Peacekeeping

by Mischa Berlinski

  “I spent my nights at the Hotel Patience also,” the Sénateur said. “Beautiful nights I would wish to stay private.”

  Her breath was nervous as the Sénateur’s thumb caressed her thigh.

  “Tell your husband something for me,” he said.

  Now the Sénateur’s hand was higher. She felt his hand at her center, pressing against her, inside of her.

  The Sénateur said, “I am a rooster. Is Juge Blan a rooster too?”

  Nadia was aware of everything and nothing. Her soul was fleeing her body. She saw a woman trembling and the Sénateur leaning over her, his hand between her legs.

  The Sénateur repeated, “Is your husband a rooster too?”

  She shook her head. Her hips moved back into her chair: she ground against his long fingers. He was inside her. The music in the room was louder. She felt beads of sweat on her back. She could only feel the Sénateur’s fingers and hear his voice. The Sénateur leaned back. He smiled at her—a gentle smile. She saw her dampness on his fingers. The Sénateur put his finger in his mouth and tasted her. Then he reached for his drink.

  “Madame Johel, here’s a lesson in politics for your husband. Tell him losers have no friends. Tell him he wants to fight the roosters, he better win. He seems like a nice boy, your blan. But he’s no rooster. Tell him to leave rooster business to the roosters.”

  * * *

  Nadia went back to the judge the next day. Now the Fear was very close. The thought of the Sénateur’s hands on her thigh or probing inside her nauseated her.

  It was then that she began to beg the judge to abandon his political plans. She had not thought much about them before: they had been to her like his regular proposals to lose weight. These projects had foundered on shoals of deep-fried plantains or guacamole rich with garlic and onions, strips of goat meat sautéed in oil.

  But now she heard his voice and heard “road” and heard “election” and heard “democracy” and heard “the people’s will” and heard “Mandela” and heard “Martin Luther King” and heard “freedom,” and Nadia felt the Sénateur’s fingers like cold snakes sliming the inside of her thigh. She thought of what would happen if the judge learned about the Hotel Patience: he would put her out. Then she would be alone in the high mountains with the loup-garou and the hunger, rain coming, nothing to eat and no place to go. That was the place where the Baron came hunting.

  Only once in her lifetime had she been so frightened—not even when the police had arrested her and Ti Pierre in Miami, because then in some recess of her mind she had known there was Johel.

  No, the precursor to this fear was in childhood. In her village, there had been a boko who knew the recipe for poud’ zombie. He was an old, slobbery man who took as his right the deflowering of all the village girls: nobody dared refuse him for fear of dying and awakening from death in idiot slavery. When she was twelve and blossoming into beauty, she came home from the river with a bucket of water balanced neatly on her head and found the old boko sitting on her front porch. She saw his yellow eyes and narrow serpent tongue flickering around a cavernous mouth, his smell filling the family hut like the smell of old meat.

  Seeing the boko, she had collapsed to the ground, the heavy water splashing down the hill. She had begun to tremble and then to forget, and when she began to remember again, they told her that the boko had not come for her. It was not her time yet. But he would come, oh yes …

  That was the Fear.

  When she first heard the bullets break into her bedroom, and again when she felt the Sénateur’s touch, her first thought had been betrayal. She and Johel had a bargain: he would keep Fear away from her, and in exchange she would be his. The bargain had never been stated, but Nadia had understood it clearly; she thought Johel understood it also. The night the bullets came, she lay under the bed in her underwear and Fear looked at her and fitted her and Johel for mahogany his-and-hers coffins. Fear smiled at her and laughed and said, Child, I’m ready for you. Now, when Nadia thought of the election, she would start to shiver as the Fear seeped out from inside her, carried from viscera to skin by way of high, cold sweat.

  The judge looked at her with generous confusion. Nadia knew that what he felt for her was love. He pulled her against his warm body and she shivered there, and she promised herself that if only he would give up his plans, she would love him too, only him.

  “What’s your problem?” the judge said.

  But Nadia couldn’t find the words to tell him what she feared. “This isn’t your thing,” she said. “Leave this alone.”

  This was incident number one, and then there was incident number two and incident number three and incident number twenty-six, and then the judge said, “Okay.”

  “Really?” she said. “Vraiment vrai?”

  “Vraiment vrai,” said the judge.

  And Nadia remembered her promise and folded herself into his arms, where she became small against his bigness. Her gratitude was like love. Johel would do what he had promised—he would protect her—and she would do what she had promised: she would love him. If there was one moment in which she found happiness with Johel it was then. Happiness for Nadia meant that things were no worse than they had been. She threw her phone into the sea. Sometimes she imagined the phone ringing under the waves, Terry’s calls provoking the curiosity of the gray-nosed fish.

  * * *

  The events of the world have consequences, and from consequences arise new events. Nadia sometimes wondered where things started and where things ended, or whether things ever ended at all, and the world was just a continuous blur of action. The Trois Rivières threw her passengers into the sea, and the judge decided, despite Nadia’s tears, to play politician.

  Nadia thought frequently of the boy the judge found at the hospital. She didn’t know how to swim, and deep water was a particular terror to her. She wondered how long the boy had foundered before hands pulled him out. Had he struggled against the warm water or had he lain very still and floated, as she knew some children will do by instinct? She wondered whether he had been frightened in the blackness of night and water, or whether he found the nothingness soothing. How long had he been in the water? Nadia lay in the darkness of her bedroom at night, the judge asleep beside her, imagining the little boy floating calmly as the engines of the big boat churned and the frightened passengers shouted. She waited for the hands to grab and pull her out of the water too.

  Nadia began to dream nightly of the boat and the sea, dreams of remarkable vividness and power. The boat was headed to New York. All the men she had known were there: the man with the mustache and Ti Pierre, the Fat Man from Miami and the Sénateur; Johel was there, and so was Terry. And she was in the middle between them, and they were throwing the Fat Man’s golden watch back and forth. Someone had told her that the watch was worth as much as a car. Nadia had understood intuitively why someone would pay so much money for something so beautiful; she would have given anything to have such a beautiful thing herself. Nadia loved the intricacy of tiny objects: the minute precision of an earring clasp, or the well-wrought, neatly balanced heft of a chain necklace, or the gleaming, glinting light of color in a sparkling stone. Now, in her dream, Nadia’s tripe twisted in horror as she watched the men throw the watch. It seemed to her a crime that such a beautiful thing should smash on the boat’s deck or fall uselessly into the sea. The men were giggling like schoolgirls.

  Nadia grew enraged at the carelessness of men. She had never known anger like this before. Only a woman knew the value of things; only women knew how hard it was to make things. Men were forever smashing, playing, throwing, shouting, screaming, hitting, cursing. Men broke things. So she ran between the men as they tossed the beautiful watch into the air. She saw it glinting high as it flew. She grabbed at the men, but they were so much stronger, so much larger, and the watch flew higher. She scratched at the men’s faces and kicked at their shins: it was like scratching concrete or hitting stone. The men hardly noticed her, so absorbed were they in t
heir men’s game, and the watch looped and tumbled high in the sky. Why would you throw around such a lovely little thing? Then the boat tipped, and Nadia stumbled. The men laughed. Every night, the watch, arcing high across the sky, fell into the black and empty sea.

  * * *

  We sat in silence for a long time. Shadows had lengthened through the course of the afternoon from nubs at the base of the palms until they were longer than the palms themselves, and the palms were just black silhouettes against the last of the evening’s light. It was warm, but I shivered slightly nevertheless.

  Nadia told me that the dreams of the boat, of men, and of precarious and lovely little things had come every night. She knew that a dream that comes nightly is Bon Dieu or the Loa speaking to you with persistence of important matters, and she visited a lady she knew in Sainte-Hélène who was skilled in the interpretation of difficult dreams. Then Nadia told me that she was pregnant.

  I wasn’t surprised. She had that aureate glow some women achieve in the first flush of incipient motherhood, when Nature, for no reason at all, renders women particularly desirable.

  “Does either of them know about the baby?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Do you know who—”

  I couldn’t finish the question, and she didn’t answer it. I don’t think she knew if it was Terry’s child or the judge’s, or even the Sénateur’s: women in Haiti told stories of homme mystiques who could make a woman heavy just by staring at them. Some women were impregnated in their dreams, and others touched by the Loa.

  A tear ran down her face, and she wiped it away with a casual, almost masculine gesture of her fingertips. I can’t imagine there was a man on the planet who would have been indifferent to this woman’s sorrow. She inspired a silly, hopeless tenderness. “Do you want the baby?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “He’s my passport and my visa,” she said.

  A passport and a visa. What you need at the border. Nothing more precious in the world.

  PART FIVE

  1

  A copper plaque on the wall of the Bibliothèque Nationale “Sténio Vincent” announced that the library had been rehabilitated thanks to a charitable intervention by the Honorable Sénateur Maxim Bayard. The Sénateur had reroofed the library, purchased chairs and tables, and installed a ceiling fan, which, owing to the lack of electricity, hung immobile, cobwebs dangling from the blades.

  I have very few mementos of my time in Haiti—no art, no metalwork from Croix-des-Bouquets, no papier-mâché Carnival masks from Jacmel—but in my wallet I carry at all times my library card. The library consisted of nothing but a reading room that, in the absence of a breeze and under the Sénateur’s tin roof, grew stiflingly hot in the late afternoons, and a small back room where the stacks were maintained. There were some newspapers imported from the capital, none more current than the previous week, and a table dedicated to the poets of Jérémie, the Sénateur’s own book having pride of place. To select a book from the collection, you first consulted the catalog, a handwritten list of titles affixed to the wall with Scotch tape; then you prepared a written request for the librarian. Monsieur Duval was a man of antique vintage, gray-haired, with a pair of reading glasses so thick they might have been bulletproof. He would rise, with a thousand creaking joints, from his chair, where he had been comfortably reading the same volume since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and trundle slowly into the back room. Then you waited. I have many lovely memories of the library. They are not dramatic. There was a young man, a motorcycle taxi driver, reading Les Misérables and a young woman, her baby asleep on the floor, her legs tucked neatly under her haunches, nodding in sympathy to a tattered edition of Le Deuxième Sexe. There were high school students reciting from Le Cid. There was an older gentleman who every morning read from the library’s not insubstantial collection of Latin poetry—the high schools of Jérémie had once taught Latin as a matter of course.

  Père Abraham Samedi was another regular in our ranks. I knew his name from Toussaint Legrand, who had told the judge, Terry, and me of the important role the priest played in local politics. I saw him for the first time as I read Maigret et le corps sans tête and he read, at the adjacent table, Un Américain bien tranquille by Monsieur Graham Greene. He was a tall, thick man in a clerical collar, a coeval of the librarian, with sooty dark skin, holding his book at arm’s length, as if unwilling to admit that he might be ready for spectacles. Something in his manner suggested that a conversational overture would not be unwelcome.

  Thereafter, whenever I drove in the direction of Anse du Clerc, I would stop by Père Samedi’s house. He was usually able to spare me no more than a few minutes from the crush of his duties, but in those moments we would drink a cup of coffee and he would tell me some amusing tale of daily life in the forgotten stretch of the universe that lay on the southwest coast of Haiti between Jérémie and Bonbon.

  This was territory Père Samedi famously patrolled on foot, until his recent bouts with gout, when he had allowed himself to be transported on muleback. Here there was little tin- or thatch-roofed house after little house, interspersed with gardens or small fields. Père Samedi, at one time or another in the quarter century since his return from exile, had slept in every one of those huts, dossing down without fuss on the stone or dirt floor. He was as likely to arrive with a substantial and well-timed present as without: for a family with a new baby, he would have a pair of squealing, healthy piglets, a glossy young goat, or a half dozen chicks; or for a family recovering from illness, a sack of seed, which he imported personally from the capital. I met one family in Anse du Clerc that had tumbled from poverty to bitter poverty by the loss of the ten-dollar diving mask that had formerly allowed the father of the family to set lobster traps. I mentioned this story to Père Samedi, who made a note of it on a scrap of paper. On my next visit to Anse du Clerc, I learned that Père Samedi had replaced the mask.

  Although I had drunk half a dozen cups of gritty black coffee with him, I had not thought us friends. He required a moment each time he saw me at the library to remember me, and once, when I passed him in the marché, where he was buying supplies, he did not so much as glance at me, as if out of my usual context, I had become invisible.

  So it was a surprise when my phone rang just after dawn and a gravelly voice said, “Père Samedi à l’appareil.”

  “How are you, Father?” I said.

  “One maintains,” he said.

  He cleared his throat.

  “Bring your friend Johel Célestin to visit one of these days,” he said.

  “Can I tell him what this is about?”

  “He’ll understand.”

  * * *

  Two days later, the judge, Terry, and I drove to Bonbon to meet with Père Samedi.

  The judge was riding shotgun, and I got into the back.

  “Either of you guys see that moon last night?” I asked.

  It had been a night of almost perfect darkness when a gap emerged in the clouds to reveal, low on the horizon, the full moon. Silvery moonlight reflected off the undersides of the clouds, producing an unexpected dawn, so bright that the palms cast long, straight moon shadows. The dogs awoke and began to howl, the chickens crowed—even the songbirds began to trill. It was the precise opposite, I suppose, of the disturbing moment in a solar eclipse when the midday sun disappears, but no less unsettling.

  “Nadia woke me up,” the judge said. “Spooked her out.”

  “It was pretty amazing,” I said.

  “She calm down?” Terry asked.

  “I put her to sleep.”

  Then he chuckled, his laughter greasy and suggestive, and started to talk about tobacco. What he wanted to know was why a rich, value-added crop like tobacco wasn’t being grown right here. This was tobacco country. Dominican Republic. Cuba. Same latitude, same climate, same soil. So why not here? When he had the opportunity, that was something he wanted to explore, some kind of cooperation on importing some Dominican
tobacco farmers, cigar makers, exchange some skills—why not hand-rolled Haitian cigars? Wouldn’t that be fine, driving down our road, puffing on a big fat Haitian cigar?

  Now we were in front of the Uruguayan military base. There was always a crowd of children and teenage girls loitering there. Sometimes the girls traded favors with the soldiers in the garbage pit behind the base. The enlisted men had no money, but they could pilfer rations and supplies from the base, which the girls gave to their mothers to sell in the market. This was a seasonal traffic: new battalion commanders arrived, industrious and idealistic, from Montevideo, and the skin trade disappeared. By the time the battalion left nine months later, the girls lounged in front of the base unabashedly.

  The judge was in a garrulous mood. “You know these farmers here are eating their seed?” He wanted to talk about seed supplies and fertilizer. “Now, fertilizer—basic agricultural input. Only in Haiti does seed cost more than the agricultural output. You want to know why they don’t have vegetables around—”

  “Do you ever shut up?” Terry said. His face had been drawn since the judge mentioned Nadia’s name. “Could you just give it a rest?”

  The judge looked like a child reprimanded unjustly by an overtired parent.

  Terry said, “What’s the color of my skin? Basically pink and rosy? I’m not Haitian. I can’t vote. If I were from around here, and thank fucking Christ I’m not, you’d have my vote. But could you give it a rest?”

  The judge looked forlorn. I regret now that I didn’t tell him that I found his conversation interesting.

  The airport flashed by on the seaward side of the road.

  “Slow down, brother,” the judge said. “We’ll get there when we get there.”

  “I got to take a shit,” Terry said.

  “Be that as it may, son, you hit a donkey or a kid, I’ll be the Haitian judge who puts you in a prison cell.”

  I couldn’t figure out if this was banter or something rawer: two men, too many hours alone in a car together.