Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Kenneth shook his head in disappointment when he heard the news.

“None of this will be good for business,” he had said. “Having bricks thrown through windows is a bad sign.”

I told him that business had been better the past week than it had been in months.

“That’s just temporary,” he said. “Things always go up in times of crisis. People get confused, scared. So what do they do? They spend. If this keeps up, a few weeks from now and this place will be empty.”

“It’s already empty,” I reminded him.

“Well. It will be even emptier.”

“This is how it happened in Zaire,” Joseph said. “One day we heard that some people were beaten up by guys with guns. The next day we had a rebel group walking through the neighborhood saying they had come to liberate us from the government. To prove their point they shot five people in the street who were responsible for our oppression.”

“You must have been grateful,” I said.

“Of course we were. We didn’t even know that we were oppressed. Imagine our surprise and joy to find out that we had been. We gave the rebels all the money we had to thank them. I remember one man was so happy he even gave them his wife and daughter. As an African, you should understand what’s happening here, Stephanos.”

“And what is that?” Kenneth asked him.

“That there’s nothing these people can do. Look at this place. All of the marches in the world won’t change anything anymore. We were at our best in the sixties. Africa was free. America was free. Everyone was marching to something. And now look at us.”

I walked over to the door then and picked up the brick that had been thrown at my store that morning. I had left it lying on the ground in case the weather turned nice again.

“I found this in front of my store today,” I said.

Joseph took the brick from my hand and turned it over and over as if he were checking its density and weight. He paused and held it in his lap silently as he thought about what he was going to say next. He wanted to say something important, something worthy of a brick left lying on a doorstep.

“There’s a great metaphor in this,” he said. He held the brick in the air with one hand. It could have been a poem from Yeats that he was talking about for all of the import and dignity he was attributing to the brick. His words and gestures were borrowed — part academic, part statesman. They were all wrong. Watching him, I couldn’t help but think that in Africa, he could have led a crowd straight to the bush or palace. He had that kind of charisma about him when he spoke.

“The Palestinians have their rocks. The Rwandans had their machetes. Our weapons aren’t accidents,” he said. “They’re a part of who we are.”

“It’s just a brick, Joseph,” Kenneth said.

“That’s exactly my point,” Joseph responded.

After that we began to catalogue the child wars fought over the last three decades when the roar of the fire trucks and ambulances caught us in midthought. Kenneth was pressing his case that every war in Africa was essentially a war fought by and against children. He was asking us to look at the numbers, at the sum total of children’s lives lost in battle, and just as important, the even greater number lost in the margins of those battles. He was saying, “It’s a simple matter of arithmetic. You can’t deny the numbers,” when I noticed that the sirens and the lights that accompanied them had come to a halt on the other side of the circle. The store was spinning in red and white. Kenneth’s voice was being drowned out by the hard-pressed wailing sound coming from another fire truck that was rounding the corner. His voice trailed off as the three of us looked up from the table and out the window into the indiscriminate glare of the emergency lights twirling like a disco ball around the circle. We have instincts for tragedies. We know when they belong to us long before we understand them. Even before I ran out of the store, across the circle, to the wall of waiting fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars, parked in front of my house, I knew.

This is how it began, then, with the three of us sitting in my store on a Thursday night listing for the hundredth time the victims of a continent that at times seemed full of nothing else. We were always more comfortable with the world’s tragedies than our own. That night was no different. Coups, child soldiers, famines were all a part of the same package of unending grief that we picked our way through in order to avoid our own frustrations and disappointments with life. It was only inevitable that the two would have to meet at some point.

The windows to Judith’s house are still boarded up, and you can still see streaks of black around the top. The only part of the house not ruined by the fire is the stone steps leading up to the front door. The last conversation I had with Judith was on these steps. It was almost a month ago to the day, on an early April afternoon touched intermittently with a light, cold drizzle. On the night of the fire, she had been off watching a movie and having dinner with her former colleagues. She didn’t come back home until the last traces of the fire had died down. The front door, and every window in the house, had been broken. Firefighters and a crowd that had come out to watch the spectacle circled the house. When Judith arrived, I was standing directly across the street with Kenneth and Joseph, surrounded on either side by my neighbors, all of whom had run out of their homes. Even before I saw her I already knew she wasn’t in the house. A policeman had told me the moment I approached my building. He said they found the place abandoned when they arrived, and so there had been nothing to do at the time besides stand there and watch the flames burst through the top-floor windows and tear down the molding that lined the roof. Joseph and Kenneth stood close to me as we watched the spectacle and the quickly gathering crowd. The old widows were craning their heads out of their windows, while women and children gathered on the porches, watching safely from a distance. The last time I had seen anything similar was five years ago, when a man was shot and killed in front of General Logan. The line of police cars surrounding the circle had brought out the entire neighborhood then, too.

It was clear from nearly the beginning that my house was going to be spared, as were all of the others surrounding Judith’s. If there was a theme to the conversations I overheard, it was: Thank God it isn’t us. Grateful, once again, in the way only other people’s suffering can make us.

When Judith finally arrived to reclaim what was left of her home, there was a simple, almost casual pragmatism that governed her actions. It was as if she had known all along that her time in Logan Circle was only temporary, despite how hard she may have wanted to believe otherwise. That night we exchanged only a few brief, customary words. I told her how sorry I was, and she accepted my apology with as much conviction as she could muster. I think I realized she was already gone. Logan Circle, her beautiful four-story mansion. She began to leave it all behind the moment she saw the firemen walking nonchalantly out the front door. The whole thing could be shaken off as a protracted bad dream, one that had lasted, from start to finish, approximately five months.

After a brief hug, I left her alone to deal with the firemen and police. Joseph, Kenneth, and I returned to the store.

“So that’s her?” Joseph asked me once we were situated around the table once again.

I nodded my head. It would have been too much to have said yes, affirmatively, as if I had ever really known who Judith was.

Back at the store that night, we joined the rest of the neighborhood in speculating as to whether or not the fire had been an accident. There were the lingering questions provoked by the bricks that had been thrown through Judith’s car and the Hampshire Tower. But those were minor, perhaps even irrelevant, when compared to the sight of Judith’s four-story mansion lit in flames. Joseph insisted that they weren’t.