Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

My uncle is a quick learner. Soon, he shed his innocence. He learned to write sentences that were sparer and more detailed. He clipped articles out of the New York Times and Washington Post and included them with his letters.

Dear President Carter,

You may have read yesterday’s

New York Times

article on the current crisis in Ethiopia. The newspaper says that there are widespread reports of arrests and disappearances throughout the country. I want to tell you personally that these disappearances are in fact executions. This month alone I have learned of the death of at least ten friends of mine. There are many more, I am sure, that I have yet to learn about. Those that died were all taken from their homes, in front of their wives and children. My brother-in-law, Shibrew Stephanos, was one of those men. He was beaten in front of his wife and two sons by government troops and then carried out of the house. The soldiers who arrested him said he was an anti-revolutionary because they had found some flyers in his office. Shibrew Stephanos was a good man and an excellent father. I implore you not to let his death, and the death of so many others like him, pass in vain.

He was wrong on two counts in that letter. My father was not carried out of the house. He walked out on his own. He was insistent on that point. It was the one thing he begged the troops for. They had beaten him nearly unconscious in our living room. Blood from his nose and eyes dotted the yellow walls and streaked the chair he used to sit on when he came home from work. Still, he begged them: “I will walk out on my own two feet. That is it. That is all I want from you.” The second thing: the flyers they found did not belong to my father; they were mine. They were not found in his office, but in his bedroom, where he had taken them the night before, after he had found them in my room. That was partially why the soldiers beat him so thoroughly. He had refused to tell them where the flyers had come from. Eventually he said they were his. Of course they didn’t believe him, but that was never really the point anyway. The flyers were inconsequential. All they had was an acronym, SFD (Students for Democracy), and a time. There wasn’t even a location on the flyer. When my father said the flyers belonged to him, my mother made a desperate attempt to throw her body over his, but the soldiers were well practiced in handling situations like this. I remember the studied, almost bored air in which they conducted the whole affair. They saw her coming long before she even took her first step. One of them simply raised the butt of his gun and leveled it directly at her chest. He didn’t even have to turn around to see her coming. When she fell, it was as if someone had lifted her legs from under her, and then pushed her backward while she was in midair. She seemed to float across the living room, light as air, and just as inconsequential. And me? Where was I during all of this? Standing in a corner holding my seven-year-old brother’s head against my body. As soon as the soldiers entered the house, my father had made a point of telling them that they lived there alone with their two sons, ages seven and twelve. I was small for my age back then. Small and skinny, without even a trace of facial hair, and a voice that still broke, especially when I was frightened. I had volunteered to pass out flyers to people I could trust. I was only sixteen at the time. I didn’t believe in consequences yet.

The bedroom is a wreck now. I’ve forgotten the importance of maintaining order. The letters are scattered around me in a semicircle that begins chronologically and dissolves into carelessness. Hasn’t this always been my problem? My uncle would say yes. He would say that I lack the ability to maintain structure and order. Begin from the beginning, he would say. Begin there, and then you can move on with your life point by point. That’s why he has boxes full of letters, neatly arranged and tucked away, while I don’t have so much as a picture of my own that dates back more than ten years. I never could find the guiding principle that relegated the past to its proper place. I can step in at any moment and see the house exactly as it looked that day, with the midafternoon sun spilling in through the front windows. My father has already seen and heard the soldiers coming and is waiting for them in the doorway. “Stay right here in the living room, together,” he says. “Don’t make them go looking for you. I’m sure everything will be fine.” The guard who used to sit at the front gate of the house has already quit (as have all the other servants, and so maybe I should start there, with the day they emptied out their quarters and begged my mother and father to forgive them for having to leave). The truck carrying the soldiers simply rolls past the open gate and pulls up in front of the house. My father tries to greet them courteously. Unfortunately for him, he’s wearing a suit that morning. He hasn’t gone near his office in two weeks, but today he’s decided to go and see what’s become of it. Of course he knows already that all the windows have been smashed in, and that his files, or what remains of them, are littering the floor. (Or is this where the story begins, with my father’s work as a lawyer?) Only three soldiers get out of the truck. There are at least four more waiting in the back. The lead soldier has a mustache, just like my father’s. Neat, well trimmed, it arcs around his fat upper lip and stops just an inch above his pointy, hairless chin. He pushes my father into the living room with one hand. It’s an important gesture, and in its own way could signal the start of an entirely different approach to this story. He already considers my father weak, vulnerable. The two soldiers behind him are carrying their rifles over their chest. They both have faint traces of facial hair, but they’re still too young to grow a complete mustache. They can’t be more than a year or two older than I was. My father tries to mention the names of high-ranking army officials he’s known his entire life: Colonel Getachew Woldermarian, Captain Sisay. (That would be the wrong story, my father’s early disillusioned days in the military. He was too slight and soft-spoken a man to have ever made a proper soldier.) The lead soldier sneers at the names (my father doesn’t know yet that these men are all already dead or in jail). Then he spits onto my mother’s carpet. That’s the breaking moment. Regardless of how I get here, everything unfolds straight from that point, with no room for deviation or digression. As soon as he spits, one of the soldiers steps to the front and, with the butt of his rifle, knocks my father across the head. Is it possible that they practiced this routine before coming over? Or is it something that’s grown organically out of their previous experiences? Spit and then hit. The two soldiers take turns kicking my father in the head and ribs. When my mother begins to cry out, the lead soldier draws his pistol and orders her to stop. She does so immediately. She’s a strong woman, and nothing I ever say or do could describe or match that strength. He returns his gun to his holster and goes searching through the bedrooms. He’s learned this from experience. Bedrooms are where people hide the things they want no one else to know of. We can hear him opening drawers. Glass shatters uselessly, unnecessarily, from somewhere in the house. It doesn’t take him long to find what he’s looking for, if in fact he’s come looking for anything. (I know now that they would have taken him regardless, but things weren’t so clear then.) When he returns with the flyers, my mother, who is now standing next to me in the corner, whispers one word to me: “Zimbe.” Shut up. Close your mouth. Don’t speak. It all comes to the same thing. The lead soldier taunts my father, who is now sitting up against the wall, with the flyers. He knows that they cannot have anything to do with a man my father’s age, but he berates and hits him nonetheless. Where is this meeting and Who gave you this and Who are these people and What is your role with this organization and Who do you think you are and Who else is helping you and What are their names and What do you hope to accomplish with your meetings and Don’t you know that this is a time of revolution and that there can be no room for dissension? My father’s left eye has already swollen shut. He is struggling to keep his head from falling. He barely responds to the smacks that follow each ridiculous question. He begins to declare over and over that the flyers are his. The first tears are beginning to fall down his face. I found them and brought them home to throw away, he says, his voice cracking as he struggles for breath. Of course his pleas lead to more kicking, but at this point, my father has resigned himself to everything except claiming ownership of those flyers. He doesn’t speak again until one of the soldiers bends down and reaches for his legs. It’s only then that he begins to demand that they take their hands off him, as if somehow he had sanctioned everything they have done to him thus far. He lifts himself off the ground by bracing his back against the wall and climbing up with his entire body, inch by inch. His effort to stand on his own invites the mockery of the two young soldiers. They applaud sarcastically. They encourage him to go on. I pray to God, with as much conviction and faith that I have, for their deaths. I beg Him silently to kill them right then and there. I implore Him. I demand it of Him. If He cannot give me their deaths alone, though, then I ask Him to take all of us together. I pray for the roof of the house to cave in, for the ground to open up and swallow us whole, anything to end this moment.