Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

“I bet you feel just lousy.”

“I do,” he said, thinking maybe she’d talk to him, just talk.

“And you want me to tell you it’s not your fault.”

“Kay—”

“You want me to tell you that you had nothing to do with breaking him—”

He said, “It was a heart attack or something. Just one of those things that happen.”

She said, “What do you want from me?”

“How did it all get like this?”

“You tell me, Terry. You tell me.”

“I had my reasons, Kay.”

“Funny thing is, I used to care.”

The worst of it was that there was no one to talk to, no one who would understand. Only reason he got up in the morning and went to the office was to see faces: he couldn’t take another minute alone in that hotel room. Now he was in a room with twenty other guys, each of them manning a desk, staring into space, waiting out their last few days in-country before being sent back home; and if one guy, just one, had walked over to Terry and said, Tell me what’s got you looking so troubled, my brother , what a tale he would have told! He had seen it so many times, of course, from the other side of the desk. That desk wasn’t six square feet of wood; it was like some vast abyss that separated a hopeful heart from a guilty one. Just to get across that abyss, men used to say the words to him that would put them in a cage for life. Men used to tell him their stories and then break down in tears of gratitude that he’d listened.

A week without sleep makes the dead walk: the judge kept strolling right into the Villa Privé, sitting himself right down next to Terry, looking him in the eye. Man looked terrible, but of course he was dead.

* * *

Nadia’s phone was ringing, but she didn’t want to talk to him. There was nothing more he could do for her. Phone was ringing all that day she was walking up into the mountains, the day Johel had put her out. Phone kept ringing all week long.

At the funeral, she saw Johel’s body in the coffin, and she wanted to be buried with him. No man had ever loved her as he had. She threw herself right into the coffin to hold him one last time. He was dead, but he still smelled like Johel; his cologne was in the fabric of his dark blue suit. She felt his cold, fat flesh. She felt hands pulling at her waist, pulling her away from him, then other hands at her feet. Still she held on tight. They would never have taken her off him if she hadn’t felt the baby move inside her.

The doyen of the Tribunal of Jérémie came to her in the house she had shared with Johel, just three days after she buried her husband, and sat beside her on the fauteuil and grasped her trembling hand.

“Beloved widow of my beloved friend,” said the doyen, his Creole so intermingled with French that Nadia could barely understand him. “My most profound condolences.”

The doyen folded his hands into fists, as if in prayer.

“But I am here this evening not to comfort your sorrows, but to add to your burdens. I address you now not as a suffering widow, but as a citizen. His sacrifice must not have been in vain.”

All through that evening and the next, the doyen’s plea was seconded by the requests of well-wishers and acquaintances: were the judge’s place on the ballot to remain blank, the Sénateur would win by default. The road would never be built.

Nadia listened to them from some place deep inside, some place where sound arrives slowly and sight is blurry. She thought about how many lives she’d led already, and she remembered the feel of Ti Pierre’s hand on her cheek, the weight of the judge’s body, the smell of Terry’s breath. She felt the baby kick. She wondered what choice she had but to listen to the men.

The next morning, Nadia flew to Port-au-Prince. The doyen had arranged for a lawyer to accompany her to CEH headquarters and get her on the ballot, employing whatever means were necessary. She spoke to Andrés Richard, who promised to offer her whatever resources she required. Père Samedi called to offer his condolences. He would support her candidacy also.

Nadia had a car and driver waiting for her at the airport in Port-au-Prince. The driver was a stocky, bull-necked creature with red eyes. He asked if she would mind stopping at the Caribbean Market on Delmas on the way to her hotel. His wife had just had a baby, and they needed diapers. Nadia didn’t mind at all. Since Johel’s death, her baby had wanted ginger. She had brewed cup after cup of spicy ginger tea, and still the baby’s thirst wasn’t satisfied. So she went into the supermarket to buy a can of ginger ale. That where she was on January 12, 2010, at 4:53 in the afternoon.

* * *

The Sénateur would meet that evening with the president at the Presidential Palace in Port-au-Prince, but before the meeting, the Sénateur decided to eat on the terrace of the Hotel Montana. He accompanied his steak with a good Burgundy. He ate and drank alone: he needed to think. The president was going to ask him to withdraw from the second round of the election. The foreign donors, you see — with the suspicions hanging over the Sénateur, with the disorder that had convulsed the country — here was a last sacrifice the Sénateur would make for the Haitian people. The president would protect him, see that he was not deported to the Cold Land. He would never see the inside of the Pénitencier National. A dignified retirement awaited him.

But the Sénateur was not convinced. He had lost the first round of the election, but narrowly, so very narrowly. Now that the bloated judge’s strumpet widow was proposing to stand in her husband’s place, the Sénateur was sure that he would win, and he was not prepared to sacrifice the accomplishments of a lifetime on the altar of the foreign donors.

The Sénateur stood up from his meal. His bladder was not what it had once been. He walked past the pool where the blan swam laps like deranged penguins. He wandered past the deck chairs where they bathed themselves in his people’s sunshine.

A thought intruded on the Sénateur’s newly resolute mind. The truth, he thought, was that he had been lucky to leave Jérémie alive. He attempted to suppress the thought, but by the time he arrived in the bathroom and unzipped his fly, the thought had returned with greater vigor: only the PNH, only the Mission had saved him. For the first time, he had seen hatred on the faces of his people. He had tried to attend, as a gesture of respect, his rival’s funeral, and they had turned on him with scorn and rocks.

It was strange. His bladder had been so full, the need so pressing, but standing at the urinal, it was hard to coax out the stream. A few drops, a few more. An unaccustomed sense of weariness oppressed him. His bladder relaxed.

But hatred never bothered the Sénateur: he had suffered the hatred of his enemies before. Any man who stands for dignity will endure hatred. No, the worst was the laughter. The Mission had flown him out on the propeller plane, and behind the chain-link fence of the airport, his children had been laughing. He had served them faithfully for so many years, and now they were laughing at him. One man who not so long before had come to the Sénateur’s terrace and promised him his love, kindness, and obedience shouted in a clear, carrying voice, “Bon voyage, Sénateur!”

* * *

Terry heard, before he felt, the rolling wave of earth moving slower than sound: bombs exploding, huge stones grinding, big trucks roaring, bulldozers digging, dump trucks smashing, cars colliding, jackhammers ripping, drums pounding, massively amplified static.

Then the first wave arrived, and the red and green and blue plastic Bics on his desk began to dance and chatter and the old serious desktop computer leaped giddily to the floor, and Terry felt a tepid wetness in his lap as a cup of cold coffee threw itself downward. Through the window he saw the solid horizon of parked vehicles and offices and palms sway at an angle.