Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

“At least thirty,” I said.

“I wonder what we’re going to talk about when we run out.”

“We’re never going to run out,” Joseph said. “Having a coup is addictive. Look at what happened after Idi. Yusufu Lule, Godfrey Binaisa, the return of Obote, and then Tito Okello. One after another. Why would anyone want to stop? I wish I had been there to see Mobutu go. I would have been one of those people you saw dancing in the street. I would have carried Kabila on my shoulders straight to the president’s palace if I were there.”

Joseph finished his speech by leaning over the bar and snapping his fingers for another drink. As he leaned too far over the counter to catch the attention of the bartender, Kenneth abruptly stood up.

“Where are you going?” I asked him. “You just got here.”

“Sorry, Stephanos. I’m tired of these conversations. I’m going to go home and sleep. I have to be back at work tomorrow.”

“Let him go, Stephanos,” Joseph said. “The Big Man is tired of our African talk. He wants to go home and dream of his new suit.”

“What was your father, Stephanos?” Kenneth asked me.

“A lawyer.”

“That’s right. A lawyer. And you, Joseph?”

“You know what he was.”

“A businessman.”

“Yes. A businessman.”

“And what was mine?”

Kenneth looked over at Joseph, and then me, knowing that neither one of us knew how to answer his question.

“Come, Joseph. I’ve told you this before.”

“He was illiterate,” Joseph responded.

“What else?”

“That’s it.”

“Exactly. That’s it. That’s all he ever was. A poor illiterate man who lived in a slum. And you know what that makes him in Africa? Nothing. That’s what Africa is right now. A continent full of poor illiterates dying in slums. What am I supposed to miss? Being sent into the street to beg white tourists for money? If I die today, my sister in Nairobi will get one hundred thousand dollars. Someone would have to come and move the furniture out of my apartment. My suits will be shipped back to Kenya for my cousins. You, Joseph, would get my car. The only thing my father owned when he died was a picture of Jomo Kenyatta. His great leader. From the day I was born, there have been only two leaders of Kenya. The first was terrible, and now the second is even worse. That’s why I’m here in this country. No revolution. No coup.”

Kenneth slipped into his gray wool overcoat. He took a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet and left it on the bar to pay for the one drink that he had ordered but never finished. Joseph and I said nothing to stop him as he walked out of the bar.

For the rest of December I watched Judith’s house for signs of life. I expected her and Naomi to return from Connecticut at any moment, and so every day I eagerly awaited their arrival. In the morning, on my way to the store, and again at the end of the night, and on occasion during the day, I stared into the house, hoping to see the flutter of a curtain or a passing shadow in the window. Without her and Naomi, the nights were suddenly hard. I found that it was difficult to sleep. I paced around my apartment and stayed up late listening to the BBC’s reports on Eastern Europe and the Middle East. I decided it was going to be a bloody, terrible winter. Back at the store I finished reading The Brothers Karamazov by myself. I came back to the final pages with Alyosha and the young boys gathered around him, the death of the innocent Illusha adding a certain touching sentimentality to the scene, which continued to bring a few tears to the corners of my eyes regardless of how often I read it. I read out loud to the shelves and empty aisles my favorite passage:

People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.

I memorized the passage by reciting it on my way to work. I highlighted it in the book for Naomi, knowing even then that it would never make its way back to a shelf. Remember this , I wrote in the margins.

I filled in my afternoons by making a list of aphorisms, some new, some borrowed, that I wanted to tell her.

Never trust anyone who says “Trust me.”

Try to find high places to look down from.

I wanted to give her a catalogue description of the world, a list of rules by which she could live her life and spare herself the same disappointments that I had already suffered.

On New Year’s Eve I sat on a bench in the circle and toasted General Logan with the same stale bottle of scotch Judith and I had shared. I got drunk and then walked home alone. Two days later, I went to pay my rent and found that I barely had enough money to get through the month. Business had steadily slowed down since the neighborhood first began to change, but the last four months had been the quietest since I first opened the store. A month before Judith moved into the neighborhood a single six-story brick housing project that sat on the edge of Logan Circle had been declared uninhabitable and was torn down. At least half the people who lived in it had been regulars at my store, and when the building went, they and their small daily purchases went with it. More dramatic departures had been happening all around me as well, but I had tried hard at first not to give them too much weight. Moving vans were showing up around the neighborhood again, but these were leaving, not coming. They were short and shabby, stacked from the ground to the roof with half-packed boxes of clothes and dishes, mattresses tied in pairs to the roofs. Rents had been on the rise for over a year, but it was only now, in the past six months, that you began to see the effects. Evictions had become common. I often overheard Mrs. Davis standing in front of our house complaining about them and the rent increases. A name or address would float by—

“You know the Harris family.”

— and instantly I would turn a deaf ear to the rest of what she had to say.

On the few occasions she had tried to grab my attention, I had simply stood there, mute, nodding my head as need be. She always said the same thing every time.

“It’s not right. These people coming in like that and forcing us out.”

I was in no position, though, to say what was right or wrong. I was not one of “these people,” as Mrs. Davis had just made clear to me. I hadn’t forced anyone out, but I had never really been a part of Logan Circle either, at least not in the way Mrs. Davis and most of my customers were. I had snuck into the neighborhood as well. I had used it for its cheap rent, and if others were now doing the same, then what right did I have to deny them? At first I had even believed that the steady stream of new, affluent faces moving into the neighborhood would eventually more than make up for the loss. With the exception, though, of a few things here and there — trash bags, laundry detergent, candy bars, and of course, bottled water — most of these people wanted nothing to do with my little run-down store.

The prostitutes, and the line of cars that came with them, had also thinned out as the neighborhood moved from decay to respectability. I had stopped staying open late; there was almost no one left to cater to. All of that, along with those days in December when I couldn’t find the energy or courage to face my store, had taken their toll on what little money I had. Life was precarious. I had always been willing to admit that. I lived on a fine line with poverty on one side and just enough extra money for an occasional beer on the other. In January I slipped off that line, and after that, it was all but impossible to get back on.