Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

Eventually the SRSG led Johel to the dining room, where a table had been set for two.

“May I offer you a drink?” said the SRSG.

“Just water,” the judge said. “If you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” said the SRSG. “It’s certainly the easiest thing I’ve had to deal with in days.”

The SRSG chuckled wryly, as if to suggest that the riots, the seizure of CEH headquarters, and the paralysis of the nation were only minor inconveniences. He poured the glass for Johel with his own hands, his manner suggesting that he was both humble and proud of being so. Then he invited Johel to the table, which had been set with white linen.

“I was once a political man myself,” the SRSG said. “I was a candidate for the Parliament of Sweden three times.”

“Did you win?”

“Let’s just say I survived the experience. My wife likes to say that I’m too honest to be a politician. I lost all three times.”

The judge said, “So you entered diplomacy instead.”

“I have found honesty remarkably successful in my line of work. It’s so rarely employed that it stuns everyone.”

A waiter came in with a shrimp and avocado salad set in elegant geometrical patterns on a pair of small plates. The judge waited for the SRSG to reach for his fork, then reached for his own.

“I should thank you,” said the SRSG. “There had been talk of moving into a Mission reduction phase. I suppose now we’ll be able to fight that off another year. From a budgetary perspective, this couldn’t have been better timed.”

“You are honest,” said the judge.

“Too honest, my wife says.”

“Mine just complains that I’m too fat,” said the judge.

“It sounds like she and I share the same vice of speaking our minds.”

The SRSG chewed delicately and then continued.

“It’s a fine balance. If this country is too peaceful, they will eliminate our Mission. And if this country is too disorderly, I will be accused of incompetence. Neither is optimal.”

“Optimal for whom?”

The SRSG made his special noise, soothing, like the purring of a cat.

“For me! For me, of course! The president called me this morning. He wants to storm the CEH headquarters, and he wants logistical support from the Mission. I said, ‘Mister President, allow me to achieve a peaceful resolution to this crisis.’ And if I can’t, I’ll let him use my Brazilian APCs. Then he’ll owe me something. For now he wants something from me. The Americans want this to wind down calmly, I don’t know why, and now I have something to offer them also. All of this is very, very good for me.”

“I see why you didn’t make it in politics,” said the judge.

“I’m too honest.”

“These shrimp are rancid.”

“You see how lovely it feels to let an honest word escape your mouth?”

“I prefer fresh shrimp to truth.”

“I’ll let the cook know that you weren’t happy,” the SRSG said.

“Be careful, or she’ll put poison in your morning coffee,” Johel said. “Our Haitian ladies can be temperamental.”

The SRSG allowed himself a smile, but now his face grew grave. The judge had all his life felt that the world of men was divided into two categories, the serious and the frivolous, and he had endeavored always to ally himself with the serious. Now he wondered in what camp the SRSG placed him.

“You might be an honest man also,” the SRSG said. “The essential thing for an honest man is to know it, and to adjust his behavior accordingly.”

Johel was silent. Through the windows, he could see a garden, and in the garden, a gardener clipped roses.

“This situation cannot continue,” the SRSG said.

The judge was startled to find the conversation come around so directly to essentials.

“My colleagues and I—”

“Your colleagues and you are running a foolish, grave risk. I invited you here today to tell you that you will lose. You must choose how you wish to lose. I say this as an honest man to another honest man.”

“We have an honest grievance.”

“Take your honest grievance to an honest judge, if you can find one, and win an honest verdict. Then enforce it. I didn’t say that you were in the wrong — I said that you were going to lose. And it’s a terrible shame if Haiti loses a man like you. I saw you on television yesterday, and I said to myself, ‘Here is a man who can help this country. So full of ideas. So mature.’”

“Some might say that the place for such a man is in government,” the judge said.

“Yes, if you could win an election, but they won’t even allow you on the ballot. They will never allow you on the ballot.”

“How can you be so sure of that?”

“My office is on the top floor of the Hotel Christopher. I have a view that extends to the sea — it might well be the broadest view in Port-au-Prince. Just from looking out the window, I can see whether there is smoke in Cité Soleil, if the airport is open, if the president’s limousine is parked at his mistress’s house, or if he has slept at home with the First Lady. And so I know before he knows himself if the president is in a good mood or a bad one.”

The SRSG leaned forward. “If I could, I’d make you president of Haiti tomorrow — I would. That’s how certain I am that your heart is in the right place. I think Haiti would be a better place for a man like you in power. But I don’t have that power.”

“I don’t want to be president,” said the judge.

“I know you better than you know yourself. You have a presidential heart.”

“I want to build a road.”

“And I thought you were an honest man.”

The judge watched the gardener take a towel from his pocket and rub the sweat off his face. “What do you want from me?” he asked.

“Peace. I want you to do what you have to do, and relinquish the CEH headquarters. I want you to tell your protesters to go home. I want schools to open and the ladies to sell their mangoes and spaghetti in the markets, and I want those children to stop throwing rocks.”

“And what will you do for me?”

The SRSG made his special noise. Buying rugs in Isfahan, he had found it an effective way to commence negotiations; it suggested that he was a connoisseur of rugs and well acquainted with their market values.

“We’ll let you come round to our side of the desk, see the world from on high. We’ll establish a commission of the best and the brightest on electoral reform, and we’ll need a chairman, someone honest. The chairman will find a place on the payroll of the Mission, and his report will be submitted to a grateful president, who will use all of his powers to see that its recommendations are implemented.”

“Will I be on the ballot?”

“That remains in the hands of the current, legally constituted authority.”

The judge understood the diplomatic subterfuge.

A waiter came into the room to clear the table. He was a dead ringer, Johel thought, for his Tonton Jean. Johel hadn’t seen Tonton Jean since his bachelor party. They said that in the last few years he didn’t recognize anyone, with the Alzheimer’s and all. But Tonton Jean in his day would have known just what advice to give his nephew: he’d had an instinctive, canny shrewdness when giving advice to others, at sharp odds with his notorious inability to manage his own affairs. Johel studied the waiter’s face as if Tonton Jean could incarnate himself in this stranger, returned to vigor across time and distance. The waiter’s blank-faced stare of practiced servility gave away nothing at all, but Johel knew that this man went home to his wife and children bursting with the opinions he had concealed throughout the day, then entranced the neighbors with brilliant mimicry of the powerful men who dined in the SRSG’s private dining room.