Ghosts by Daylight

by Janine di Giovanni

  ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘He’s alive, see?’ I pointed to the screen.

  Then he said, ‘The baby is so big,’ and wiped his face. In fact, the baby was tiny. But I knew what he meant, and so did the professor, who said nothing, just swabbed the ultrasound wand clean of the gel and told me not to eat too much sugar and to be careful.

  ‘This is real,’ I said as we climbed into the taxi to drive back to Paris. ‘This is really happening.’

  It was so big.

  And so began our new life in Paris.

  Usually the expats in Paris gave birth at the American Hospital in Neuilly, or at chic private clinics in the 16th with french doors that opened on to gardens. One of my American friends had been born in the American Hospital herself, forty years earlier, and delivered all three of her boys there. She told me, laughing, of the menus presented to you when you were about to go into labour, with the choice of wines, and the croissants freshly baked on the premises.

  You had a private room. You could give birth screaming in English if you chose to, and people would understand you. Bruno and I went head to head: I wanted to give birth at the American Hospital because it felt safe, and I was feeling terribly unsafe. I missed my mother and my girlfriends, I missed the chemist in London who had known me for a decade, and mixed special cough syrup just for me, and the newsagent, and the grocery store on Elgin Crescent. I missed being someplace where people knew who I was.

  ‘There is no way that our baby will be born here,’ he said after checking out the surgical unit, which was minimal compared to the French state hospitals. ‘If something goes wrong, they are going to move you to a hospital you really don’t want to be in – like Hotel Dieu.’ Hotel Dieu was the Victor Hugo-esque hospital where the prisoners from local jails were brought in in chains, and where crowds of people waited in draughty rooms for hours to see a doctor.

  Combined with my blood-clotting disorder, which the doctors feared would cause me to haemorrhage during the birth, there was the metal stitch I had had inserted after Israel, to keep the baby firmly locked inside. There was also the problem of my age, which seemed young in New York, but ancient in France where women began their families in their twenties, and where, at thirty-five, you were considered old. And so it was decided, early on, that we would use the Zen doctor and his hospital.

  A few weeks after we arrived in Paris, shortly after the Polish painters rolled up their dust sheets and closed the cans of white paint, after we stored O.’s things in a barn outside of Paris, after we painted everything so it was white and clean, after we finally bought a piece of furniture from IKEA on which to change the baby (but I forgot to buy nappies), the SAMU – the French paramedics – arrived for the first time at rue du 29 Juillet.

  It started in the early evening. I stood in the bathroom, holding my toothbrush and began to cough. And cough. And cough, so that I could not stop and could not breathe. I leaned over the sink, and suddenly I heard something pop inside me, and felt a sharp bone sticking in my chest. Later I found out that one of my ribs had become distanced from the muscle from the strength of my cough, and the pain was excruciating.

  Bruno found me on the floor, my arms wrapped around my middle. He pulled me to my feet, but I could not straighten my body – the bone was sticking into my skin. ‘Lie down,’ he said, but I could not. I stood as best I could while he called 15 – the number for the SAMU, the paramedics, and then, hanging up the phone, rubbed my back.

  The SAMU arrived within minutes, a man from the Antilles and another thinner, greyer one, and they led me, hunched, into the elevator, which was thankfully now working. But the three of us could not fit in the tiny space – I was that large – so the Antillean man came with me, clearly terrified, and the other one took the stairs with Bruno.

  ‘Ça va, Madame, ça va,’ he said, trying to comfort me. ‘Respirez! soufflez!’ But breathing hurt too much.

  They strapped me in the ambulance bed, and Bruno shouted that he would take his moto.

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ I said, and he touched my face.

  ‘Five minutes and you are at the hospital.’

  On my back, I watched the lights of Paris above me as we drove down past Pyramides, then on to rue de Rivoli, past the Louvre, across the bridge, and on to one of the islands in the Seine.

  Inside Hotel Dieu were drunks, shouting crazies, a man holding an arm with a deep gash, dripping blood. They all stared at me, this distorted figure twisted in half, like one of Victor Hugo’s characters. For once, I was happy to be in France, happy that the doctors were so good, that the nurses here who X-rayed me tried to soothe me, and told me they knew how much it hurt.

  My doctor told me that I had torn a muscle that connected the ribs, and one of the ribs was out of place, dislocated, floating around somewhere in my body. She apologized: even if I were not pregnant, there was little they could do about broken ribs, but as I was pregnant, all she could do was wrap me to try to stabilize the bone.

  Tiny and birdlike, she worked quickly, binding my upper body in elastic bandage, wrapping me round and round like a mummy, and telling Bruno to buy a warming pad from the pharmacy. But she could not give me any painkillers because of the blood clotting and because she said they would go into my bloodstream and affect the baby.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and genuinely seemed to mean it. She pressed her hand against mine. It was tiny, like a doll’s hand. ‘Courage. Your baby is coming soon.’

  The SAMU had left, so we got a taxi home. It was nearly dawn. Since the time I had held my toothbrush while preparing to get into bed, an entire night had passed.

  The faint colour was coming back to Paris’ streets, even on this cold winter morning, and there were people moving quietly, going to work, the early shift. There was something oddly comforting about that, life going on. I kept my hand on the place where my rib should have been, and watched as we passed the Ile Saint-Louis, Châtelet, down rue de Rivoli and past the Café Welcome with its orange-and-red walls, and back to our apartment. I went to bed and stayed there.

  A week passed, and the coughing did not stop. I could not sleep and grew heavier and less agile. I had one pair of boots I could slip on and off, but that was about it. When I coughed, the rib shifted – I could feel it moving under my tight skin – and I would breathe sharply, the pain worse than anything I had ever felt.

  One day, it was so uncomfortable that I sat willing the baby to come out, so that my body would return to normal, wishing that I could take a painkiller or a sleeping pill, and fall into darkness, obscurity, where there was no pain, only sleep.

  ‘I know you want him to come,’ Bruno said, ‘but he’s not ready yet.’ He tried to lift my spirits with lemon tarts and lemon tea, the only thing I could stomach. He took me for walks around the Place du Marché Saint-Honoré and let me lean on his shoulder. He guided me by the elbow and remained constantly optimistic. The more difficult I became, the more patient he seemed to be. I was aware of how badly I was behaving, like a spoilt and miserable teenager. But it was the first time since I was a child that I depended on someone else, that I was out of control. I did not like it.

  One day, Bruno arrived home with news: I had to meet the sage-femme – the midwife – who would assist the birth. She was supposed to be magical, recommended by the Zen doctor, and she saw women at a famous hotel in Versailles where she guided them in the water, like bloated balloons, through various prenatal exercises. It was meant to be a surprise, Bruno’s treat for me; a trip out of the apartment where I was confined, a swimming pool, and the cameraderie of other pregnant women.

  We borrowed a car from a friend and set out, freezing because the heater did not work. The sage-femme introduced me to the other women, all of them slender with tiny bumps that protruded from their black nylon swimming costumes. The sage-femme asked me pointedly: ‘How much sugar are you eating each day?’

  ‘Sugar? I don’t eat sugar.’ I imagined someone eating spoonfuls of sugar from a sack, or Bruno eating
Nutella from a jar with a spoon.

  ‘Because in France, we don’t gain more than twenty pounds.’

  I told her about my enforced bed rest, how I had exercised my whole life and was forbidden to do so during my pregnancy. ‘To be honest,’ I told her, ‘I don’t care what I look like now, I just want a healthy baby. I don’t want to starve myself, or go on a diet during my pregnancy. I can do that after.’ After, I added, I stopped breastfeeding.

  ‘You plan on breastfeeding?’ I told her I was. She looked at me. ‘Because, in France, most women don’t. It ruins your breasts.’

  I came from a culture where it was practically criminal not to breastfeed but I was already having misgivings.

  ‘OK,’ she said, regarding me as some strange Anglo-Saxon species, ‘get in the pool.’

  I climbed into the freezing water with the other women, who seemed pleasant enough and who looked at me sympathetically. One of them spoke English. ‘I worked in New York,’ she said conspiratorially, as if to say: I know how shocking our culture is to you.

  The midwife stood at the edge of the pool like a drill sergeant. ‘OK, now race! See who can get to the other side first!’

  Even when I was not pregnant, I did not like the idea of racing. I thought one of the things about pregnancy was the escape from the competitive life I had lived before – racing against deadlines, trying to get the story before my counterparts on other papers.

  ‘I’m not racing,’ I said. ‘I’ll swim, but really, I don’t want to race.’

  She shrugged, and the other women paddled viciously. I did some slow laps, but as my skin was turning blue, I climbed out of the pool.

  The midwife turned to look at me. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Home,’ I told her, wrapping a towel around the huge bump that was my baby.

  She looked at me coldly. ‘Are you ready for your birth? Do you know about the options for pain relief during labour? We’re discussing that next.’

  I shrugged. I assumed I would have a natural childbirth, that I was not going to bring my child into the world drugged. ‘I guess I’m ready.’ I left her and the poor paddling women, as ready as I would ever be.

  At thirty-two weeks, I could not stop coughing. I sat at my dressing table applying eyeliner and blusher because, even while pregnant, French women looked pretty. I spent time lying on the sofa with a blanket over me, and Bruno would light the fire while I read. I waited for my final check-up with Professor F.

  We took a taxi to Hôpital Antoine-Béclère, passing Porte d’Orleans, the cinemas, the brasseries, and then the grey suburbs: kebab stalls, betting shops, Arab fruit and vegetable markets. Wet snow and low-hanging grey skies.

  Why, at the happiest moments of my life, was I filled with such immense melancholy, such a profound sense of sadness? I was married to someone who loved me fiercely. I was having a baby, at last, who would be much loved, and was much desired. Yet my thoughts were blackened, ashes, coal. My sister said, ‘It’s in the genes. We come from a long line of melancholics. Remember Daddy?’ And I suddenly remembered my father on summer afternoons in our beach house, lying down for a siesta but not sleeping, his eyes open, listening to the distant sound of foghorns.

  ‘What are you thinking of, Daddy?’ I would ask, coming into his room.

  ‘Leave your father alone, he’s resting,’ my mother would say. ‘Go out and play.’

  And it was February and my sister added, rather cheerfully: ‘February is suicide month. Everyone kills themselves in February.’ She went on to list our aunts, our cousins, and various family members who had died in February. ‘And Sylvia Plath stuck her head inside an oven,’ she added. ‘Because of the cold.’

  The taxi dropped us outside the hospital, and Bruno bought a coffee in a small plastic cup from a machine. As we rode up the elevator, he turned to me and there was such happiness on his face. He said, ‘The next time I go up in this lift, it will be to see my baby.’

  But inside the maternity wing, the Zen doctor was not at all happy. He sat frowning behind his huge desk, fingering his pen. The African sculptures suddenly looked menacing.

  ‘You are very, very fragile,’ he said. ‘Not in good shape to give birth.’ Frankly, he added, he did not know how I was going to push to get a baby out with my ribs broken. And he was perplexed. The cough, he reckoned, was some rare thing I had picked up on my travels: an amoeba, a bug, something infiltrating my system like al-Qaeda infiltrates weakened villages in Pakistan. Perhaps from the dirt in Iraq? He stared at my chart while the muscles in Bruno’s face tensed. They spoke in rapid French.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the Zen doctor said at last, ‘but I want you to stay here.’

  ‘For how long? I want to go home.’

  ‘Until the baby comes. I’m sorry, I know it’s not pleasant,’ he said. ‘But it’s for the best. I have to watch you.’

  He filled out papers and ordered a battery of tests. He sent me down one floor to the pulmonologist who tapped my chest and back and looked confused. ‘Possibly TB? When was your last visit to Africa?’ he asked, and sent me to the bowels of the hospital for chest X-rays.

  The X-rays came back clear on tuberculosis and cancer, and then I was sent for more blood work: for HIV, malaria, and other infectious diseases. ‘Sorry, I know this hurts,’ the nurse said, seeking out my collapsed veins to slide a large needle under my skin. ‘What terrible veins!’

  ‘It runs in my family,’ I said miserably. Like the melancholy and the depression, that too – deep veins that resisted every blood test, making taking a vial of blood agony – were a gift from my family, inherited. My mother and I had simple blood tests and emerged with bruises the size of oranges.

  The tests went on all day. Whooping cough, polio, cholera, cancer of every part of my body. I was tested for diseases that I thought had disappeared in Victorian times. An immunologist came to interview me, to try to find the bug hiding somewhere in my system. I climbed on to and off five or six examining tables that day, and everyone poked my ribs and touched my stomach and took my blood pressure and made me cough so that my breath was short.

  ‘Cough!’

  ‘Cough again!’

  ‘Move on your side. On your back! On your side!’

  ‘Give me your arm for a little blood test. This one won’t hurt, promise. A little scratch.’ Everything in French. Medical French. Clinical French. I yearned for someone to speak English to me.

  After all the tests came back, and all the doctors conversed and decided they did not know what it was, they put me in the isolation ward. It was at the end of a long, dark corridor and there was no one else there; I felt terribly lonely.

  Bruno left for a few hours and came back with a new tea kettle because when I asked the nurse for a cup of tea she stared back at me blankly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean, no?’

  ‘We bring drinks at mealtimes. You must wait.’

  Bruno also brought me a pillow, a pale green silk pillowcase I loved, some chocolates and my computer and books.

  ‘I’m not supposed to eat sugar,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, fuck that, you’re pregnant.’ He went down to the reception and argued with the staff to get the TV turned on. ‘Anyway, I would love you if you were a hundred kilos.’

  ‘I’m not far off.’

  He made me laugh. He took care of the endless paperwork involved with giving birth to a baby in the French state system. The more complicated it got, the more energized he became.

  ‘Now we are in emergency mode,’ he said more than once. My God, I thought, he is still addicted to adrenalin.

  Meanwhile, more doctors came in and stuck their hands up my silk nightgown. A team of medical interns came in. A tropical disease specialist too. ‘It’s probably something you picked up in Iraq,’ said the immunologist. ‘I’m sure it’s from the soil.’

  ‘If that’s the case,’ I said, ‘then why don’t all Iraqi women have it?’

  He shrugged. ‘You’re fore
ign. Your system isn’t used to it.’

  Someone else thought it was a rare form of asthma. Someone else wanted to put me on steroids. Professor F., who headed the diagnostic team that surrounded my bed every day with helpful but puzzled faces, kept checking my metal stitch which I could feel straining every time I breathed. I caught them discussing that it would be impossible for me to give birth in this state.

  ‘I don’t want a caesarean,’ I said one afternoon. ‘Absolutely not, under no circumstances.’

  ‘We don’t know till the labour starts how the baby will come out,’ Professor F. said calmly. ‘But I will try.’

  In the end, they could not work out what the cough was. The Greek immunologist who came and monitored all the machines around me thought it might be an allergy, so after a week, they let me go home. That’s when I realized medicine was not an exact science. They only do what they can.

  ‘The truth is,’ the Greek said, ‘all we can do is relieve your symptoms. I actually have no idea what is wrong with you.’ I was given packets of various drugs and I did not bother asking what was inside them.

  The day I was leaving the isolation wing, I woke early, before dawn. I heaved myself out of bed, feeling the cold floor under my bare feet. There was no one else in the ward, no other high-risk patients but me, and I thought all the nurses must be sleeping. I could see a blue light coming from a television set in the staffroom, but there was no sound. I stood by the window watching the night seep away and the morning begin. It had started to snow. As I stood in the cold, barefoot, I could see the first people coming to work in the near dark, blowing on their hands to warm them. The snow was so white, so pure and so new. It made me happy.

  The ashes inside my head seemed to be fading away. I knew then, for the first time since the pregnancy had begun, for the first time since I started war reporting and entered cities under siege and walked with rebel armies, that everything was going to be all right. The fear that had lain dormant in me like some foreign invasion was gone. The baby was going to live, the cough was going to go away, the rib would heal, and Paris would be fine. I was lucky to be here, lucky to be pregnant, lucky to have Bruno.