Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Within a week of Judith’s arrival an army of men descended on the house in squadlike formations. There were the plumbers, the electricians, the heating guys, the painters, the roofers, and the architect, who always came dressed in a well-tailored suit and stood leaning against the side of his silver Mercedes with a yellow hard hat on. Almost all of the men who worked on the house came into my store during their lunch breaks to buy a few dollars’ worth of junk food. They were as reliable as the Jehovah’s Witnesses who still made their weekly rounds across the neighborhood. And while I knew the workers would come and go, I took their presence at the time as a sign that things were improving, that the neighborhood was getting better and life was on the verge of changing. It was partly because of them and what they did to the house and others in the neighborhood that I added the deli counter to my store in January, hoping that perhaps I, too, could profit from the houses that gleamed with their newly restored glory.

It was from the construction workers that I first found out some of the details of Judith’s life — details that could, of course, come only from people who know your home so intimately they inevitably believe they’ve come to know something of you as well. Through them I learned that the woman was a lesbian bitch with too much money on her hands. She was fucking the architect on the side (you could tell by the way they always went off to some room when she came by), which explained why he was such a bastard himself and why he probably got the job. She wanted a bathroom on every floor of the house, which made no goddamn sense because why the fuck would she need four bathrooms when only two people would be living there? Her library was an entire floor and she wanted the whole thing with built-in bookcases and sliding doors to cover them. What kind of fucking person needed doors to cover their books? And her bedroom? It was half of the third floor. A whole fucking family could live in a room that size. There was no husband, boyfriend, or girlfriend, but she was a lesbian, you could bet on that. All you had to do was look at that short hair and nearly flat chest to see it.

It wasn’t until the end of that September that I finally met the woman I had described to Joseph and Kenneth as tall and white. Until then I had seen her only once, in passing, out my bedroom window as she stood on the steps of the house and stared up at the roof. At first I had assumed that she was an agent of some city bureaucracy, assigned to the neighborhood to report on the condition of its aging buildings, to determine whether they were in need of repair or demolishment. Before Judith, these were the only reasons white people had ever come into the neighborhood: to deliver official notices, investigate crimes, and check up on the children of negligent parents. It wasn’t until she began to rub her hand along the banister and chip away at the crumbling black paint that I realized her interest in the house was purely personal. She foraged through her purse, pulled out a set of keys, and nudged the door open with her shoulder: irrefutable signs of ownership.

Judith was sitting on the bottom steps of the house on an early fall afternoon with a little girl leaning back in between her legs when I came out of my house. I was dressed for a wedding, and as I turned to lock the door behind me, I heard her say, “What a beautiful garment.” Her use of the word “garment” struck me most — it was polite, almost formal, as if the word had been inserted into her sentence at the last possible moment out of an instinctive sense of cultural diplomacy. I was dressed entirely in white. I had on white pants, with a white shirt that had a crucifix embroidered down the middle, over which I wore a finely woven shroud of white cotton. It was an outfit that meant nothing here, stripped as it was of all context. On the rare occasions that I still wore it, I did so expecting the taunts and stares of my neighbors and their children.

“Thank you,” I said.

“What’s it made of?”

“Cotton.”

“Special occasion?”

“A wedding.”

“Not your own, is it?”

“No. A cousin’s.”

She introduced herself by pointing to the house behind her and telling me she had just moved in. Her name, Judith — Judy — was the English counterpart to my cousin’s name — Yodit. When I pointed that out she shook her head, bit down on her lower lip, and said, “No, no. That’s much prettier than Judith. Much prettier.” She was tall and narrow, with skinny arms and short brown hair cut just above her shoulders. She had a slightly crooked mouth and full lips that marked her face in a peculiar way. They made her mouth seem too large for her face, and her face too small for her head, so that there was something almost doll-like about her.

“You’re right,” I said. “It is.”

We both pretended to laugh, after which she introduced me to her daughter, Naomi, a small, pretty girl with a skin tone closer to mine than her mother’s.

“She’s beautiful,” I told her.

“Yes. You’re right. She is,” she said. She rubbed her hands over her daughter’s head and then whispered something into her ear. The girl leaned her head back, looked up at her mother, and smiled. I could see the resemblance then. It was in the narrow angle of their faces, both of which sloped down into a smooth, pointed chin. When the girl turned back around and faced me I felt a hint of embarrassment and shame come over me. I knew I was being judged by this child as she refused to avert her gaze from mine.

The cab I had called to take me to the wedding pulled up then. It was an expense that I couldn’t afford, but one that had nonetheless been demanded of me by the occasion. Judith and I said good-bye, it was nice to meet you, and then I was off to my cousin’s wedding — a woman ten years younger than me, and of no real relationship to me beyond an affinity that our fathers had shared for each other in Ethiopia. After the wedding the photographs were taken at the National Botanical Gardens, most inside the greenhouse, in the shadow of yellow, purple, and red flora so large as to seem comical. There my cousin and her new husband met another newlywed Ethiopian couple also posing for pictures. They took three together, the two brides and two grooms standing on opposite sides of a blooming purple bush. And later that evening, during the reception, we heard that the same groom who had been standing on the opposite side of that bush only two hours earlier had died in the middle of his own reception.

Everyone grew somber when they heard the news whispered at their table. If there was one thing we all knew how to do, it was pay our respects to the dead. We all shook our heads, mumbled parts of the same prayers we had used for our fathers and friends, and then moved on, grateful in the way only other people’s tragedies can make you.

Once construction on Judith’s house had progressed far enough for her to move in near the end of October, I began to see her around the neighborhood more often. I often saw her reading on one of the benches across from General Logan on a late fall afternoon, undisturbed by the drunk men sleeping or stumbling around her. A whirlwind of fallen leaves and trash would occasionally rise around the base of Logan’s statue and flit about in the air as if deliberately calling attention to itself. Judith, however, looked as indifferent to her surroundings as General Logan did on his horse, her legs properly crossed, one shoe dangling just slightly from her foot as she turned her head with the flip of each page. I admired her from a distance; the way she sat, confident and oblivious to the world, her hair sometimes caught in a gust of wind to reveal the long, elegant lines of her neck. She would sweep her hair back with one clean gesture that suggested unbroken concentration on whatever was in front of her.