Peacekeeping

by Mischa Berlinski

  Now everybody’s sweating a little from the spicy food and cool drinks; everybody’s been eating for an hour straight, loading up their plates and wiping their foreheads with their handkerchiefs, complimenting Johel on the delicious salty spicy food and getting up for just one more fried plantain or just a little more chicken. That’s when Tonton Jean decides to take the microphone and make a toast to the groom, only he forgets that half the room doesn’t speak Creole, so Ti Maurice takes the other microphone to translate, only Ti Maurice’s English is not so good either, so what you got was something like this:

  “My fwens, my fwens, I wanna tell all you a little thing which touch my heart. This boy, when he get here to New York See Tee, he start learn spelling, and when he goes to Washington to make a big champion, I make a bet, like this. I bet one hundred dollars that he lose.”

  Everyone in the room giggles.

  “And you know who I make this stoo-peed bet with? With his maman. She bet that he ween.”

  And Evelyne Célestin, sitting up at the front table, she’s prouder than a victorious general on parade, looking like an overripe fruit sitting in the sun, a big, shiny lady, retiring this very year after forty years of working as a maternity nurse. Not that she needed the money the last few years, mind you: one son a doctor, the other a lawyer, and the family owns four parking lots upstate.

  “And she tell this boy, she going to whip him if he loses. She lose her money, she going to whip him until he crying rivers.

  “And so this boy, he come to me before—how you call it, the championnat? The shampyon sheep? What you call it? I don’t know. I don’t care. And he say me, ‘Tomorrow I go lose, Tonton, and you give me half de monee, okay?’ And I say, ‘Boy, you got a deal.’ And I think, Dis boy, he some real Aye-eesyen. But the next day he make me a big sooprees, and he win everything. That night, I say, ‘Boy, I thought we had a deal.’ And he says, ‘My mamma, she offer me soixante-quarante!’”

  And now the room is drunken chaos, everyone pounding on the table, hooting and hollering, clapping and whistling. That’s when the band arrives, but no one notices but Johel. The band is nine men and a woman, all of them dripping from the late-February rains.

  “And so dis boy, when he meet dis bay-oo-tiful girl, I make another bet with his maman. I say, ‘Evelyne, he going to marry that girl before it make one year.’ And she say, ‘Not my Johel. She too bay-oo-tiful for my Johel. She say no, she run away laughing. Ti belle fille comme ca!’ And I say, ‘One hun-erd dollars,’ and she say, ‘Okay.’ Now what we say in Creole, we say, ‘Money makes a dog dance.’ Now this dog, he dancing because Johel and I this time we go sixty-forty!”

  Sixty-forty! That had them on their feet applauding, whistling, cheering. “He one real Haitian dog!” shouts Tonton Alphonse, to which the senior partner replies, “He’s one real Yankee lawyer!”

  But Johel Célestin, who is greeting the band in the back and shaking hands with the bandleader and the rest of the band, he’s not listening at all—he’s hardly hearing a word, not thinking of his opportunity to earn sixty dollars—he’s staring into a pair of blue-green eyes set in a sculpted, unsmiling face, the most beautiful face he’s ever seen.

  * * *

  After the party, Erzulie L’Amour wants their money, and Johel doesn’t want to give it to them.

  Not that they didn’t work hard for the money; not that they didn’t deserve it; not that there was a man or woman in the room of any color, constitution, or ethnicity who didn’t feel the rhythm slip into their bones and oscillate there until they grabbed the nearest grateful lady or were gratefully grabbed and headed to the dance floor.

  What you have to imagine is Evelyne Célestin’s sheer bulk, her massive bosom, her broad behind, her huge thighs, all of it shaking like a maraca or a wild animal as the mama tambour beats faster than a hummingbird’s heart.

  What you have to imagine is Johel’s mentor and guide, the gray-haired senior partner, his Charvet shirt soaked with sweat, mopping himself down with a fringe of tablecloth, spinning like a top across the dance floor.

  What you have to imagine is the rhythm slowing and two dozen lawyerly hands venturing down over two dozen rounded and grabbable buttocks of African descent in a slippery one-two, one-two, those Haitian derrieres gliding up and down. That’s what this kind of music is all about when the rhythm gets slow. It’s the kind of music that invites you to explore a little.

  What you have to imagine is Johel sipping a cold beer, his first of the night at his own bachelor party, watching Nadia onstage in her silver lamé dress. Then, late in the evening, Nadia settles herself on a stool, legs crossed, and she and the guitarist offer a little soft troubadour together, to calm the evening down and send everyone out into the cold night warm and happy. The ladies drape their arms around the men’s necks and hang there happily, bodies rubbing up against bodies while Nadia sings Creole love music in her thin, sweet voice. On every table there is a candle, and the flames keep time to the slow music as the wax slips down drop by drop and Nadia sings what she knows about the suffering and sweetness of love.

  When the band is done and the guests are all gone and the waiters have taken off their ties and are eating plates of leftover griot and plantains, Nadia and the guitarist get to fighting. Johel wants to pay them, and Nadia is telling Johel to give her half to her directly because she doesn’t ever want to see or talk with this lying dog again.

  Johel has no problem with that. But Ti Pierre, the guitarist who leads the band, is looking at Johel with laughter in his mouth but menace in his eyes, telling him—Mon cher, mon frère, mon vieux—that he’s the leader of the band and she’s a little folle, if you know what I mean, clearly hoping to resolve this whole situation homme à homme.

  So Johel the contract lawyer, mediator, third-year associate, and champion speller is telling the two of them to work it out between them, and he’s not unaware that Nadia’s green eyes are piercing him like two daggers of contempt. Nor is he unaware that Ti Pierre has scars on his face and hands, the kind you get from knife fights. So he wanders back to the bar to let them work out their troubles, and soon Ti Pierre is saying to Nadia, “Be quiet, woman, or I’ll break your face,” to which Johel says, “Calm down, brother,” and Nadia says, “Break my face, go on” and adds something about his breath, like the smell of Ti Pierre’s mother’s hairy cunt. Then Ti Pierre slaps Nadia hard across the face, hard enough to send her reeling out of her chair and onto the floor, where, crouched on all fours in her silver lamé dress, she glares at the men like a wounded animal.

  Johel is not a small man, but it’s easy to miss that under the jovial layers of blubber. Because he smiles easily and often and chuckles frequently, it’s easy to miss or not understand that he had some unyielding kernel of courage and rectitude—or maybe he didn’t even know he possessed it himself until that moment.

  He says to Ti Pierre, “Don’t touch her again, brother.”

  Here is how calmly he says it: Will you please pass me the salt? Or: And how are you this morning, Fred? But he frightens Ti Pierre. Ti Pierre is a man of the world, a man of experience, and he knows that in this country it is men like Johel who have the power: men who know how to speak the language, who know the law, who don’t speak with an accent. He looks at Johel’s eyes and knows that this is a man who will not forget, will not forgive. Ti Pierre knows that in this country, when the police come, it is Johel who will talk and it is Ti Pierre who will end up in a cell. Life has taught Ti Pierre to be afraid of men like Johel.

  Johel says, “It was a wonderful night. I’ll pay everything I owe.”

  That’s the prudent lawyer speaking, the one who knows the value of settling early, even at a cost to one’s pride, of resolving problems quickly and efficaciously.

  Everything Haitian is always cash business. People who overstay their visas by a decade don’t open bank accounts. Johel has cash on hand for Ti Maurice, cash for the food, cash for the bartenders, cash for the drinks. Thousands and thousands of
dollars in cash. He puts Ti Pierre’s full fee on the table, which Ti Pierre counts and pockets. Then he puts half again more on the table, and he says, “That’s for her.”

  Ti Pierre says to Nadia, “Let’s go.”

  Nadia starts to get up, and when she gets to her feet, she is small and fragile. She has lost a shoe: it has skittered across the nightclub floor. Johel stares at the shoe, its sole scuffed and tarnished. Then he looks at Nadia’s tiny stockinged foot.

  In Creole, Johel says, “Do you want to go with him?”

  “I don’t know,” Nadia says.

  “Let’s go,” Ti Pierre says. “We got Boston tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know,” Nadia says again, looking at Johel, the green eyes pleading with him, looking at him in every way a man wants to be looked at, just once, by a beautiful woman.

  So Johel says, “This money is for you. You can take it and go with him if you want. Or you can take it and leave. If you have no place to go tonight, you can come with me.”

  Eventually the wedding is canceled, and Johel’s mother collects a hundred dollars from his uncle.

  6

  She left almost no trace when she was gone.

  Johel went to work, and when he came home, the apartment was empty. Only a hint of her sweat lingered in his good sheets. A little rum was gone from the bottle. A few dark hairs on the pillow. Either out of politeness or indifference, she left the ivory nightgown he gave her hanging from a hook on the bathroom door. She left no other sign or signal—but how would she? She had no idea how to read or write, nothing more than her own name. It wasn’t a secret where she had gone: a week later he looked up Erzulie L’Amour on the Internet, found they had played a Miami nightclub, called up, and discovered that she had sung there the night before.

  What did Nadia do that first week in Johel’s apartment? She slept, mostly. She must have been exhausted, and she was very young. At first she slept on Johel’s leather couch, where he installed her with a duvet and his pillows; then on Johel’s bed, picking herself up from the couch and putting herself between the sheets. She had so few things of her own: the dress on her back, a small suitcase, and her purse, small and nearly empty. Johel thought it strange that anyone could move across the earth having so little. The only thing that seemed truly hers was a small ceramic figurine, no taller than Johel’s outstretched hand, that she had bought for herself when Erzulie L’Amour played Boston. The doll was painted in the thick furs of Russian winter, lips and cheeks bright red against the cold, staring out at the world with twinkling eyes of boundless sadness. Nadia placed the doll on Johel’s nightstand, the first thing that she would see when she woke up.

  When she woke up, she asked for spaghetti. So he fried her up some the way his mother made it, thick and greasy in tomato paste, with garlic and onions. Then she went back to sleep. From time to time she got up to pee. He had never known a woman could sleep so much. She slept almost without interruption for two full days. Only once did he leave her alone, slipping out to buy some food and then, on impulse, from a little lingerie store on the corner, a satin nightgown, which reached down to her ankles and was worked around the bosom in fine lace—just something soft to sleep in. When she saw the nightgown, she said, “Merci,” as if he had brought her a glass of water when she was very thirsty in the night. She slipped into the nightgown, inserted herself between his fine Egyptian cotton sheets, settled her angular head on his pillows, and went back to sleep.

  Johel watched her sleep, as surprised by her presence as he would have been by the arrival of a fox in his midtown apartment. The few occasions when she left his bed, she watched TV—midday soap operas whose plots she seemed to intuit immediately and whose dramas she absorbed as her own. Then she told Johel the stories of those television dramas as if she had lived them, her story mingling with those stories in a breathless, boring stream of narrative that held him as enchanted as an audience with the president.

  It took almost a week before Johel slipped into his own bed beside her. When she found him there, she rolled over and placed her soft face on his chest. Then Johel did not move more than he possibly could, not even when his arm began to ache or when he started to sweat. He listened to the sound of traffic far below and her soft breathing.

  She had been in Johel’s house ten days when she came to bed naked. She crossed her small leg over his large one and he could feel her hair on his thigh, her small breasts on his chest. Johel had decided in his mind that he was going to save her from whatever she needed saving from. He wanted to be the kind of man who gave her everything and expected nothing; but when he felt the softness of her skin and her gentle breathing on his neck, he kissed her and rolled his big body over hers.

  Only a month. How then to explain Johel’s panic when she was gone, his sorrow, his night terrors, his unreasoning sadness? His thoughts slipping around in circles over and over again until they bumped up against themselves coming the other way round. The nausea? Whatever he thought before was love—that wasn’t love. Only a woman’s sorcery could do this. She must have slipped love powder into his coffee, rubbed it on his body while he was sleeping, kneading love into his muscles and groin and fat. Why would she do such a thing, enchant him and then abandon him? He knew the answer: it was a woman’s nature. Tonton Jean, who knew women like a bird knows flight, had once told him that women carry a sachet of love powder in their purses or hide it in their brassieres, and they sprinkle a dash here and there as needed. That is how women survive in this hard world.

  * * *

  The only love powder she had used had been her story. She told it to him lying naked beside him in bed, her delicate, slow voice sweet in his ears. Later he would lie in bed alone and tell it to himself, the only thing of her that he had left.

  Her first life had been in the village, seven children in the house and enough money to send one child to school—not her. She had known the smell of the other children as they slept all together in the big bed, their little bodies rubbing hot against each other in the sweaty hut. She had known the river and she had known the hill, and she had known every stump and root and stone on the hill, and she had washed clothes on the bank of the river, and she had known hunger always, and she had learned that when you are hungry, sometimes a song can be like food.

  That life came to an end as if she were dead and in her coffin when the man with the mustache came to the village. He had been of the village and he had gone away and he had come back, and now his mustache was thick and waxy and his chest heavy and sweaty and his eyes red. And they took him around to see all the girls of the village, to show him which ones could lift and which ones could sing and which ones could carry, which girl was becoming a woman and had a woman’s high breasts, and when he saw Nadia, the bucket of water on her head, spine erect, singing “Ti kolibri,” he pointed at her.

  The negotiations had lasted an afternoon, and Nadia had prayed that her mother would take the cows from the man and let her go, because she knew there was nothing for her there but that high hill and the buckets of water and the hunger and the song. And the man with the mustache told Nadia that if she came with him, she would sing every night and never carry water again and her hands would be soft and she would have long hair like a blan. In the end, the man with the mustache offered her mother five cows. He had never paid so much for a girl before.

  Now the story was on the ocean in the little boat, when a storm came up. Even the men began to cry because in the black clouds and pelting rain they saw the Baron. So Nadia sang to La Sirene, Erzulie of the Waters, who was so charmed by this maiden’s song that she implored her lover Agwe to let the boat ride on his back a little longer. Nadia came to the coast of a place that the others called Miami.

  This was another life. She didn’t know how much the woman with the belt and the fat man with the golden watch paid for her. Now her story lived in a house with shiny wood floors. She was their restavek, their slave, and they told her that just as soon as she paid off her debt, she could leav
e: step out the door with no money and no language (who spoke Creole but Haitians?) into the vast white emptiness of America. So she stayed. The house was very large and the floors very shiny, and if the floors were not shiny, the woman beat her with a belt; and if the floors were shiny or if the floors were not shiny, the fat man with the golden watch came to her at night and she heard the golden watch ticking against her ear.

  And that life lasted a very long time.

  The fat man liked to make music. He liked to invite his friends some evenings to drink rum, and he would wake Nadia up and make her sing. Then she would come downstairs, and all the men would watch her as she sang the songs she remembered from the village, the fat man playing on his guitar. She had been in the house long enough that she knew the seasons of the plants in the garden, when one of the fat man’s friends took her aside. This was Ti Pierre, asking her if she wanted to come with him. She was tired of mopping the floor and the crack of the lady’s belt and the heavy weight of the fat man riding on top of her at the end of the night. So she said, “I don’t know.” And the man with the mustache and Ti Pierre bargained, and she was sold again. That’s how she became Ti Pierre’s. It was Ti Pierre who taught her to sing with the band, and Ti Pierre who had bought her shiny clothes, and Ti Pierre who taught her—

  All those lives, thought Johel, and still so young.

  * * *

  Later, Johel’s mother, worried for her big, sad boy, insisted that he visit the family hougan in Brooklyn. Here was a man with good understanding of the power of the celestial realm. Johel had known Monsieur Etienne since he was taken as a boy by his mother to visit the dark and cavernous hounfort before the great spelling championship. Then the hougan had prescribed for the young Johel as follows: to bathe in five liters of water taken from three different rivers and mixed with two liters of rainwater, two liters of springwater, two liters of seawater, and a dash of consecrated water from the altar of the church. The hougan had been consulted on all matters of significance since; and Johel’s life had been, under Monsieur Etienne’s guidance, a series of triumphs.