Peacekeeping

by Mischa Berlinski

  At the conclusion of the evening, the Sénateur took his old friend’s hand. The Sénateur was a larger man than Dr. Philistin, and his thick, callused paw swallowed up the doctor’s wiry fingers.

  “Mon vieux, I have been haunted by a dream. I am standing on a hillside watching birds fighting. What could such a dream mean?”

  “I’ve never understood dreams,” murmured Dr. Philistin.

  “I have understood the dream to mean that there are perils ahead. It is for this reason that I wish to ask you an immense favor. I have been to a lawyer and prepared a final testament. May I mention you as a legatee?”

  Dr. Philistin was shocked. He loved the Sénateur, but he had not realized that the Sénateur loved him also.

  “I would be honored,” he finally said.

  I watched Dr. Philistin stand up from the couch where we had been sitting. He told me that the Sénateur had bequeathed him Michel Dumartin’s final painting, the last in the triptych Andrés Richard so fervently coveted. The first painting had depicted the realm of the underworld, the second terrestrial life. This painting portrayed Paradise.

  This was a landscape of heaven. It looked a lot like Haiti, a place of color, light, and shadow. Heaven was a banquet, a table so long it curved around itself like a snake. You could have spent all day looking at that painting, picking out the faces, identifying those lucky enough to eat from the good Lord’s pigs, yams, crabs, and mangoes. A dark-skinned Jesus sat at the head of the table, laughing uproariously at the story Moses was telling. All manner of saints and prophets were eating and drinking, slapping each other on the back, flirting and kissing, dancing to the music of angels, and enjoying a nice long break from all the troubles they had endured below. Adam and Eve were fighting, and I figured out why: Adam’s hand was on Erzulie’s behind. Children played under the big table; a few of them were dancing on top of it. Toussaint L’Ouverture was in the crowd, being served his plate by Napoleon Bonaparte. The table was long enough for ordinary people too, and after staring awhile, I saw the lady who hacked up my goat meat, and the motorcycle taxi drivers who camped out on the Place Dumas, and Micheline, the woman who squeezed our juice. The only face I couldn’t find in that crowd was mine.

  3

  I was drinking my juice and watching a spider devour a fly when Toussaint Legrand showed up one sultry August morning. I had harbored an ambition of working that morning, a project not compatible with the presence of Toussaint on my terrace. I could smell the stench of Lightning, Toussaint’s new cologne, at once spicy and sweet and altogether nauseating. I tried to ignore him in the hope that he would grow bored and go away. I got up and fetched myself another glass of juice, not offering him one. He stared at me somberly. The spider had completed its breakfast, and now it settled into immobility. I picked up my book and began to read, but the words refused to form sentences. When I looked up, I noticed glistening teardrops rolling down Toussaint’s cheeks. Toussaint in tears made me think of ice cream on the sidewalk, the last day of summer, and the mocking laughter of pretty girls.

  Then, in his incongruous, improbably deep voice, Toussaint told me that the Conseil Electoral Haïtien* had published that morning the final ballot for the upcoming election. He had heard the announcement on the radio. Johel’s name had not been listed as a candidate for the office of sénateur from the Grand’Anse.

  “It must have been a mistake,” I said.

  For the first time in our relationship, Toussaint looked at me with the cynical eyes of a grown man.

  A little later, Kay called. She was waiting for Terry and the judge at his campaign headquarters.

  “Come on down, will you?” she said.

  “Is anything wrong?”

  “I just want to see a friendly face.”

  I had seen Jérémie only hours before the anticipated landfall of a Class 3 hurricane, and the town had remained unfathomably calm. There had been no lines to buy water; the families who lived on the banks of the river, which would rise if the hurricane hit and drown them, stayed right where they were. The women shopped, the men played dominoes, and the children went to school in their bright uniforms even as radio forecasters predicted imminent doom. But the townies were right: Hurricane Gilda changed course at the last minute and blew harmlessly out to sea.

  Now the moment was different.

  There was a corner of the Place Dumas where the marchandes who came down from the mountains sat. I bought some mangoes on my way to campaign HQ.

  “A pile of problems today,” said the lady who sold bananas.

  “Always a pile of problems. The good Lord will save us,” said the mango lady.

  “They eliminated Juge Blan.”

  “Juge Blan won’t accept that,” said Banana. “People won’t accept that.”

  “Juge Blan won’t accept that at all,” said Mango resolutely.

  “The Devil’s motorcycle never breaks down,” said Banana proverbially.

  Mango nodded. Then she said, “Juge Blan, he saved me one time.”

  “Didn’t know that.”

  “It’s true, it’s true. Juge Blan didn’t help me, my little one would be in the coffin today.”

  “Didn’t know that.”

  “Juge Blan put money in my pocket when he had the fever.”

  “Didn’t know that.”

  “People will take the streets today for Juge Blan.”

  “The Devil’s motorcycle,” said Banana, putting her bananas back in the basket. “A pile of problems.”

  Campaign HQ, when I eventually arrived, was packed: the usual gang, but others also, people I had never seen before who had come to the office that morning out of solidarity with the judge. The big room with its impermeable cinder-block walls was hot and smelled of old sweat. People had been there since the night before, when the CEH held its press conference.

  I found Kay sitting at her desk, her back to the wall, headphones on, watching a video of blond yogi performing a series of unnatural complications. Kay’s hair was matted with sweat.

  “You startled me,” she said.

  “I wonder how he’s going to get out of that,” I said.

  “I watch this when I get stressed.”

  I sat on the edge of Kay’s desk. She closed her laptop. Her eyes were red-rimmed and tired.

  “Can you believe?” she said. “I heard in the middle of the night. Terry woke me up and said, ‘Kay, they eliminated Johel.’ ‘They shot him?’ I said. I swear to God, that’s what I thought. He was like, no, they eliminated him from the ballot.”

  “Did they give a reason?”

  “Terry said he heard from his guy on the CEH that Johel wasn’t a Haitian citizen.”

  “He told me he never got American citizenship. Just a green card.”

  “Of course he’s Haitian,” she said.

  “And no one can stop them?”

  She said, “Johel said it was legal.”

  “How’s he taking it?”

  She said, “Terry said he’s not going to take it lying down.”

  “Does he have a choice?”

  “I guess he’s going to take it standing up.”

  The ceiling fans succeeded only in swirling the anxiety around the room, producing eddies, ripples, and riptides of unease. We were about to be submerged by a rogue wave when I proposed that we get something cold to drink.

  There was a small crowd milling outside of campaign headquarters. Mid-August in the Caribbean is a month to be endured. The sky was gray like steel. I thought the dog on the Place Dumas was dead, but then it scratched its snout. A small crowd was assembling in front of headquarters. It didn’t take much to get a crowd together in Jérémie—any hint of excitement would do—and Radio Jérémie had already announced that the judge was going to speak later that morning.

  We followed the dusty road to the little bar kitty-corner to campaign HQ. A dozen children shouted, “Blan!” and each time, Kay winced. The bar was a dark place with a bead curtain to keep out the flies, and there was a s
cent of sea salt and sewage in the air. Kay had a drop of sweat on her upper lip. I asked her what she wanted to drink and she asked for a Coke. I ordered one too.

  “Boat’s not here yet,” the waitress said. We’d been waiting for the overdue boat for days. The shelves of every store were empty.

  Kay attempted to order a Sprite, a Fanta, a Cola Couronne, a Limonade, and a Tampico; I asked for Prestige; we settled on a bottle of water, which came to the table warm enough to make cocoa.

  “What does Terry say about this?” I said.

  “Who cares?”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “I look awful.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Yes I do, and you know it. I haven’t slept in two days—”

  She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. She breathed deeply, held the breath a heartbeat, and exhaled raggedly.

  “How long have you known?” I asked.

  “I always knew. I just didn’t want to know.”

  “How did you find out for sure?”

  “He was talking to her on the phone, saying, you know. Two days ago. Saying things.” She looked away and swallowed. “You always think it’s not going to matter, or you’re going to be adult about it all, but when it happens, it does matter. It matters so much.”

  “What does he say?”

  “He tells me that I don’t understand.”

  “And what do you say?”

  “I tell him he’s right. That I just don’t understand.”

  Kay looked at anything but me for a minute. She looked at the refrigerator that wasn’t cold, at the ceiling fan that didn’t spin, at the clock that didn’t tell the time. She looked at her fingernails, which were, despite everything, neatly painted. She looked at the sign on the wall that informed clients that credit made enemies.

  “Maybe you should be thinking of going home,” I said.

  “It’s too hot. The inverter’s broken, we don’t even have a fan—”

  “Home, home. Back to wherever you come from. Back to the Gap and Zara. Not here.”

  Her face was covered in a film of sweat. Little blond tendrils clung to her temples. She seemed so intensely alive, so present in the moment: sometime in the future, when she was showing couples starter homes, I thought, she might even remember this moment, improbable as it seemed, with something like affection.

  “I want to help Johel,” she said. She meant it. She had been building something too. We could hear people chanting the judge’s name out front of headquarters.

  I said, “Have you ever met the guy who owns this place? Ti Blan François? I got to talking to him once. He’s a deportee, he’s been back a decade. I asked him what happened, and he said, ‘I driving drunk and I kill my wife.’ He spent five years in jail for vehicular manslaughter, then got sent back here. You know what he told me? He said it was the best thing that ever happened to him.”

  “Oh, God, that’s awful.”

  “But you know what? The man is happy. He sold his house in Miami, lives like a king here, has a pretty, young girlfriend, just a perfectly fine life.”

  When Kay didn’t say anything, I said, “I don’t know if you want to hear this, but I don’t think I’d count on a man’s conscience to make sure that things work out the way you want them to. And I’m a man. You don’t want to end up like Ti Blan François’s wife, roadkill on the way to Terry’s new life.”

  That came out rougher than I intended. Kay looked a little stunned, and wiped the sweat from her forehead. Some kids came in and ordered a Coca-Cola. The waitress explained that there wasn’t any. Then it happened again a few minutes later.

  She said, “Terry told me today that he’s never going back. I said, ‘What are you going to do? Stay here forever?’ He said, ‘Maybe.’ It would be so much easier if I just knew what he was thinking.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I just don’t get what he sees in her.”

  “He’s fallen in love with some story he’s telling himself.”

  “What story is that?” Kay said.

  “An ordinary man with an ordinary life sees a burning house and hears a child crying and he runs inside.”

  Kay looked at me. She was such a pretty woman when her pale face was reddened by a touch of anger.

  She said, “He didn’t have an ordinary life—he was married to me. Being married to me is wonderful.”

  “I’m sure it is,” I finally said. “You have many charms as a woman. But you’re not a helpless child crying in a burning house. Terry knows that you’re perfectly capable of opening a window and climbing out all by yourself. By the time he showed up, you’d have put out the fire, remodeled the house, and sold it for a profit.”

  * * *

  By early afternoon the crowd filled the Place Dumas. Kids were shinnying up electrical poles to see the judge. Women fanned themselves with scraps of cardboard.

  The crowd was Toussaint Legrand’s doing. It was Toussaint’s job to turn out bespoke crowds on the judge’s behalf, masses of enthusiastic paid supporters. It wasn’t the strangest profession that I came across in Haiti—that was the femmes pleureuses, the women who were paid to weep at funerals. Haitian funerals aimed for a malarial fever of high emotion with god-awful wailing, breast-beating, rending of garments, and eventual hysterical collapse, women carried out of the funeral parlor face-first, writhing and moaning. Toward this end, the pleureuses would amp the emotional temperature up past scalding by sobbing convulsively until a frenzy of mourning spread contagiously through the crowd. It was a gesture of respect for the dead.

  I later learned that Toussaint had paid five hundred young men and women to come and manifest their loyalty to the judge, but there were many more who came of their own initiative. The paid supporters that day were not so very far in their passion from the femmes pleureuses, and the effect on the crowd was the same: men grew soberly angry, but soon the women began to wail. “Amway!” they cried, an untranslatable Creole word that meant something like “Disaster!”

  Here was my introduction to Haitian politics. I had no idea what kind of place Haiti was until I saw that crowd. The intensity of the day reminded me of something I had seen years before, when I attended the funeral of a revered guru in Tamil Nadu. Mourners that day were convinced that by throwing themselves under the chariot conducting the swami to his funeral pyre, they too would escape the cycle of suffering; the police held the crowd back with whips. Both the demonstration on the Place Dumas and the funeral in India produced the same sound, like the vastly amplified buzzing of a hive. On both days I saw something human beings ordinarily keep hidden. Both encounters left me frightened and exhilarated, as such encounters inevitably do.

  Soon the shabby, malnourished crowd was chanting for the judge. They were waving little photos of him that Toussaint had distributed, or green boughs, making a small forest; women banged on pots and pans, the drumming assembling spontaneously into complicated, hectic rhythms. They chanted, “What we want, is to vote.” Women were dancing, singing, clapping.

  I don’t know how long we waited before the judge and Terry drove up in the judge’s black SUV. This was the moment the crowd had been waiting for. Now the drumming came to a crescendo, and the wailing intensified. I noticed that I was grinding my teeth as I watched the judge get down from his car, the crowd surging around him. “Come on,” I said to myself. Johel was in a dark suit, Terry in his uniform. At first the judge looked pleased by the crowd, waving and smiling, but then he seemed frightened as people pressed so tightly against him that he couldn’t move. Terry put his arm up, and the judge took a step, and another. Still, it took him almost ten minutes until he could work his way across the street.

  When the judge and Terry were finally inside HQ, the dark room was filled with light as the flash of one cell phone camera exploded and then another.

  Terry came and stood beside me. His beefy face was flushed. He was almost shaking with adrenaline. He
was bouncing on the balls of his feet.

  “God damn,” he said. “You ever see something like that?”

  “Kay’s looking for you,” I said.

  He blinked, as if startled by the name. He looked around the room, through the doors of the HQ, where the crowd was seething in a mass. It wasn’t like a person, that crowd, or like a thousand people. It was just its own kind of thing.

  “That man is a rock,” Terry said. “What you got to understand is, that man has some big-ass balls. We’ve been preparing for this for weeks.”

  “Why’d they do it?”

  “The way Johel’s guy heard it, the Sénateur paid the head of the CEH.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “We’re headed to Port-au-Prince this afternoon. You know he’s not alone in this.”

  “And what about—Nadia and Kay?” It seemed almost wrong to say their names in the same sentence.

  “They’re coming too,” he said.

  “Both of them?”

  But I don’t think Terry heard me over the roar of the crowd. Johel had stepped out onto the upstairs balcony.

  * * *

  “We’ll get there,” the judge finally said. “We’ll get there.”

  I submit that there is a natural sympathy between certain languages and certain forms of speech. Sibilant, formal French is certainly, in my experience, the language of seduction and diplomacy, the language of lies; bouncy Italian, with its diminutives, is ideal for conversation with children. Attic Greek does triple duty as the language of epic, tragedy, and philosophy. I would go into battle with any commander who spoke Latin, so brutal and so punchy; and I can’t really imagine why anyone would ever wish to write a novel in anything but English, with its massive vocabulary and remarkable ability to leapfrog effortlessly between the lyric and the vulgar, the raw and the fucking sublime.

  But if I had to harangue a crowd, I’d do it in Creole.

  There was to Creole a compression of sense and thought, a pithiness, a violence that rendered even tongue-tied Haitian orators compelling—and in the hands of someone who could really talk, it was superb.