Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

There had been a boy in the bathroom also. Now the Sénateur remembered. His mother had been waiting for him outside the door. She had said, “Are you sure you can go alone?” The boy had said, “But I’m big now, maman !” The boy had been sitting on the toilet when the earth attacked them.

“Come to me, child,” the Sénateur said.

“But I can’t see you,” the boy said.

“Follow my voice.”

Soon the boy was at his side. He told the boy to touch his face, and he could feel small hands wandering across his broad, bony skull. He could smell the child’s hair. He could feel his heart beating. The Sénateur began to laugh. His story had not ended. His people needed him. Life needed him. Old Baron Samedi had come for him, and he, the Sénateur, had been too tough.

* * *

Only when Nadia began to hear a woman’s screams, “Jesus save me! Jesus save me!” did she realize that the thing was done. She began to crawl in the darkness, slipping and gliding through the oozing lake of oil. Something grabbed at her ankle — it was a hand attached to a body trapped under a slab of concrete — then slid off her greased limbs. She saw a distant light, wavering in the powdery clouds of dust. Past the olive oil there were pickles, which she knew by their vinegary smell. She moved steadily on her hands and feet in the direction of the light, which grew ever brighter and more distinct the closer she came to the hole in the supermarket wall. She slid over bodies and across exploded sacks of flour, found her forward progress stopped by an overturned shopping cart, a pair of hands still attached to the handle, the remainder of the body under collapsed refrigerators, writhing slightly.

Nadia slid through the hole in the wall and into the supermarket’s parking lot. She blinked at the sharpness of the light. She stood up and saw that her hands and legs were red with blood, scintillating with shards of glass. The pain arrived from a distance. The others who had survived were coming out of the supermarket also. Nadia looked with a vague curiosity at their hysterical, frightened faces. She felt her baby kick and was comforted.

Nadia stood in the parking lot, breathing heavily. Her heart was leaping, bounding at her chest. Her lungs were raw. She could hear rising from every corner of the destroyed city an assortment of human voices: screams, groans, shouts, and cries. She looked at herself in the mirror of a car and began to laugh. Her face was white with flour, attached to her oily skin. She felt a greatness in her soul, a mastery such as she had never before experienced: She had lived. She had triumphed. She was not afraid.

* * *

For three days and three nights the Sénateur kept the boy alive. For three days and three nights the Sénateur never stopped talking, except when the boy slept, his small, warm body pressed close to the Sénateur’s. Stories, poems, and doggerel — jokes, verse, and song — came forth from the Sénateur’s tired, ragged consciousness like water from a spring. He told the boy stories of Bouki and Ti Malice.

“Krik,” the Sénateur said.

“Krak,” the boy said.

“He is taller when he sits than when he stands.”

“I don’t know.”

“Think, child.”

The boy began to whimper.

“A dog!”

The boy giggled as the Sénateur began to sniff like a beagle at the boy’s dark curly hair. The boy giggled and relaxed.

Then the Sénateur confided in the child. He talked about politics, and a man’s duty to protect his children. The Sénateur told the boy stories from his childhood, the sweetness of his first kiss, the rapture of love. He told him of everything that awaited him in manhood. He tried to teach the boy everything he knew, everything he felt was important: how to treat a woman, how to steer the voilier into the wind, how to compose a line of living verse.

They had no water and no food. The room was stiflingly hot and close. The Sénateur felt Baron Samedi approaching, circling, prowling, and he kept him at bay. The Baron had been working hard, but was not tired from his exertions. When the boy slept, the Baron told the Sénateur of the legions of freshly dead he had shepherded into his domain. And still the Sénateur told Death, “I’m not ready yet! Not ready! I won’t cry fire!”

The boy was tiring. Now he whimpered and cried for thirst. The Sénateur told him to close his eyes and imagine a tall glass of Coca-Cola, the glass condensing. He told the boy to drink that glass of Coca-Cola and feel it filling up his empty tummy.

Later the boy would insist to his rescuers that there had been a Coca-Cola in the bathroom of the collapsed hotel. That he had drunk Coca-Cola.

And now the Sénateur could last no longer. He had kept the implacable Baron at bay so many hours, so many days. The firing squad was ready. The army had yielded: they would allow the priest to order his own execution. But they would wait only so long. There was work to be done, so many others to shoot. The Baron’s patience was finite. All that the soldiers awaited was the word, and when the Sénateur — finally, after so much work and suffering, so much love and sorrow — could hear the voices of rescuers chipping at the walls of the bathroom, he cried, in a voice of command and resolution and hope, “Gentlemen, you may fire!”

I saw Terry again three years after the earthquake.

It had taken a few years longer than I expected, but I finally completed the novel I had begun in Jérémie. The work had been interrupted by the earthquake: that was too much Life and Death, too present and too intense, for me to retreat into my room and spend my days imagining. Serving no end and motivated by nothing, an earthquake is everything that fiction is not.

It was only when my wife found a new job, far from Haiti, that I was finally able to get back to work. Now my publishers were sending me on a publicity tour: twelve cities in twenty-four days, to an average audience numbering about twenty-five, average age about sixty, most of them there for the other writer on the program. But I saw cities I had never seen before, slept every night in comfortable hotel beds, and in every audience there was someone who told me that the black marks I had made on the page had helped them pass a long night or reminded them of times past or made them laugh. That’s all that a writer can ask for, really.

When I posted my tour schedule on Facebook, both Kay and Terry, the one in Atlanta, the other in Miami, had promised to stop by and see me. But I was surprised that Terry, not Kay, had made the effort. I didn’t notice him during the reading, but when I looked up from the table where I was signing books, there he was, an almost nervous look on his face.

I stood up and walked around the table. “Terry Fucking White,” I said, and I hugged him. The last time I had seen him was on the night Johel Célestin won the first round of the senatorial election, and he had taken one hell of a bruising since then: his hair had gone gray and he was walking with a cane. A ton of concrete on your leg will do that to you. They took three days just to dig him out of the rubble — at one point the Watsonville County Herald reported him presumed dead. It took a week before he was medevaced out of Haiti, and the first doctor who touched him, in Santo Domingo, botched the operation. There had been some doubt whether he was going to keep the leg at all. He was in and out of hospitals for a year after the earthquake. That thing Terry always had, the almost animal quality, athletic and feral, that hinted at physical menace — that was all gone now. He suggested fragility, like you could take him in a fight. That’s what made me feel such tenderness toward him, that and the memory of all the places we’d seen together and the people we’d known. And I must have reminded him of something also, because he hugged me longer and harder than I expected, the two of us standing in the Coral Gables Barnes & Noble, book buyers watching us and wondering.