Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

The office towers fade quickly. They stop at a specific point, leaving the rest of the blocks ahead to the houses and stores that are neither completely run down nor well maintained, but somewhere perfectly in between, as if whoever lived in them had been asked by some higher power never to stray too far from their starting point.

I can’t help but think of what I’m doing as going home. “I’m going back home.” I say the words out loud as I turn left on Massachusetts Avenue, leaving the last of the city’s downtown towers to itself. The sidewalks and street are thick with traffic. There is a simple and startling power to that phrase: going back home. There’s an implied contradiction, a sense of moving forward and backward at the same time, but there’s no tension in the phrase. Instead, the contradiction gives in to something else: an understanding, perhaps, that what you’re returning to can never be the same as what you left. I understand now that distant, faraway look I’ve seen in other immigrants when they talk about returning to wherever it was they first came from. I can see my store exactly as I left it this morning. I can remember the exact location of my chair behind the counter, the amount of change in the cash register, the look of the aisles, and the way the light hit the windows. I can see all of that just as clearly as I can still see the look on my mother’s face as she handed me all of her jewelry in a red cloth sack and begged me to leave. There she is with deep bags under her eyes, her long black hair tied in a loose bun, the white blanket she’s wrapped herself in rising up and down with her deep breaths. It was less than twelve hours since my father had been taken away, and there we stood at the front of our house in the near perfect predawn blackness testing the merits of certain words over and over.

A trail of fire engines are stalled in the traffic on Massachusetts Avenue, their sirens wailing uselessly over and over as the cars in front of them search in vain for an inch of space in which to move. What will be waiting for me when I return? The cynic in me has already altered everything into an unrecognizable, chaotic mess. I picture my store burned to the ground, its contents looted. I imagine a crowd gathered around the charred remains of the building, shaking their heads silently in sympathy, in pity. Cans of Campbell’s soup are rolling down the sidewalk and street. The air smells of melted plastic, and no one can do anything because the trucks sent to save my store are here in front of me moving at roughly the same pace that I am.

It would be so much easier never to return, wouldn’t it? To just keep walking down this road until I hit the city’s edge. And from there I could hop on a bus or train and make my way farther south, or north, and start all over again. How long did it take for me to understand that I was never going to return to Ethiopia again? It seems as if there should have been a particular moment when the knowledge settled in. For at least the first two years that I was here, I was so busy passing my mother, brother, father, and friends in the aisles of grocery stores, in parks and restaurants, that at times it hardly felt as if I had really left. I searched for familiarity wherever I went. I found it in the buildings and in the layout of the streets. I saw glimpses of home whenever I came across three or four roads that intersected at odd angles, in the squat glass office buildings caught in the sun’s glare. I found a small measure of it in the circles and in the beggars who slept under the office towers at night. I used to let my imagination get the best of me. My hallucinations of home became standard. I welcomed them into my day completely. I talked to my mother from across the bus; I walked home with my father across the spare, treeless campus of my northern Virginia community college. We talked for hours. I told him about my classes, about Berhane and our little apartment together and my job carrying suitcases at the Capitol Hotel. I explained to him the parts of American culture that I had never heard of before. “There’s no respect here,” I told him. “The students in my class call our teacher John. They dress like they’re coming from bed and then sleep through class.”

I couldn’t have asked for a better listener than my father. We talked and saw more of each other during my first two years here than in all of the years we spent living under the same roof. It was so easy to slip him into my day. All it took was a passing thought of him in his impeccable white shirt and pinstriped suit, and there he was. Does any of this make sense to you, abaye ? I know you wouldn’t have had much patience for these conversations with the dead. That would have never been your style. You would have simply asked that I remember you fondly. But it’s nice having you here with me for just a little while as we near 13th Street. You would have loved this city on a day like today. You used to stretch open your hands and crane your neck back so you could feel the wind wrapping around you, a gesture that I can’t help but mime every time a warm breeze blows by. Perhaps you would have thought, as I always do, that the portrait of Frederick Douglass painted onto the back of that red building on the corner bears, from the right angle, a striking resemblance to one of the pictures of Haile Selassie that used to adorn the walls of the capitol. I was saying earlier that I couldn’t remember at which point I understood that I had left home for good. I can’t seem to remember, either, when we stopped having these conversations. The two are connected, aren’t they? I never understood that until right now: that everything went with you.

Christmas morning I went back to my store. I took down the “Closed” sign that I had put up the afternoon Naomi came to the store, and placed a chair in front of the register so I could read The Brothers Karamazov and stare absently out the window. I had decided to open up again out of a sense of obligation. Christmas, after all, was not a holiday that immigrant storekeepers were permitted to take. The world depended on us to work on Christmas day to provide last-minute supplies of groceries for dinner and batteries for new stereos and radio-controlled cars, not to mention the extra cases of beer and wine I always purchased just before the holiday season began. Christmas day was my favorite day of the year to work. Once I learned to forgive the faith, I began at least to appreciate the general effect the holiday had on people. There was a quietness to Christmas that I loved, an absence of sound that fell on Logan Circle with the force of a finger being pressed against a child’s lips. On warmer and sunnier Christmas days, I would spend most of the afternoon standing right in front of the store, leaning back against the wall, just staring vacantly into the emptiness. There were no cars. There were no people on the sidewalk or in the circle. It felt as if the world had been abandoned by the people who had been busy making it and destroying it, and now the only ones left were timid shopkeepers like myself. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth, if not for eternity, then at least for a few hours once a year. The customers who came to the store that day generally came in high spirits, filled to the brim with the Christmas mirth and alcohol that would keep them beaming for at least a few more hours. I met their high spirits with equally high spirits of my own, delighted, as I was, to have a day that could pass so pleasantly. I didn’t worry about how much the store made that day. If it made nothing at all, I couldn’t have cared less.

This was exactly the type of Christmas I loved the most. Sunny, slightly warmer than usual, with a few thin clouds to drift lazily over the sky for contrast. Perhaps it was the weather that brought out the steady stream of customers into my store over the course of that morning and afternoon. They came every ten to fifteen minutes for several hours. A few were from the neighborhood, but most were people passing through on their way to Christmas dinners with aunts, uncles, and in-laws they tried to avoid for most of the year. Aluminum foil was important that year. I must have sold as much of it in that one day as I had in the previous six months combined.