Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

The two students, in the course of the still-short school year, had hardly spoken: Maxim was the center of a social whirl, effortlessly charming and witty, but a terrible student, flogged as often for inattention as Abraham was for speaking Creole. Maxim, however, did not seem to take the teacher’s whippings with the air of humiliation that so tormented Abraham. Maxim winced as the beef tendon came down on his knuckles but thereafter laughed with the Jesuit fathers, who seemed no less immune to his carefree charms than were his peers.

“How many cards do you have?” Maxim said in Creole.

Abraham looked at Maxim, wondering if this was some trick.

“Two,” he said.

“I have nine,” Maxim said, still in Creole.

Abraham stared at his classmate until Maxim, still speaking Creole, said, “Ask me for my card.”

“Give me your card,” said Abraham, so flustered that he was not sure if he had asked in Creole or in French.

“Here you go,” said Maxim, and handed Abraham not one card, but his whole stack of them. That morning at the habitual assembly, Maxim allowed the priest to strike his knuckles, and later, Abraham’s eleven cards were sufficient to allow him to taste komparet for the first time.

* * *

Young Père Samedi, nearly graduated from seminary, was consumed by a singular ambition: to instruct his illiterate parishioners in the art of reading, that they might read for themselves in their maternal language, Creole, the Testament of their Lord. To this end, he labored very nearly day and night. It was known that any man or woman who stopped by Père Samedi’s modest hut might receive a simple lesson in the art of literacy; he organized not only a school for children but schools for adults as well. The bookish priest, with his thick neck and bull-like body but strangely fine and thoughtful features, was a familiar face on the trails and mountain byways of his parish, hectoring his parishioners not only to receive Mass in the whitewashed churches that dotted the countryside but to remain thereafter for an hour or two of instruction.

In 1964 Père Samedi’s modest life intersected with history when a band of thirteen idealistic adventurers calling themselves Jeune Haiti arrived on the shores of the Grand’Anse. These young men were all exiles from the dictatorship of François Duvalier, and they proposed, beginning first in the distant villages of the Grand’Anse, to spark a revolution.

Haiti was absolutely in the madman’s grip now: he had been eliminating his enemies (they were everywhere) and consolidating his power (it was at once absolute and insufficient) since his election seven years earlier. The results of his political work could be seen in the excellent results of his reelection, in which three million of his subjects voted in his favor, only 3200 opposing him. Even 3200 was too many: a worrisome and hostile trend, to the One and Absolute ruler of the state. François Duvalier bayoneted, shot, bludgeoned, electrocuted, eviscerated, and starved his opponents, real and imaginary; he divided them one against another and pursued power, more power, and still more power with a monomaniacal zeal no preceding Haitian dictator, king, emperor, strongman, or president had ever considered possible.

The Doc came to power after a career as a country physician, a champion of the doctrine known as Noirisme —the power of black. Haiti was a nation divided between the descendants of slaveholder and slave, between France and Africa, French and Creole, Catholic and vodouisant , pale skin and dark, urban and rural, a few very wealthy and the vast majority very poor. Noirisme was Duvalier’s radical untying of the complex knot of Haitian life, the favoring of the latter over the former. If in campaigning he had been motivated by his vision of social justice, in power he was motivated by a single transcendently important goal: the elimination of his enemies. Like all evil men, Duvalier knew that he had enemies everywhere. But there was no place where he suspected that he had more enemies than Jérémie, that town like an island off the edge of Haiti, where the poets wrote in French, where the commerce was direct with Le Havre, and where the wealthy families were pale-skinned. They represented all that Noirisme and the Doc abhorred.

The young men of Jeune Haiti had no notion of how cruel was the personality to whom they had put themselves in opposition. One by one, the dictator hunted them down, dragged them to Port-au-Prince, tortured them, shot them live on Haitian television, and left their decapitated bodies to rot openly in the streets, a warning to any who might indulge in like-minded folly. Then the dictator put his mind to eradicating their accomplices. The dictator was not of a mind to be subtle, and he counted as Jeune Haiti’s abettors the entire mulatto community of Jeune Haiti’s natal town, Jérémie.

* * *

Père Samedi found his old friend Maxim huddled in the small barn where he kept his donkey and pigs. He was dressed in the ill-fitting overalls of a peasant — his friend who took such pleasure in his tailored suits. His face was covered in blood, and his eyes, ordinarily so insouciant and charming, flickered from shadow to shadow. Père Samedi could not imagine what might have produced so dramatic a transformation of his old school comrade, who passed his days, to the frustration of his mother, composing mildly erotic verse, painting, and seducing village girls, the blacker and more full-breasted the better. Père Samedi did not have it in his heart to censure Maxim’s conduct, but neither had it been a friendship he had been eager to sustain after lycée and his years at seminary in Port-au-Prince. So it was a surprise to see his old school comrade prostrate in his barn, trembling in fear, pleading for his assistance.

“My Father, you must help me,” Maxim said.

Maxim had never before addressed Abraham by his title, and the young priest’s first thought was that Maxim had seduced the wrong girl, and some outraged boyfriend or father had taken his correct revenge. Or perhaps an outraged woman, Abraham thought: the image of one of Maxim’s slighted amours assaulting the runabout produced a hint of a smile on Abraham’s face. He wondered why Maxim had thought to come to him, of all people.

“What happened to you?” he asked.

“My Father, don’t you know?” said Maxim.

“Know what?”

Maxim stared at the priest. In that moment the priest knew that this was no matter of jilted hearts or wounded honor.

“We’re all dead. All of us.”

The priest stifled his instinct to demand an explanation. His own hut afforded greater privacy than the barn, which fronted a path where villagers would sometimes walk in the night, so he led Maxim through the lakou and into his dusty dwelling. He started a fire and brewed coffee, which he laced liberally with rum. “More,” said Maxim, and the priest topped up the mug until it contained more rum than coffee. Maxim sipped at the strong beverage until he found the strength to speak.

* * *

There had been rumors for some time, of course, that the Macoutes would come for them, but Maxim did not believe it: no one would let such a thing happen in that small town, where mulâtre and noir had so long lived side by side in easy friendship.

(Père Samedi stayed silent as he recalled the pews of the cathedral, the first ranks reserved for the mulattos, the remainder for the blacks. He recalled the time when Maxim had invited him to a literary evening at the Excelsior Club, a night dedicated to the poètes maudits , and some mulatto wag had set the room aflame by declaring that a fly had landed in the milk.)

Maxim had been at home with his sisters and mother when Sanette Balmir, the leader of the local band of Tontons Macoutes, came to the terrace of the family gingerbread accompanied by half a dozen of her men. Sanette Balmir! Who could have imagined that this woman could rise to such prominence? She was old and fat, a diabetic — too old to ply her quondam trade as whore and thief, but not so old that she didn’t remember every disparaging word the townsfolk had ever muttered at her hunched-over figure as she swept the streets of Jérémie in penal servitude — and there was no family she loathed more than the Bayards. This was because it was the testimony of Evelyne Bayard herself that had placed Sanette in the hands of justice after Sanette Balmir stole an entire harvest of roses from her garden. Sanette had made no secret of her loathing for this wealthy, privileged clan, and of her desire to take revenge. Now she was a great Macoute, and she awaited only the word of her patron and chief, the Doc himself, to obtain her satisfaction. The telephone call from Port-au-Prince soon arrived.