Sitting in a circle under the thatched roof at the field hospital, the doctors and other volunteers drink coffee from metal mugs. I listen to their earthquake stories as I distribute meat patties and mille feuilles for breakfast, creatures snaking their way between the soft brown strands of my hair, slithering worms of sweat wriggling down into my collar. As an interpreter, I have to take all my emotions and get rid of them. I imagine placing them on a wooden kayak and pushing them out into Lake Azuei, waving goodbye. This is how I deal with the survivors’ pain. I go into denial. Into repression. Into it-didn’t-really-happen.
A few weeks ago, there was, throughout the city, a terrible noise of earth shaking and houses cracking, and the cries of men and the cries of women, a great dust cloud taking Port-au-Prince in its fist.
Nurse Maggie leans forward, rakes back gray braids, and stifles a yawn. “So, here’s a joke,” she says. “Jesus and Satan are having an argument, right? Satan says, ‘I have more followers in Haiti than you do. All the people at the church? Mine. They’re just pretending to be real Christians.’ Jesus nods, ‘So that’s what you think, huh? Let’s find out.’ And Jesus goes ahead and shakes the earth a little bit, and everyone in Haiti cries out, Jezi! ‘You see,’ Jesus says, ‘It’s my name they’re calling. I win.’”
She chuckles. She has amused herself. I can hear the charms of her bracelet jingle as she drops in a lump of sugar.
Most people under the thatched roof laugh, others giggle. Those who are unsure whether joking about the tragedy is appropriate still manage to smile. There’s a girl in the group who spent three days under the rubble of a supermarket. She’s one of the gigglers. She never shared her story with the group. Those who’d hear her words—would they be able to bear such sorrow? Her eyes come back in Maggie’s direction but focus on the wall behind the nurse.
“Let me tell you how that whole rescue thing goes down,” a man says. “You show up at the destroyed site, right? There’s a group of men with pikwa and stuff. They tell you, ‘Give us 28,000 gourdes and we’ll get your loved one out.’ So you pay the money and they dig out a survivor. ‘That’s not my daughter,’ you say. ‘Sorry, no return policy,’ the men with the pikwa say. You pay up 28,000 gourdes again and they dig out someone else. And it goes on and on, until you’re broke.”
Some Israeli guy named Jonas is knitting, his eyes down, colorful yarns slowly lengthening as his needles moved rhythmically, back and forth, back and forth. He doesn’t look at us to tell about the director of a bank downtown. “The directors were all at a meeting, and this one guy couldn’t wait to go home. Let’s call it a day, he said. He was all fidgety. Got his suitcase and left. He was standing by his car when a wall fell atop of him. All the others, who were still inside, survived.”
Jonas’ voice sounds ethereal, not connected to any human being, just the sound of pure sadness. I reach out and catch a mosquito, but when I open my fingers it refuses to fly away.
Maggie nods. “Death was after him. Vas ou tu veux, meurs ou tu dois. My neighbor was at the Hotel Christopher. After the meeting, the others in her delegation decided to hang out with the UN officers. Nadine was in a hurry to leave. She and a pregnant woman had just stepped outside when the building collapsed.”
Cars in the street pass in a steady stream, and I wonder how many people in them know what I know, have lived through somebody dying. Most of them, I think, most of them had to know, and yet they keep driving their cars.
Jonas says, “My cousin was supposed to be at Hotel Montana that morning, working at the desk. She was on vacation, and it would have been her first day back. Her neighbors were having a noisy kleren night on Monday night and she spent la nuit blanche. She called sick in the morning. Everyone in her office died, including a woman who’d given her two-week notice. That woman’s husband had called her from Miami the night before, begging her to jump on the next plane. ‘Why do you need to go there tomorrow?’ he’d asked. ‘I need you here, by my side.’”
I listen intently, nodding, cocking my eyebrow, biting my lip, and opening my eyes wide.
Nurse Maggie is helping with breakfast cleanup, putting away dirty mugs and paper napkins. She takes a mouthful of air and with all the fullness of her breath sings for us all, a song about the odds shifting, low and soft, the words biting.
There are more stories, countless stories, but Adolfo, the doctor from Porto-Rico is back from a break and I’m the interpreter assigned to him.
“You look pale,” Adolfo says.
“I’ll be just fine,” I say. “I’m just happy to be here.”
Here. As in alive. Alive and well.
M.J. Fievre is the author of several mystery novels and children’s books in French. Her latest publications include Le Fantôme de Lisbeth and Les Fantasmes de Sophie. Her short stories and poems have appeared in P’an Ku and The Mom Egg; they are forthcoming in Writer’s Digest and 365 Days of Flash Fiction. She is a regular contributor to The Nervous Breakdown and The Examiner, and a contributing editor for Rebelle Haiti Magazine and Vis.A.Vis Magazine. She is currently a graduate student in the Creative Writing program at Florida International University.
Survivor Chronicles 
Heartbreaking, MJ.