Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

“You don’t know the half of it. Listen to the story. The way it works with visas is that applicants have to prove to us that they’re not going to live in the States.”

Now Nadia was looking at Baker. I had thought the language was too difficult for her, but she was staring at him, her brilliant eyes not blinking.

“Basically, you have to prove you’re not broke. Show us a bank account, show us a house, show us a job. And that’s not easy to do. Nine out of ten applicants we turn down.”

Kay had a little smile on her face, waiting for the punch line.

“So one of my colleagues gets this applicant. Lady makes an appointment, shows up at the window, pays her hundred dollars, and wants a visa. Neatly dressed older lady, says she works at American Airlines, wants to visit her kids in Boston. And for whatever reason, my colleague — we call her Permission Denied, she’s such a hard-ass — Permission Denied doesn’t believe the story. The letter from the employer looks strange, the bank account is nearly empty, et cetera, et cetera. Decision is final. No appeals.”

Baker paused for a second as the waiter delivered the appetizers.

“So a couple of weeks later, Permission Denied is ready to go back to the States on vacation. She gets herself to the airport, waits in line, and who’s standing there behind the counter but this lady, the one who got her visa denied. Permission Denied is sweating bullets just because this is so awkward. And this lady, sugar wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Doesn’t say a thing. ‘Enjoy your flight, ma’am.’ Permission Denied thinks everything will be fine, just until the moment she’s getting on board the plane, when American Airlines security stops her. Seems she’s been flagged on the No Fly List. And she’s sputtering how she works at the American embassy, et cetera, et cetera. She makes such a holy scandal they bring out the head of airport security.”

“Don’t tell me—,” Kay said.

“You got it,” Baker said.

“Really?” I said.

“She turned him down for a visa too.”

“Oh, no!” Kay said.

“You know what the lady at the counter, the first lady, said?”

“What?” Kay said.

“She looks at Permission Denied and says, ‘I didn’t want to take my vacation in Port-au-Prince either.’”

“Oh, that’s too good,” Kay said.

“True story.”

Now it was our side of the table that exploded in laughter. Soon all of us were telling jokes. The only one who wasn’t laughing was Nadia. But Kay was happy again, as all the men — Baker, LBJ, and me — placated her and made her laugh.

It didn’t seem like cruelty to ignore Nadia, maybe even a kindness. She did not look bored. She stared at her husband. From time to time her face would attract my eye, and my glance would linger on her high cheekbones, her tiny ears, and her sculpted lips. Later, when the judge excused himself and went to the bathroom, I do not believe that Nadia’s eyes wavered for even a fraction of a second from the pathway leading to the main building in which the toilets were located; and she seemed to respire shallowly until the very instant he returned to the table, where he leaned his big body over hers and whispered in her ear. Whatever he said produced a wan smile. Then he sat down again at the far side of the table.

Baker whispered to me, “Is that Madame Mireille?”

I followed his glance across the room to a distinguished lady in red crêpe de chine, the only woman at a table of older men.

“What are you two talking about?” Kay asked.

Baker said, “Not so loud, she’ll hear us.”

“Who?” Kay asked, her voice inexplicably louder.

“That’s Madame Mireille,” I said.

“Where?”

“That lady. That’s her.”

Our heads all swung around like spectators at a tennis match, and then people at neighboring tables followed our glance.

“She doesn’t look like the posters,” Kay said.

Madame Mireille’s face, admittedly somewhat younger, was on electoral posters all over the capital: she had been a losing candidate in the last presidential election, a partisan of the mulatto urban economic elite. The posters had yet to be taken down. Her husband had been president in the late 1980s before being deposed; on his death a few years back, she entered politics herself. She had lost the election very badly.

“She’s a brave woman,” Nadia said.

Her voice surprised me.

Kay said, “I never understood that, how some women go into politics when their men die. If Terry died, it’s not like I’d see it as a career opportunity.”

Then the waiter came back. Now we had had sufficient time to consider our choices, and the process of ordering was efficient. It was interrupted only by Nadia, who had not looked at her menu. Instead she insisted on interrogating the waiter on her choices. And I understood that she could not read the menu.

Kay must have noticed the same thing. “The fish is so good,” she said. “They make it with this beurre blanc white sauce and—”

Nadia continued to interrogate the waiter.

“The last time we were here, I loved it,” Kay said, as much to me as to Nadia. “I’m just not getting it today because sometimes I need meat, you know? If I don’t eat a steak once a week, I feel faint. Terry says I’m a natural-born carnivore.”

The waiter in his pressed white shirt and tuxedo jacket seemed to be losing his patience.

“Fish is good,” he said.

“See?” Kay said. “You’ll love it.”

“Give me the fish,” Nadia finally said.

But when the food eventually arrived, Nadia did something that surprised me. She took a bite and called the waiter over. Her voice now had lost its timidity.

“This fish slept,” she said, the Creole way of saying that the fish wasn’t fresh.

“He didn’t sleep,” the waiter said.

Nadia didn’t say anything. She had decided before she tasted the fish that it had slept, I think. It was a point of principle. I had not thought her capable of confronting the white-shirted waiter in this fancy restaurant. She stared the waiter into submission. He glanced helplessly around the table for a moment, as if one of us might intervene, then, his shoulders sagging, took the plate away.

Later, when he came back with another fish — we had almost all of us finished eating by then — Nadia accepted the plate with a curt “Merci.” Then she ate delicately, flicking little bits of fish off the bone and onto her fork. I have never seen anyone eat a plate of food more slowly. We were all long finished before her fish was half consumed.

This is the story, pretty much the way Kay White told it to me.

There was a young Manhattan lawyer who wore a sweater-vest in winter under his dark gray suit and carried an antique pocket watch with a flinty silver face (he collects them) and a fat Waterman fountain pen (he collects them too); a man who looked forty when he was twenty, with a bit of a belly and a receding hairline, and looked just the same at thirty; a man who will look just the same splayed out one day in his gleaming acajou coffin.

There was a young man who, from the moment he arrived at the age of eleven on the other side of the water, embraced responsibility and eschewed frivolity; a young man who excelled through the application of discipline, intelligence, and unstinting hard work at every American endeavor thus far essayed, and who has been rewarded by being denied nothing in his American life that is his due.

There was a young man with a pretty honey-blond fiancée named Jennifer McCall, a nice girl whom he met in law school, two highly intelligent, highly learned young creatures, both of them ambitious and kindly and smart, building a beautiful American life together.