Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

“Hanging in there,” I said.

“The heat not getting you down?”

He spoke with a neutral Northeast accent, the clipped inflections of educated American speech.

“Learning to sweat,” I said. “Never knew I could sweat like this until I got to Haiti.”

“Good man,” he said.

I trust first impressions, and mine was that this man was as out of place in Jérémie as a zebra at Sea World. This brother, I figured, had made a wrong turn somewhere round about the Bahamas. What he’d been aiming for was St. Croix. His handsome clothes; his refined, chubby features; and his general high-toned snooty air — he looked as if he ought to be shanking a 3-iron wide, dressed in knickerbockers and wearing a silly white cap, laughing things over with the senior partners. But here we were in Haiti.

There had been a kid on the beach asking me for money. Now he was at my heels right there in the outdoor restaurant, barefoot and wearing nothing but a filthy T-shirt down to his ankles. His hair was reddish-orange at the roots: protein deficiency. You could have taken his picture and put it on the cover of Save the Children’s Annual Report, both from the cherubic cuteness and the desperate poverty POV.

“Blan, mwem grangou. Blan, ba’m cinq gourdes,” the kid said. Blan , I’m hungry. Blan , give me five gourdes.

Terry and the judge were seated at a table on which a large fish had been reduced to a flimsy skeleton. A few grains were what remained of what had once been a rice mountain.

It was Terry, still sucking on a beer, who said no.

The kid looked at his feet, all confused. But he didn’t back off. He just stood there looking cute and desperate.

“Ba’m cinq gourdes,” the kid said all over again, as if he were turning the key on a stalled engine.

Terry said, “Ba’m cinq gourdes, s’il vous plaît.”

The kid just stood there. He wasn’t in a hurry. He had all the time in the world. He was thinking things over. Then he smiled at us. What a smile! What the good Lord gave this kid in exchange for all his troubles was this smile, as hot as a hundred suns.

“Blan, ba’m cinq gourdes, s’il vous plaît,” the kid said, figuring things out.

So Terry turned out his pockets and gave him some coins, and the kid, still smiling, wandered away. You would have needed a scanning tunneling microscope to find a spot of trouble in his soul: he would eat that afternoon. Life would take care of itself.

“I hate to see that,” Terry said. “Kid should be in school, not begging for money like that.”

This was such an obvious moral truth that nobody else I knew in Haiti but Terry would have said it. I had been in Haiti only a short time, and I was already coming to see that kid and his protein deficiencies as an irritant, like clouds on an otherwise sunny day. The phrase “breaks your heart” can mean many different things.

“Maybe he would be in school if he wasn’t making a living begging,” the judge said.

“Maybe he’d be fucking hungry if I didn’t feed him,” Terry said.

The way these two men bantered, you could tell that they bantered back and forth all day long. It was like watching them chuck a football, and after a minute or so, I interrupted them. “So you’re a judge?”

Terry had told me that he worked with a Haitian judge: the two somehow collaborated.

“Juge d’instruction,” the judge said, just a touch of snootiness in his voice.

“Wait—,” I said. “Are you Juge Blan?”

A smile, not modest, broke across his fleshy face.

“Some folks call me that,” he said.

I had heard the name a dozen times — from my Creole teacher, from the plumber, from the woman who squeezed our lime juice, and from the woman in the market who hacked up our meat. “Take your problems to Juge Blan,” they said, and it had taken me some time to understand that this wasn’t some difficult Creole proverb, but an injunction to encounter a living man, a member of the local judiciary who kept offices at the Tribunal.

Terry said, “You want a beer or rum or what?”

“I’ll get a Coke,” I said.

“Get a beer,” Terry said. “Life is good.”

“Coke is okay.”

“I’m getting another one,” he said. “J.?”

“I’m good,” the judge said.

“Cherie!”

Cherie was dozing in a chair in the shade. At the sound of Terry’s voice Cherie lifted her head, then shifted her torso, then rocked on her haunches, then stood up. With a sigh she ambled over to our table.

“Oui?” she said, putting her hand on Terry’s shoulder.

“Bring us more beers, and some cigarettes too, and another round of plantains,” he said. His Creole, after however long he’d been in the country, was good enough to communicate his needs.

Cherie was the lady, pretty in a fleshy kind of way, accused by rumor of betraying and murdering her patroness. The smile that she flashed Terry, however, suggested only flirtatiousness, sweetness and light.

The judge and Terry had been talking about something heavy when I showed up. They were still both of them thinking about that something heavy. It was weighing on them. They were thinking up one more thing to say to each other, that last and conclusive point. I was about to excuse myself and allow them to conclude their conversation when Johel said, “So how are you liking Haiti?”

I started to say, You know, Haiti is a lot like pussy , but instead I told the judge something like the truth: I had never been anyplace so dysfunctional, so rotten, or so very fascinating. I had been in the Caribbean before and had expected the light, the colors, the tastes. But Haiti had something different from Jamaica or Barbados: that profusion of stories. If you enjoy the taste of an overripe peach, then you might like Haiti; it was a place that sunk tentacles down deep into the soul.

“How’s your kid?” Terry asked me.

“Toussaint Legrand?”

“What a name!” the judge said.

“Still a fuckup,” I said.

And I told them the latest Toussaint Legrand story.

“I think he might have died if I hadn’t given him the money,” I said. I didn’t say it looking for praise or glory, because every foreigner in Haiti who isn’t deeply hard has done something like that: it’s just part of the Haitian experience.

“I hear a story like that, and I wonder if we were all meant to be here,” the judge said.

“Like destiny,” I said.

The judge reclined his head rearward and looked down at me, his sharp gaze skimming over his broad nose. I had thought he was drunk, but his eyes were sober and clear and humorless. He had that concentrated attention for which a man in trouble pays ten dollars a minute. “You think we got one?” he asked.

“A what.”

“A destiny.”

All you can really say to a question like that is “Maybe.” It’s easy for the guys drinking a cold beer on the beach to figure that this is the way it’s all supposed to be.

I glanced at Terry. “Do you?”

“No doubt, brother,” said Terry. “I know His strength. We’re all here for a reason. That’s what I’m telling this guy. I’m saying, ‘Judge, you can’t escape your destiny. You’re like a fish on a line. Destiny is reeling you in, and you’re fighting. Just give in, brother.’”

“Sounds like Terry thinks you’re a marlin,” I said.

The judge didn’t laugh.

“Where does Brother Terry think your destiny lies?” I asked.

“Brother Terry thinks I have a vocation.”

“I don’t really see you in a clerical collar.”

Now the judge laughed. “Terry’s been telling me to run for senate.”

“Where?”

“Right here.”