Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

She didn’t mean it as an attack, but it felt like one anyway.

“I could have said something.”

“And what do you think that would have done? If I had lived here as long as they had, I’d be angry too. What I couldn’t do was sign that petition. That would have been the definition of hypocrisy, don’t you think? I’m embarrassed to say what I paid for this house. Even after all the repairs. I can’t pretend that there’s anything just to it, but there’s nothing evil to it either.

“I saw the new sign in front of your store. It looks good.”

“You should come in and have a sandwich. They’re the best in the neighborhood. I make my own bread. Slaughter my own deli meat in the basement.”

“Sounds tempting.”

“Good. Come by tomorrow and see for yourself.”

I couldn’t hide the eagerness in that last line. I hadn’t even known it was there until there was enough space for it to appear.

“Maybe,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll see you around regardless.”

The next day a brick was planted in Judith’s car, her white Volkswagen Cabriolet with Virginia license plates and a troop of stuffed animals pressed against the rear window. The brick shattered most of the windshield and landed squarely on the driver’s seat. There were flecks of glass all over the interior of the car and sidewalk. They were the first things that caught my eye when I walked out of my house early in the morning to head to work. They sparkled the way I imagined crystals or diamonds would have in the sun.

The other cars — a bright red Monte Carlo sedan with white seats, and a baby-blue Chevy Impala — parked behind and in front of Judith’s were untouched. I walked closer to Judith’s car so I could peer inside. There was a stack of books still sitting on the passenger seat next to a haphazard pile of CD cases and a few envelopes bearing Judith’s name. Whoever threw the brick through the car had no intention of stealing it. All they had wanted was to shatter the windshield, and having done that, were happy to walk away.

I rang Judith’s doorbell to tell her what had happened. It was only a few minutes past seven in the morning. The sun had been up for less than a half hour. It was going to be a cloudy, cold day: the definition of a winter morning. The only people out were the new early-morning joggers, who seemed to increase in number by the week. I wondered, briefly, how I could get them into my store before or after their runs.

It wasn’t Judith who answered her door that morning. I rang the doorbell at least three times before a sleepy man wearing a long white terrycloth robe answered the door. I saw his figure and his color through the glass. I thought briefly of running away, and had I more time between my first impression of him and his opening of the door, I would have. He had a face like an eagle, a soft brown muddled skin tone that suggested multiple ancestries: part black, part Arab, with perhaps even a touch of the French colonist. This was the face of the celebrated economist who had cigar-tinged breath, lived all over the world, and sent home typewriters to his daughter. A handsome, even beautiful face defined by a long, thin nose and thick, wavy black hair that had streaks of gray so perfectly placed that they could have been artificial.

There was a defensive, guarded look to his face when he opened the door and found me standing on the porch. I knew that look all too well. It was the same one I employed whenever someone entered my store with the obvious intention of begging. Had it been later in the day, he would have tried to shoo me away with a quick flick of his wrist.

“Judith’s car,” I said, “has been broken into.” I said the words with an obviously forced elegance, a touch of Kenneth’s fake English accent lurking behind my words, as if what I had really wanted to say from the moment I opened my mouth was, “The tea is ready.”

Before the man could respond, Judith’s voice appeared from somewhere in the house. It called out: “What is it? Who’s down there?”

I had never thought of her voice as being shrill, but at that moment it seemed to be the epitome of the word.

The eagle spoke. It turned its head back slowly to face the steps. It said in French: “There’s a man saying your car has been broken into.”

Judith ran down the steps. Her first words, the moment she saw that it was me the man had been referring to, were those of an introduction. Her instinct for diplomacy couldn’t be matched. For a second she seemed to have completely forgotten why she had come down the steps in the first place, but as soon as she saw me she slowed her steps to a crawl and braced herself. I half-expected her to open her arms and bellow my name from above.

“Sepha, this is Ayad. Ayad, Sepha. He’s my next-door neighbor.”

She made the introductions casually, as if we were acquaintances meeting at a dinner party being thrown in her honor. Ayad couldn’t help but lean out the door to look at the dilapidated buildings on either side of Judith’s house for comfort. There was a barely repressed smile behind his face when he faced me again. He seemed to want to apologize for having overestimated me from the beginning.

“I’m terribly sorry to disturb you so early in the morning,” I said again in my exalted Cambridge-touched tone. “But I noticed as I was leaving my house that your car had been broken into.”

Judith grabbed a long, black wool coat hanging in the hallway and slipped on a pair of worn tennis shoes that could have dated back to her years as a graduate student. They had that soft worn look, the kind that breeds unnecessary, sentimental attachments. She walked down the steps of her house and over to her car. She stared at the shards of glass crunching under her steps. She walked around to the front of her car. As soon as she saw the gaping hole in the windshield, and the brick lying innocently on the seat, she gasped audibly. She held her right hand over her mouth, as if she wanted to cry or scream but had suddenly forgotten how to do either.

Ayad and I watched her from the porch. I wanted him to do something dramatic, something uniquely French, like shrug his shoulders casually and whisper in a raspy voice, “C’est la vie,” or pull a cigarette from the pockets of his white robe and smoke with a world-weary indifference. Instead, he just leaned against the doorway and watched Judith mourn her broken car, just as I did.

I walked away from the two of them, touched by the casual, even cruel way they must have treated each other. I walked all the way around the circle to reach my store so I would be less tempted to turn back and see whether Judith was still standing in the street by herself. It didn’t work. I turned back anyway, and when I did, I saw that she was still standing there alone, arms folded, as if she had been here and done this before.

There was talk of Judith’s car all morning in the store. The police were called in, and inevitably their whirling lights drew a small crowd. I didn’t hear any speculation as to who could have done it or why. But still people talked. They said things like: “You know that woman who owns that house on the circle…that big red one with all the windows.” I realized after overhearing a few of these conversations that what stood out the most, more than Judith and her car, was the house. The formerly rundown, four-story brick mansion that had been abandoned for as long as I had lived here. Look at it now. It was shining. I actually heard someone use that word. That shining big house. There was more than just a sense of mystery to its transformation. There was something that bordered on the miraculous, the impossible. Less than a year ago, no one who lived in this neighborhood would have ever imagined such a feat was possible, but here it was. Mixed in with the pride that inevitably came with living in such close proximity to a house as grand as Judith’s was the unshakable faith that there was something not quite right to the whole affair. We expect the things that are dead or dying to remain so. But what happens when they refuse to stay that way?