The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (11 page)

Approximately twenty-five minutes passed before Judith lifted her head on her own. I had counted each minute off on the clock hanging above the stove in the kitchen. Her mouth had hung slightly open the entire time, as if there had been something that she had been waiting to say but hadn’t quite yet found the proper words for.

“I should get back home,” she said when she opened her eyes. “I would hate to imagine what Naomi would do if she woke up and found that I wasn’t there. Don’t worry about walking me home or anything. I think I can get there safe.”

“You really like that joke, don’t you?”

“I don’t have many to choose from.”

She put one arm around my neck and pressed her cheek against mine. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I left them dangling limp at my side for a second while Judith whispered into my ear, “Thank you for being so sweet.” I gave in then and let my arms wrap, just barely, around her waist. All of the tenderness that I had stored inside of me came rushing to the surface of my skin. I bit down hard on my tongue to hold it back. I waited for her to lift her head toward mine, but it never happened.

She left immediately after that. I watched her from the top of the staircase as she made her way down to the street, and then followed her from my living-room window as she climbed the steps to her own house. We may not have been lovers, but that didn’t stop me from thinking of her as such.

Naomi was back in my store the next day. I didn’t ask her where she had been, or why she hadn’t come by to see me all week. I told her simply, “You were missed,” which she responded to with a shy smile.

She came in strapped with books that she hoisted onto the counter by standing on the tips of her toes. It was the first day of her Christmas break, and she had raided the local library for all it was worth. She opened the bag and pulled out the half-dozen books she had picked to make her way through the quiet winter weeks. Apparently, she had gone exclusively for size.
The Education of Henry Adams, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, The Brothers Karamazov, Plants and Animals of the Western Hemisphere,
and an
Atlas of the Modern World.

“What do you plan on doing with all these books?”

“Reading them.”

“Even the dictionary and atlas?”

She shook her head and rolled her eyes at me. She hadn’t learned yet to conceal her scorn for my silly questions, and I know it sounds easy to say, but had she been able to explain her derision, I’m sure it would have had something to do with my adult impulse to place limits on her world.

“Seems like a lot for one girl to read. How long is your vacation?”

“Sixteen days, counting weekends.”

“You better get started, then.”

“What should we read first?”

It was that simple with her. She claimed me without even trying, while I, for my part, gratefully accepted her designation as one half of a “we” with nothing but pride.

“I don’t know,” I said. “You pick.”

She laid the books next to one another on the counter, and then opened each one to a random page in the middle. She read out loud the history of the laurel tree in Greek mythology, a passage about the mountain lion in North America, and then the last pages of
The Brothers Karamazov
. Alyosha’s speech to the young boys gathered around him, or perhaps it was the deliberately crude sketch drawing of the three brothers on the paperback cover, won her over.

“This one,” she said. “Let’s read this one.”

Inside the front flap of the book were the handwritten names of the dozen or so people who had checked the book out before Naomi. Instead of writing her name, Naomi had a thin paper receipt with the due date printed on it. She could never possess this book the way those other people had. It was one of those uselessly nostalgic and sentimental thoughts that serve only our own romantic ideals, but I couldn’t help believing it was true nonetheless. I took a pencil out from behind the register and handed it to her.

“Write your name in here,” I told her.

“You’re not supposed to write in the books.”

“I know. But this is different. This is just your name. And this way, anyone who picks up this book years and years from now will know that Naomi once read it.”

I don’t know if it was that idea or the opportunity to defy authority that appealed to her. Either way, she took the pencil and wrote her name carefully, in cursive, on the last slot available.

7

L
ying on the grass on the edge of Dupont Circle, away from the shade cast by the office buildings and trees, I listen closely to the sirens. They don’t fit in with the picturesque scene of office workers lunching on the grass, but there they are, faint, undoubtedly audible, and growing louder with each passing second. The couple that I followed to the circle from my store stand up and exit. As the sirens draw closer, the people lying on the grass look up from their books. Those who are strolling strain under the glare of the sun to see what’s coming at them, while the people on the benches, comfortable and relaxed, try not to bother. There’s more than one siren, perhaps as many as four or five, their sounds echoing and amplifying one another, so it’s impossible to be certain. The sound quickly takes over the circle. No one has any option but to watch the parade of police motorcycles, cars, massive black SUVs, and black limos heading toward us. People begin to point in awe. Some pull out their cameras and take pictures, while others clasp their hands around their ears to block out the nearly deafening roar. A lasso of black cars forms around the circle, blowing past stoplights, oblivious to the motionless cars trapped in their lane and the people standing perfectly still at all the crosswalks. We all have the sense that someone of great import is passing, and that we are fulfilling our role as observers. It seems as if time has been temporarily suspended, the world placed on pause as we wait to return to our ordinary lives. In Ethiopia the story was similar. Troops used to line whatever route the emperor took hours in advance. They swept the streets clean of beggars, cripples, and trash, and had faithful loyalists stand on the side of the road, ready to bow as he passed. When the emperor was finally deposed at the start of the revolution, he was carried out of his palace in a blue Volkswagen Beetle. At the time I had thought of it as a silly and pointless thing to do, but now I can see how wrong I was. Few things are as important as the last impressions we make when leaving. Take away the whirling lights and blaring sirens of a motorcade and this is what you are left with: an old man, slightly senile, in the backseat of a beat-up car.

As the police cars vanish, I imagine an entirely empty motorcade whose sole purpose is to remind people what they are up against.

The clock at the bank on the corner flashes the time, 1:28, and the temperature, 72 degrees. Branches are swaying in the wind, shedding their petals, just like they’re supposed to, while the red and yellow tulips along the perimeter of the circle bob their heads to the rhythm of the breeze. The lunch crowd is beginning to file back toward the offices and I stand up to join them. It’s like watching the end of afternoon recess on a playground. We funnel into the circle’s four exits, returning, no doubt out of habit, to the lessons of our childhood.

I walk to the pay phones near the metro entrance. I want to call my uncle Berhane to tell him that I’m getting on a train in the middle of the day to come see him. Over the course of the past two years, I have visited him three, maybe four times. We see each other almost exclusively in extreme circumstances. When his mother died in Ethiopia two years ago, we came together here in D.C. to mourn a woman whom, in the end, neither one of us really knew. We sat in his living room, our hands firmly clasped, in complete silence, as men and women whose names I hardly recognized entered the incense-filled room, offered their condolences, and sat quietly like black-draped ghosts on the paltry furniture. Tiny blue-and-white cups of coffee circulated ceaselessly around the room, along with plates of
injera
piled high with cabbage, greens, and chicken. A few women clicked their tongues in mourning as soon as they entered the apartment; I remember one man even wept. Everyone agreed it was God’s will, and a powerful old priest from one of the Orthodox churches was even called up to confirm it. After three days, the guests stopped coming, and Berhane, two decades older than me with a soft, stoic face and sleepy eyes, told me gently that I could go back home now. Eight months later, his girlfriend’s asylum application failed, and she moved to Canada to live with a cousin. On her last night in D.C., the three of us went to the nicest Ethiopian restaurant in the city and drank through the silence and awkwardness. This is the type of family we are. Two men who depend on each other in the oddest and most important circumstances. Even now, after nearly two decades in America, I continue to refer to him respectfully as Gashe.

I dial his number, and after a few rings, the answering machine picks up. I hear his soft, muted voice say, in its heavy accent, “Hello. Thank you for calling. You have reached the home of Berhane Selassie.” It took him almost two years to remove my name from that recording. Every time I hear that greeting I feel a small pang of regret for having left him in that apartment alone. I don’t have the heart to leave him a message and tell him I’m coming. It would only worry him, so instead I do what I do best. I close my eyes and hang up.

I call Joseph’s restaurant next. He’s been a waiter at the Colonial Grill for over eight years now, and I’ve never once been inside the restaurant to see him. The excuse I’ve offered has always been that I’m too busy with the store, but that doesn’t hold any longer now, does it? When Joseph first began to work at the restaurant, he would demand that I come and eat there during his shift so he could, as he liked to say, “take care of me.” “Come in sometime, Stephanos. Close the store. Take the day off. And I’ll have you treated like the king of Ethiopia.”

When I reminded him that the emperor had been killed and buried under a toilet, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “These things happen. We all make mistakes.”

When the hostess answers, “Colonial Grill. How may I help you?” I ask her if Joseph Kahangi is working today. She hesitates for a moment and replies, “Yes, he is.” Before she can ask who’s calling, I hang up. Today is not a day for trivial questions or useless answers. I take another quarter and call my answering machine. I have two messages, both from Kenneth. He says the same thing in each one. “Pick up, Stephanos. Where are you?”

I take my last quarter and call Kenneth’s office one more time. I want to tell him that today is a beautiful day, and not to worry. I want to reassure him and tell him that I am going to do something, with my store and with myself, just as he asked me to. I have one more name for him first: Valentine Strasser. It’s an impossible name: Valentine Strasser. At twenty-five he became the youngest coup leader in Africa’s history and the youngest head of state in the world. In pictures his small eyes peer out over a flat, hairless face too young to have killed and ruined so many lives. I hang up just after the first ring. Strasser, with his baby-soft criminal looks, is too fresh in our memories for this game.

I take the quarter back and call my store. I keep my finger on the lever. The phone rings once, twice, and then on the fourth ring, someone picks up. I’m too startled to speak, and so, apparently, is the person on the other end. Neither one of us says anything. It’s been nearly two hours since I abandoned my store. Everything that has or has not happened to it since could fit into this silence.

I hear children yelling in the background. Their voices are happy, exuberant even. And why not? There is nothing in my store that they can’t have. Someone shouts, “Get the fuck outta here,” after which there is a tumbling, tossing noise. It’s the sound of cans of soup raining on the ground, my store falling to pieces.

A steady but nervous voice, slightly frail, finally whispers, “Hello.” It repeats itself, more confident and assured, a few seconds later. “Hello. Who is this?”

It’s the “Who is this?” that gives it away. It’s the same voice that in the morning yells out from the first-floor window, “Don’t forget my milk,” and in the evening, “You got my milk?” On the weekends the voice monitors my comings and goings, scrutinizes my clothes, tells me to polish my shoes, asks me whether or not I think it’s going to rain, makes me pitchers of sweet iced tea, encourages me to come to church, and more recently, can sense my loneliness and occasional despair and tries to wash it away with a firm grip on my hand and a wet kiss on my cheek.

God bless you, Mrs. Davis, and all the widows of the world, I think as I hang up the phone.

The escalators that lead down to the metro are vast and cavernous, an enormous yawning mouth that swallows and spits out thousands of people each day. My uncle lives at the end of the red train line in one of the poorer suburbs of Maryland. At worst, it’s a twenty-minute ride on the metro and a half-hour walk from there, a paltry distance for two men who are otherwise thousands of miles away from any other living relative. There are no subdivisions, and you would be hard pressed to find even one well-manicured lawn. Instead of pleasant gated communities, twenty-story slabs of gray concrete apartment buildings line an overly congested road developed to the point of breaking with a dozen strip malls. In Ethiopia, my uncle barely ever figured into my family’s life. A powerful, wealthy man, he lived just outside of Addis on a sprawling ranch that I visited only once as a child. It sat on the edge of a ridge with sweeping views of the shallow green valley below. It’s difficult to remember that places like that ever existed. They seem conjured, the fictitious dreams of a hyperactive and lonely imagination. Today, all I can remember of the house are the dust-caked walls and the wooden rafter beams on the ceiling. I remember there were windows everywhere, and that entire rooms seemed to have been made of nothing but glass and light. The house, I learned later, was inspired by a picture of a Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie home my uncle had seen in an issue of
Architectural Digest
. Berhane designed the home himself, entirely from the memory of that photograph. The house, he said, was supposed to disappear into the landscape, invisible to the naked eye until just the last moment. Whatever his business was, he tended to it from there. He knew even then to be distrustful of the city.