Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

Terry couldn’t find the flaw in the argument. But he wasn’t convinced either.

“Most men don’t know where right and wrong are, but you and I — we know,” the judge said. “Don’t tell me we don’t know, because we do. That’s what it means to have power. That’s what this is all about. You get to be the one who decides.”

* * *

That evening, Terry went for a swim after dark. There was enough of a moon to keep an eye on the shore, and Terry thought that if he didn’t move, the humidity, mosquitoes, and small-town claustrophobia might eat him alive. He was grateful for the water, just cool enough to bite, and for the waves, bigger that evening than normal, high enough that he could wrestle with them. The waves came in rhythm: two or three small ones, easy to ride out, then a big one, surprising him in the darkness, picking him up and sending him crashing shoreward.

That afternoon, he had decided to tell Johel that he was headed home, that this wasn’t the way he wanted to play the game. But the words wouldn’t come, because he knew that if he left, he wouldn’t see Nadia again. It was that simple. When Johel had told him that Nadia had used love powder long ago to ensnare him, Terry had laughed. “More like poontang powder,” he said. Now he wondered whether there wasn’t something to the story.

Terry rode the waves for an hour or so, letting himself float and splashing. When he finally got to shore, he discovered that someone had stolen his pants, shoes, and shirt. The keys to his vehicle had been in his pants. His phone and wallet were locked in the car. Terry stood there cursing. He was facing a long walk back to the base, barefoot, in his dripping swimsuit, and he was aware for the moment of the ridiculous figure he would cut on the road.

Terry smashed the window of the car with a rock. He knew he would catch hell the next day from Balu, the chef de transport , but he figured he could bluff it out. Then he called Johel, who was out there to get him in twenty minutes. When Johel saw Terry standing there in his wet swimsuit, he started to laugh, and Terry laughed too. All the acrimony of their fight dissipated in the warm night air.

* * *

Sometimes on those long drives Nadia would drift off to sleep in the jouncing car and Toussaint would come to visit her. That’s how she knew that Toussaint had been in love with her. He never spoke to her in her dreams, but simply watched her, his hollowed-out stare miserable with adolescent lust and desire. She didn’t think that he had ever touched a woman. Sometimes he’d come to her naked, and she’d marvel at the erection protruding from the undernourished, hairless body; and she would feel a tender pity for his suffering. She took him in her hands and caressed him, or she let him rub his thin, long fingers over her body. He’d just arrive at the very precipice of his desire when the shaking of the car would wake her up.

The dead are nothing if not persistent, and she’d drift back off to sleep and he’d come back into her dream, the big car bouncing and rutting across the rocky back roads, her head balanced on the strap of the seat belt.

The dreams came to her so often that she visited the woman in Sainte-Hélène who knew how to interpret such things. This lady listened to Nadia seriously and advised her that the dreams would continue until she pleased Toussaint. But the dead would only lie with a woman who was pure.

There was a little spring that Nadia knew in the mountains, a place called Source Bleu, where the water ran clean. It was a holy place, a place for the spirits. Nadia knew that women who could not get pregnant sometimes came to this pool in the hopes of finding a child. On the way back from visiting the juge de paix of Roseaux, Nadia instructed her driver to stop by the side of the road, and she hiked inland to the source, where she bathed herself in the cold waters, murmuring the prayers she had learned as a girl.

That night, she dreamed that she was in the village, following a funeral cortege to the cemetery. The ladies were in white and the men in suits, and everyone was singing, walking through the green-leafed, red-dirt mountain behind the painted white coffin. Such a pretty coffin, she was thinking, a lady’s coffin. She was asking everyone where they were taking the body, but no one would talk to her; she didn’t know any of these folks, and nobody wants to talk to a stranger on the day you bury someone. She fell into step beside Toussaint.

She didn’t expect him to talk to her either, but he said, “That’s a lady who died too young.”

“What happened to her, Toussaint?” she said.

“Her man found her in the wrong arms and took her head from her shoulders.”

“Some men are like that.”

“All men are like that,” he said.

She and Toussaint followed the funeral cortege for a long spell, marching side by side with the villagers. Then she found herself alone with Toussaint. She was so happy not to be dead that she allowed him to make love to her. But dreams being what they are, she knew as soon as he touched her that this was not Toussaint, but the man with the mustache, the first man who ever touched her. Every man who had ever touched her was inside her, none of them good, liars and cheats and deceivers all of them. She struggled with Toussaint and he held her down, strong and firm, like they all did, taking her wrists in his thick hands, pushing against her until she opened up with a cry of pain, panting on her with his thick smell of old sweat and sour breath, death and Lightning. Nadia never dreamed about Toussaint again.

The ballots had been impregnated with swine flu — that was the rumor that hit four days before the election. We first started hearing the story in Jérémie, then reports came to us from all the coastal towns, until even in the most remote mountain villages, voters had heard that the ballot itself was poison.

“Goatfucker,” the judge said when his campaign workers started talking about the rumor. “This is the Sénateur. This is just like him.”

The swine flu story infected all of the Grand’Anse in about a day. Nobody knew what the symptoms of swine flu were, how to identify a sufferer of swine flu, or whether it could be treated. Although the rumor was specifically associated with the ballots, people began to visit the hospital and clinic, where doctors were unable to reassure them that they were healthy. A fight broke out at the bank when somebody sneezed. A hysterical mother came up to me in tears, holding a healthy-looking baby, insisting that the baby had been looked upon by a woman known to have contracted the disease.

That final week of the campaign, the judge pushed himself and everyone around him to the edge of nervous collapse. But he wouldn’t stop. He could feel the wind at his back.

Just a few days before election day the judge made a four-day swing down the coast, hitting Dame Marie and Anse-d’Hainault, even visiting Les Irois, where the residents did not forget that the judge had put Mayor Fanfan in prison. Still, they turned out to hear the judge talk, eat his pigs, dance to his music, and drink his beer. Then he’d held a rally all the way inland at Source Chaude, going deep into the mountains, a stretch in the middle on donkeys and horses.

And he was making progress.

On his way back to Jérémie, word spread that the judge was coming over the mountains. At first it was just the curious, but soon there were hundreds and then thousands, standing on the side of the road. So the judge told Terry he was going to walk, and there he was, walking back home through the mountains— rara music sounding and someone beating a drum — carrying a little kid on his big shoulders, telling the people the story of the road they were going to build themselves.