Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

“Ah, that reminds me. Did I tell you about—

The shepherd who beat his sheep too hard

The farmer who was too lazy to plow his fields

The hyena who laughed himself to death

The lion who tried to steal the monkey’s dinner

The monkey who tried to steal the lion’s dinner?”

If I had heard the story before, I let him tell it to me again. His performance was that good, his love of a story that obvious. Henry the chauffeur and his lavish monkey employers had their predecessors here, even though I never told Naomi that part of the story. Instead, when Fyodor Karamazov spoke, I waved my hands wildly in the air. I grumbled in a deep baritone and tried as hard as I could to do my father proud.

“Ah, you fools,” I shouted out, and Naomi smiled in delight.

Naomi found each of the characters as real as anyone she met in the street.

“Oooh, I hate him,” she would cry out after a particularly cruel antic on the part of the elder Karamazov. “He’s such a moron.” When it came to Alyosha, though, the youngest and gentlest of the Karamazov brothers, she was willing to fall completely in love. I read his scenes and lines with all of the aplomb and grace I could gather. Sometimes while I read, Naomi would lay her head against my arm or in my lap and rest there, wide awake and attentive, until forced to move. It was just enough to make me see how one could want so much more out of life.

The customers who came to the store regularly took to Naomi immediately. She judged them harshly, as I knew she would. The five to eight drunk old men who made their way into the store every afternoon to pick up another bottle of malt liquor were never rewarded with so much as a hello despite their best efforts. “Who’s that pretty young thang you got working behind the counter now, Stephanos? I know she can’t be related to you, not with a face as pretty as that.” “What’s your name, pretty girl? I used to have a daughter that looked just like you. She had the same pretty eyes that you do.”

Naomi met all of their attention, sincere and good-natured as it may have been, with a fake grin that they took to be a mark of shyness. I knew better. Once, as one of the men was walking out of the store, I saw her roll her eyes and heard her whisper, “Take a bath.” The man, whom I knew only as Mr. Clark, paused just slightly at the door when she said that. Like all of the other men, he was old enough to have been her father or grandfather. He wore thick glasses taped together in the center, and the same pair of rumpled brown pants that hit his ankles just an inch too high. His hair had gone mostly gray, and on warmer days he passed his afternoons sleeping on one of the benches surrounding General Logan. I didn’t know him to be a good, or bad, man. I knew only that every day he chose to lose himself in as many bottles of alcohol as he could afford rather than waste his energy facing his life head on. When he turned his head toward her, there was a resigned sadness to his expression that neither Naomi nor I could bear to look at. His face seemed to say that if given half a chance, he would have done anything not to be judged by this eleven-year-old girl who wore pink cashmere.

When we finished reading just after lunch, Naomi refused to go back home. Rather than leave the store she asked, “So what do we do now?”

It was easy enough to invent small tasks to keep her with me. On the first day of her vacation I gave her a broom that she pushed up and down the aisles. She was meticulous. She swept each piece of tile once, and then twice, as if she were brushing an ancient artifact free of centuries of dust and sand. She swept the floor underneath the lowest shelves, which had rarely seen the bristles of a broom.

“This place is filthy,” Naomi said. And while I may have been hurt just slightly by her judgment, I also wanted to make it better for her so I could be rewarded with a hundred mornings and afternoons just like this one.

Judith came as usual to pick Naomi up at five or a few minutes before. On that first day, Naomi saw her mother just before she came in. At the last second, she picked up her copy of The Brothers Karamazov and in that same insistent voice of hers said, “Come on, Mr. Stephanos, one more chapter.” I saw Judith walking across the street, just steps away. I grabbed the book from Naomi’s hands and turned to a random page near the beginning.

“Fyodor Karamazov,” I continued without looking up as Judith entered the store. She paused just inside the door, while Naomi leaned over the counter with one hand resting on her chin as if she were reading the pages with me. When I looked up I saw Naomi trying as hard as she could to act as if she were listening. We had become accomplices.

“So,” Judith said after a few seconds of standing in the doorway and watching us pretend to read. “I see she even has you reading to her now.” She had her arms folded over her chest and was leaning slightly against the wall. She hadn’t caught on to the act we were putting on, but she wasn’t completely fooled, either.

I closed the book and acted as if I were noticing her for the first time.

“We’ve been taking turns,” I said.

“Is that true, Naomi?”

Naomi nodded her head vigorously.

“Pull up a chair and join us,” I offered.

“Depends on what you’re reading.”

I showed Judith the cover of the book.

“A little dense, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t pick it out. Naomi did.”

“Of course she did. How else could she keep you reading to her for hours?”

I wanted to applaud Naomi for her foresight. Judith and I were both being conned, but neither of us particularly minded. To earn that kind of trust and affection from a child is to find out that you may have just been a better person than you believed all along.

“So is that why we’re reading this?” I asked Naomi.

She did what few children could have done. She looked me directly in the eye and said, “Yes.”

“We have to go now, though,” Judith said. “It’s getting late and we have dinner plans.”

“One more chapter,” Naomi pleaded.

“Tomorrow,” Judith said. “Tomorrow you can stay as long as you like.”

Tomorrow did not come fast enough, but when it finally did arrive after a restless night, I was ready. I had called Joseph as soon as I returned home so I could explain everything that had happened to him.

“Tell me again now, what did she say when she left the store?” he asked me.

“She said, ‘You can stay as long as you like.’”

There was a long stretch of silence on Joseph’s end as he deliberated over the meaning of Judith’s words.

“What else did she say?” he asked.

“That was it.”

“Was she smiling at you?”

“No. She may have, and I just missed it.”

I could almost see Joseph shaking his head on the other end of the phone. He breathed in deeply and sighed loudly enough for me to hear him.

“What do you know about this woman?” he asked me.

“What do you mean?” I said. “I know plenty.”

“Don’t get mad at me, Stephanos. I’m just asking you simple questions. Relationships with women are tricky. Trust me. I know about these things. You’ve never dated an American before.”

Joseph was kind enough not to remind me that since coming to America I had never had a relationship of any kind beyond brief one-night encounters.

“American women are different,” he continued. “Remember that. You never know what’s in their hearts.”

He was talking like a scorned lover. I thought of him in his restaurant, as the Rouge that he had known years earlier in a different life sat at a table with a crowd of people eating, laughing, while he sat hiding in the back.