Ghosts by Daylight
Page 13
The next morning, I sat eating breakfast by the slime-green pool of our decrepit hotel with another journalist I’d known in Bosnia, Miguel Gil Moreno, the same man who would warn me of the bombs in Chechnya. It was the end of the rainy season in West Africa, and as we ate we could see dozens and dozens of frogs procreating by the edge of the water. It was like a biblical plague.
‘And now,’ said a CNN producer, a man wearing a cravat and carrying a cigarette in a long ivory holder, ‘we will watch the frogs engage in sexual intercourse.’ He lay on the ground near the pool with a camera, filming the frogs, trying to bring some humour into the utterly grim scene outside the hotel. Miguel and I ate stale cheese sandwiches, watching; some light relief.
Miguel once asked me about a home-made video I’d been given which showed men who might have been UN soldiers being tortured by rebels in Sierra Leone. It should have been a warning to both of us – look; this is the madness that happens here. But instead we said goodbye and Miguel followed Kurt and his crew up the road towards Rogbury Junction to find out if the video was real. By lunchtime both men were dead, ambushed and killed by rebels; probably stoned teenagers.
I wasn’t afraid then, not as much as I should have been. There really was nothing to fear, I always told myself: it was just fate, and maybe I would live or maybe not. If you take life that way, you don’t fear anything.
But I was afraid now. War is a violent teacher.
Most of all, I was desperate not to pass my nightmares, or my bad blood, on to my son.
The trauma psychiatrist, as part of his research, had once asked me: ‘How many dead bodies have you seen?’
I thought hard, trying to remember events and places; fields of bodies, mass graves, wells with blue corpses stuffed down them, the man in East Timor who washed up in the sewer, the slabs of dead flesh on my daily trips to the morgue in Sarajevo, the soldier in the snow in Chechnya, the miles and miles of dead Rwandans on a road near Goma. Skin stretched purple over bone. Bloated faces. How many? The fact was, I did not know. Dozens? Hundreds?
The psychiatrist was silent as he wrote in his notebook. After a while, he looked up. ‘Don’t you find that odd?’ he said, not unkindly. ‘Most people only see the bodies of their grandparents, or their parents, and only at their funerals.’
Other than my grandmother’s, my first dead body was in Bosnia. I arrived in the early autumn of 1992; it was still warm enough to get stung by a wasp, the last balmy days before a brutal winter. The war that would ruin the country was still in its early stages. I wasn’t a complete ingénue – I’d been tear-gassed in the crowd during Israeli–Palestinian clashes – but Bosnia was my first war zone.
That first trip, I travelled with a nervous Australian photographer and a young Croatian interpreter down small roads that had been commandeered by various rag-tag militias. Vesna, the interpreter, gave a potted history of the former Yugoslavia and smoked all my cigarettes. We passed empty villages with shuttered houses and fields of dead animals. There were no people on the road. Through the car window came the smell of distant explosives and petrol and fire. Near Vitez we passed empty munitions factories which Vesna said had been a major industry during the Tito years.
There was another photographer in the car behind us. He was French and silent. Sometimes I drove with him. He was known to be fearless and somewhat distant, almost mystical in his intensity. Once, on a particularly spooky road, we came to a Bosnian checkpoint and I lowered my window to hand the soldier our passports. The soldier reached out, but instead of taking the passports, he stared hard at the photographer’s pale face.
‘What strange eyes you have, my friend,’ he said flatly.
The photographer frowned. ‘Strange?’ he asked. ‘What do you mean, strange?’
‘You have death in your eyes,’ the soldier said matter-of-factly. He handed back our passports, lit a cigarette and lifted the frayed rope that was the checkpoint. He motioned us through, not speaking, not smiling and not waving. The photographer was silent for the rest of the trip until we reached the car wreck. Then we saw the real dead, two of them, a couple who had been trying to flee something – fighting, a village being burned, none of us would ever know. Vesna had studied some medicine and she said they could only have been dead a few hours. Long enough, I remember thinking, for their souls to fly away.
They had driven into a tree at what must have been full speed, and they had flown through the windscreen so that their bodies lay half in, half out of the car. Their necks were broken and hung down at unnatural angles. Their eyes were still open. Their bodies fascinated me. I walked closer and stared, trying to memorize their surprised expressions caught in the exact moment of death.
That was the first real death I saw. It triggered some kind of strange autopilot mechanism in me, in which I felt very little emotion, in which I was nearly numb. Then more wars came, and I suppose an addiction grew and grew, because I got good at them, the way one gets good at a tennis game if you practise long and hard enough. When I would watch television and see a conflict gathering in some remote part of the world, I found it impossible to stay still, not to pick up the phone and ask to be sent there, and as a result I developed skills: intuition, bravery, the ability to talk or push my way into any situation, on to any helicopter or boat leaving for a dangerous place. I got used to pressure without cracking: Gellhorn’s grace under pressure.
What was harder was other people’s suffering. Those are the images that stuck, not the interview with the general who took out his knife and pointed at places on maps and talked about hardware and equipment. I could not bear the loneliness or physical pain of children. Perhaps that is why I feared my own child would be hurt.
The first time I saw a child crawling on a dirty cot in a field hospital with his guts ripped open and no painkillers, I went outside, leaned against a wall and threw up. But I did that only once. I learned how to observe, to write it in my notebook, and then at home, in the privacy of my room, to cry or to hold my head in my hands, to lie on the bed staring at the ceiling.
The arrogant truth was that I never thought I would die. It wasn’t only me who felt this. A famous war photographer, a woman who had hidden behind a bush in Africa to photograph an execution and was renowned for her bravery, once said to me years later, ‘I never thought I would get killed because my mother loved me too much.’
When my father was dying of cancer, I sat by his bed and we talked about many things: faith, death and war. My father emigrated from Italy to the United States as a young boy. My grandfather was an anti-fascist and the story is that they were run out of town with shot guns; I will never know what really happened because everyone I need to ask is dead. But the records do show that my grandfather, Costantino, made three voyages alone before he went back and brought his family from Naples.
My father spoke only Italian and remembers being terrified on his first day at his new American school. But he grew up to be ferociously American: an athlete, a college football player. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, he enlisted in the American air force. But war frightened him. As he lay dying, he said, ‘That was normal. All the men were frightened.’ He looked at me from his bed, barely 100 pounds, ravaged by cancer. ‘I worry because you never seem afraid. That is not normal.’
I went to Iraq during the invasion in 2003 for nearly five months, but even as I was packing my bag to go, I thought it would be one of my last wars. I was getting married, and I wanted a child. I knew I couldn’t sustain the pace or the loneliness of those long assignments any more.
I would wander through the gardens of the Al Rashid Hotel in the early morning, waiting for the bombing of Baghdad to start, with only half my heart interested in reporting this war. I was already thinking of an escape, a life, a world with feelings and emotions and love. Later, sent to the desert with American troops, I felt no interest in the story, no excitement. A colleague who had reported wars as far back as Vietnam told me that when you lost your edge it was time to leave.
And yet when he was barely six months old I would go back to Baghdad, leaving him with his father and his nanny Raquel in Paris. Bruno told me to go. ‘You will understand how you want to live the rest of your life. Whether you want to continue this path or not.’
I went in late summer. My breasts leaked milk and I missed my baby with a ferocity that I could not understand. I moved slowly, I could not focus, I had no interest in Sadr City or the insurgents. There was a new generation of reporters who had never been to Africa or the Balkans, and one day, trapped in an elevator with some of them, I thought: Leave it to them.
Dear Janine. Congratulations on your baby. You’ve done your bit. Now pass the baton to someone else. Enjoy your son.
This email from a famous war photographer after the birth of Luca, when I said I would never go anywhere without him ever again. But Luca was still an infant and I was back at the al-Hamra Hotel. One afternoon I went to lunch with a famous Iraqi politician who sat in a large empty room surrounded by his staff.
He looked at me over his spectacles. ‘How’s Luca?’ he asked. I said that he was well, at home with his father.
‘There will always be other wars,’ he told me sternly. ‘But if you miss him growing up, miss his first tooth, his first step, you will regret it for ever.’
After nearly three weeks there, I was at Baghdad Airport and my flight home via Jordan was overbooked. There were only three seats left. A crowd of people was waiting for those seats, crushing forwards, and I surprised myself with the intensity of how I fought to get home. I shoved people out of the way, bribed someone and got the last seat. The plane took off and I looked down at Baghdad and thought: No, I am not going to miss this life at all. I cracked it. I ended the addiction.
And for the next five years, I watched my son, and I fed him and laughed with him and lay down with him at night to tell stories that always started with, ‘A long, long time ago in a place far, far away . . .’ My assignments were done with less passion: that passion was reserved only for my husband and my son, and the bubble of happiness that I lived in in Paris.
When I worked, I crammed what I would have done in one month into five days. I got off the plane in South Africa or India or Nairobi and I worked solidly, dreaming at night of the smell of my son’s breath, milky and soft.
I did not miss my old life at all. And very slowly, the fear began to go away.
Part Three
‘War is a violent teacher.’
Thucydides, reporting on the
Peloponnesian wars, fifth century bc
11
The First Straw
Sometime in the autumn of my second or maybe my third year in Paris, when the leaves got wet and slippery and stuck to the pavement like skin, Bruno’s back broke. It did not exactly break in two like a stick, but the discs fell from their places and suddenly he had grown into an old and tired man who could not sleep and could not walk and had to lie in terrible pain for long hours on a wooden floor.
The French doctors gave him white tubes of drugs with poetic names, all opiates that dissolved in water and made him languid and glassy eyed. As one doctor began loading him up on oxycontin, I thought of my brother Richard, his eyes fired up by the morphine that he was given at the end of his life for the cancer that would eventually kill him. He was my second sibling to die.
But that was after years and years of American doctors, bored and cynical, not interested enough in patients like my brother who did not have health insurance, misdiagnosing him with an untreatable stomach condition and giving him drugs, though he begged them not to. All along, cancer was eating my brother alive, starting in his colon, his liver, his lungs and eventually working its way to his brain. But even in the days before he died, in extreme agony and wasted to the weight of a child, they would not give him the dignity of putting him in a hospice.
My brother was dying in America of a mysterious disease, and my husband’s back was breaking, and I saw both of them tormented with unrelenting physical pain. Bruno withdrew with the agony. I continued to live my life as a mother, going on assignments occasionally, but with premonitions of catastrophe. I tried to push the dark thoughts back, away, to the corner of my mind, the place that housed the war memories. But Bruno was getting sicker and sicker. Most of the time when I woke up at night, he was not there in the bed next to me, and it was four or five or three in the morning, and I found him alone in the living room watching television with a full ashtray next to him. I began to feel afraid. My household, the warmth, the pink light of Paris were all fading.
But Luca grew. He was now two and a half years old, fluent in French and English, with a sweet nature. He was an easy baby who played with boats in the Tuileries, who liked to be read to, sung to, rocked. He rarely cried, did not have temper tantrums, and did not mind being transported everywhere his father and I took him.
His first aeroplane flight was when he was several weeks old, and he lay in a box provided by Air France that we strapped on the seats in front of us. Now he went back and forth to America with me three or four times a year to see his grandmother, and planes, trains, buses and taxis were as familiar to him as his toys at home. He seemed not to notice his father’s withdrawal.
As autumn arrived that third year in Paris, and the leaves came down, the Tuileries grew more desolate with their black bare trees until soon there were only a few nannies walking fat babies in their strollers. The clock across the gardens on the Musée d’Orsay, which Bruno had pointed out to me with such hope for our future, seemed frosted over with the cold.
Winter came. When Luca was eight months old, for his first Christmas, Bruno took us to Strasbourg for the Christmas market. He knew I loved Christmas, loved snow, loved fir trees brushed with white, and pain d’épices and carols sung in incense-filled churches. But this Christmas, two years later, even while we put up the tree and hung wreaths, I felt something ominous creeping into our lives.
At 5 p.m., when I walked to the Place du Marché Sainte Honoré, it was dark. I still passed St Roch on the way home, where as a five-month-old baby we had baptized Luca and thrown a huge party after, and lit a candle meant to represent the scattering of light into the darkness of the world. I still stopped and lit candles when I passed St Roch where, in October 1795 Napoleon’s batteries fired on rebles hiding inside the church. But now I did it with more trepidation.
And still, Luca grew. He wore a blue gingham snowsuit, a hand-me-down from his godmother’s boy, and Raquel glued a fleece into his pousette so she could take him to the park for hours in the cold and come back with his cheeks bright red. As the lights got darker near the Tuileries one afternoon, I sat at my desk and took a phone call from a doctor.
‘Madame Girodon,’ she said in a flat tone. It was someone I didn’t know. She explained that she worked at Val de Grace, the military hospital known for treating Arafat and Jacques Chirac, and that she was a doctor treating my husband.
‘I wanted to tell you,’ she said, ‘that I am here with your husband and I am keeping him here under orders for several weeks.’ When I asked why, she said it was her belief that he was exhausted and suicidal.
I held the phone and sat down in the nearest chair. I had no idea who I was talking to. All I knew was that Bruno had left the house that morning for a check-up.
The doctor was waiting for me to say something.
‘I know he’s not sleeping,’ I offered. ‘I know he has nightmares.’ I told her that he was having EMDR, a treatment for removing trauma. I began to explain what it was but she stopped me.
‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I’m a doctor.’
‘But he’s not suicidal,’ I said, trying to find the words. ‘He’s just tired.’
There was a lingering pause.
‘May I speak with him?’ I said. I heard her say so
mething and she passed the phone to Bruno. He got on, his voice full of tears. ‘Do you want to stay there?’ I said as gently as I could.
He said, ‘I’m so tired.’
‘All right then; stay, stay as long as you need to.’ I kept my voice quiet, low and calm.
‘All right, baby. I’m sorry,’ he said.
He passed the phone to the doctor and she told me how to reach him and when I could come.
I stayed at the desk in the dark, my head in my hands, till I heard Raquel come in, her key turning in the lock, and the happy sound of Luca singing. I ran to him, pulled him from the pousette and pushed my warm cheek against his cold one. The baby laughed and pulled my hair. Raquel took him from me and went to the kitchen to make his pureed courgettes. I could hear her talking to him, and I sat at the desk thinking of Bruno in the hospital, alone, tired, scared. I thought of how much responsibility he had taken on, so quickly after coming back from Africa. A pregnant, demanding wife. A new city. A premature baby. ‘My shoulders aren’t that big,’ I remembered him once telling me.
For so many years, people asked me about war. What was it like, did you get shot at, were you raped, how many times have you seen action, were you on front lines, what do dead bodies look like, how many dead bodies have you seen, were you scared, what do chest wounds look like, have you been shot, have you seen someone die? The more interesting ones asked: And how did it affect you?
But I was fine, I said. I did not like to talk about the places I had come back from: they went into black bound notebooks and the notebooks went into a box and the box went into the basement. From there, I could look at them some day and remember all the people, the places, the red dirt, the rain and the mud. But for now, I was fine. I always thought Bruno was too.
The trauma psychiatrist in London also said I was resilient, and resilience had saved me. That, and being able to write it out of my system: write about being marched into the woods by Serb paramilitaries in Kosovo with a gun at my back; about the child soldiers in Africa surrounding my car with the RPG; about the dead around me. The bodies in wells, the bodies in the sewers in East Timor, the hundreds and hundreds of bodies in Goma, after the Rwandan massacre, when people – mainly Hutus – were dying in hundreds of cholera. People dropping in front of me, puking green stuff, till there was no more fluid in their bodies, then dying.