Peacekeeping

by Mischa Berlinski

  Things boiled over in the early afternoon. The crowd had been waiting a long time in the hot sun for the funeral to start. Crowds are temperamental beasts, and when it was well past lunch, the mourners, who had all set out that morning in the earnest, peaceful, and reflective mood that accompanies the burial of a young man, started getting antsy. When someone on the fringe of the crowd was accused of being a supporter of the Sénateur, it took the efforts of half a dozen strong men to break up the fight.

  The judge was still working the phones at campaign HQ, trying to get Toussaint’s body so that he could eulogize the defunct, when one of his students rushed in, waving his hands wildly and babbling insanely. Johel couldn’t understand a word. “Go look,” the student finally said.

  From the upstairs balcony of campaign headquarters, we could see the crowd moving and slithering around. Someone said, “Oh my!” and the judge said, “Holy shit.” Toussaint Legrand was crowd-surfing across the Place. The crowd had broken into the Bon Repos and stolen his corpse. You couldn’t really tell if he was alive or dead, because someone in the crowd had his head and others were holding on to his feet. He was dressed in the clothes he had died in, jeans and his favorite Barcelona jersey.

  Now, crowds don’t make decisions the way individuals do, but decisions are made, and the crowd decided first to parade around the Place Dumas with Toussaint. Then they did that again. Now that they were in possession of the body, the crowd seemed good-natured again, chanting slogans and dancing happily.

  Then someone in the crowd got the bright idea to combine the two events of the day and take Toussaint’s body to the Sénateur’s rally, perhaps because it was well past lunch, and no funeral being evident, a lot of folks were thinking they’d like some pig. Crowds can move with strange speed: Toussaint’s body was around the corner and gone in an instant, and Terry, the judge, Nadia, and I were left staring at the nearly empty Place Dumas. Even Nadia, who prided herself on being surprised by nothing, was shaking her head. I supposed that when the Sénateur’s pig-eaters and Toussaint’s funeral cortege met up, it was going to be trouble. I heard the wail of sirens.

  But the two crowds intermingled peacefully. By the time I got down there, you couldn’t tell who was for the Sénateur and who was for the judge. There was good music playing and pig being eaten and beer being drunk, and because nobody quite knew what to do with Toussaint at that point, they had him up on the dais, slouched in a chair, where he had a strange smile on his face, like he had finally met a lady. Neither the Sénateur nor the judge gave a speech that day.

  2

  I was reading in bed when the phone rang. The judge said something, and I said, “I was about to.” He spoke some more, and I said, “It’s fine.”

  My wife said, “Who is it?” but fell back asleep before I could answer.

  I lay for a while in the dark, listening to the high whine of frustrated mosquitoes on the far side of the mosquito net. I had been expecting a call like this for a long time. Then I went downstairs, where Johel was already waiting for me on the terrace.

  I hadn’t seen the judge in person since Toussaint’s funeral, although his face, on campaign posters plastered on every flat surface in town, had become omnipresent. Since the funeral he had been campaigning fiercely, holding rallies, sometimes two in a day, in every corner of the region.

  “This campaign is kicking your ass,” I said.

  “It’s work, brother, hard work.”

  He looked terrible. His eyes were red and his skin had the washed-out, bloodless gray of dark men who haven’t slept well.

  “Drink?” I asked.

  “Whatever you’ve got,” he said.

  I poured a shot of rum for the judge and one for myself. Then we sat in silence for a few minutes. I was hoping he had got me out of bed to talk about an attractive low-risk investment opportunity. He exhaled slowly, stretched his neck, cracked his knuckles, and rubbed his eyes. He was in a torment of embarrassment.

  “I want to know why Kay left,” he said.

  My heart quickened. I’ve always felt honesty a severely overvalued virtue. I could see no advantage to it in the present instance.

  “She told me her mother was sick.”

  “Why didn’t she tell me?”

  “Maybe she thought you had enough on your plate.”

  “Terry told me that her father was sick.”

  “He’s married to her. He knows more about her family than I do.”

  The judge’s eyes wandered to the edge of the terrace, then back to me. He decided to take a different approach.

  “What do you think about Terry?”

  “Seems decent enough,” I said.

  He pounced. “Seems?”

  “Is.”

  Johel kept looking at me and looking at me, so I added, “From what I know.”

  “What do you know?”

  “I don’t know him any better than you do.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I don’t think. Very often.”

  Johel exhaled and leaned forward. I had not quite realized what a large man he was.

  “Have you seen anything?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  He paused, his agile, lawyerly mind working.

  “Heard?” he asked.

  “About Terry?”

  “About me. About either of us. About Nadia.”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I like you. I like all of you.”

  The judge tilted his head. He smiled, a rearrangement of his face that in no way suggested mirth and in no way diminished the impression he gave of high intelligence struggling with a difficult problem. He closed his eyes and kept them shut for long enough that I almost thought he was asleep. Then he opened them and looked around.

  * * *

  Three days back, the judge told me, he had gone with Terry to a large rally in the town of Abricots. By now, the campaign had become a serious production, and they traveled in a caravan of four vehicles—three pickups and the judge’s SUV. The first truck was stuffed with speakers as tall as a man and a generator to power them, along with the seven members of Nadia’s old band, Galaxy, whom Nadia had convinced the judge to hire for the duration of the campaign. A free concert was a pretty good draw, and Galaxy had written a number of catchy campaign tunes, some of them enthusiastic encomia to the judge, others nasty satires about the Sénateur.

  The second truck was the swag wagon. Every kid in the Grand’Anse that month was wearing a T-shirt and kicking a soccer ball with the judge’s face on it. (Kay had ordered all the swag from an importer in the Dominican Republic.) Then, if the free gear wasn’t enough, Johel had hired a squad of six marchandes to prepare vast feasts of rice, beans, piklis, and grilled chicken. These ladies would stay up half the night cooking, and then at the rallies would serve up big plates, telling each voter, “It’s Juge Blan who gives you this. Let him give you something more.” Just getting that much food into Jérémie from Port-au-Prince was an immense logistical challenge, requiring the full-time attention of three of the judge’s students.

  Abricots is certainly a contender for the title of Prettiest Town on the Face of the Planet. The white sails of the two-masted fishing boats were sharp against the tranquil green waters, and the forested hills rolled right down to the edge of town. There was a church painted powder blue and white, a little cobblestoned town square, and a big tree under whose bower, if sleepiness took you in the afternoon, you could take a long nap. Folks who left Abricots for whatever reason—love, money, or necessity—never thought, as the years passed, that they’d ended up anyplace better.

  The town itself had a tiny population (978, according to the census), but there were thousands more citizens living in the hills. This had never been country where the Sénateur’s popularity had run particularly deep, and the judge thought that if the voters went to the polls, and if the votes were fairly counted, they might turn out in substantial numbers for him. The double “if” depended chiefly on the goodwill of a mambo
named Madame Trésor, and it was to woo Madame Trésor, as much as to woo the voters, that the judge had traveled to Abricots.

  * * *

  “People in Port-au-Prince eat canned fish imported from Peru,” the judge told the crowd. “You have got the sea on every side of this beautiful country, and you cannot buy a fresh fish in the capital unless you win the borlette. You go over to the Dominican Republic, they are eating fish soup, fish stew, fried fish, baked fish, whole fish, fish fillets, and fish steaks. Dominican fishermen go fishing, come back with some nice big fish, they pack it on ice, they drive it in three hours on their good paved roads to the capital. Because they have roads.

  “But here, what are you going to do with that fish? Drive it two days to Port-au-Prince under a hot sun? That’ll smell terrific.”

  The judge waved his hand in front of his face and pantomimed a rotten smell. The crowd tittered.

  “Our problem here is this: Fishermen have little boats, no ice, and the big fish are too far out to sea for the little boats. Maybe you can catch a few itsy-bitsy fish to feed your family. But to lay nets, haul in a serious catch, you need a more serious craft. And who can afford to buy a boat like that if you can’t get your fish to market?” This, the judge said, was the poverty trap, when no matter what you do to get ahead sees you running in place.

  The judge started running in place on the stage, huffing and puffing as he went.

  “You’re not poor if you can work hard and get ahead.” The judge began to pant. “If you can work hard—and get ahead—then you just don’t have a lot of money. No sin, no crime in that.” The judge stopped running. “But if you work and work and work some more, and you’re still as broke the next day as the day before—then you need a road.”

  When the judge started talking about the poverty trap, the man standing next to Terry, whose lined and leathery face suggested a lifetime on the seas, said, “That’s right,” and Terry knew that Johel had earned himself that man’s vote.

  If the vote was counted.

  * * *

  In the last election, Abricots had not been peaceful. Armed partisans of opposing candidates had frightened the bulk of the population into hunkering down at home rather than venturing out to the polls. Turnout in Abricots had been extremely low.

  This was the problem the judge proposed to discuss with Madame Trésor. Madame Trésor had never taken an active role in formal politics, seeing the business of elections and the state as beneath the dignity of an empress of the night. An incident the year before, however, had changed her perspective: her beloved younger brother had been imprisoned in Port-au-Prince, accused of being a member of a gang of kidnappers. Madame Trésor, whose power in her own commune was immense, was helpless to affect affairs in the capital, and so she had done what she was loath to do: she traveled all the way to Jérémie, a long and dusty road for a woman of her size, and made her way to the Sénateur’s house, where she was made to sit in the sun for hours, like a peasant, only to have the Sénateur’s security at the end of the day dismiss the crowd of supplicants, telling them to return in the morning. Madame Trésor was a woman whose capacity to perceive a slight was of infinite delicacy, and she returned that evening, in the dark, to her home in the hills of Abricots.

  If it was known that she supported a candidate, the judge felt, his enemies would think twice before intimidating his supporters.

  Madame Trésor lived in a stucco house about a mile out of town, not accessible by road, and the judge and Terry walked there after the rally. By the time they reached Madame Tresor’s little cabin, the judge’s face was swampy with sweat. Only after sitting down for five minutes on a mossy rock, breathing hard, and rubbing his forehead with a handkerchief was he able to concentrate on the business at hand.

  Madame Trésor had been expecting Johel and she greeted him with the exaggerated, flirtatious warmth of beautiful fat women. She invited him to sit beside her on the couch and insisted that he drink a glass of grapefruit juice, made from the fruit of her own tree.

  People told many stories about Madame Trésor, and some of them might even have been true: She could transform herself into a bat and fly through the night on gossamer wings. She was said to know the recipe for the poud’ that turned men into zombies and for the poud’ that made a man’s heart swell up until it exploded from his chest. People came to her to complain of their enemies or to avenge themselves on unfaithful husbands or to find relief from tormented dreams.

  She was a large woman, with a nearly square head attached to an oval body. Her small dark eyes fastened on Johel and did not blink or move away. He wondered how she navigated her way up and down these hills. She didn’t look much like the feared empress of a secret society that ruled the Night—but then again, Johel figured, it was a secret society. She had a habit of saying “My Lord! My Lord!” but otherwise she listened patiently as Johel explained the reasons for his visit.

  By now, he had become an excellent pitchman for himself. He had been trying to convince one important personage of the Grand’Anse after another to support his candidacy—and had been successful more often than not. Some wanted a school refurbished, others a new well, and still others just wanted cash. Johel thought seriously about each request and promised what he could. So he told Madame Trésor about the Canadians and the road and, having heard of her problems with the Sénateur, made sure to mention the Sénateur’s arrogance. He thought what she wanted chiefly was respect—and possibly vengeance—and her brother’s freedom. That was something, he suggested, that he could provide.

  “My Lord! My Lord!” said Madame Trésor.

  The little room was uncomfortably hot, and Johel felt himself sweating heavily as he spoke. Finally he finished talking, and a grave silence filled the room.

  “I had a revelation about you,” Madame Trésor said. “A heavy revelation.”

  Johel didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing.

  “I want you to see my babies,” she said.

  She rose to her feet and shuffled out of the room. She came back a minute later with a Mason jar in which some strange thing floated in a tea-colored liquid. It was certainly a biological thing—maybe a squid? Not identifiably mammalian.

  “That’s my femininity,” Madame Trésor said.

  Johel was not sure if he was expected to compliment it, but the lady explained. When she was in her early twenties, the doctors had removed her uterus and ovaries. That was the thing floating in the jar. She had been until then without mystical powers. She had come home from the hospital in Jérémie unsexed but gifted with Sight.

  “Take my children,” she said, and handed the jar to Johel. He didn’t want to, but he didn’t know how to say no. Despite the warmth of the room, he felt a chill of fear pass up his spine. The jar was heavy in his hands and sticky, and the thing inside seemed to vibrate and buzz. Johel suddenly was seized by a wave of nausea. He worried that he was going to vomit the juice on the floor. He saw children playing on the floor, a schoolgirl with yellow ribbons in her hair, a boy climbing a palm tree and flinging down coconuts …

  Johel, frightened that he was going to drop the jar on the unfinished cement floor, handed it back to Madame Trésor, who accepted it gravely and kissed it, as a mother kisses her babies before sleep. Then she buried the jar between her immense breasts.

  “My Lord! My Lord!” she murmured, her eyes closed, rocking back and forth on her heavy haunches. “Come to me, my Lord!”

  She must have rocked like that, moaning and crying, for ten minutes or more before she finally sat up straight, her eyes so wide they seemed as if they might burst from her head. She stood up, saying not a word, and walked with the jar into the back room.

  When Madame Trésor came back, she said, “My children like you.”

  “I’m glad,” Johel said, not sure if that was the correct word at all.

  “They tell me I need to help you.”

  Johel found it hard to calm his racing heart. His mouth tasted sour, and it was
difficult to understand just what Madame Trésor was saying. She was going to support his candidacy. But she looked him in the eye. Her children had warned her—“You have a traitor, a traitor in your camp. Your victory is in unity. You need to look left, look right, look high, look low. Look!”

  * * *

  That was two days ago, Johel told me, and he hadn’t slept since. Madame Trésor’s warning was dominating him. It was as if she were telling him something he already knew. He had never known a pain like this. Not a minute of sleep in two nights, just lying next to her, watching her breathe, thinking of Terry, each breath like a knife in his belly …

  “Seriously?” I said. “You get me up in the dead of night seriously because some lady talked to her uterus, and so now you think—I don’t even want to know what you think.”

  “I have to know the truth,” Johel said.

  “The truth is that this lady is a professional mind-fuck. That’s what she does. People go to her to get their minds fucked and she fucks their minds. Congratulations, you got mind-fucked. It’s happened to better men than you.”

  “It’s killing me,” he said.

  “I think you need to get some sleep.”

  “I can’t. I just lie there thinking.”

  “Thinking about this lady’s uterus.”

  “Just tell me what you think, and I’ll go home,” he said.

  “Maybe I’d buy it if this lady had some dead kids that were talking to her. Dead kids can channel like fuck. But that’s not the way this situation is. You were talking to a flappy old uterus. That’s different.”

  Johel could endure anything but mockery.

  “The whole thing just got me thinking,” he said.

  “It can happen,” I said. “We’ve all been there. You don’t get enough sleep and your brain gets on top of you and before you know it…”

  “I just wish I was sleeping better.”