobs they bounced back and forth between, and teenage boys who had nothing better to do than stand around and righteously declare that what was happening was indeed fucked up. The crowd gathered in the circle spontaneously in the aftermath of each eviction and grew larger over the course of the afternoon as people came out of their homes to take part in what was happening. I watched them from my store and waited for them to come in, and they did. People came in waves and bought bags of pork rinds, cans of sweet soda, beer, and plastic-wrapped pickles. I heard rumors of letters that were going to be written, protests that could be staged, and meetings that were being planned. An air of conspiracy was slowly building, and even if it never amounted to more than indignant chatter, there was a sense that something drastic was lying on the horizon.

Those three days were a boon for my little store. It was almost like old times, with my register ringing and a buzz of numbers and voices constantly floating around in my head. I made enough each one of those days to walk home at the end of the night grateful and relieved. America was a beautiful place once again.

I didn’t know any of the people who had been evicted, but after the second eviction, I did go out of my way one night to pass by each of their homes to see what they had left behind. It was late enough so no one was around. I took my time and rummaged through the dirty clothes lying on the ground. It didn’t matter where you lived, or where you came from, or how far you had traveled, somewhere near you someone was on the run. I pitied and resented those people, whoever they may have been, for being chased out of their homes, perhaps in part because I felt even then a similar fate waiting for me once more.

I kicked a faded white cotton T-shirt with holes near the bottom across a frozen stretch of dead grass, and then turned around and walked back to my apartment.

A few days after that last eviction, Mrs. Davis came into my store carrying a stack of flyers under her arms. A community meeting was going to be held in a church basement with the neighborhood’s councilman. She placed one flyer on the counter and tapped it twice with her finger. I couldn’t help but smile as she pushed the flyers toward me. I knew that there were patterns to life, but what I had never understood until then was how insignificant a role we played in creating them.

“We need as many people there as can make it,” she said to me.

PROTECT OUR NEIGHBROHOOD

NO MORE EVICTIONS

She had spent all afternoon walking around on her arthritic joints passing around those handwritten, misspelled copies to every friendly store and building she knew. The bottom of the flyer was signed The Logan Circle Community Association. I had never heard of it before. Perhaps it had always existed, but more likely than not, it had been created on the spur of the moment by Mrs. Davis and the other widows of the neighborhood. The name carried a certain natural legitimacy to it, which was important if you ever wanted anyone to believe you.