Peacekeeping by Mischa Berlinski

Author:Mischa Berlinski
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780374715168
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2016-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

PART FIVE

1

A copper plaque on the wall of the Bibliothèque Nationale “Sténio Vincent” announced that the library had been rehabilitated thanks to a charitable intervention by the Honorable Sénateur Maxim Bayard. The Sénateur had reroofed the library, purchased chairs and tables, and installed a ceiling fan, which, owing to the lack of electricity, hung immobile, cobwebs dangling from the blades.

I have very few mementos of my time in Haiti—no art, no metalwork from Croix-des-Bouquets, no papier-mâché Carnival masks from Jacmel—but in my wallet I carry at all times my library card. The library consisted of nothing but a reading room that, in the absence of a breeze and under the Sénateur’s tin roof, grew stiflingly hot in the late afternoons, and a small back room where the stacks were maintained. There were some newspapers imported from the capital, none more current than the previous week, and a table dedicated to the poets of Jérémie, the Sénateur’s own book having pride of place. To select a book from the collection, you first consulted the catalog, a handwritten list of titles affixed to the wall with Scotch tape; then you prepared a written request for the librarian. Monsieur Duval was a man of antique vintage, gray-haired, with a pair of reading glasses so thick they might have been bulletproof. He would rise, with a thousand creaking joints, from his chair, where he had been comfortably reading the same volume since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and trundle slowly into the back room. Then you waited. I have many lovely memories of the library. They are not dramatic. There was a young man, a motorcycle taxi driver, reading Les Misérables and a young woman, her baby asleep on the floor, her legs tucked neatly under her haunches, nodding in sympathy to a tattered edition of Le Deuxième Sexe. There were high school students reciting from Le Cid. There was an older gentleman who every morning read from the library’s not insubstantial collection of Latin poetry—the high schools of Jérémie had once taught Latin as a matter of course.

Père Abraham Samedi was another regular in our ranks. I knew his name from Toussaint Legrand, who had told the judge, Terry, and me of the important role the priest played in local politics. I saw him for the first time as I read Maigret et le corps sans tête and he read, at the adjacent table, Un Américain bien tranquille by Monsieur Graham Greene. He was a tall, thick man in a clerical collar, a coeval of the librarian, with sooty dark skin, holding his book at arm’s length, as if unwilling to admit that he might be ready for spectacles. Something in his manner suggested that a conversational overture would not be unwelcome.

Thereafter, whenever I drove in the direction of Anse du Clerc, I would stop by Père Samedi’s house. He was usually able to spare me no more than a few minutes from the crush of his duties, but in those moments

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