Edwidge Danticat - The Dew Breaker

“It’s been so many years,” the dream aunt said. “Are you sure he’s the one?”

He took the empty room in the barber’s basement. He couldn’t sleep for months, spending his weekends in nightclubs to pass the time. He visited the barbershop regularly for haircuts, arriving early in the morning soon after he opened. He would sit and watch the barber, now a much thinner man, turn on his radio, then sweep the entire shop before lining up his tools and calling him to the chair. His heart would race as the barber draped a black cape over his chest, then sheared paths through his hair until barely a stubble was left on top of his head. All the while he would study the pictures on the walls, campaign posters for local elections, hairstyle samples that he never chose from, asking the barber only to “cut as much as you can.”

The barber never made conversation, never said, “How do you like the basement?” He only asked in a soft voice that sounded nothing like the hoarse and angry voice that had threatened him so many years ago, “Would you like a shave?”

He never turned down the shaves, for he thought it would give the barber a chance to have a closer look at his face, to remember him. He always expected the barber’s large hands to tremble, but it was his own body that quivered instead, his forehead and neck that became covered with sweat, melting the shaving cream on his chin, forcing the barber to offer him extra napkins and towels and warn him to stay still to avoid nicks and cuts.

Finally, two nights ago, when the barber’s wife was away at a religious retreat-he looked for such opportunities all the time and hadn’t found one until then-he climbed the splintered steps to the first floor, then made his way with a flashlight to the barber’s bedroom.

“What did you do?” the dream aunt asked.

He stood there and listened to the barber breathing. The barber was snoring, each round of snores beginning with a grunt and ending in a high-pitched moan. He lowered his face toward the barber’s widow’s peak, hoping he would wake him up and startle him to death. When he was a boy, he’d heard about political prisoners being choked in their sleep, their faces swelling, their eyes bulging out of their heads. He wanted to do the same thing now to the barber. Or maybe press a pillow down on his face. Or simply wake him up to ask him “Why?”

Looking down at the barber’s face, which had shrunk so much over the years, he lost the desire to kill. It wasn’t that he was afraid, for he was momentarily feeling bold, fearless. It wasn’t pity, either. He was too angry to feel pity. It was something else, something less measurable. It was the dread of being wrong, of harming the wrong man, of making the wrong woman a widow and the wrong child an orphan. It was the realization that he would never know why-why one single person had been given the power to destroy his entire life.

He was trembling again. His whole body, it seemed, was soaked with sweat as he tiptoed out of the barber’s room. Even when he was back in the basement calling about flights to Port-au-Prince, he couldn’t shake the feeling that after all these years the barber might finally make good on his promise to shoot him, just as he had his parents.

Dany woke himself with the sound of his own voice reciting his story. His aunt was awake too; he could make out her outline in the dark. It looked as though she was sitting up in her cot, pushing the chamber pot beneath her, to relieve herself.

“Da, were you dreaming about your parents?” She leaned over and replaced the chamber pot back under the bed. “You were calling their names.”

“Was I?” He would have thought he was calling the barber.

“You were calling your parents,” she said, “just this instant.”

He was still back there, on the burning porch, hoping that his mother and father would rise and put out the fire. He was in the yard, watching the barber’s car speed away and his aunt crawling off the porch, on her belly, like a blind snake. He was in that room in Brooklyn, with the barber, watching him sleep. Now his aunt’s voice was just an echo of things he could no longer enjoy-his mother’s voice, his father’s laugh.

“I’m sorry I woke you,” he said, wiping the sweat off his forehead with the backs of his hands.

“I should have let you continue telling me what you came here to say.” His aunt’s voice seemed to be floating toward him in the dark. “It’s like walking up these mountains and losing something precious halfway. For you, it would be no problem walking back to find it because you’re still young and strong, but for me it would take a lot more time and effort.”

He heard the cot squeak as she lay back down.

“Tante Estina,” he said, lying back on the small sisal mat himself.

“Wi, Da,” she replied.

“Were my parents in politics?”

“Oh, Da,” she said, as if protesting the question.

“Please,” he said.

“No more than any of us,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“They didn’t do anything bad, Da,” she said, “or anything at all. I didn’t know all my brother’s secrets, but I think he was taken for somebody else.”

“Who?” he asked.

“M pa konnen,” she said.

He thought maybe she’d said a name, Lubin or Firmin.

“Who were they mistaken for?” he asked her again.

“M pa konnen,” she repeated. “I don’t know, Da. Maybe they were mistaken for all of us. There’s a belief that if you kill people, you can take their knowledge, become everything they were. Maybe they wanted to take all that knowledge for themselves. I don’t know, Da. All I know is I’m very tired now. Let me sleep.”

He decided to let her rest. They should have a chance to talk again. She went back to sleep, whispering something he could not hear under her breath, then growing silent. When he woke up the next morning, she was dead.

It was Old Zo’s daughter who let out the first cry, announcing the death to the entire valley. Sitting near the body, on the edge of his aunt’s cot, Dany was doubled over with an intense bellyache. Old Zo’s daughter took over immediately, brewing him some tea while waiting for their neighbors to arrive.

The tea did nothing for him. He wasn’t expecting it to. Part of him was grateful for the pain, for the physically agonizing diversion it provided him.

Soon after Old Zo’s daughter’s cry, a few of the village women started to arrive. It was only then that he learned Old Zo’s daughter’s name, at least her nickname, Ti Fanm, Little Woman, which the others kept shouting as they badgered her with questions.

“What happened, Ti Fanm?”

“Ti Fanm, did she die in her sleep?”

“Did she fall, Ti Fanm?”

“Ti Fanm, did she suffer?”

“Ti Fanm, she wasn’t even sick.”

“She was old,” Ti Fanm said in a firm and mature voice. “It can happen like that.”

They didn’t bother asking him anything. He wouldn’t have known how to answer anyway. After he and his aunt had spoken in the middle of the night, he thought she had fallen asleep. When he woke up in the morning, even later than he had the day before, she was still lying there, her eyes shut, her hands resting on her belly, her fingers intertwined. He tried to find her pulse, but she had none. He lowered his face to her nose and felt no breath; then he walked out of the house and found Ti Fanm, sitting on the steps, waiting to cook their breakfast. The pain was already starting in his stomach. Ti Fanm came in and performed her own investigation on his aunt, then let out that cry, a cry as loud as any siren he had heard on the streets of New York.

His aunt’s house was filled with people now, each of them taking turns examining his aunt’s body for signs of life, and when finding none immediately assigning themselves, and one another, tasks related to her burial. One group ran off to get purple curtains, to hang shroudlike over the front door to show that this was a household in mourning. Another group went off to fetch an unused washbasin to bathe the corpse. Others were searching through the baskets beneath his aunt’s cot for an appropriate dress to change her into after her bath. Another went looking for a carpenter to build her coffin.