Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

The only person I knew who hadn’t given up hope in the judge, strange to say, was Terry. The day after the election, the Mission sent Terry to Port-au-Prince. I understand that he had no choice in the matter if he wished to remain outside the pénitencier . From Port-au-Prince he called me daily, wanting to know if I had heard from either Nadia or the judge. I told him I had no news from either one.

“Big Guy is taking this pretty hard,” he said, as if “this” had nothing to do with him.

The tone in his voice angered me. “You broke his heart.”

“He’ll bounce back. What you got to understand is that this guy’s got balls of steel.”

Terry called me every day, and each passing day made his confidence in the judge’s capacity for recuperation seem ever more fantastical. A rumor spread that the judge’s security guard had found him passed out and bruised on the back terrace. Someone heard that someone had seen him wandering through town in the night, half dressed. Still Terry insisted on the judge’s balls of steel.

I had all but lost hope when one of the judge’s students called me: the judge had come into the office. I found him there half an hour later, dressed in his cream suit with the pink tie, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. By now there were two dozen students assembled and others were showing up every minute. He had lost weight, he was tired; his skin was an ashen gray.

But it was wonderful to hear him talk about the road. He told us that the road — a highway! — leading right out of Jérémie to Port-au-Prince would be no dirt track, but a solid tarmacked expressway, two lanes, signposted, metal barriers on the curves. It would be a broad-backed python of a road, creeping around the mountain bends before descending graciously down into the broad plains of the Département de Sud. Two hours, more or less: that’s all the trucks would need to get from Jérémie to Les Cayes, then two hours more to reach Port-au-Prince. On this road would be trucks filled with mangoes, bananas, breadfruit, pineapple, avocados, and fish. That’s what they were building together.

The judge stood up. I had never liked the man more or been more proud of him. Every eye was on him. He said, “Fish! In Santo Domingo…” Then he wobbled slightly, rolled his eyes, and vomited the contents of his breakfast across his desk, a big, ugly spray of fried spaghetti, coffee, and orange juice. The orange juice still reeked of raw rum. Then he fell over backward and collapsed on the floor.

* * *

You could tell just from his eyes, black and unreflecting, like pools of mud, that his situation was serious. The doctor at the hospital attached him to a saline line. His breathing was irregular and sharp. He was still dressed in his good shirt and cream trousers, both soaked in sweat; his face was covered in beads of sweat, and he was hot to the touch. The only doctor on service at the hospital that morning was fresh out of medical school. I took him aside to ask for details, and he told me that the judge was suffering from a combination of malaria, dengue, and exhaustion. He wasn’t very sure in his diagnosis. Perhaps it was a heart attack. Or perhaps, the young doctor said, it was swine flu. Whatever the disease, there was no possibility of treatment in Jérémie, and the doctor recommended immediately transporting the judge to Port-au-Prince.

But he was in no condition to travel. The nurses set up a fan to blow over him. He floated in and out of lucidity. Once he said “Nadia.”

“She’s coming,” I said, although I had already tried twice to call her and had no answer.

He tried to sit up, and his force failed him. He collapsed onto his back, groaning.

Out in front of the hospital, a small crowd was swelling, informed by rumor that the judge was inside and in the grip of serious illness. The crowd began to sing, “Sweet Jesus, Savior of Our Souls.” Big birds circled high in the sky. In the sickroom there were at least two dozen of us.

He had lain there from morning to night when Nadia arrived at the hospital. It was well after dark. When she saw Johel, she cried out, swayed on her feet, and was caught by the bystanders. Then she sat in a chair by Johel’s side, holding his hand and mopping his forehead with a damp washcloth. She spoke softly into his ear. Now his breathing was irregular and ragged. She sat by his side and massaged his arms and shoulders as he shuddered quietly. She fed him water with a spoon.

By midnight, a vast crowd had spontaneously assembled on the Place Dumas and in the cathedral, where the faithful sat on pews and prayed. They had come on foot from every corner of the Grand’Anse, marching down the mountainsides from as far away as Gommier, Roseaux, Beaumont, Corail, Pestel, Anse-d’Hainault, even Dame Marie. Some had walked as long as a day and a night to reach Jérémie. They waited all through the night for news, telling each other stories of the time they had met the judge, the time he had settled their argument, the way he had put money in their pocket when the little one was sick. They lit candles, and no one slept except the children. Some of the men sipped clairin , and some of the women cried, but softly, as if the sound might carry and disturb the sick man.

Just after dawn, the cathedral bells began to toll and the town began to swell with light and a lady in a red dress sat up straight and swore she saw the Merciful Angel of the Lord.

On January 12, 2010, at 4:53 in the afternoon, Terry White was riding a desk at the Villa Privé, UNPOL HQ, two hundred meters from the Hotel Christopher. They were sending him home, but these things take time. Of all strange things, what they were after him for — after everything that happened — was the Toto Dorsemilus dossier. That felt as if it had happened to another man, it happened so long ago. That was the judge’s farewell present to him, a request via the minister of justice that the dossier be reopened. So they gave him a desk at the Villa Privé and told him to sit there, and that’s what he did.

Terry had called Nadia what must have been twenty times a day for a week. Sometimes the phone would ring, sometimes the phone was off. What you have to understand is that he didn’t want anything from her, he never did — he just wanted to hear her voice. He knew that if she listened to him, he could make her laugh again, and if she laughed, she’d see him; and if she saw him, she’d let him hold her; and if he held her, he’d be all right.

The world had come apart so fast.

No mule had ever kicked a man harder than the judge’s death kicked Terry. The way they say it knocked the wind right out of you? In his case no exaggeration at all: gripping the side of his plastic-and-felt office chair, moaning, trying to find oxygen. Eyes bulging, hand going up to his throat, heart beating two hundred times a minute trying to shuttle around the oxygen that wasn’t going down the pipe. Enough time to think that he was going to have a heart attack and die too.

When he got his breath back, he wanted to go to Jérémie for the funeral: pay his respects and see Nadia. But he was scared, plain and simple. What do you call them, he wondered, those dreams you have in the daytime, as vivid as a nightmare, but eyes open. He didn’t have a good word for it, but three times in two days, in the run-up to the funeral, he’d had a vision of Nadia turning to him in the cathedral, raising up this bony finger in his face, and the whole church of mourners turning on him, ripping him apart limb by limb. He couldn’t chase away the fear, couldn’t fight it, couldn’t beat it down until the funeral had come and gone.

The day of the judge’s funeral, he called Kay.

“They’re burying Johel today,” he said.