The judge rubbed his eyes, thinking, Young birds? Fly?
“And the birds, not all of them understood that you get to a certain point on that lake, you got to keep flying. You get past the halfway point, it’s shorter to wing it on over to the other side. Some birds don’t know that, they get tired, they want to fly back where they came from. But now it’s too far for them. On the way back, they fall into the lake. That’s where we are now, brother. We’re just about midway over that lake. And when all you see is water and your wings are tired, that ain’t the time to stop flapping.”
The judge was too tired to argue. He said, “Doing my best,” and got out of the car.
The SRSG was waiting for him in the foyer of the house. Ceiling fans stirred breezes down long white corridors.
“It’s good that you’re here,” the SRSG said. “I’m grateful that you’ve made time for me.”
The SRSG was small, an elegant man, lithe and controlled. The judge noted his handsomely groomed fingernails.
“Let me show you the place,” said the SRSG. The house was only a rental, but the SRSG took pride in it nevertheless. He led Johel from room to room: the drawing room, the gazebo, the music room, the dining room, on whose walls hung portraits of great Haitian statesmen. From time to time he pointed out a feature of the house—a picture on the wall, a sconce, the high arches—and the judge would nod appreciatively.
Eventually the SRSG led Johel to the dining room, where a table had been set for two.
“May I offer you a drink?” said the SRSG.
“Just water,” the judge said. “If you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” said the SRSG. “It’s certainly the easiest thing I’ve had to deal with in days.”
The SRSG chuckled wryly, as if to suggest that the riots, the seizure of CEH headquarters, and the paralysis of the nation were only minor inconveniences. He poured the glass for Johel with his own hands, his manner suggesting that he was both humble and proud of being so. Then he invited Johel to the table, which had been set with white linen.
“I was once a political man myself,” the SRSG said. “I was a candidate for the Parliament of Sweden three times.”
“Did you win?”
“Let’s just say I survived the experience. My wife likes to say that I’m too honest to be a politician. I lost all three times.”
The judge said, “So you entered diplomacy instead.”
“I have found honesty remarkably successful in my line of work. It’s so rarely employed that it stuns everyone.”
A waiter came in with a shrimp and avocado salad set in elegant geometrical patterns on a pair of small plates. The judge waited for the SRSG to reach for his fork, then reached for his own.
“I should thank you,” said the SRSG. “There had been talk of moving into a Mission reduction phase. I suppose now we’ll be able to fight that off another year. From a budgetary perspective, this couldn’t have been better timed.”
“You are honest,” said the judge.
“Too honest, my wife says.”
“Mine just complains that I’m too fat,” said the judge.
“It sounds like she and I share the same vice of speaking our minds.”
The SRSG chewed delicately and then continued.
“It’s a fine balance. If this country is too peaceful, they will eliminate our Mission. And if this country is too disorderly, I will be accused of incompetence. Neither is optimal.”
“Optimal for whom?”
The SRSG made his special noise, soothing, like the purring of a cat.
“For me! For me, of course! The president called me this morning. He wants to storm the CEH headquarters, and he wants logistical support from the Mission. I said, ‘Mister President, allow me to achieve a peaceful resolution to this crisis.’ And if I can’t, I’ll let him use my Brazilian APCs. Then he’ll owe me something. For now he wants something from me. The Americans want this to wind down calmly, I don’t know why, and now I have something to offer them also. All of this is very, very good for me.”
“I see why you didn’t make it in politics,” said the judge.
“I’m too honest.”
“These shrimp are rancid.”
“You see how lovely it feels to let an honest word escape your mouth?”
“I prefer fresh shrimp to truth.”
“I’ll let the cook know that you weren’t happy,” the SRSG said.
“Be careful, or she’ll put poison in your morning coffee,” Johel said. “Our Haitian ladies can be temperamental.”
The SRSG allowed himself a smile, but now his face grew grave. The judge had all his life felt that the world of men was divided into two categories, the serious and the frivolous, and he had endeavored always to ally himself with the serious. Now he wondered in what camp the SRSG placed him.
“You might be an honest man also,” the SRSG said. “The essential thing for an honest man is to know it, and to adjust his behavior accordingly.”
Johel was silent. Through the windows, he could see a garden, and in the garden, a gardener clipped roses.
“This situation cannot continue,” the SRSG said.
The judge was startled to find the conversation come around so directly to essentials.
“My colleagues and I—”
“Your colleagues and you are running a foolish, grave risk. I invited you here today to tell you that you will lose. You must choose how you wish to lose. I say this as an honest man to another honest man.”
“We have an honest grievance.”
“Take your honest grievance to an honest judge, if you can find one, and win an honest verdict. Then enforce it. I didn’t say that you were in the wrong—I said that you were going to lose. And it’s a terrible shame if Haiti loses a man like you. I saw you on television yesterday, and I said to myself, ‘Here is a man who can help this country. So full of ideas. So mature.’”
“Some might say that the place for such a man is in government,” the judge said.
“Yes, if you could win an election, but they won’t even allow you on the ballot. They will never allow you on the ballot.”
“How can you be so sure of that?”
“My office is on the top floor of the Hotel Christopher. I have a view that extends to the sea—it might well be the broadest view in Port-au-Prince. Just from looking out the window, I can see whether there is smoke in Cité Soleil, if the airport is open, if the president’s limousine is parked at his mistress’s house, or if he has slept at home with the First Lady. And so I know before he knows himself if the president is in a good mood or a bad one.”
The SRSG leaned forward. “If I could, I’d make you president of Haiti tomorrow—I would. That’s how certain I am that your heart is in the right place. I think Haiti would be a better place for a man like you in power. But I don’t have that power.”
“I don’t want to be president,” said the judge.
“I know you better than you know yourself. You have a presidential heart.”
“I want to build a road.”
“And I thought you were an honest man.”
The judge watched the gardener take a towel from his pocket and rub the sweat off his face. “What do you want from me?” he asked.
“Peace. I want you to do what you have to do, and relinquish the CEH headquarters. I want you to tell your protesters to go home. I want schools to open and the ladies to sell their mangoes and spaghetti in the markets, and I want those children to stop throwing rocks.”
“And what will you do for me?”
The SRSG made his special noise. Buying rugs in Isfahan, he had found it an effective way to commence negotiations; it suggested that he was a connoisseur of rugs and well acquainted with their market values.
“We’ll let you come round to our side of the desk, see the world from on high. We’ll establish a commission of the best and the brightest on electoral reform, and we’ll need a chairman, someone honest. The chairman will find a place o
n the payroll of the Mission, and his report will be submitted to a grateful president, who will use all of his powers to see that its recommendations are implemented.”
“Will I be on the ballot?”
“That remains in the hands of the current, legally constituted authority.”
The judge understood the diplomatic subterfuge.
A waiter came into the room to clear the table. He was a dead ringer, Johel thought, for his Tonton Jean. Johel hadn’t seen Tonton Jean since his bachelor party. They said that in the last few years he didn’t recognize anyone, with the Alzheimer’s and all. But Tonton Jean in his day would have known just what advice to give his nephew: he’d had an instinctive, canny shrewdness when giving advice to others, at sharp odds with his notorious inability to manage his own affairs. Johel studied the waiter’s face as if Tonton Jean could incarnate himself in this stranger, returned to vigor across time and distance. The waiter’s blank-faced stare of practiced servility gave away nothing at all, but Johel knew that this man went home to his wife and children bursting with the opinions he had concealed throughout the day, then entranced the neighbors with brilliant mimicry of the powerful men who dined in the SRSG’s private dining room.
“Will you excuse me?” the judge asked the SRSG.
“To your left.”
The bathroom was just down the hall, the walls decorated with paintings of women in the market. A commission, the judge thought. Now that might be enough. Enough to let everyone stand down with honor. Enough to look himself in the mirror.
The judge opened his fly and pulled out the gavel. He knew (the SRSG hadn’t needed to mention it) that the money would be more than decent—and beyond this commission, there would be others. That’s the way the system worked. He felt an almost giddy sense of relief. The SRSG had been right, he reckoned: he was an honest man, and truth be told, he had wanted a way out. He’d gotten himself in too deep—who knows how these things happen? Blessed be the Peacemakers, for theirs is the Kingdom—
In the otherwise immaculate toilet of the SRSG’s guest bathroom there was an immense turd, eight inches of muscular excrement, tan in color, formed like a submarine, a perfect specimen.
The judge, fastidious about all things fecal, flushed the toilet. The turd rolled slightly to one side and settled back into place, a sturdy bark in unruly waters. The judge pissed into the toilet (he could hold back no longer) and flushed again; and again the turd, fine craft that she was, rode out the water’s blast.
This, the judge reckoned, was the kind of turd that required breaking up. He looked for a toilet brush. There was none. Would the household staff have dared to crap in the SRSG’s guest toilet? Unlikely, but surely the SRSG himself had a private toilet in which to do his business. In any case, this turd was almost as large as the SRSG himself.
The judge tried flushing the toilet a third time. The turd began to move along the toilet’s floor, like a jellyfish drifting, and then disappeared from view. The judge reinserted his manhood in his pants—and the turd came swimming back into the bowl.
And the judge knew: no matter who had produced this turd, it was now his. There was no flushing away this fact: this turd was on him. No matter who was its author, he would be blamed for this turd. And tonight at the waiter’s house, the neighbors would laugh as the waiter who looked like Tonton Jean told how the judge had eaten the SRSG’s rich food, been made a fool of by the silver-tongued blan, and left behind the turd of the century for the servants to clean up.
The judge knew that only by defiance could he escape the SRSG’s trap. Only by walking out now—head high, proud, independent, free—could he escape that turd’s shame.
6
The next morning, very early, first sun slanting across the hotel room floor, Nadia curls naked in the judge’s arms. The judge breathes in her smell. He feels her tongue, quick and agile, graze along his lip. She is weightless, like a bird. Her shallow breath. His thick hands on her smooth skin. She sighs. He slips inside her and the room is filled with yellow sunlight, so strong the judge shuts his eyes.
Afterward Nadia says, “You can’t stop now.”
She has been thinking, calculating. She senses the child, the precarious little thing inside of her: its presence is not yet weight, but heat. She still dreams at night about the men and the golden watch. Sometimes the Sénateur comes to her in the night, and she can feel his cool breath, hear the ticking of the watch. Sometimes Ti Pierre comes, and she can feel his heavy hands holding her down, the watch’s clasp scratching her back. She sees the watch sinking in the water.
“This is all I want,” the judge says. His voice is languorous.
“I know,” she says. “But they won’t let us stop now. There was a moment—”
“We could go back.”
“To where?”
It’s the same problem, the eternal problem: a passport and a visa.
“We could go away,” he says.
Nadia knows from her dreams that the wheel of possibility has turned. “We can’t.”
“We could have everything,” he says.
“Only if we win.”
The judge runs his hands over her shoulders, amazed as always by the knots of marbled muscle under her smooth skin.
“You are the wave,” Nadia says. “Remember what you are. The wave that sweeps and washes clean the shore.”
The judge thinks, Or breaks, crashes, and is heard no more.
* * *
The airport was closed, and Kay was trapped in Jérémie until it opened again. So, at my invitation, she dropped by the Sénateur’s mother’s house daily, sometimes having breakfast with my wife and me, sometimes spending a quiet hour in the afternoon reading and dozing in the hammock, and almost every evening, eating with us.
I admired Kay’s courage. She never came by the house unless she was carefully groomed, with a bright, false smile on her painted lips. One day she made us a cake, and the next day she spent the morning chopping fruit to produce a salad. Jérémie had remained more or less tranquil throughout the crisis, but there had been a few moments of disorder: the day before, a few dozen of the judge’s supporters, inspired by the events in Port-au-Prince, had decided to seize city hall. They had been rebuffed by the police with tear gas. Kay nevertheless came zipping up the hill to our house on a motorcycle taxi.
“If I stay home and just stare at the walls, I’ll go insane,” she said.
My wife had just left for work, and Kay and I decided to make a second pot of coffee.
“Terry told me they’re almost out of money,” she said.
“You guys are talking?”
“We’re texting,” she said. “Andrés Richard told them he’s not paying for anything else until he sees some results. Terry said that Johel came out of the meeting with the SRSG all fired up. But last night he started talking about sending everyone home. Then he started shivering and vomiting and saying he couldn’t breathe.”
“Maybe it’s over,” I said.
“I wouldn’t mind if it were.”
The coffee was ready. By now Kay was comfortable enough in the house that she said, “I’ll get it.” She went into the kitchen and came back out to the terrace with two cups. She even knew how much sugar I liked.
“You know who I just don’t get?” I said. “Like the person in this story who I can’t figure out?”
“She thinks he’s going to take her away.”
“No, that’s not who I meant. I know what she’s thinking. I meant you.”
Kay smiled, as if she had been complimented. “What do you mean?”
“I can’t figure out how a sensible woman like yourself got mixed up in a mess like this.”
She sipped her coffee.
“I wish we had ice,” she said.
“They say cold drinks just make you hotter. In the tropics—”
“You do it for the money,” she said.
The word “money,” when Kay said it, was like the kiss of a woman one has long desired. It was
something serious and exciting. It made you nervous.
I said, “I thought you wanted to build the road and sell mangoes and fish and—”
“Maybe that’s how it started, but those two win this election, there’s so many things we can do.”
“You think?” I said.
“You might be the only person in Haiti who doesn’t think so. My God, we’re sitting on some of the most lucrative real estate in the Caribbean. Everyone knows what this is all about.”
“Even Terry?” I asked.
Kay stood up and walked over to the little mirror that hung on the wall. She stared at her reflection, fixing her hair and wiping away a smudge of dirt.
She said, “Terry likes to tell himself a lot of stories, I guess all men do. Women are different—we have to be, we have to live with you people. A man will tell himself he’s building a road. Or saving an orphan from a burning building. Or whatever the hell he’s doing with that woman. And if the story is good enough, a man will tell himself it’s okay to go to bed at night. But truth is, men don’t have a clue. Terry doesn’t even know why he gets out of bed in the morning. But I sure know why I do.”
* * *
At the hotel, Terry and Nadia get the judge dressed and walking. Maybe around the second pot of coffee he’s roaring like a lion. He’s sloughing off the doubts like old skin. He had the idea in the shower, comes bursting out of the bathroom wearing nothing but a towel.
“I don’t need to see that, brother,” Terry says.
“What do you think—”
“I think you should get that thing covered.”
“We’re going to walk to the CEH.”
CEH headquarters is still being held by the loose coalitions of thugs, students, and paid protesters, maybe a hundred young men holed up in there. Every hour, every day a few are drifting out the back stairs.
What the judge is proposing is a march from the Presidential Palace right to CEH headquarters, carrying boxes of food and supplies for the Democracy Warriors (the phrase came to the judge in the shower) holed up inside. Then the judge will give a speech, right out the window of the CEH, to a crowd of demonstrators assembled in the street below.
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