The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (25 page)

When I finally returned home I saw that every light in Judith’s house had been turned on. I thought of the Christmas tree in her living room, and then of Gatsby and his corner mansion all lit up. There was no party or music, and as I neared her house, I heard her voice yelling at what must have been close to the top of her lungs. Most of the words were indistinguishable. All I could make out was the profanity: fuck you and so on. Her voice came in and out as she walked through her house cursing away at Ayad, whose figure I could make out from behind the living-room drapes.

I sat down on the steps outside of my house and listened to them scream and curse at each other. I wondered whether I would catch a glimpse of the rumored black-clad men if I waited there long enough. Anything seemed possible at that point. It was fifty degrees and it was January.

I found a brick in front of my store the next morning. It was lying right in front of the door, as harmless as a fallen branch or leaf. The windows and door to my store had metal grates too thick and close together to have let anything as large as a brick go through them. I checked all the grates and found hardly any signs of damage.

I opened my store as usual. I used the brick that had been given to me to prop the door open. The warm weather had held through the night, and I didn’t want to miss any of it.

Judith was my first customer that morning. She came in with heavy bags under her eyes, her hair tied up in a sloppy bun that left loose strands to fall around the sides of her face. She was wearing the same tennis shoes she used to walk to her car that morning, along with a pair of faded jeans and a thick University of Connecticut sweatshirt.

She came in and handed me a letter.

“It’s from Naomi,” she said. “It came in the mail the morning you stopped by the house. I meant to give it to you that day. And to tell you thank you for coming by and letting me know about the car, but somehow all of that got lost.”

She looked up at me and I could see that she wanted some form of consolation. There was the same shame and embarrassment I had seen in her face when Naomi made her first escape from the house, and Judith returned to my store to apologize for her frightened, hysterical behavior. Last night, I had listened to her and Ayad fight until nearly four in the morning. At some point they took their fight to the bedroom. I opened my window, which meant that I could hear nearly everything they said to each other over the course of the evening. Judith had accused him of being cruel and indifferent, a self-absorbed asshole who had used her as a prop to feel better about himself. She told him that his daughter could barely stand to be around him. She said that he was ashamed of his own daughter, which made him the worst possible type of father. Ayad was no less harsh. In a mixture of French and English, he reminded Judith of the role she had played in seducing him. He told her she was just like all of the American women he had met: willing and all too eager. Look at where she was living now, he pointed out. In a shitty slum of a neighborhood where people throw bricks at your car. He told Judith the only part of his daughter he was ashamed of was the part that came from her.

There was no address on the envelope. Just my name, properly spelled, in Naomi’s elegant, childish handwriting.

“Do you have an address?” I asked her. “There’s not one on this envelope and I’d like to write Naomi back.”

Judith pulled a pen out of her pocket and wrote Naomi’s address at school on the envelope. Her hand shook with every turn of the pen.

“Ayad left this morning,” she said. “He came back with me from Connecticut. It was a terrible mistake. One I know never to make again. I’m sorry you ever had to meet him.”

“You don’t have to apologize to me,” I told her.

“Let’s have dinner soon,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow if you’re free.”

Our emotions do get the best of us. Whether they’re valid or genuine in the end is irrelevant when all you want is a kind gesture or word to redeem you.

“Yes. Let’s do that,” I told her.

Judith thanked me for being so sweet and understanding before she left the store. She used those words so easily: “sweet and understanding.” She hesitated a moment at the door, but then thought better of whatever else she was going to say. I watched her through the window as she cut through the circle and bounded her way home. I tried to think of what she reminded me of with her quick, long strides somewhere in between a jog and a brisk walk. In the end I decided that it wasn’t the way she moved, but the sense of injury that hovered around her that made me think of a wounded animal.

Naomi’s letter to me was two pages, front and back, written in purple, blue, and black ink forming carefully scripted letters that were so small I had to hold the paper almost directly in front of my face to read it. Her first few sentences were customary—hi; how are you; I am fine. Every sentence after that was increasingly eloquent. She wrote about her teachers and new friends and the school’s “magnificent grounds.” She closed by saying that she hoped I wasn’t lonely without her. I had always wondered if she was perceptive enough to know how far her presence went toward filling my days. I was relieved to find that she was. She saved the best sentences for last. She wrote them as a couplet:

There are many nice people here, but none as nice as you.

Please write me back, because that’s what friends are supposed to do.

I hid the letter under the cash register. I imagined that if I ever wanted to read it again, it would be while I was standing here, behind the counter.

16

T
here are only three blocks left between General Logan and me. I can just make out the edge of the circle, its empty benches and the trees shaking lightly in the wind. There was a park in Addis that looked just like Logan Circle does from a distance, with a few minor adjustments. That was the other reason I moved into this neighborhood. The first time I saw General Logan riding on his horse, surrounded by his benches and dying clumps of grass, I was reminded of the late-afternoon walks my father and I used to take during the summer, when I spent a part of each afternoon working with him in his office. Near the end of each day he locked up his office doors and together the two of us strolled down the street, past the open-market vendors, through the chaotically jammed roads crowded with cars, buses, and people walking with their small flocks of sheep, everyone fighting for space, until we reached the circle built in the shadows of one of the emperor’s palaces. The park was small, no larger than Logan Circle, but it was enough of a reprieve from the city to achieve the intended effect, which was to block out the world in order to live quietly for a half hour or so with our thoughts. My father walked with both hands clasped behind his back and ran silently over the day. Sometimes his thoughts took him even farther back in time, and when they did, he walked around the park talking quietly to himself. He whispered the names of dead relatives—his mother and father, both of whom had died long before I was born. We almost never spoke to each other during those walks. That would have betrayed the lesson he was trying to teach me. It wasn’t enough to be comfortable with silence. In order to truly understand it, you had to welcome it and invite it into your life. And so that was what we did. We walked in silence around and around that park until it was time to return to work or home. The last walk we took around that park was on January 23, 1977, less than six months before he was killed. We had just entered the park grounds when we saw the first of seven bodies neatly lined up in the center of the grass. They were lined up in a row, their feet bare, just inside the entrance. They were impossible to miss or avoid. Hung around each of their necks was a crudely made cardboard sign that simply read “Traitor.” A lone sentry, no older than the boys lying on the ground, guarded the bodies. He stood to the side so as not to interrupt the view, a rifle slung lazily over his shoulder. It would have been easy enough to turn around and walk back out of the park. With the exception of the guard and the bodies, no one else was there. Instead of leaving, my father pulled me around to his side and placed one arm over my shoulder and led me forward, around the same path that we had always walked on, as if the bodies and the guard assigned to watch them had never been there. It was the simplest act of defiance my father could think of. An arrogant, almost blind refusal to give in to the self-proclaimed terror of the revolution. It was only a few weeks earlier that Mengistu Haile Mariam had declared the start of the Red Terror in a crowded city square by throwing to the ground bottles filled with red ink to represent the blood of the revolution’s enemies. And here they were now, lined up like matchsticks on the grass, the soles of their muddy feet exposed to my father and me as we circled the grounds of the park.

Rather than go directly to my store, I turn right at the corner and head toward home. I can see pieces of my store from here. From the corner of 13th and Rhode Island Avenue, I can catch a glimpse of the store’s blue and white façade. I can see the outline of my stand-alone chalkboard sign advertising a lunch special that doesn’t exist. A turkey and cheddar sandwich on a roll with a complimentary bag of potato chips and a can of soda for $4.50. From here, there is no sign of chaos or destruction. It looks just like any other corner store: humble, well maintained. For a few seconds I imagine that it belongs to someone else. Another immigrant, one who looks much like I do, who right now is standing behind the counter bantering casually with one of his regular customers on a spring day that is all but perfect.

It’s almost six o’clock now. The sunlight is hitting the top of the trees. Here is the usual parade of commuters returning home marching around the circle. I find myself walking slowly behind an older black woman dressed far too warmly for the day. She’s wearing a heavy, full-length black coat that wraps around her broad, hunched back. She’s pushing a red plastic cart in front of her, its contents wrapped in plastic piled to the very top. I walk behind her slowly, admiring the deliberation that seems to come with every step. I can only guess at the effort it takes for a woman like this to make her way through the city every day. I wonder if the world slows down to match her understanding of it, if the mind doesn’t catch each passing image and hold it for a second longer in order to compensate for the extra energy each step takes. I wish this day had passed at this pace, that I hadn’t run from one end of the city to the other. Despite how hard I may have tried, there is still so much I missed. I should have visited the market by my uncle’s house and talked to the old Somali man who used to sell me
injera
and
berbere
when I was still a teenager. I should have taken the time to stand outside of the Capitol Hotel’s palatial entrance and marvel at the disappearance of time.

The woman and I part ways in front of what remains of Judith’s old house. On the night of the fire, Joseph, Kenneth, and I were sitting in my store. The three of us were sitting around our table eating turkey sandwiches and drinking a cheap bottle of wine Joseph had stolen from his restaurant. I remember I was telling them about what had been happening, beginning with the brick that had been thrown through Judith’s car. I told them about Ayad and his eaglelike face, and the rumors of marauding men in black touring through the neighborhood.

Kenneth shook his head in disappointment when he heard the news.

“None of this will be good for business,” he had said. “Having bricks thrown through windows is a bad sign.”

I told him that business had been better the past week than it had been in months.

“That’s just temporary,” he said. “Things always go up in times of crisis. People get confused, scared. So what do they do? They spend. If this keeps up, a few weeks from now and this place will be empty.”

“It’s already empty,” I reminded him.

“Well. It will be even emptier.”

“This is how it happened in Zaire,” Joseph said. “One day we heard that some people were beaten up by guys with guns. The next day we had a rebel group walking through the neighborhood saying they had come to liberate us from the government. To prove their point they shot five people in the street who were responsible for our oppression.”

“You must have been grateful,” I said.

“Of course we were. We didn’t even know that we were oppressed. Imagine our surprise and joy to find out that we had been. We gave the rebels all the money we had to thank them. I remember one man was so happy he even gave them his wife and daughter. As an African, you should understand what’s happening here, Stephanos.”

“And what is that?” Kenneth asked him.

“That there’s nothing these people can do. Look at this place. All of the marches in the world won’t change anything anymore. We were at our best in the sixties. Africa was free. America was free. Everyone was marching to something. And now look at us.”

I walked over to the door then and picked up the brick that had been thrown at my store that morning. I had left it lying on the ground in case the weather turned nice again.

“I found this in front of my store today,” I said.

Joseph took the brick from my hand and turned it over and over as if he were checking its density and weight. He paused and held it in his lap silently as he thought about what he was going to say next. He wanted to say something important, something worthy of a brick left lying on a doorstep.

“There’s a great metaphor in this,” he said. He held the brick in the air with one hand. It could have been a poem from Yeats that he was talking about for all of the import and dignity he was attributing to the brick. His words and gestures were borrowed—part academic, part statesman. They were all wrong. Watching him, I couldn’t help but think that in Africa, he could have led a crowd straight to the bush or palace. He had that kind of charisma about him when he spoke.