Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

“No. You can have any one of them.”

She considered each box thoughtfully, without touching any. She pointed toward the bottle of perfume.

“Can I have that one?”

“Of course,” I told her.

“What is it?”

“Perfume.”

“I don’t wear perfume,” she said. “Gives me a headache.”

“That’s okay,” I told her. “Just give it to someone you know.”

Idecide to take the bus from my uncle’s apartment to see Joseph at his restaurant. There are buses constantly coming and going from in front of the complex, each one as crowded as the one behind it. Today it’s standing room only on all the buses. The crowd is my consolation for not walking. The bus I’m on is the M28, while behind us is the M34 and in front of us is the M19. I may marvel at the trains, but it’s the buses that have my heart. The trains speak to that part of me that craves to know that there is an unseen hand into which I can place if not my life, then at least my ability to move from one location to the next in the dark; the buses are a test of my faith in man. They go into the neighborhoods the trains don’t dare to touch, sneaking down narrow side streets, squeezing in between cars and buildings. I was never allowed to ride the buses in Addis until I became old enough to do so without my parents’ knowledge, but the city and country fell apart shortly after that, and so all I have are a handful of memorable rides taken alone through the city’s haphazardly carved streets, past the tin-roof shantytowns that adorned everything but the richest neighborhoods. My mother, brother, and I were always carted from home to school to whatever event my father might have planned for the evening in a simple black sedan driven by either my father or, when he was away at work, the guard who always stood in front of our house while we were there. Inside our quiet car was a family, properly restrained, with music playing softly from the front. Occasionally my father whistled along to one of the sad Ethiopian pop songs that I still listen to. His tune filled the car to the exclusion of any other sound that might have tried to interfere, while outside on the bus a small, chaotic world orbited around the city. Compared to the crowded city buses that rolled through downtown Addis, my empty backseat seemed like such a hollow and lonely existence. Each window had a half-dozen faces pressed against it. Old women with their heads wrapped in a thin white cloth and children with their dirty rags and mud-stained faces stared at me through the windows, while standing above them were the faceless shirts and pants of men who eyed one another suspiciously and kept their money tucked into their hands. They hardly had space enough to breathe, much less move, and that was what I envied most. While I sat comfortably alone in the backseat of my father’s car, there was an entire city moving together, block by city block, with every curve and bump the bus took through the pothole-riddled streets of the capital, like marionettes attached to the same piece of string being orchestrated by the bus driver’s hands. I imagined the crowd exiting the bus through the windows and doors like water spilling out of a jar full of holes, and I imagined them entering much in the same way, except in reverse. I wanted to be with them. I would have given anything to have disappeared into one of those buses, swallowed whole by the crowd, my face and limbs so thoroughly merged into theirs that the words “I” and “alone” could never be uttered again.

When the revolution came the buses emptied out. During those first few months I would sometimes see one trolling down the street, empty with the exception of the driver and a few soldiers who stood near the windows, their guns pointing out. Later, the buses were used to carry hundreds of boys to one of the new prisons built on the outskirts of the city. I remember thinking that I couldn’t understand how a city that had demanded so much intimacy could turn on itself. It was the thought of a childish, privileged young man, but that didn’t make the disappointment hurt any less.

When I lived in Silver Rock with my uncle, I often spent my free Friday and Saturday nights hopping from one crowded bus to the next. I rode the buses until the crowds began to thin out, and then I would get off and take another crowded bus back in the same direction. Eventually I came to know which buses were the busiest at which times of day, which buses could be counted on to always arrive on time or full to the brim, and which ones always left me wanting more. It was enough to feel that for twenty or thirty minutes I had locked myself into the same fate with dozens of people who, like myself, could barely move their hands out of their pocket or shift their weight from one foot to the other without pressing against someone else. To me, the buses were the benchmarks of civilization, although at the time I would haven’t known to describe them as such. Instead, I would have said that I felt safer on those buses than I did anywhere else in this city.

I have at least another hour before Joseph gets off work. Joseph was proud of this job when he first started, although he could never have admitted it. Yes, he was still a waiter, but instead of working at a decent restaurant in a nice hotel, he was working at the “premier eating establishment of the District’s elite.” Those were his words: “This restaurant is the premier eating establishment of the District’s elite.” And it is. The Colonial Grill is where senators and lawyers and lobbyists go to dine for lunch and dinner. The restaurant is wrapped in glass and looks onto one of the busiest intersections of the city, so that at any given moment during the workday it’s possible to spy on the city’s “elite” conducting their affairs and those of the country over three-course lunches served on white tablecloths under crystal chandeliers and plastered ceilings. Joseph was forced to learn the names and faces of every regular politician who ate at the restaurant. He knows all one hundred senators and close to half of the House by sight alone. His first year at the restaurant, he reported to Kenneth and me at the end of each week whom he had served and seen. He always added a slight conspiratorial note to each narrative, convinced, as he was, that everything of any import happened with secret whispers and handshakes.

“You know who came in on Tuesday? The president’s chief of staff. And you know who he was eating with? That senator from Mississippi that no one likes. They were the only two at the table. I watched them. Neither one of them laughed or smiled the whole time. That can’t be good for things.”

His interest in the city’s politics lasted only as long as it took him to know the faces behind it. Once he accomplished that, there was no more mystery or surprise. Politicians came and went. They ate their lunches. They tipped generously. They demanded to be treated like royalty, and that was it. Perhaps Joseph had believed that his physical proximity to power meant great things were in store for him. That was what the Colonial Grill was supposed to have meant — a step up in the world, a sign of progress, advancement, promotion. When he first came to D.C., he had worked as a busboy, and then as a bellhop, and now as a waiter. We all have measures by which we gauge the progress of our lives. Joseph has been generous with his. It’s been nineteen years since he came to America, and he has tried to see each and every one of those years in the best possible light. Michigan and the PhD are now the idle dreams of a restless young immigrant.

“You don’t need a PhD anymore,” he said to me once. “Anything you want to learn in this world, you can learn in this city for free.” We were walking back from the Library of Congress, where we had spent most of an afternoon looking for the poems of an obscure Congolese poet Joseph remembered reading as a teenager. In his rare and sober off hours from work, he was working on his own cycle of poems, ones that would trace the history of the Congo from King Leopold to the death of Patrice Lumumba and the rise of Mobutu Sese Seko.