Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

Then, just six weeks before the final examinations that would have marked the culmination of so many years’ effort, Beatrice stopped coming by the house. A day or so passed, and Terry asked Mirabelle if Beatrice was sick. He was eager to see her. There was a transitional undergraduate program at Florida State, his own alma mater, for which he thought she would be ideal; and he had a notion how such a program could be paid for through the Rotarians. Mirabelle shook her head. She told Terry that Beatrice was going to be leaving for her uncle’s house in Port-au-Prince on the very next boat; she was dropping out of school. Then Mirabelle began to cry.

Soon Terry, who had two decades’ experience in this sort of thing, coaxed the whole story out of Mirabelle.

Mirabelle and Beatrice lived in a neighborhood of small tin-roofed shacks not far from Terry’s house. For several months now, an older boy in the neighborhood, from a larger, wealthier household, had been aggressively courting Beatrice. Toto Dorsemilus was in his middle twenties, one of the young men in the orbit of Sénateur Maxim Bayard. In the evenings when the Sénateur was in town, Toto would sit and play cards on the Sénateur’s terrace as the Sénateur received his guests.

Every afternoon Toto would wait for Beatrice at the gates of the lycée and offer to drive her home on his motorcycle; when popular acts like Jean Jean Roosevelt came to town, he bought Beatrice a ticket. When she refused to go out at night with him alone, he bought tickets for her friends. In this crowd of teenage girls he stood out for his age and size: he wore his beard in a goatee, and on his thick fingers he had a handful of rings — a skull and crossbones, a garnet, and an opal. He wore oversize jeans that hung down over his buttocks and a basketball jersey that showed off his broad shoulders and thick arms. It was his habit to chew on an old toothbrush, as someone else might gnaw an unlit cigar or a toothpick.

Mirabelle told Terry that the other afternoon Toto had been at the gates of the school, waiting for Beatrice on his motorcycle. Beatrice ordinarily refused his offers, but there’d been a big storm that afternoon, and she had just purchased new shoes, a pair of dark leather penny loafers that had cost the better part of her mother’s weekly salary. She accepted the ride, and Toto suggested waiting out the rain at his house: the narrow pathway that led to Beatrice’s own home was too slippery in the mud to reach by bike.

Had it not been for the bruises across her daughter’s face and shoulders left by those heavy rings, Mirabelle might not have realized the next day that anything was wrong, but the bruises, and later the swelling, made it clear that something was very wrong indeed. Beatrice told her mother that she had been raped. Moreover, she was terrified that it would happen again. For this reason, mother and daughter decided together that she would flee — immediately — to Port-au-Prince.

For the first time since his arrival in Haiti Terry felt as if he had a reason for his presence there. He took Mirabelle’s hand, which was hard and lined by twenty years of rough manual labor, all invested in her daughter. When there were no houses to clean, she had cut cane, gathered plantains, or walked hours in a burning sun to sell a meager harvest of manioc and yam at far-flung local markets. Plenty of nights had seen Mirabelle go to bed hungry, the food in the family cooking pot reserved for her daughter. Terry, still holding the thick, dry hand, looked in Mirabelle’s eyes and told her that he would help.

That evening, Toto Dorsemilus was in the custody of the PNH. Terry was there when they picked him up.

The next morning, Terry’s colleague, the young Canadian UNPOL who worked regularly with the sex-crimes unit of the PNH, took him aside and told him a number of disturbing details. The PNH records are poorly maintained, but she had learned from one of her counterparts in the sex-crimes unit that Toto Dorsemilus had been arrested twice before for the same crime under almost identical circumstances. Both times he had been released shortly after his arrest.

Terry passed a number of rough nights thinking of Toto, hearing the scared women cry on the Jordanian’s computer. When the PNH arrested him, Toto, chewing on that old toothbrush, had looked Terry straight in the eye, fearless and arrogant. Terry was convinced that Toto Dorsemilus would soon be out on the streets again, and just a week later he was. Terry saw him on his motorcycle, riding down the Grand Rue. When he saw Terry, he slowed his bike down, looked him in the eye, and said, “Blan.”

It wasn’t hard to find out what happened: Mirabelle had bought herself a television set with some of the money the Sénateur had given her and Beatrice, two thousand dollars in all. In exchange, they had agreed to drop the charges. Then the Sénateur had pressured the public prosecutor to release Toto Dorsemilus without further investigation.

“Christ, Mirabelle, what do you need a television for? There’s no electricity,” Terry said.

“Gen toujou lespwa,” Mirabelle said. A Creole proverb: There’s always hope.

“And the next girl? How much is she worth?”

“I only have one daughter,” Mirabelle said.

“That’s a shame. If you had a couple of them, you’d be rich.”

Terry had been in Haiti four months or so when Kay decided to come down and visit for the first time. She was celebrating her fortieth birthday. She flew down to Haiti with a stomach full of butterflies, and not only because her sisters told her she was crazy to go on vacation in Haiti: “Wake up and smell the State Department travel advisories,” they said. But Kay knew that Terry wouldn’t invite her if she wasn’t going to be safe. No, it was seeing Terry that scared her. He’d been on Mission a couple of months — it was the longest spell they’d been apart since they were married — and for no reason she could explain, even to herself, the prospect of seeing him made her anxious, as if she were going on a blind date. She was worried that he was going to be a weirdo, or boring, or that she was going to hate him.

Just as soon as she saw him, though, waiting for her at the airport in Jérémie, she knew things were going to be okay. He hadn’t shaved in a week or so, which was how she liked him best; and he must have dropped ten pounds, making his cheeks lean and angular. His skin was bronzed, and the smile he flashed her when she got off the plane made her know he was excited to see her.

“Well hello, stranger,” she said, sliding into his arms. “Know where a girl can find a man around here?”

That evening she sat with Terry drinking beer and eating barbecued chicken on the roof of his rented house. Both of his housemates were on vacation. Then Terry told Kay the whole Mirabelle and Beatrice saga.

“And you fired her?” Kay asked.

“Don’t you think it’s wrong, what she did?”

“Maybe that money could change her whole life. You don’t know. Maybe she could pay for school. Maybe she could—”

“If it’s wrong to buy justice, it’s wrong to sell it,” Terry said. “That’s not why I’m here.”

Kay wasn’t sure that Terry was right. But she took it as a sign of his sincerity — and his love for her — that he’d spent two days getting the house clean on his own. He’d even washed the sheets by hand.

The house was dark and charmless, with barred windows and low ceilings, but if you climbed up on the roof, there was a view of the Caribbean, which in the slanting light of sunset was a vast reflecting pool of ochre, crimson, and gold.

“This isn’t the way I imagined it at all,” she said.

“How did you imagine it?” said Terry.