Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

“I wish he hadn’t.”

“I’ll grant you that it’s unfortunate, Dag, but that’s the world we live in.”

She told the SRSG that she has had her staff prepare a list of visas for suspension. The secretary of state needed something to show Senator Oxblood as soon as possible.

“It’s budget time in Washington. We’re not going to cross the chairman on this one. If it matters to him—”

She let the sentence dangle.

“And what can I do for you, Anne?”

But he knew the answer to his own question. The embassy wanted him to talk to DG Brutus. They wanted his fingerprints on the knife protruding from DG Brutus’s back. And what choice did the SRSG have, really? You can’t cross State and aspire one day to be deputy secretary-general of the United Nations. That simply isn’t realistic.

* * *

The SRSG called around sunset with an offer: DG Brutus had agreed to “review” the exclusions if Johel would get his guys out of CEH headquarters. The embassy would hold off on suspending his sons’ student visas.

It was Nadia who insisted that they go out dancing, Johel and Terry both being steak-and-a-bottle-of-wine kind of guys. But she winked and pouted at both of them until they relented. They ended up at one of the big dance halls in Pétionville. Nadia danced first with Terry and then with Johel as the threesome drank their way steadily through a bottle of Barbancourt. Everyone in the club recognized Johel. His appearances on television had made him famous, and all night long, strangers came up to him and offered him a drink or clapped him on the shoulder or asked if he’d found his “lost goat.”

While Johel circulated through the crowd, Nadia danced with Terry. She felt as light in his arms as a sparrow, but a childhood spent hauling water had given her shoulders and back a surprising hardness. He stood half a head taller, and he could brush her hair, arranged in cornrows, with his chin. He could feel her small breasts press against him, and her dress seemed to his hands as if it were made of gossamer: he took pleasure in the warmth of her body through the fabric. He had never wanted a woman more. He said, “I love you.” He had never said this to her before, but as soon as the words escaped his lips, he knew it was the truth. He wasn’t sure if Nadia heard him over the loud music, but she seemed to press her fragile body closer to his, as if in response. He thought that after the election, anything was possible.

Inspired by the moment, he kissed her. She reared back, beestung. “He’s not looking,” Terry said, and he tried to kiss her again. She writhed in his arms, and Terry realized that she was serious, that she would not kiss him. The mood was broken. Terry could see in Nadia’s green eyes reproach and contempt. His high emotions were like a bubble, as quick to explode as to expand. All the drama and the tension of the long week settled on his shoulders. He wanted to sleep.

But the judge didn’t want to leave the club. Soon Terry and Nadia were seated at a table with the judge and a half dozen other men, beefy men with bad skin, gold chains, and expensive wristwatches. Terry knew some of these men by name. They were members of the Port-au-Prince political world: a couple of deputies from up north, and a man who worked in the prime minister’s office. Terry’s Creole wasn’t good enough to understand the conversation, which came to him as isolated words floating through the loud music. Terry understood that in these men’s eyes, he was the judge’s pet blan . He wondered whether it had been worth all the struggle: maybe Johel was just another Haitian politician. Terry watched couples dancing, their laughing faces like masks. Loneliness assaulted him with a violence that was almost physical. His life, he thought, had amounted to nothing: he had built nothing, made nothing, begat no one. He wondered, should he disappear tomorrow from the planet, whether anyone would truly mourn him.

Then he felt a pressure on his thigh. It was Nadia’s hand. Her face gave nothing away: it stared into the distance, pretty and impassive. He could see Johel’s face, fat and shiny with sweat, laughing at some joke, exulting in his triumph. Someone slapped Johel on the back. Terry sipped his drink, melted ice and lemon juice and sweet, thick rum.

I took Kay to the airport the next morning, the first flight out of Jérémie in a week.

“I don’t want to see him,” Kay said when she learned that Terry and Johel were coming back from Port-au-Prince that evening.

“Then you should go home,” I said.

“And do what?”

We sat under the sign that read BIENVENUE À JÉRÉMIE. LA CITÉ DES POÈTES, and watched the marchandes sell spiky-headed pineapples, immense grapefruit, finger bananas, and oversweet mandarins. You would never have known driving through Jérémie that morning that there had been any disorder at all, except for the Uruguayan APCs parked at aggressive angles to the street in front of Mission headquarters.

“I guess I lost,” Kay said with a brave, unhappy chuckle.

“Don’t think about it that way.”

“How should I think about it? I came to Haiti with a husband and a dream, and I’m going home—”

“That’s how you should think about it. You’re going home.”

Kay offered me a banana. Then she peeled one of her own.

“Are you going to miss me?” she said.

“Of course.”

“Well, I’m going to miss you.”

We might have gone back and forth like this had my phone not rung. Kay saw me glancing at it and said, “Go on.”

I let it ring — it seemed the least I could do — but as soon as it was done ringing, it rang again.

This time I did answer it. It was Marie Legrand, Toussaint’s mother. I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. It was as if she were falling from a very high place. Finally I understood what she was telling me.

* * *

Nadia, Johel, and Terry drove back that day from Port-au-Prince. They left the city after breakfast, the three of them hungover. Between them, they’d slept no more than a dozen hours.

It took a couple of hours to get out of town, crawling through downtown and past the Martissant slum, then through Carrefour, the traffic tight. This stretch of road leading out of Port-au-Prince was as nasty a corner of the planet as any Terry had ever seen: tin-roofed shacks festering in sun-scorched chaos all the way to the sea. Nadia dozed in the backseat while the judge and Terry nudged their way through town, no one talking.

But when they got on the open road, the judge slapped his thigh and said, “Holy shit.” Terry and Nadia understood: they were warriors coming home from battle, and they’d won. Soon Andrés Richard called, congratulating Johel. Then Père Samedi. In the light of day, the judge’s victory was an even more amazing accomplishment than it had seemed the night before. Terry knew that even Nadia had been caught up in the dream. When they stopped to buy gas in Les Cayes, a small crowd gathered around the pump, all of them wanting to see the judge or shake his hand.

Terry could see Nadia’s eyes in the rearview mirror. It made him happy to be so close to her. He felt as if the two of them could speak with no words, his sighs sufficient to tell her that he loved her, her glances in the mirror enough to let Terry know that she was proud.

The night before, Kay had called him. She told him that she was headed home.

“I think that’s for the best,” Terry said.

“There’s still time for you to come too,” Kay said.

That Kay would even suggest such a thing — that’s how little faith in him she had. The trip to Port-au-Prince had been his plan; his force of will had animated their adventure. It was strange to Terry that Nadia understood so much more clearly the dimensions of his soul than his own wife.