The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

“‘Your father is already dead,’ I tell him. ‘And so is yours, Stephanos. Don’t you worry you’ll forget him someday?’ ‘No. I don’t. I still see him everywhere I go.’ ‘All of our fathers are dead,’ Joseph adds. ‘Exactly,’ Kenneth says. It’s the closest we’ve ever come to a resolution.” 

In addition to the continent of Africa, each of the three friends have also lost their fathers. While they come from different countries and have different dreams and aspirations, all three men can agree on this shared loss. Joseph sees a metaphor for Africa in everything, Kenneth focuses on becoming American while mourning the loss of his father’s face, and Sepha remains haunted by his father still. With each man suffering and longing in their own way, the three can agree that they all have the loss of their fathers in common.

“When I moved into the neighborhood I did so because it was all I could afford, and because secretly I loved the circle for what it had become: proof that wealth and power were not immutable, and America was not always so great after all. The neighborhood, and by extension the city, had fallen, and every night I could see and hear that out of my living-room window.” 

Sepha identifies with the powerless, the displaced, and the dispossessed. He fled the revolution in Ethiopia, and his father died at the hands of those in power at the time. In this passage, Sepha sees hope in the Logan Circle neighborhood because it is an example that wealth and power can be challenged and changed. The balance can shift, even in America. This idea gives Sepha consolation and validates his own sense of displacement.

“I knew I had time, and on particularly slow days, I had more of it than I knew what to do with, a problem that posed a risk greater than I was willing to bear.” 

Working in a store with very few customers in a poor, Black neighborhood guarantees Sepha has time on his hands. Time allows him to dwell on the past, and he starts to feel the weight of that past. This is why he must always have library books on hand to read. He cannot afford to allow his mind to wander because it will wander back to the past he must confront and desperately wants to avoid: the death of his father and loss of his family. Feeling that pain and acknowledging the reality of what happened is more than he can stand.

“I was poor, black, and wore the anonymity that came with that as a shield against all of the early ambitions of the immigrant, which had long since abandoned me, assuming they had ever really been mine to begin with. As it was, I did not come to America to find a better life. I came here running and screaming with the ghosts of an old one firmly attached to my back. My goal since then has always been a simple one: to persist unnoticed through the days, to do no more harm.” 

Sepha moves into a neighborhood that is also poor and Black, and this provides him with a safety net against high expectations or ambitions common for the immigrant to America. As Sepha explains, he was a refugee forced to flee his homeland and not an immigrant voluntarily coming to America looking for a better life. The “ghost” he references is his father, whose presence is always with him and reminds him that it is his fault he was killed. Sepha, therefore, moves through the world trying not to disappoint or hurt anyone else. This explains why he stays out of the spotlight, doesn’t try to get ahead, has no ambitions, and takes no initiative in relationships or self-care.

“There was something about affluence that needed exposure, that resisted closed windows and poor lighting and made a willing spectacle of everything.”

Sepha notes the changes going on in his gentrified neighborhood. He enjoys walking the streets and looking into the well-dressed windows of the white people who are moving in. These people, like Judith, leave their windows wide open, their homes well-lit, and their window frames impeccably adorned. He thinks they ask for attention because wealth needs validation. This display of wealth eventually leads a frustrated poor man of the neighborhood to burn Judith’s house to the ground.

“How much better would it have been to have spent even just a few minutes walking in the cold? Or to have sat on the stairwell in the pitch black, unable to see my hand in front of my face? There I could have replayed pieces of our conversation, reenacted our gestures, imagined alternatives. In the harsh light of my apartment, there was only room for practical concerns

After enjoying dinner with Judith and Naomi, Sepha returns to his apartment. He craves the chance to dwell on his memory of the dinner and Judith’s “gentle press” of a near-kiss at the end of the evening. The evening’s activities provide fodder for Sepha’s imagination, and he prefers to spend time in that space rather than with Judith in real time. Sepha is most comfortable revisiting the daily or far-gone encounters of his life in the safety of anonymity and solitude. This is how he self-preserves and keeps himself from having to confront the overwhelming feelings of loneliness, loss, guilt, and shame that might come from fully engaging with this world.

“They had a religious devotion to the game, a respect for its handful of rules and almost infinite variations born, as Joseph said, out of a shared sense of gratitude for having at least one space where their decisions mattered. ‘Nobody,’ he said once, ‘understands chess like an African.’” 

According to Sepha, chess is a game of revolution for Africans. It is a re-enactment of royal coups and wars where one common person can make all the decisions that will take down a king. For people living under constant repressive regimes, this one game is a symbolic outlet. Suddenly, the chess player finds himself with agency and power, and this is intoxicating for the men of Africa who now find themselves pawns in an American regime.

“To go on living halfheartedly is ridiculous, I think. Here I am; this is it. Starting today, I am going to press on valiantly. I am going to march through the hours and weeks and let no disappointment, regardless of how large, steer me from my course or bring me down. I am going to open my store early. I am going to catch the morning rush-hour commuters and make them mine.” 

Sepha, normally indifferent to his store and its customers, awakes on May 4 newly motivated and inspired. He makes a resolution to begin living life to the fullest starting today, no matter what happens. Given his story up to this point, this sense of determination and tenacity is completely out of character. It suggests that after 17 years, Sepha might finally accept becoming American and allow himself to dream of the life he could have. He is looking forward instead back, and he is resolute. When he arrives at the store soon after, he discovers an eviction notice giving him 30 days to vacate the property. His hard-earned and long-awaited resolution is too late.

“No. That’s true. You never said, ‘I want to open and close my store whenever I want, lose all my customers, and then be forced out of business.’ But that doesn’t mean you didn’t want it.” 

When Sepha reads the eviction letter, he immediately calls Kenneth, the one who has always helped him with the store. Kenneth, frustrated with Sepha’s many years of apathy and indifference regarding the store, believes that Sepha sabotages his own possibilities for success. He asks if he wanted this to happen and Sepha says no, but his indignation is only a performance for Kenneth. Sepha has always behaved as if he has no agency and just waits to see what life will put in his path. Kenneth does not understand why Sepha did not do something to prevent this outcome.

“I turned my abandonment into anger and my anger into pity. I cursed myself for my silly expectations. I thought I saw the situation now clearly for what it was—a case of mistaken identity. I had forgotten who I was, with my shabby apartment and run-down store, and like any great fool, I had tried to recast myself into the type of man who dined casually on porcelain plates and chatted easily about Emerson and Tocqueville while sitting on a plush leather couch in a grand house.” 

After spending the evening having dinner with Naomi and Judith at their home, Sepha awakes the next morning looking forward to seeing them when they stop by his store. As the hours pass and neither one appears, Sepha berates himself for even entertaining the possibility of such happiness. He insists it is a case of “mistaken identity” because he forgot his place. He tried to engage in the world—a world he identifies as “better than”—instead of staying detached, and now he must pay with a felling of abandonment. He eventually convinces himself that the pleasant evening never happened at all. In keeping with a central theme of the book, Sepha does not know who he is, so he does not know where he belongs. Once again, Sepha blames himself for having any expectations at all.

“The second thing: the flyers they found did not belong to my father; they were mine. They were not found in his office, but in his bedroom, where he had taken them the night before, after he had found them in my room. That was partially why the soldiers beat him so thoroughly. He had refused to tell them where the flyers had come from. Eventually he said they were his.” 

While sitting on the floor and reading his uncle’s old letters to President Jimmy Carter, Sepha critiques his uncle’s description of what happened the night his father died. In Sepha’s recounting, he places the blame for his father’s death squarely on himself. The detachment and lack of emotion points to Sepha’s trauma and the ways in which he is haunted by guilt for his father’s death. This guilt and trauma explain his inability to feel like he deserves any happiness at all. If his father’s death is his own fault, then it follows that his displacement from home, family, and country is also of his own making.

“Any connection, whether it was to a person, building, or time of day, would have been deceitful, and so I avoided making eye contact with people I didn’t know, and tried to deny myself even the simplest of pleasures.” 

This quote describes Sepha’s first few weeks in America where he speaks to only his uncle, and even those conversations are limited and strained. Sepha arrives in America through no choice of his own. He is not looking for a better life or longing to support his family back home. Instead, Sepha is a displaced person looking to make his circumstances as miserable as he already feels. Connection with people is what makes him happiest, and it is this very thing that he denies himself throughout the novel.

“It was one thing for him to ‘sir’ his way through the day on his own, and an entirely different matter to have me there as a witness to it.” 

Sepha explains why his uncle must curse and berate his employers to Sepha. His uncle, once a wealthy and prominent Ethiopian public figure, now works as an immigrant employee in an American hotel. His uncle must prostrate himself to his bosses while still earning respect from his nephew. Part of the immigrant experience in America often involves tolerating disrespect and racism in order to participate in the American dream. Seeing his uncle accede is also an intimate experience, and intimacy is something Sepha wants to avoid.

“The next day I quit my job at the Capitol Hotel. I left my uncle’s apartment less than a year later. They were the first real decisions I had made on my own since coming to this country. I loved them. Their impracticality made me love them even more.” 

Sepha hints at his feelings of self-destruction and depression when he recalls quitting the job his uncle helped him get and moving out of his uncle’s apartment. Sepha works at denying himself happiness, pleasure, and stability. He does not fell he deserves these things. When he makes these first decisions for himself, they seem to be contrary to common sense. He leaves the safety and security of his uncle’s apartment and a stable job without a plan for what happens next. The important and familiar act of departing is what matters most. Sepha just walks away from it all in much the same way he walked away from his family in Ethiopia—suddenly and without a plan. Although these actions are somewhat self-destructive, they are also made with autonomy, and Sepha finds relief and pride in them.

“We were all guilty of hyperinflated optimism and irrational hope at that point. But how could we not have been? You should have seen us then. Joseph was right, you wouldn’t have believed your eyes. We were young, and we were skinny, and in our eyes beautiful.” 

Sepha remembers when he first met Kenneth and Joseph on the job at the Capitol Hotel. The three young men had their whole lives in front of them and greatness was still possible. Sepha believes this is the common ambition of the immigrant: They have unrealistic hopes and dreams. Sepha describes the younger men as “beautiful”—like the many things that “heaven bears,” according to the novel’s title.

“Narrative. Perhaps that’s the word that I’m looking for. Where is the grand narrative of my life? The one I could spread out and read for signs and clues as to what to expect next. It seems to have run out, if such a thing is possible. It’s harder to admit that perhaps it had never been there at all.” 

Sepha wonders about how he came to this place 17 years after coming to this country. He finds himself now sitting on the floor of his uncle’s apartment and reading through old letters. Sepha tries to reconstruct his past as a story that continues to develop, but he cannot find any cohesive thread for the narrative. He wonders if maybe his whole life has been a meaningless series of accidents to get him to this point. If that is true, it does not matter if he takes any action or not. This is another indication of Sepha’s lack of agency. He wants to know what comes next now that he has lost his store. To find the answers, he consults the past.

“This year was going to be different. I was going to celebrate Christmas twice, properly on both occasions. I had something in America that I had never planned or thought I would have before: the beginnings of a life.” 

After 17 years of keeping his distance and staying detached, Sepha lets himself see a future with someone else in it. Because of this, he now feels like he can properly honor the Christmas Day celebrated by his family in Ethiopia. He now has something to share with them. He wants to belong and to know who he is without being with his Ethiopian family. The possibility of belonging with Judith and Naomi gives him a new sense of identity and the possible chance at a “life.”

“I would have given anything to have disappeared into one of those buses, swallowed whole by the crowd, my face and limbs so thoroughly merged into theirs that the words ‘I’ and ‘alone’ could never be uttered again.” 

Sepha feels safest on buses. He likes the anonymity of the crowd combined with the voyeuristic experience of winding through people’s neighborhoods. He can, for a moment, stay anonymous and simultaneously feel connected to humanity in a way he cannot experience anywhere else but on a bus. Sepha desperately does not want to feel alone, yet he is most comfortable in solitude.

“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.” 

Sepha is speaking to his father, who is present only his memories and his thoughts. Sepha realizes that it is not possible to ever start anew and leave everything behind. What comes before follows you, the way memories of his father follow him now, and the way memories of Africa follow Sepha and his immigrant friends. No one can escape the past, even though he has separated from the major elements of his past—his country and his family—for good.

“‘Look,’ Joseph said. ‘The man even wears a suit when he’s the only one in the office. You’re the perfect immigrant, I tell you. The INS should make a poster out of you, Kenneth. You could even be their spokesperson.’” 

Joseph and Sepha make fun of Kenneth, who is the consummate symbol of capitalism and the American dream. Kenneth has a seemingly limitless supply of hope and ambition. He is willing to do anything and everything to become a successful engineer and businessman. In this passage, Joseph, who is an opposing character to Kenneth, accuses him of being the perfect immigrant because he plays the role without question, and he believes in it so strongly he even wears his suit when no one is around. Kenneth has shaped his identity around American expectations.

“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.” 

This passage, taken from the book The Brothers Karamazov, is Sepha’s favorite. This is the book he read aloud to Naomi, though they never finished it. He marks this passage for her and wants her to pay attention to it. It is his way of telling her that his own memories are his life, and she is now also among his memories. For Sepha, reflecting on the past is how he remembers who he is and who is supposed to be. He clings to his memories and to nostalgia about his childhood. He feels validated by the passage from the book.

“‘Everything is connected,’ he said. ‘The bricks, this fire. They’re not just accidents, Stephanos. That’s the way these things begin. With a handful of small actions that build and build. A month from now you could be looking at an entirely new neighborhood.’” 

In this passage, Joseph comments on the increasing unrest in the Logan Circle neighborhood. He connects it to what happened in their own hometowns in Africa. They are, after all, children of a revolution, forced out of their homelands and trying to make their way in a foreign country. Their grief at their own histories intersects with the gentrification and protest happening in Logan Circle. This culminates in the burning of Judith’s house. What seems like an escalating series of violent incidents turns out to be the frustrated actions of one single man. The tension and turmoil, however, is enough to send Sepha, Joseph, and Kenneth back to the shelter of the convenience store where they can continue to distract themselves from their own trauma and memories of violence.

“What was it my father used to say? A bird stuck between two branches gets bitten on both wings. I would like to add my own saying to the list now, Father: a man stuck between two worlds lives and dies alone. I have dangled and been suspended long enough.” 

Sepha is constantly recalling his father’s aphorisms and even takes to writing his own. In this passage he confronts one such aphorism and challenges the lesson based on his own experience. The passage represents hope and suggests that Sepha is going to be a more active agent in his own life. It suggests that he has come to the end of grieving and has accepted his new place in the world. He no longer wants to live between two worlds, and he is done waiting to see what happens next.