Ghosts by Daylight

by Janine di Giovanni

  ‘Alassane!’ I screamed. But he was gone.

  We had no landline phone in the bedroom, and I estimated I had ten minutes’ battery left on my cell phone. The electricity was going in and out. I phoned Fifi, the wife of another journalist who worked with Bruno. Fifi was languid and smart, Ethiopian by birth but educated at British boarding schools. She worked for UNICEF and was branchée, plugged in.

  ‘What the FUCK is going on?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ she said. She sounded calm. She had grown up as the daughter of a UN diplomat and had lived through the last round of violence in the Côte d’Ivoire. ‘It can’t be another coup. Let me make some calls.’

  I sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, fully dressed, and then packed a small bag: passport, computer with my recently finished book on it, notebook, press cards.

  Fifi phoned back thirty minutes later. ‘No one knows. Just lock yourself in, and don’t go outside. Wait until the boys get back.’

  At 4 a.m., I heard the screech of tyres. A car was pulling into our drive. I heard someone running up the stairs. A soldier? God, I hope not, I thought. Then a pounding on the door, and then Alassane, I think, also coming upstairs, then someone opening the door.

  It was Bruno. ‘Get your passport, get your things, and let’s go.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Come on, baby. No time. Just get in the car.’

  He didn’t know either, I realized. Nobody did. I got in the back of the car. Eric, Fifi’s husband, was driving. It was still dark, that time of night known as the hour of the wolf; the time, a doctor once told me, when most people died.

  We took a shortcut through town and the hair stood on my neck. That intuition. That bad feeling.

  ‘Don’t go this way,’ I said suddenly.

  No one listened to me.

  I said it again: ‘I don’t like this road.’

  I heard Eric and Bruno speaking rapid French. I could not understand them. Next to me was Sylvain, a young producer, crouched low in his seat.

  A third time: ‘I don’t like this road . . .’

  ‘Tell your girlfriend to shut up,’ Eric said, annoyed. At that second, from the corner of my eye, I saw several young soldiers crossing the road in the filmy darkness, guns in their hands. They crept steadily across the road, as slowly as a caterpillar weaving across a pavement. They saw us and turned, guns forwards.

  I slid under the seat, just as I heard the windshield crack from a bullet. Then another. Bruno had his camera in his lap and was filming. The glass shattered everywhere, and I heard him scream. A shard hit my arm.

  ‘Are you hit? ARE YOU HIT?’

  More bullets. Eric reversed fast, the wheels grinding into mud, and went backwards at high speed. I remember thinking: Thank God a French guy is driving. Sylvain and I crouched on the ground.

  ‘I’m OK,’ Bruno shouted. His hand was bleeding. There was a cut on his face.

  We got to the office of France Television in the centre of town, but no one knew what had happened. At 6 a.m., the phone rang. It was the foreign desk of CNN in London.

  ‘What’s going on down there?’ someone shouted down the crackling line. ‘We are hearing news of a coup, we are hearing news of another war . . .’

  I got on the phone and did a live report about not knowing what was going on, but describing the scenes in the street, the fear, the disorientation, the feeling in the air shortly before a country blows sky high.

  The sun came up, full and hot. That was when we realised that the country was in a State of Emergency.

  While Abidjan was falling to pieces, I was trying to get pregnant. The house near Nuit de Saigon was the only place we had lived together as a couple, and the only place that had any pretence of normalcy, any sense of a couple planning a future. We had a copy of a rental agreement with both our names on it. The bathroom was stocked with those sticks that tell you if you are pregnant or not and reserves of folic acid. By my bed was a copy of What to Expect When You Are Expecting. Grown-ups.

  But the coup and the violence stopped all that. The news said the same thing every day: updates of more territory the rebels had taken in the north, who had been killed the night before, which minister had replaced which. People burned out of their houses, people killed. This was exactly the kind of world that Bruno had told me, for years and years, that we could not bring a child into.

  It was a morning like that when I found the gun. It lay on the clean white tiles like the reptiles I sometimes found in the house. But, unlike lizards, this was more repellent: huge, threatening. I pulled it out and lay it on my lap.

  I have always been afraid of guns; I have seen so much of what they can do. But they fascinate me too on some level: the power they have, the quickness of a bullet, the amount of time it takes to leave the barrel and reach someone’s brain. Every country I ever worked in had some rebel army that carried Kalashnikovs, and I hate the sound of an AK-47. It’s only the bad guys, the non-conventional armies, that use them. If you hear one, you are already too close.

  I never carried a gun and had only picked one up once before, in Central Bosnia as the city of Jajce was falling, and a soldier grabbed it abruptly out of my hand, telling me not to treat dangerous things like toys. I had been marched into the woods with a gun at my back in Kosovo, and once, in a cattle market in Africa littered with dead and wounded bodies, a soldier had pointed an AK-47 at my heart, the safety catch off.

  And yet, and I did not know why, I was magnetically drawn to Bruno’s gun. It was silver, like a little boy’s imitation of a sheriff’s gun. I weighed it in my lap. I ran my finger up and down the trigger, wondering what would happen if I pulled it. I even put it to my head to imagine what it felt like when people blew their brains out, as a friend of mine, another war reporter, had done shortly after he had said, ‘I’ve seen too much.’

  I put the gun back. I wondered if it was loaded, and assumed it was. Then I took a shower and dressed, pulling a lightweight cotton dress, made by Mr Baa who had a shop around the corner, over my head.

  Mr Baa. I had given him one cotton dress and a width of different coloured fabrics, and he had made me five African dresses. This one was a copy of a pink-and-black dress bought long ago in a boutique in Soho, and Mr Baa had taken pride in covering the buttons with fabric and finishing the hem with hand stitching.

  But I did not go to Mr Baa any more, not since the day we drove to Bruno’s office and I saw, in the empty field near Mr Baa’s shop, the naked corpse of a man with his hands bound by wire behind his back. A few days later, Mr Baa took his son and his bolts of fabric and fled, north, I supposed. The country was now divided: north and south; Christian and Muslim.

  Downstairs, the house was quiet. Bruno was on the patio, reading a two-day-old Liberation newspaper imported from France. I told him about the gun. He looked up with an unreadable expression. Then he looked down and kept reading the paper.

  Matthew, the cook, a refugee from Burkina Faso – the Burkinabe were being burned out of their homes and driven north – brought me coffee, tasting of acid, bitter, thin and weak, like all the coffee in the Ivory Coast. (‘But how can a country that exports the most cacao in the world have bad coffee?’ I would ask over and over, and no one would ever be able to answer.)

  Matthew was small with a deeply scarred face from some tribal ritual. He was in his thirties, but looked ancient. He wore the same thing every day: baggy grey trousers, a freshly washed print shirt, and sandals, which he left by the back door when he came in. He padded through the house on wide, calloused feet that seemed to have no arch at all.

  I liked Matthew because he seemed not to take life, which included his job, seriously. He dropped dishes and laughed. He burned the food and laughed. He dropped trays of coffee; broke the brand-new washing machine; shrank Bruno’s trousers; dyed my white underwear navy blue and probably was responsible for the level of whisky in the bottle rapidly diminishing – though he blamed Alassane and Alassane blamed him.


  The colonial French have never been good with domestic help, particularly in Africa, and Bruno often shouted at Matthew. I hated when he did, but Matthew did not seem to care. He laughed when Bruno raised his voice, laughed when Bruno left for work shrugging his shoulders in disbelief, and laughed when I asked him about his many children.

  One day, Matthew came to work late and said that his brother had died. He had been electrocuted from a wire that the families living in the shanty ran between shacks. We both stared at him.

  ‘Go home, Matthew,’ Bruno said quietly. ‘You don’t have to work today.’

  ‘You should be with your family,’ I said.

  But Matthew did not want to go home. In Africa, he said, people died every day and it was as much a part of life as waking up in the morning. It just happened.

  The day of his brother’s death, Matthew washed up the breakfast dishes, and watered the plants, and did the laundry, padding up and down the cool stone stairs. He walked, as he did every day, to the market run by the little girl who had a withered leg from polio, who set up her shop on an old blanket in front of the video store, and came back with root vegetables to make a soup for lunch. I went back to my studio on the side of the garden to write. And I forgot, for the moment, about the gun.

  Later on in the evening, we were eating more root soup covered with Gruyère cheese in deep bowls, and watching a video. We were lying on Mr Baa’s huge pillows, which he had made for the enormous living room. It was always hot downstairs, but upstairs Bruno turned on the air conditioning until just before we went to sleep, to kill the mosquitoes. We were watching Annie Hall, and the shots of the Upper West Side seemed so foreign, like another planet, from the tropical heat, the languid trees of the Côte d’Ivoire.

  I asked again about the gun. ‘Where did it come from?’

  Bruno looked away. So much of him, I realized, I did not know, and would probably never know.

  ‘But I don’t understand . . . Why do you have it?’

  ‘Forget about it.’ He picked up the remote for the video and paused the film.

  ‘Who did you buy it from?’

  ‘A man in the market.’ He turned to me. Anger darkened his face. ‘It’s my business. Not yours. You don’t own me.’ He turned the film back on.

  The next day, he left for work. He turned to tell me what he’d told me every day since the coup d’état started in September: lock the door, don’t let anyone in, and don’t wander around the streets. Remember the curfew and have a nice day. Try to find a flight to go home.

  He added that last part because day by day, things were rapidly descending into chaos in Abidjan, government forces against rebel forces. How many wars had I reported that always came down to that? Government troops against a doctored up, rag-tail army, usually composed of kids.

  But every day the fighting got heavier in the Côte d’Ivoire and the air began to smell like the air in Central Bosnia during the terrible days of ethnic cleansing. Gangs were burning people out of their homes, and raping women. We could smell the smoke from Cocody, and one morning we drove out to see a freshly burned-out house, and a family of refugees from Burkino weeping by the side of the smoldering ruins, their dishes broken, and a cooking pot at the father’s feet.

  What do you take with you when you run away? What do you take when you are driven from your house at gunpoint? How many times had I asked this question?

  They always took what they could, what they could load on their shoulders, then they locked the door and ran away.

  Bruno wanted me to go home. He did not like the risks I took when I worked, so he did not want me to work, though The Times and CNN phoned me daily, when they could get through, for updates. And, more, there was something he would not tell me, something he would never tell me, but I found out: he was in danger.

  He did not feel comfortable working when I was alone at home. He worried about me. It was one thing to take responsibility for your own life, another to worry for someone else. He told me he could not concentrate, that my safety was a distraction for him. The curfews were earlier, the soldiers waiting at roadblocks more twitchy.

  One night when I came back fifteen minutes after curfew from doing yoga with a friend in a nearby house, he was waiting outside, pacing. ‘Where were you?’ he shouted. He saw my friend inside, and shouted to her: ‘This is not a game! They will shoot you for being out past curfew!’

  My friend, who came from South America and was calm and clear, apologized. ‘We didn’t realize it was this late.’

  ‘You didn’t realize? Are you crazy? Do you know what’s going on out there? It’s not a joke!’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. But for the first time, I sensed I was not really fine. I worked in my studio. I swam. I could not leave the house, but I wandered in the garden, picking the mangos and coconuts. I counted my books on the shelf, and tried my cell phone, which still did not work. I went to the kitchen to help Matthew make the lunch soup: carrots, turnips and something dark and pungent and bitter which I had never seen before. I held up the ugly vegetable and shook it. ‘What is it?’ But Matthew did not know its name. I suddenly felt lonely, isolated, strange.

  One afternoon, in the north, we saw a truckload of men about to be taken away by government forces. The commander had gone, strangely enough, to Sandhurst and spoke some English. We sat with him in a garden, and he agreed to let me interview the prisoners.

  I jumped in the back of the truck and one of them said, ‘Miss, please, take our names, our villages. They are going to kill us.’

  So while the government forces soldier stood outside the truck, thinking I was interviewing them, I wrote, blinking back tears, all their names and villages, and their ages.

  All that night, I tried phoning NGOs, trying to report the truck, the men and the incident. I finally reached someone on the overnight desk at the Red Cross. ‘We’ll look into it.’

  Bruno said to me, with a touch of resigned cynicism: ‘They’re probably in a mass grave already. You know that, don’t you?’

  But at night I kept dreaming of them, the way they grabbed my arm to write down their names, to tell their wives, their sisters, their mothers that they were on their way to death.

  A few weeks later, Bruno came home at night in a dark mood. ‘I want you to leave.’

  ‘Because of the gun?’

  ‘No, because of the war.’

  But it was because of the gun, or rather, what the gun represented. The real truth of the gun was this: if someone had come through the iron door that separated our bedroom from the other rooms in the house, Bruno would have used it. Sometimes I think because we were so close to the equator, so close to nature, so close to the smell of the earth, everything came faster – life, birth, illness, and then of course the inevitability of death. The terrifying thing was the neither one of us feared death enough.

  We moved out of the house because it was no longer safe, to a hotel. I left everything but some dresses and my books. From the hotel, in downtown Abidjan, I had seen a crowd beat a Spanish tourist nearly to death simply because he was walking down the wrong street at the wrong time and they thought he was French. At this point, the French, the former colonials, were hated. I was watching from a window, drinking a can of Coke, and saw the crowd descend on the man.

  ‘There’s a man being beaten to death down there,’ I said to the three other reporters in the room with me who were frantically pacing, trying to get a phone line through to France. One French reporter came with me at the window and watched, but he said nothing. ‘Should we do something?’ I said.

  ‘Do what?’ he said. ‘Call the police? The police are useless these days.’

  So we watched, helpless. The crowd got hold of the man’s legs and his arms and they pulled and pulled and beat him with sticks until some police managed to tear-gas the crowd and get to him.

  I thought of the gun at my heart, the first day of the coup, when I tried to drag a wounded rebel into my taxi to take him to the hospital. The
government soldier, young, probably scared, sweating, raised his gun to my chest.

  A few weeks later, Bruno phoned a friend at the American Embassy as the evacuations of families and dependents, of NGOs and schoolchildren, missionaries and Peace Corps workers were going on. Planeloads of les colons, the colonials, headed back to countries they barely knew any more, leaving behind their big houses, their servants, their mango trees.

  He put me on a flight to Paris. ‘It’s better this way,’ he said.

  ‘But I don’t want to go.’

  It was late at night and he was driving to the north, to Bouake, to stay with the rebels, with a car full of other French journalists. I thought I might be pregnant, and without me knowing he had called the Embassy and asked a friend to bump me up to the next flight out.

  ‘You’ve got to go, baby,’ he said. ‘I can’t work with you around.’

  In the headlights of the waiting car, with someone shouting out for him to hurry up, he kissed me goodbye. A Paris Match photographer snapped the picture of that moment, me tearful, him with his hands on my shoulders, leaning in to kiss me, determined, and there we are, our last night together in Abidjan. I was wearing Mr Baa’s polka-dot dress and sneakers.

  ‘Please be careful,’ I said.

  He smiled. Then he got in the car and drove away. The next day an armed escort from the American Embassy came to take me down the dangerous airport road – the first time in my career I ever had the luxury of any kind of protection – and I took the flight to Paris, tears of nerves and sorrow running down my face. The plane climbed higher in the clouds, and I watched the watery city of Abidjan below me fading from sight. I thought I saw the beaches of Grand-Bassam, where we had spent weekends walking on the long beaches; the shack where we ate barbecued chicken and drank beer before the war started; the long rows of roads fringed by bush.