Peacekeeping

by Mischa Berlinski

  Cemetery in Jérémie was a spooky, beautiful place. Not some neatly tended country club of a cemetery, the kind you find back home: The Garden of the Eternal Snooze. Our Lady of Rot and Repose. In Jérémie, the bodies were all parked aboveground, in concrete tombs. The better class of Jérémie family owned a tomb to give their loved ones perennial shelter, but for the most part, the people in Jérémie could only afford to rent a vault for a year or two. When the rental period was concluded, no ceremony at all, the tomb’s owner jacked open the grave and tossed the current occupant out into the cemetery’s high grass and weeds and vines. If there’s still some flesh on the cadaver, they’ll toss on some kerosene and let it burn. That’s that. The cemetery was riddled with these evicted skeletons and skulls. Sometimes a dog trotted off, chewing on a femur. Those days, when the shit started building up between his temples, Terry found it very calming going over there to that cemetery, watching the bodies coming in, the skeletons going out.

  And that morning, she was doing the same thing he was doing. Wandering around the tombs, looking at the skeletons. Maybe she’d been up all night with the drums and Erzulie—she did that. She was in a white dress—how’d she keep it so clean? She had this smile on her face, like she could hear the dead talking too, telling her she was pretty. Some of those graves went back a century. Lot of the graves have padlocks on them so nobody can come and open them up, turn the cadavers into zombies.

  And Nadia is looking at him. Tell yourself all the lies you want, when there’s that thing, it’s there. They ended up sitting on the tombstone of Monsieur Maximilien St. Valois, who lived in Jérémie from 1876 until 1932. How many women had he loved? Father, husband, grandfather, citoyen. Now his tomb was empty—he was gone. No one remembered him. No one remembered anyone who remembered him. Some dog is gonna chew your leg. That’ll be your skull right there. That’s where he was headed, Terry thought. That was his worst fear, to leave this earth never having built something, made something. To be forgotten. He could smell Nadia’s perfume, like wildflowers, and he could hear her breathing, like life. Better build something while you can. Better live while you can. Better love while you can.

  * * *

  What you got to understand, if you think about it a certain way, is that she’s like the judge’s prisoner, and what you got to understand also is that Terry hadn’t always been able to protect the ones he loved. Maybe without the one fact the other fact wouldn’t have been so strong. But memory weighs on present. Maybe if he hadn’t known sorrow, he wouldn’t have been so frightened of sorrow. Now he looks at Nadia and thinks of his sister, her head like a skeleton at the end, as thin as a bird, equally fragile, looking at him with deep, scared eyes that said, Save me. Help me. Make it stop. And what could he do for her but nothing?

  * * *

  There was a place he took her, the Hotel Patience. It must have been a grand old place in the day: a large foyer and a sweeping staircase leading up to little rooms, all sharing a balcony on the Grand Rue. Nowadays there was a pig sleeping on the floor and a blind man sitting alone. That was Emile Sever, and people came to the Hotel Patience because just so long as the gentleman did the talking, Emile Sever would never be able to identify the owner of the high-heeled footsteps.

  First time they were in that little room, the place reeking of old semen and sweat, she starts to tremble. Room lit only by the barest light of flickering candles. Terry can still taste her, like something spicy, can still smell her on his face. He’s watching the mosquitoes dive in frustration at the net. Then her teeth are chattering, she starts to moan.

  And he knew what to do because this was something his sister used to do when they were kids: the fainting … not quite gone, not quite present … like everything she was feeling, even happiness and sadness, was stuck up there in the—he doesn’t know the word, the synapses or something, and some switch in the brain goes off and she can’t stop trembling …

  So what he did was what he did with his sister. He got out from under the mosquito net, and he started to juggle, with whatever was at hand. He started juggling with his shoes and a bar of soap and some other stuff. At first she’s not even looking at him, just sitting under the net, trembling. But then he started dropping stuff, half on purpose and half because he was clumsy.

  It took him a few minutes, but he got her to smile.

  * * *

  Terry wanted me to talk to her. That was all he was asking. Just go and talk to her. He wasn’t afraid to admit that he was frightened. He hadn’t slept in a week, not really: a couple of hours rolling around, four in the morning, wide awake, watching sunrise, his head pounding. Thing was, Terry figured, he was all she had. And now she didn’t want him. And if that were true, she had nothing left. Every instinct he had told him to protect her. There wasn’t much arguing with a feeling like that.

  Terry wanted me to talk to her, but he didn’t even have her phone number. About a week before, her phone had stopped ringing. He figured she’d changed numbers.

  “That’s a sign,” I said.

  “Just go see her. Make sure everything’s okay. Tell her—”

  “Tell her what?”

  “Tell her I’m still here.”

  3

  May is rainy, hour after hour, water tumbling down from the rooftops, making sticky the mango leaves, splashing loudly on the broad banana leaves, sliding down the palms’ ringed trunks. Out of town, people went wet and desolate on muddy roads to dripping mud houses, the women tying plastic bags on their heads. Yellow rivers scattered garbage down the hills. Soaked pigs rooted in the trash. Clothes mildewed. Young and old huddled in doorways and porticos, watching the rain or throwing down dominoes or staring with ruminant patience at the overflowing gutters. The rain washed down the sides of the hills; the topsoil turned to mud and silted the three rivers—the Grand’Anse, the Voldrogue, and the Roseaux. The rivers rose, and the gray-brown waters colored the sea gray. A voilier from Pestel collapsed in the rough seas: seven drowned. A landslide near Les Corberas cut the road to Port-au-Prince.

  With the road cut, there was no way in or out of Jérémie for the poor but the night ferry. It was the breadfruit harvest, and so the people came down from the hills with engorged gunnysacks. The Trois Rivières was late coming out of Port-au-Prince, and so they waited some more, until the wharf was like an encampment of peasants and marchandes interlaced between mountains of breadfruit. The Trois Rivières was almost three days late, and every day the crowds on the wharf grew.

  Everyone would later agree that the boat, which had never been meant to navigate on the high seas, was wildly overcrowded. There had been no plan in the loading of the Trois Rivières. The cargo was all on deck: tens of thousands of pounds of breadfruit, charcoal, waterlogged hardwoods, yams, and rotting mangoes. Nobody knows just how many people were aboard, but under ordinary circumstances the ship transported a thousand passengers or more: some estimated that the traffic that evening was twice that. The passengers arranged themselves on top of the cargo, prepared to sit all night in the open air, in the rain, on the high seas.

  The ship had been scheduled to leave harbor in the early afternoon, but so great was the crowd, and so complicated the project of loading the vessel, that she first attempted to pull out into the open sea just after dark.

  The wharf at Jérémie was short, the harbor had not been dredged in decades, and in the rainy season the high tides washed into shore all the silt that ran down from the mountains. It was low tide. Biting mud held fast the Trois Rivières. The engines whined, and the ship strained—the sound of the engines, survivors would later say, like an ox pulling a plow. The ship didn’t move.

  The captain of the Trois Rivières, a pale-skinned Cuban, made three attempts to pull the ship out to sea and then shut down the engines, and the ship sat at harbor. Soon the mood of the passengers grew surly. The patience of the Haitian peasant is legendary, but it is not infinite. The men and women on this ship had sat on the wharf for days in the rain, then endured the cha
os of the ship’s loading. Few things in life are as enervating as sitting in wet clothes. The captain spoke no Creole, and when he stepped out onto the deck of the bridge, he did not see tired travelers impatient for the journey to begin so that it could soon end; he had no words to explain the situation to his passengers; he saw only a vast sea of angry faces hurling furious epithets in his direction.

  By chance, there was a second vessel in the harbor that evening. This ship wandered the coast of Haiti, delivering its cargo of fifty-pound sacks of cement. The captain of the Trois Rivières contacted the captain of the cement ship, and the two captains devised a plan.

  The cement ship pulled to the flank of the Trois Rivières, and crewmen laid lines between the vessels. Then the cement ship reversed her engines, intending to pull the Trois Rivières off the reef of mud that held her.

  As the ropes grew taught, they produced a high whine, like the buzzing of innumerable bees or static on the radio, a noise that echoed across the waters and into the slums. People as far away as Sainte-Hélène or Caracolie could hear the hempen ropes.

  Aboard the Trois Rivières there was at first a moment of pleased satisfaction as the ship swayed at harbor. Then a bag of breadfruit opened, and the fruit, the size of bowling balls and just as hard, began to bound and skitter across the deck. A woman cried—those were her fruit! Soon the Trois Rivières was inclined to the horizon and the hands of the passengers sought something solid to cling to. Children tried to balance. A wave of laughter swept the boat from stern to tip as it swung out into the harbor, only the rear of the ship still low in the muck.

  Now the Trois Rivières was at a severe angle to the horizon. Now the mothers were grabbing their children. Now the cargo was shifting, and things were tumbling. Now the ropes were extended full-length. Now the engines of the cement ship and the engines of the Trois Rivières droned powerfully. Now there was a noise louder than a gunshot, like the crack of thunder overhead—even in my house on the rue Bayard I heard it. The lines had snapped.

  What happened next happened very, very fast. The Trois Rivières swung back in the other direction. She had been leaning one way, and now she leaned the other way. Nobody aboard had been prepared for this movement. Hundreds of passengers were thrown into the shallow water. Very few could swim.

  * * *

  I was reading on the terrace when I began to hear voices. They were coming down from the hill, some passing at a run, others ambling. I followed the voices in the direction of Hôpital Saint-Antoine, where, at the entrance to the hospital grounds, a woman wearing a short skirt and nothing else lay howling, beating her head slowly and insistently against the ground. Near her a cluster of young girls was inexplicably dancing, and from the interior of the hospital walls emerged a groaning sound, like a car in low gear straining. This was the roar of a large crowd. Soon the only ambulance in Jérémie, a gift from the people of Japan, attempted to part the crowd, and the crowd surged to surround it. The faces surrounding the ambulance flashed red and blue. The driver honked, and still the crowd didn’t move.

  A policeman climbed down from the passenger side of the vehicle. I watched him unholster his revolver, aim roughly in the direction of Venus, and squeeze the trigger. The crack of the shot silenced the crowd, as if someone had depressed the mute button. Then a wave of hysterical laughter swept the throng, which moved to let the ambulance pass.

  There was a powerful smell in the air, of urine and sea salt and ammonia and old sweat. It was the smell of fear. The smell of shit repulses and the smell of sex arouses; so too the smell of fear spooks. Everyone there, whether they had been on the Trois Rivières or had just wandered down the hill to rubberneck, was soon under its sway. I began to sweat myself, a cold, clammy, unpleasant dampness at the small of my back.

  The entrance to the hospital was like a chute or a ramp. Soon I was swept up into the crowd. Some of these people had been separated from their traveling companions in the accident. Now they wanted to get to the hospital as quickly as possible and find their missing. Others had put someone on the boat. I was pushed from the sides and behind. I felt hands on my back and sides, grasping at my feet. Everywhere, I heard voices saying, Blan—blan—blan. The crowd pressed up in a huge mass at the steel doors of the hospital, which were closed and held fast with a steel chain. Then the crowd spilled out to press up against the steel security bars of the hospital windows, and the more athletic young men tried to shinny up the drainage spout to reach the roof. From there they could drop into the courtyard.

  The victims came up the hill on the backs of motorcycle taxis, wedged unconscious between the driver and some Samaritan riding shotgun, legs dangling helter-skelter; others staggered in on their own, clutching scraps of bloodstained shirts to their heads. For some of these newcomers the crowd parted, as if guided by an invisible hand, but others, too weak to press forward, simply recoiled to the margins of the crowd and sat on the ground to nurse their wounds alone.

  I must have stayed on the fringe of the crowd five minutes or more. Two women saw each other: they had lost each other in the accident. They began to dance and sing in a spontaneous thanksgiving, spinning each other around. Next to them a lady cried in an open-throated, unforgettable howl of grief. Angry voices, sorrowful voices, reasonable voices all intermingled incomprehensibly.

  Somebody grabbed my shoulder: somebody was making eye contact with me, talking to me. I couldn’t understand a word. I nodded my head. Then I heard the word “médecin.” The word echoed through the crowd: médecin—médecin—médecin. Hearing the word, a woman thrust a small boy at me. He might have been two. He was wearing a T-shirt and shorts still wet from the sea. The boy saw me and began to cry. I didn’t want to accept the child, but the crowd had seized me and the boy and placed us together. The woman who handed me the child merged back into the throng of faces. The crowd was now maneuvering us toward the steel doors of the hospital. The doors opened a crack to admit us, then slammed shut behind us.

  * * *

  The Hôpital Saint-Antoine is a square of concrete with an open courtyard in the center. There was a nurse in blue scrubs at a counter, writing in a ledger, a look on her face of acute boredom. I have since tried with no success to imagine how she had arrived at that moment—that vast sea of frantic faces peering in at her through the barred windows of the hospital—and produced that face, but here is the limit to my capacity for empathy.

  “This child—,” I began.

  “You need to wait,” the nurse said.

  “This child isn’t mine,” I said. But talking to this woman was like throwing pebbles into the sea. She returned to her ledger.

  The boy in my arms seemed to suffer from no ailment but that he was in my arms and not the arms of his mother. This was enough. He writhed in my arms with surprising strength and wailed as if I were pricking him with a sharp needle. I put him down and he stopped crying. He looked up at me solemnly.

  I leaned over and said, “What’s your name?”

  He looked at the ground.

  “Where’s your mommy?”

  The boy stood there.

  We were standing in front of the open doors of the salle d’urgence, where a doctor, a Haitian, was occupied with a man who had cut his head. On the floor were puddles of coagulating blood. The doctor, who could have been no older than thirty, attended to the wound with meticulous attention. Those waiting to see him sat on the floor or lay sprawled out in the corridors. Many had lost their clothing in the accident: a woman with massive breasts moaned and swayed. Another woman massaged the back of a man—to what end, I’m not sure, for he was dead.

  The boy, for all his unhappiness, seemed to need nothing but his mother. He began to cry again, and I picked him up and balanced him on my hip. He allowed himself to be consoled. I wandered the hospital, bouncing the boy on my hip. I was looking for that person who in Haiti does not exist—the man in charge.

  The wards were small and poorly lit and overcrowded. The patients lay in beds and in the spaces
between the beds, on the floor. There was the sharp chemical smell of carbolic acid and Betadine. Haitians come to the hospital either to give birth or to die. The boy and I walked down the hall and turned left into the maternity ward, with its air of teeming fecundity and rows of fussing, immensely pregnant women. When they saw me and that child, a murmur of laughter arose. I had thought for a moment that one of these women might be the child’s mother. Perhaps he had been playing outdoors and had been overwhelmed by the arriving crowds. But he wasn’t.

  We wandered out into the courtyard. Your brain in moments of stress is meant to work a certain way, and those things that do not move and make no noise are stimuli of lesser importance. So before your brain notices the dead, your brain will see the fat rat scurrying through the grass, and before your brain understands the dead, your brain will see the rosebush, which had no business being in that courtyard but was nevertheless in glorious bloom. Only then does your brain comprehend that the men, women, and children piled in a heap are not shadows on the wall or broken furniture.

  The rat stopped at a Styrofoam box in which had been left behind the remnants of somebody’s dinner of rice and beans.

  Watching a rat eat his supper and confronted with a hill of cadavers, I couldn’t think of what else to do at that moment but call Terry White.

  * * *

  “Nice kid,” Terry said.

  “It’s not mine.”

  “Really?” he said. Terry’s calm was contagious. “That boat was a fucking death trap. First time I saw that thing, I said it was only a matter of time until we’re fishing bodies out of the sink.”

  “Sénateur owns that boat,” I said, repeating the rumor I had heard from the crowd.

  “Fucking Haiti.”

  The judge showed up a few minutes later. Terry had called him on his way down the hill.