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)

The arrival of Stephanos's new neighbors, Judith and her daughter, Naomi, offers Stephanos a more forward-looking connection. Naomi is a mesmerizing child, wise beyond her years, who persuades Stephanos to read "The Brothers Karamazov" to her and draws him out of his self-imposed emotional exile.

Where did she come from?

Mengestu doesn't know.

"She just came wholesale," he says. "I felt their relationship, for some reason, really distinctly."

But the hope that Naomi and Judith represent is undermined by complications of race and especially class. At one crisis point, Stephanos leaves his store and heads aimlessly west on P Street, one of his (and Mengestu's) favorite places to walk. Eventually he finds himself alone in an uncle's apartment, reading letters the older man wrote to President Jimmy Carter.

No one else in his life, it seemed, could bear hearing him talk about what he'd lost.

Dear President Carter . . . Those that died were all taken from their homes, in front of their wives and children. My brother-in-law, Shibrew Stephanos, was one of those men . . .

* * *

Here it comes, then, that long-shrouded "event."

In the novel, the man called Shibrew Stephanos is the shopkeeper's father. As a teenager, the younger man has to watch him brutalized in his own living room during the so-called Red Terror of the 1970s, then led away by government soldiers to his death.

In real life, Shibrew Stephanos was Mengestu's father's older brother. Mengestu was too young to have really known his uncle before he was killed.