Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

Later that morning, when his campaign staff was assembled, Johel told the crew of students, professionals, and lawyers of his emotions as he listened to the stirring verse. His obvious sincerity inspired in his staff similar feelings. Even Terry, who did not understand the lyrics of the song, was moved, and he rose with everyone else when the judge suggested that they sing the anthem in Toussaint’s honor. Toussaint’s friends and colleagues placed their hands over their hearts and promised to form ranks for the country and the flag. The anthem had a special meaning to each of them that day. There was no thought of retreat. They sang, “Mourir est beau, mourir est beau / Pour le Drapeau, pour la Patrie.” When they were finished, the room was silent, as if they had all taken a solemn oath.

Then Nadia spoke. She had surprised her husband, who had supposed that she would be intimidated by this crowd of fast-talking, educated young people, by insisting on attending the strategy session. Then she surprised him still more.

“We have to bury him right,” she said. “We won’t get another moment like this one.”

Nadia understood that the way to win a heart was to tell a story, and that the funeral was like a stage that would attract an audience of ten thousand or more, all of them eager to see the patriot’s body. She told the men that Toussaint’s flag-draped coffin could say more than the judge’s words and that in each of Madame Legrand’s tears there would be a thousand votes.

The suggestion shocked the judge.

“Should I take his shirt and pants too?” the judge said. “The boy is dead. Let’s bury him in peace.”

“You don’t understand how a dead man thinks,” Nadia said.

“And you do?”

“I know he fought for you when he was alive, and you won’t fight for him when he’s dead.”

“What does his mother want?” asked the judge.

“She wants to bury him right.”

That afternoon Nadia went to sit beside Marie Legrand in the bereft woman’s hut. Nadia rocked her body in sympathetic rhythm to Madame Legrand, the women crying together. Nadia told Madame Legrand that the judge wanted to put Toussaint in the ground with all due respect.

Madame Legrand’s tears subsided.

“The boy loved his mother,” she said.

“He was a fine child,” Nadia said.

“The boy always worried how his family would eat.”

“We need to send him home right.”

“Will Juge Blan take care of us now?” asked Madame Legrand. “That’s the way Toussaint would want it.”

The two women, both veterans of the marché , understood each other. A Haitian funeral is expensive, and nothing brings more honor to a woman than burying her son right.

Toussaint’s death and burial would never have been a significant political or social occasion had the judge himself not acquired such notoriety over the course of the last weeks. He had gone to Port-au-Prince, confronted the blan , and come home a hero.

The next day, the judge, as he did most every morning, went on foot to buy fresh cabiche . He enjoyed eating the hot rolls spread thickly with homemade peanut butter. Soon the boulangerie was overwhelmed with a quickly growing crowd, all pushing and shoving to get closer to him. Women wanted to touch his face. The shouting of the crowd was too loud to allow the judge to speak, and eventually he had to call Terry to come and get him.

Then, that afternoon, there was a scary moment. The judge was in his office when one of his students received a call from an acquaintance in Camp-Perrin. A black SUV had stopped there on its way to Jérémie, the caller said, with four men inside, heavily armed. The story soon spread that the men were on their way to Jérémie to assassinate the judge, and Terry attempted to convince him that he should take refuge for the day on the grounds of the Uruguayan military base, where he would be surrounded by machine-gun nests, watchtowers, and barbed wire.

“Not going to happen,” Johel said.

“Just for a day, buddy,” Terry said. “Until we figure out what’s going on.”

“No man walks who can stop us.”

“That’s fine, but these folks are in a car.”

Johel looked at Terry, and Terry knew there was no use arguing the point further.

That evening, a brigade vigilance met the black SUV at the bridge over the Grand’Anse. The four men inside the vehicle, flustered by the large crowd that surrounded them, explained that they had flown in from New York the day before. The car was a rental. They were tourists, members of the Haitian diaspora, on their way to visit family in Dame Marie. Two of the four men barely spoke Creole. All were unarmed, and none of them had ever heard the name Johel Célestin.

* * *

The bishop of the Grand’Anse made his political affiliations clear by agreeing to conduct Toussaint’s obsequies in the cathedral. On the morning of the funeral, the Place Dumas was overwhelmed by mourners. They came from every corner of the Grand’Anse, many on foot, still others by the fleet of buses the judge had chartered, those tough old yellow school buses, long retired from hauling American children, that found a second life on the battered Haitian roads.

There was, however, a problem that the judge had not been able to overcome. He had hired on Madame Legrand’s behalf a private morgue to hold the body and prepare it for burial. But the PNH refused to release the body, claiming that the criminal investigation into Toussaint’s death required an autopsy. There were, however, neither forensic pathologists in the Grand’Anse nor facilities to autopsy a corpse, and it was widely assumed that the chief of police was acting on behalf of the Sénateur, who wished to forestall the political rally that the funeral would entail.

Johel had been negotiating now for three days to obtain the body, but on the morning of the funeral, the crowds already massing, the body still lay under lock and key at the Bon Repos. The family had not been admitted to wash the body and dress it and pray over it. The judge had presumed that the urgency of the funeral would cause the PNH to relent, but instead, battle lines had hardened as the chief of the PNH, declaring that the law came before tears, threatened with impeccable logic to burn the body in the courtyard of the commissariat rather than release it under blackmail.

There was an additional complication: the Sénateur himself was back in town. An old political hand, he announced that he was going to kick off his own campaign with a massive rally on the day of the funeral. At the very hour that the judge was going to bury Toussaint, he was going to be roasting pigs and serving them with mountains of rice and beans. He suggested slyly on Radio Vision 2000 that in grief and sorrow, nothing was more important than a good meal.

Things boiled over in the early afternoon. The crowd had been waiting a long time in the hot sun for the funeral to start. Crowds are temperamental beasts, and when it was well past lunch, the mourners, who had all set out that morning in the earnest, peaceful, and reflective mood that accompanies the burial of a young man, started getting antsy. When someone on the fringe of the crowd was accused of being a supporter of the Sénateur, it took the efforts of half a dozen strong men to break up the fight.

The judge was still working the phones at campaign HQ, trying to get Toussaint’s body so that he could eulogize the defunct, when one of his students rushed in, waving his hands wildly and babbling insanely. Johel couldn’t understand a word. “Go look ,” the student finally said.

From the upstairs balcony of campaign headquarters, we could see the crowd moving and slithering around. Someone said, “Oh my!” and the judge said, “Holy shit.” Toussaint Legrand was crowd-surfing across the Place. The crowd had broken into the Bon Repos and stolen his corpse. You couldn’t really tell if he was alive or dead, because someone in the crowd had his head and others were holding on to his feet. He was dressed in the clothes he had died in, jeans and his favorite Barcelona jersey.