Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

I’m covered in sweat when I reach the apartment complex. I catch my reflection in the building’s door. Sweat is streaming down the side of my face. I look exactly like what I am: a desperate man, on the verge of middle age, with only the money in his pocket to spare. I have dark rings under my eyes, a nose and forehead damp with sweat. My shirt collar has an old coffee stain on it, and the sides of my pant pockets have a streak of dirt running down the side. I take a second to tuck in my shirt, pat down the edges of my hair, and wipe the sweat off my brow with the edges of my sleeve. I pray that I don’t run into anyone I know.

There are twenty-eight floors to the building, and of those twenty-eight floors, at least twenty-six are occupied exclusively by other Ethiopians who, like my uncle, moved here sometime after the revolution and found to their surprise that they would never leave. Within this building there is an entire world made up of old lives and relationships transported perfectly intact from Ethiopia. To call the building insular is to miss the point entirely. Living here is as close to living back home as one can get, which is precisely why I moved out after two years and precisely why my uncle has never left. Hardly a word of English is spoken inside of these doors. The hallways on every floor smell of wat , coffee, and incense. The older women still travel from apartment to apartment dressed in slippers and white blankets that they keep wrapped around their heads, just as if they were still walking through the crowded streets of Addis. The children keep only the friendships sanctioned by their parents. There are a few families who occupy entire floors. They run them like minor villages with children, grandchildren, grandparents, and in-laws all living within shouting distance of one another. There is a beauty and a terror to those floors. Only once did I ever step onto one of them and see it firsthand. When I got off the elevator, I was met by a row of open apartment doors, each one guarded by a young woman who stepped into the doorway and stared at me with more apprehension and fear than I’ve ever been greeted by. I turned back to the elevator immediately, feeling as if I had intruded onto something sacred, something that I had no right to witness or speak of again.

My uncle stands out from the rest of the building. That he is only one man, with no wife, mother, or children, gives him an independence and peculiarity that no one here is comfortable with. He is respected because of the money and power he once had in Ethiopia, because his name was once associated with the cabinet members and princes of the old empire. He is also mocked now by some for exactly the same reason. Berhane Selassie. It’s a beautiful name. Translated into English, it means Light of the Holy Trinity. He no longer has his money or his prestige, but he has his reserve, and his corner apartment on the twenty-fourth floor. For Silver Rock, it’s a beautiful apartment. I believe he took as much time preparing its rooms as he did studying the design for the house he built for himself. It no more fits in with the dilapidated exterior — the dimly lit hallways, crumbling paint, and broken elevators — than he does.

Only one of the elevators is working today. A line builds up in front of it, forcing a round of general greetings with people whose faces, much less names, I can hardly recall. I know that there’s a curiosity surrounding me. There’s an upturned glance behind every salaam and tadias that I exchange. I’m being measured for everything. For my clothes, hair, shoes, for my readiness to offer a proper greeting and good-bye. Sometimes I think of my decision to leave this building as an escape, while at other times it seems more like an abandonment. I try not to take the thought too seriously, but when every eye you catch seems to hold an accusation or question behind it, a decision has to be made. Either I left to create a new life of my own, one free from the restraints and limits of culture, or I turned my back on everything I was and that had made me. Each familiar face waiting for the elevator seems to want to ask the same questions: What have you done with yourself, where have you gone, and who do you think you are? I know there would be a fair amount of pleasure behind the pity that would greet me if my life were ever laid bare before this crowd.

I’m pressed into the back of the elevator with at least fifteen other people. There’s a joke waiting to be had here. How many Ethiopians can you fit into an elevator? All of them. What do you call an elevator full of Ethiopians? An oxymoron. Once the elevator begins to move, the gossip begins. It’s disguised as innocent conversation between two women. Speaking much louder than necessary, one woman claims to have seen Dr. Negatu’s daughter getting out of a cab by herself at sunrise. To make matters worse, she was sitting in the front seat. The news is followed by the customary tsking of sound judgment being passed. It’s soon followed up with the other news of the day. Those who don’t join in on the conversation simply stand quietly like myself, complicit and greedy. In one protracted elevator ride there are rumors of infidelity, abuse, drugs, unemployment. It all amounts to one thing: proof of a vanishing culture. Time, distance, and nostalgia have convinced these women that back in Ethiopia, we were all moral and perfect, all of which is easier to believe when you consider the lives that most of us live now. With our menial jobs and cramped apartments, it’s impossible not to want to look back sometimes and pretend there was once a better world, one where husbands were faithful, children were obedient, and life was easy and wonderful.

With enough time, one woman says in Amharic, there won’t be any Ethiopians. They’ll all become American.

I can’t help but smile whenever I hear that line. By even the most liberal standards, I would easily stand convicted of the same crime. I can count the number of Ethiopian friends still in my life with two fingers. I go out of my way to avoid the restaurants and bars frequented by other Ethiopians of my generation. My phone calls home are infrequent. I eat injera only on social occasions. I consider the old emperor to have been a tyrant, not a god. When I try to pray, it’s only to ask God to forgive me for not believing in Him in the first place. And of course there had been Judith and Naomi, who alone could have set every gossiping tongue on fire for months.

I still have keys to Berhane’s apartment, but I’m reluctant to use them right away. It’s been too long since I’ve lived here, and I can’t help but feel like a stranger every time I enter this apartment. I knock nearly a dozen times before accepting the fact that he’s not home. Only then do I let myself in.

My uncle’s apartment hasn’t changed in the slightest detail since I moved out. I’m grateful to him for this small measure of consistency. He’s kept all of the furniture exactly the same, even though he’s been talking of buying a new couch or dining-room table for years. He’s attached to the old ones. He can’t help but be. I’m not sure what else in the world he has to believe in if not the couch and table that have stayed with him for the past nineteen years. That’s the same couch I slept on, the same one I made every night and unmade every morning before dressing up to begin my day as a student or bellhop. At night, I slept on that couch and relived old fantasies and memories. I thought of my father. I remembered the way he cried at funerals, baptisms, and weddings, how any form of joy or pain seemed to always be too much for him to bear. I remembered him, a tall, slight, discerning man, in his suits and ties and in the long-gaited walk that I struggled to keep pace with. I saw the corpses that lay rotting on unpaved dusty roads with the words “traitor” or “Communist” written in blood on the chest, and the furious mobs that roamed the streets at night. I saw my father’s face just before three soldiers in tattered uniforms escorted him out of our house. I never saw what death did to his face, whether or not it aged it, or perhaps even restored it to some long-vanished peaceful state. I did imagine it involuntarily while lying awake and staring across the living room to the glass doors that lead out to the balcony I sometimes imagined leaping off. In my mind, his face was untouched, free from any bruises or scars the soldiers might have left, his eyes, nose, and mouth impossibly perfect. I gave him a wonderful funeral, complete with all of the rites the dead deserve: a body, casket, and flowers, along with a priest and a cast of mourners who followed him all the way to his family’s burial ground just outside of Addis. All of that happened on that couch.