Krik? Krak!

by Edwidge Danticat

  I leaned real close and whispered the word in his ear.

  "Don't ever forget it if you're in trouble. It could save your life," he said.

  "I will remember."

  "Tell me again what it is."

  I swallowed a gulp of dusty air and said, "Peace."

  A round of gunshots rang through the air, signaling that curfew was about to begin.

  "I should go back now," I said.

  He made no effort to get up, but raised his hand to his lips and blew me a kiss.

  "Look after yourself tonight," I said.

  "Peace."

  On the way home, I cut through a line of skeletal houses that had been torched the night of the coup. A lot of the old régime followers died that night. Others fled to the hills or took boats to Miami.

  I rushed past a churchyard, where the security officers sometimes buried the bodies of old régime people. The yard was bordered with a chain link fence. But every once in a while, if you looked very closely, you could see a bushy head of hair poking through the ground.

  There was a bed of red hibiscus on the footpath behind the yard. Covering my nose, I pulled up a few stems and ran all the way home with them.

  My grandmother was sitting in the rocking chair in front of our house, making knots in the sisal rope around her waist. She grabbed the hibiscus from my hand and threw them on the ground.

  "How many times must I tell you?" she said. "Those things grow with blood on them." Pulling a leaf from my hair, she slapped me on the shoulder and shoved me inside the house.

  "Somebody rented the two rooms in the yellow house," she said, saliva flying out from between her front teeth. "I want you to bring the lady some needles and thread."

  My grandmother had fixed up the yellow house very nicely so that many visitors who passed through Ville Rose came to stay in it. Sometimes our boarders were French and American journalists who wanted to take pictures of the churchyard where you could see the bodies.

  I rushed out to my grandmother s garden, hoping to catch a glimpse of our new guest. Then I went over to the basin of rainwater in the yard and took off my clothes. My grandmother scrubbed a handful of mint leaves up and down my back as she ran a comb through my hair.

  "It's a lady," said my grandmother. "Don t give her a headful of things to worry about. Things you say, thoughts you have, will decide how people treat you."

  "Is the lady alone?"

  "She is like all those foreign women. She feels she can be alone. And she smokes too." My grandmother giggled. "She smokes just like an old woman when life gets hard."

  "She smokes a pipe?"

  "Ladies her age don't smoke pipes."

  "Cigarettes, then?"

  "I don't want you to ask her to let you smoke any."

  "Is she a journalist?" I asked.

  "That is no concern of mine," my grandmother said.

  "Is she intelligent?"

  "Intelligence is not only in reading and writing."

  "Is she old régime or new régime?"

  "She is like us. The only régime she believe in is God's régime. She says she wants to write things down for posterity."

  "What did you tell her when she said that?"

  "That I already have posterity. I was once a baby and now I am an old woman. That is posterity."

  "If she asks me questions, I am going to answer them," I said.

  "One day you will stick your hand in a stew that will burn your fingers. I told her to watch her mouth as to how she talks to people. I told her to watch out for vagabonds like Toto and Raymond."

  "Never look them in the eye."

  "I told her that too," my grandmother said as she dis-carded the mint leaves.

  My whole body felt taut and taint-free. My grand-mother's face softened as she noticed the sheen of cleanliness.

  "See, you can be a pretty girl," she said, handing me her precious pouch of needles, thimbles, and thread. "You can be a very pretty girl. Just like your mother used to be."

  A burst of evening air chilled my face as I walked across to the yellow house. I was wearing my only Sunday out-fit, a white lace dress that I had worn to my confirmation two years before.

  The lady poked her head through the door after my first knock.

  "Mademoiselle Gallant?"

  "How do you know my name?"

  "My grandmother sent me."

  She was wearing a pair of abakos, American blue jeans.

  "It looks as though your grandmother has put you to some inconvenience," she said. Then she led me into the front room, with its oversized mahogany chairs and a desk that my grandmother had bought especially for the journalists to use when they were working there.

  "My name is really Emilie," she said in Creole, with a very heavy American accent. "What do people call you?"

  "Lamort."

  "How did your name come to be 'death'?"

  "My mother died while I was being born," I explained. "My grandmother was really mad at me for that."

  "They should have given you your mother's name," she said, taking the pouch of needles, thread, and thimbles from me. "That is the way it should have been done."

  She walked over to the table in the corner and picked up a pitcher of lemonade that my grandmother made for all her guests when they first arrived.

  "Would you like some?" she said, already pouring the lemonade.

  "Oui, Madame. Please."

  She held a small carton box of butter cookies in front of me. I took one, only one, just as my grandmother would have done.

  'Are you a journalist?" I asked her.

  "Why do you ask that?"

  "The people who stay here in this house usually are, journalists."

  She lit a cigarette. The smoke breezed in and out of her mouth, just like her own breath.

  "I am not a journalist," she said. "I have come here to pay a little visit."

  "Who are you visiting?"

  "Just people."

  "Why don't you stay with the people you are visiting?"

  "I didn't want to bother them."

  'Are they old régime or new régime?"

  "Who?"

  "Your people?"

  "Why do you ask?"

  "Because things you say, thoughts you have, will decide how people treat you."

  "It seems to me, you are the journalist," she said.

  "What do you believe in? Old régime or new régime?"

  "Your grandmother told me to say to anyone who is interested, 'The only régime I believe in is God's régime.' I would wager that you are a very good source for the journalists. Do you have any schooling?"

  "A little."

  Once again, she held the box of cookies in front of me. I took another cookie, but she kept the box there, in the same place. I took yet another cookie, and another, until the whole box was empty.

  "Can you read what it says there?" she asked, point-ing at a line of red letters.

  "I cannot read American," I said. Though many of the journalists who came to stay at the yellow house had tried to teach me, I had not learned.

  "It is not American," she said. "They are French cookies. That says Le Petit Ecolier."

  I stuffed my mouth in shame.

  "Intelligence is not only in reading and writing," I said.

  "I did not mean to make you feel ashamed," she said, dropping her cigarette into the half glass of lemonade in her hand. "I want to ask you a question."

  "I will answer if I can."

  "My mother was old régime," she said. "She was a journalist. For a newspaper called Libèté in Port-au-Prince."

  "She came to Ville Rose?"

  "Maybe. Or some other town. I don't know. The people who worked with her in Port-au-Prince think she might be in this region. Do you remember any shootings the night of the coup?"

  "There were many shootings," I said.

  "Did you see any of the bodies?"

  "My grandmother and me, we stayed inside."

  "Did a woman come to your door? Did
anyone ever say that a woman in a purple dress came to their door?"

  "No."

  "I hear there is a mass burial site," she said. "Do you know it?"

  "Yes. I have taken journalists there."

  "I would like to go there. Can you take me?"

  "Now?"

  "Yes."

  She pulled some coins from her purse and placed them on the table.

  "I have more," she said.

  From the back pocket of her jeans, she took out an envelope full of pictures. I ran my fingers over the glossy paper that froze her mother into all kinds of smiling poses: a skinny brown woman with shiny black hair in short spiral curls.

  "I have never seen her," I admitted.

  "It is possible that she arrived in the evening, and then the coup took place in the middle of the night. Do you know if they found any dead women the day after the coup?"

  "There were no bodies," I said. "That is to say no funerals."

  I heard my grandmother's footsteps even before she reached the door to the yellow house.

  "If you tell her that I'm here, I can't go with you," I said.

  "Go into the next room and stay there until I come for you."

  My grandmother knocked once and then a second time. I rushed to the next room and crouched in a corner.

  The plain white sheets that we usually covered the bed with had been replaced by a large piece of purple cloth. On the cement floor were many small pieces of cloth lined up in squares, one next to the other.

  "Thank you for sending me the needles," I heard Emilie say to my grandmother. "I thought I had packed some in my suitcase, but I must have forgotten them."

  "My old eyes are not what they used to be," my grandmother said, in the shy humble voice she reserved for prayers and for total strangers. "But if you need some mending, I can do it for you."

  "Thank you," said Emilie, "but I can do the mending myself."

  "Very well then. Is my granddaughter here?"

  "She had to run off," Emilie said.

  "Do you know where she went?"

  "I don't know. She was dressed for a very fancy affair."

  My grandmother was silent for a minute as her knuckles tapped the wood on the front door.

  "I will let you rest now," said my grandmother.

  "Thank you for the needles," said Emilie.

  Emilie bolted the door after my grandmother had left.

  "Is there a way we can leave without her seeing you?" She came into the room with a flashlight and her American passport. "You might get a little beating when you go home."

  "What are all these small pieces of cloth for?" I asked.

  "I am going to sew them onto that purple blanket," she said. 'All her life, my mother's wanted to sew some old things together onto that piece of purple cloth."

  She raised a piece of white lace above her head. "That's from my mother's wedding dress."

  Grabbing a piece of pink terry cloth, she said, "That's an old baby bib."

  Tears were beginning to cloud her eyes. She fought them away fast by pushing her head back.

  "Purple," she said, "was Mama's favorite color."

  "I can ask my grandmother if she saw your mother," I said.

  "When I first came, this afternoon," she said, "I showed her the pictures and, like you, she said no."

  "We would tell you if we had seen her."

  "I want to go to the churchyard," she said. "You say you have already taken other people there."

  "I walk by it every day."

  "Let's go then."

  "Sometimes the yard's guarded at night," I warned her.

  "I have an American passport. Maybe that will help."

  "The soldiers don't know the difference. Most of them are like me. They would not be able to identify your cookies either."

  "How old are you?" she asked.

  "Fourteen."

  'At your age, you already have a wide reputation. I have a journalist friend who has stayed in this house. He told me you are the only person who would take me to the yard."

  I could not think which particular journalist would have given me such a high recommendation, there had been so many.

  "Better to be known for good than bad," I said to her.

  "I am ready to go," she announced.

  "If she is there, will you take her away?"

  "Who?"

  "Your mother?"

  "I have not thought that far."

  'And if you see them carrying her, what will you do? She will belong to them and not you."

  "They say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother," she said. "You, child, were born a woman."

  We walked through the footpath in my grandmother's garden, toward the main road.

  "I have been having these awful dreams," Emilie whispered as she plucked some leaves off my grand-mother's pumpkin vines. "I see my mother sinking into a river, and she keeps calling my name."

  A round of gunshots echoed in the distance, signals from the night guards who had no other ways of speaking to one another.

  We stopped on the side of the road and waited for a while and then continued on our way.

  The night air blew the smell of rotting flesh to my nose. We circled the churchyard carefully before finding an entrance route. There was a rustle in the yard, like pieces of tin scraping the moist dirt.

  "Who is there?"

  I thought she stopped breathing when the voice echoed in the night air.

  "I am an American journalist," Emilie said in breath-less Creole.

  She pulled out her passport and raised it toward a blinding flashlight beam. The guard moved the light away from our faces.

  It was Raymond's friend, Toto, the one who had shot at him. He was tall and skinny and looked barely six-teen. He was staring at me as though he was possessed by a spirit. In the night, he did not know me.

  He took Emilie's passport and flipped through it quickly.

  "What are you doing here?" he asked, handing the passport back to her. "It is after curfew."

  "The lady was not feeling well," I said. "So she asked me to take her for a walk."

  "Didn't you hear the signals?" asked Toto. "The cur-few has already started. You would not want to have blood on your nice communion dress."

  Two other soldiers passed us on their way to the field. They were dragging the blood-soaked body of a beard-ed man with an old election slogan written on a T-shirt across his chest: ALONE WE ARE WEAK, TOGETHER WE ARE A FLOOD. The guards were carrying him, feet first, like a breech birth.

  Emilie moved toward the body as though she want-ed to see it better.

  "You see nothing," Toto said, reaching up to turn Emilie's face. Her eyes twitched from Toto's touch on her cheek.

  "Under God's sky, you do this to people!" she hollered in a brazen Creole.

  Toto laughed loudly.

  "We are doing that poor indigent a favor burying him," he said.

  Emilie moved forward, trying to follow the guards taking the body into the yard.

  "You see nothing," Toto said again, grabbing her face. She raised her arm as if to strike him. He seized her wrist in midair and whisked her hand behind her back.

  "You see nothing," he said, his voice hissing between his teeth. "Repeat after me. You see nothing."

  "I see nothing," I said in her place. "The lady does not understand."

  "I see you," she saidin Creole. "How can that be nothing?"

  "Peace, let her go," I said.

  "You are a coward," she told him.

  He lowered his head so he was staring directly into her eyes. He twisted her arm like a wet rag.

  "Peace, have mercy on her," I said.

  "Let her ask for herself," he said.

  She stamped her feet on his boots. He let go of her hand and tapped his rifle on her shoulder. Emilie looked up at him, angry and stunned. He moved back, aiming his rifle at her head, squinting as though he was going to shoot.

  "Peace!" I hollered.

  My eyes fell o
n Raymond's as he walked out of the field. I mouthed the word, pleading for help. Peace. Peace. Peace.

  "They'll go," Raymond said to Toto.

  "Then go!" Toto shouted. "Let me watch you go."

  "Let's go," I said to Emilie. "My grandmother will be mad at me if I get killed."

  Raymond walked behind us as we went back to the road.

  "The password has changed," he said. "Stop say-ing peace.'"

  By the time I turned around to look at his face, he was already gone.

  Emilie and I said nothing to each other on the way back. The sound of bullets continued to ring through the night.

  "You never look them in the eye," I told her when we got to the yellow house doorstep.

  "Is that how you do it?"

  I helped her up the steps and into the house.

  "I am going to sew these old pieces of cloth onto my mother's blanket tonight," she said.

  She took a needle from my grandmother's bundle and began sewing. Her ringers moved quickly as she stitched the pieces together.

  "I should go," I said, eyeing the money still on the table.

  "Please, stay. I will pay you more if you stay with me until the morning."

  "My grandmother will worry."

  "What was your mother's name?" she asked.

  "Marie Magdalene," I said.

  "They should have given you that name instead of the one you got. Was your mother pretty?"

  "I don't know. She never took portraits like the ones you have of yours."

  "Did you know those men who were in the yard tonight?"

  "Yes."

  "I didn't fight them because I didn't want to make trouble for you later," she said. "We should write down their names. For posterity."

  "We have already had posterity," I said.

  "When?"

  "We were babies and we grew old."

  "You're still young," she said. "You're not old."

  "My grandmother is old for me."

  "If she is old for you, then doesn't it matter if you get old? You can't say that. You can't just say what she wants for you to say. I didn't get in a fight with them because I did not want them to hurt you," she said.

  "I will stay with you," I said, "because I know you are afraid."

  I curled my body on the floor next to her and went to sleep.