Then Nadia’s bodyguard said “Blan.” Terry stood up gingerly. He could feel shimmering ripples of pain running through his leg. He was glad for the feeling, distracting him from his nervous stomach.
The house was just the way Johel had left it, right down to the portrait of the judge in his judicial robes on the living room wall. The judge’s family stared somberly from their silver frames; the judge’s books filled the judge’s bookshelves. Nadia was standing at the window, speaking on the phone. He saw the familiar back and muscled shoulders, but the straight shoulder-length hair was from another woman. Then she turned, and Terry fell, as if diving cleanly from a great height, into her sea-green eyes.
Neither of them spoke for a minute. Terry had thought that by presenting himself unannounced, he would have the advantage of surprise. But he had not counted on his own emotions. Nadia stumbled backward when she saw him, as if an invisible hand had pressed lightly on her shoulders. Then her face—unlined, unchanged—broke into a smile, and she ran to Terry, throwing herself—warm, fragrant, soft, alive—into his arms. Nadia was light, but the weight of her arms on his shoulders was enough to make him grunt with pain.
She said, “It’s you.”
“It’s just me,” Terry said. “It’s just me.”
Never let her go, Terry thought. The past is under the rubble and bricks. Terry felt her breathing and her heartbeat, and he thought, This is all that’s real, the past is like the dead—who wants to dig up those rotting bones?
“They told me you were dead,” she finally said.
She must have asked someone to look Terry up on the Internet and then stopped after the first link. Terry thought about those first weeks after the earthquake, when to see a familiar face was to see someone who had come back from the dead, when everyone was a presumed ghost.
“Not dead,” he said. “Just in Florida.”
Nadia stepped back.
“Then why you never call?” she asked. “I needed you.”
Now it was Terry’s turn to lie. “Johel told me to leave you alone. He comes to me in my dreams. And he told me to stay away.”
* * *
Nadia sat on the couch. She invited Terry to sit beside her, but the high cushions were too painful for his back, so he took the judge’s armchair. That’s where Johel used to sit and watch football, and even now the imprint of the big man’s body was in the cushions. Sitting in his chair felt like wearing the dead man’s clothes. Nadia smiled, but it was no longer that first smile of pure joy. Now she has started to wonder why Terry has come back from the dead to visit her. People came to her all day and wanted something. The poor came and wanted enough to eat. The rich came and wanted to be richer. There was only one person on the planet who wanted to see Nadia because of the thing she is. She kept Johel’s son in Port-au-Prince, in a house surrounded by a high wall, topped with barbed wire, and protected by a man with a shotgun.
But Terry knew about this secret place, this region of vulnerability. He asked about little Johel.
“He looks like his daddy,” Terry said, thumbing through the pictures on Nadia’s phone. There is no doubt—none at all—about who this chubby, round-faced child’s father is.
“He’s smart like his daddy,” Nadia said. “He can almost read.”
Terry said, “He used to worry about you, you know. I always said, ‘Don’t worry about Nadia. She can take care of herself.’ But he made me promise to take care of you, come what may.”
When Terry had walked into the room and felt her skin against his own, he had wavered. Truth never loved Terry, never slept on his chest; he never wanted Truth with every fiber of his being. Truth never took Terry’s hand under the tablecloth and squeezed it. Truth never looked over her shoulder at Terry. But when Nadia broke off her embrace, Terry knew, come what may, that he was frightened of Truth. Twenty years of experience and interrogation had taught Terry that Truth was a lady who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“Do you ever dream about him?” Terry asked.
Nadia shook her head. Sometimes she dreamed of the men throwing the golden watch on the Trois Rivières, and sometimes she dreamed of the Caribbean Market, wandering through the collapsed corridors in blackness. On those nights, if she was in Port-au-Prince, she pulled her baby out of his crib where he was sleeping and put him in bed with her. But she never dreamed about Johel.
Terry said, “I talk to him sometimes in my dreams, just like I’m talking to you. And he’s been telling me now to keep his boy safe.”
Now Terry’s training and experience have taken over. The Reid technique is a scientific procedure. It has been tested in tens of thousands of interrogations. Terry knew to keep his eyes focused on hers, and he knew how to let the silence talk for him. He kept his body as still as a statue.
If Nadia wanted Terry to leave, she only had to say so. She had two strong men on the other side of the door. If Terry resisted, they would throw him into the street. But the idea never crossed her mind. She was thinking of the boy: she knew what it was to be helpless, to be beaten, to be hungry.
“Nadia, Johel wants to keep that boy safe. And I want to keep that boy safe too. That means keeping you safe. But I can only keep you safe if I know the truth. And I know that you killed him.”
Nadia opened her mouth. She wanted to tell him that it wasn’t true. That was what the suspect always tries to say.
But Terry said, “Let me talk now. You can talk later. But I know for a fact what happened.”
Now anything could happen. Nadia’s phone could ring, the guard could knock at the door, and the moment would be lost. Then Terry would never know the truth. But nothing happened. Sometimes Terry will tell a suspect that they were captured on a surveillance camera. Sometimes he’ll talk about a witness, or endotriglyceride levels. Today he talked about his dreams.
* * *
The café at which Terry and I sat in the Coral Gables Barnes & Noble was directly adjacent to the fiction department, in whose aisles a few dedicated members of my tribe sat cross-legged on the floor or stood balanced on one leg like fragile birds. By now afternoon had passed to evening. Darkness had fallen and the plate glass windows reflected only the bookstore’s light. The air was thick with stories. At other tables, people read stories or told stories on their phones or sat at their laptops and typed out stories of their own.
It is nonsense, of course, that stories make us live: that is the precinct of a sufficient number of calories, of protein, of vaccinations and antibiotics, of clean air, safe water, solid shelter, and, as Johel Célestin understood, of good roads; for life you need money. But I learned in Haiti that stories, if not a necessity, are not a luxury either. Only the rich and the lucky can afford to live without stories, for without stories, as every Haitian peasant knows, life is all just things that happen to you, and you are just something that happens in the lives of others. The highbrows may snoot, as they will, but by my lights, a good story is the greatest of all literary inventions, the only realm in our existence where for every “Why?” there exists a commensurate “Because…” Those two words, “why?” and “because,” might be the best thing our species has going for it.
And so we follow that trail, leaping across the terrifying abyss and landing on those strong stones until, just beyond the last “because,” there is, as every Haitian knows, something sublime—so close that you can touch it, so near that you can smell it, so hot that it can burn you.
* * *
Not even Terry knows which story is true.
The first story Terry tells Nadia is the story he has read in the chat rooms, the story Nadia’s enemies are whispering. It is the story of an ambitious man and an even more ambitious woman. Terry talks about a man who loved a woman with a rare love, who gave up everything he had for her: another woman, his home, his career. When did she first poison him? When he fell in love with her? When did she realize that she was smarter than the man? When did it occur to her that the crown was within her reach? Did she lie in bed and
imagine herself dressed in a widow’s weeds, the mournful crowd hushed, every tear a thousand votes?
How easy it was for such a woman to find the boko. How easy it was for such a woman to wait for the right moment: after the first round of the election, before the second. How easy it was for such a woman to slip the coup poud’ in the judge’s drink. How easy it was for this woman to cry.
But there are two stories; there are always two stories. The only difference between the stories is that we can live with one story and not the other. Innocence is never an option.
So Terry tells the other story. It is the story of a woman who had no choices, a woman who had no passport and no visa. This was a story of a woman just trying to get by—and the good Lord knows, getting by isn’t a sin. This was the story of a woman who had never lived free a moment in her life, passed from man to man like a donkey or chattel, until she finally found herself in a cage with only one key, a terrible key. There were loup-garou in that cage with her. She didn’t want to turn that key. She turned to Terry first to keep her safe in the cage; he couldn’t. She begged, she pleaded with him to give her a visa; he wouldn’t. Then she discovered something to live for, something more important than herself. And still she wouldn’t turn the key until she had no choice, none at all.
Maybe she had prepared, just in case, visiting the boko when Johel wouldn’t listen to her. Maybe she had what she needed tucked in a corner of her valise. Maybe that terrible morning when Johel hardened his heart to her, when he wouldn’t listen to her story … A woman like that—who can blame her? Who can blame her for defending herself, her baby? Who can blame her for wanting freedom, for wanting what every man, woman, and child is owed by the good Lord? Who can blame her for wanting to live?
Not even Johel could blame her, says Terry. You have time to think in the Other Land across the Sea, time to reflect on your sins. Johel understood now that she had no choice. Johel understood his sins.
Now Terry waits. He knows the moment is ripe. He can see that Nadia wants to tell him the truth. He knows that she understands the gravity of her crime, that she has thought of nothing else since the moment she acted. He knows that human beings, sinful as they are, strive for goodness. He knows that human beings want to confess. They want to tell the truth and be forgiven.
And so, when Nadia looks at him, and says, “I want only to be free,” he says what he always says.
He says, “I understand.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I have taken liberties with the details of recent Haitian history. Attentive readers will know, for example, that there were no elections in the weeks preceding the earthquake. I am not I, you are not you, and my Mission is certainly not MINUSTAH, the Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti. Nothing that I have written here should be taken as true in the journalistic sense of the word: the characters, scandals, and successes depicted in these pages are all products of my imagination.
There are other scandals associated with MINUSTAH that I have not written about. Certainly the gravest is the introduction of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae by Nepalese peacekeepers into the Meille River. The resultant cholera epidemic has killed at least ten thousand Haitians. The crystal waterways of the Grand’Anse, when I knew them, were so clean that villagers drank river water without undue concern. I remember bathing happily in the Roseaux River. No one would dare do such a thing nowadays.
My spelling of Haitian Creole is unorthodox. I have decided to spell Haitian Creole as I have both because the currently accepted spelling of Creole is so ugly on the page, and to allow Francophone readers a firmer toehold into this wonderful but inaccessible language.
I have translated Avocat Noé Fourcand’s speech from the words of the historical Noé Fourcand, quoted in Arthur Rouzier’s Les belles figures de l’intelligentsia jérémienne du temps passé—et du présent. This is the finest introduction to the lost poets of Jérémie.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have been written without the generous assistance of the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mischa Berlinski is the author of the novel Fieldwork, a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Addison M. Metcalf Award. You can sign up for email updates here.
ALSO BY MISCHA BERLINSKI
Fieldwork
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Sarah Crichton Books
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2016 by Mischa Berlinski
Map copyright © 2016 by Jeffrey L. Ward
All rights reserved
First edition, 2016
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berlinski, Mischa, 1973–
Peacekeeping: a novel / Mischa Berlinski.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-0-374-23044-9 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-374-71516-8 (ebook)
1. Police—Haiti—Fiction. 2. Corruption—Haiti—Fiction. 3. Political fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.E75825P43 2016
813'.6—dc23
2015034511
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Prologue
Part One
1
2
3
4
Part Two
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Part Three
1
2
3
4
Part Four
1
2
3
4
Part Five
1
2
3
4
Part Six
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Part Seven
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Part Eight
Part Nine
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Also by Mischa Berlinski
Copyright
*In addition to hiring police officers, the United Nations hired armies: the UN offered $1,038 per month per soldier to the national army of any country that sent soldiers on Mission. This was a very attractive offer to those countries with large, expensive standing armies where the soldiers earned less than $1,038 per month. In addition, the United Nations paid contributing armies for every tank, armored personnel carrier, jeep, and generator they provided. This was how the Uruguayan battalion arrived in Haiti.
Peacekeeping missions are a particularly attractive option for nations with some kind of simmering social disorder at home. Wars are expensive, and sending half the army abroad to keep the peace pays for the other half of the army to stay home and fight your
Tamil Tigers, your Ibo petro-guerrillas, or your Maoists, which explains why there were large contingents from Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Nepal on the ground.
*The Conseil Electoral Haïtien, known as the CEH, was the bureaucratic organ in charge of organizing the election, from registering voters to preparing ballots to establishing voting centers to counting the votes themselves. One of the prerogatives of the CEH was to ensure that every candidate on the ballot met the requirements of the Haitian Constitution for the office in question. Candidates for the sénat needed to be thirty years old, have a clean criminal record, have lived four years in the territory they wished to represent, own property, exercise a profession in the territory they wished to represent—and be a citizen of one nation, and just one nation, on God’s green earth: Haiti. (Haitian law did not recognize double nationality.) The CEH was ostensibly a neutral administrative body, its members selected by all three branches of government, but no one in Haiti believed that it was anything but the well-trained pet of the president himself. To further isolate the CEH from partisan politics, it was, by constitutional imperative, subservient to no court of appeals. Its decisions—whether about the location of a voting center or the outcome of a close election—were final.
*These local officials were chosen by the Departmental Electoral Office in Jérémie, whose members were selected by the CEH in Port-au-Prince, and to the extent that the CEH was a biased and partisan body, so too the local electoral officials.
Peacekeeping Page 37