God Loves Haiti (9780062348142) (20 page)

When through the woods and forest glades I wander

And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees;

When I look down from lofty mountain grandeur

And hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze:

And when I think that God, His Son not sparing,

Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in;

That on the cross, my burden gladly bearing,

He bled and died to take away my sin:

When Christ shall come with shouts of acclamation

And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart!

Then I shall bow in humble adoration,

And there proclaim, my God, how great Thou art!

The young men sang like angels. Their clothes stank to high heavens. Yes, they were gravediggers. The foul smell that came from their sweat as they sang confirmed it. Natasha had heard rumors about a group of men from the outskirts of Pétionville near a soccer field in a valley. After the earthquake, these men had organized themselves into a brigade that took charge of policing and protecting survivors living in camps and finding help. Incredibly, they earned people's trust by burying, free of charge, the stacks of dead, often decomposing, corpses that littered the neighborhoods. We have to do it for ourselves was their motto. Their leader this night stepped toward Natasha, but not too far forward, for he knew he carried the stench of hundreds of dead bodies. Jean-Richard Souvenir, he said. Natasha hesitated to say her name. They might recognize it, and she'd jeopardize one of the myriad security protocols of the first lady of Haiti. Bah, they probably don't read the papers much, she thought.

Natasha Robert, she said.

We're sorry for disturbing you, madame.

That was some entrance.

We sing when we enter a room at night to let people around know we mean no harm.

Outside, the day had slipped into night without Natasha's noticing. A full moon hung overhead, silver and cheesy. Natasha felt hungry and horny for the first time in a long time; the appetites of the normal had taken over her body where depression had ruled. Fleetingly, Natasha wondered what making love to twenty strapping young gravediggers in the church's pews would feel like.

That hymn was written from a nineteenth-century Swedish poem, Souvenir said.

So they do know how to read, Natasha thought. Shit. They know who I am.

Come in, she said. Sit, sit. Make yourselves comfortable. You look tired. You must be exhausted. I'll get you some water. I have no food, just some bread.

That's OK, Souvenir said. We picked up some
fritailles
before we came. We don't want to trouble you. We only wish to bunk for the night.

There are
marchands de fritailles
working already?

Yes, ma'am.

This was the first good news from the city outside the cathedral Natasha had gotten in days, too many days for her to remember. Small fried food stands were running! That's terrific news. Was it possible that birds would soon start singing again, lovers start caressing and arguing, and live bands start inspiring slow-dancing to return as the national pastime? Over fried pork chunks, plantains, and sugared water, the men ate in silence and shared what they could with Natasha. When the first bellies felt satisfied,
their owners began to banter. They joked about some of the most elaborate funerals they remembered. They talked of tombs that were bigger and more stylishly designed than many houses. How common it was to see a woman who lived in a shack be buried in a minicastle.

When Natasha chimed in, mouth full and fingers greasy, she wondered why, with all the funerals that were surely taking place around town these days, no one came to the cathedral for services. A silence fell with the thud of an iron gate. One man got up and walked away, disappearing into one of the pitch-black corners of the church. Another did the same. Many lowered their heads or looked away. Most looked to Souvenir to speak. The moment was awkward. You could hear rats skitter for crumbs across the marble floor.

First we tried to identify the dead, Souvenir said. His voice echoed around the church. We really tried, but there were too many. The smell was making everyone sick. It wasn't just us. The government, business owners, everyone who owned a truck, it seemed, helped, pitched in, but there were too many corpses. Too, too many. The best we could do was keep a running tally on sheets of paper as we scooped corpses with loaders and deposited them in dump trucks.

Dump trucks?

Yes, dump trucks.

One of the men flung a beer bottle against a wall in disgust.
Mon Dieu
, forgive us, another said. Another crossed himself.

To be fair, some families did come retrieve bodies along the way, Souvenir continued. Those that could afford to bought pretty caskets and draped them with flowers. They drove their dead themselves to a crematory or family plots, God bless them.

Amen, said an older man sitting in the pew next to Jean-Richard Souvenir.

Those who had no money burned the bodies themselves, Souvenir said. Initially we tried to wrap all the dead tightly in pink and white sheets stripped from beds or salvaged from the rubble, and then carefully placing them on sidewalks for loading. Soon, even relatives who had spent days digging up their dead were too tired to care about what happened to them. They placed them on the sidewalks. We picked them up and went looking for places, and then we buried the bodies. We did what we could. It wasn't pretty.

And some people criticized us for it, said the man who had walked away upon return. His face lit up close by yellow candlelight. Us!

The prime minister said the country cleared some hundred thousand bodies in the first five days alone. Can you imagine a hundred thousand dead bodies in one city like that? And we barely scratched the surface. Léogâne's dead have barely been touched. There are more bodies all over the streets.

So many more, someone else said.

Who knows how many.

The government really did try to figure out how to best handle all the dead bodies after goudou-goudou. We all wanted to find an alternative to putting bodies on loaders and having loaders put bodies in trucks, and having trucks take bodies to improvised dump sites, like so much trash. Those people deserved better. But the bodies were beginning to decompose, to smell. We were facing a choice: leave them in the streets to rot where you would never be able to identify them and run the risk of making people living around them sick, or leave with them and bury them wherever we could, as well as we could. We all decided to put the safety of those people who are still alive ahead of better treatment of the dead.

Who gave you the right, huh? the Angry Man said, angrily. Who?

The Fort National cemetery was quickly filled beyond capacity, Souvenir said after a sympathetic glance at Angry Man. There were bodies on top of bodies on top of tombs.

All the men shook their heads at the memory. One looked like he wanted to literally shake the memory out of his head. Natasha listened with her mouth open.

The earthquake demolished a lot of tombs, so what we did was, we broke into tombs to create mass graves. It was the simplest solution for us to quickly remove the bodies from the streets.

Angry Man sucked his teeth loudly.

Some people are upset, Souvenir said. The government
buried five thousand bodies in a landfill in Titanyen, then the people living in the neighborhood near it started protesting. The government had to quickly find another location while trucks loaded with bodies stood still. The government designated a new site. People started dumping bodies there, on the road near there, on the road to go there, everywhere, without even burying them. We've been burying those bodies to protect the locals from diseases. We all wish things worked out differently. Jesus Christ, why couldn't we have more body bags at least?

Angry Man walked away again and disappeared into the darkness on the other side of the cathedral. His sobs wafted through the pews seconds later. The sobs were heavy and watery.

See that man? Souvenir said to Natasha, pointing into the blackness where sobs flowed like beat-boxing. That man buried fourteen family members with his own hands over two days after goudou-goudou. Wife, children, nieces, uncles, and his parents.

Natasha, an orphan, stared at the darkness and tried to imagine what having fourteen relatives to love and live near could be like, and how horrible having to bury them all at once could feel. She almost fainted.

The next morning, the brilliant heat of the sun stunned Natasha awake despite the fact that she slept under a pew with her forearm shielding her face. You think you miss not having a roof over your head when it rains? When you're trying to sleep in after a long night of dreaming of
hurriedly discarded dead bodies, not having a roof sucks almost as bad. Around Natasha, the guys were awake too. But they looked like they'd had the good night's sleep Natasha wished she'd had. Their energy was high, in midday form. Clean-shaven, showered, and pumped from performing push-ups and crunches, not smiling but faintly upbeat, they were gentlemen who tried not to look at the train wreck Natasha no doubt looked like. In the bathroom—yes, the bathroom had no roof, yet, oddly, the toilet still flushed—Natasha took stock in the mirror. She did indeed look like shit. Her hair went everywhere and nowhere and begged for the mercy of a drop of shampoo. The rest of her could use a proper, long, and languid wash too instead of the splashes of cold water and the touch of a microcube of soap. This is not how you want to look when you're going to see the man who could have been your father-in-law on the day of the memorial of his son's death, Natasha thought. At least her clothes were relatively clean, her breasts firm and high, and her face unblemished, chocolate skin looking brand-new. She checked in on Monsignor Dorélien. He was enjoying having the gravediggers around.

In many ways we are in the same business, he said.

A few of them listened to him intently as he talked about the importance of honoring the dead and how they shouldn't make much of the absence of the rituals of service he specialized in for the dead. My work was elaborate and a welcome succor in normal times. In these
times, these men will have to count on the purity of the love in their hearts and the talent they pour into their work to stand as the symbol of the rite of passage for those thousands of folks who have gone on to meet their maker without the comfort of a coffin and a tombstone. Before they left, they all closed their eyes, and Monsignor Dorélien blessed them and their families for their courage and faith. Natasha watched the men stream out of Monsignor Dorélien's small office with chins high. Today was the national day of mourning for the victims of goudou-goudou. The government had declared a weekend period of memorial. Millions were expected to converge on the National Palace and the Champ de Mars to sing and pray and cry for their collective and individual losses. A nation of stoics was about to have a very public mass catharsis. The gravediggers were eager for it. Most people were. Natasha was too. They, the living, wanted to touch and to be touched. Mourning was such a lonely business. Today, sorrow would be shared. Natasha planned to pay her respects to the dead by visiting an elderly couple she knew to be too old to make the trip from their hilltop home to the Champ de Mars.

Are you sure about this? Jean-Richard asked for the fifth time.

They were standing on the steps of the National Cathedral. His confreres stood a few meters away. They were all clean and eager to join the ceremonies, which, Haiti being Haiti, would have a carnivalesque flair. Natasha
would be going in the opposite direction, in a car provided by her new friends. You're not even going to wait for your security guards to come take you? Jean-Richard asked. Is that wise?

This is not an affair of state, Natasha said. Everyone has the right to mourn their dead this day their own way. Besides, with everyone downtown today, going the opposite direction will be the safest direction to go in the entire city.

All right, Madame Robert, he said.

Natasha, she said.

Madame Natasha, he said with a smile.

They hugged farewell. The man was all muscle, Natasha thought, her chin on his shoulder. Thanks for everything, she said. Squinting into the morning sun, she waved good-bye to the rest of the fellas.
Au revoir
, they said,
et merci
! She watched them join the crowd one by one, brown heads and arms bobbing, red, yellow, black, green shirts and dresses, hats and caps and fans a-waving. The gravediggers could be anyone now, lost among the living. They couldn't be happier. She was happy for them.

The car was old and looked unsafe. It may have been yellow once. Today the car was a sickly beige-and-white with echoes of a mustard past. There were no windows but there were a windshield and leather seats. Very hot leather seats. Took a while for the car to start, a dozen tries of the ignition, enough to make Natasha's wrist sore. The engine wheezed and seemed to ask why Natasha wanted it
to make the effort of waking up. Like a metallic wounded horse, the car seemed to want to sit there, ready to be put to sleep or somehow be nursed to health.

Come on, car, Natasha said. I don't have all day.

The crowds walking by the car toward the Champ de Mars grew thin. Songs and prayers began to waft along the morning breeze from down the street. The festivities were off and running. The dead were no doubt smiling. Some of them in heaven were probably pointing fingers at Natasha and having a laugh. Some people looked into the car and at Natasha and then asked her if she needed help, a push, something. No, no, she said, waving them off.

After a while people looked at her like she was crazy to believe the car would start at any point that day or crazy to want to drive the vomit-colored pile of junk in the first place. Miracle of miracles, the car started. Easing into the street, Natasha saw fewer and fewer people. Fort National had been severely hit by the earthquake. Buildings looked like bombed-out skeletons. Natasha could see dead bodies inside them. Corpses propped up to sitting position. By who? For what? In front of some other buildings, she saw corpses in the usual positions, flat on their backs and wrapped up, mummified. She sped up. In front of the Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien, off the Champ de Mars, she saw mothers and grandmothers and fathers and sons and daughters embrace. Everyone, it seemed, had an arm wrapped over another's shoulders, eyes shut tight in prayer. After a while, she turned onto Avenue Ducoste.
Where the Air France store once stood as a symbol of the great world off the island, Natasha saw only two stories of gray rubble. She also saw a woman on her knees praying to the sky with two plane tickets in her hands. Natasha crossed herself. There but for the grace of God go I, she said. She dared not imagine how those tickets, Air France, and the earthquake had hurt that woman. She dared not. Before long, Natasha had to make a left turn on Chemin des Dalles, and then a right turn on Avenue John Brown. Big like its namesake, Avenue John Brown was orderly this day. Some foot traffic headed toward the Champ de Mars. Most people sat pensively on wooden chairs at storefronts. Not for the first time, Natasha noticed the Haitian flags. They were everywhere and bigger and, for some reason, redder, whiter, and bluer than she ever remembered. Avenue John Brown was also called Lalue, and it was where Natasha and Bobo had seen the fearsome crowd and tried to rescue the small boy from getting trampled. What happened to you, young man? Natasha thought. Where are you now? I hope you're safe.