Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

“You startled me,” she said.

“I wonder how he’s going to get out of that,” I said.

“I watch this when I get stressed.”

I sat on the edge of Kay’s desk. She closed her laptop. Her eyes were red-rimmed and tired.

“Can you believe?” she said. “I heard in the middle of the night. Terry woke me up and said, ‘Kay, they eliminated Johel.’ ‘They shot him?’ I said. I swear to God, that’s what I thought. He was like, no, they eliminated him from the ballot.”

“Did they give a reason?”

“Terry said he heard from his guy on the CEH that Johel wasn’t a Haitian citizen.”

“He told me he never got American citizenship. Just a green card.”

“Of course he’s Haitian,” she said.

“And no one can stop them?”

She said, “Johel said it was legal.”

“How’s he taking it?”

She said, “Terry said he’s not going to take it lying down.”

“Does he have a choice?”

“I guess he’s going to take it standing up.”

The ceiling fans succeeded only in swirling the anxiety around the room, producing eddies, ripples, and riptides of unease. We were about to be submerged by a rogue wave when I proposed that we get something cold to drink.

There was a small crowd milling outside of campaign headquarters. Mid-August in the Caribbean is a month to be endured. The sky was gray like steel. I thought the dog on the Place Dumas was dead, but then it scratched its snout. A small crowd was assembling in front of headquarters. It didn’t take much to get a crowd together in Jérémie — any hint of excitement would do — and Radio Jérémie had already announced that the judge was going to speak later that morning.

We followed the dusty road to the little bar kitty-corner to campaign HQ. A dozen children shouted, “Blan!” and each time, Kay winced. The bar was a dark place with a bead curtain to keep out the flies, and there was a scent of sea salt and sewage in the air. Kay had a drop of sweat on her upper lip. I asked her what she wanted to drink and she asked for a Coke. I ordered one too.

“Boat’s not here yet,” the waitress said. We’d been waiting for the overdue boat for days. The shelves of every store were empty.

Kay attempted to order a Sprite, a Fanta, a Cola Couronne, a Limonade, and a Tampico; I asked for Prestige; we settled on a bottle of water, which came to the table warm enough to make cocoa.

“What does Terry say about this?” I said.

“Who cares?”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “I look awful.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yes I do, and you know it. I haven’t slept in two days—”

She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. She breathed deeply, held the breath a heartbeat, and exhaled raggedly.

“How long have you known?” I asked.

“I always knew. I just didn’t want to know.”

“How did you find out for sure?”

“He was talking to her on the phone, saying, you know. Two days ago. Saying things.” She looked away and swallowed. “You always think it’s not going to matter, or you’re going to be adult about it all, but when it happens, it does matter. It matters so much.”

“What does he say?”

“He tells me that I don’t understand.”

“And what do you say?”

“I tell him he’s right. That I just don’t understand.”

Kay looked at anything but me for a minute. She looked at the refrigerator that wasn’t cold, at the ceiling fan that didn’t spin, at the clock that didn’t tell the time. She looked at her fingernails, which were, despite everything, neatly painted. She looked at the sign on the wall that informed clients that credit made enemies.

“Maybe you should be thinking of going home,” I said.

“It’s too hot. The inverter’s broken, we don’t even have a fan—”

“Home, home. Back to wherever you come from. Back to the Gap and Zara. Not here.”

Her face was covered in a film of sweat. Little blond tendrils clung to her temples. She seemed so intensely alive, so present in the moment: sometime in the future, when she was showing couples starter homes, I thought, she might even remember this moment, improbable as it seemed, with something like affection.

“I want to help Johel,” she said. She meant it. She had been building something too. We could hear people chanting the judge’s name out front of headquarters.

I said, “Have you ever met the guy who owns this place? Ti Blan François? I got to talking to him once. He’s a deportee, he’s been back a decade. I asked him what happened, and he said, ‘I driving drunk and I kill my wife.’ He spent five years in jail for vehicular manslaughter, then got sent back here. You know what he told me? He said it was the best thing that ever happened to him.”

“Oh, God, that’s awful.”

“But you know what? The man is happy. He sold his house in Miami, lives like a king here, has a pretty, young girlfriend, just a perfectly fine life.”

When Kay didn’t say anything, I said, “I don’t know if you want to hear this, but I don’t think I’d count on a man’s conscience to make sure that things work out the way you want them to. And I’m a man. You don’t want to end up like Ti Blan François’s wife, roadkill on the way to Terry’s new life.”

That came out rougher than I intended. Kay looked a little stunned, and wiped the sweat from her forehead. Some kids came in and ordered a Coca-Cola. The waitress explained that there wasn’t any. Then it happened again a few minutes later.

She said, “Terry told me today that he’s never going back. I said, ‘What are you going to do? Stay here forever?’ He said, ‘Maybe.’ It would be so much easier if I just knew what he was thinking.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I just don’t get what he sees in her.”

“He’s fallen in love with some story he’s telling himself.”

“What story is that?” Kay said.

“An ordinary man with an ordinary life sees a burning house and hears a child crying and he runs inside.”

Kay looked at me. She was such a pretty woman when her pale face was reddened by a touch of anger.

She said, “He didn’t have an ordinary life — he was married to me. Being married to me is wonderful.”

“I’m sure it is,” I finally said. “You have many charms as a woman. But you’re not a helpless child crying in a burning house. Terry knows that you’re perfectly capable of opening a window and climbing out all by yourself. By the time he showed up, you’d have put out the fire, remodeled the house, and sold it for a profit.”

* * *

By early afternoon the crowd filled the Place Dumas. Kids were shinnying up electrical poles to see the judge. Women fanned themselves with scraps of cardboard.

The crowd was Toussaint Legrand’s doing. It was Toussaint’s job to turn out bespoke crowds on the judge’s behalf, masses of enthusiastic paid supporters. It wasn’t the strangest profession that I came across in Haiti — that was the femmes pleureuses , the women who were paid to weep at funerals. Haitian funerals aimed for a malarial fever of high emotion with god-awful wailing, breast-beating, rending of garments, and eventual hysterical collapse, women carried out of the funeral parlor face-first, writhing and moaning. Toward this end, the pleureuses would amp the emotional temperature up past scalding by sobbing convulsively until a frenzy of mourning spread contagiously through the crowd. It was a gesture of respect for the dead.

I later learned that Toussaint had paid five hundred young men and women to come and manifest their loyalty to the judge, but there were many more who came of their own initiative. The paid supporters that day were not so very far in their passion from the femmes pleureuses , and the effect on the crowd was the same: men grew soberly angry, but soon the women began to wail. “Amway!” they cried, an untranslatable Creole word that meant something like “Disaster!”