Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

I leaned over and said, “What’s your name?”

He looked at the ground.

“Where’s your mommy?”

The boy stood there.

We were standing in front of the open doors of the salle d’urgence , where a doctor, a Haitian, was occupied with a man who had cut his head. On the floor were puddles of coagulating blood. The doctor, who could have been no older than thirty, attended to the wound with meticulous attention. Those waiting to see him sat on the floor or lay sprawled out in the corridors. Many had lost their clothing in the accident: a woman with massive breasts moaned and swayed. Another woman massaged the back of a man — to what end, I’m not sure, for he was dead.

The boy, for all his unhappiness, seemed to need nothing but his mother. He began to cry again, and I picked him up and balanced him on my hip. He allowed himself to be consoled. I wandered the hospital, bouncing the boy on my hip. I was looking for that person who in Haiti does not exist — the man in charge.

The wards were small and poorly lit and overcrowded. The patients lay in beds and in the spaces between the beds, on the floor. There was the sharp chemical smell of carbolic acid and Betadine. Haitians come to the hospital either to give birth or to die. The boy and I walked down the hall and turned left into the maternity ward, with its air of teeming fecundity and rows of fussing, immensely pregnant women. When they saw me and that child, a murmur of laughter arose. I had thought for a moment that one of these women might be the child’s mother. Perhaps he had been playing outdoors and had been overwhelmed by the arriving crowds. But he wasn’t.

We wandered out into the courtyard. Your brain in moments of stress is meant to work a certain way, and those things that do not move and make no noise are stimuli of lesser importance. So before your brain notices the dead, your brain will see the fat rat scurrying through the grass, and before your brain understands the dead, your brain will see the rosebush, which had no business being in that courtyard but was nevertheless in glorious bloom. Only then does your brain comprehend that the men, women, and children piled in a heap are not shadows on the wall or broken furniture.

The rat stopped at a Styrofoam box in which had been left behind the remnants of somebody’s dinner of rice and beans.

Watching a rat eat his supper and confronted with a hill of cadavers, I couldn’t think of what else to do at that moment but call Terry White.

* * *

“Nice kid,” Terry said.

“It’s not mine.”

“Really?” he said. Terry’s calm was contagious. “That boat was a fucking death trap. First time I saw that thing, I said it was only a matter of time until we’re fishing bodies out of the sink.”

“Sénateur owns that boat,” I said, repeating the rumor I had heard from the crowd.

“Fucking Haiti.”

The judge showed up a few minutes later. Terry had called him on his way down the hill.

I said, “You should sit down. You look like you’re going to hurl.”

“Not me,” Johel said.

“It’s pretty fucked-up.”

“That it is, brother, that it is,” he said.

“You got any idea what I should do with this guy?” I asked.

Terry said, “Somebody just handed him to you?”

“I think somebody figured his mother was in here. But I don’t see her.”

Johel said, “The water rises and drowns the women.”

The little boy reached for Johel’s hand. Maybe because of his size, Johel seemed like a more comforting presence. Johel held the boy’s hand with the stiffly self-conscious air of a man unused to children, but who is pleased to be liked by them.

A few minutes later two men from the morgue began to pick up the bodies from the pile and arrange them in rows. It was a two-man job: one for the arms, one for the legs. As each body rose up in the air, the head flopped backward. The men were straining hard, lifting the bodies over the others and dragging them into rectilinear order. Soon the men were sweating, drops of sweat flopping off their faces onto the faces of the dead. The men from the morgue rifled through their pockets, looking for money or phones.

Johel was trying to keep the kid from seeing his mother come out of that pile. But kids aren’t stupid. Johel turned him around and tried to keep him looking at something else, but there was nothing to look at, and the child turned around and stared at the bodies as they came out from the pile and the men from the morgue lined them up. Then Johel tried to pick him up and take him for a walk, but he squirmed out of Johel’s arms, walked back to the same spot in the courtyard where he had been standing, and stood there watching.

She never came out of that pile. The bodies were lined up in a row of eight and in a row of seven, and never once did that kid cry out Maman! — although he was looking for her, believe me he was.

Lined up in neat rows, they were like something else entirely from cadavers tossed in a heap. There is a difference between being tossed aside and being lined up in a row with your head neatly balanced between your shoulders and your eyes closed. Maybe the dead don’t care, but the living do. There was a man with a broad, muscled chest — mid-forties, a workingman — wearing one Timberland boot. He might have cared a lot about losing his shoe if he cared about anything. There was a teenager wearing a shirt that read LIFE IS SHORT. EAT DESSERT FIRST, the publicity for a bakery in Paulson, Minnesota. His face was smeared with a weird smile of sputum and sea foam, like being dead was better than cake.

Terry lit a cigarette and said, “Do what you want, Judge, but for me this isn’t acceptable. I had it in my power to change something like this, I’d do it.”

* * *

When we left the hospital, the boy’s mother saw him. He was still holding the judge’s hand. She had no idea if he had lived and he had no idea if she had lived. When she saw him, she cried out. He ran to her without looking back. A roar of applause rose up from the crowd.

“ Merci Jezi ,” a woman cried out.

“ Merci Juge Blan ,” another woman cried.

Thank you Jesus and Juge Blan! That crowd camped outside the hospital, which had seemed so recently threatening and unreadable, now became festive and rejoicing, not at their own good fortune, but at the happiness of another. The generous crowd swarmed around the judge, the men shaking his hand and the women embracing him. Johel’s face was soon streaked with tears.

In the weeks to come, he thought often of that moment in the foyer of the hospital, the crowd chanting his name.

Thank goodness for Kay! If it were not for Kay, I don’t think the judge’s campaign would have gotten much past “Hey! I would like to be sénateur !” When Kay heard that the judge had decided to contest the election, she put in place what she called Plan Kay, which consisted of her telling Todd Malgarini that she was out of commission for a while, flying down from Florida ASAP, and putting on her get-stuff-done hat, the actual hat in question being a tennis visor. Twenty-four hours after the judge announced his intention to run and just two weeks after the grounding of the Trois Rivières , Kay had already begun to turn a shaggy wooden house just off the Place Dumas into campaign HQ. The rental was concluded so fast that she must have organized it all, in typical Kay style, weeks or even months in advance. “Thank goodness for Kay!” we said when a large generator began to throb in the back; it was thanks to Kay that there was a fifty-five-gallon drum of petrol beside the generator; and it was thanks — yet again! — to Kay that there were desks, chairs, lights, and pens. Kay and the judge covered the walls of the office with maps of the Grand’Anse, each village, hamlet, and town shaded according to the size of its population. Kay even thought of pushpins, bright yellow, red, and green, sunk into the map in those places where the judge, after consultation with Toussaint, intended to campaign.