Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

Cemetery in Jérémie was a spooky, beautiful place. Not some neatly tended country club of a cemetery, the kind you find back home: The Garden of the Eternal Snooze. Our Lady of Rot and Repose. In Jérémie, the bodies were all parked aboveground, in concrete tombs. The better class of Jérémie family owned a tomb to give their loved ones perennial shelter, but for the most part, the people in Jérémie could only afford to rent a vault for a year or two. When the rental period was concluded, no ceremony at all, the tomb’s owner jacked open the grave and tossed the current occupant out into the cemetery’s high grass and weeds and vines. If there’s still some flesh on the cadaver, they’ll toss on some kerosene and let it burn. That’s that. The cemetery was riddled with these evicted skeletons and skulls. Sometimes a dog trotted off, chewing on a femur. Those days, when the shit started building up between his temples, Terry found it very calming going over there to that cemetery, watching the bodies coming in, the skeletons going out.

And that morning, she was doing the same thing he was doing. Wandering around the tombs, looking at the skeletons. Maybe she’d been up all night with the drums and Erzulie — she did that. She was in a white dress — how’d she keep it so clean? She had this smile on her face, like she could hear the dead talking too, telling her she was pretty. Some of those graves went back a century. Lot of the graves have padlocks on them so nobody can come and open them up, turn the cadavers into zombies.

And Nadia is looking at him. Tell yourself all the lies you want, when there’s that thing, it’s there. They ended up sitting on the tombstone of Monsieur Maximilien St. Valois, who lived in Jérémie from 1876 until 1932. How many women had he loved? Father, husband, grandfather, citoyen . Now his tomb was empty — he was gone. No one remembered him. No one remembered anyone who remembered him. Some dog is gonna chew your leg. That’ll be your skull right there. That’s where he was headed, Terry thought. That was his worst fear, to leave this earth never having built something, made something. To be forgotten. He could smell Nadia’s perfume, like wildflowers, and he could hear her breathing, like life. Better build something while you can. Better live while you can. Better love while you can.

* * *

What you got to understand, if you think about it a certain way, is that she’s like the judge’s prisoner, and what you got to understand also is that Terry hadn’t always been able to protect the ones he loved. Maybe without the one fact the other fact wouldn’t have been so strong. But memory weighs on present. Maybe if he hadn’t known sorrow, he wouldn’t have been so frightened of sorrow. Now he looks at Nadia and thinks of his sister, her head like a skeleton at the end, as thin as a bird, equally fragile, looking at him with deep, scared eyes that said, Save me. Help me. Make it stop . And what could he do for her but nothing?

* * *

There was a place he took her, the Hotel Patience. It must have been a grand old place in the day: a large foyer and a sweeping staircase leading up to little rooms, all sharing a balcony on the Grand Rue. Nowadays there was a pig sleeping on the floor and a blind man sitting alone. That was Emile Sever, and people came to the Hotel Patience because just so long as the gentleman did the talking, Emile Sever would never be able to identify the owner of the high-heeled footsteps.

First time they were in that little room, the place reeking of old semen and sweat, she starts to tremble. Room lit only by the barest light of flickering candles. Terry can still taste her, like something spicy, can still smell her on his face. He’s watching the mosquitoes dive in frustration at the net. Then her teeth are chattering, she starts to moan.

And he knew what to do because this was something his sister used to do when they were kids: the fainting … not quite gone, not quite present … like everything she was feeling, even happiness and sadness, was stuck up there in the — he doesn’t know the word, the synapses or something, and some switch in the brain goes off and she can’t stop trembling …

So what he did was what he did with his sister. He got out from under the mosquito net, and he started to juggle, with whatever was at hand. He started juggling with his shoes and a bar of soap and some other stuff. At first she’s not even looking at him, just sitting under the net, trembling. But then he started dropping stuff, half on purpose and half because he was clumsy.

It took him a few minutes, but he got her to smile.

* * *

Terry wanted me to talk to her. That was all he was asking. Just go and talk to her. He wasn’t afraid to admit that he was frightened. He hadn’t slept in a week, not really: a couple of hours rolling around, four in the morning, wide awake, watching sunrise, his head pounding. Thing was, Terry figured, he was all she had. And now she didn’t want him. And if that were true, she had nothing left. Every instinct he had told him to protect her. There wasn’t much arguing with a feeling like that.

Terry wanted me to talk to her, but he didn’t even have her phone number. About a week before, her phone had stopped ringing. He figured she’d changed numbers.

“That’s a sign,” I said.

“Just go see her. Make sure everything’s okay. Tell her—”

“Tell her what?”

“Tell her I’m still here.”

May is rainy, hour after hour, water tumbling down from the rooftops, making sticky the mango leaves, splashing loudly on the broad banana leaves, sliding down the palms’ ringed trunks. Out of town, people went wet and desolate on muddy roads to dripping mud houses, the women tying plastic bags on their heads. Yellow rivers scattered garbage down the hills. Soaked pigs rooted in the trash. Clothes mildewed. Young and old huddled in doorways and porticos, watching the rain or throwing down dominoes or staring with ruminant patience at the overflowing gutters. The rain washed down the sides of the hills; the topsoil turned to mud and silted the three rivers — the Grand’Anse, the Voldrogue, and the Roseaux. The rivers rose, and the gray-brown waters colored the sea gray. A voilier from Pestel collapsed in the rough seas: seven drowned. A landslide near Les Corberas cut the road to Port-au-Prince.

With the road cut, there was no way in or out of Jérémie for the poor but the night ferry. It was the breadfruit harvest, and so the people came down from the hills with engorged gunnysacks. The Trois Rivières was late coming out of Port-au-Prince, and so they waited some more, until the wharf was like an encampment of peasants and marchandes interlaced between mountains of breadfruit. The Trois Rivières was almost three days late, and every day the crowds on the wharf grew.

Everyone would later agree that the boat, which had never been meant to navigate on the high seas, was wildly overcrowded. There had been no plan in the loading of the Trois Rivières . The cargo was all on deck: tens of thousands of pounds of breadfruit, charcoal, waterlogged hardwoods, yams, and rotting mangoes. Nobody knows just how many people were aboard, but under ordinary circumstances the ship transported a thousand passengers or more: some estimated that the traffic that evening was twice that. The passengers arranged themselves on top of the cargo, prepared to sit all night in the open air, in the rain, on the high seas.

The ship had been scheduled to leave harbor in the early afternoon, but so great was the crowd, and so complicated the project of loading the vessel, that she first attempted to pull out into the open sea just after dark.

The wharf at Jérémie was short, the harbor had not been dredged in decades, and in the rainy season the high tides washed into shore all the silt that ran down from the mountains. It was low tide. Biting mud held fast the Trois Rivières . The engines whined, and the ship strained — the sound of the engines, survivors would later say, like an ox pulling a plow. The ship didn’t move.