Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

I knew what he meant immediately: enough. And he was right, it had been enough. No one but he would have said it so gently, or granted me so much license.

I nodded my head in agreement. I was ashamed of myself and would have done anything he asked me to.

“Come with me to work tomorrow and I’ll try to find you a job,” he said.

That was how my life in America started. It seems a shame we don’t know these things at the time. My first day of work at the Capitol Hotel, I was escorted by my uncle to the manager’s office. My uncle introduced me as his nephew, Sepha Stephanos, although he told the manager he could call me Sepha, or even Steven for short, if he found that more convenient. The two men discussed my background while I stood there, mute. The manager, a solid, squat bald man whom I had been told to refer to only as “sir,” didn’t believe that I could speak English. He pointed to my skinny arms and asked my uncle if I had any problems lifting heavy objects, if I had any objections to working late-night shifts, if I could be trusted, in general, not to steal from the hotel or its clients. “No, sir,” my uncle replied for me, “he has no problems. Perfectly honest. He has no objections to anything.” The manager decided that I should begin that day so that he “could see what I was made of.” He squeezed my right bicep once for good measure, and then held out his hand for me to shake. I remember wishing I had the courage and strength to crush every bone in his hand. After we walked out of the office, I heard my uncle mumble under his breath just loud enough so only I could hear, “Fucking bastard.” Yes, it was a show of pride, halfhearted, but necessary nonetheless. It was one thing for him to “sir” his way through the day on his own, and an entirely different matter to have me there as a witness to it.

We rode the train back to Maryland together. We spoke as little as possible until we reached the apartment. When we reached home, I wanted to ask him if this was worth it: this one-bedroom apartment in a dilapidated building on the edges of a city. Our rent was only several hundred dollars a month, but look at what it took to earn that money. My uncle turned himself off every morning the moment he left the apartment for work. He didn’t turn himself back on until ten or twelve hours later when he returned home. “Nothing” was the right word for the way he lived, and so was the vacancy with which he had said it.

I worked at the job my uncle found for me, and later on I attended the school he had picked. I hardly remember making any decisions of my own, until one night, three years later, when I realized I couldn’t continue living like this any longer. The choice became clear to me as I walked alone along the banks of the Potomac after working two shifts at the hotel. My arms and legs were numb from thirteen hours of lifting luggage and bending at every moment to someone else’s needs. It was too late at night to be walking alone along the empty riverbank, but there was nothing at that point that I cared for or worried about losing. Life could come or go and it wouldn’t have made a difference. I walked miles that night, under the willow trees that had just begun to bloom. Lincoln’s and Jefferson’s memorials stood to my right, casting a distant pale glow over the river. I followed the Potomac to the Memorial Bridge and stood in the center, D.C. to one side, Virginia to the other. I leaned my body over the edge and stared down into the water wondering what, if anything, I had to live for. I couldn’t believe that my father had died and I had been spared in order to carry luggage in and out of a room. There was nothing special to death anymore. I had seen enough lifeless bodies by that point to know that. I thought long and hard about what it would be like to simply step off the edge. I didn’t know how to swim, nor would I have tried.

The next day I quit my job at the Capitol Hotel. I left my uncle’s apartment less than a year later. They were the first real decisions I had made on my own since coming to this country. I loved them. Their impracticality made me love them even more. When I first told Joseph and Kenneth that I was leaving the hotel, they looked at me dumbstruck for a few minutes until Joseph finally leaned over and smacked my hand high in the air.

“You see, Stephanos? I always knew you had more in you. Soon we will all leave this place and the next time we come back, they will be carrying our luggage up the stairs.”

Finding an apartment in Logan Circle was easy enough at the time. There was a “For Rent” sign in just about every building I passed. As for the store, that had been Kenneth’s idea. “Be your own boss, man. That’s the only way to get anywhere in this country.” And so with Kenneth’s help I got a small-business loan from the government. I opened my store in a space that had once been a liquor store. As far as I know, it was the first liquor store in the neighborhood to have gone out of business. Kenneth taught me how to keep track of my accounts, make lists, order supplies and goods, and balance my budget. I used to think he would have made an exceptional father, patient as he always was with me, and who knows, perhaps someday he will. In the meantime those fatherly instincts of his have led him into countless hours of tedious arithmetic, most of which I failed to learn properly. Joseph, for his part, came up with the name: Logan’s Market. I’ve never heard anyone but him refer to it as such. For the store opening, he insisted on designing leaflets to pass around the neighborhood.

Logan’s Market. A New Community Store to serve all of your needs. Carrying freshly stocked produce, canned goods, and general household needs at GREAT PRICES!

In his usual fashion, he toiled over those two sentences for an entire afternoon in my apartment.

“What do you think about this, Stephanos? Logan’s Market, a leader in top-quality produce. Or better yet, Logan’s Market, serving you and your family with only the freshest ingredients for the best prices.”

His ideas only grew larger as he spoke.

“Logan’s Market, an internationally recognized leader in top-quality products.”

When I pointed out to him that his last suggestion might be taking it a bit too far, he responded with one of his twists of logic.

“Where are you from?” he asked me.

“Ethiopia.”

“And what about me? Where am I from?”

“Zaire, Congo. Take your pick.”

“Well, then. That settles it. If you ask me who has the best products, I will tell you Logan’s Market. I am international, and so are you. That means the store is internationally recognized. It’s all about marketing,” he said. “You have to learn to think now like a businessman.”

I let him scribble away in my apartment until he settled on something that matched the eloquence he knew he was capable of. By the time the store opened, Joseph and Kenneth had put as much energy and thought into it as I had. Kenneth was waiting for me in front of the store with a bottle of champagne the morning I opened.

“Don’t you have work?” I asked him.

“I took the day off,” he said. “I wanted to be here for this.”

We drank the bottle later that evening once Joseph got off work.

“This is the beginning,” Joseph said. “Today, right here with Stephanos’s store. We begin new lives. No more of this bullshit. Right?”

We were all guilty of hyperinflated optimism and irrational hope at that point. But how could we not have been? You should have seen us then. Joseph was right, you wouldn’t have believed your eyes. We were young, and we were skinny, and in our eyes beautiful. Joseph and Kenneth were both still working at the Capitol Hotel as waiters in the hotel’s main restaurant, and the opening of my store—“our store,” as we referred to it that night — was supposed to signal a departure from frustrating, underpaying jobs and unrealized ambitions. As that first night in the store wore on, our conversation grew increasingly grand, our ambitions and desires for the world limited only by imagination.