Peacekeeping

by Mischa Berlinski

  Just after dawn, the cathedral bells began to toll and the town began to swell with light and a lady in a red dress sat up straight and swore she saw the Merciful Angel of the Lord.

  PART EIGHT

  On January 12, 2010, at 4:53 in the afternoon, Terry White was riding a desk at the Villa Privé, UNPOL HQ, two hundred meters from the Hotel Christopher. They were sending him home, but these things take time. Of all strange things, what they were after him for—after everything that happened—was the Toto Dorsemilus dossier. That felt as if it had happened to another man, it happened so long ago. That was the judge’s farewell present to him, a request via the minister of justice that the dossier be reopened. So they gave him a desk at the Villa Privé and told him to sit there, and that’s what he did.

  Terry had called Nadia what must have been twenty times a day for a week. Sometimes the phone would ring, sometimes the phone was off. What you have to understand is that he didn’t want anything from her, he never did—he just wanted to hear her voice. He knew that if she listened to him, he could make her laugh again, and if she laughed, she’d see him; and if she saw him, she’d let him hold her; and if he held her, he’d be all right.

  The world had come apart so fast.

  No mule had ever kicked a man harder than the judge’s death kicked Terry. The way they say it knocked the wind right out of you? In his case no exaggeration at all: gripping the side of his plastic-and-felt office chair, moaning, trying to find oxygen. Eyes bulging, hand going up to his throat, heart beating two hundred times a minute trying to shuttle around the oxygen that wasn’t going down the pipe. Enough time to think that he was going to have a heart attack and die too.

  When he got his breath back, he wanted to go to Jérémie for the funeral: pay his respects and see Nadia. But he was scared, plain and simple. What do you call them, he wondered, those dreams you have in the daytime, as vivid as a nightmare, but eyes open. He didn’t have a good word for it, but three times in two days, in the run-up to the funeral, he’d had a vision of Nadia turning to him in the cathedral, raising up this bony finger in his face, and the whole church of mourners turning on him, ripping him apart limb by limb. He couldn’t chase away the fear, couldn’t fight it, couldn’t beat it down until the funeral had come and gone.

  The day of the judge’s funeral, he called Kay.

  “They’re burying Johel today,” he said.

  “I bet you feel just lousy.”

  “I do,” he said, thinking maybe she’d talk to him, just talk.

  “And you want me to tell you it’s not your fault.”

  “Kay—”

  “You want me to tell you that you had nothing to do with breaking him—”

  He said, “It was a heart attack or something. Just one of those things that happen.”

  She said, “What do you want from me?”

  “How did it all get like this?”

  “You tell me, Terry. You tell me.”

  “I had my reasons, Kay.”

  “Funny thing is, I used to care.”

  The worst of it was that there was no one to talk to, no one who would understand. Only reason he got up in the morning and went to the office was to see faces: he couldn’t take another minute alone in that hotel room. Now he was in a room with twenty other guys, each of them manning a desk, staring into space, waiting out their last few days in-country before being sent back home; and if one guy, just one, had walked over to Terry and said, Tell me what’s got you looking so troubled, my brother, what a tale he would have told! He had seen it so many times, of course, from the other side of the desk. That desk wasn’t six square feet of wood; it was like some vast abyss that separated a hopeful heart from a guilty one. Just to get across that abyss, men used to say the words to him that would put them in a cage for life. Men used to tell him their stories and then break down in tears of gratitude that he’d listened.

  A week without sleep makes the dead walk: the judge kept strolling right into the Villa Privé, sitting himself right down next to Terry, looking him in the eye. Man looked terrible, but of course he was dead.

  * * *

  Nadia’s phone was ringing, but she didn’t want to talk to him. There was nothing more he could do for her. Phone was ringing all that day she was walking up into the mountains, the day Johel had put her out. Phone kept ringing all week long.

  At the funeral, she saw Johel’s body in the coffin, and she wanted to be buried with him. No man had ever loved her as he had. She threw herself right into the coffin to hold him one last time. He was dead, but he still smelled like Johel; his cologne was in the fabric of his dark blue suit. She felt his cold, fat flesh. She felt hands pulling at her waist, pulling her away from him, then other hands at her feet. Still she held on tight. They would never have taken her off him if she hadn’t felt the baby move inside her.

  The doyen of the Tribunal of Jérémie came to her in the house she had shared with Johel, just three days after she buried her husband, and sat beside her on the fauteuil and grasped her trembling hand.

  “Beloved widow of my beloved friend,” said the doyen, his Creole so intermingled with French that Nadia could barely understand him. “My most profound condolences.”

  The doyen folded his hands into fists, as if in prayer.

  “But I am here this evening not to comfort your sorrows, but to add to your burdens. I address you now not as a suffering widow, but as a citizen. His sacrifice must not have been in vain.”

  All through that evening and the next, the doyen’s plea was seconded by the requests of well-wishers and acquaintances: were the judge’s place on the ballot to remain blank, the Sénateur would win by default. The road would never be built.

  Nadia listened to them from some place deep inside, some place where sound arrives slowly and sight is blurry. She thought about how many lives she’d led already, and she remembered the feel of Ti Pierre’s hand on her cheek, the weight of the judge’s body, the smell of Terry’s breath. She felt the baby kick. She wondered what choice she had but to listen to the men.

  The next morning, Nadia flew to Port-au-Prince. The doyen had arranged for a lawyer to accompany her to CEH headquarters and get her on the ballot, employing whatever means were necessary. She spoke to Andrés Richard, who promised to offer her whatever resources she required. Père Samedi called to offer his condolences. He would support her candidacy also.

  Nadia had a car and driver waiting for her at the airport in Port-au-Prince. The driver was a stocky, bull-necked creature with red eyes. He asked if she would mind stopping at the Caribbean Market on Delmas on the way to her hotel. His wife had just had a baby, and they needed diapers. Nadia didn’t mind at all. Since Johel’s death, her baby had wanted ginger. She had brewed cup after cup of spicy ginger tea, and still the baby’s thirst wasn’t satisfied. So she went into the supermarket to buy a can of ginger ale. That where she was on January 12, 2010, at 4:53 in the afternoon.

  * * *

  The Sénateur would meet that evening with the president at the Presidential Palace in Port-au-Prince, but before the meeting, the Sénateur decided to eat on the terrace of the Hotel Montana. He accompanied his steak with a good Burgundy. He ate and drank alone: he needed to think. The president was going to ask him to withdraw from the second round of the election. The foreign donors, you see—with the suspicions hanging over the Sénateur, with the disorder that had convulsed the country—here was a last sacrifice the Sénateur would make for the Haitian people. The president would protect him, see that he was not deported to the Cold Land. He would never see the inside of the Pénitencier National. A dignified retirement awaited him.

  But the Sénateur was not convinced. He had lost the first round of the election, but narrowly, so very narrowly. Now that the bloated judge’s strumpet widow was proposing to stand in her husband’s place, the Sénateur was sure that he would win, and he was not prepared to sacrifice the accomplishments of a lifetime on the altar of the foreign donors.

 
The Sénateur stood up from his meal. His bladder was not what it had once been. He walked past the pool where the blan swam laps like deranged penguins. He wandered past the deck chairs where they bathed themselves in his people’s sunshine.

  A thought intruded on the Sénateur’s newly resolute mind. The truth, he thought, was that he had been lucky to leave Jérémie alive. He attempted to suppress the thought, but by the time he arrived in the bathroom and unzipped his fly, the thought had returned with greater vigor: only the PNH, only the Mission had saved him. For the first time, he had seen hatred on the faces of his people. He had tried to attend, as a gesture of respect, his rival’s funeral, and they had turned on him with scorn and rocks.

  It was strange. His bladder had been so full, the need so pressing, but standing at the urinal, it was hard to coax out the stream. A few drops, a few more. An unaccustomed sense of weariness oppressed him. His bladder relaxed.

  But hatred never bothered the Sénateur: he had suffered the hatred of his enemies before. Any man who stands for dignity will endure hatred. No, the worst was the laughter. The Mission had flown him out on the propeller plane, and behind the chain-link fence of the airport, his children had been laughing. He had served them faithfully for so many years, and now they were laughing at him. One man who not so long before had come to the Sénateur’s terrace and promised him his love, kindness, and obedience shouted in a clear, carrying voice, “Bon voyage, Sénateur!”

  * * *

  Terry heard, before he felt, the rolling wave of earth moving slower than sound: bombs exploding, huge stones grinding, big trucks roaring, bulldozers digging, dump trucks smashing, cars colliding, jackhammers ripping, drums pounding, massively amplified static.

  Then the first wave arrived, and the red and green and blue plastic Bics on his desk began to dance and chatter and the old serious desktop computer leaped giddily to the floor, and Terry felt a tepid wetness in his lap as a cup of cold coffee threw itself downward. Through the window he saw the solid horizon of parked vehicles and offices and palms sway at an angle.

  But, Terry thought, horizons do not sway.

  He went toward the office door. They were on the first floor. A long corridor led out to the open air. The bombs were dropping faster now, and coming closer. Terry, unbalanced and dizzy, reached for the wall, and the wall was gone. He could see through the sheared concrete the cement rods bending, twisting, deforming. He heard but did not see pieces of concrete tumbling to the ground and exploding.

  The hallway was crowded with men and women sprinting toward the closed door. Terry’s office was adjacent to the door; he was closest. The door swung open inward, into the hallway. He could step through the doorway and out into the parking lot or step backward into the collapsing building. If he stepped outward, the door would close behind him: the people on the inside would be trapped. Terry didn’t hesitate. He swung the door open and stepped backward and out of the way, pressing himself against the corridor wall.

  * * *

  The walls began to roll, the floor buckled. The Sénateur held on to the ceramic urinal and clung to it with all his might. He wrestled with the writhing urinal for what felt to him like a day and a night. He felt a puddle of hotness spill out of the urinal onto his trousers. The urinal pitched left and back and forth, and then the urinal won: the Sénateur was on his back. Then the sound of an immense building collapsing just above his head, and he was in darkness, his leg crushed under something heavy from which he could not extricate himself. The Sénateur strained with his great force, but could not pull away the massive concrete pillar that pinned him to the rolling earth.

  He had never feared Death, whom he saw as a fellow traveler, a companion and deliverer. His oldest friend was Baron Samedi, lord of the underworld. How many times had Baron Samedi come down the poteau-mitan to inhabit his own soul. But the Sénateur had suffered a lifelong revulsion at the idea of imprisonment. Even as a child, dark and enclosed spaces had terrified him; even in the coldest winter night of exile, he had slept with the window ajar. In his will, he had commanded Dr. Philistin, the executor of his estate, to cremate his body and disperse the ashes to the hills of the Grand’Anse: no coffin for him, no concrete tomb, no marble sepulcher. He wished to be delivered into eternity on the winds of the Gros Nord, blowing down from the Atlantic in the north, crossing over Port-au-Prince, swirling and eddying in the gorges of his country. He would be forever like a great bird, mounting and soaring in the glens and hills, always in sight of the sea.

  He felt the rising tide of panic. This was how his story was to end: trapped like a rat in glue. The dread swept up from his viscera. He was an old man. He had never been old before. He could not feel his foot or his leg, and his groin was wet with urine: the earthquake had struck midstream. How nasty to think that they would find him this way, soiled like a child. When he was young he would have simply risen up, no matter what lay across his legs, tossed the obstacle aside, and with a roar announced to Death, This is how you come for me? Try again, old man! Try better! I am the one who shouts “Fire,” not you! And I am not ready!

  Or perhaps this was the afterlife. Perhaps Baron Samedi had found him after all, and his old companion had deceived him. Here in the darkness was the place where zombies wandered. Had he been separated from his soul? Or was he a soul away from body? He had never been able to forget the sight, as a young man coming home from an evening of love in the mountains, of a string of zombies shuffling down a mountain path, led by a hooded condeur. These men had been separated from their souls: they were just animated bodies. Their souls had collapsed and been encaged in ceramic jars. Had the boko taken his soul also and enclosed it in a canari, to sell in the market, to infiltrate into the body of a cow, to make him a slave?

  The panic was now total: it had him by the balls. Thank the good sweet Lord they were still attached, pulling downward toward the uncertain earth. But even the feel of his manhood in his hand was not enough to stifle his nausea. He felt himself drifting into darkness.

  There was a voice crying in the darkness, the voice of a child.

  * * *

  On January 12, 2010, at 4:53 in the afternoon, the cereal boxes at the Caribbean Market fell down. They didn’t fall one by one, but the supermarket tilted on its side and they all fell: the Special K, the All-Bran, the Wheaties, the Raisin Bran, the Chex. Then the supermarket tilted to the other side, and Nadia heard glass breaking as shelves of olive oil smashed at her feet. Then the supermarket tilted again, and the wall of sodas fell; and then the supermarket seesawed again and the massive refrigerators toppled over. Nadia began to pray. Her prayer came from the deepest recesses of her spirit, as spontaneous as a child’s smile. Lord, give me victory, give me victory. Jesus, give me victory. She heard the sounds of the collapsing building and was aware that she was in darkness, buffeted from side to side as the reinforced concrete walls of the market buckled and gave way. Knowing that she would soon fall, she sat down, and then to protect herself from the hard-edged or sharp things flying down invisibly upon her, she huddled into a fetal position. She breathed in a cloud of dust and began to choke, but still she managed wordlessly to pray.

  * * *

  Only later would they comment on his heroism, the men and women Terry saved that day. They moved past him, not noticing him, not thinking in which direction the hinge of their fate had swing. Terry pressed himself up against the wall of the convulsing building. He held the door open and encouraged the people leaving to move quickly, waving at them with his free hand, knowing that to let go of the door would be to condemn others. When Rose-Marie Dessault, who worked as a secretary, stumbled at Terry’s feet, he scooped her up, not gently, and pushed her through the open door.

  Here were some of the people who rushed past Terry White out of the Villa Privé and into the open air: Ludmilla Voskoboynikova, from Ukraine, mother of three, on her third day on Mission, who had brought binoculars with her because she liked to watch birds; Lucner Antoine, Haitian, electrician, at the
Villa Privé to replace a failing fuse box, who seduced the female members of his gospel choir; Alain Chirac, Canadian, who believed until the day of the earthquake that he was immortal; Li Chin-Yai, from China, who thought Michael Jackson understood better than any other man the intricacies of her heart; Serge Thibaut, French, who in the evenings composed his memoirs of life as a street cop in the roughest quarters of Marseilles; Michelle Rosamond, Haitian, a maid, who ran from the collapsing building still holding her mop and thinking of her six-week-old baby daughter, whom she did not know was now dead.

  Terry held the door open for everyone who ran past, and for his sister also. It did not seem strange to him that Jackie was in the building, returned to her youth and beauty. Her red hair cascaded across her shoulders. When she saw Terry, she smiled at him: he was her hero. She meandered down the hallway, oblivious to the collapsing building—so typical of Jackie, who would not run to catch a plane if she was late at the airport, who had lived her whole life according to some private calendar of her own devising, arriving late and leaving all too early.

  Terry was the last to leave the convulsing building. He could smell his sister’s cleanliness as she pulled him into the light.

  * * *

  The Sénateur heard the child cry “Maman!” and he knew that he was alive.

  “My child,” the Sénateur said.

  There had been a boy in the bathroom also. Now the Sénateur remembered. His mother had been waiting for him outside the door. She had said, “Are you sure you can go alone?” The boy had said, “But I’m big now, maman!” The boy had been sitting on the toilet when the earth attacked them.