Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

From my living-room window I could see the lights in Judith’s house. There was at least one room on every floor that was fully lit. I decided there was something monstrous about a house with so many lights, something distinctly unjust.

After I’d been standing there for only a few minutes, the lights on the second floor began to flicker on and off. It was a signal from Naomi. We began to turn our lights off and on in an imaginary Morse code dialogue. I could picture her standing by the switch, eagerly flicking the lights until her head began to hurt. Finally, instead of continuing to respond, I just stood in the dark and tried not to think of her disappointment.

The next day Joseph and Kenneth came to the store and I told them about my dinner with Judith. I had mentioned her before — the house, Naomi, our conversations at the store — but only infrequently, and with no more passion than I discussed anything else that might have happened on that given day. When I told them about the dinner and brief kiss, the two of them looked up from their chessboard at each other, and not me.

“You see?” Joseph said. “You should listen to me more often.” He was wagging one of his chubby fingers at Kenneth, who was now leaning back in his chair with his hands folded on his stomach.

“What can I say? You were right.”

“About what?” I asked.

“Jo-Jo said you were…what’s the word you used?”

“Enamored.”

“Yes. Enamored by this woman.”

When I looked over at Joseph he was struggling and failing to contain his grin.

“You have nothing to be embarrassed about, Stephanos. You’ve been in America for almost seventeen years. It’s about time you dated a white woman.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“He’s right,” Kenneth jumped in. “You spend too much time by yourself. You’re in this store all alone, and then you go home. It’s no way for a man to live.”

“What about the little girl’s father?” Joseph asked me.

“It was just dinner,” I said.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never asked her.”

“I imagine if I saw the three of you walking down the street, I would think you were it.”

There was a second of silence before Kenneth reached across the table and smacked Joseph on the arm.

“Sorry, Stephanos. You know what I meant.”

“Of course,” I told him.

Joseph won the chess game easily, as he always did. Whenever he plays against Kenneth or me, he does so absentmindedly, his fingers dancing over the board as if he were seeing it for the first time. When he moves a piece, he never focuses on the spot he’s moving it to. Instead, he turns his eyes back to his opponent, or even better, to someone else in the room, lending an air of inevitability to every move he makes. As a young man, he had been one of the better chess players in Kinshasa, known for his quiet, restrained demeanor even in the face of certain defeat. He had stories of all-night chess tournaments held in dingy cafés and bars, games that erupted into beatings, stabbings, and on occasion, shootings. “We had no jobs, we were done with school, no family, no money, so we played chess all day. It was what we did.” Clusters, and in some cases, surrogate families of young men formed around the game. Some were illiterate and had spent years fighting from the bush; others, like Joseph, were born into affluent families who had paid for French and English tutors before losing everything to Mobutu and his corrupt, bloated government. They had a religious devotion to the game, a respect for its handful of rules and almost infinite variations born, as Joseph said, out of a shared sense of gratitude for having at least one space where their decisions mattered. “Nobody,” he said once, “understands chess like an African.”

After the game was over, Joseph settled back into a quiet contemplation that involved deep breaths and long pauses between each sip of beer. Winning these games gave him nothing. Kenneth was rearranging the pieces on the board, trying to discover where he had gone wrong. If and when he figured it out, he would rock back in his chair and exclaim, “Now I see what you did, you tricky bastard. That will never work again with me.”

“You know,” Joseph said to me, “I dated a white woman once. She was from Boston. She had short curly red hair, so the teachers nicknamed her Rouge.”

“When?” I asked him.

“A long time ago.”

“In the Congo?”

“In Zaire. She was a Peace Corps volunteer.”

“For how long?”

“Almost two years.”

“You didn’t waste any time, did you?”

“What can I say? It was meant to be. We were teaching at the same school.”

“And then what?”

“She went back to Boston.”

“And you lost touch?”

“We never tried to keep it. Maybe I wrote her a letter once or twice, but nothing more than that. We had talked briefly about getting married and having little red Afro babies together, but we both knew better. She lives here now. I see her every once in a while. She’s come into the restaurant a few times for lunch.”

“What do you say to her?”

“Nothing.”

“Not even once?”

“I don’t think she recognizes me.”

“How could she not?” I asked him.

He finished his beer and patted his stomach.

“I was skinnier then,” he said. “You should have seen me. I was so beautiful. You wouldn’t have believed your eyes.”

On May 4 I wake up earlier than usual with my head still clouded from last night’s drinking. The sun has barely cracked through the day, and I can still hear Joseph’s voice singing in the bar. As I swing my legs onto the floor, I make a firm resolution to myself. To go on living halfheartedly is ridiculous, I think. Here I am; this is it. Starting today, I am going to press on valiantly. I am going to march through the hours and weeks and let no disappointment, regardless of how large, steer me from my course or bring me down. I am going to open my store early. I am going to catch the morning rush-hour commuters and make them mine.

By seven a.m. I’m fully dressed and walking out the door. Five minutes later, I’m standing in front of my store, pulling the keys out of my pocket. All around me people are walking, rushing, and for the first time since Judith and Naomi left the neighborhood, I am one of them. The morning is bright and mild; it is a picture-perfect May day with low humidity and surges of cool air that dry the sweat on my forehead as quickly as it forms. The day, I tell myself, is nothing to be afraid of. Life ticks on just as it always has. It was only by a trick of the imagination that I had come to believe I could step outside of it. Sunlight is tilting through the space between the leaves, lighting up the edges of the circle nearest my store. The sight is so perfect that I pause for a second, keys in hand, with the deliberate intention of admiring it.

I lift the lock from its latch, grab hold of the lowest rung on the grate, and with three quick, solid jerks hurl it over my head and send it crashing. That same sound is echoing from stores all across this city; it is we, the small storekeepers and newspaper vendors, who are drawing it back to life.

The grate crashes and locks into place, and as it does, a thin white envelope, slid into a corner of the door, flutters to the ground. My name is typed neatly on the front, with no postage or address. I pick it up and hold it against the sky. The sun catches it from the back. Through the envelope I can make out one clear line: Dear Mr. Stephanos.

Dear Mr. Stephanos. My knees give, just a bit, at the sight of the words. Something — call it hope, optimism — drops in my stomach and goes running. Dear Mr. Stephanos. A sign of official business. Never in my life have I done well with official business. Official business is prompt and efficient and demanding. I have a stack of official letters from vendors and utility companies and a credit card that all begin the same way: Dear Mr. Stephanos. In each of them there is a simple, unwavering demand for money, for which I’ve had no response except to close my eyes and wish desperately like a child that it would all go away. I have done the best I can under the circumstances. I write out checks for meager amounts: $10.34 here, $3.29 there. And when I can’t, I have learned not to pick up my phone or read my mail for a week or two at a time.