Ghosts by Daylight

by Janine di Giovanni

I held the receiver between my hands, trying to hear him amid the noise of the television centre. Someone sat at a desk in front of me listening to his walkman. Another reporter was waiting impatiently to use the phone. A producer from ABC was motioning me to move out of the way. I tried hard to concentrate.

  ‘But if I leave and Sarajevo falls when I’m gone . . . I won’t be able to get back.’

  ‘It won’t fall,’ Bruno said persuasively. ‘Come to Stuttgart.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘No, don’t try,’ he said ‘just do it.’ The finality of his tone was comforting – he belived this was the right thing to do.

  I decided then that I would go.

  ‘It’s your choice,’ Ariane said later with a slight disapproving air. ‘But if I were you, I wouldn’t do it. It’s too much of a risk.’

  ‘But I have to,’ I told her. ‘I don’t know why, but I do.’

  She shrugged again, and turned back to her book and her cigarette.

  I disappeared a few days later, and told no one but Ariane, who along with Didier, another French reporter who shared our ‘office’, was in crisis mode – storing water, petrol and fuel for the generator in case the city fell. She drove me to the airport in her armoured car. I took a UN flight to Ancona, Italy, a train journey to Rome, a flight to Munich, a connection to Stuttgart. It took eighteen hours and cost around a thousand dollars. But I did not care about the expense. I was earning money and putting it in a bank account in London. I had nowhere to spend it. I did not have a normal life or normal bills to pay. There were no restaurants to go to or clothes to buy in Sarajevo.

  I got off the plane in Stuttgart, carrying my flak jacket, my polka-dotted Croatian housedress and my dirty Keds sneakers. Bruno was waiting nervously at the gate. When he saw me, his eyes looked wet. He picked me up and spun me around.

  We stayed in a small wooden hotel and slept squished together in a twin bed. I took a shower that lasted an hour. We went to an outdoor swimming pool and I dived off the highest board. He hid in the crowd and watched me. After, we walked in the forest and lay down on the dirt in between the ferns.

  I went back to Sarajevo and he went to Kurdistan to live with the Pershmerga, but he hiked for days to deliver a love letter by fax to me. There was a drawing of a mosque on it – he wanted to meet in Istanbul. I put the fax in a box. The affair seemed impossibly doomed, but I had fallen in love with this strange, spontaneous man.

  Then, purely by chance, his girlfriend found out. She went – quite understandably – nuclear. Bruno and I met in Paris one weekend and tearfully ended it with cups of hot chocolate on the Boulevard Montparnasse. It was autumn, and I wore a grey jacket and a long scarf. He picked at the fringe at the end of it and explained it was for the best. Then he took off on his motorcycle, to see his brother in Brittany. ‘I’m sad,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sad too,’ I answered.

  When I told Ariane, she snorted. ‘Coward. He could have left her for you, but French men never do.’ As for the hot chocolate, she added in an annoyed tone, I might as well have rubbed it on my thighs. ‘That’s where it’s going to go anyway.’ She took me to a party that night in the countryside outside Paris and told me to forget him.

  I thought about him for a very long time, and then I forgot him. Once, a few years later, I found his number and I rang him but he said, ‘I can’t talk to you. Not now, not ever. I don’t want to remember.’ And I thought, as the Arabs say, makhtoub, it is written.

  So we said goodbye.

  After that, both of us continued to roam, lost in the world.

  For many years, we did not talk, did not speak, did not email or text – it was long before those days of easy, constant communication, even before the days of cell phones – and did not write letters. Bruno was an honourable man and he had promised his girlfriend he would never contact me again. I have a vague memory that at one point I rang him again, years after the hot chocolate, and he answered the phone, heard my voice, and put it down. But that also might have been a dream.

  The fax that he sent me from Kurdistan had the words ‘But one thing is certain – they will meet again!’ and a drawing of a mosque with a minaret tower. It was now faded, and went into the bottom of an old shoebox. Other people came and went, and then it was five years after we had fallen in love in Sarajevo. The war was over, reconstruction had begun, corrupt politicians had taken over the government, and vast amounts of Western money poured into Bosnia. Other wars had exploded elsewhere in the world. I went to Africa, to Asia, to the Middle East, and back again and again to the Balkans.

  I put my Sarajevo war notebooks on a shelf in my cupboard, and I saw them every morning when I dressed. I wanted to forget about Bosnia, to say goodbye to that story, that section of my life, but it was always there, a wound that would not heal, no matter how hard I tried to repair it. And one day, when I was preparing to go on an assignment in Algeria at a particularly dangerous time, I found a name in one of my notebooks: BRUNO.

  Bruno loved Algeria. He had done his best work there, he told me. And so I rang him, and a secretary answered the phone and gave me a cell number. It was the first time I had rung a cell phone. He answered, and I could hear wind behind him. He was on a ski slope, in the Alps.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, and his voice sounded infinitely sad. ‘It’s you. I would recognize that voice anywhere.’ He was filming while skiing backwards and had a 28-pound camera on his shoulder. And yes, he had contacts in Algeria. He had a friend who would ‘guard you with his life’. He suggested I come to Paris as a layover, and we could have dinner and talk about working in Algiers.

  ‘Did you marry? Do you have children?’

  No, he said, he had never married. A few weeks before, he had left his girlfriend, the same one, after nine years. He was broken-hearted, but he felt he had made the right decision. He wanted to know if this was why I had called him.

  I did not know about his girlfriend, I told him. I assumed he was married with five children. I said I was sorry. He said he would meet me at the airport in a few weeks’ time.

  It was June, and I saw him as soon as I came out of the gate into the arrivals hall of Roissy Airport. He looked older, and smaller. Thinner. Deep lines creased his forehead. He took my backpack and told me I looked beautiful. I had cut my hair short, like a boy, and dyed it black. The back of my neck was exposed, and I remember that he touched it when he kissed me.

  ‘Do you mind a moto?’ he asked. I thought he meant a scooter, instead it was an enormous BMW motorcycle. I had never been on one before, and he told me to go to the bathroom and change out of my dress. On the motorbike, he reached behind, leaving one hand on the handlebars and put the other leather-gloved hand on my thigh as he drove. He wove in and out of traffic, in and out of lines of cars stalled for miles.

  He took me to La Coupole, the enormous 1920s art deco brasserie on Boulevard Montparnasse, with tables pushed close together and waiters who make a show of bringing your champagne, and he asked for a booth and ordered for us both. Downstairs in the bathroom, I changed back into my black-and-white polka-dot sundress, and tried to wash my face. When I came back, he was smoking and he told me again I was beautiful. ‘Like a Madonna.’

  I sat close to him, and we ate steak tartare and frites. He ordered Sancerre. I can’t remember what we talked about but it must have been about the years that passed between us.

  I had a small bag with me and I remembered when I was packing in London, wondering where I was going to stay. I had not booked a hotel, but I had not assumed I would stay with him. I said, ‘Can I stay on your couch?’ and he laughed.

  He handed me a helmet and in the pale heat of a summer night, he drove to the Pont des Arts and led me by the hand to the edge and kissed me. He said, ‘It seems we have not lost our desire for each other.’ We drove to his small apartment on the Boulevard Beaumarchais and I climbed seven flights up the stairs after him, he with my bag and his helmet. I did not sleep on the sofa.

  We had bre
akfast in the Café Bastille. I was anxious about my trip, anxious about the danger that lay ahead, the fact that I knew no one at all in the country, and that a reporter in Algeria had been killed the week before. He said, ‘What are we going to do about our relationship?’ and, distracted, I replied: ‘What relationship?’

  He laughed. It became a joke between us for many years. The detachment. The inability to commit. The damage. What relationship?

  He drove me to the airport and bought me a glass of champagne in the lounge. ‘To work,’ he said and clinked my glass. ‘And to us.’

  On the way to Algiers there was a storm. The plane shook and wove like a toy and I was frightened. At the gate, there were half a dozen government bodyguards waiting for me, sent by the Ministry of Information allegedly for my protection, but they were really there to spy on me. They made me feel agitated and claustrophobic. But my room in the old Hotel St George was faded and lovely, and I imagined the days when General Eisenhower used the hotel as his headquarters during the desert campaign of the Second World War. My room was on the ground floor and opened on to a scented rose garden, and I ate my dinner in an enormous dining room, alone, huddled over my notebooks.

  I had come to Algeria to report on the dirty war, the killing between Islamists and the government, but it was a different conflict from Sarajevo, or the other places in Africa where I had been working for the past four years. There were no other reporters or aid workers, no camaraderie, no one with whom I could to share ideas or secrets or glasses of whisky late at night. There were no front lines, just the shadowy intuition of constant danger. I stood with the doors open looking out to the garden and felt very alone. I was not sure how to write, or what to write. I had Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth with me, but when I tried to read at night, I heard voices in the garden and could not sleep for fear I would wake up with a knife at my throat. When you died like that, slit from ear to ear, they called it the Algerian Smile.

  One afternoon, through the light in the dining room door, I saw the outline of a figure: it was Bruno. He had flown to Algeria to work, and to be with me. He put his arms around me and held me against him. ‘I had to come anyway,’ he said. ‘So why not now? I got a visa.’

  He took me to a restaurant called El Djenina, like my name. The owner knew him and hugged him hard, and Bruno, flirting, told me she was a remarkable woman. I felt jealous of this stranger, this Algerian woman in her sixties with white hair to whom he was paying so much attention. We went to my room, and I was startled to see he had brought his bag – he was planning on staying with me.

  I was nervous so I put on my peach-coloured antique nightgown – bought on the Portobello Road by a friend for my birthday – in the bathroom and sat on the bed. He lay down next to me and rolled one lace sleeve down over my shoulder, then the other.

  We did not, could not, sleep. We wandered through the rose garden. He wrote out all the words to the Jacques Brel song, ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’, and we sat by the quiet pool at dawn as the birds began to call. The night-watchman passed us and asked Bruno for a cigarette. The scent of roses was overpowering. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we smoked and said nothing.

  Sometime later we would arrive in Marseilles at dawn after travelling all night from Paris on the train. As we walked into the first bar we saw that was open for coffee, a man was sitting at the piano, still drunk from the night before. Several people hung on the bar, drinking cloudy glasses of Pernod and water, weary from their long night. We ordered Mauresque, the southern drink of almond syrup and Pernod, and as we sat down at a table, the drunk at the piano picked out with one finger Jacques Brel’s ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’.

  From that night in June when he stood in the doorway outlined in a pale light, many years and a dozen wars between us passed. There were endless phone calls, three miscarriages, much of what the French call malentendu, break-ups, a breakdown, and a lot of alcohol. There was depression, death, suicide of friends, addiction, and more times than I like to think when both of us nearly died.

  There were several fallen cities, countless rebel armies and many times when Bruno said, ‘I want to be alone,’ and then tracked me down to Mogadishu or Grozny and said, ‘I can’t lose you.’ There were times when I wanted to hide in a far corner of the earth to be away from him, and somehow he would always find me.

  There were frenzied meetings in Dakar and Tora Bora, and an entire night in Jalalabad when we split up and I cried so hard that the photographer staying next door put his hand on my shoulder the next morning as I drank my coffee, bleary-eyed, before getting a car to Peshawar, and asked, ‘Are you all right?’ Bruno and I did not speak after that time for a while. I had asked him, pointedly, to please leave me alone. Then I went to Africa to forget.

  One night, in Somalia, after the tropical heat had died down, I climbed to the roof of the armed compound where I was staying to assemble my satellite phone. As I turned it on, amid the gunfire, the telephone rang. It was strange to hear the ring of a satellite telephone, to actually get an incoming phone call in the middle of Mogadishu. Whoever it was had awfully good timing.

  It was Bruno, in Kigali Airport. He was in Rwanda on an assignment. On the plane, looking down on the forests, he said he realized what he wanted. ‘Let’s have a baby,’ he said. ‘Let’s get married.’ I flew to Zimbabwe the week after that, and sometime later, after a few more wars, a few more skirmishes, and a few close calls, we did.

  3

  The Gun

  The new, married, grown-up life in Paris was meant to be smaller, so we had both shed much of our past. Even so, Bruno’s possessions, which were few, defined him. He was proud that he owned almost nothing but a motorcycle, the same one he had picked me up from the airport on and driven, at breakneck speed, to La Coupole. The few things he had brought back with him from his voyages around the world were like things looted from a pirate ship: as mystical and as unique as he was.

  I did not know, and would not know for some time, what else he had brought back with him from Africa, but I knew about one thing he had left behind. It was his gun. He did not take it when he was packing up his life, closing up his life there, and for all I know it is still there, back in the huge, empty West African house that because of the conflict that would ravage that country no one would ever rent, as lovely as it was with its vast, cool garden of cocoa and mango trees, the swimming pool and the studio Bruno had painted apple green for me to write in.

  He had left his gun behind, a magnum that I found under the bed in our villa in Abidjan, in the section of town named Cocody, on a street that had a number rather than a name, the second left near the Nuit de Saigon restaurant. I found it on a humid, wet morning.

  Bruno had been posted to the Côte d’Ivoire, an African base from which he could report the entire continent. It was one day after the war had started, sometime in 2001. I was still sleepy, still in bed, but I leaned my head over the edge to try to find the flat red sandals I had kicked off the night before. There was only one, along with a pair of Bruno’s dirty socks, but something else was gleaming on the polished white tile floor. And there it was: an enormous silver gun like something from A Fistful of Dollars, a movie I had watched over and over on Bosnian television many years before.

  When I think of Africa, I see myself lying in bed in our room upstairs, behind the thick iron door, on top of pale green linen sheets. I had bought those sheets with Bruno on the rue St Sulpice in Paris, at a shop called Maison de Famille; it was the first item we had ever bought together, after nearly a decade. I also see myself rising slowly in the heat – the sound of the birds squabbling noisily outside, the way they can only in Africa, a saraband of birds – and downstairs, I hear Bruno.

  He’s moving slowly with his morning ritual: the news in French; the BBC World Service tuned to Africa; the tea in an iron pot on a yellow-and-green plastic tray brought by Matthew, a refugee from Burkina Faso, and a peeled mango for me.

  The country where we live is in a State of Emergency. It
happened very quickly, the change from being a place of parties and barbecues and champagne receptions with tiny little finger sandwiches in the vast garden of the French Embassy to a place that smelled of death.

  On the last night of normal life, Bruno and I went out to an Italian restaurant and ate veal and drank martinis to celebrate my finishing my book – I had gotten the internet to work that day, and I’d sent it off to my publisher.

  The next day, Bruno left to go on an overnight trip, leaving me alone in the house with Alassane, the guard. I felt agitated, but he reassured me.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said. The country was so quiet, and news was so slow that he was going to make a film about French nuns who lived in the bush and made Camembert.

  At night, I grew more wary, my childhood fears of the dark reflecting all the shadows in the room. I locked all the doors and turned out the lights and worked alone in the bedroom until very late. I was reading, I remember, a United Nations report on the genocide at Srebrenica. It disturbed me, and it was 3 a.m. when I finished. That was when I heard the shooting. I put down the report, turned out my light – I had learned that much from living in war zones before – and crawled to the window. In the sky were flares, shooting into the darkness like Fourth of July firecrackers. I could hear machine-gun fire somewhere further down the road, and the ominous sound of a Kalashnikov.

  Not again, I thought. We came here to live in peace.

  I was tired, but I knew I should not sleep. I crept back to bed and turned on my radio to the BBC World Service. There was nothing about Côte d’Ivoire. I picked up my cell phone which had very little battery and tried to call Bruno. A recorded message came on.

  Then Alassane came running up the stairs, panting. ‘Madame, Madame, it’s war! It’s a war!’ His eyes were wild. He had the key to the iron door that separated our bedroom from the rest of the house. He pushed me inside.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. I ran down to the kitchen and grabbed a gallon of water, some bananas and my phone charger. From my study in the garden, I took my passport and my computer. I ran across the garden, my feet growing wet from the evening moisture, and back into my house. Up the stairs. Then Alassane shut the door and locked it. I could hear him running down the stairs. I was locked in, from the outside.