The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (26 page)

“The Palestinians have their rocks. The Rwandans had their machetes. Our weapons aren’t accidents,” he said. “They’re a part of who we are.”

“It’s just a brick, Joseph,” Kenneth said.

“That’s exactly my point,” Joseph responded.

After that we began to catalogue the child wars fought over the last three decades when the roar of the fire trucks and ambulances caught us in midthought. Kenneth was pressing his case that every war in Africa was essentially a war fought by and against children. He was asking us to look at the numbers, at the sum total of children’s lives lost in battle, and just as important, the even greater number lost in the margins of those battles. He was saying, “It’s a simple matter of arithmetic. You can’t deny the numbers,” when I noticed that the sirens and the lights that accompanied them had come to a halt on the other side of the circle. The store was spinning in red and white. Kenneth’s voice was being drowned out by the hard-pressed wailing sound coming from another fire truck that was rounding the corner. His voice trailed off as the three of us looked up from the table and out the window into the indiscriminate glare of the emergency lights twirling like a disco ball around the circle. We have instincts for tragedies. We know when they belong to us long before we understand them. Even before I ran out of the store, across the circle, to the wall of waiting fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars, parked in front of my house, I knew.

This is how it began, then, with the three of us sitting in my store on a Thursday night listing for the hundredth time the victims of a continent that at times seemed full of nothing else. We were always more comfortable with the world’s tragedies than our own. That night was no different. Coups, child soldiers, famines were all a part of the same package of unending grief that we picked our way through in order to avoid our own frustrations and disappointments with life. It was only inevitable that the two would have to meet at some point.

The windows to Judith’s house are still boarded up, and you can still see streaks of black around the top. The only part of the house not ruined by the fire is the stone steps leading up to the front door. The last conversation I had with Judith was on these steps. It was almost a month ago to the day, on an early April afternoon touched intermittently with a light, cold drizzle. On the night of the fire, she had been off watching a movie and having dinner with her former colleagues. She didn’t come back home until the last traces of the fire had died down. The front door, and every window in the house, had been broken. Firefighters and a crowd that had come out to watch the spectacle circled the house. When Judith arrived, I was standing directly across the street with Kenneth and Joseph, surrounded on either side by my neighbors, all of whom had run out of their homes. Even before I saw her I already knew she wasn’t in the house. A policeman had told me the moment I approached my building. He said they found the place abandoned when they arrived, and so there had been nothing to do at the time besides stand there and watch the flames burst through the top-floor windows and tear down the molding that lined the roof. Joseph and Kenneth stood close to me as we watched the spectacle and the quickly gathering crowd. The old widows were craning their heads out of their windows, while women and children gathered on the porches, watching safely from a distance. The last time I had seen anything similar was five years ago, when a man was shot and killed in front of General Logan. The line of police cars surrounding the circle had brought out the entire neighborhood then, too.

It was clear from nearly the beginning that my house was going to be spared, as were all of the others surrounding Judith’s. If there was a theme to the conversations I overheard, it was: Thank God it isn’t us. Grateful, once again, in the way only other people’s suffering can make us.

When Judith finally arrived to reclaim what was left of her home, there was a simple, almost casual pragmatism that governed her actions. It was as if she had known all along that her time in Logan Circle was only temporary, despite how hard she may have wanted to believe otherwise. That night we exchanged only a few brief, customary words. I told her how sorry I was, and she accepted my apology with as much conviction as she could muster. I think I realized she was already gone. Logan Circle, her beautiful four-story mansion. She began to leave it all behind the moment she saw the firemen walking nonchalantly out the front door. The whole thing could be shaken off as a protracted bad dream, one that had lasted, from start to finish, approximately five months.

After a brief hug, I left her alone to deal with the firemen and police. Joseph, Kenneth, and I returned to the store.

“So that’s her?” Joseph asked me once we were situated around the table once again.

I nodded my head. It would have been too much to have said yes, affirmatively, as if I had ever really known who Judith was.

Back at the store that night, we joined the rest of the neighborhood in speculating as to whether or not the fire had been an accident. There were the lingering questions provoked by the bricks that had been thrown through Judith’s car and the Hampshire Tower. But those were minor, perhaps even irrelevant, when compared to the sight of Judith’s four-story mansion lit in flames. Joseph insisted that they weren’t.

“Everything is connected,” he said. “The bricks, this fire. They’re not just accidents, Stephanos. That’s the way these things begin. With a handful of small actions that build and build. A month from now you could be looking at an entirely new neighborhood.”

In the end, nothing changed, Joseph, as grand an event as it may have seemed to you at the time. It was only one desperate, lonely man, not a marauding group, who threw the bricks and set fire to Judith’s home. His name was Franklin Henry Thomas, and according to the brief article on him in the
Washington Post
, he had been, until one month earlier, a lifelong resident of Logan Circle. Born just a few blocks away from my store, Frank, as he was known, had lived in the Hampshire Tower for eighteen years with a wife and two children. He worked odd jobs around the neighborhood and city as a handyman. In the summertime, he rode a bicycle around the city offering illegal cable television connections to people on the street. I remember him, but I can’t say that I ever knew him or spoke to him. I used to see him riding his bicycle down the street with a book bag strapped around his chest, his middle-aged body far too large for the child’s bike he was riding. Occasionally I heard him call out to people sitting on their porches, or standing near their houses, in a high-pitched, singsong voice, “Got cable?” I remember he never paused after he said that, but would continue on down the middle of the street, his oversize body comically cramped onto the seat of his bike, his words left to echo behind him as he zigzagged his way down the road. He was a man who made his living simply hawking whatever meager wares he had.

According to the article, Franklin Henry Thomas lost his one-bedroom apartment in the Hampshire Tower when his lease expired in December and he was asked by his landlord to start paying nearly a third more than he had previously. In February he moved into a temporary shelter while his wife and children moved into an apartment in Maryland with his wife’s sister. There was a photograph of him next to the article, one that I clipped out and taped to the side of my register so that at almost any given point in the day, I could turn my head and catch at least a glimpse of the man who had burned down Judith’s home. In the picture, Franklin Henry Thomas is bald with an unkempt white beard that looks newly acquired. I was surprised, when I first saw the picture, how closely he and I resembled each other. We had the same narrow face and broad forehead. Had I lost all of my hair and grown a beard, and aged perhaps just a few more years, we could have passed for brothers. Inside my store, with no one around, I said his name often to myself. Franklin Henry Thomas. Franklin Henry Thomas. Sometimes just Frank, sometimes Frank Henry. The name was so decidedly American, so quintessentially colonial in its rhythm and grandeur. I began to think of Franklin Henry Thomas as my coconspirator in life. I even thought briefly of visiting him in jail so I could tell him that I alone understood why he did what he did. He was arrested after the police caught him trying to break into Judith’s old house a week after the fire. He was carrying all of his belongings with him in a black duffel bag. Apparently, he had planned on moving into the burned-out building for the remainder of the winter. In his delusion, he had even begun to imagine that perhaps, with a little time, he could repair the house he had burned down and move his family back in with him. His duffel bag was full of the tools he had used as a handyman. He told the police in his confession that he had made sure no one was home when he lit the book of matches that started it all.

After the fire, a police car was parked permanently in Logan Circle. It sat right next to General Logan and his horse. Together, the two stood guard over the neighborhood day and night. Following Frank’s arrest, the marauding men in black returned to the corners of the imagination that had created them, and eventually the police car disappeared as well. General Logan was left all to himself once again. As for Judith’s house, boarded up now with yellow police tape across the front door, it had returned to a state similar to the one she had found it in. I noticed that no one stopped to look at the house anymore. It was no longer beautiful. It no longer shone. I wonder even now if most of the people who live here don’t miss it. There was something nice to living in the shadows of a house like Judith’s. There are still pieces from the roof’s molding lying on the ground around me, and though the house is now abandoned and desolate in its appearance, there is enough evidence to remember that it wasn’t always this way.

From the steps, I can see across the circle, straight to the store. The front door is still open. It’s still too early in the evening for a crowd, but soon enough, one will settle onto the corner, regardless of whether the store is open or not. If I had to choose only one thing about the neighborhood that I would never want to see change, this would be it. There’s a safety in numbers that goes beyond any home. I’ve learned this only recently. It’s true that after the fire I opened and closed my store sporadically. But it was never because I wanted to see it close, as Kenneth had supposed, or because I wanted to lose whatever customers I still had. In the only letter I ever wrote to Naomi after the fire, I tried to explain what was happening. I tried to tell her that there wasn’t much point in holding on to a store, in holding on to anything, if in the end it didn’t matter to at least one other person than yourself. “You’re right,” I wrote. “I do indeed miss having you around the store. It’s hard to go back there every day now that I know you and your mother will never return. I can’t seem to find any reason to open it up in the morning.”

Of course I never mailed that letter. It reminded me far too much of the ones my uncle used to write. I still have it sitting under the cash register next to the letter she had sent me.

Judith never brought Naomi back to see what had become of their house. Perhaps she thought it would have been too tragic a scene for her daughter to witness. In her last visit back to the neighborhood, she took the time to stop by the store to say something resembling a good-bye. I closed the store for the afternoon so the two of us could take a walk back to the house. She said she didn’t want to see it alone again. We sat here on these steps in a mixture of sporadic sun and rain and talked about what Judith was going to do next. Of course I suggested that she rebuild, even if I never expected that she would.

“It’d be too much,” she said. “To go through all of that work again. It would feel like I was stuck in the past and I don’t want to live my life that way. It’s better just to start over.”

I quoted to her a line from
Democracy in America
, one of a series that she had used as an epigraph to her own book:

“Among democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition; the woof of time is every instant broken and the track of generations effaced.”

“That’s one of my favorite quotes from him,” she said.

“I know.”

I didn’t have to add that it was because I had read her book.

“I still owe you a dinner,” she said. “Maybe once I settle into a temporary place, you can come over and join Naomi and me.”

That we haven’t spoken or seen each other since then is no surprise. It was enough to pretend, for just that afternoon, that our lives might intersect again.

What was it my father used to say? A bird stuck between two branches gets bitten on both wings. I would like to add my own saying to the list now, Father: a man stuck between two worlds lives and dies alone. I have dangled and been suspended long enough.

There are approximately 883 steps between these steps and my store. A distance that I can sprint in less than ten seconds, walk in under a minute. It is always the first and last steps that are the hardest to take. We walk away and try not to turn back, or we stand just outside the gates, terrified to find what’s waiting for us now that we’ve returned. In between, we stumble blindly from one place and life to the next. We try to do the best we can. There are moments like this, however, when we are neither coming nor going, and all we have to do is sit and look back on the life we have made. Right now, I’m convinced that my store looks more perfect than ever before. I can see it exactly as I have always wanted to see it. Through the canopy of trees that line the walkway cutting through the middle of the circle is a store, one that is neither broken nor perfect, one that, regardless of everything, I’m happy to claim as entirely my own.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980, he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled Ethiopia during the Red Terror. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction and the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York City.