Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

The captain of the Trois Rivières , a pale-skinned Cuban, made three attempts to pull the ship out to sea and then shut down the engines, and the ship sat at harbor. Soon the mood of the passengers grew surly. The patience of the Haitian peasant is legendary, but it is not infinite. The men and women on this ship had sat on the wharf for days in the rain, then endured the chaos of the ship’s loading. Few things in life are as enervating as sitting in wet clothes. The captain spoke no Creole, and when he stepped out onto the deck of the bridge, he did not see tired travelers impatient for the journey to begin so that it could soon end; he had no words to explain the situation to his passengers; he saw only a vast sea of angry faces hurling furious epithets in his direction.

By chance, there was a second vessel in the harbor that evening. This ship wandered the coast of Haiti, delivering its cargo of fifty-pound sacks of cement. The captain of the Trois Rivières contacted the captain of the cement ship, and the two captains devised a plan.

The cement ship pulled to the flank of the Trois Rivières , and crewmen laid lines between the vessels. Then the cement ship reversed her engines, intending to pull the Trois Rivières off the reef of mud that held her.

As the ropes grew taught, they produced a high whine, like the buzzing of innumerable bees or static on the radio, a noise that echoed across the waters and into the slums. People as far away as Sainte-Hélène or Caracolie could hear the hempen ropes.

Aboard the Trois Rivières there was at first a moment of pleased satisfaction as the ship swayed at harbor. Then a bag of breadfruit opened, and the fruit, the size of bowling balls and just as hard, began to bound and skitter across the deck. A woman cried — those were her fruit! Soon the Trois Rivières was inclined to the horizon and the hands of the passengers sought something solid to cling to. Children tried to balance. A wave of laughter swept the boat from stern to tip as it swung out into the harbor, only the rear of the ship still low in the muck.

Now the Trois Rivières was at a severe angle to the horizon. Now the mothers were grabbing their children. Now the cargo was shifting, and things were tumbling. Now the ropes were extended full-length. Now the engines of the cement ship and the engines of the Trois Rivières droned powerfully. Now there was a noise louder than a gunshot, like the crack of thunder overhead — even in my house on the rue Bayard I heard it. The lines had snapped.

What happened next happened very, very fast. The Trois Rivières swung back in the other direction. She had been leaning one way, and now she leaned the other way. Nobody aboard had been prepared for this movement. Hundreds of passengers were thrown into the shallow water. Very few could swim.

* * *

I was reading on the terrace when I began to hear voices. They were coming down from the hill, some passing at a run, others ambling. I followed the voices in the direction of Hôpital Saint-Antoine, where, at the entrance to the hospital grounds, a woman wearing a short skirt and nothing else lay howling, beating her head slowly and insistently against the ground. Near her a cluster of young girls was inexplicably dancing, and from the interior of the hospital walls emerged a groaning sound, like a car in low gear straining. This was the roar of a large crowd. Soon the only ambulance in Jérémie, a gift from the people of Japan, attempted to part the crowd, and the crowd surged to surround it. The faces surrounding the ambulance flashed red and blue. The driver honked, and still the crowd didn’t move.

A policeman climbed down from the passenger side of the vehicle. I watched him unholster his revolver, aim roughly in the direction of Venus, and squeeze the trigger. The crack of the shot silenced the crowd, as if someone had depressed the mute button. Then a wave of hysterical laughter swept the throng, which moved to let the ambulance pass.

There was a powerful smell in the air, of urine and sea salt and ammonia and old sweat. It was the smell of fear. The smell of shit repulses and the smell of sex arouses; so too the smell of fear spooks. Everyone there, whether they had been on the Trois Rivières or had just wandered down the hill to rubberneck, was soon under its sway. I began to sweat myself, a cold, clammy, unpleasant dampness at the small of my back.

The entrance to the hospital was like a chute or a ramp. Soon I was swept up into the crowd. Some of these people had been separated from their traveling companions in the accident. Now they wanted to get to the hospital as quickly as possible and find their missing. Others had put someone on the boat. I was pushed from the sides and behind. I felt hands on my back and sides, grasping at my feet. Everywhere, I heard voices saying, Blan — blan — blan . The crowd pressed up in a huge mass at the steel doors of the hospital, which were closed and held fast with a steel chain. Then the crowd spilled out to press up against the steel security bars of the hospital windows, and the more athletic young men tried to shinny up the drainage spout to reach the roof. From there they could drop into the courtyard.

The victims came up the hill on the backs of motorcycle taxis, wedged unconscious between the driver and some Samaritan riding shotgun, legs dangling helter-skelter; others staggered in on their own, clutching scraps of bloodstained shirts to their heads. For some of these newcomers the crowd parted, as if guided by an invisible hand, but others, too weak to press forward, simply recoiled to the margins of the crowd and sat on the ground to nurse their wounds alone.

I must have stayed on the fringe of the crowd five minutes or more. Two women saw each other: they had lost each other in the accident. They began to dance and sing in a spontaneous thanksgiving, spinning each other around. Next to them a lady cried in an open-throated, unforgettable howl of grief. Angry voices, sorrowful voices, reasonable voices all intermingled incomprehensibly.

Somebody grabbed my shoulder: somebody was making eye contact with me, talking to me. I couldn’t understand a word. I nodded my head. Then I heard the word “ médecin .” The word echoed through the crowd: médecin — médecin — médecin . Hearing the word, a woman thrust a small boy at me. He might have been two. He was wearing a T-shirt and shorts still wet from the sea. The boy saw me and began to cry. I didn’t want to accept the child, but the crowd had seized me and the boy and placed us together. The woman who handed me the child merged back into the throng of faces. The crowd was now maneuvering us toward the steel doors of the hospital. The doors opened a crack to admit us, then slammed shut behind us.

* * *

The Hôpital Saint-Antoine is a square of concrete with an open courtyard in the center. There was a nurse in blue scrubs at a counter, writing in a ledger, a look on her face of acute boredom. I have since tried with no success to imagine how she had arrived at that moment — that vast sea of frantic faces peering in at her through the barred windows of the hospital — and produced that face, but here is the limit to my capacity for empathy.

“This child—,” I began.

“You need to wait,” the nurse said.

“This child isn’t mine,” I said. But talking to this woman was like throwing pebbles into the sea. She returned to her ledger.

The boy in my arms seemed to suffer from no ailment but that he was in my arms and not the arms of his mother. This was enough. He writhed in my arms with surprising strength and wailed as if I were pricking him with a sharp needle. I put him down and he stopped crying. He looked up at me solemnly.