Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

“Will you excuse me?” the judge asked the SRSG.

“To your left.”

The bathroom was just down the hall, the walls decorated with paintings of women in the market. A commission , the judge thought. Now that might be enough. Enough to let everyone stand down with honor. Enough to look himself in the mirror.

The judge opened his fly and pulled out the gavel. He knew (the SRSG hadn’t needed to mention it) that the money would be more than decent — and beyond this commission, there would be others. That’s the way the system worked. He felt an almost giddy sense of relief. The SRSG had been right, he reckoned: he was an honest man, and truth be told, he had wanted a way out. He’d gotten himself in too deep — who knows how these things happen? Blessed be the Peacemakers, for theirs is the Kingdom—

In the otherwise immaculate toilet of the SRSG’s guest bathroom there was an immense turd, eight inches of muscular excrement, tan in color, formed like a submarine, a perfect specimen.

The judge, fastidious about all things fecal, flushed the toilet. The turd rolled slightly to one side and settled back into place, a sturdy bark in unruly waters. The judge pissed into the toilet (he could hold back no longer) and flushed again; and again the turd, fine craft that she was, rode out the water’s blast.

This, the judge reckoned, was the kind of turd that required breaking up. He looked for a toilet brush. There was none. Would the household staff have dared to crap in the SRSG’s guest toilet? Unlikely, but surely the SRSG himself had a private toilet in which to do his business. In any case, this turd was almost as large as the SRSG himself.

The judge tried flushing the toilet a third time. The turd began to move along the toilet’s floor, like a jellyfish drifting, and then disappeared from view. The judge reinserted his manhood in his pants — and the turd came swimming back into the bowl.

And the judge knew: no matter who had produced this turd, it was now his. There was no flushing away this fact: this turd was on him. No matter who was its author, he would be blamed for this turd. And tonight at the waiter’s house, the neighbors would laugh as the waiter who looked like Tonton Jean told how the judge had eaten the SRSG’s rich food, been made a fool of by the silver-tongued blan , and left behind the turd of the century for the servants to clean up.

The judge knew that only by defiance could he escape the SRSG’s trap. Only by walking out now — head high, proud, independent, free — could he escape that turd’s shame.

The next morning, very early, first sun slanting across the hotel room floor, Nadia curls naked in the judge’s arms. The judge breathes in her smell. He feels her tongue, quick and agile, graze along his lip. She is weightless, like a bird. Her shallow breath. His thick hands on her smooth skin. She sighs. He slips inside her and the room is filled with yellow sunlight, so strong the judge shuts his eyes.

Afterward Nadia says, “You can’t stop now.”

She has been thinking, calculating. She senses the child, the precarious little thing inside of her: its presence is not yet weight, but heat. She still dreams at night about the men and the golden watch. Sometimes the Sénateur comes to her in the night, and she can feel his cool breath, hear the ticking of the watch. Sometimes Ti Pierre comes, and she can feel his heavy hands holding her down, the watch’s clasp scratching her back. She sees the watch sinking in the water.

“This is all I want,” the judge says. His voice is languorous.

“I know,” she says. “But they won’t let us stop now. There was a moment—”

“We could go back.”

“To where?”

It’s the same problem, the eternal problem: a passport and a visa.

“We could go away,” he says.

Nadia knows from her dreams that the wheel of possibility has turned. “We can’t.”

“We could have everything,” he says.

“Only if we win.”

The judge runs his hands over her shoulders, amazed as always by the knots of marbled muscle under her smooth skin.

“You are the wave,” Nadia says. “Remember what you are. The wave that sweeps and washes clean the shore.”

The judge thinks, Or breaks, crashes, and is heard no more.

* * *

The airport was closed, and Kay was trapped in Jérémie until it opened again. So, at my invitation, she dropped by the Sénateur’s mother’s house daily, sometimes having breakfast with my wife and me, sometimes spending a quiet hour in the afternoon reading and dozing in the hammock, and almost every evening, eating with us.

I admired Kay’s courage. She never came by the house unless she was carefully groomed, with a bright, false smile on her painted lips. One day she made us a cake, and the next day she spent the morning chopping fruit to produce a salad. Jérémie had remained more or less tranquil throughout the crisis, but there had been a few moments of disorder: the day before, a few dozen of the judge’s supporters, inspired by the events in Port-au-Prince, had decided to seize city hall. They had been rebuffed by the police with tear gas. Kay nevertheless came zipping up the hill to our house on a motorcycle taxi.

“If I stay home and just stare at the walls, I’ll go insane,” she said.

My wife had just left for work, and Kay and I decided to make a second pot of coffee.

“Terry told me they’re almost out of money,” she said.

“You guys are talking?”

“We’re texting ,” she said. “Andrés Richard told them he’s not paying for anything else until he sees some results. Terry said that Johel came out of the meeting with the SRSG all fired up. But last night he started talking about sending everyone home. Then he started shivering and vomiting and saying he couldn’t breathe.”

“Maybe it’s over,” I said.

“I wouldn’t mind if it were.”

The coffee was ready. By now Kay was comfortable enough in the house that she said, “I’ll get it.” She went into the kitchen and came back out to the terrace with two cups. She even knew how much sugar I liked.

“You know who I just don’t get?” I said. “Like the person in this story who I can’t figure out?”

“She thinks he’s going to take her away.”

“No, that’s not who I meant. I know what she’s thinking. I meant you.”

Kay smiled, as if she had been complimented. “What do you mean?”

“I can’t figure out how a sensible woman like yourself got mixed up in a mess like this.”

She sipped her coffee.

“I wish we had ice,” she said.

“They say cold drinks just make you hotter. In the tropics—”

“You do it for the money,” she said.

The word “money,” when Kay said it, was like the kiss of a woman one has long desired. It was something serious and exciting. It made you nervous.

I said, “I thought you wanted to build the road and sell mangoes and fish and—”

“Maybe that’s how it started, but those two win this election, there’s so many things we can do.”

“You think?” I said.

“You might be the only person in Haiti who doesn’t think so. My God, we’re sitting on some of the most lucrative real estate in the Caribbean. Everyone knows what this is all about.”

“Even Terry?” I asked.

Kay stood up and walked over to the little mirror that hung on the wall. She stared at her reflection, fixing her hair and wiping away a smudge of dirt.

She said, “Terry likes to tell himself a lot of stories, I guess all men do. Women are different — we have to be, we have to live with you people. A man will tell himself he’s building a road. Or saving an orphan from a burning building. Or whatever the hell he’s doing with that woman. And if the story is good enough, a man will tell himself it’s okay to go to bed at night. But truth is, men don’t have a clue. Terry doesn’t even know why he gets out of bed in the morning. But I sure know why I do.”