Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

In Creole, Johel says, “Do you want to go with him?”

“I don’t know,” Nadia says.

“Let’s go,” Ti Pierre says. “We got Boston tomorrow.”

“I don’t know,” Nadia says again, looking at Johel, the green eyes pleading with him, looking at him in every way a man wants to be looked at, just once, by a beautiful woman.

So Johel says, “This money is for you. You can take it and go with him if you want. Or you can take it and leave. If you have no place to go tonight, you can come with me.”

Eventually the wedding is canceled, and Johel’s mother collects a hundred dollars from his uncle.

She left almost no trace when she was gone.

Johel went to work, and when he came home, the apartment was empty. Only a hint of her sweat lingered in his good sheets. A little rum was gone from the bottle. A few dark hairs on the pillow. Either out of politeness or indifference, she left the ivory nightgown he gave her hanging from a hook on the bathroom door. She left no other sign or signal — but how would she? She had no idea how to read or write, nothing more than her own name. It wasn’t a secret where she had gone: a week later he looked up Erzulie L’Amour on the Internet, found they had played a Miami nightclub, called up, and discovered that she had sung there the night before.

What did Nadia do that first week in Johel’s apartment? She slept, mostly. She must have been exhausted, and she was very young. At first she slept on Johel’s leather couch, where he installed her with a duvet and his pillows; then on Johel’s bed, picking herself up from the couch and putting herself between the sheets. She had so few things of her own: the dress on her back, a small suitcase, and her purse, small and nearly empty. Johel thought it strange that anyone could move across the earth having so little. The only thing that seemed truly hers was a small ceramic figurine, no taller than Johel’s outstretched hand, that she had bought for herself when Erzulie L’Amour played Boston. The doll was painted in the thick furs of Russian winter, lips and cheeks bright red against the cold, staring out at the world with twinkling eyes of boundless sadness. Nadia placed the doll on Johel’s nightstand, the first thing that she would see when she woke up.

When she woke up, she asked for spaghetti. So he fried her up some the way his mother made it, thick and greasy in tomato paste, with garlic and onions. Then she went back to sleep. From time to time she got up to pee. He had never known a woman could sleep so much. She slept almost without interruption for two full days. Only once did he leave her alone, slipping out to buy some food and then, on impulse, from a little lingerie store on the corner, a satin nightgown, which reached down to her ankles and was worked around the bosom in fine lace — just something soft to sleep in. When she saw the nightgown, she said, “Merci,” as if he had brought her a glass of water when she was very thirsty in the night. She slipped into the nightgown, inserted herself between his fine Egyptian cotton sheets, settled her angular head on his pillows, and went back to sleep.

Johel watched her sleep, as surprised by her presence as he would have been by the arrival of a fox in his midtown apartment. The few occasions when she left his bed, she watched TV — midday soap operas whose plots she seemed to intuit immediately and whose dramas she absorbed as her own. Then she told Johel the stories of those television dramas as if she had lived them, her story mingling with those stories in a breathless, boring stream of narrative that held him as enchanted as an audience with the president.

It took almost a week before Johel slipped into his own bed beside her. When she found him there, she rolled over and placed her soft face on his chest. Then Johel did not move more than he possibly could, not even when his arm began to ache or when he started to sweat. He listened to the sound of traffic far below and her soft breathing.

She had been in Johel’s house ten days when she came to bed naked. She crossed her small leg over his large one and he could feel her hair on his thigh, her small breasts on his chest. Johel had decided in his mind that he was going to save her from whatever she needed saving from. He wanted to be the kind of man who gave her everything and expected nothing; but when he felt the softness of her skin and her gentle breathing on his neck, he kissed her and rolled his big body over hers.

Only a month. How then to explain Johel’s panic when she was gone, his sorrow, his night terrors, his unreasoning sadness? His thoughts slipping around in circles over and over again until they bumped up against themselves coming the other way round. The nausea? Whatever he thought before was love — that wasn’t love. Only a woman’s sorcery could do this. She must have slipped love powder into his coffee, rubbed it on his body while he was sleeping, kneading love into his muscles and groin and fat. Why would she do such a thing, enchant him and then abandon him? He knew the answer: it was a woman’s nature. Tonton Jean, who knew women like a bird knows flight, had once told him that women carry a sachet of love powder in their purses or hide it in their brassieres, and they sprinkle a dash here and there as needed. That is how women survive in this hard world.

* * *

The only love powder she had used had been her story. She told it to him lying naked beside him in bed, her delicate, slow voice sweet in his ears. Later he would lie in bed alone and tell it to himself, the only thing of her that he had left.

Her first life had been in the village, seven children in the house and enough money to send one child to school — not her. She had known the smell of the other children as they slept all together in the big bed, their little bodies rubbing hot against each other in the sweaty hut. She had known the river and she had known the hill, and she had known every stump and root and stone on the hill, and she had washed clothes on the bank of the river, and she had known hunger always, and she had learned that when you are hungry, sometimes a song can be like food.

That life came to an end as if she were dead and in her coffin when the man with the mustache came to the village. He had been of the village and he had gone away and he had come back, and now his mustache was thick and waxy and his chest heavy and sweaty and his eyes red. And they took him around to see all the girls of the village, to show him which ones could lift and which ones could sing and which ones could carry, which girl was becoming a woman and had a woman’s high breasts, and when he saw Nadia, the bucket of water on her head, spine erect, singing “ Ti kolibri ,” he pointed at her.

The negotiations had lasted an afternoon, and Nadia had prayed that her mother would take the cows from the man and let her go, because she knew there was nothing for her there but that high hill and the buckets of water and the hunger and the song. And the man with the mustache told Nadia that if she came with him, she would sing every night and never carry water again and her hands would be soft and she would have long hair like a blan . In the end, the man with the mustache offered her mother five cows. He had never paid so much for a girl before.

Now the story was on the ocean in the little boat, when a storm came up. Even the men began to cry because in the black clouds and pelting rain they saw the Baron. So Nadia sang to La Sirene, Erzulie of the Waters, who was so charmed by this maiden’s song that she implored her lover Agwe to let the boat ride on his back a little longer. Nadia came to the coast of a place that the others called Miami.

This was another life. She didn’t know how much the woman with the belt and the fat man with the golden watch paid for her. Now her story lived in a house with shiny wood floors. She was their restavek , their slave, and they told her that just as soon as she paid off her debt, she could leave: step out the door with no money and no language (who spoke Creole but Haitians?) into the vast white emptiness of America. So she stayed. The house was very large and the floors very shiny, and if the floors were not shiny, the woman beat her with a belt; and if the floors were shiny or if the floors were not shiny, the fat man with the golden watch came to her at night and she heard the golden watch ticking against her ear.