Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

Up in the village, Nadia dreamed every night about the Trois Rivières , about the men coming for her, about the black waters. The money Johel had given her was enough for six months, a year, maybe. She would have to live in Port-au-Prince — where would she have the baby? She imagined herself and the baby in a rented room, the rats and the mosquitoes, the open latrines. But she didn’t know if she would even make it to the city. Her cousins were already asking her for money, and she couldn’t say no. That was how the village worked. She felt like the cow that the hougan slaughtered to please the Loa , every eye on her waiting for the feast, the knives sharpening.

She had been in the village about a week when, just as the waters began to take her under, she heard a voice: It’s easy to swim . It was a woman’s voice. Erzulie La Sirene! Her heroine! Greatest of all the Loa ! Mistress of men, but slave of none: a free woman, beautiful and proud. Nadia had always admired and served Erzulie for her beauty and her grace, enveloped inevitably in a cloud of perfume. She had a hint of blue in her skin from the sea; her long hair billowed in the warm waters.

Nadia reached out for Erzulie’s blue hand, and just as soon as she found it, Nadia could swim too. She pushed against the water, first tentatively and then with greater confidence. Water didn’t pull you down; it held you up. Nadia shed her clothes. Her lithe body planed against the water. She dove under and rose up. She arced out of the water like a flying fish and slid back in. She could stay under without breathing for as long as she needed, and when she came back to the surface, the air was clean and fresh. When she tired, when she began to sink back down into the water, she had only to reach for Erzulie and she could swim again.

Nadia followed Erzulie along the ocean bottom until they came to a ridge. It was easy to descend, and somehow, although it was very dark under the water, she could see. There, glinting ahead, balanced on a rock, swaying in the watery breezes, was the golden watch. Nadia seized it and began to swim toward the surface.

Micheline, the woman who cooked and cleaned for us, had heard from the judge’s gardener that he had taken ill and hadn’t left the house in days. Micheline was a kindly woman, who in addition to giving her vote to the judge had bestowed on him her highest epithet: “Good people.” So she spent a morning preparing a plate of poulet creole , rice with black beans, deep-fried plantains, and a pitcher of fresh grapefruit juice. Then she assembled a hamper and asked me to take it up.

It will sound strange to say of a man of Johel’s size that he looked haggard, but that was the word that came to mind when I saw him. I had never seen him, whether he was casual or formal, less than carefully dressed. Now he was wearing an old T-shirt stained by age and sweat from black to gray. He was unshaven, and his dark eyes, ordinarily so alert and splendid with intelligence, were dull and streaked with red. His smell, like ammonia, congealed sweat, and fear, made me queasy; I didn’t want to shake his hand. He stumbled as he walked, caught himself, moved with effort. My first thought was that he was in the midst of a severe bout of food poisoning.

He surprised me, however, by eating all the food Micheline had prepared. He sat at the kitchen table and took huge, sloppy mouthfuls, shoveling the food in first with a fork and then with his hands, crunching on the chicken bones and sucking the marrow, mopping up the grease with plantains. He ate like a man who hadn’t eaten in days, who had forgotten that there was such a thing as food. Sweat poured from his brow as he ate, and dark rings sprouted under his arms. He didn’t talk, but occasionally grunted. He doctored the grapefruit juice with huge splashes of clear rum.

He sat at the kitchen table when the food was gone, as if stunned by a blow. He was breathing heavily, his pink tongue lolling over his lips. I was truly at a loss for words: no secrets to keep, no messages to pass, no stories to tell.

We might have sat in silence for five minutes or more when Johel said, “I should have stayed home.”

I might have followed him down the path of self-recrimination and regret, but just then, from beyond his concrete wall, I heard two cats begin to fight in the garden. Their wailings sounded like women and children crying, and I remembered Madame Legrand in the morgue.

“Are you still going to build the road?” I asked.

That it was even in doubt — that after all the suffering and blood and work, I could even wonder about such a thing — will tell you how beaten a man he seemed.

“Road?” he said, and I knew that since Nadia walked out the door, he had not thought once of anything but Nadia, that his desire to win a seat in the Haitian Sénat was entirely extinguished, that it was a matter of indifference to him now how the citizens of the Grand’Anse transported themselves to their capital.

He poured himself another shot of rum. He had never been much of a drinker, and the liquor seemed to take him badly. He offered me a glass, but the rank smell of the raw alcohol dissuaded me.

“It feels like my head is going to explode. It just won’t leave me alone,” he said.

It didn’t matter what I said. The judge wasn’t listening to me.

“First time I saw her, I knew. Never had a feeling like that before or since. Not one person wanted to see me with her, not one. But that just made her sweeter for me.”

I wanted him to be another man right then. I thought of the tens of thousands of peasants who had trudged out into the firing line to give him their vote. It was a terrible thing to see him so diminished.

“Maybe it was all destiny,” I said.

I thought that word, which so many times seemed to quicken his speech and stiffen his resolve, might work a similar magic now. But he said only, “No such thing as destiny.”

“What do you mean?” I protested. “Of course there’s such a thing as destiny. It’s what brought you back to Haiti, it’s what…”

I struggled to think of the next item in the list. The judge’s faith in his own destiny had been so superlative for so long that I had come to take it for granted. How many times in how many conversations had I told strangers about that road! It had become my purpose in Haiti also, to watch the judge fulfill his.

“Things happen,” Johel said. “And then other things happen.”

“Will she come back?” I asked.

That, I thought, was the only thing that could save the road.

Johel took another sip of that foul rum. His hand was trembling.

“She doesn’t love me.”

“Maybe she does,” I said. “Women make mistakes—”

“No. She never loved me. She came back here with me because she didn’t have a choice. But she didn’t love me. This was just her cage.”

The thing that bothered him most, he told me, was what she called him when she walked out the door. She called him blan.

* * *

New Year’s came and went, and we waited for the judge. He didn’t leave his house. Micheline was not the only woman who sent up a plate of food, but his security guard refused the plates. I tried to call him. For a few days his phone rang unanswered; then it was turned off. Nobody I knew had set eyes on the man. A rumor spread that the Sénateur had employed black magic to curse the judge. His students began to wonder if he would ever come down to campaign headquarters again, whether he would even contest the second round of the election. The Sénateur had begun his own ambitious campaign: advertisements sprang from every radio, and new posters went up. Somebody spray-painted, “Judge Blan — Judge Faggot” on the wall opposite HQ. I suspect the culprit was someone as severely disappointed in the judge as we all were.