Peacekeeping

by Mischa Berlinski

  Nadia looked in the direction of her husband, who was talking to Terry. It was obvious that she did want to sit with him. But she said, “No, with you is fine.”

  “I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t hear you.”

  “It fine with you,” Nadia said.

  “It’s fine?”

  “It no problem.”

  Kay’s buzz was fading, and she had turned surly.

  Her glance strayed from me to the judge to Nadia to the table, then lingered over the large terrace filled with others just like us, enjoying the last of a long evening before going out to confront the hungry children on the street.

  The rumors had persisted: my friend Toussaint Legrand, who had access to subterranean rivers of rumor, told me that when the judge was in Port-au-Prince, as he sometimes was, Terry’s car could be seen parked outside the judge’s house in Calasse. Yet that seemed natural enough to me, hardly dispositive. I thought of what Terry had told me: “If you ever hear a noise outside the house at night, just give me a call.” Here was a woman—you had only to see her slender, haunted face to know—who heard many noises at night.

  “Oh, good. I’m glad it’s not a problem to sit with me. I hate to make problems.” Kay took a sip from her glass and added, “But we can make a place at the other end of the table, if you’d like. Near the boys.”

  Kay was speaking quickly. She didn’t care if Nadia understood her. She wanted me and the other men to understand that her pride had been offended: she had been relegated, at her own party, to the corner of the table reserved for women and children. The center of gravity—the stories, the jokes, the masculine drama—was now at the other end of the long table.

  “He’s not going anywhere,” Kay said. “Don’t worry.”

  “Who?” Nadia said.

  “Your husband. He’s not going anywhere. He’s right there next to my husband.”

  Nadia didn’t say anything. Kay had been right: she had beautiful eyes. Their color gave her skin its hint of greenish pallor. I didn’t know what she was thinking; I thought of her vacant expression in the meat market, her face and hair coated in blood. Nadia’s eyes gave away nothing but that long-ago liaison between master and slave.

  Kay said, “Did you know it’s my birthday? In my country, when somebody has a birthday, we say ‘Happy birthday’ and give them a kiss.”

  “Happy birthday,” Nadia said. “I am very contented for you.”

  “And when is your birthday? When it’s your birthday, we can have a party.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? Honey, everyone has a birthday. It’s written on your passport. It’s written on your birth certificate. I don’t believe—”

  I interrupted her. “Kay, did you say you were thinking of going to Africa in the spring? To see the elephants?”

  “Well, everybody has to have a birthday. That way we can have a party for Nadia, and if someone’s not having a good time—”

  “After dinner, let’s hear some African music. Or see some African art.”

  Kay stopped herself. She was thinking of getting angry—you could see it building. But the spark wouldn’t catch. From the far end of the table, there was her husband’s bullying voice. He had his arm around a colleague. I heard, “This motherfucker—this guy—” Then I heard Johel saying, “Wait—wait—what you mean is—”

  Kay picked up her knife and inspected her reflection. She pouted at herself. Then she excused herself to go to the bathroom and walked off singing, “It’s my party and I’ll pee if I want to—pee if I want to.”

  When she came back, she was happy again. Baker the diplomat asked Kay if she wanted to hear a funny story.

  “I’d love to,” Kay said.

  “This is a true story,” Baker said.

  “Of course it is,” Kay said. “I bet you’ve never told a lie in your life. You’ve got that kind of face.”

  “So we give out visas, that’s what we do all day, and the truth is that most folks who want a visa, we say no.”

  “That’s cold,” Kay said.

  “You don’t know the half of it. Listen to the story. The way it works with visas is that applicants have to prove to us that they’re not going to live in the States.”

  Now Nadia was looking at Baker. I had thought the language was too difficult for her, but she was staring at him, her brilliant eyes not blinking.

  “Basically, you have to prove you’re not broke. Show us a bank account, show us a house, show us a job. And that’s not easy to do. Nine out of ten applicants we turn down.”

  Kay had a little smile on her face, waiting for the punch line.

  “So one of my colleagues gets this applicant. Lady makes an appointment, shows up at the window, pays her hundred dollars, and wants a visa. Neatly dressed older lady, says she works at American Airlines, wants to visit her kids in Boston. And for whatever reason, my colleague—we call her Permission Denied, she’s such a hard-ass—Permission Denied doesn’t believe the story. The letter from the employer looks strange, the bank account is nearly empty, et cetera, et cetera. Decision is final. No appeals.”

  Baker paused for a second as the waiter delivered the appetizers.

  “So a couple of weeks later, Permission Denied is ready to go back to the States on vacation. She gets herself to the airport, waits in line, and who’s standing there behind the counter but this lady, the one who got her visa denied. Permission Denied is sweating bullets just because this is so awkward. And this lady, sugar wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Doesn’t say a thing. ‘Enjoy your flight, ma’am.’ Permission Denied thinks everything will be fine, just until the moment she’s getting on board the plane, when American Airlines security stops her. Seems she’s been flagged on the No Fly List. And she’s sputtering how she works at the American embassy, et cetera, et cetera. She makes such a holy scandal they bring out the head of airport security.”

  “Don’t tell me—,” Kay said.

  “You got it,” Baker said.

  “Really?” I said.

  “She turned him down for a visa too.”

  “Oh, no!” Kay said.

  “You know what the lady at the counter, the first lady, said?”

  “What?” Kay said.

  “She looks at Permission Denied and says, ‘I didn’t want to take my vacation in Port-au-Prince either.’”

  “Oh, that’s too good,” Kay said.

  “True story.”

  Now it was our side of the table that exploded in laughter. Soon all of us were telling jokes. The only one who wasn’t laughing was Nadia. But Kay was happy again, as all the men—Baker, LBJ, and me—placated her and made her laugh.

  It didn’t seem like cruelty to ignore Nadia, maybe even a kindness. She did not look bored. She stared at her husband. From time to time her face would attract my eye, and my glance would linger on her high cheekbones, her tiny ears, and her sculpted lips. Later, when the judge excused himself and went to the bathroom, I do not believe that Nadia’s eyes wavered for even a fraction of a second from the pathway leading to the main building in which the toilets were located; and she seemed to respire shallowly until the very instant he returned to the table, where he leaned his big body over hers and whispered in her ear. Whatever he said produced a wan smile. Then he sat down again at the far side of the table.

  Baker whispered to me, “Is that Madame Mireille?”

  I followed his glance across the room to a distinguished lady in red crêpe de chine, the only woman at a table of older men.

  “What are you two talking about?” Kay asked.

  Baker said, “Not so loud, she’ll hear us.”

  “Who?” Kay asked, her voice inexplicably louder.

  “That’s Madame Mireille,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “That lady. That’s her.”

  Our heads all swung around like spectators at a tennis match, and then people at neighboring tables followed our glance.

  “She doesn’t loo
k like the posters,” Kay said.

  Madame Mireille’s face, admittedly somewhat younger, was on electoral posters all over the capital: she had been a losing candidate in the last presidential election, a partisan of the mulatto urban economic elite. The posters had yet to be taken down. Her husband had been president in the late 1980s before being deposed; on his death a few years back, she entered politics herself. She had lost the election very badly.

  “She’s a brave woman,” Nadia said.

  Her voice surprised me.

  Kay said, “I never understood that, how some women go into politics when their men die. If Terry died, it’s not like I’d see it as a career opportunity.”

  Then the waiter came back. Now we had had sufficient time to consider our choices, and the process of ordering was efficient. It was interrupted only by Nadia, who had not looked at her menu. Instead she insisted on interrogating the waiter on her choices. And I understood that she could not read the menu.

  Kay must have noticed the same thing. “The fish is so good,” she said. “They make it with this beurre blanc white sauce and—”

  Nadia continued to interrogate the waiter.

  “The last time we were here, I loved it,” Kay said, as much to me as to Nadia. “I’m just not getting it today because sometimes I need meat, you know? If I don’t eat a steak once a week, I feel faint. Terry says I’m a natural-born carnivore.”

  The waiter in his pressed white shirt and tuxedo jacket seemed to be losing his patience.

  “Fish is good,” he said.

  “See?” Kay said. “You’ll love it.”

  “Give me the fish,” Nadia finally said.

  But when the food eventually arrived, Nadia did something that surprised me. She took a bite and called the waiter over. Her voice now had lost its timidity.

  “This fish slept,” she said, the Creole way of saying that the fish wasn’t fresh.

  “He didn’t sleep,” the waiter said.

  Nadia didn’t say anything. She had decided before she tasted the fish that it had slept, I think. It was a point of principle. I had not thought her capable of confronting the white-shirted waiter in this fancy restaurant. She stared the waiter into submission. He glanced helplessly around the table for a moment, as if one of us might intervene, then, his shoulders sagging, took the plate away.

  Later, when he came back with another fish—we had almost all of us finished eating by then—Nadia accepted the plate with a curt “Merci.” Then she ate delicately, flicking little bits of fish off the bone and onto her fork. I have never seen anyone eat a plate of food more slowly. We were all long finished before her fish was half consumed.

  5

  This is the story, pretty much the way Kay White told it to me.

  There was a young Manhattan lawyer who wore a sweater-vest in winter under his dark gray suit and carried an antique pocket watch with a flinty silver face (he collects them) and a fat Waterman fountain pen (he collects them too); a man who looked forty when he was twenty, with a bit of a belly and a receding hairline, and looked just the same at thirty; a man who will look just the same splayed out one day in his gleaming acajou coffin.

  There was a young man who, from the moment he arrived at the age of eleven on the other side of the water, embraced responsibility and eschewed frivolity; a young man who excelled through the application of discipline, intelligence, and unstinting hard work at every American endeavor thus far essayed, and who has been rewarded by being denied nothing in his American life that is his due.

  There was a young man with a pretty honey-blond fiancée named Jennifer McCall, a nice girl whom he met in law school, two highly intelligent, highly learned young creatures, both of them ambitious and kindly and smart, building a beautiful American life together.

  The young man is holding his bachelor party at a nightclub called Kombit in Brooklyn.

  And what we have here are not strippers, hookers, and tequila shots; what we have here is not some last hurrah of single life before the shackles of domesticity are welded on for life—no, what we have here is a damn good party. The young lawyer has invited everyone to his party because that’s the Haitian style. Everyone he knows and loves is there at Kombit on that February night, from his grandparents to his innumerable cousins to his colleagues at work—partners, associates, and secretaries alike—to a dozen friends from law school, who know nothing of Haiti and think of Johel Célestin as a black guy with a French name and a white accent, a fact or condition that Johel Célestin both loves and hates, America effacing and rubbing away the nastiness of the old country, but also imposing a story on him that’s not his.

  And just what is his story?

  Jennifer McCall doesn’t know—that’s what Johel knows in his gut but won’t be able to say until years later. (“She never understood who I was, brother, because she wasn’t Haitian. That’s not a sin. Just a fact.”) She doesn’t understand that when you come from a country like Haiti, that’s as much a part of you as your family. She doesn’t know that being Haitian makes you different, it’s something that runs deep in your blood and bones. When he was in college, Johel used to dream of writing the great Haitian novel just so he could give it to his girlfriends and say, This is where I come from. But his brain didn’t work like that: two dozen drafts of twenty pages each, and Johel was applying to law school. His roommate in college was from a family of Somali immigrants, and the two of them got along just fine, members of the fraternity of the fucked-up nations of the earth. Those two didn’t need to explain to each other how hard the world is, if you scratch away the shiny surface.

  But sweet, wide-hipped, bosomy Jennifer McCall knows only that Johel is kind and generous and dignified and smart, that he likes to sip very good rum from his extensive collection and sit in an easy chair after work listening to good jazz or reading a serious book. She knows that he is the kind of man whom you can spend your life with, who will be good and kind and faithful to her and their children, who is provident and mature. Jennifer McCall was even invited to Johel’s bachelor party—although next week she’s going out with her girlfriends and, like it or not, he’s staying home, because she knows that by midnight Johel will be yawning, her big, cuddly smart teddy bear of a man wanting to snuggle up warm in bed with her.

  What a cozy future they have together.

  And she would have been at his party, too, enjoying his colleagues and family and keeping an eye on her man, if it hadn’t been for Grandma McCall’s little stroke, not so serious, thank goodness, but necessitating an unplanned trip back to Boston.

  She was sorry to be gone, because Johel had planned that party with the care and discipline and capacity for hard work that he brought to bear on everything in his life, somewhere between neuroticism and obsession, right down to the food, which had to be Haitian enough for his aunts and uncles who are fully and one hundred percent old country—that is to say, the food had to be greasy and hot and piquant enough for Tonton Jean and Tonton Alphonse and Tante Marie, who don’t like food if it doesn’t make your mouth explode—and still interesting enough to please his yuppie colleagues who regularly put the best restaurants in Manhattan on their expense accounts. So Johel stressed over the menu: huge platters of fried plantains; mountains of griot marinated in lemons and Scotch bonnet chiles; beef tassot made the way his grandmother liked it, soaked in orange juice for a night, then boiled and fried; and tray after tray of deep-fried akra. Everything was drenched in piklis, so spicy the waiters carrying the platters out from the kitchen kept rubbing their eyes with the back of their tuxedoed sleeves. Not to mention the drinks: vats of Prestige in big steel buckets, and on every table a bottle of five-star Barbancourt and pitchers of cocktails made from Haitian grapefruit, available at a Haitian greengrocer in Flatbush.

  And the music—Johel originally chose the date for the party because Tropicana was touring up the East Coast and he thought, How about that, if Tropicana could play my party? But Tropicana dropped out at the last moment owing to
the ever-present visa issues, and he sat with Ti Maurice who owns Kombit, listening to demo tapes of all the major Haitian bands who play the East Coast circuit: Miami, Brooklyn, Montreal, and Boston. When he hears Erzulie L’Amour, he says to himself, That’s just right. He thinks of the old-time bands from the back-in-the-day that he never knew; he thinks of starry tropical nights and a big band playing under a gazebo poolside at the legendary hotels of Port-au-Prince, the El Rancho or the Ibo Lele, a lady’s voice wafting out over the palmy night, and all sophisticated Port-au-Prince society dressed in white jackets and pretty dresses, drinking rum sours and dancing until dawn.

  With planning like that, how could the party be anything less than a success? Everybody had a great time, even though the band was late and Johel was fretting like a maniac—not that you could tell, if you weren’t as close to him as someone like Jennifer McCall, who wasn’t there, of course. The associates from the firm had their ties loose and were flirting, like the crazy guys they were deep down, with Johel’s pretty Haitian cousins, all of them dancing to the music on the stereo—where is that band?—and winking at Johel and saying, “You sure you don’t want to marry a nice Haitian girl?” The cousins in their tight dresses and short, flouncy skirts are laughing and saying, “I tell him that every day, but he don’t listen!” Even the partners from the law firm seem to be having a good time, there with their wives, drinking cocktails and talking about long-ago vacations down in the Caribbean. The Haitian people of course are having a better time. Tonton Jean is telling jokes in Creole—there’s no better language in the world for joke telling, puns, stories, making fun, and having a good time generally. Tonton Jean’s telling that story about the time he had to go to Baraderes on a donkey in a hurricane, and when he starts talking in the donkey’s voice, there isn’t a person in that room who can understand a word he’s saying that isn’t slapping the table and letting loose monstrous guffaws.

  Where is that band? Haitian people, Johel is thinking, would be late to their own damn funeral if somebody else wasn’t hauling them around in the casket.