Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

“He was on the phone at three in the morning. He’s in a mood, Dag.”

Every afternoon at the Presidential Palace is naptime. The president dresses himself in pajamas, pulls tightly shut the thick curtains, and cannot be disturbed. But he comes alive at night, pacing the long corridors of the palace. If you wish to deal with PoH, it must be done between midnight and dawn.

The SRSG’s rise through the bureaucratic ranks had been lubricated by a special noise he makes. It comes from the back of his throat; it is somewhere between the sound of clearing his throat and sighing. It acknowledges the suffering of others without himself accepting any portion of the blame.

The SRSG made his special noise, and the ambassador continued.

“This can’t go on,” she said.

The government of the United States felt it an embarrassment, having invested so many hundreds of millions of dollars in Haitian peacekeeping and Haitian nation building, to see the headquarters of the Haitian electoral process under siege. It was a personal embarrassment to the secretary of state, who not two weeks earlier in congressional testimony had mentioned “continuing and ongoing progress” in Haitian reform as justification of the administration’s policies in the Caribbean and Latin America.

“We are under pressure here, Dag.”

The SRSG hung up the phone and massaged his face with his fingertips. It was indeed a delicate situation — but it was to resolve situations like this one that there were peacekeepers, after all, and diplomats, and men like the SRSG, who make special noises. On the one hand, there was the president of Haiti, who was quite correct in denouncing the illegal occupation of the headquarters of the electoral authority. On the other hand (and the SRSG knew, from long experience, there was always a countervailing hand), you had these protesters who were also quite correct. How sad it was that they couldn’t vote. The tragedy of peacekeeping, he reflected, was that you are inevitably on the wrong side of someone who is in the right. Perhaps, he thought, that was the tragedy of life.

The SRSG invited Johel to lunch at his private residence in Bourdon.

* * *

I awoke around dawn to see the marchandes and their donkeys coming down from the hills, saddlebags stuffed with the first breadfruit and avocados of the season, or leading goats to their doom. These women were the Haiti that I loved best — indomitable, mystical, courageous. Nothing would have stopped their slow progression down the hill to market, certainly not politics: that was Port-au-Prince business, something that got the menfolk huddled around the radios all heated up. Even if Jérémie were in flames, they would have kept coming, setting up the breadfruit on a groundsheet, sitting patiently until the good Lord saw fit to send them a client.

That morning, from his pulpit in the cathedral, the bishop called for calm. As always in moments of crisis, the cathedral was full, and the bishop advised his flock to avoid those old devil twins: rage and pride. Later, the town would discuss the sermon, trying to understand the political implications. The bishop had been a prominent supporter of the Sénateur: Was he again coming to his longtime friend’s assistance? Or had his speech been aimed at a narrower audience — the chief of the PNH, who took Communion from his habitual central pew? Was it a tailored message to this man alone, urging him to break with the Sénateur? Nobody supposed that in Haiti the Church represented God alone.

At Monsieur Brunel’s borlette shop, there was a long line. Toussaint Legrand had told me that people were playing the lottery in record numbers that week, employing every numerological system they could devise, the numbers all originating somehow in either the name or the birth date of Johel Célestin. Then Toussaint asked me for money so that he could play the lottery himself, which I gave him.

* * *

The judge remembered something in the night, an incident from his childhood. When he was eleven and just recently arrived in America, he had been invited by a classmate, Reginald McKnight, to the public swimming pool. Johel, unusually for a Haitian kid, had learned the basic strokes in his home country, and he felt comfortable enough in the water that he could enjoy a summer’s afternoon horsing around and splashing in the crowded pool. But the afternoon turned nasty when Reginald McKnight and the other kids started jumping off the high dive and the judge, not realizing how high the high dive really was, had followed the boys up to the edge of the board, stared down at the water below, and froze. Kids down below were shouting, “Jump! Go! Move your fat ass!” The situation would have been all right if Johel could have just backed up and climbed down the ladder, but he couldn’t make himself do that either. That would have been humiliating. His fear of jumping and his fear of humiliation produced paralysis, and his body refused to move. He had never forgotten that sensation of being frozen on the edge of the board.

That morning, the judge no longer wanted to be the sénateur from the Grand’Anse. He tried to summon up the passion that had motivated him. He repeated to himself, “What we need is a road.” He tried to remember that good, strong feeling back in Jérémie when the crowd was chanting his name, the way it felt when the people said “We need a man like you, Judge.”

Terry was the first to see that the judge was off the reservation, mentally speaking.

“You got your game, brother?” Terry said.

The judge didn’t say anything — that said everything.

“They’re going to try and roll you,” Terry said. “You got to get your game face on.”

Still the judge didn’t say anything.

“Talk to me, brother. Let me in. You can’t back down now.”

But the judge didn’t feel that either — the connection with Terry, the way they used to feel driving down the back roads of the Grand’Anse. He wondered what Terry really wanted from him.

Later that morning, Terry drove Johel up to the residence of the SRSG, honked the horn twice, waited for the SRSG’s security detail to sweep the car for explosives. Then he pulled into the long driveway leading to the large white house.

Before the judge got down from the vehicle, Terry put his hand on his forearm. The look in Terry’s eyes was almost imploring. He said, “Nobody’s going to do this if you don’t do it.”

The judge started to say something, stopped, started again.

Terry said, “My daddy used to take me out camping up in Georgia, on the shores of Lake Lanier. That’s a big lake. Every spring, young birds would try and fly it.”

The judge rubbed his eyes, thinking, Young birds? Fly?

“And the birds, not all of them understood that you get to a certain point on that lake, you got to keep flying. You get past the halfway point, it’s shorter to wing it on over to the other side. Some birds don’t know that, they get tired, they want to fly back where they came from. But now it’s too far for them. On the way back, they fall into the lake. That’s where we are now, brother. We’re just about midway over that lake. And when all you see is water and your wings are tired, that ain’t the time to stop flapping.”

The judge was too tired to argue. He said, “Doing my best,” and got out of the car.

The SRSG was waiting for him in the foyer of the house. Ceiling fans stirred breezes down long white corridors.

“It’s good that you’re here,” the SRSG said. “I’m grateful that you’ve made time for me.”

The SRSG was small, an elegant man, lithe and controlled. The judge noted his handsomely groomed fingernails.

“Let me show you the place,” said the SRSG. The house was only a rental, but the SRSG took pride in it nevertheless. He led Johel from room to room: the drawing room, the gazebo, the music room, the dining room, on whose walls hung portraits of great Haitian statesmen. From time to time he pointed out a feature of the house — a picture on the wall, a sconce, the high arches — and the judge would nod appreciatively.