Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

Which would you choose?

Now Antwan might say, “I’ve never done something wrong before, you can ask—”

And I’ll say, “See? That’s good. That’s real good. We can work with that. That shows this here was a misjudgment. That matters. I know what happened. I know this was an error in judgment, owing to the stress.”

Antwan will be silent a long time. Maybe there are tears in his eyes.

All he wants is for this moment to be over.

So I say, “Antwan, my wife and I been planning a trip to the Keys since last November. We’re supposed to be leaving tomorrow. I disappoint my wife and tell her our trip is over because I have to stay here working this case, getting you to tell me the truth that we both know about that car, waiting for your endotriglycerides to come back from the lab — believe you me, when I have to talk to the district attorney, you will feel my wife’s pain. She’s been dieting three weeks now, feeding me nothing but carrots. The first thing that district attorney is going to ask me when we decide how to proceed is whether you were a man. If I tell him how things really went down, about your error in judgment, about your stress — Christ alive, we all were young once. I can help you. But I need to know from you, right now, what happened.”

I look at him a long time, not blinking. The very second he looks away, I say, “Now tell me all about it.”

Most times it’s just as easy as that.

Sometimes the crime is of greater gravity — a murder or a rape. These confessions, contrary to expectations, are often easier to produce, despite the greater punishment the criminal will incur. For in these cases the criminal’s tension is also that much greater, as is his desire to tell his side of the story. He has been telling himself the story of his crime since the moment he pulled the trigger. This is certain: he has done nothing else but think about his crime. He wants to talk about the most significant thing he has done in his life. A car thief, a vandal, a petty drug dealer will not always understand the gravity of his situation, the consequences of his actions. It will not seem serious to him. Never so a murderer.

Immediately after the confession — and this is a moment of very great intimacy between myself and the suspect — the suspect will almost always offer a second justification of his crimes, an honest justification. It will come out as an afterthought. This is something he wants me to hear, and no matter what he says, it will remain between us. I already have what the law requires. Sometimes the justification is as simple as “I was bored and wanted to go for a ride,” and sometimes as heartbreaking as “I needed the money to buy my daddy’s heart medicine.”

No matter what the crime, I always say, “I understand.”

That’s what I hope you’ll say too.

There wasn’t much to the town, really — a triangular spit of land between a river and the sea, and shaped like the bowl of a natural amphitheater, most every street sloping down sooner or later to the azure stage of the Caribbean or guttering out inconclusively into twisting warrens of dirt paths, the houses degenerating to huts, then hovels. In the city center, old wooden houses listed at improbable angles. Energetic, prosperous people had built these houses and carefully painted them, but the salt air had long ago stripped away the color, leaving them a uniform grayish brown. There was a small town square, the Place Dumas, around which a flock of motorcycle taxi drivers circumnavigated in the course of every sunny day, maneuvering always to stay in the shade, and a filthy market where the marchandes hacked up and sold goat cadavers under a nimbus of flies. On the Grand Rue, merchants in old-fashioned shophouses with imposing wrought iron balconies sold sacks of cement or PVC pipes, or bought coffee. Jérémie had more coffin makers than restaurants. There were fewer cars on the streets than donkeys. The Hotel Patience down on the Grand Rue was said to be a bordello; word was that the ladies of the night were fat. Several little shops, all identical, featured row upon row of gallon-size vats of mayonnaise, which fact I could not reconcile with the lack of ready refrigeration, and bottles of Night Train and Manischewitz — local belief held the latter was a powerful aphrodisiac. You could buy cans of Dole Tropical Fruit mix, but you could not obtain a fresh vegetable; Jérémie was on the sea, but fresh fish was a rarity.

At midday, the dogs lay in the dusty streets panting, which is more or less what they did evening, morning, and night also, except when they copulated.

Whole days would pass discussing when the big boat from Port-au-Prince would arrive, staring out at the multicolored sea to register its earliest presence. The boat’s arrival brought a momentary flurry of excitement as the cargo was unloaded and barefoot men, muscles straining, eyeballs bulging, dragged thousand-pound chariots of rice, Coca-Cola, or cement through the dusty streets.

My wife and I lived in a tumbledown gingerbread, at least a century old and shaded by a quartet of sprawling mango trees. It was one of the most beautiful houses in all of Haiti. A cool terrace ran around the house, where we ate our meals and dozed away the hot afternoons in the shade. In the evenings it was (mildly) exciting to sit outside in the rocking chair and watch thick purple strokes of lightning light up cloud mountains out over the Îles Cayemites. It was the kind of house in which one might have found behind the acajou armoire a map indicating the location in the untended garden of hidden treasure.

The windows of the house had no glass, just hurricane shutters, and very late at night I sometimes heard coming up from Basse-Ville the manic beating of drums and women’s voices singing spooky songs with no melody. This was the only time Jérémie really came alive. My whole body would grow tense as I strained to hear more clearly this strange music, which would endure all through the night and well into sunrise. I had never before heard music like that. It was the music of a people laboring to communicate with unseen forces; it was the music of a people dancing wildly around a fire until seized up by some mighty unknown thing.

Only in these midnight dances would the languid tenor of the town change, revealing its frantic, urgent heart.

* * *

Our chef d’administration was a Trinidadian named Slim. His Sunday barbecues were animated by his personal vision of the United Nations as a brotherhood of man — Asian, African, and Occidental all seated together at plastic tables under big umbrellas eating hunks of jerk chicken. There were maybe a dozen of us there, in the dusty courtyard of his little concrete house.

I was talking to the chef de transport , Balu, from Tanzania — his long, glum face reminded me of Eeyore. Balu was unique in that in all his time in Haiti he never sought housing of his own. He kept a bedroll in the corner of his office and unrolled it at night. He had been living there for a year now.

I asked him once if this was difficult.

“I am come from African village!” he said. “This is everything good. I have electricity”—he was referring to the generators, which at Mission HQ went 24/7—“I have water. Maybe I am not even finding a house as good as this. Why should I be paying for anything more?”

Balu had been hired as local staff in Tanzania, supporting the UN Mission to Congo. He had done a good job and won himself a place in Haiti.

“I am not even number one in my village, or number two — I am number twelve!” he said. “If you ask anyone in village when I am boy where Balu will go one day, nobody will say, ‘Balu is going one day to United Nations.’ They will say, ‘Balu, he is going straight to Hell!’”