Indelible Images of a Place Unseen

Tragic history informs Ethiopian-born Dinaw Mengestu's first novel, set in Washington. (By Bill O'leary -- The Washington Post)

Tilden, a Georgetown English professor, still remembers the first assignment Mengestu turned in for her creative nonfiction class. Go out and observe people having fun, she'd told her students. A couple of days later, she sat down with "this miserable group of pieces." Everyone was trying too hard -- except Mengestu. His story was a simple one: A man sitting at a bus stop watches two boys "run down the street and push each other back and forth."

Every sentence, Tilden recalls, was perfect and in its place.

Mengestu had come to Georgetown from the suburbs of Chicago, where his family had moved when he was 9 (his father had left a management job at Caterpillar Inc., in Peoria, to launch his own messenger service). But he had relatives in Washington, so he knew the city, and he never confined himself to the Georgetown campus.

"When I first moved to D.C., my girlfriend was living in Logan Circle," he says, "and it was still pretty battered. We'd spend a lot of time sitting on the stoops . . . because we were young and poor and didn't have anything else to do."

The rapidly changing landscape of Logan Circle in Northwest Washington is central to Mengestu's novel. His main character, known simply as Stephanos, runs a convenience store there and gets involved with a white woman and her mixed-race daughter who move into a restored house nearby. But the "very specific image" that sparked "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears," he says, came from a late-night walk down 18th Street in Adams Morgan.

All it took was a glimpse of a lonely-looking Ethiopian shopkeeper "and I had a sentence in my head, which was: 'No one comes into the store anymore.' "

On the most obvious level, Stephanos's history is not Mengestu's. The character was 17 -- not 2 -- when he left Ethiopia and he has spent years beset by indelible images of the homeland that his creator cannot remember at all.

Unlike Mengestu in Peoria, where there was no Ethiopian community, Stephanos starts his American life in a Silver Spring apartment building crammed with his countrymen. His move to Logan Circle is a rejection of that Ethiopia-centric immigrant existence. He wants to move on, though he's not quite sure how.

The main elements of his new life become the store and his friendships with two other African immigrants. Both Joseph, from the Congo, and Kenneth, from Kenya, arrived in the United States ambitious to rise and thrive. Both have settled for less.

Now, with Stephanos, they drink too much and play a game replete with nostalgia and bitterness. They vie with each other to see who is the most knowledgeable about their beloved continent's destructive dictators and seemingly endless coups, which Mengestu threw himself into researching.

We all have favorites. Bukassa. Amin. Mobutu. . .

"Our memories," Joseph says more seriously, during a lull in the game, "are like a river cut off from the ocean. With time they will slowly dry out in the sun, and so we drink and drink and drink and we can never have our fill."