Peacekeeping

by Mischa Berlinski

  “I’m not your brother.”

  “Johel—”

  “She was my life,” the judge said.

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Is she—”

  “They always ask me, ‘How can you trust the blan?’ And I always say, ‘Terry? Like my brother, what we’ve been through. Man would throw himself on a hand grenade for me.’”

  “It’s true, Johel,” Terry said. “I would.”

  “Throw yourself on my fucking wife.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She doesn’t want you. That’s what she told me. She told me to stay away from you. She said you smelled like a pig. Had to take a bath every time she rode in the car with you.”

  Terry said, “Johel, I need to know from you, right now, where Nadia is.”

  That’s the training talking, the two decades of experience, Terry thinking of the judge’s big hands on her slender neck; the judge with a knife; the judge holding a pillow on her face. These things happen every day. Ordinary men snap. One man in a thousand will do something only one in a thousand will do.

  “She’s in the mountains. She’s in Port-au-Prince. She’s on the fucking moon. I told her to get out of my house, and she left.”

  The way he said it, Terry knew (twenty years of experience in interrogations teaches a man something) that the judge was telling the truth.

  The judge started to talk, stopped. He walked over to the sink, let the water run. He washed his face, his big head. He came up from the sink looking like a lawyer who charges four hundred dollars an hour for his time.

  “Brother, we’ve got problems, you and I, but we no longer have the same problems.”

  “Let me talk to her,” Terry said.

  “Let me tell you about your problem. As your lawyer, I’d advise you to get out of town, because if you’re here in an hour, you’ll be sitting in the penitentiary. They’ll put you in the prison and leave you there until you rot.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “I can do whatever I want,” the judge said. “I won.”

  * * *

  Nadia went to her cousin’s hut. She didn’t know how long she would be allowed to stay: that hut was all mouths and no food, and she was bringing herself and a big belly too. In the mornings Nadia walked to the river with the girls to wash clothes and fetch water. Once, she saw Johel standing behind a tree. By the time she realized that it was only a shadow, the bucket of water she had carried up the hill had tumbled to the ground.

  She was drowning when he woke her up. Before that she was on the Trois Rivières, where the men were eating chicken, ripping the bird apart. It was still alive. The judge’s goatee was covered in grease. Terry was gnawing at a fluttering wing. The Sénateur was sucking from a bone. Ti Pierre was laughing, his face coated in feathers. The bird was gone, the men were still hungry, and Nadia knew that they would eat her next. So she jumped into the water. She felt the water pulling her down, and when she opened her eyes, her clothes were piled high across her chest: the dresses, skirts, and blouses pulled out of the wardrobe, thrown haphazardly across her. They weighed more than she expected.

  She said, “What are you doing?”

  Johel didn’t speak. His face was rigid, as soaked from sweat as if he had stepped out of the shower. She waited for him to look at her, but he continued to throw her things on the bed with the mechanical gestures of a man seized by the Loa. She asked him again what he was doing, and he ignored her. His breathing was heavy.

  When Johel picked up the ceramic figurine Nadia had bought for herself many years ago when Erzulie L’Amour played Boston, Nadia cried out. It was the only possession she had managed to maintain in her years of traveling. She had come to love the doll’s pretty painted face and strange costume. Then he threw the doll at a spot on the wall just above her head. The doll smashed into a thousand pieces, and Nadia felt the fragments fall across her face and shoulders. She screamed, knowing that no one could hear her. Johel left the room.

  Nadia lay in bed, panting heavily. Terry had installed bars on the windows, and Johel stood between her and the front door. The Fear was in the room with her: she could see the Fear’s black shadow in the open armoire, smell the Fear’s rotten breath, hear the Fear’s ragged exhalations. Her figurine’s tiny face, with its brightly painted lips and sad eyes, stared up at her from the bed.

  Then Johel was back in the room. There was a look in his eyes of endless melancholy. Nadia pulled herself out of the bed and dropped to her knees. She held on to his massive bulk with all her strength. She was weeping. She knew that if he would only listen, then he would understand. But he pushed her aside. “Please,” she said. “Please.” He had a roll of hundred-dollar bills in his hands, and he started flipping cash on the bed. The money fluttered down on her dresses and skirts until the bed was covered in a thin layer of money. “Never tell them I didn’t pay you,” he said. “Everything that you deserve.”

  She waited for him to hit her, but the blow never came. This, in a way, was the worst thing: Nadia knew how to fight. She knew that if he came at her, she could scratch at his eyes, kick between his legs. They would fight until they were exhausted. Then he would put ice on her bruises, and she would tend his cuts. But he only stared at her. She had never seen in a man’s eyes such a combination of cold contempt and profound sorrow. Nadia’s mother used to say that a man who didn’t have the courage to beat his woman was the man who had the courage to slit her throat.

  Johel left the room, and the house was silent. Nadia waited—one minute, five, ten. Then she packed up her clothes and the money in her old suitcase. She put on a pair of jeans and laced up her sneakers. Her head was light, as if she were going to faint. But the darkness didn’t come. Carrying her suitcase, she wandered through the house, through the living room to the kitchen. Johel was sitting on the terrace. She opened the door and spoke to him a minute, waiting for him to call her back. But he didn’t.

  Up in the village, Nadia dreamed every night about the Trois Rivières, about the men coming for her, about the black waters. The money Johel had given her was enough for six months, a year, maybe. She would have to live in Port-au-Prince—where would she have the baby? She imagined herself and the baby in a rented room, the rats and the mosquitoes, the open latrines. But she didn’t know if she would even make it to the city. Her cousins were already asking her for money, and she couldn’t say no. That was how the village worked. She felt like the cow that the hougan slaughtered to please the Loa, every eye on her waiting for the feast, the knives sharpening.

  She had been in the village about a week when, just as the waters began to take her under, she heard a voice: It’s easy to swim. It was a woman’s voice. Erzulie La Sirene! Her heroine! Greatest of all the Loa! Mistress of men, but slave of none: a free woman, beautiful and proud. Nadia had always admired and served Erzulie for her beauty and her grace, enveloped inevitably in a cloud of perfume. She had a hint of blue in her skin from the sea; her long hair billowed in the warm waters.

  Nadia reached out for Erzulie’s blue hand, and just as soon as she found it, Nadia could swim too. She pushed against the water, first tentatively and then with greater confidence. Water didn’t pull you down; it held you up. Nadia shed her clothes. Her lithe body planed against the water. She dove under and rose up. She arced out of the water like a flying fish and slid back in. She could stay under without breathing for as long as she needed, and when she came back to the surface, the air was clean and fresh. When she tired, when she began to sink back down into the water, she had only to reach for Erzulie and she could swim again.

  Nadia followed Erzulie along the ocean bottom until they came to a ridge. It was easy to descend, and somehow, although it was very dark under the water, she could see. There, glinting ahead, balanced on a rock, swaying in the watery breezes, was the golden watch. Nadia seized it and began to swim toward the surface.

  7

  Micheline, the woman who cooked an
d cleaned for us, had heard from the judge’s gardener that he had taken ill and hadn’t left the house in days. Micheline was a kindly woman, who in addition to giving her vote to the judge had bestowed on him her highest epithet: “Good people.” So she spent a morning preparing a plate of poulet creole, rice with black beans, deep-fried plantains, and a pitcher of fresh grapefruit juice. Then she assembled a hamper and asked me to take it up.

  It will sound strange to say of a man of Johel’s size that he looked haggard, but that was the word that came to mind when I saw him. I had never seen him, whether he was casual or formal, less than carefully dressed. Now he was wearing an old T-shirt stained by age and sweat from black to gray. He was unshaven, and his dark eyes, ordinarily so alert and splendid with intelligence, were dull and streaked with red. His smell, like ammonia, congealed sweat, and fear, made me queasy; I didn’t want to shake his hand. He stumbled as he walked, caught himself, moved with effort. My first thought was that he was in the midst of a severe bout of food poisoning.

  He surprised me, however, by eating all the food Micheline had prepared. He sat at the kitchen table and took huge, sloppy mouthfuls, shoveling the food in first with a fork and then with his hands, crunching on the chicken bones and sucking the marrow, mopping up the grease with plantains. He ate like a man who hadn’t eaten in days, who had forgotten that there was such a thing as food. Sweat poured from his brow as he ate, and dark rings sprouted under his arms. He didn’t talk, but occasionally grunted. He doctored the grapefruit juice with huge splashes of clear rum.

  He sat at the kitchen table when the food was gone, as if stunned by a blow. He was breathing heavily, his pink tongue lolling over his lips. I was truly at a loss for words: no secrets to keep, no messages to pass, no stories to tell.

  We might have sat in silence for five minutes or more when Johel said, “I should have stayed home.”

  I might have followed him down the path of self-recrimination and regret, but just then, from beyond his concrete wall, I heard two cats begin to fight in the garden. Their wailings sounded like women and children crying, and I remembered Madame Legrand in the morgue.

  “Are you still going to build the road?” I asked.

  That it was even in doubt—that after all the suffering and blood and work, I could even wonder about such a thing—will tell you how beaten a man he seemed.

  “Road?” he said, and I knew that since Nadia walked out the door, he had not thought once of anything but Nadia, that his desire to win a seat in the Haitian Sénat was entirely extinguished, that it was a matter of indifference to him now how the citizens of the Grand’Anse transported themselves to their capital.

  He poured himself another shot of rum. He had never been much of a drinker, and the liquor seemed to take him badly. He offered me a glass, but the rank smell of the raw alcohol dissuaded me.

  “It feels like my head is going to explode. It just won’t leave me alone,” he said.

  It didn’t matter what I said. The judge wasn’t listening to me.

  “First time I saw her, I knew. Never had a feeling like that before or since. Not one person wanted to see me with her, not one. But that just made her sweeter for me.”

  I wanted him to be another man right then. I thought of the tens of thousands of peasants who had trudged out into the firing line to give him their vote. It was a terrible thing to see him so diminished.

  “Maybe it was all destiny,” I said.

  I thought that word, which so many times seemed to quicken his speech and stiffen his resolve, might work a similar magic now. But he said only, “No such thing as destiny.”

  “What do you mean?” I protested. “Of course there’s such a thing as destiny. It’s what brought you back to Haiti, it’s what…”

  I struggled to think of the next item in the list. The judge’s faith in his own destiny had been so superlative for so long that I had come to take it for granted. How many times in how many conversations had I told strangers about that road! It had become my purpose in Haiti also, to watch the judge fulfill his.

  “Things happen,” Johel said. “And then other things happen.”

  “Will she come back?” I asked.

  That, I thought, was the only thing that could save the road.

  Johel took another sip of that foul rum. His hand was trembling.

  “She doesn’t love me.”

  “Maybe she does,” I said. “Women make mistakes—”

  “No. She never loved me. She came back here with me because she didn’t have a choice. But she didn’t love me. This was just her cage.”

  The thing that bothered him most, he told me, was what she called him when she walked out the door. She called him blan.

  * * *

  New Year’s came and went, and we waited for the judge. He didn’t leave his house. Micheline was not the only woman who sent up a plate of food, but his security guard refused the plates. I tried to call him. For a few days his phone rang unanswered; then it was turned off. Nobody I knew had set eyes on the man. A rumor spread that the Sénateur had employed black magic to curse the judge. His students began to wonder if he would ever come down to campaign headquarters again, whether he would even contest the second round of the election. The Sénateur had begun his own ambitious campaign: advertisements sprang from every radio, and new posters went up. Somebody spray-painted, “Judge Blan—Judge Faggot” on the wall opposite HQ. I suspect the culprit was someone as severely disappointed in the judge as we all were.

  The only person I knew who hadn’t given up hope in the judge, strange to say, was Terry. The day after the election, the Mission sent Terry to Port-au-Prince. I understand that he had no choice in the matter if he wished to remain outside the pénitencier. From Port-au-Prince he called me daily, wanting to know if I had heard from either Nadia or the judge. I told him I had no news from either one.

  “Big Guy is taking this pretty hard,” he said, as if “this” had nothing to do with him.

  The tone in his voice angered me. “You broke his heart.”

  “He’ll bounce back. What you got to understand is that this guy’s got balls of steel.”

  Terry called me every day, and each passing day made his confidence in the judge’s capacity for recuperation seem ever more fantastical. A rumor spread that the judge’s security guard had found him passed out and bruised on the back terrace. Someone heard that someone had seen him wandering through town in the night, half dressed. Still Terry insisted on the judge’s balls of steel.

  I had all but lost hope when one of the judge’s students called me: the judge had come into the office. I found him there half an hour later, dressed in his cream suit with the pink tie, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. By now there were two dozen students assembled and others were showing up every minute. He had lost weight, he was tired; his skin was an ashen gray.

  But it was wonderful to hear him talk about the road. He told us that the road—a highway!—leading right out of Jérémie to Port-au-Prince would be no dirt track, but a solid tarmacked expressway, two lanes, signposted, metal barriers on the curves. It would be a broad-backed python of a road, creeping around the mountain bends before descending graciously down into the broad plains of the Département de Sud. Two hours, more or less: that’s all the trucks would need to get from Jérémie to Les Cayes, then two hours more to reach Port-au-Prince. On this road would be trucks filled with mangoes, bananas, breadfruit, pineapple, avocados, and fish. That’s what they were building together.

  The judge stood up. I had never liked the man more or been more proud of him. Every eye was on him. He said, “Fish! In Santo Domingo…” Then he wobbled slightly, rolled his eyes, and vomited the contents of his breakfast across his desk, a big, ugly spray of fried spaghetti, coffee, and orange juice. The orange juice still reeked of raw rum. Then he fell over backward and collapsed on the floor.

  * * *

  You could tell just from his eyes, black and unreflecting, like pools of mud, that his sit
uation was serious. The doctor at the hospital attached him to a saline line. His breathing was irregular and sharp. He was still dressed in his good shirt and cream trousers, both soaked in sweat; his face was covered in beads of sweat, and he was hot to the touch. The only doctor on service at the hospital that morning was fresh out of medical school. I took him aside to ask for details, and he told me that the judge was suffering from a combination of malaria, dengue, and exhaustion. He wasn’t very sure in his diagnosis. Perhaps it was a heart attack. Or perhaps, the young doctor said, it was swine flu. Whatever the disease, there was no possibility of treatment in Jérémie, and the doctor recommended immediately transporting the judge to Port-au-Prince.

  But he was in no condition to travel. The nurses set up a fan to blow over him. He floated in and out of lucidity. Once he said “Nadia.”

  “She’s coming,” I said, although I had already tried twice to call her and had no answer.

  He tried to sit up, and his force failed him. He collapsed onto his back, groaning.

  Out in front of the hospital, a small crowd was swelling, informed by rumor that the judge was inside and in the grip of serious illness. The crowd began to sing, “Sweet Jesus, Savior of Our Souls.” Big birds circled high in the sky. In the sickroom there were at least two dozen of us.

  He had lain there from morning to night when Nadia arrived at the hospital. It was well after dark. When she saw Johel, she cried out, swayed on her feet, and was caught by the bystanders. Then she sat in a chair by Johel’s side, holding his hand and mopping his forehead with a damp washcloth. She spoke softly into his ear. Now his breathing was irregular and ragged. She sat by his side and massaged his arms and shoulders as he shuddered quietly. She fed him water with a spoon.

  By midnight, a vast crowd had spontaneously assembled on the Place Dumas and in the cathedral, where the faithful sat on pews and prayed. They had come on foot from every corner of the Grand’Anse, marching down the mountainsides from as far away as Gommier, Roseaux, Beaumont, Corail, Pestel, Anse-d’Hainault, even Dame Marie. Some had walked as long as a day and a night to reach Jérémie. They waited all through the night for news, telling each other stories of the time they had met the judge, the time he had settled their argument, the way he had put money in their pocket when the little one was sick. They lit candles, and no one slept except the children. Some of the men sipped clairin, and some of the women cried, but softly, as if the sound might carry and disturb the sick man.