Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

Only once in her lifetime had she been so frightened — not even when the police had arrested her and Ti Pierre in Miami, because then in some recess of her mind she had known there was Johel.

No, the precursor to this fear was in childhood. In her village, there had been a boko who knew the recipe for poud’ zombie . He was an old, slobbery man who took as his right the deflowering of all the village girls: nobody dared refuse him for fear of dying and awakening from death in idiot slavery. When she was twelve and blossoming into beauty, she came home from the river with a bucket of water balanced neatly on her head and found the old boko sitting on her front porch. She saw his yellow eyes and narrow serpent tongue flickering around a cavernous mouth, his smell filling the family hut like the smell of old meat.

Seeing the boko , she had collapsed to the ground, the heavy water splashing down the hill. She had begun to tremble and then to forget, and when she began to remember again, they told her that the boko had not come for her. It was not her time yet. But he would come, oh yes …

That was the Fear.

When she first heard the bullets break into her bedroom, and again when she felt the Sénateur’s touch, her first thought had been betrayal. She and Johel had a bargain: he would keep Fear away from her, and in exchange she would be his. The bargain had never been stated, but Nadia had understood it clearly; she thought Johel understood it also. The night the bullets came, she lay under the bed in her underwear and Fear looked at her and fitted her and Johel for mahogany his-and-hers coffins. Fear smiled at her and laughed and said, Child, I’m ready for you. Now, when Nadia thought of the election, she would start to shiver as the Fear seeped out from inside her, carried from viscera to skin by way of high, cold sweat.

The judge looked at her with generous confusion. Nadia knew that what he felt for her was love. He pulled her against his warm body and she shivered there, and she promised herself that if only he would give up his plans, she would love him too, only him.

“What’s your problem?” the judge said.

But Nadia couldn’t find the words to tell him what she feared. “This isn’t your thing,” she said. “Leave this alone.”

This was incident number one, and then there was incident number two and incident number three and incident number twenty-six, and then the judge said, “Okay.”

“Really?” she said. “Vraiment vrai?”

“Vraiment vrai,” said the judge.

And Nadia remembered her promise and folded herself into his arms, where she became small against his bigness. Her gratitude was like love. Johel would do what he had promised — he would protect her — and she would do what she had promised: she would love him. If there was one moment in which she found happiness with Johel it was then. Happiness for Nadia meant that things were no worse than they had been. She threw her phone into the sea. Sometimes she imagined the phone ringing under the waves, Terry’s calls provoking the curiosity of the gray-nosed fish.

* * *

The events of the world have consequences, and from consequences arise new events. Nadia sometimes wondered where things started and where things ended, or whether things ever ended at all, and the world was just a continuous blur of action. The Trois Rivières threw her passengers into the sea, and the judge decided, despite Nadia’s tears, to play politician.

Nadia thought frequently of the boy the judge found at the hospital. She didn’t know how to swim, and deep water was a particular terror to her. She wondered how long the boy had foundered before hands pulled him out. Had he struggled against the warm water or had he lain very still and floated, as she knew some children will do by instinct? She wondered whether he had been frightened in the blackness of night and water, or whether he found the nothingness soothing. How long had he been in the water? Nadia lay in the darkness of her bedroom at night, the judge asleep beside her, imagining the little boy floating calmly as the engines of the big boat churned and the frightened passengers shouted. She waited for the hands to grab and pull her out of the water too.

Nadia began to dream nightly of the boat and the sea, dreams of remarkable vividness and power. The boat was headed to New York. All the men she had known were there: the man with the mustache and Ti Pierre, the Fat Man from Miami and the Sénateur; Johel was there, and so was Terry. And she was in the middle between them, and they were throwing the Fat Man’s golden watch back and forth. Someone had told her that the watch was worth as much as a car. Nadia had understood intuitively why someone would pay so much money for something so beautiful; she would have given anything to have such a beautiful thing herself. Nadia loved the intricacy of tiny objects: the minute precision of an earring clasp, or the well-wrought, neatly balanced heft of a chain necklace, or the gleaming, glinting light of color in a sparkling stone. Now, in her dream, Nadia’s tripe twisted in horror as she watched the men throw the watch. It seemed to her a crime that such a beautiful thing should smash on the boat’s deck or fall uselessly into the sea. The men were giggling like schoolgirls.

Nadia grew enraged at the carelessness of men. She had never known anger like this before. Only a woman knew the value of things; only women knew how hard it was to make things. Men were forever smashing, playing, throwing, shouting, screaming, hitting, cursing. Men broke things. So she ran between the men as they tossed the beautiful watch into the air. She saw it glinting high as it flew. She grabbed at the men, but they were so much stronger, so much larger, and the watch flew higher. She scratched at the men’s faces and kicked at their shins: it was like scratching concrete or hitting stone. The men hardly noticed her, so absorbed were they in their men’s game, and the watch looped and tumbled high in the sky. Why would you throw around such a lovely little thing? Then the boat tipped, and Nadia stumbled. The men laughed. Every night, the watch, arcing high across the sky, fell into the black and empty sea.

* * *

We sat in silence for a long time. Shadows had lengthened through the course of the afternoon from nubs at the base of the palms until they were longer than the palms themselves, and the palms were just black silhouettes against the last of the evening’s light. It was warm, but I shivered slightly nevertheless.

Nadia told me that the dreams of the boat, of men, and of precarious and lovely little things had come every night. She knew that a dream that comes nightly is Bon Dieu or the Loa speaking to you with persistence of important matters, and she visited a lady she knew in Sainte-Hélène who was skilled in the interpretation of difficult dreams. Then Nadia told me that she was pregnant.

I wasn’t surprised. She had that aureate glow some women achieve in the first flush of incipient motherhood, when Nature, for no reason at all, renders women particularly desirable.

“Does either of them know about the baby?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Do you know who—”

I couldn’t finish the question, and she didn’t answer it. I don’t think she knew if it was Terry’s child or the judge’s, or even the Sénateur’s: women in Haiti told stories of homme mystiques who could make a woman heavy just by staring at them. Some women were impregnated in their dreams, and others touched by the Loa .

A tear ran down her face, and she wiped it away with a casual, almost masculine gesture of her fingertips. I can’t imagine there was a man on the planet who would have been indifferent to this woman’s sorrow. She inspired a silly, hopeless tenderness. “Do you want the baby?” I said.