Peacekeeping

by Mischa Berlinski

  Monsieur Etienne was now in his late eighties, and from early morning until first starlight he accepted visitors who gathered in the anteroom to his professional chambers as he counseled, consoled, advised, and cured those in need of change of fortune, those who sought to win love, or those who sought to escape love’s curse. His face was lined, as if by the daily accretion of sorrows his profession obliged him to absorb. His room was lit by precisely forty-three candles. The raw white rum that Monsieur Etienne spilled on the floor to please the various thirsty members of his pantheon burned Johel’s eyes. On the wood floor of the apartment, the two ladies who served as Monsieur Etienne’s acolytes had chalked in intricate swirls the veve of the great lord Damballah, a pair of snakes whose intertwined forms explained the most profound mysteries of the universe, if one had eyes to see and sense to understand.

  When he had heard enough of Johel’s sad story to understand it was a matter of love, Monsieur Etienne spoke at length in soft Creole. Monsieur Etienne didn’t have a quorum of teeth left in his mouth, and the words went to mush somewhere between palate and lips. Johel had trouble understanding him in ordinary circumstances, but when Monsieur Etienne’s red eyes fluttered behind his eyelids and his body trembled and the spirit came down to talk through Monsieur Etienne’s dried-out lizard tongue and his thin, drooly lips, it was anyone’s guess, really, just what Ogoun was trying to say. Even the acolytes were confused, the fat lady saying that love was like a blessing, and the other lady, who was thin and seemed to Johel generally more sensible, suggesting that love was like a curse. Johel’s sorrows had not impeded the acuity of his legal mind, and this seemed to him a significant distinction, but both acolytes were agreed that the remedy to Johel’s sorrows could be obtained, Ogoun and the good Lord willing. Johel would be freed of love, Ogoun said, if he could offer Ogoun some trace of her presence.

  At first Johel presented the long dark hairs he gathered from his pillow. This proved nearly disastrous because only after the lampe had been lit, only after Monsieur Etienne had implored Saint Jacques, only after the libation had been spilled, did one of the acolytes think to ask Johel about the hair. Elaborate discussion ensued, and soon both acolytes were laughing at the innocence and stupidity of men. They very nearly had united Johel for life with some anonymous impoverished woman who had sold her hair once upon a time to make the extensions that now drifted down Nadia’s back. “That lady, she’s broke and bald!” the fat acolyte said, eliciting from Monsieur Etienne and the thin acolyte choking squawks of dried-out laughter. When Johel presented the long nightgown he had bought for Nadia, the acolytes ran the cloth between their assessing fingers. They knew from the lace and satin and embroidery right to the penny how much such an object costs. But for the magic to be effective, Monsieur Etienne was obliged to pose intimate questions. Had the lady obtained her pleasure in this item? he asked. Johel affirmed that she had, recalling the nightgown slipped up above her slender waist as she ground herself down onto him, her eyes closed. But Monsieur Etienne leaned close to Johel and cautioned him that the power of the celestial realm was infrangible and unforgiving. He spoke to Johel as an older man speaks to a younger man. He told Johel that he was the father of seventeen children and had known more women in his lifetime than waves break on the shore, and still he hardly knew when the pleasure in a woman’s body was genuine or had been feigned—such was the malign trickiness of women. You never knew how fully you had possessed one. Now there could be no mistake.

  And Johel recalled the green eyes set in the angular face, and her rapid breathing, and the tensing of her hands on his chest; how her body had paused and gathered strength; how her thin musical voice had made a sound almost like a song. So he said yes, this was the lady’s nightgown.

  Monsieur Etienne began to look unwell. His head rolled alarmingly from side to side. His breathing was shallow. Johel began to sense that strange tingling in his skin that always accompanied the arrival of Ogoun. The acolytes began to chant, “Open the door! Open the door!” Then the aged prophet sat upright, his yellow eyes commanding, like lights in fog.

  Ogoun was a warrior, a being born to command, to plunge into the fray, sword in hand. He feared no mortal nor no thing divine. Now he surveyed the room into which he had been peremptorily summoned. With eyes that saw all that has happened and will come, he regarded Johel.

  The acolytes said, “Hail, Ogoun! Master of the snake!”

  Ogoun said, “From the place of lightning and darkness I come from the sleep that is not sleep to see a man who will be great and not great.”

  Johel was never sure where Monsieur Etienne ended and Ogoun began. Some part of him always wondered, until just the moment when Ogoun was present, whether Monsieur Etienne was nothing but a canny old showman. But when Ogoun was present, his doubts were silenced.

  Ogoun said, “Black clouds gather fast and wash away the hillsides. Water rises and drowns the women. Trees will come across mountains and fish will live on land. No man walks who can stop you. You are the wave that sweeps and washes clean the shore.”

  Johel said, “I’m here, Ogoun—”

  “—for the hummingbird, the bird of love, who never stops flying, never sups from the same flower twice.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Put money on the table.”

  Johel pulled out his wallet and placed a hundred-dollar bill on the table. Ogoun stayed silent, staring off into the distance. Johel added another. His mother always said, “Good magic is expensive.” Then Johel added a final bill, and Ogoun said, “We can help you.”

  The procedure that followed was lengthy, and when a month later there was still no trace of Nadia, when his heart was still like abraded flesh, Johel called Monsieur Etienne on the phone to complain. Patience, the older man advised, patience. There exists the time of men and the time of spirit: there are no clocks or calendars in the celestial realm.

  * * *

  The powerful beings who had taken possession of Johel’s amorous dossier required a full year to act. Then she called. She was in jail in Dade County. She had been arrested together with Ti Pierre and two other members of the band as they went up north from Miami; dogs smelled the cocaine in the trunk. This was magic surely of the most powerful order. How many times had the band driven north with no problems whatsoever? How many dogs had sniffed the car and smelled nothing?

  What Johel thought on his way down to Miami was this. He thought he’d send her back to Haiti and he’d be free. For months, he had dreamed about her every night, rolling over in his sleep and moaning with sorrow and pain—and then the dreams had stopped. He’d started dating: nice women, professional women, women who understood the kind of life a man like Johel needed. Once, he’d even gone on vacation with a lady. The two of them went to Paris, and for five days Johel didn’t think once of Nadia or her green eyes, just thought how nice it was to be in Paris, eating fine French food and seeing the museums. A friend told him that Jennifer McCall was engaged, and he sent her a card, wishing her all the happiness in the world. She wrote back, graciously wishing him the same.

  Then, when he saw Nadia in the visitors’ room in a prison jumpsuit, he knew he was lost to her forever. He knew that nothing mattered more to him than those eyes. He felt the magic with which she had ensnared him throb in his veins. Johel saw her delicate, almost childlike face and he knew that some prison spell would simply kill her: one day she would close her eyes and her soul would slip away. Johel remembered stories of the days when Haitians were slaves. There was a tribe from Guinée—his mother had told him, her mother having told her, stories like this one handed down through the Haitian generations—who when the chains were locked on, simply died. A sob, a moan, and then the overseer found the bodies of these strong men and lithe women in the cane fields. That was in Nadia’s blood—and it was in his blood too.

  When she saw Johel, she did not cry. Her restless green eyes roamed across his swollen face. He knew that she had no one in the world but him. So he called a ma
n whose business card read “Criminal Law” and wrote a check, and then he waited. The law is like this: there is the sea, and there are currents in the sea, and only an expert sailor knows the deep currents where the real force and energy of the sea dominate. Only an expert sailor knows how to navigate the hidden shoals and reefs of the law, knows how to find safe harbor even in a vicious storm. The man with the business card made a deal. In exchange for her cooperation and on account of her youth, she will be deported. Nothing else.

  When Johel told her this, she didn’t understand. Then she did, and now, for the first time, she began to cry. She had not cried when the police stopped her and Ti Pierre; she had not cried when her cousin called from Haiti the year before and she learned that her mother, the lady who had sold her across the waters, was dead. Nothing brought the water to her eyes until she learned that Johel was sending her back to Haiti. For her, Haiti’s the prison: the ocean is a wall, the hills are bars, the guards are everywhere. And she will be alone. Nothing frightens her more. Nowhere is life harder than her Haiti, not even here in some Florida prison. She looks at Johel and sees in his smile the cruelest betrayal.

  She looked at Johel and saw that he understood nothing at all.

  And so she sat in the chair across from Johel and cried until Johel did understand. Then he didn’t think: he made the most important decision of his life as naturally as breathing.

  7

  The others drifted off, one by one or two by two, until by the end of the evening it was just us Jérémie folk at the table: Terry and Kay, Johel and Nadia, and me. We were like members of some secret society, bound together by geography, intrigue, gossip, and isolation. It felt natural that we would finish the evening just the five of us.

  I don’t know what prompted me to ask Johel if he was still interested in running for the Haitian Sénat. “No,” he said. “That’s not right for me.”

  “So what made you change your mind?”

  The judge reached out for his wife’s hand. “I guess I just don’t want to shake all those hands.”

  “Bullshit,” Terry said. “You just pussied out.”

  “Meow,” said the judge.

  Kay laughed.

  Terry said, “We got to do this thing, Johel. Just for the road. That’s all I’m saying. Just for the road.”

  “You seemed pretty set on the idea that day at Anse du Clerc,” I said.

  “Rum and sun,” he said. “Just rum and sun, messing with my brain.”

  “I know that story,” Kay said. “There was this time in college—”

  “Like a couple of kings,” Terry interrupted. “One day—one fine day—we’ll drive down that road and we’ll be like a couple of kings. Then when you and me—when we’ve got just about six marbles together rolling around upstairs, when we’re sitting in the nursing home and the nurses are changing our shitty-ass diapers, I’ll look at you and you’ll look at me, and we’ll just grin. Because we got that road built.”

  Johel inhaled, started to say something, then stopped. His eyes glanced down at his wife’s hand. She was trembling very slightly, as if feverish.

  Kay said, “Honey, what’s wrong?”

  “This is no game,” Nadia said.

  “Of course not, of course it’s not a game,” Kay said.

  “For you this all some funny game. This some funny game you play, and if you win, you feel nice in your heart, and if you lose, you say, ‘Too bad.’ But you don’t know Haiti. Haiti is no funny game.”

  Johel said something to Nadia in Creole. His voice was too soft for me to understand. She shook her head.

  “She’s tired,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”

  Kay said, “Don’t talk about her like she’s not even here, Johel. If she’s tired, she’ll say she’s tired.”

  “Kay—,” Terry said.

  “Kay what? Am I too tired also? Is that what you want to say?”

  “Maybe we’re all a little tired,” I said. “I know I am.”

  “Amen,” the judge said.

  Terry said, “Listen. This is a decision, obviously this is a decision you guys got to make by yourselves. But I want to say one thing.”

  “You—,” Nadia said.

  “Just listen to me.”

  “Where we gonna go now?” she said. “You tell me where. Where I gonna go now?”

  “Just listen to me.”

  “We all listen, listen, listen you. We don’t want to listen you no more.”

  “Let him talk,” Johel said.

  “The only place we go now is dead,” she said.

  Terry ran his fingers through his hair. He said, “If this is about security, I will be with Johel every step of the way. Just listen to me. Haiti’s no game, but I’m not playing. Kay, you tell her—you tell Nadia that when I make a promise, I keep it. And I’m promising Nadia right here and now, win or lose, that she’s going to be just fine.”

  “That’s true,” Kay said. “Nadia, you should know that. What Terry is saying is true.”

  “What I’m saying is you either shit or you get off the pot,” Terry said. “Don’t just sit there squeezing.”

  “Thank you, Terry, for that beautiful image,” Kay said.

  “All I’m saying is that if you’re going to do this thing, do it. You’re not going to get a chance like this twice. Believe me, I know. And I want you to think long and hard how you’re going to feel in twenty-five years, you come back and the people are still dying and there’s still no road, and you think, Oh, I could have done that.”

  The judge started to say something and stopped, then started to say something else and stopped again. He looked at his wife, whose eyes tenaciously sought the floor.

  As we were leaving, Terry reached for the check.

  “It’s on us,” he said.

  It had been understood that we would all share the cost of the meal, with its rich food and many bottles of good wine. One by one the other guests had offered to contribute and Terry had waved them off. Now Terry made a gaudy, immodest gesture of pulling his credit card out of his wallet and presenting it with a flourish to the waiter. The pleasure he took in our thanks thereafter was evident: he had switched for the evening from cigarettes to cigars, and he puffed grandly as we shook his hand, his ruddy face enveloped in great clouds of Cuban tobacco.

  I looked at Kay. She seemed delighted by the gesture, by her husband’s audacity, by the story it told of their success and generosity. “It’s our pleasure, really,” she said when Johel protested. “The only good thing about having a birthday is taking your friends out.” When Nadia thanked her, she said, “We’re just so happy you could come, honey. We love you and Johel so much.”

  Where had that warmth and fondness come from, that sudden transformation?

  It had come from money.

  PART THREE

  1

  UNPOL is the acronym for United Nations Police, sometimes also called CIVPOL, or Civilian Police; and as the acronyms suggest, the UNPOLs occupied some nether ground between civilian employees of the Mission and military units like the Uruguayans. The UNPOLs came to work dressed in uniforms—the uniforms of their national police force—but unlike the soldiers, they were in Haiti by choice.

  Any nation can contribute a police officer to a United Nations Peacekeeping unit: just how many police officers a nation will contribute and to which mission is part of the intense and often inscrutable politics of the UN in New York. There is a lot of arm-twisting involved, and nations heavily invested in the outcome of a mission, as the United States is heavily invested in the success of the Mission in Haiti, will put lots of behind-the-scenes pressure on nations like Senegal or Sri Lanka to muscle up some manpower. (At one point, Senegal had 150 policemen in Haiti. The United States, by way of comparison, had 45.) More or less, the deal between the United Nations and the contributing nations is this: the contributing nation will continue to pay an individual police officer’s salary back home, but the UN will pay his housing and travel, plus a per d
iem and bonus for hazardous duty.* The UN, however, is generous in its assessment of expenses, and for police officers from poor countries, the expense money will often outstrip by far their salaries back home. So with frugal living in Haiti, cops from Burkina Faso or Sri Lanka or the Philippines, living six to a room and eating nothing but Top Ramen from the PX, can save quite a boodle on Mission. Policemen from the States, on the other hand, are often reluctant to head off to Haiti, so the base salary offered by the State Department through its contractors is significant: this, plus the expense money and hazard pay, is what enticed Terry White to Haiti. Every contributing nation has its own method of selecting UNPOLs. Qualifications are, professionally speaking, minimal: five years’ experience in law enforcement, basic physical fitness, a health exam, and working knowledge of one of the official languages, which in the case of the Mission in Haiti were French and English. UNPOLs from poorer nations tended to be at the end of their careers, assigned either as the capstone of long service or, rumor had it, as a result of bribery and corruption back home. Competition for a UN job could be quite intense. One of the ironies of the UN system is this: there are Haitian policemen serving all over the world as UNPOLs themselves, monitoring and mentoring law enforcement officials in places like Congo and Burundi, even as Congo and Burundi send their policemen to serve in Haiti.

  * * *

  When Terry White first came to Hades, he had an interview with the personnel office in Port-au-Prince. The guy who conducted the interview was a pygmy—no kidding! That’s the way Terry told it. From the contingent of Congo. He was perhaps five feet tall, with enormous glasses and a face as wrinkled as a walnut. He spoke very slowly, and whatever Terry said provoked a copious round of note taking. The interview lasted ten minutes.